He had remembered that. In his bedroom now hung a pastel original, in the kind of muted colours Charlie favoured, by a local Bristol painter not yet celebrated enough to be out of his price range. And on a specially purchased round white table in one corner of the living room stood an abstract bronze by West Country sculptor Clive Gunnell. Charlie had saved up for his two original pieces of art only out of money given him by Mrs Pattinson. It seemed appropriate.
Charlie glanced around him with quiet satisfaction. He had achieved something here and he knew it. Mrs Pattinson and all the rest of them were part of it. The painting and the bronze were from her, that was how he thought of it. The floor was his widow’s. The muslin curtains had been bought through six months of regular Wednesday afternoon sessions with an overly thin woman who called herself Angela and seemed to live on nervous energy and nothing else. She would remove her sensible low-heeled shoes, strip off her formal business suits and with them discard the last vestige of her tight-lipped, tension-filled respectability. She had been rampant that one, Charlie remembered.
Mrs Pattinson was rampant too. But, even though she was paying him, Mrs Pattinson gave as well as took. Charlie’s body still glowed pleasurably. He always looked forward to the times spent with her at the Crescent Hotel. Every time was different, you see, every time a new experience. What a way to earn a living, he thought to himself smugly. And what a good living it was too.
Charlie took a winter holiday in his native West Indies every year, and this February planned to take his mother with him. His family were very proud of him. He was bright, likeable, self-assured, fun to have around. But Charlie’s family had no idea what Charlie really did for a living — something in computers, never too precisely explained, was his cover — and neither did most of his friends. It wasn’t that he was ashamed, it was just that, in common with the Merry Widow’s daughter, he didn’t think they would understand. In fact he knew his mother would throw a fit. There were three older brothers and two sisters, one older than him and one younger; the elder, Mary Anne, married to a decent enough but unexceptional man. His younger sister, Daisy, strikingly pretty, looked set to escape to a better life than might be expected, as Charlie considered that he had done. Daisy had caught the eye of a clever young black man who had recently graduated in Law from Bristol University. He had landed a job in London and they were soon to be married. Charlie was ecstatically happy for Daisy. He wanted the best for all his family, but for the others it was probably not to be.
Charlie and his brothers and sisters had been brought up in the St Paul’s area of Bristol which had improved greatly since the terrible days of the notorious race riots, but remained a rough and tough place. Many of the boys and girls he had gone to school with already seemed to have wrecked their lives. Some were in jail or just put. Drugs figured heavily in the day-to-day life of St Paul’s, and Charlie knew that one of his elder brothers, Bart, who had always liked dope a bit too much, was now into crack. That frightened Charlie, but he didn’t blame Bart. Life was hard and you took your pleasures where you could in St Paul’s. The dangers rarely presented themselves until it was too late. Charlie knew that about drugs and always had done — but never even considered that the same premise could be applied to his chosen way of life in which he saw no hidden dangers at all.
Both the older brothers, Jack and Winston, were married and held down steady labouring jobs with the council. They earned little for hard dirty work and Charlie thought they both deserved better. His family was not like many in the St Paul’s area. They had been brought up by a mother who had sacrificed everything for them — his father, who had come to Bristol because of the docks and never got over their closure, had died suddenly of a heart attack when Charlie had been seven years old — to be well behaved, honest and hard working. It seemed to Charlie, though, that these qualities did not necessarily help you get on in life. He knew that up in Clifton, all around the Crescent Hotel where he had spent half the afternoon and evening with Mrs Pattinson, a host of privileged white kids without half his intelligence were being handed opportunities on a plate that his brothers and sisters would have crawled over beds of nails for.
Charlie had determined that he was going to have a future, whatever he had to do in order to build one. His real work was conducted with great discretion. Unlike most of his kind Charlie did not fall into male prostitution by accident. He had made a conscious decision that this was what he would do. After all, sex was what he was best at, what he had always been best at. It was no different really, he told himself, from being good at football, and a hell of a lot better, he reckoned, than being good at boxing — and those were the other two great working-class means of escape.
Charlie first realised how good he was at sex when, aged only thirteen, he had been seduced by the Sunday-school teacher who was supposed to be giving him confirmation class — Mrs Collins believed in religious education above all else. The young woman — although being around thirty she had seemed quite old to him then — had, in between outbursts of self-flagellating guilt, set about giving him a superb sexual education over a period of several months.
At around this time Charlie remembered one of the few things his daddy had told him. If you have a talent you should make the most of it, his father had said. He had been thinking, Charlie had known all too well, of his own abandoned talent as a jazz trombonist. Charlie’s father had even sold his treasured trombone, passed on to him by his own father, in order to provide for his family. Ranwell Collins’ talent died years before he did, and before Charlie had even been born, and Ranwell never stopped mourning it.
Charlie knew what his talent was all right. He also knew his father would not have approved any more than would his mother — but he didn’t think about that. Charlie was a natural sexual athlete whom nature had equipped particularly well for the job. He had been told by veterans in his trade, mostly women, that one day it would destroy him. Some had advised him to get out while he could. It was advice Charlie had no intention of taking. In fact, he couldn’t quite comprehend what they were talking about.
Charlie reckoned he was totally in control of his own life. And he was particularly happy that day. He always was after being with Mrs P. Happy, if exhausted. Invariably exhausted. Charlie chuckled. He liked Mrs Pattinson. Charlie didn’t understand why women were still not supposed to reveal the same kinds of appetites men had quite freely exhibited for years. He didn’t see anything wrong with Mrs Pattinson’s behaviour. And he thought it was sad that she had to be quite so secretive. She was a complete mystery to him, that one. Even the occasions when she would talk to him about his life were few and far between. Mostly she only wanted to talk about sex. That seemed quite reasonable to Charlie. He saw nothing wrong with sex. If you were sensible and used your head, sex was simply about pleasure and nobody need get hurt. Charlie had no time for double standards. Nonetheless, it was largely thanks to double standards that business was so good for him. His market was a growing one. There were quite a lot of Mrs Pattinsons around looking for no-risk sexual adventure, Charlie had discovered, and he was very grateful for it.
He gave Mrs Pattinson a good time, no questions asked, no emotional ties, pure sex — and she paid him handsomely. That seemed like a perfect arrangement to Charlie. And there was the added bonus, of course. As Charlie had yet to become jaded by his work, Mrs Pattinson gave him a pretty good time too.
But this was an adventurous and imaginative woman. She also liked to try new young men from time to time and sometimes she liked to have two of them together. Charlie didn’t mind that. He quite liked watching as well as doing, come to that. And, in any case, there wasn’t a lot that Charlie minded. Life was good.