There was a polite rap on the bathroom door and Phyllis came in. She was wearing a lemon-yellow cardigan and chocolate-brown slacks.
“How are we doing, Jack?” she asked. She was a small, plump, full-breasted woman with a great quiff of reddish blonde hair swept up in a frosted, billow-effect around her pretty face. “Out we get — turn into a jelly fish, you will.” She had a deep voice for a small woman — probably an ex-smoker, Ingram thought — one that he found made her cockney accent more raucous and agreeably lewd, somehow.
He stepped meekly out of the bath and she advanced on him with a towel and began to dry him.
“Someone’s growing a little pot belly, Jack-me-lad,” she said, patting his stomach. “Hello, hello, what’ve we got here, then?”
♦
Ingram counted out the four 50-pound notes and laid them discreetly on Phyllis’s dresser. It seemed unspeakably cheap for the thirty minutes or so of intense sexual pleasure he had enjoyed with her. He checked his hair in the mirror — he looked a little flushed, still — and adjusted his tie-knot.
“That was wonderful, Phyllis,” he said, adding another “Tremendous.”
“You can fuck me any day you want, Jack, darling,” she said, slipping naked out of the bed. She gave him a kiss and squeezed his balls, making him flinch, then laugh. “Ta muchly,” she said, picking up the money. “Close the door behind you, Jack dear, there’s a love.” She put the notes in a large wallet. “Give us a bell any time — don’t forget, twenty-four hours notice.”
On the Tube back to Victoria, Ingram thought back, with nostalgic pleasure, over the various sex acts he’d performed with Phyllis that morning and marvelled, as he always did when he left her, that he’d found her at all. For five years before Phyllis he had enjoyed the professional services of Nerys, a Welsh woman, with a thick, singing Welsh accent, who had a couple of rooms in Soho. When she told him she was going back to Swansea to look after her grandchildren Ingram felt some key component of his life was being removed. “Don’t worry, lovely,” she had said, “I’ll find you a perfect substitute,” and it was Nerys who had introduced him to Phyllis. Networking, he supposed, everyone did it…He kept his Nerys name—“Jack”—and the relationship, such as it was, flourished and endured — perhaps even better than it had been with Nerys.
How come? he wondered. He didn’t want to delve too deeply into the reasons why he found the Neryses and the Phyllises of this world so sexually alluring. He wasn’t a fooclass="underline" he knew absolutely that on one level it was all about class. It was because they were working class — because they were ‘common’—that he was excited by them: the terrible decor of their rooms, their funny names, their culture, their accents, their grammar, their language. He suspected also that it was something to do with his schooldays, his prep school, the onset of puberty and all that — not wanting to delve too deeply…Didn’t someone say that what attracted you sexually as a thirteen-year-old haunted you all your adult life? A friend’s mother, an aunt, a sibling’s nanny, an au pair, an under-matron, a girl working in the school kitchen…What set these time bombs ticking in your sexual psyche? How could you know when and how they would detonate?
He stepped out of the train on to the platform — he took careful precautions on his journeys to and from Phyllis — Shoreditch not being somewhere he frequented, normally. Luigi parked in a square not far from the station. Ingram would say he had a meeting that would last a couple of hours and he wasn’t to be disturbed. He’d walk to the Underground station on a circuitous route and always return to the car by a different one.
He paused on the station concourse for a second and briefly closed his eyes, remembering Phyllis’s generous, well-padded body, her gentle mockery. Sex was fun, a bit of a lark, robustly uncomplicated — no need for PRO-Vyril’s stealthy, chemical helping hand. He headed out of the station, wondering if she ever thought about him after he’d left — her ‘Jack’—and if she ever speculated about who he really was (he took no ID with him, another precaution, just cash). No, he thought, this was the punter’s typical, sad fantasy — all she wanted was her 200 quid because another ‘Jack’ was due. He wasn’t that vain, that naive — thank god! Still, sometimes he wondered…
Her husband, Wesley — he knew his name — was a despatcher for a minicab firm, absent about twelve hours a day, and Phyllis had decided to make the family home in Shoreditch generate some income while he was at work. Only once had he met another client, coming to the house as he was leaving — another man his age, grey-haired, in his fifties, his whole demeanour reeking of upper-middle — classdom: the dark suit and banded tie, the covert coat, the briefcase. A QC? A senior civil servant? Politician? Banker? Harley Street doctor? They had ignored each other utterly, as if they were both invisible — ghosts. But it was a jolt: a tangible reminder that Phyllis sold her time and her body to others. How did we find our Phyllises, he wondered? What led us to these accommodating professionals?
Luigi was waiting with the car in Eccleston Square.
“You have one call, signore,” he said, handing Ingram his mobile phone. “Signer Rilke.”
Ingrain called back. “Alfredo, you’re here — wonderful. I was expecting you on Monday.”
“Where were you?”
“I had a meeting,” Ingram improvised quickly. “I had to see a doctor. About my son,” he added, taking the heat off himself.
“Is that your homosexual son?”
“Yes — my ‘gay’ son. All very troublesome and complex.” Ingram rather wished he hadn’t embarked on this lie.
“Has he got AIDS?”
“No, no — nothing like that. Anyway, let’s—”
“I’m at the Firststopotel, Cromwell Road.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
♦
Alfredo Rilke only stayed in chain hotels — Marriott, Hilton, Schooner Inns, Novotel — but he always took an entire floor and however many rooms that floor contained. When he arrived, Ingram was shown up to the fifth floor and one of Alfredo’s youthful associates — a young man in jeans with an earpiece and a thin stick-microphone at his mouth — led him down a featureless corridor to one of the rooms and left him there with a smile and a small bow from the waist.
Alfredo Rilke opened the door himself before Ingram could knock. They embraced, diffidently, more a clasping of the upper arms and a leaning in to each other than anything else — their faces did not touch — Rilke patting him reassuringly on a shoulder blade and steering him into the dark room, curtains drawn.
Rilke was a tall, heavily built man in his early sixties, bespectacled, smiling, avuncular, bald with a neat semicircular ruff of unnaturally dark hair that started above one ear and circumnavigated the back of his head to the other. He moved slowly and deliberately as if he were on the verge of frailty. It was an illusion: Ingram had seen him playing energetic tennis in Grand Cayman and the US Virgin Islands, hitting the ball with real force. But off the tennis court he feigned this quasi-senility — a way of reassuring and disarming his colleagues, rivals and competitors, Ingram supposed. Alfredo Rilke seemed like a rapidly ageing man — exactly what he wanted people to think.
“Sit down, Ingram, sit down.”
Ingram did, noting that the bedroom had been converted, somewhat half-heartedly, into a sitting room — the bed pushed back to the side wall, some chairs and a coffee table added.