Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant Page A

waiters will appreciateAlain’s laid-back Godard-esque manner, shades, shirt and all).
    â€˜He had a pretty rocky childhood, poor Alain’, Henrietta says with enjoyment; and it comes to me that my List for Potential Sugar Mummies badly needs rewriting. I’d rather
not
be told all about my—well, my what?—my property I was about to say, because I need to know it all myself.
    Before Henrietta has time to go on, Alain rounds the corner of Cornwall Crescent and is almost on top of us, while Henrietta is finishing a brief anecdote detailing the sadly impractical tiles from Bandol installed in Eaton Square in the flat of a publishing peer. ‘The design simply washed off when the cleaner ran her cloth over the walls. I mean, it just wasn’t good enough.
    But now I see that Alain, like some very thin and apparently perma-white-and-exhausted people, is capable of very fast movement indeed. In one minute this skeletal
Bout-de-Souffle
figure (OK, Howie’s crowd used to go to the NFT; what a long time ago it seems—and was—and we choked up on Alain Delon and Alphaville and all the rest)—the other Alain,
my
Alain, is standing on the pavement by our table and I can see he’s trying to decide whether to sit down or not. There’s only a smallwindow now between a viewing with all the possible excitement of an offer (and oh my God I haven’t called Crookstons, suppose the offer on my flat has expired and I’m down to what I actually have in the bank, i.e. overdraft £254, owe on credit cards £1,670) but isn’t the market still going up and up … Stefan Mocny said I’d get more next week but I might as well stay with Mr Nyan, he’s a cash buyer …
    â€˜We should go’, Alain is saying in a surprisingly grown-up (not a word I’ve used before) tone of voice. ‘We’ll be late for Maygrove Road.’ And, as Henrietta stares up at him in astonishment—after all, he’s the man who couldn’t even fix the colours on a tile—he recognises her and gives one of his incredibly sexy smiles and I see her melt, a cliché I know, but you can almost notice her face turn to candle wax and run down the front of her (unbecoming) striped top.
    â€˜Hi Alain’, says this pretend young girl, and shrugs in a Gallic way so we can all clock her boobs as they peek out from the folds of an unsuitable-for-her-age bra.
    â€˜So what are you doing these days?’ Alain says. I register the fact I’m glaring at him, just like an exasperated wife who has to stop in the street againand again for her celeb husband to say ‘hi’ and receive compliments. All this is putting me off the viewing, I can tell you that for sure.
    â€˜Maygrove Road?’ says Henrietta brightly. ‘Is that where people are over-spilling from Queen’s Park these days?’
    Again, I have reason to admire Alain even though I’m furious with him. He knows not to give away our secret—well, that’s how I felt about it—and I still do, ass that I am. ‘Our secret’ indeed! It’s only giving away hard-earned money (as I now see the increase in value on my flat: after all I was struggling to earn a living all the time I’ve lived there and I’ve had stress illnesses as a result: I
deserve
the huge sum I’m about to be paid).
    So, as I just said, Alain doesn’t reply to Henrietta’s question and we leave her there, sitting at the table with a blush still on her face and a sagging jaw, and a puzzled waiter, Italian-looking and young, bending over her as if he can’t resist staring right down past the Agent Provocateur Spank-me-I’m-a-Naughty-Schoolgirl bra at her old grey tits.
    They say you only have to think something bad about a person for exactly the same thing to happen to you.
    So here it is. I just never felt in my life anything like the sheer charge, the electrical communication … the sexual