Don't You Want Me? (2 page)

‘You never do, though, do you? Are they all homeless? Anyway, I hope it was worth it. Was it good?’ I’ve gulped down my juice and am standing by the coffee machine. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please. Was what good?’

‘The sex, Frank.’

Frank, I am pleased to notice, has gone scarlet. What with the tangerine above the red face, he looks like the kind of cardigan women wore in the late Nineties.

‘Stella, honey, you can’t ask things like that,’ he says, trying not to stammer. He shakes his head. He is scrabbling for something to say. ‘I’m a good Catholic boy,’ is what he comes out with, absurdly.

‘Yuck! Don’t talk to me as if I were your mummy. Firstly, you’re not a boy: you were a thirty-five-year-old man, last time I looked. Secondly, Catholic doesn’t come into it, frankly.’

‘Stella,’ Frank interrupts.

‘Thirdly,’ I interrupt him back, ‘thirdly, Frank-eee, there
is nothing good or Catholic or even boyish about
coming on women’s faces
. Classy number, was she? Known her long?’

Frank slams his juice down on the counter, spilling it.

‘For fuck’s sake, Stella! Have some respect!’

‘What, like you respect the female form?’

‘Stella! Stop it!’

We stand in uneasy silence, glaring at each other. I might have gone too far, I think to myself. On the other hand, it gets really on my nerves when people – English men – are all uptight about something you’ve actually heard them do. I’ll just go a little further: test his mettle.

‘Oa. Oa. Oa,’ I shout, right into his face. ‘Oa, Frankie, baby.’

Frank looks truly appalled. He runs his hand through his hair, which is standing up in soft peaks, like egg whites would if egg whites were orange. And then he smiles, and I smile, and then we giggle.

‘You’re an appalling human being,’ he says. ‘You do terrible things.’

‘Pot,’ I reply. ‘I don’t believe you’ve ever met kettle.’

He rolls his eyes.

‘Really, Frankie. I know it’s none of my business, but “oa, oa”?’

Frank is trying to look severe, and failing. He laughs through his nose, and then properly, out loud. When he laughs, his eyes start watering, which always sets me off. He does it now. We laugh, and then he snorts, and then we’re friends again.

I expect you’re wondering how I come to be sharing a house with a sex-obsessed ginger man. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’d better tell it, and that way we’ll have got the
boring explanatory bit out of the way and can go on with the rest.

My name, as you will have noticed, is Stella. It’s really Estelle, but I got so tired of the mispronunciation I had to put up with daily – ‘Ee-stell’, ‘Eh-stelley’, ‘Es-tewell’, even ‘Esther’ – and with people asking me to spell it for them, that I anglicized it some years ago. I am, as I mentioned, partly English, on my mother’s side. My father is French (and, I think, possibly gay, though I can’t be quite sure; certainly, he’s the campest man on earth, as you will see). I was brought up in Paris, speaking French, although Mummy, being one of those tenaciously snobbish Englishwomen who spend twenty years abroad and deliberately don’t quite master the basic gist of the language, always spoke English to me at home.

So I was brought up bilingual, although obviously living in Paris meant that all my day-to-day business – school, friends, shops, restaurants – was conducted in French. We spent summer holidays in England every year, staying with my maternal grandparents at their house in East Sussex, and this, combined with my mother’s descending like a ton of bricks the second her immaculate ear discerned anything approaching a French accent in me – ‘Darling, don’t be
froggy
’ – means that I speak English like, well, a native.

(Odd of my mother to marry a Frenchman and then be embarrassed by Frenchness, isn’t it? If she imitates someone French, she literally says, ‘Nee nor nee nor’. But it often happens when English people marry ‘foreigners’, I notice: blissfully exotic for thirty seconds, and then an albatross of shame for the next twenty years.)

I spent a couple of years at a boarding school in the
shires when Mummy and Papa separated, when I was fourteen. That was when I realized, on a daily basis, that I could sound as English as Judi Dench, but that, like it or not, in the middle-class world which I inhabited, I was hopelessly, helplessly foreign: I liked my family better than I liked horses, I couldn’t eat grey mince, I’d done snogging, I liked cigarettes and was allowed to smoke one a day at home, I refused to play lacrosse on the grounds that it would ruin my calves (I know: terrible of me – true, though), and so on and so inexcusably foreignly forth. Still, I made some nice horse-faced friends and became good at tennis, so it wasn’t entirely wasted.

