Queen K, page 9
Booked.
*
In an English lesson one morning Alex kept yawning. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘Mama and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching American Idol.’
‘No worries,’ I said, examining the page in front of me, an essay plan she’d just done.
She must have read something into my minimal response because after a silence I heard her say, ‘Um, you know …’ and pause. Sensing something was on her mind, I looked up at her. ‘The things I told you about Mama …’ she said, ‘don’t … don’t think too badly of her. She’s a complicated person, she has her reasons, I’m spending time with her because—’
I interrupted her. ‘Alex. Sweetheart. You don’t need to explain yourself to me, OK? I understand. Alex?’ I waited until she looked up at me. ‘I understand totally, OK? She’s your mum.’
She seemed relieved when I said that. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘OK.’ She returned her attention to the task at hand. We continued to go through her plan.
And it seemed this little moment brought her closer to me, made her feel she could trust me, because quite late that night, when I was already in bed but with my light still on, reading, I heard a tap on my door and Alex came in and sat on the edge of my bed.
‘So, you know Tatiana’s arriving tomorrow?’ she said. ‘I feel very nervous about it. We’re going to the airport in the morning to pick her up. Please, Mel, will you come with me? Will you come too?’
*
I was curious to see this Tatiana person.
We stood waiting for her in the airport. On screen she looked glowy, her skin a uniform golden colour, but then so did all the people on the show. What would she look like in real life? ‘Ah,’ murmured Kata, ‘here she is.’ I followed her gaze and saw a blonde girl detaching herself from the stream of arrivals and heading in our direction. She raised a hand from her trolley, gave an unemphatic smile. She did not hurry.
She was very beautiful, more so in the flesh than on screen. Her hair was a soft, blonde cloud, like in photos of old-time Hollywood movie stars. Her features were exquisite, as if each had been sculpted into the most perfect possibility of a lip, an eye, a nose. Her whole person seemed dewy and supple. ‘Hello,’ she said. She wore a delicate chain around her wrist. She kissed Kata on the cheek, and then Alex.
‘This is Alex’s tutor, Melanie,’ Kata said.
‘Hello,’ said Tatiana. She did not kiss me.
Kata was queenly in the back of the limo, saying little apart from the occasional formal, stilted offering: ‘Have you enjoyed your summer so far, Tatiana? Have you visited Monaco before?’
But even I could tell that beneath her lofty manner she was nervous. Alex was staring glassily ahead. Tatiana did not seem anxious at all. She responded to each of Kata’s niceties perfectly, but she didn’t prolong her answers, or make any attempt to fill the silences with an inconsequential patter that would have put everyone at ease. When she had finished answering she would continue to look in the direction of whoever she had been speaking to, with a steady gaze that seemed almost forensic, almost as if she wanted it known, that she was taking in, processing …
This was not what I had been expecting; it seemed to me deliberate and bordering on cruel. I marvelled at how quickly she had established her ascendancy. I sat there in the back of the limo with them all, not saying a word, just watching. There was no need for me to feel nervous, because nothing was expected of me: no conversation; no contribution. I was on a completely different footing from the other people in the car, on a completely different footing from Tatiana. I was only six years older than Tatiana. We had been to the same sort of school. And yet what a gulf between us. Here we were, in the back of this limo, with these billionaires, she as their guest, I as their employee.
When we got to the apartment, I saw it afresh, through Tatiana’s eyes. I’d become accustomed to the over-plush sateen heaviness, the purples and blacks and greys. Tatiana walked through to the living room. I saw her reach out and take a fold of purple taffeta curtain between her finger and thumb.
‘It is due for a makeover …’ Kata said. ‘We moved in here some years ago …’ Kata was statuesque and fleshy but her whole aspect seemed permeable and exposed.
I winced. Stop apologising. Stop apologising for your own home.
Tatiana turned around. ‘I think it’s amazing,’ she said. ‘I love it. Thank you so much for having me to stay. You have such exquisite taste. It’s so beautiful here. Can you show me around?’
*
The next morning, Tatiana stretched out her arms luxuriantly before lifting her morning cup of green tea to her lips. ‘I slept like a baby,’ she said.
