“Mum,” Rachel had said woozily through the cotton wool pads in her cheeks. “They’re all dentists here, not doctors.”
“OK, dentist then, Jewish doctor, dentist what difference? Come on.”
“What do you mean, come on?”
“I mean come on and get in the wheelchair. I’m going to take you out there and introduce you.”
Had her brain not been addled by lingering anesthesia, she would have been horrified by such a suggestion, but instead all she said was: “But, Mum, what are you going to say?”
“I’ll think of something,” Faye said as she dragged her daughter out of the bed and into the wheelchair. Even in her fuddled state Rachel couldn’t help wondering how a sixty-year-old sparrow like woman of five foot three could possess the upper-body strength of a hod carrier.
Rachel caught sight of her face in the dressing table mirror. Her cheeks were so stuffed with cotton pads she looked like a hamster stocking up for a famine.
“Maybe you should put on some mascara and a bit of eye shadow. Some blusher wouldn’t hurt.”
“Mum.” Rachel’s shriek was muffled, but eloquent. Clearly realizing she had pushed her daughter far enough, Faye simply put a blanket over her daughter’s knees and swung the wheelchair round toward the door.
A moment later they were charging down the corridor, Faye muttering breathlessly, “I can’t see him. He was here a minute ago. How far could he have gotten in just a few seconds?” Then, just as the wheelchair smashed through a pair of clear plastic doors and came out the other side, Faye screeched to a cartoon halt.
“There he is,” she said in a shrill whisper, “on the left there. Talking to some other doctors.”
Rachel wouldn’t have described him as gorgeous exactly, but he was good-looking in a beaky kind of way. She suddenly became even more aware of her hamster face and she decided, unwisely as it turned out, to remove the cotton wool from her mouth. Almost at once she could feel blood starting to trickle down the back of her throat.
“Doctor . . . er . . .” Faye squinted at Adam’s identity badge.
“Landsberg. Ooh, any relation to the Hendon Landsbergs?”
Adam smiled and shook his head.
Rachel squirmed with embarrassment. What was more, the taste of blood was beginning to make her feel sick. Very sick indeed.
At that point Adam’s colleagues, clearly taking the view that he’d picked up a couple of nutters, made their excuses and left.
Faye cleared her throat nervously. “Er, look, Dr. Landsberg,” she said.
“He’s not a doctor,” Rachel hissed.
Faye glared down at her.
“Er . . . look,” she went on. Rachel could have sworn her mother was actually batting her eyelashes at Adam. “I realize you are a very busy man and I know you didn’t actually perform the operation on my daughter, but she’s in a great deal of pain and as there’s nobody else around just now, I was wondering if you would mind taking a look at her.”
Rachel looked up at Adam and smiled a weak, helpless smile.
He returned the smile. He had soft, gentle eyes, she thought.
He crouched down and whispered in her ear. “It’s OK. I’ve got a Jewish mother at home too.”
At that moment the nausea took over. Before Adam had a chance to stand up, Rachel had chucked up all over his Edward Green brogues.
He didn’t flinch. (It was only once she got to know Adam and his hygiene fanaticism that she realized what a heroic act his lack of flinching had been.) Instead, he fetched a nurse to mop up the vomit and agreed to examine Rachel as soon as he’d cleaned himself up. The following day, just before she was due to go home, he came back with a huge bunch of white lilies.
* * * * *
Dear sweet, kind Adam. She really should start making wedding plans. Marrying him did make sense in so many ways.
Rachel fell into an uneasy sleep. In her dreams a bunch of weeping, pierced-nose feminists, each with Adam’s bald patch and each wearing a candlewick dressing gown and rubber gloves, were pelting her with Flash-soaked tampons for daring to suggest that somebody should invent a new intimate deodorant for women and call it Fishguard.
CHAPTER 3
Rachel stared down at the damp patch on the bottom sheet and grimaced. Funny, she found herself thinking, that even the rich and famous leaked when they did it. She threw the huge square pillows on the floor, released one fitted sheet corner and started walking round the bed to do the others. Like many ordinary people, Rachel had long nurtured a suspicion that celebs and royals were, due to a dispensation from on high, excused the unpleasant seepages, emissions and outflowings that afflicted the rest of humanity. Dame Judi farting, Sophie Wessex dropping a floater, or Martha Stewart giving birth through anything other than a tiny, specially constructed orifice behind her ear were thoughts far too gruesome to contemplate.
