My Fair Man

Chapter Five

Hattie and Claire spent most of that Sunday afternoon making lists and notes on how Jimmy’s makeover would best be achieved. First of all he had to have somewhere to live. Hattie knew that his continued presence in her flat would agitate and alienate Toby – who had still not returned home – but she was unwillingly to allow Claire to take him back to her own cramped mews house. She wanted to be in control of what happened to Jimmy because she was a little suspicious of the motives of her friend, whose values were not always her own.

They agreed that if they were going to win Jon’s bet they would have to be prepared to invest some of their own money in the project. Hattie agreed to put up half the figure wagered – £2500 – to cover the initial costs of buying clothes and making the cosmetic changes Claire deemed necessary.

But to win the bet it wasn’t enough to have his hair cut, his teeth straightened and to buy him new clothes. If Jimmy were to fit in with Jon’s definition of ‘a man of worth’ he was going to have to be able to make some sort of living. And whilst Jimmy himself was eager to continue selling the Big Issue on his pitch near the Opera House – ‘so I can pay my way a bit, like’ – Hattie wanted more for him.

Rather more, in fact, than Claire, who was even now hooting with laughter as she tried to understand Jimmy’s Geordie idioms.

‘Haddaway, man?’ Claire said in mocking imitation of Jimmy’s pronunciation of his favourite phrase. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

He was clearly shocked by her language. In fact, Hattie had already discovered, he never resorted to using the guttural expletives that commonly punctuated Claire’s conversation. The worst words in his albeit limited vocabulary were ‘shite’ and ‘bugger’.

There was, as Hattie had hoped and suspected, something rather dignified about the man Jon would dismiss as worthless.

‘“Haddaway, man”,’ said Hattie, ‘means “Get away with you” or “Would you ever?” Am I right Jimmy?’

He looked across at her gratefully. She had become an interpreter for him in this strange new world. For he found the language of these women totally incomprehensible. He was fascinated by Claire’s transatlantic accent – and rather disappointed to discover that it was Canadian – but she spoke so fast that he found it difficult to keep up with her words. In fact there was little about either of the women that Jimmy understood. The women in his own life – those in his vast dysfunctional family – were very different creatures and whilst he was at times mesmerised by the attention of two such attractive and confident females, he didn’t trust them.

He was sufficiently worldly, though, to realise that going along with Hattie’s research could be of benefit to him even if, along the way, he had to endure their mocking patronage. And if he had to choose one of them as his protector, then it would be Hattie, even if it meant staying in this odd place and accepting the disapproval and contempt of her man. So he agreed to their plans, and to staying on in her flat.

When Claire departed for home late that afternoon Hattie set about creating Jimmy his own area within the vast living space. Although their home was the height of fashion – what estate agents now described as a New York loft – it was ill-suited to house guests. There were no doors on the ground floor except to the kitchen and just the one big bedroom and bathroom upstairs so that Hattie had to fashion Jimmy a room by putting together two Japanese screens and offer him a foldaway futon to sleep on.

‘There is one thing, Jimmy. Toby really doesn’t like smoking. I don’t mind, in fact I used to smoke before I met him …’

‘Aye?’ he said.

‘So when you want a cigarette, do you think you could go and stand outside the front door … so the smoke doesn’t pollute the flat…?’ she said nervously.

Then she turned her attention to Rex. The dog, she explained, would need to be a little more house-trained if he were to live with them.

‘But he pittles in street,’ said Jimmy.

‘I know he does but he, well, he smells rather dreadful, Jimmy. Couldn’t we give him a bath?’

‘Rex hates water,’ said Jimmy.

Rex, Hattie was beginning to suspect, hated everything apart from food and Jimmy. He growled every time Hattie or Claire inadvertently went near him, and he barked in a shrill, neurotic fashion every time the doorbell or the phone went. Worse, he clearly had a digestive problem which – perhaps aggravated by the sushi he had eaten for breakfast – resulted in regular emissions of offensive ozone-eroding wind. Hattie had grown up with dogs – her father had always had a brace of Labradors for shooting and her mother was never parted from her beloved West Highland terrier – but try as she might she could find nothing about Rex that was remotely attractive. She accepted, though, that the dog represented the closest thing to family in Jimmy’s life and she supposed she would have to establish some sort of relationship with him.

