Confessions of a Sugar Mummy Read Online Free

tell Molly, either, that I saw a glass on the table which had clearly been recently used. And I saw the bottle of tequila was half empty. She would have been I-told-you-so about it and I couldn’t have stood that. Not then—hardly even now.
    â€˜Shall I make you a margarita?’ I said in a bright, girlish voice I couldn’t believe was actually comingout of me. ‘Or would you prefer wine?’
    But Alain had clearly had enough already. He swayed slightly on his feet in those diarrhoea-colour cheap shoes and I saw his eyes were like a fruit machine, with his pupils rising slowly and then falling so I began to feel dizzy myself.
    No, Alain had to go. He would call tomorrow. Where was he staying? Oh, with a cousin of Claire’s, she is married to a famous artist, I can’t remember the name, not Damien Hirst but someone like that.
    â€˜It won’t be too far to walk’, Alain said. Claire’s cousin lives in Notting Hill.
    Molly and I stood by the front door of the flat and pretended not to watch as he ran down the steps and turned left into the grey streets of W9. We said nothing as the vacuum closed round us, and Molly opened a bottle of red wine.
    Later, when we’d drunk that and another as well, I saw that Alain had left his Vuitton bag behind and we opened it as if it would somehow provide the answer to the aura of mystery which seemed to hang around him. But there was nothing inside except one poxy tile.

Advice for the Other Woman on Sexual Fantasies

6
    I am called Scarlett because my mother was reading the interminable Mega-Bore on Christmas Eve (When? We all know it was a long time ago) and, so she’s told me about a thousand times, I came out just as the (‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’) scene began. I am the product—by osmosis, you might say—of the most embarrassing and loathsome sexual coupling in history, Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.
    I was the result of the coy glance the hateful Vivien Leigh threw in Clark Gable’s direction when he came in drunk and ready to rape the genteel tart under the sheets (which, as everyone knows, he did). His reward was another coy glance across thebreakfast tray on Scarlett’s bed.
    So, with that monstrous pair as my virtual parents, what would you do in my place when the visitor you thought was coming to make you feel young again turns up a day late, drinks the booze without even pouring you a drink, and shows he’s been in trouble by wearing cheap clothes from Primark or, even worse, the property of a recently dead man and acquired under the bridge in Ladbroke Grove?
    Would you decide never to see him again? Or just put up with it along with the prospect of a restless night and a counting of hours until it’s decent to make a phone call. (When’s that? To someone in Alain’s condition, it’s never the right time to call: mornings he’s stuffing down the pills to kill the pain of the hangover; midday, more pills to counter the depression brought on by wasting the morning; afternoon, the vodka, the red wine; evening Irish whiskey—if there’s the money to buy it with, Paddy doesn’t come cheap in the Harrow Road.) And what if this ‘cousin of Claire’s’ answers the phone? How do you get out of that one? Suppose he was lying and Claire herself is enjoying the amenities of her cousin’s posh pad in Notting Hill?
    Then the horrible thoughts begin. Is Claire about to throw that coy look at Alain? Did he sober up on the walk back from W9 and give his wife the best time she’s had for years—liberated, as she must be, by freedom from running the house in the south of France and from the niggling worries that her brother-in-law is about to throw them out in the street? Has she let herself go for the first time in years?
    Advice to would-be Sugar Mums
    Don’t speculate on the sexual activities of the object of desire. He is either