I shan’t bore you with my days at university – two years at the Sorbonne, one at Cambridge, reading Romance Languages. All you need to know is that I didn’t work particularly hard, went to a lot of parties and generally had a lovely time. After Cambridge, I got married to the boy I’d been going out with in the summer term: we were only twenty-two and, really, it was doomed to failure. In the event, it lasted two silly, giggly years and the split was entirely friendly: Rupert is even Honey’s godfather.

Unfortunately for lonely old me – I could do with an extra friend right now – Rupert, having lived the post-marital life of an eligible west Londoner to the full – shag-pad in Ladbroke Grove and so on – decided six months ago to grow a beard, up sticks and move to the Hebrides, where he studies birds, eats crabs, wears itchy sweaters and is, by his own account, blissfully happy. Funny how people always revert to type: I remember his mother telling me that he spent his entire childhood collecting feathers and climbing up trees to find nests.

I moved around Europe for a while and then, aged twenty-seven, I went home to Paris and started working as a translator. I had a wonderful life: a flat in the Marais, good friends, a fantastic bistro right underneath my apartment – they’d send up old-fashioned
soupe à l’oignon
when I had a cold or a hangover. The only fly in the ointment was work: there’s a limit to how excited you can get translating endless documents about petrochemical companies’ plans for expansion. Still, it seemed that the more boring and technical the job, the better you got paid, so I pottered along happily. The odd love affair along the way kept things zinging nicely; I was, with the luxury of retrospect, perfectly content.

I met Dominic Midhurst when I was thirty-four, through my poofy father, who has always had a fondness for contemporary art (at one stage during my childhood – this would have been the late Sixties – he decided we should live in a bare white house with white rubber flooring and huge disturbing, nightmare-inducing canvases of what I remember to be carcasses, though surely they can’t all have been, adorning the double-height walls. We also had a small, graphically realistic painting in the downstairs loo of an erect, perfectly pink penis called, not unreasonably,
Le Penis
, artist unknown, though I always suspected Papa had sketched it).

When we met, Dominic, who was a couple of years younger than me, was just beginning to create his empire: he understood the importance of PR and publicity before anyone else did, and had a stable of young conceptual artists (what does this
mean
? Don’t all artists have a concept? It’s like the houses you see advertised for sale, proclaiming themselves to be ‘architect-designed’); artists who could
all be relied on to grace the gossip pages of the tabloids on a regular basis with some outrage or other.

My father bought some works – you could hardly call them paintings – for his XVIième apartment, and after a few months it turned out that Dominic needed someone to translate his increasingly hefty, wordy catalogues for him. Oddly, since he’s never claimed to actually like Dominic much, Papa volunteered me, and although neither the idea of my daddy getting me a job, nor the art, nor the pale, blond, effete Dominic was exactly my cup of tea, the alternative career-wise would eventually have involved something like moving to Brussels to translate at the European Commission. Working for Dominic meant I could keep my beloved flat, keep taking the onion soup, and continue my affair with a Parisian bookshop owner with a foot fetish (inexplicable, as fetishes go. I mean,
feet
). So I took the job and started translating the quasi-nonsensical catalogues.

Eventually Dominic decided it would be easier for everyone concerned if I worked from his Paris gallery rather than from home (there were then two galleries, one in Paris and one in London: he divided his time between them) with, in many cases, the art hanging in front of me, for clarification purposes. As well as translating the catalogues, in which ludicrously pseudy sentiments were expressed in award-winningly ludicrous pseudy sentences, I began involving myself with the general day-to-day life of the gallery; this occasionally involved going to lunch with Dominic and some potential buyers.

Dominic, like my mother and Jane Birkin, spoke only the most rudimentary, heavily accented French: very charming, boldly fast, but not quite up to a serious discussion
of the various merits of our various artists. After the clients had left, we’d sit and drink a cognac companionably, and slowly came to realize we quite enjoyed each other’s company. ‘You make me laugh, Stella,’ he once said, with the sense of shocked, not entirely delighted wonder one might use if saying, ‘You make me poo.’