What she was forced to contemplate, however, was that Otto and Xantia Marx, founders of the planet’s most renowned interior design company, OP8 UK, who were about to launch what would surely become the planet’s most renowned high-street fashion label, OP8 of the People, and for whom she had recently started cleaning five mornings a week, had sex much the same as everybody else. She rolled up the bottom sheet and dropped it on the floor next to the pillows. As she started removing the duvet cover she prayed that when she went into the bathroom she wouldn’t find skid marks on the sides of the lavvy.
Wet patches aside, the Marxes seemed to have very little in common with ordinary people. For a start there was their immense wealth. In interviews, for the sake of good public relations and a desire to continue being regular guests at Number 10, they preferred to play down their multimillionaire status and made much of their socialist thinker namesake, referring constantly and in the most gushing and exuberant terms to Otto’s illustrious great-uncle Karl. In private, however, Xantia owned a modern art collection to rival Charles Saatchi’s and a rowing machine that looked to Rachel like it could sleep eight. Moreover, despite sitting on several government working parties set up to combat inner-city poverty, she wasn’t the warmest of souls. On Rachel’s first day she’d heard Xantia on the phone to a friend suggesting that instead of feeding the Third World starving, they should be taught how to become Breatharians. “You know, those wonderful people who live on air alone.”
But it wasn’t simply their wealth and fame that marked them out from the rest of the world. The couple possessed a unique sartorial style that was odd, to say the least. Xantia wore only purple muslin saris with stiffened shrouds covering her Day-Glo mauve dreadlocks. Otto had a shaved head and wore purple combats and T-shirts.
Then there was the house. From the outside, the Marx pile looked much the same as all the other grand four-story Victorian villas overlooking Hampstead Heath. The interior on the other hand gave the impression, at least as far as Rachel was concerned, that it had been designed by a couple of thirtieth-century androids who had just won the lottery.
In the eighteen months the Marxes had owned the house, they had knocked down every nonsupporting wall, removed the roof and all the floors. The vast, eighty-foot-high shell had then been topped with a glass dome and divided up by four immensely thick, semiopaque toughened glass platforms suspended and encased by steel wires. Bedrooms were obscured by high metal screens on wheels. Only the bathrooms had doors. Living areas were linked by steel and glass staircases or bridges. These were bathed twenty-four hours a day in bright purple halogen light.
“By dispensing with the notion of room qua room,” Otto had expounded to Nettle di Lucca when she arrived to interview the couple for the Sunday
Tribune
’s “Shitegeist” page (in which famous artists and designers revealed their three pet design hates of the twentieth century), “we have rejected an authoritarian use of power and collective regulation. What we have created instead, with carefully weighed juxtapositions of man-made materials and forms, is a functionalist, timeless idiom of pure universal order. The room is dead. Long live the
piazza
.”
Nettle di Lucca leaped to her feet in the huge purple inflated dinghy filled with cushions that served as a sofa, almost turning her ankle on her flower-filled Perspex platforms as she did so, and burst into dainty, fingertip applause.
“And three cheers to that say I,” she squealed, breaking off from her clapping to rearrange the two chopsticks that had started to fall out of the half ponytail, half spiky-haired fan arrangement at the back of her head. “Otto, my darling, those are without doubt the most moving, inspiring and spiritually uplifting words I have heard since Gwyneth’s Oscar acceptance speech.”
Rachel saw and heard all this because she was standing at the kitchen sink at the far end of the downstairs piazza, wiping over the half dozen or so sets of stainless steel wind chimes that the Marxes had hanging about the place for feng shui purposes.
* * * * *
Back in the master bed piazza, Rachel picked up the dirty linen from the floor and headed toward the bathroom and the aluminum laundry bin, which Xantia insisted she call “the laundry
’pod,’
dahling. The laundry ‘
pod
.
