I never did tell Sharon why I had left Pierre’s club and I suspected that Wanda, for reasons of pride, had never mentioned the incident with Pierre to her either. Instead, I had bemoaned the increased regimentation and commercialisation of the old place and talked favourably of the new club I was dancing at.
It billed itself as a modern strip club and not as a Victorian gentleman’s club. Overt sexual provocation replaced seedy gentility and hypocrisy. Customers were encouraged to take the girls home, with the house taking its cut of the girls’ earnings, and touching was not verboten. Its owner was an enterprising young German who mucked in with his staff, not a French letch who lorded it over his. Its location in increasingly gentrified Farringdon suited me better than the West End.
Godehard reminded me of my mother with his perfect English, just the odd German word peppering it here and there. He was slim, a quality disguised by his wearing trousers and shirts a size too large for him, the latter unbuttoned to reveal a silver egg on a silver chain in a nest of curly chest hair and with its cuffs never done up. A large, expensive-looking watch was on show on one wrist and a copper bracelet on the other. He wore his light brown hair straight with a side parting and black-framed glasses that the NHS had made so familiar to my generation, but that he insisted had been tailor-made for him by a specialist glasses manufacturer in Hamburg at great expense. Where Pierre had sought to exercise his droit du seigneur underhandedly, Godehard propositioned the girls he employed openly in a commercial transaction with no strings attached. He dispensed advice on the importance of managing one’s money, on saving, on shares and other investments and bemoaned the fact that no one listened to him. He did the same on the subject of sex, too, advising on the importance of general hygiene, frequent exercise, a good diet and plenty of sleep, of the use of condoms and of regular health checks at the VD clinic, and he would listen sympathetically to the girls who told him about their gynaecological problems. He was, within the scope of my experience, American in his open and frank attitude to sex, but he spoke of himself as European in contrast to English. ‘What is it with you limeys?’ he would say to the English girls, and would stand to attention and do his shirt top button up while grimacing in what we understood was an attempt at stiffening his upper lip. ‘So stuffy! So repressed! Hey, sex happens!’
Godehard guiding me by the elbow, the two of us clutching our coats at the throat despite our scarves, we crossed the road to Smithfield Market where we ordered tea and bacon sandwiches in The Hope. We had it to ourselves; at 2.30 in the morning the butchers and tradesmen were still at work. We sat at a table in the bay window watching, through the clear glass above the frosted frieze, the unloading of vehicles, admiring the industry of the steaming tradesmen as cow halves were hurried from the dark backs of trucks through flapping rubber and Perspex doors to the bright lights of the glimpsed butchers’ stalls for further, final dismemberment. I found something contemplative in the repetition of the actions of the men in the backs of lorries and vans and of the men in chiaroscuro who dashed from vehicle to the market and back as though on a loop, the cumulative recurrence of which would deliver meaning. When not running, the men stamped their feet and blew into their hands, their breath forming speech bubbles in which everything had been left unsaid. I knew many of them by name. I had slept with some of them. Some stood in the half-dark, smoking and drinking from hip flasks by the doors, jollying their colleagues along. I could tell those who had been butchering lambs, that were placed on a block and cut towards the butcher, by their bloodier, grislier aprons.
‘Heaven or hell?’ asked Godehard of the scene.
I only smiled in reply.
We ordered more tea and another round of bacon sandwiches from a pale, wordless waif of a waitress who appeared, while corporeally intact, to have been filleted fully from her personality in partial counterpart to the massacred carcasses across the street.
‘You’re half German, I hear,’ Godehard said to me.
I nodded.
‘Wunderbar!Welche Hälfte?’
I bit into my sandwich.
‘Now, tell me,’ he continued, the smile leaving his face and his eyes looming large in their television-like frames. ‘I’ve never seen you so unhappy. What’s wrong?’
I said nothing.
‘You’ve always been the cheerful one. Boyfriend problems? Money problems?’ probed Godehard encouragingly.
‘No boyfriend and plenty of money.’ I smiled weakly. My knees against the old, clunking iron radiator were warm and my stomach, mouth and fingers, where they held my teacup, were hot; everything else was cold. When I had thought that I’d been answering London’s call, it felt to me now as though I’d been running away from Oxford. When I had thought that I might have been running away from my father, I now had to accept the possibility that I had been running away from myself. There is a paradox about the self that when you try to grasp it you change it, that the unreflective self is no longer such when reflected upon. I failed to see the connection between me and the excited girl who had climbed the stairs to a rented apartment with Freddie all those years ago, and I could only just recognise the girl who had gone from fun-loving sexual encounters to prostitution at around the time Isabella had become Gaia. The change went deeper than a name, however; it carried with it a sense of shame, of latent disappointment not by my own lights but by those of my mother and her family and of society at large. But shame is born of pride, and what pride I possessed fed my revolt against what shame I felt. ‘But I enjoy sex!’ I wanted to proclaim; and that, to me, was sufficient justification for it before I even contemplated hiding behind the ready incestuous abuse excuse that well-meaning social workers had seemed so willing to allow me. Again, I grasped for that understanding of myself and wondered if one could ever be sufficiently honest with one’s self to look where one knew it was hidden. I forced myself to look my reflection in The Hope’s window in the eye and to admit to myself that I had enjoyed the consensual sex that had nurtured my butterfly in adulthood, that had unlocked me from within, liberated me, permitted me my orgasmic, cosmic escape. Latterly, though, sex had become perfunctory and had rooted me in the physical, in my body, leaving it invested with an inhibiting consciousness. Isabella’s pale complexion looked back at me from The Hope’s window. I missed Mama and Opa. And Gaia who I hoped would have forgiven me the misappropriation of her name. I missed Oma, Cosmo and Uncle James with whom I maintained occasional contact and who, I hoped, missed the me I had once been and who didn’t know the me I had become.
‘Hel-lo,’ said Godehard, reminding me of his presence.
‘Everything’s fine, really,’ I said. ‘I’m just a little tired, I suppose.’
We made small talk about Paderborn that Godehard had once visited and about my grandmother.
Expressing surprise at the hour, Godehard stood to go. ‘Take care,’ he said.
I ordered a third cup of tea in the hope of regaining my earlier pensive, meditative state of mind.
Shoppers – butchers and retail, in their cars and in their vans – replaced the wholesalers who drove their lorries elsewhere, back home or to the railway depots. The animals that had gone to market as recognisable as they had been dead now left it amputated, disjointed, smuggled out in indistinguishable packages of plastic wrap.