Surrender to Mr. X by Rosa Mundi Page A

with female; new life is thus created, though that particular sacramental function these days gets overlooked.
    I would have thought if I hadn’t known better that Alden was gay. The houses of people who have had children, or even mean to have them, are different from those of people who live without the expectation; these are cleaner and more self-conscious than the dwellings of the breeding kind, more post-modern, metro-centric, reflecting a culture with a declining birth rate, where appearance is valued above function.
    Personally I had what I wanted: a top floor in a house built a century and a half ago, and showing it, lookingout over the Canal at one of the prettier topographies in London, with a shabby old kitchen and an ergonomic office stripped for intellectual action.
    I decided, thinking about Alden, that what he needed was social approval, acceptance. Why else the Radio 3 music? He wanted to be taken seriously. He designed environments for people who wanted to display art, but there wasn’t a single painting in his own place. The reason might well be that he doubted his own taste. The painting you buy is such a giveaway. At least mine were inherited so I wasn’t responsible for them. Maybe he could make a living from the art and design business, but his lifestyle suggested that there was nothing ordinarily sumptuary about its funding. But what? Something he was ashamed of, perhaps. Was he an arms dealer, or manufacturing portable toilets, or importing false teeth, or diluting antibiotics like Harry Lime in
The Third Man?
Something that would douse conversation at dinner parties?
    My mind was over-active again: a doctor once claimed I had Bipolar Two syndrome, the liveable-with, workably acceptable, up-and-down kind of manic depression, and when I was a student the university head-shrinks put me on lithium—but the side-effects were worse than the BP2: I just couldn’t bear the way it slowed my mind up and it made my hands tremble, so I stopped. I learned instead to let my mind race, and enjoy the skill of controlling it like a rally driver doesthe gears of a car on the winding corniche roads of a mountain range.
    Woo-hoo! I sang aloud. I tossed the soggy new July
Vogue
I was reading into the air, and watched it tumble into the loo like a shot bird. £5,000 cash! Hey! “Nothing cheap, a lot of color.” I leapt out of the bath, dried myself, and put £2,000 of it straight away between the pages of Jung, vol.13,
Alchemical Studies
. I slung on some Matalan jeans and a yellow T-shirt with the word “So?,” skipped my way to the taxi rank and headed for Knightsbridge with the rest.
    Shop assistants can be very helpful, especially in SW1, where black-burkaed Arab wives and girlfriends wield their store cards in the designer boutiques, never given cash in case they use it to run away. They buy the fanciest clothes to wear beneath the shrouds, present their man the receipts, model the clothes for him, and their girl friends at the odd tea-party: then run round to the up-market thrift shops and exchange their purchases for cash. I would get Alden £5,000 worth of clothes: but I reckoned I had only to spend £3,000 doing it by deft recycling. £2,000 was what one of the more expensive professional girls would have charged for an evening’s bondage and full sex at the end of it. If the money shot was missing it wasn’t this girl’s fault.
    The small shops are not above changing a receipt for the sake of a sale, and some of the clothes you find are gorgeous, from A-list designers, only one or two wearers from the catwalk, and lingerie to die for.You have to pay full price for shoes, though: I like the shoe departments in Harvey Nicks, so I went there and bought four pairs which set me back £1200, the most expensive an absurd pair of winter ankle boots by Stuart Weitzman in silver with a ruff of leopard fur and rather dangerous looking chrome heels, in a sale for only