‘We have to clean him, Jimmy. We’ve got to do something to try and remove the bad smell from under Toby’s nose,’ she said, although she doubted if pickling the dog in Chanel No. 5 or Eternity would make Toby more tolerant of him.

Hattie ran a bath filled with pungent bubbles and Jimmy carried the reluctant, whimpering dog and immersed him in the warm water.

There followed a terrible scene in which Rex fought, scratched, clawed and finally bit his way out of the bath, displacing gallons of water over Hattie, Jimmy and the floor, before disappearing back into his favourite place under the kitchen table.

Hattie was touched by the way in which Jimmy tried to calm him, singing to him and gently drying him with one of her expensive white waffle towels. When he had finished and the dog had calmed down enough to stop shivering and whining Jimmy turned to Hattie.

‘I’ll need me stuff, like,’ he said, ‘if I’m staying a while.’

‘Your stuff?’ said Hattie, who had assumed that all Jimmy had in the world were the clothes he had once stood up in, his sleeping bag and the couple of carrier bags she had noticed when she had first encountered him.

‘Yeah, me bits an’ pieces, like. They’re in a left luggage box at King’s Cross,’ he said, pulling a key from the pocket of Toby’s jeans.

‘Well, of course we should get them,’ Hattie said, smiling at him. ‘Now, if you want.’

‘OK,’ he said, jumping up.

Outside in the street Hattie hailed a black cab, to the astonishment and wonder of Jimmy who had not, it quickly emerged, ever travelled in one before. On the journey to the station he was enchanted by the two pull-down seats and moved from one to the other in the excited fashion of a small child on a big adventure.

Indeed, Hattie thought as she paid off the taxi and followed Jimmy through to the dirty, depressing station interior, he had many of the more endearing qualities of a child. He was enthusiastic, questioning, responsive and direct. He said what he meant, even if on occasion she could not quite understand his dialect or comprehend the words he used.

‘This is where I came when I left home, like,’ he said thoughtfully, pointing up at the departure board on which a dozen or so inter-city trains – coming from Northern towns she had never heard of, let alone visited – were indicated.

‘When was that? How old are you, Jimmy, and how long have you been in London?’

‘Must be going on five years now. I’m twenty-three,’ he said, lighting up his third cigarette since they had left the flat.

‘And what did you think of this place when you arrived?’

‘Big,’ he said simply, drawing on his cigarette.

Hattie wondered what he had expected of London, and if he was disappointed by what he did find.

‘Where did you go when you arrived? Did you know anyone here?’ she asked him gently.

‘Na,’ he said.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I got by, did a bit of labouring, like, now and then. There’s people, like, that offer you a place to stay.’ He paused and looked across at Hattie. ‘Not people like you, mind. Hard people, mean people, what pretend they’re going to help you and just sook ya in, like …’

She was aware of the fact that the young and homeless were often preyed on by unscrupulous shadowy men who led them into desperate and corrupt lives. She wondered a little guiltily, too, if what she was doing – in going along with Jon’s bet – wasn’t just another form of the kind of exploitation Jimmy had encountered since he arrived here.

‘But you didn’t get sucked in by those people, Jimmy?’ she said.

He looked at her with those penetrating blue eyes and shook his head. ‘Not for long, hinny.’ He glanced away quickly.

She sensed that he did not want to talk about his past and she stopped her questioning and followed him silently towards the left-luggage area.

Inside his box was a cheap black leatherette holdall, a cardboard box that was tied together with string and a small zipped child-sized canvas case. Hattie was moved by his evident excitement at his reunion with this odd collection of possessions. She held out her hand to grasp hold of the black bag but he would only allow her to carry the small case, and then not before he had gravely warned her that its contents were ‘breakable, like’.

In the taxi he was rather more subdued than he had been on their outward journey. He didn’t attempt to open any of his luggage but he glanced at the three pieces that he had carefully placed on the floor of the cab as if their reappearance in his life was an unexpected piece of good fortune.

