Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant Page B

chemistry … it’s like being on a shared drug and at an opposing voltage so his High meets your Low and you’re both floating, diving, soaring …
    I can’t do better than that. Alain’s profile in the little red car is unchanging and we drive along at the speed of old-age pensioners out for a spin in Torquay. I don’t think we ever stopped at a red light—but we aren’t run into or vice versa, either. We are on another plane: perhaps we have actually become invisible.
    Clearly, these are signs a Sugar Mummy should counter with the strictest caution. Sixty-nine Maygrove Road, a house puffed by the agents as ‘West Hampstead’, a fine family home in need of modernisation, private rear garden’ etc. had become Nirvana. Whatever it was like, I would buy it—and for however great a sum was demanded of me.
    But first—and this I had ascertained in a phone call earlier to the offices of Hengrove, Layward & Bull and so I knew 69 Maygrove Road to be uninhabited but still furnished—first I would seduce Alain there. On the top floor … it feels more protected and sexy; and we can look out on theprivate rear garden without anyone seeing us in return.
    My sole piece of advice to an aspiring Sugar Mummy in these circumstances is: turn round and go home. And don’t throw yourself at someone else out of pure frustration.
    Remember that a man who actually believes a relative stranger is happy to give him a sizeable lump of equity in a property in order for him to house himself and his wife is not the most sensitive of mortals. He won’t even notice what you’re trying to do.
    None of which makes any difference to me.

The Property from Hell

21
    The house in Maygrove Road—well, have you ever been in a place you knew was evil, where there must have been a murder or at least a succession of property deals that were crooked and wrecked people’s lives, or maybe just a lot of unhappiness and abuse, that kind of thing?
    No. 69 Maygrove Road stank of everything. You wouldn’t want to put your bag down in the hall, let alone enjoy sex for the first time with the Object of Desire. In fact, you’d rather enter a nunnery than indulge in carnal romps in this House from Hell, all three floors and a basement too terrifying to try and go down to. Ping! That was the fireplace on the ground floor as we walked past: our mere presencedislodged a fall of soot that would bury Santa Claus. Pong! That was the smell of rotting goldfish from an abandoned tank on the half landing as we went up. Pang! That was what I felt as I climbed and climbed and Igor the estate agent extolled the wonders of the place.
    I had a pang because I realised that Alain, with a past lived in Provençal splendour and no notion of the dumps people are forced to buy and ‘renovate’ these days, must think this is the kind of house I actually want to live in. To him, I’m a Woman Without Qualities, a tasteless commonplace piece of suburban sadness—an interior decorator who has demeaned the glory of his tiles by asking to include one in some ghastly flat I’m doing up, probably in Balham.
    To Alain I must be shit.
    â€˜Three floors!’ Igor is saying; and I clock the fact he’s checked out that I’m selling two floors, i.e. my maisonette in W9 and looking to trade down into a bigger place in a less fancy area. ‘Loft extension a possibility’, Igor wheezes—and it’s when I turn a gaze of deadly hatred on him (if they froze me now I’d be the Gorgon, the Medusa with my victims petrified by my glare) that I notice the absence of Alain. He’s nowhere to be seen, and my tinny calls,shrunk to a mouse squeak by the infernal vibes of the house, raise no reply at all. (I just hope, for his sake and for his lovely wife’s sake, that he hasn’t gone down to the cellar, undoubtedly the bourn from which no traveller returns.)
    â€˜Roof