‘Yes, please,’ I said, when Irina came in and asked who wanted a second coffee, but Kata said, ‘Please, Melanie, take it with you to Alex’s room, lessons will start early today so that Alex is ready to come with us at 12.30.’
‘Oh,’ said Alex. ‘No, I don’t need …’
‘Oh, you’ve got to come, Alex!’ Tatiana cut in. ‘A friend of mine from The Royal Borough is having a trunk show of her swimwear collection in a suite at the Hotel de Paris. It should be super fun. I was hoping Kata might like to come along with me.’
Would she ever.
‘Please come with us, Alex!’ Tatiana said and Alex replied, ‘Well, OK.’
Alex shook her head when she heard them calling her name at 12.30. She was wearing white shorts and a grey T-shirt. She stood up and pulled on a thin grey cardigan that came down below the hem of her shorts. Kata and Tatiana were waiting by the door, wearing high heels and carrying stiff, heavy handbags. Kata looked Alex up and down and opened her mouth as if to say something, but Tatiana said, ‘Cute outfit, Alex!’ so Kata smiled agreement and then two pairs of heels clattered out the front door, with Alex following behind.
I was waiting in my room when they came back, my door ajar, ready for Alex to come and fill me in, ready to laugh with her about the absurdities of the day, but she didn’t come, and when I went to her door an hour or so later to ask, ‘Well, how was it?’, she turned to me with cheeks pink with pleasure and said, ‘Actually, it was kind of fun.’
*
They were out all the time. My lessons with Alex shrank from four hours a day to three and we began them one hour earlier in the mornings. They went all sorts of places. ‘And where was it today?’ I would ask Alex. One day it was Nikki Beach down in St Tropez. They took a helicopter and Tatiana introduced Kata to a swimwear model who was currently dating a Hollywood movie star! The model invited them to a party on a yacht hosted by a British high-street tycoon, where they met more supermodels and a French DJ of international fame. This sojourn was parlayed into an invitation to be part of a table at that year’s charity gala at the Hotel du Cap. A single place at the table cost around ten thousand dollars. Tatiana was sharing her contacts and Kata was footing the bill, an old and established custom, nothing unusual in it.
One hundred years ago someone like Tatiana might have been supported by a solid and incontestable wealth, in the form of inherited family estates. Today, she was still of the ruling class but the capital that had once underpinned people like her had dwindled away, relative to the new power players on the global stage.
The elite status of people like Tatiana came from their heritage, their networks, their manner, their understanding of the codes, their insider access; they now had to hustle to parlay these things into actual wealth. Whether it was a TV show, a wellpaid city job, a house bought by their parents – a lot of money compared to someone like me, who relied solely on a wage, but nothing relative to the people they would actually be mingling with and comparing themselves to: the oligarchs, the owners of oil reserves, the tech billionaires, the monopolisers of entire sectors of emerging markets. People like Kata, with their recent billions, were still insecure enough to defer to people like Tatiana, so long as people like Tatiana offered them the requisite amount of flattery. How easy it was for the Tatianas of the world to offer this flattery; whether it did or did not stick in the throat was hard to tell: the controlled veneer, the breeding of people like Tatiana, meant that resentment, were there any, would never be shown. Or never inadvertently, at least.
I didn’t know how wealthy Tatiana was, not exactly. I knew from googling her that her dad worked in finance, and I had worked out from her Instagram that even though she was only nineteen and had only just left school, she had moved into a flat in London that she called her own. It served as her base; she didn’t seem to be there very much. Her class was evident both from her person – her precocity and self-possession – and from the snapshots of her life as seen on her Instagram: the French windows and stone balustrades and oversized lamps that lurked in the background of her selfies, group photos and videos taken with her friends. The TV show, flattened and formatted, revealed less about her.
Trained from an early age to be a good house guest, Tatiana wanted to take Kata out for dinner to thank her for having her to stay. ‘Anywhere you like,’ she said. ‘It would be my pleasure.’