Hattie felt like an intruder and, when they were inside the flat, she left Jimmy stowing away his booty, and made her way to the kitchen where a dour-faced Toby was sitting reading the papers.

‘Picked up the Vuitton cases, I see,’ he said, raising an eyebrow sarcastically in the direction of Jimmy’s Japanese screened room.

Hattie looked at him with contempt. She was beginning to think that Toby was even more insensitive to the feelings of others than she had ever realised (although, of course, their sex life had been a bit of a clue). The thought of Jimmy’s few material possessions – probably worthless in Hattie and Toby’s terms – being pored over in the corner of her elegant home had touched something deep within her. Perhaps even sparked in her, she thought as she remembered the childlike qualities she had noticed in him earlier that evening, some sort of frustrated maternal instinct.

In her work she regularly came across injured children who would arouse a strong need to nurture in her, but she was never able to indulge it. She could only go so far in helping them which, for her, was never quite far enough. At the end of their sessions she could only send them back to their foster homes or their families. With Jimmy it was different. He wasn’t a patient; she wasn’t restricted by the rules and regulations of her profession. She could go further, do more, nurture in the way she wanted.

She was already conscious that Claire’s approach to Jimmy was, rather like Claire herself, a little superficial. She even suspected that her friend might have some hidden agenda in her own interest in Jimmy’s transformation. But Hattie felt that she had a deeper and more profound reason for wanting this young man to succeed. He would be the means by which she proved – not just to Jon but to herself – that she was right in her theories. All men, she thought, as she glanced past Toby towards Jimmy, were born equal.

‘I thought I’d cook us some supper,’ she said, moving towards the fridge and taking out some pasta, some mushrooms, a large onion and a piece of fresh Parmesan.

‘That’ll make a change,’ Toby said snidely.

Just because Hattie didn’t often cook didn’t mean she couldn’t. She just wasn’t focused on food. And besides, there was never any real need to feed Toby because he had a business lunch every day. But having Jimmy here changed that. She was overwhelmed by the need to care for him. To give him some decent food, clean clothes and a place of safety in which to live.

She sliced the onions and fried them in some extra virgin olive oil that Toby had brought back from Umbria. Then she threw in the exotic mushrooms and some garlic and finally mixed the lot with some fresh penne she had boiled, sprinkling the finished dish with freshly grated Parmesan and chopped parsley. She even remembered to put some part-baked ciabatta in the oven so that when the pasta was ready she could serve it with crispy, hot bread. She laid the table in the kitchen for three and opened a bottle of red wine.

Toby, who had been looking on in wonder at the sight of Hattie happily cooking, put down his paper and came over to the table.

‘And is our guest going to deign to join us?’ he said, in the sneering tone he adopted whenever he referred to Jimmy.

She went to the corner of the room where he was camped and coughed gently. ‘Jimmy?’ she said softly. ‘Supper is ready.’

‘Oh aye,’ he said, putting his head round the corner. ‘I was just sorting me things out, like.’

Hattie glanced down behind him and noticed the array of possessions that littered the bed: a collection of Newcastle United programmes, a scrunched up and soiled Everton duvet cover, some rosettes, a silver-plated cup, some medals, a pile of photographs and, beneath them, numerous other half-obscured trinkets. She didn’t ask him about them although she was aware of a growing curiosity. She wanted to know more about him, his family, his origins, but she smiled for now and went back to the kitchen.

She indicated that he should sit down – something she had noticed he didn’t like to do when he ate – and he slipped onto one of the steel chairs next to Toby. Rex, who followed his master like a particularly distorted shadow, slunk beneath the table.

‘Christ Almighty – he’s got my fucking clothes on!’ exclaimed Toby, who had, until now, not focused on the newly cleaned up and beautiful Jimmy. ‘That’s the last fucking straw …’

‘Eee, man, I’m sorry,’ said Jimmy, his wonderful face blushing with embarrassment.

‘Don’t be sorry, Jimmy,’ said Hattie shortly. ‘Toby has got at least a dozen pairs of jeans and, to my certain knowledge, over fifty plain white Paul Smith T-shirts—’

‘That’s not the point, Hattie,’ said Toby, who was experiencing, Hattie suddenly surmised, stirrings of what was probably deep sexual jealousy.

