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talk to them. Mercedes, with her talons and her extensions, was the official naughty girl, for customers who wanted something a bit more racy, but Olly preferred the rest of us to dress in plain, well-cut dresses, not too much make-up, clean hair, discreet jewellery. They didn’t want risk, or mess, or their wives finding out, or probably even the embarrassment and trouble of having to get it up. Unbelievably pathetic as it was, they just wanted to feel wanted.
    Olly knew his market, and he catered to it perfectly. There was a tiny dance floor in the club, with Carlo doubling as DJ, to give the idea that at any moment our chap might spin us off into the disco night, though we were never to encourage this. There was a menu, with perfectly acceptable steak and scallops and ice cream sundaes – middle-aged men like to watch girls eat fattening puddings. Obviously, the knickerbocker glories stayed down just as long as it took us to make a discreet trip to the loo. Girls who took drugs or who were too obviously slutty didn’t last a night – a Polite Notice by the gents proclaimed that it was Strictly Forbidden to offer to Escort any of the Young Ladies Outside the Club. They were meant to aspire to us.
    I found myself looking forward to Thursday and Friday nights. With the exception of Leanne (I couldn’t really think of her as Mercedes yet), the girls were neither friendly nor unfriendly; pleasant but incurious. They didn’t appear interested in my life, perhaps because none of the details they revealed about their own were real. The first night, as we swung a little unsteadily down Albemarle Street, Leanne suggested I choose a name to use in the club. My middle name was Lauren; neutral, untelling.
    I said I was studying history of art part-time. All the girls seemed to be studying something, business administration mostly, and perhaps some of them were. None of them were English; clearly the idea that they were working in the bar to try to better themselves struck some sort of Eliza Doolittle chord with the punters. Leanne was flattening out her raucous Scouse – cushion came out as ‘cashion’; I modified my own accent, the one I used at work, which had become the voice I dreamed in, to make it a little less obviously Received Pronunciation, but to Olly’s evident satisfaction, I still sounded relatively ‘posh’.
    At my day job, on Prince Street, there were those million tiny codes. Anyone’s placement on the social scale could be calibrated to the n th degree at a single glance, and learning the rules was a lot more difficult than identifying paintings, because the whole point of those rules was that if you were on the inside, you never had to be told. Those hours of carefully teaching myself how to speak and how to walk might have passed the test with most people – Leanne, for instance, seemed bemused and grudgingly impressed by my transformation – but somewhere inside the house was a hidden casket of Alice in Wonderland keys that I would never possess, keys that unlocked ever tinier gardens whose walls were all the more impregnable because they were invisible. At the Gstaad, though, I was the token ‘toff’ and the girls, if they thought about it at all, believed there was no distinction between the WAGs and the superannuated debutantes who occupied adjoining pages in OK! magazine. Of course, in a deeper sense they would have been right.
    The chat at the club was mostly about clothes, the acquisition of designer-branded shoes and handbags, and men. Some of the girls claimed to have steady boyfriends, many of them married, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their boyfriends endlessly; others were dating, in which case it was the done thing to complain about their dates endlessly. To Natalia and Anastasia and Martina and Karolina it seemed a self-evident truth that men were a necessary evil, to be endured for the sake of shoes, handbags and Saturday night trips to Japanese restaurants in