How to Kill Your Family(5)
They drone on about friends at the golf club, discussing someone called Brian who disgraced himself at the recent charity auction (poor Brian, imagine the shame of being cast out by the elderly ex-pat community). Kathleen and the other woman dining, who looks a lot like Kathleen but with more girth and a smaller Chanel, move on to slagging off a hairdresser who takes too long and couldn’t fit her friend in last Monday. My attention is wandering. I want to learn everything I can, but by God these people don’t make it easy.
Can I have one more glass of wine, or will that sabotage this fact-finding mission? Fuck it. Glass of wine ordered, I pick at the remnants of my tapas. Perhaps the group I’m watching had the right idea when it came to the steak. The food I ordered is confusingly rubbery, and looks less like it came from the sea and more like it was grown in a warehouse off a motorway. The group in front of me have ordered coffee, and Kathleen is fussing over a stain on Jeremy’s tie, which looks as though it’s a club tie of some sort. I bet Jeremy is a Freemason, it would just fit. Fat friend’s husband is asking when they will next be at the casino, and mentions a drinks event this coming Thursday.
‘Yes we’ll be there,’ says Jeremy sharply, brushing Kathleen’s proffered napkin away. ‘We’re having dinner with the Beresfords at 7.30, and we’ll drop in on the way back.’
WHERE ARE YOU HAVING DINNER, I want to scream, but they don’t elaborate. Instead, Jeremy asks for the bill by brusquely beckoning the waiter. The other man at the table grabs the saucer the moment it comes, and does a nod towards my grandparents.
‘We must get this, I’m sure it’s our turn – no please, I insist.’ A gold card is thrown down, and Jeremy barely responds, instead looking over at me again. This time I look away. I don’t want him to mark me, or know my face too well. I’m not worried, I assume he spends a lot of time looking at women young enough to be his granddaughter. Perhaps fewer who actually are, but with Simon’s track record, who could ever be sure?
As they leave, I notice Jeremy’s tie properly. I was wrong, not Freemasons. A print in green and yellow, with the letters ‘RC’. A quick google tells me it’s the official tie for the Regency Club, a private members’ establishment in Mayfair, opened in 1788 for men, royal, and wealthy, to consort without their wives. I almost laugh. I know where you started life, Jeremy. In a two-room dwelling in Bethnal Green, with a seamstress mother and a father who fucked off and ended up who knows where before you were five. Simon has talked about it in interviews with pride, as a sign of how hard your family has worked to rise in the world. So here you are in your tie, imagining it shows your pedigree – the one you bought for yourself. Admirable to some, perhaps. Even to me, since I’m trying to do the same thing – climb out of poverty, get away from my starting offer in life. But I know you. I know your hatred of your roots, whatever the story you’ve spun since. You saw it in me, and when asked to help your own flesh and blood out of a similar situation, you ran. Helene was right. You’re just a thug, and your private clubs and your expensive clothes don’t do much to conceal that. But wear your tie. Thursday isn’t far away.
I walk back to my rooms, taking in the main promenade in Puerto Banús as I go. The boutiques are filled with women holding up embellished dresses in the mirror and chatting to their friends. Teenage girls stroll past engrossed in a discussion about their tans. I wonder if I’d have been one of these empty shells had I grown up within the folds of the Artemis family. I read books, I follow world affairs, I have opinions on more than just shoes and golf clubs. I am better than these people, that’s not in doubt. But they look happy despite their ignorance. Perhaps because of it. What is there to worry about? None of these idiots are thinking about climate change, they’re wondering what to wear on the yacht tomorrow. But it’s fascinating to watch, and I only have a short time to see it. Once I’ve done my job, I won’t be coming back to this playground for the diamanté class. Perhaps I should buy a memento. I look at the shop windows, with their overpriced tat. I have neither the money nor the desire to buy a fur-cuffed kaftan, even as a silly joke. Besides, I think I know what my keepsake will be, and it won’t cost me a thing.
The next day, after a quick run along the beach, I drive to their house. It’s a large villa in a secure complex, hidden away from the unwashed masses and guarded by big gates and a bored security officer in a hut, who I imagine is supposed to check who visitors are, but lets me through with a wave when I say I’m here from the boutique Afterdark to drop off a dress for Mrs Lyle at number 8. I guessed that there would be a fairly steady stream of deliveries for the bored ladies alone in their pristine villas, always ordering a new outfit, or demanding a nail technician visit at short notice. I didn’t say I was going to the Artemis household. I don’t want there to be an obvious link, just in case questions are asked later.
Their house, number 9, is almost identical to numbers 8 and 10. White stucco, terracotta tiles leading up to the door. Palm trees on either side of the porch. Perfect green lawn, even in this scorching heat. I guess hosepipe bans don’t apply when you live in a compound away from normal society. I take my foot off the pedal and roll by, but there’s nothing to see really. There’s nobody in sight on these wide avenues, not a dog walker or a mother and buggy. All this money, and it can only buy silence. I appreciate silence, by the way. You don’t grow up on a main road in London and not dream of the day you might live in a home without hearing your neighbours alternately having angry sex and or sobbing to the soundtrack of Les Misérables. But this calm is artificial – it feels flat and dull, as though made for people who wanted to create an environment which completely denied the loud reality of human life. The Artemises choice of house only tells me about them in so far as it tells me nothing. It’s a house which was built for rich people who don’t care about design but really value security and status. Did Lynn and Brian buy a house in this compound? Well then let’s buy a bigger one. That’s it. There’s no nod to personality, there’s no activity – only sanitised conformity. I leave feeling rather depressed. I share DNA with these people, will I too one day hanker after beige carpets and a maid I can mistreat? I guess a maid would be nice, but I think I’d find their inevitable sadness a bit oppressive. I imagine it’s a bonus for Kathleen though. Someone who is more miserable than her, in full view every day.