His eyes ran across the face of the unwanted intruder and down his torso to the crotch of his tight Tommy Hilfiger jeans.

‘Besides, Toby, they look much better on Jimmy – even if they are a little too small,’ Hattie added with a merry laugh.

There was an awkward silence during which it seemed as if Toby might leave. But something – the idea of this beautiful stranger sleeping so close to Hattie, or the delicious aroma of the pasta – made him stay and eat.

Jimmy – who had been studying the food with a wary eye – watched Hattie and Toby begin to eat, in the mannered way that they did, with just their forks in their right hands. Picking up his own fork and his butter knife he began gingerly to taste the pasta on his plate.

Alone with the two women Jimmy had been far more relaxed, but in the presence of this hostile stranger he was obviously intimidated. He stopped eating, switched his fork into his right hand and slowly attempted to imitate the way they so expertly ate their food. Very carefully he managed to prod his fork through the pasta and lift it to his mouth. His progress was slow, painful and noisy.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said Toby, pushing his half-empty plate away. ‘I think I’ll watch some television and get an early night.’

‘In the bedroom?’ enquired Hattie.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to intrude on our guest’s space,’ said Toby, moving to get up. ‘JESUS CHRIST! That bloody dog bit my leg!’

‘He’s a wonderful guard dog,’ said Hattie defensively.

‘It’s probably bloody rabid,’ Toby said, moving quickly out of Rex’s way. ‘It should be muzzled.’

It occurred to Hattie that Toby and Rex had a lot in common right now. Both were behaving in a territorial fashion that was positively primeval. They both needed muzzling, growling and snarling as they sought to demonstrate their supremacy.

Toby’s exit up the stairs had a liberating effect on Jimmy, who jumped up, reached into the cupboard and returned to the table clutching a jar of crushed sun-dried tomato paste, the closest thing to ketchup he had yet found in this strange, foreign kitchen. Standing up, with the plate in his hand, he began to eat the food – now covered in the rich, red sauce – with more enthusiasm while he walked up and down the room.

Hattie suspected that long before he was reduced to squatting on the streets Jimmy had got used to eating wherever and whenever he could. And almost never at a table. He was happiest, she had already noted, pacing up and down while he ate.

‘Why don’t you finish that in front of the television, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘while I go and check up on Toby?’

Putting her own plate on the sheet steel work surface she left him alone and went upstairs.

Toby was lying in bed channel hopping in a slightly less furious fashion than Jimmy had done earlier. He looked up at her with a cold hard face.

‘How long is this going to go on, Hattie?’

‘Well, I’ve got just under three months to achieve the transformation,’ she said gaily, ‘so I suppose till about August.’

‘That’s ridiculous. I’m sure Jon wasn’t really serious about that bet. He certainly wouldn’t expect us to put up with this kind of upheaval for some bloody wager about a brain-dead bum like that.’

‘It was you who said that Jon is always serious about his bets. And anyway, what makes you think he’s brain dead?’

‘Those teeth for a start.’

‘You mean no orthodontic care when he was a child might indicate a low IQ?’

‘Low life, Hattie. He’s low life. Anyone with any sense could see that. Christ, he eats like a pig. He can barely speak, for Christ’s sakes. And what he does say is virtually unintelligible.’

‘He’s limited by his education, Toby. He didn’t go to Charterhouse—’

‘It’s more than that, Hattie. He’s on the same evolutional level as his bloody dog. He’s not even house-trained. He pees in the sink, he smokes and he can’t sit still to eat. And it’s quite clear from this evening that he’s rarely come into contact with a knife or fork before.’

‘You are so fucking bourgeois, Toby. All you are saying is that he is not what you would classify as civilised. But that’s just conditioning. You can teach people to eat with a knife and fork and to pull the chain on the loo – which incidentally you forget to do every morning when you pee – but what you cannot teach anyone is sensitivity. It’s insensitivity that makes a man into an animal, Toby …’

‘You really are serious, aren’t you? You’d really put that animal before anything else in your life – our relationship, my happiness. Can’t you see it’s intolerable for me to have to live with him in my home?’