I was putting a piece of smoked swordfish into my mouth, feeling my tastebuds pop, when I heard Alex saying from down the table, ‘Mel, maybe you would like to come with us?’
‘Oh, no, no, thanks,’ I said. But she was gazing at me with a tender look of – what was it? – was it pity for me? Was she keen to the fact that we hadn’t been doing as much together as we used to? ‘Oh, come on, Mel,’ Alex said, putting her head to one side, and as much to move the conversation on as anything I said, ‘OK, thanks.’
Kata chose her favourite place, as Tatiana had said she should. It was the sort of place I’d expected she would like. High-octane, prohibitively expensive, VIP. It was early evening when we arrived but the inside of the restaurant-bar-club – whatever it was – was completely sealed to the outside elements; no natural light came in. It could have been midnight. Round tables dotted the ground floor, fanning out from a circular bar. A curving staircase, velvet-carpeted and underlit with red lights, led up to a second-floor gallery. At the top of the staircase, presiding over the whole of the club, was a vast Buddha, hewn from some kind of dark metal.
The place was a bit out of Alex’s age range, but Kata didn’t seem concerned.
Loud house music pulsing from a DJ up on the gallery made it hard for us to hear each other but we did our best. We sat together at one of the little round tables; a waiter came over and we shouted some orders for dinner.
Kata had wavered over where to go. ‘You decide, you are the guest,’ she had said several times to Tatiana. Being insecure in her own tastes, she was reluctant to take responsibility for the evening. But Tatiana had been adamant. ‘No, no,’ she had insisted. ‘It’s my treat to you. I’d like to take you to the place you like best.’ So eventually Kata had had to make a decision, and here we had come. When we’d arrived, I’d seen Kata look anxiously at Tatiana; she’d opened her mouth to speak and I’d wondered what she was going to apologise for. Was she going to say she didn’t remember the music being this loud, or that they must have changed the decor since she’d last been, or that she didn’t remember it being this busy? But before she could say anything Tatiana had said, ‘Wow, this place is amazing, great choice, Kata, what a treat.’ So that by the time we were sitting at our little round table, Kata was completely relaxed.
I was anxious what would happen when it came time for the bill so I ordered the cheapest thing I could see on the menu, a pizza margerita. As the evening had been Tatiana’s idea I assumed she would be paying for all of us, but I still felt the need to make as little impact as possible on the tally of the evening, for my imprint on the bill to be as faint as my imprint on the evening itself. I said nothing as I sat at the table with them. I smiled and nodded and was ready to respond if anyone looked to me for anything. It was a more negative state of being than if I hadn’t come at all, and I wished that that were so, that I had not come at all.
Kata asked Tatiana when shooting on the TV show would resume, when was the new season starting? There was a feverish cast to her as she asked, a slight tinge of red, some uncanny life in her solid, product-moist cheeks. I suspected she’d been holding off from mentioning the show as an act of will, but now judged enough days to have passed to be able to bring it up in a way that seemed nonchalant. She brought her glass of champagne to her lips, then set it back down with a robotic, slicing motion.
‘Oh,’ said Tatiana, ‘I’m taking a break from that actually. Yeah, I don’t want, you know, that show to be the thing that defines me. It might stop people taking me seriously.’
‘Oh,’ said Kata. ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’
‘I’ll be at university from September,’ Tatiana continued. ‘I’m going to the Courtauld Institute to study History of Art. Any time you want to come and have a look round, just give me a call, Alex.’
‘OK, cool, thanks,’ Alex said.
‘I’m good at the subject, but Alex really has a gift for it,’ Tatiana said to Kata. ‘She understands how to look at art, she is really able to see.’
Alex smiled with pleasure.
‘It is your best subject, isn’t it, my darling?’ Kata said to her. ‘But then, you are good at everything, my sweet.’
‘We should do some day trips together,’ Tatiana said. ‘There’s the Matisse museum in Nice.’
‘And the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence,’ Alex added. ‘And the Cocteau Museum down in Menton.’
‘Deal,’ said Tatiana, raising her glass. She and Alex clinked, and Kata joined them. Alex put her glass down and lifted her hands to her cheeks, which were rosy.
