David Nobbs - The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

There she was, beaming plumply, sexy and generous, far too aroused for him to even contemplate disappointing her. He would let her down gently later. He owed her that much.

There was a smell of something else, dominating even the distant drains. It was the faintly sweet, temptingly disgusting aroma of cooking lamb. She had made one of her shepherd’s pies.

They kissed hungrily, hurried to the bedroom, tottered on to the bed, clawed at each other’s clothes – they couldn’t get them off fast enough. He raised her rate of interest, he made his deposit, it was urgent, it was a meeting of needs, it was a contract, it was the execution of an agreement, it was over.

It had always struck him as pathetic that she tried to lay an attractive table in her cramped kitchen-diner. There was a single, rather tatty rose in a cheap vase. There was a flickering candle which would deposit wax over the Formica that wasn’t even retro. She had placed the mats for the veg without a vestige of spatial awareness. The salt and pepper pots were dumped inelegantly in just the wrong place. It was a disaster, but she had tried. It made a vivid contrast to luncheon at Flaxborough Hall, where elegance hung in the air like a memory.

She would have to go.

He couldn’t tell her just now, or, if he did, he would have to leave before the meal. He wasn’t that cruel, to leave her with two portions of shepherd’s pie to eat through her tears. Besides, the portions had not been generous at luncheon, and a man is always hungry when he has just agreed to pay £20 million for a picture.

But would she shed tears? Did she care a jot for him?

She poured him a glass of wine. In the first few months he had always taken a bottle, hugely expensive, wasted on her. She had said that she was perfectly able to buy good wine, she was his girlfriend, not a paid mistress. He knew that sometimes she paid as much as £9.50 for the wine they drank.

He took a sip and actually enjoyed the roughness that her palate could not detect. Sometimes the wines that he bought were so smooth that all the tension had been bred out of them. Yes, he could enjoy this. And as the top of the shepherd’s pie began to crisp up the smell grew far more appealing, and he realized that he was very hungry indeed, even hungry enough to eat lamb for the second time that day.

‘I hope this is going to be all right,’ she said. ‘It’s only shepherd’s pie.’

‘It’ll be just lovely. I’ve told, you, Mandy, I don’t particularly like sophisticated food.’ He realized that this hadn’t sounded like the essence of tact, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Good old British simplicity, that’s me. Besides, how can I criticize? I’ve never cooked anything in my life.’

Her large pale blue eyes grew even larger in astonishment.

‘What, never? Not even boiled an egg?’

‘Never. Not even boiled an egg. I have things done for me, Mandy. I have everything done for me. I haven’t cut my toenails myself for a quarter of a century.’

‘I can’t imagine your life.’

She wouldn’t be able to imagine the Earl of Flaxborough’s either.

‘I can’t imagine yours.’

She served the shepherd’s pie with cabbage and carrots.

He ate hungrily.

‘Sex makes me hungry,’ he said.

She blushed just a little. Her body was so uninhibited, but she went all coy when she talked about sex. She changed the subject hurriedly.

‘I’m trying out a new girl this week. She’s better with hair than with people.’

He didn’t want to talk. He was actually relishing the food. The cabbage and the carrots were a little undercooked to his taste, but the pie itself was succulent, nicely seasoned, simple but unadorned, a success.

Sometimes when she talked about her salon he thought of other things, but today he actually found himself listening and wondering about this other world, so far removed from his, and even further removed from the Earl of Flaxborough’s. How many worlds there were.

‘That’s the thing with hairdressing. You get people who’re good with hair and useless with people and you get people who’re good with people and useless with hair.’

He smiled. They shared a problem – the inadequacy of underlings.

‘If you get somebody who’s good with hair and people it’s like gold, and then they emigrate to Dubai, and they never come back. There must be millions of hairdressers in Dubai. I don’t know how you do it, finding people for eleven manufacturing companies plus your financial empire and your property portfolio and all your ancillary activities.’

He had once used the phrase ‘my property portfolio and my ancillary activities’ to her, to explain the cancellation of that month’s visit, and she was one of those dangerous people who remember every single thing that is said to them.

‘This is very nice, Mandy.’

He really meant it and she knew that he meant it and she blushed slightly again and he felt the first tingle of returning desire. Maybe … maybe he wouldn’t tell her till after their second helping.

‘Would you like a second helping?’

Her timing was immaculate, and completely innocent.

‘Thank you. I would. Very much.’

Over his second helping he found himself making a request. He, making a request to her!

‘Tell me more about the new girl. The one who’s not good with people.’

‘Why?’

‘I like hearing you talk.’

Forget Hackney. It was Blush City, Arizona.

‘She talks too much. I think they’ve told her in training that’s what you do. Hairdressers can be overtrained.’

‘Like footballers.’

‘I was sorry you lost on Saturday. I always look for the scores.’

‘Yes. Unfortunate. Go on. In what way does she talk too much?’

‘Asks questions. I mean, the sort of women I get, they nod off or read magazines. They don’t want her saying, “Are you doing anything exciting this weekend?” Because most of them aren’t, and if they were they wouldn’t tell her, would they?’

She chatted away and he didn’t have to say much in reply and actually to his surprise he found it not unbearably boring to hear about this other world. There was apple crumble; he praised it and asked her if she’d made it herself and she said it was from Waitrose. They finished the bottle and he assured her three times that it was nice and she said, ‘I won’t wash up,’ which was the nearest she would ever get to ‘How about another fuck?’

This was one of his best evenings with her and he was amazed to find how much more he was enjoying it than his visit to Flaxborough Hall. He felt a twinge of pity for the eighteenth Earl, who would never hear anything about Hair Hunters of Hackney. The meal had been much better than usual, really quite edible, and she had worked hard over it, and it would have seemed heartless to have said, after that, ‘Mandy, this can’t go on, you know.’ So he didn’t.

This time he relished her unfashionable fleshiness, her large untrendy breasts, her full cheeks, her generous lips, the pleasure in her pale blue eyes. She once, in a rare moment of post-coital candour, had told him that his power turned her on, that it was exciting not to have been entered by her friend, the traffic warden, but by a man who had eleven manufacturing outlets in England alone. (Not to mention his property portfolio and his ancillary activities, though she hadn’t mentioned those on that occasion.)

This second coming was so gentle, so relaxed, so slow, so synchronized, so lovely. You really could almost have believed that there was real emotion in it. You could almost have believed that he felt real affection for her. You could almost have believed – oh, he hoped not – that she felt some kind of love for him.