‘It’s my home, Toby …’

‘You always used to say our home, Hattie.’

‘Oh Toby, you know this means a lot to me. It might strike you as absurd and selfish behaviour but actually I am trying to help Jimmy. To take the animal – as you call it – out of the man and give him a chance to be something else than a creature that skulks around the streets and sleeps in shop doorways.’

‘Fine but not here, Hattie.’

‘Do you know something, Toby, this boy has awoken something in me. Oh, I know that I have always had what you and Jon sneeringly used to refer to as a social conscience but I have never before been able to make the difference in the way I can with Jimmy. Every day I see people who are so damaged by what has happened in their lives that it is almost impossible to help them. But I can only do so much for them. With him I have the chance to really achieve something. I believe that beneath that animal you see there is a fine human being with the potential to achieve great things. It’s as if he were new, do you understand, raw, waiting to be transformed into something special? If you don’t like it you can go back and live in your flat for a while.’

‘He could turn out to be Frankenstein’s monster.’

‘Oh, I hardly think so, Toby. Look at him. He has, apart from those teeth and tattoos, a quite extraordinary beauty.’

‘So that’s it then? That’s what you see in him?’

‘Don’t be so stupid, Toby. I am not the slightest bit interested in him in that way,’ she said with a giggle as Toby confirmed the jealousy she’d earlier suspected. ‘I am just saying that he has outstanding natural grace and beauty. And more than that, he has got – I don’t quite know how to express it – something.’

Toby’s face softened as his fear of Hattie’s attraction to Jimmy receded. His insecurity – so rarely expressed by a man who carefully controlled all his emotions – touched what was left of Hattie’s love for him.

‘Is that your only objection, that I might find him attractive?’ she said, laughing and reaching a hand out to hold his in the comforting way you might take the hand of a small, unsure boy.

Toby leant across and kissed Hattie passionately, thrusting his tongue into her mouth in a way that he hadn’t since they first met. Kisses had slipped out of his sexual repertoire long ago and she found herself unusually aroused.

Toby fought to unbutton her shirt and undo her bra, without releasing his mouth from hers.

‘Do you want me, Hattie?’ he said urgently. ‘Look at me, look how big I am …’

He pushed her hand down to touch his penis and then started to grab at her jeans, unzipping them and pulling them down quite roughly. When she was naked he entered her and began to make love more powerfully than he had done since their first days together.

‘I’m going to fuck you and fuck you and fuck you,’ he roared.

‘SSH! Toby, he might hear us …’

‘I want him to fucking well hear us. This is our home, not his,’ said Toby as he thundered into her, and the bed, unaccustomed to such frenzied action, banged against the wall in an unmistakable rhythm that she felt sure could be heard above the sound of the television in the room below.

Chapter Six

An hour or so later, after Toby had fallen into a deep and obviously contented sleep, Hattie got up, slipped on her dressing gown and went downstairs. She felt unduly anxious about Jimmy. She supposed her concern about his overhearing their noisy lovemaking was linked to the maternal instinct he had aroused in her. At any rate she couldn’t think of any other explanation for the need to check if he was all right before she herself slept.

Since there were no lights coming from the big open space living area she assumed he was asleep and made her way to the kitchen. She turned on the dimmer switch and noticed that Jimmy had made an effort to clean up. The plates were washed and stacked on the draining board and the pans were soaking in the sink.

It wasn’t Jimmy who lacked house-training, it was Toby. The real animal here, she thought as she made her way to the bathroom, was the man she lived with. Marking out his territory with that loud display of his sexual prowess. She shuddered in recollection and experienced an added pang of guilt for the fact that, for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she had actually enjoyed sex.

She poured some oil into the bath and turned on the taps. She wasn’t the kind of woman who had any particular beauty regime but she felt the need to deep cleanse herself tonight and she fished around in the big drawer for an old tube of face mask which she carefully applied. The effect was, she thought as she examined herself in the mirror, oddly depersonalising. The greeny white paste obliterated her features and held her face in a fixed expression.