’
” She couldn’t put the sheets in the washing machine because the damned thing was on the blink. She’d put in two or three bath towels when she arrived at half past eight, as Xantia and Otto were leaving for the day, and after a couple of minutes the thing was shuddering and jumping across the floor and sounding like a thousand castanets were caught up in the works. She didn’t know whether to call out a repairman or start humming “La Cucaracha.” In the end she’d consulted Xantia’s “Tradesmen to call in an emergency” list and phoned the washing machine man.
She put the lid down on the laundry pod and turned toward the shower cubiculum. Not only was the Marxes’ shower huge and purple, tiled with spotlights in the floor and Surround-Sound speakers, but it was of the “car wash variety,” whereby electronically powered jets of hot water shot out from the cubicle sides as well as the shower head. So far, whenever Rachel had cleaned it, which could only be done from the inside, she’d gotten confused about which of the shower settings was which and ended up soaking wet.
Rachel stepped into the cubiculum, picked up a bar of Space NK soap from the tiled floor, removed several Marx pubic hairs that were stuck to it and laid it on the wire soap holder. Then she unhooked the hand shower that she would use to hose down the tiles once she’d Jiffed them.
She moved the chunky metal dial on the wall to what she thought was the correct setting. The next second, as seemed to happen whichever way she set it, needles of ice-cold water were shooting down on her. She yelped and leaped out. Her hair was soaked. Swearing, she grabbed one of the Marxes’ oversize bath towels from the heated rail and wrapped it in a turban round her head. It was then that she noticed her T-shirt front. It was dripping wet and clinging to her bra. Swearing again, she leaned over the bath, took hold of the fabric and squeezed out some of the water. When she’d finished the T-shirt was horribly creased and only marginally less wet. She started to shiver. There was nothing for it. She would have to borrow a T-shirt from Xantia’s freebie pile in the spare bed piazza. Young fashion designers and companies in search of her sponsorship sent her T-shirts, sneakers and sweatshirts “by the truckload, dahling, by the truckload.” Naturally Xantia, who loathed the sartorially parochial (which for her included Voyage, Comme des Garçons and Vivienne Westwood), wore none of the items she was sent. On Rachel’s first day she had pointed out the freebie pile and invited her to help herself.
“Your sense of style is so natural, so unaffected, dahling,” she smiled, holding a canary-yellow Giorgio sweatshirt up against Rachel, “I’m sure you’ll find absolutely oodles of things here to suit you.”
Rachel took off her sodden T-shirt and bra and hung them over the heated towel rail. (They wouldn’t take more than an hour or so to dry. She would put them back on when she left at lunchtime.) Then she headed toward the spare bed piazza. Under the clothes rack was a pile of white T-shirts, each wrapped in cellophane. She had just begun ripping into the packet on the top of the pile when the front doorbell rang.
She looked at her watch. If that was the washing machine repairman, he was half an hour early. Quickly she undid the turban. A moment later, wearing the new T-shirt, she was dashing toward the glass bridge that connected the bed piazza to the stairs. She’d almost reached the bottom when the doorbell rang for a second time.
“All right. All right,” she muttered. “Gimme a chance.” She threw her long damp hair forward and back again, hoping it would fall into some halfway acceptable shape.
Through the one-way glass panel in the door she saw a tall bloke in jeans and a suede jacket, carrying a blue metal toolbox.
She opened the door.
“Matt Clapton,” he said brightly. “You phoned earlier about the washer-dryer.”
“Hi. Sorry I took so long, I was right at the top of the house.”
“No problem.” He smiled, ramming his keys into the pocket of his 501s.
She stood back to let him in.
“Jeez,” he said, looking round and shaking his head, “I knew I should have worn titanium.”
She giggled.
“The moment I turned into the road,” he continued, “I remembered I’d been here before. I plumbed in the washer-dryer a year ago. The place was starting to look a bit Skylab then, but this . . .”
