Maestra Read Free

trip, reappearing exhausted and grimy at 5.30 to another reprimand for missing the departmental viewing of the paintings I’d spent the morning working on.
    ‘Honestly, Judith,’ Laura remarked, ‘you’ll never make any progress if you’re haring about town when you could be looking at the works.’
    Twitches on invisible threads aside, maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that when I came across Leanne at the Tube station a little later, I really did feel like a drink.

3
    My interview at the Gstaad Club that night consisted of Olly, the giant, morose Finn who was proprietor, maître d’ and bouncer, looking me over in the lacy nude blouse I’d hastily shuffled on in the loos at the Ritz.
    ‘Can you drink?’ he asked me.
    ‘She’s from Liverpool,’ giggled ‘Mercedes’, and that was that.
    So for the next eight weeks, I worked Thursday and Friday nights in the club. Not hours that most people my age would welcome, but after-work drinks with the team weren’t really a big feature of my career. The name, like everything else about the place, was a dated stab at fake class; the only thing that was real about the club was the truly eye-watering mark-up on the champagne. In fact, it didn’t look much different from Annabel’s, the has-been nightclub a few streets away in Berkeley Square. Same Sloane-Ranger yellow walls, same bad-good pictures, same collection of tragic paunchy older men, same lounging gaggle of girls who were not quite hookers but who always needed a little help with the rent. The job was simple. About ten girls gathered half an hour before the club opened at nine for a pick-me-up dispensed by Carlo the bartender in his immaculately pressed but slightly whiffy white jacket. The rest of the staff consisted of an ancient babushka who took the coats, and Olly. At nine sharp he unbolted the street door and made the same solemn joke.
    ‘OK girls, knickers off.’
    After opening, we sat about chatting, flicking through celebrity mags or texting for an hour until the customers started to drift in, almost always alone. The idea was that they would pick the girl they liked and take her to sit in one of the pink-velvet swagged alcoves, which was known rather bluntly as ‘getting booked’. When you were booked, your objective was to get the punter to order as many ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne as possible. We got no wages, just ten per cent on every bottle and whatever the customer chose to leave. My first night, I reeled away from the table halfway through the third bottle and had to ask the babushka to hold my hair while I made myself throw up.
    ‘Stupid girl,’ she said with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Is not for you to be drinking it.’
    So I learned. Carlo served the champagne with huge, goldfish-bowl sized glasses, which we would empty into the ice bucket or the flowers as soon as the customer left the table. Another strategy was to persuade him to invite a ‘friend’ to share a glass. The girls wore pumps, never open-toed sandals, as another ruse was to teasingly persuade him to sip some out of your shoe. You can pour a surprising amount of champagne into a size 39 Louboutin. If all else failed, we just tipped the stuff on the floor.
    At first, it seemed miraculous to me that the place stayed open at all. It seemed positively Edwardian, all the heavy-handed flirting and the exorbitant fee for our company. Why would any man bother when he could order up whatever he wanted on his I-Hooker app? It was all so painfully old-fashioned. But I gradually realised that this was exactly what kept the guys coming back. They weren’t after sex, though plenty of them could get a bit frisky after a few goldfish bowls. They weren’t players, these guys, even in their dreams. They were ordinary middle-aged married blokes who for a few hours wanted to pretend to themselves that they were on a real date, with a real girl, a pretty girl, nicely dressed with decent manners, who actually wanted to