Confessions of a Sugar Mummy Read Online Free Page A

doing what you most dread, or something that wasn’t invented when you were young.
    Do call him—but only when
you
feel like it—drunk will do, midnight will be fine, on a Sunday morning with the sound of church bells is perfectly OK. It’s his fault for not being with you at the time.
    Never ever try to contact his current girlfriend, wife, incestuous half-sister or suspect male best friend. He needs time off from the endless stream of gifts, £50 notes,artworks or whatever you’re pushing on him. And if he’s in the middle of an orgy when you call it’s none of your business. Just reflect on why you haven’t been invited.
    Of course it’s easier to give advice than to follow it. Sometimes, as my friend Molly knows well, comparisons are easier to understand than hard-and-fast rules of behaviour. If the difference between what is considered in life or in fiction to be winning or acceptable conduct contrasts badly with the deal you seem to have set up for yourself in real life, then this is the time to think really hard about your relationship. Is it all one way? Are the times you can see yourself as another human being in a couple almost non-existent? If so, aren’t you wasting your time as a Sugar Mummy, because this is precisely what it’s all about. You’re better off joining the Gaga Third Age University
now
and forgetting about the life of the elderly geisha, where service is unpaid and seldom met with a smile.
    I shut my eyes—we’re back in last night now—and when I open them I see that the giant plasma screen on the wall at the end of my bed (my one great extravagance) is activated. Its pinkish glow makes me feel better and younger, and I prop myselfup while still half asleep.
    Molly has put on something—a DVD or one of her home-made videos (pray God NOT that)—and it’s some time before I see it’s
Gone With The Wind
, and I realise (I hate you, Molly) that she’s interested in showing me the difference between the kind of gorgeous, wicked time that original Scarlett could have and the miserable fate of her namesake (that’s me). Never mind.
    I drift off as Scarlett goes into one of her famous tantrums and Rhett showers her with expensive gifts …

Meeting Gloria, the sugar mummy par excellence

7
    It turns out the first Scarlett was right—tomorrow
is
another day. In my case, with the sleeplessness and denial of sex, it felt like two days—and that’s because, I suppose, my memories are of having sex at night and waking up the next day.
    First things first.
    I come down from my room with the endless replay of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in their primeval relationship (Molly’s idea of a joke, but it might have driven me mad) to find my friend sitting in the kitchen with a guest, a woman in what used to be called late middle age, wearing a lot of gold jewellery and a bright floral-patterned dress. I almost groaned aloud, except it would have beenrude in front of Molly’s guest.
    Molly is looking tremendously pleased with herself—that’s the first thing I thought—then, dimly (and without even a cup of coffee) I work out why. The story of the uninvited (by me) guest in my kitchen is another of Molly’s teases, and boy am I growing tired of them.
    So here we have it: this woman of about sixty with hair dyed the bright red you sometimes see in Kilburn High Road and I wonder just how drunk the dyer was when it went on—henna-ed hen-night perhaps?—is sitting right up close to the kitchen table and smiling all over her face (yes, at this hour, if it really is as early as it feels). Her smile is sort of triumphant, as if she’s just heard she’s been left a packet—and this is in W9 of all places! Maybe, I think in my still groggy way, she’s heard how much her flat has been valued at. Perhaps everyone in W9 is smiling like this when they wake up, except for those who