His eyes continued darting round. After a few seconds they came to rest. On her chest. She couldn’t be sure, but he appeared to be trying to get an eyeful of her tits through the T-shirt. She felt herself blush with pleasure. Rachel always pretended to despise men who leered at women, while secretly acknowledging that a wolf whistle from a huge sweaty bloke in a hard hat and CAT boots could set her up for the rest of the day. It was only as the look became a prolonged stare that her sense of feeling mildly flattered (particularly as her tits, although still pert, were utterly average thirty-four Bs) turned to annoyance and discomfort.
She cleared her throat uneasily. He carried on staring.
“Sorry about my hair,” she said, smiling, hoping bland chatter might divert him. “Must look a sight. I was trying to clean the shower cubicle, got confused with the settings and ended up drenched in freezing water. Look at me. My arms are covered in goose bumps.”
He looked up.
“Oh right,” he said vacantly, before his eyes returned to her breasts.
“OK,” she said firmly, starting to get irritated now. “So I’ll lead the way, shall I?”
He just about managed to tear his eyes away.
“Sure,” he said.
As she watched his eyeline drop again, her instinct was to ask him to leave, but she just knew Xantia was the type to throw a major wobbly if she came home to find a pile of dirty laundry and the washing machine on the blink. Rachel needed the money too much to risk getting the sack. Instead she stretched her T-shirt neck and shoved her hand down inside.
“Here,” she said sarcastically, bringing out the hand and thrusting her open palm at him, “you seem to have mislaid your eyeballs in my cleavage.”
He came to with a start.
“Oh God. S—sorry, what did you say?” he said, clearly abandoning his sexual reverie. “I was miles away.”
“I’m sure you were,” she said with an icy smile, bringing her hand back down to her side. “The utility room is this way.”
“Oh . . . oh . . . right,” he said.
She turned and headed toward the kitchen. He followed.
“So you a friend of Xantia’s, then?” he said breezily.
Blimey, Rachel thought, I catch him ogling my tits and he doesn’t even have the decency to look awkward—just carries on as if nothing’s happened.
“Nope, just the cleaner,” she replied, keeping her back to him in order to make it crystal clear she had no intention of getting into matey banter with him.
“Oh, I see,” he said.
He put his toolbox on the floor, took off his jacket and crouched down in front of the machine. The Wiener 2500 was a brushed aluminum washer-dryer of Laundromat proportions that cost thousands and had to be especially imported from Stuttgart.
“So what seems to be the trouble?” he asked, looking up at her. She explained about the castanets.
“Probably just needs a few squirts of Oil of Olé.” He looked up at her, grinned and began rolling up the sleeve of his denim shirt.
Right, she thought, he wasn’t only a letch, he was a smart arse too.
“You reckon?” she said. Her lips had formed a thin smile.
“No, not really,” he chortled, “just a joke. Look, don’t worry. You just put the kettle on and I’ll have you sorted in no time.”
Typical workman, she thought. First he ogles my tits then he starts demanding bloody tea. He was the kind of cocky git, she decided, who rang “Dial-a-Prayer” and asked for his messages.
“Perhaps you’d like a nice toasted tea cake with that.”
“Oh God. No, sorry,” he shot back. “You said you were cold that’s all. I thought a hot drink might warm you up. I wasn’t suggesting or even asking . . .”
“Course you weren’t,” Rachel said flatly.
“No, really . . .”
Apparently deciding to give up his feeble protest, he turned back to the machine, released the catch and stuck his head inside the drum.
“So what do you think might be the matter with it?” Rachel asked.
“Probably got a foreign body in the works,” he said. “I find all sorts.”
“Yeah, like lipsticks, jewelry, bottles of nail varnish?” she said in a barely audible murmur.
He carried on poking around inside the machine.
“OK,” he said eventually, his head emerging from the drum. “Can’t tell till I get the back off, but I might have to send off for a new part.”
She nodded, noting that neither the name of the part nor its purpose was forthcoming. He clearly thought she was too much of a bubble brain to take it in. She watched him stand up and hoick his baggy Levi’s back to his waist. Two minutes from now, she thought, he’d be dragging the machine out from the wall, all exposed beer gut and hairy arse cleavage saying, “I mean take my girlfriend, for example. Loses everything. Mind you, she’s about as bright as Alaska in December. If a form says ‘sign here,’ she writes ‘Capricorn.’ ”