Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant Page A

didn’t find it funny. “How old are you, Hannah? Thirty-six, thirty-seven?”
    Not bad. But then she was a pro. Do I get to ask the same question back? I thought. What would I guess? I thought about that gorgeous swimsuit body, every single muscle in tone. A mixture of his work and hers. Forty plus? But how many? I nodded. “More or less.”
    “Then let’s have this conversation again when you’re fifty-five.” She paused. “Or maybe you could ask your mother how she feels about aging?”
    Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. My mother’s perfectly happy about it. But then, of course, she’s never really been young. Or not that I’ve noticed. I picked myself up from the elephant trap I’d fallen into and saw Olivia waiting atthe top of the hole. She looked so good, I got grumpy. “I think if the world weren’t so obsessed with what women looked like, we wouldn’t have to worry about it so much,” I said, falling back on ideology.
    “Absolutely,” she said firmly. “I couldn’t agree with you more.” And I couldn’t tell if she was taking the piss or not. “I mean we women are just victims of male stereotyping. Left to ourselves we’d never want to be slimmer or more attractive or even a bit younger, would we? We don’t care about how we look. Ugly, beautiful—makes no difference to us. The whole thing is their fault. We all know that.”
    Fuck you, I thought. I don’t need to take this from a woman who’s been reconstructed. Single malt. It always brings out the Glaswegian in me.
    “And you know the other thing, Hannah? In my experience, it’s always the women who don’t need it who think like you do. The ones who’ve never felt crippled by their appearance, or who are still young enough to think that age is something that happens to everyone else.” My turn to feel the backhand in the compliment. “Good-looking women can afford to be above it all. But would you feel the same if nature hadn’t been so generous? If at puberty your breasts had sagged like a couple of pancakes, or if whoever gave you that fine little scar above your right eye had hit an inch lower and taken the whole thing out instead? How much confidence would you have then about flirting with some man at a party, or even standing in a queue outside a cinema with a bunch of prettier girlfriends?”
    Well, not a lot I could say to that, really. Except who wants to work for someone you can knock out in the first round? On the other hand, Glaswegians in their cups traditionally don’t have much truck with intelligent women. I’m ashamed to say I behaved rather brutally.
    “And is that who you were, then, Mrs. Marchant? Somebody who was crippled by it?”
    “Who I was is my own business.” She said it like a slap across the cheek. I could almost feel the sting. “Who I am now is what counts. And how much I have to lose. My husband and I have worked long and hard for what we have. Now we’re being targeted by some loony. And I’m scared to death what they might do next. But you’re clearly not interested in helping us stop them.”
    She was angry, but she was also great. Oh dear, here was a sticky one: was I really going to let myself be more influenced by a woman’s body than her mind?
    I wonder how much I’m going to regret this, I thought as I lifted my glass and drained the rest. Frank says it’s my downfall—always wanting the women clients to be feistier than the men. “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve already taken the job.”

    I left the next afternoon. I would have gone earlier, only I couldn’t be sure that my blood levels would have made it through a Breathalyzer. I had slept till 11:00 A.M. and woken with a mother of a hangover and no clear memory of how I’d actually got to bed. I had a swim, force-fed myself a bowl of bran and three pint glasses of water, then sweated out most of it in the steam room alongside my Cézanne bathers and the museum curator.
    It was her final day as well, so after the