are you, still single? Why aren’t you seeing anybody? Your standards are too high! None of that. No pressure at all.’
‘Do you see her often?’
‘My mother? She comes to visit every couple of weeks, and vents about my father, and his obsession with the car parking spaces in Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose … I think all men of that generation eventually become obsessed with supermarket car parks. Are you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you’ve got a couple of years yet.’
‘We were talking about your mother.’
‘Yes. She comes to see me, on the train because my dad doesn’t like her driving the car – she mounts kerbs like a crazy woman – and she asks me to make her a cup of milky tea and then we chat about other people’s lives really. With a feigned interest, at best. We don’t mention mine.’
‘Do you feel that she is interested in your life?’
‘Well, sometimes she’ll ask about work, but only how I am getting on financially, whether it makes me happy working for myself. She doesn’t like to talk about the nature of my business – not that she officially disapproves of sex toys: she watches Channel Four.’
‘Do you think she might not want to intrude? Do you think she might be waiting for you to offer some information?’
‘I really don’t know what she thinks … about the lack of men in my life … I don’t think I want to know. Maybe she believes I am happier on my own, or assumes things go on that I don’t choose to share with her. She talks about the inadequacies of my sister’s latest flings as if they are all the same man, and all a disappointment at that.’
‘Do you feel inadequate compared to your sister? Do you feel that your mother doesn’t see you as enough, on your own?’
‘No, there has never been any suggestion from anybody that I am not enough on my own. I think they consider me more than enough on my own. Nobody seems to think that I might like to be taken care of. I just take care of myself. I always have.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Strong.’ I run my fingers through my hair. ‘And sad.’
Some would say it was a strange sequence of events that led me to establish shewantsshegets.com. But rather, it was one rather pedestrian happening, coupled with a slightly crazier occurrence, in addition to my deep-rooted wish to quit my then job. In the first instance I just happened to catch a TV programme that I wouldn’t normally have watched. I fell upon it late one night as I lay in bed cracking my way through a family-sized bar of Galaxy and a mug of hot chocolate, after a vanilla-scented bath. There was European Championship football on BBC1, Young Musician of the Year on BBC2, a crime reconstruction show that terrified me on ITV, and a party political broadcast for the Liberal Democrats on Channel Four. So I flicked to Channel Five, and settled down with a documentary about an ex-porn star in the US who claimed to be called Elixir Lake. She had huge blonde hair that looked as if it must have been set in rollers every half an hour. She also had swollen, precarious-looking breasts, on the brink of explosion: the nipple of her left breast was constantly erect and pointing diagonally down towards the floor in rock-hard shame.
Elixir Lake had, after a particularly unpleasant attack of herpes, decided to get out of porn, but porn was all she had known since she was a girl – a common problem. It was then that Elixir had her brainwave. She decided to cherry-pick pornography that she believed would appeal to an underexploited sector of the market – women – and sell it via this strange new phenomenon called the World Wide Web. Elixir’s porn stream exploded, so much so that within eighteen months she was selling warehouse loads of soft-core videos. Elixir herself had only ever done soft core; ‘No shit, no anal, those were my rules,’ she said seriously through plumped-up frosted-pink lips and a deep red lip line. But as well as the videos she was also being asked for dildos and vibrators and all manner of toys by her female clientele. So Elixir seized upon the demand, and now she was living in a six-bedroom house with a pool shaped like a vast pair of bosoms, and a tennis court shaped like a tennis court, in the hills above Los Angeles. Selling rather than swallowing proved more profitable for Ms Lake. But then maybe if she’d done shit or anal …
A week later Mrs Browning died. Mrs Browning lived three houses along from me. But whereas I lived on the top floor of a converted house, Mrs Browning lived in a four-bedroom house alone in the heart of wealthy Kew. Her husband had died eight years ago, and she had been on her own ever since. She had nieces and nephews who she was close to, because she and Rudolph had never had children of their own. They were German Jews, who had been fortunate enough to make it out of Germany in 1934, as teenagers. Rudolph had found a job as an apprentice on Savile Row, working his way up until finally he was running the business for the last twenty years of his life. Elsa dedicated a bench in Kew Gardens to her husband after his stroke. The plaque read, ‘He loved this place, and its peace.’ It made me cry every time I saw it, when I would sit with Mrs Browning after a walk around the Gardens on alternate Thursday mornings. Rudolph’s bench was on top of a small hill, overlooking the Thames at the bottom of the gardens, and shaded by an oak tree.
Mrs Browning was the first person I spoke to when I moved to Kew three years ago. She watched me from her window for fifteen minutes, before walking slowly but precisely to my front wall, leaning on it patiently as I unpacked a large box full of books from my car, then introduced herself, and asked why my husband was letting me lift all the heavy boxes.
I liked her from the start. She had some mischief in her. For the past two years she had received a gentleman caller every Tuesday afternoon for tea. I called him her boyfriend, and she would laugh and shake her head and say that boyfriends were for beautiful young women like me, and she was merely the only person left in Kew as ancient as Wilbur Hardy, who was ninety-two and walked with a cane, but walked none the less. She would smile and refer to him as a harmless rogue. And I don’t know if it was because of those words, but I always thought that he grinned like an old-time crook. His suits were either mustard yellow, or apple green, or plum purple, and all had matching waistcoats. If I happened to be there when Wilbur rapped on the door on a Tuesday afternoon, Elsa would wink and say, ‘Don’t trust them, Sunny. Only one in one thousand will be worth the wait.’ Wilbur would always kiss my hand as I squeezed past him on the doorstep, and I would get embarrassed, even by such a mannerly show of affection from a ninety-two-year-old man. Elsa would wink again and mouth, ‘Don’t trust them,’ one more time, before she let him in.
Wilbur Hardy had died on New Year’s Day. His son had paid Elsa a visit to tell her and she had smiled sadly and said merely, ‘He was ancient. It was bound to happen sooner or later.’ His son had then informed her that Mr Hardy had managed many businesses and bought many licences, working from his study, right up until that New Year’s Day. Some of these businesses were highly profitable, and had been for many years, and were administered by his sons, and nephews, and nieces. Some of these businesses were dormant, however, acquired often just for fun and what Wilbur Hardy regarded as pocket change. Wilbur had left Elsa a number of these dormant concerns in his will. He had not left her property or money, but merely things that might make her smile. He had left her the exclusive UK licence to distribute Female Belly-Dancing Garden Gnomes for the next twelve years. He had left her the exclusive licence to distribute fingerless gloves in Ethiopia for the next seven months. And he left her a newly acquired licence, bought only two months previously, to distribute two new sex toys for women, known as ‘Three-Fingered and Two-Fingered Fondlers’. They had just started to be distributed in the US, and Wilbur had read about them as a funny fanciful ‘and finally’ story in the Sunday Telegraph, and enquired about the licence. Finding that it was up for sale, and this time predicting a healthy profit margin, he had snapped