So yes, obviously, we started dating, but it took two years: hardly the old
coup de foudre
. Sitting in the back room of the gallery, I’d noticed he had a predilection for vacant-seeming leggy blondes with artfully striped hair: the kinds of women who look best in sports cars (Dom had two, both red: if big car = small dick, I thought to myself, does big car × 2 = ‘Is it in yet?’ proportions?).

I had the legs, but that was about it: in every other respect, I was the physical antithesis of what he usually went for. I’m tall, have shoulder-length dark brown hair, once poetically described by Dominic as being the colour of bitter chocolate, and matching eyes. I’m OK – I really like my eyelashes – but you wouldn’t necessarily think ‘polo and champagne’ if you looked at me, and polo and champagne were very much what Dominic seemed to be about deep down: he was about those women who you think must have micro-manicurists, invisible to the naked eye, permanently welded to their immaculate fingernails. My fingernails were bitten and, at the time, I wore no make-up and no heels: I dressed out of (French) thrift shops, in fourth-hand old dresses by Dior and Balenciaga. I looked remarkable, I’d always tell myself, but in the capital of style, I must have also looked pretty peculiar.

He was hardly my type either: he was like my school friends’ brothers. You know the look: sort of Bleached English, complete with floppy former public schoolboy
hair and a pronounced liking for scuffed Chelsea boots and frayed pale pink shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Being an art dealer, though, this look was accessorized with a perfect mockney accent and a selection of sharp black Prada coats that deliberately confused the issue class-wise: his artists, it seemed to me, appeared to believe that Dom was a geezer done good. He didn’t disabuse them.

But then, two years after I’d first met him and six months or so into those lunches, Dominic lunged (the English always lunge, as if they want to pin you down before you run away). It was easy not to resist. The amount of time he spent in Paris convinced me that he was not problematically English, especially when it came to sex: he didn’t want to spank me, or be spanked, for instance. Dominic was charming, witty, spoke French fearlessly badly and was always whisking me off to some
m’as-tu-vu
new restaurant where, very occasionally, people would recognize him. How could I resist him?

We got Not Married, which is to say official cohabitation began, in 1999, which was also the year we moved to London. I was thirty-six and hadn’t spent time in the capital for over a decade. In my heart, I knew even then that he was hardly the love of my life; but then surely that was the point of getting Not Married: you could always walk away without too much debris. In theory, at any rate. Even then, though, the theory seemed a bit half-arsed: I mean, either love someone and marry them, or don’t, and keep your own apartment. (I didn’t, sadly: my Marais flat went up for sale, and all my stuff got packed into boxes and shipped to London.)

To his credit, Dom didn’t claim that I was the love of his life either: what he said was, ‘We’ll have such good fun,
Stella. We’ll have everything we want. You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t bore me.’ I was
charmed
by this last sentence, as you would be. And then, even though we were from the generation that didn’t get married – too bourgeois, which is a laugh, considering our circs – he clicked open an old box from Cartier and presented me with a Thirties emerald, when I’d expected either nothing or a ‘contemporary’ number with metal spikes and stones that looked like ploppety pellets. So that, conclusively, was that.

He was right: we did have fun, we liked each other, and if the bed-action quickly became unremarkable, we never discussed it. He kept his promise, too: our life by then was, I suppose, really quite glamorous from the outside: dinner invitations arrived by their dozen every week at our big, leafy Primrose Hill house; there were two or three parties a night; and Dominic’s growing fame meant that, although we still hung out with his posse of artists, our social circle grew increasingly large, with all sorts of creative types lounging about our drawing room, as well as the odd promising young MP, media tycoon or on-the-up actor.

By the time Honey was born – a year later, making me, as my obstetrician kindly pointed out, an ‘elderly’ first-time mother – it would not be an exaggeration to say that we knew what passes for ‘everyone’. The world, or at least London, was our oyster, and if every now and then I wondered why the oyster had no pearl – well, that was just me being spoiled. And if a part of me wondered why pregnancy hadn’t spurred us on to tie the knot – it seems incredibly
rude
to me not to marry someone when they’ve
gone to the trouble of carrying your child and pushing it out of their poor vagina – well, ditto.