The woman carries on walking: a brisk tick-tacking on the paving stones that echoes then fades. Up above her, a metal criss-cross of scaffolding has been erected to cover the façade of the mansion block opposite, each slotted-in pole the precise pigeon-grey of the sky beyond, each brick the damp russet colour that Howard has come to associate uniquely with his city. A builder in a hard hat and a reflective vest sends a formless shout into the street below.
Howard wishes they’d stop tampering with everything. There was so much building going on in London these days. Lumbering mechanical cranes pierced the skyline at regular intervals. Hoardings patterned with the meaningless insignia of redevelopment had cropped up everywhere. Streets were shut down, traffic diverted, bridges closed, all in the name of a frantic progress, an endless quest for more things that were shiny and new and glittering, when increasingly all Howard lusts after is the past, packaged up, preserved and honoured. Nice, historical buildings that didn’t demand attention, designed to a manageable scale so that everyone knew what they were getting.
He lets the curtain fall and then reminds himself he is not here to get annoyed by modern architecture. These monthly nights in this Mayfair hotel are meant to be his meditation space, a few hours’ holiday from himself and his memories. Only Rupert, Claudia and Tracy, his PA, know about them. Everyone else is told he’s away on business. He tells himself he must make the most of it before going back to normality tomorrow morning.
He takes slower breaths. He pushes back his shoulder blades and stretches his arms. He tries counting to ten but only gets to three before he remembers the Chablis.
Howard takes the bottle out of the minibar, unscrews the top and pours himself a healthy measure. The glass frosts up satisfyingly. Perfect temperature. A viticulturist (there are such things) once told him he shouldn’t over-refrigerate white wines. Howard repeated this to anyone he thought might be impressed and sometimes sent back cold wine at restaurants just to show he couldn’t be made a fool of. In the privacy of these four walls, however, he felt at liberty to indulge his own secret taste.
Or lack of it, as the case may be.
There is a knock on the door.
‘Housekeeping,’ comes a disembodied voice from the other side of the lustrous wood laminate.
Howard looks at the bedside clock. He is shocked to see it is already 6 p.m. and the maid is coming to do the pre-dinner turn-down. He opens the door. A black face smiles at him broadly.
‘I can come back later if you like,’ the woman says, her voice lightly accented. Howard takes in the smoothness of her skin, taught over high cheekbones, and the compactness of her diminutive frame, clad in a fitted black blouse and black trousers. She is carrying a moulded plastic basket, filled with cleaning products and mini-packets of shortbread.
‘No, no,’ he replies, loosening the belt of his robe ever so slightly. ‘Come on in.’ He holds the door with his arm so that the maid has to bend under to walk through. She giggles as she does so. Howard is encouraged.
The maid checks the tea tray and replaces a sachet of hot chocolate, then goes into the bedroom with a quick economy of movement. When Howard follows, he sees she is piling the purple and brown cushions neatly at the foot of the bed. She glances over her shoulder, catches his eye and giggles again. He laughs lightly, then takes two steps towards her. She is bending over the bed and her backside is pressing against the fabric of her trousers. Howard, who knows how these things are done, who has successfully initiated a handful of similar transactions in high-end hotels across the globe, comes up close behind her, puts his hands on either side of her waist and nudges the knot of his robe belt against the maid’s haunches.
For a second, she tenses and does not move. Then, without looking at him, the maid straightens up, letting the pillow she is holding in one hand drop onto the Egyptian cotton, 450-thread count sheets.
‘Sir … I …’
‘Shhh,’ Howard says, nuzzling her neck, smelling the sweetness of cocoa butter. He does not like to talk in these situations. Talking would make it more real.
With the maid still turned towards the bed, he unbuttons her shirt with the quick fingers bequeathed him by generations of Finks. He slips his thumb underneath the wiring of her bra, easing in his hand until it cups the maid’s right breast. He groans, in spite of himself. With his free hand, he undoes his belt, lets the robe fall open, and grips his erection. He starts slowly, rhythmically, moving up and down the shaft, all the while holding the maid’s breast, feeling the nipple turn hard underneath his touch. She is breathing more quickly now. He cannot see her face but he knows, without needing to have it confirmed, that she is smiling, that she is enjoying this, that she is loving the attention, that she is gagging for it, that she needs him to thrust against her and take her and spill his white seed across her skin … He comes with a half-suppressed sigh and a feeling of disgust. It is all over in a matter of seconds.
He is aware, even in the midst of his supposed abandon, of the need not to stain the maid’s dark trousers.
Once a tailor, always a tailor, as his mum might say. God rest her soul.
Esme has started walking to the office as part of a springtime health kick. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush and works on High Street Kensington, so admittedly, it’s not the most arduous walk and, according to those miserable cut-out-and-keep fitness guides in various women’s magazines, it will hardly burn any calories at all (something called spinning does that, she has discovered, and she imagines a stuffy room filled with Victorian peasants frantically producing exercise leotards from their super-fast spinning wheels). Anyway, apparently spinning gets rid of 450 calories an hour. A Mars bar contains 280. So the chances are that her forty-five-minute walk will allow her to eat approximately half a molecule more chocolate than she would do otherwise.
But the walk makes her feel better, mentally. It makes her feel she’s doing something, at least, instead of sitting on her arse all day, either at her desk or in the train on the way to another futile doorstep on editor’s orders. Esme doesn’t need to lose weight. She possesses the natural slenderness of the terminally neurotic. But, being a woman, she feels guilty about not exercising. And her colleague Sanjay once told her that your metabolism slowed down to a crawling pace when you hit thirty. She’d been eating a baked potato at the time.
‘You won’t be able to do carbs any more,’ he’d said, flicking an elegant wrist in her direction. ‘You’ll want to be eating seeds and grains.’
‘Seeds and grains?’ She pushed the baked potato to one side, regretfully. ‘What, like birds?’
Sanjay nodded knowledgeably. He was the health editor and abreast of such things.
‘Keen-wah,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ll need.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Ha-de-bloody-ha. I’m only telling you this for your own good, missy. This’ – he flapped a hand in front of her torso – ‘doesn’t come for free.’
When she’d turned thirty last December, Sanjay’s words had jangled in her head like a drawerful of mismatched cutlery. She was terrified that she’d pile on unwanted pounds purely by eating the same as she’d always done. For about a week, Esme had stuck faithfully to the recipes provided by a ‘Low-GI’ website but, by the end of seven days, she was heartily sick of egg-white omelettes and slow-release oats.
