‘You got a call while you were out,’ my wife said as I came in the door, studiously staring at the vegetables, which she was cutting up for supper with more vigour than strictly necessary.
There was a tension in the air and my usually ineffective male antenna was warning me to tread carefully.
I had informed her as I left that morning that I had a meeting in London with a woman who was at the time infamous for her exploits as a courtesan amongst the highest and mightiest in the land. The woman had been seamlessly professional at the meeting with the publisher and the old boy had fallen in love just as heavily as she had intended. After the meeting she and I had repaired to the bar at the Dorchester for a celebratory drink. The outfit she had chosen for maximum impact at the meeting was so tightly fitted to her figure, and so lacking in any excess material, that she had not had anywhere to store any cash. She protested her embarrassment at finding herself unable to pay for the drink she wanted to buy me, but I was quite happy to fork out since her eyelash-fluttering performance had definitely added another zero to the publisher’s offer. Now I was trying to divine why my wife might be avoiding eye contact so obviously.
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Who was that?’
‘She said she didn’t need to leave a name because you would know who it was. She had a foreign accent; all very breathy.’ Still her eyes were fixed on the execution of the innocent vegetables giving up their lives to the blows from her knife. ‘She said to tell you “thank you”.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. Although actually it sounded more like “tank you”.’
Those who have had affairs with people of importance, either paid or not paid, often seem to feel the need to vent their frustrations in print when things go pear-shaped. Sometimes it is because they need the money; sometimes it is for the sheer mischief-making hell of it. Sometimes they have even been married to the person of importance and want to vent the spleen which their divorce has built up in them, usually aided by their legal teams. Mostly they don’t have stories that the publishers, or indeed the public, feel they want to pay money for, but now and then one will catch the public’s imagination. The soldier who wrote about his affair with Princess Diana was probably the most successful in this genre, but there have been others.
Those who make a living in this manner have various ways of introducing themselves when they first make contact with a ghost. Some like to come straight out with the announcement that they are ‘high class prostitutes’ (in reality the ‘low class’ ones often have the more interesting stories to tell, Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly and Emile Zola’s Nana notwithstanding). Sometimes they prefer to describe themselves as ‘escorts’. ‘Courtesan’ was a description I had suggested to my latest client as part of the proposed book title. I thought it sounded rather romantic and redolent with historical connotations. She liked the sound of it until she looked it up in the dictionary and decided that she would rather be described as a ‘mistress’.
Books can also provide interesting insights into the thinking that has led these authors to follow their chosen paths through life.
‘I told you she was an interesting woman,’ I said.
‘I really couldn’t say,’ my wife said, chucking the vegetables into a pan of boiling water with a dangerous splash. ‘She just said that and then hung up.’