‘What is it, my girl?’ asked Kata.
‘Oh,’ said Alex. ‘Nothing. I’m just … happy!’
Tatiana blew a kiss to her across the table. ‘You and me both,’ she said.
When the waiter brought the bill Kata tried to pay but Tatiana wouldn’t let her. ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘My treat.’
‘Um,’ I said, feeling like gaucheness personified, ‘can I, um, give you something …’
‘No,’ Tatiana said, without looking at me. ‘It’s done.’ She took her card back from the waiter. Her oyster nails, perfectly manicured. ‘Shall we?’ she said and at her prompting we all rose.
She was younger than me. I kept forgetting it. We followed her towards the exit. Where will she be, I wondered, what will her life look like, in ten years’ time? I knew I would never have her poise.
Back in Courchevel, I’d taken pleasure in going along with Ivan and Kata and Alex to restaurants I could never have afforded to eat in if I was paying for myself. I’d taken the experience for what it was and enjoyed what it had to offer. The pure material pleasure of it. They were far enough removed from me – they were billionaires – that I was able to simply relish the novelty of it all. But with Tatiana there it was different.
She was too close to me.
I walked two paces behind her as we made our way across the restaurant. Two paces behind the perfection of her hair, her clothes, her carriage.
I was close enough to touch. I could reach out a hand to that silk-clad back. I could feel it, I could taste it, what it must be like to be her.
I slackened my pace. I let her move ahead, and I followed them at a distance out of the restaurant door.
*
It was quiet in the entrance foyer, padded doors closed behind us to mute the sound of the music inside the club. Kata was calling Dmitri on her mobile, instructing him to bring the car. ‘Let’s sit,’ she said. Couches lined either side of the foyer. We moved towards one.
‘Well, well, well,’ we heard a loud male voice say. A man, somewhat rumpled in a linen jacket, was raising himself from an armchair. ‘International woman of mystery,’ he said.
Tatiana stopped, flew a hand to her chest. ‘What the …?’ she began. ‘What are you doing here?’
The man smiled, unfazed; he looked around at the rest of us. ‘Hello, hello,’ he said.
I put him in his mid-forties. The white shirt he wore beneath his jacket was open to the second button. ‘What am I doing in Monaco, or in this nightclub?’ he said to Tatiana.
‘Both,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘with regards to this particular establishment, I’ve had a meeting, I’m waiting for my car. I bumped together a few business meetings, thought I’d make a long weekend of it.
‘Hello,’ he said again, turning to the rest of us, ‘hello,’ and he shook Kata’s hand. He paused, her hand in his, he kept his gaze on her face, he looked quizzical, he stepped back a bit, still holding on to her hand. ‘Have we met before?’
‘Yes,’ Kata replied, shyly. ‘Yes, we have met, I am not sure if you will remember. It was some years ago, in a nightclub called Calico.’
*
The coincidence, first of Tatiana and then of Kata, was too much to be borne. No matter his early start the next day: Oliver insisted we turn on our heels, that we have another drink.
‘Not down here though,’ he said, ‘let’s go upstairs. The private rooms, where we can hear ourselves think.’
A waiter let us in to room number seven, a small room with dark-leather club chairs, wood panelling, some hunting-style paintings on the walls; a sort of riff on a gentleman’s club, apart from the rogue element of an enormous vase of willow spray in one corner, reaching almost to the ceiling.
I watched Tatiana and Oliver closely, wondering about the exact nature of their relationship. There must have been a twenty-year age gap between them but Tatiana assumed an air of dominance when it came to Oliver; she made fun of the room, said it was a bit funereal – there were candles – she made fun of his shoes, spanking new navy-blue boaters – ‘Bit off-key, Oliver,’ she joked – but through all her chaffing there was a definite sexual element, in the way she would raise her eyebrows, hold his gaze.
I wondered if this was specific to her interaction with Oliver or if Tatiana used her sexuality in this way with men in general. The men she was used to being around probably expected this from women, I thought, or at least expected it from women who looked like Tatiana.
