Truly Madly Guilty(69)

There was silence around the table. Vid beamed.

‘Do you mean you were a pole dancer?’ Clementine lowered her voice. ‘Like a … like a stripper?’

‘Clementine, of course she wasn’t a stripper,’ said Erika.

‘Well,’ said Tiffany.

There was a pause.

‘Oh,’ said Erika. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’

‘You’ve certainly got the body for it,’ said Clementine.

‘Well,’ said Tiffany again. This was where it got tricky. She couldn’t say, Yeah, too right I do, girlfriend. You weren’t allowed to be proud of your body. Women expected humility on this topic. ‘When I was nineteen I did.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Sam asked Tiffany.

Clementine gave him a look. ‘What?’ Sam lifted his hands. ‘I’m just asking if she enjoyed a previous occupation. That’s a valid question.’

‘I loved it,’ said Tiffany. ‘For the most part. It was like any job. Good parts and bad parts, but I mostly enjoyed it.’

‘Good money?’ continued Sam.

‘Great money,’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s why I did it. I was doing my degree, and I could earn so much more money doing that than being a check-out chick.’

‘I was a check-out chick,’ said Clementine. ‘I didn’t especially love it, by the way, if anyone is interested.’

‘Such a pity. You would have made a wonderful stripper, darling,’ said Sam.

‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ said Clementine evenly.

‘You could have made your cello faces as you spun around the pole. That would have got you some good tips.’ Sam threw back his head, closed his eyes and made his eyebrows go up and down, presumably in imitation of Clementine’s face as she played the cello.

Clementine looked down at the table and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Her whole body shook. Tiffany stared. Was she crying?

‘She’s laughing,’ said Erika dismissively. ‘You won’t be able to get any sense out of her for the next few minutes.’

Oliver cleared this throat. ‘I read an article recently about a move to make pole dancing an Olympic sport,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s very athletic. You need good core strength.’

Tiffany had to smile at the poor fellow doing his level best to manoeuvre the conversation back into safe middle-class dinner party conversation territory.

‘Oh yes, Oliver, it’s very athletic,’ said Vid meaningfully, one eyebrow lifted, and Clementine dissolved again.

Tiffany thought how much simpler the world would be if everyone shared Vid’s almost child-like approach to all things sexual. Vid liked sex in the same way he like classical music and blue cheese and fast cars. To him, it was all the same. The good stuff of life. It was just naked pretty dancing girls in a club. What was the big deal?

Erika turned pointedly in her seat to look over her shoulder towards the kids. ‘So does your daughter –?’ she said to Tiffany.

‘Dakota knows I was a dancer.’ Tiffany lifted her chin. Don’t you freaking well question my parenting choices. ‘I’ll wait till she’s older to give her more details than that.’

Vid’s older daughters and ex-wife didn’t know either. Oh God, the judgement that would come her way from his daughters, who dressed like Kardashians but behaved around Tiffany as if they had the moral high ground normally reserved for nuns. If they ever found out they would leap on that secret like rabid dogs.

‘Right,’ said Erika. ‘Of course. Right.’

Clementine lifted her head and ran her fingertips beneath her eyes. Her voice still trembled with laughter. ‘So, forgive me, because I guess I’ve led a very, you know, vanilla life,’ she said.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Sam. ‘What are you implying? I read Fifty Shades of Grey. I studied it. I tried to set up the study as the Red Room of Pain.’

Clementine elbowed him. ‘I’m just fascinated. Did you find it … well, I don’t know, where to start! Weren’t the men watching you kind of … sleazy?’

‘Of course some of them were, but most of them were just ordinary blokes.’

‘I wasn’t sleazy,’ said Vid. ‘Ah, well, maybe I was a little bit sleazy. In a good way sleazy!’

‘So did you go to those places often?’ Clementine asked him, and Tiffany could hear the effort she was making to keep her tone clear of judgement.

This was what Vid never understood and Tiffany always forgot: people had such complicated feelings when they heard that she’d been a dancer. It was all mixed up with their feelings about sex, which sadly for most people were always inextricably linked with shame and class and morality (some people thought she was confessing to an illegal act), and for the women there were issues relating to body image and jealousy and insecurity, and the men didn’t want to look too interested, even though they were generally very interested, and some men got that angry, defensive look as if she were trying to trick them into revealing a weakness, and most people, men and women, wanted to giggle like teenagers but didn’t know if they should. It was a freaking minefield. Never again, Vid, never again.

‘Sure, I went lots!’ said Vid easily. ‘When my marriage broke up my friends wanted to take me out, and, you know, my friends didn’t go to symphonies or whatever, you know, they went to clubs. And when I saw this woman dance, well, she blew my mind. She just blew my mind.’ He put a pretend gun to his head, pulled a pretend trigger and made his fingertips explode. ‘That’s why I recognised her straight away at that auction. Even though she had her clothes on.’