The High Flyer Read Free Page B

power remained much as they had always been.
    A successful woman, it seemed clear to me, had to achieve both a career
and
a faultless domesticity; it was not an either/or situation, and in order to maximise my success I had to stick to my life-plan and net the right husband. Celibacy was just as much for losers as chastity was. That was the dogma. Those were the rules. One conformed or else one was consigned to hell as someone who had failed to make it to the heaven of “having it all.” Occasionally, very occasionally, I did think this ideology was as rigorous as the crackpot lifestyle of some fundamentalist religious sect, but I always eliminated that heretical thought by reminding myself what agony it would be to wind up a loser, with everyone breathing contempt on me from all sides.
    The irony was that when I first met Kim in that airport lounge I did not see him as a potential husband. I merely saw him as a male who could boost my shattered self-esteem, and besides I had by that time given up hope of marrying a fellow lawyer. Successful lawyers all seemed to gravitate towards the traditional wives who would slot easily into the dinosaur lifestyle, and although I had cast my net wider, trawling among the stockbrokers and the bankers and the various other businessmen who flourished in the City’s Square Mile, I had found only the unsuitable and the unavailable.
    I had wondered if I was being too fussy, but thought not. It was no good marrying someone unsuitable; I would have been written off as pitifully desperate. It was also no good angling for someone who was already married; that would have been a very unwise move, no matter how desirable the husband was, because people would have said I was reckless, hormone-driven, incapable of ordering my private life properly, and I could not afford to make any move which would have been detrimental to my career.
    “My wife’s ideal for a dinosaur,” said Kim on the flight to New York, “but the trouble is I’m not the dinosaur I appear to be. I’ve always been the outsider, acting a part in order to get on.”
    “Me too. So are you saying—”
    “I’m saying Sophie and I have recently decided to go our separate ways. There are no children and no other people involved, so the divorce could hardly be easier.”
    “How civilised,” I said politely, but despite this information that he would soon be single I still did not see him as a potential husband. I was too busy massaging my battered ego with erotic thoughts of a one-night stand.
    VI
    According to romantic convention and modern urban myth a torrid sex-scene should have unfolded when Kim and I went to bed together that same night in New York, but fortunately real life is rather more unpredictable. The last thing I wanted was a torrid sex-scene. Erotic, yes, but not pornographically torrid. In my experience (which was well up to the modern average as established by earnest sociologists) torrid sex-scenes indicated the presence of either male bastards or male perverts or both, and were conducted as if the woman’s body were a plastic machine designed for unspeakable experiments. No woman in her right mind could enjoy that kind of rubbish. Torrid sex-scenes might have been fun in the 1960s when everyone was so innocent and the weirdos were still hiding in the woodwork, but now, when everything is not only permitted but expected, they have degenerated into a big bore which is not only repulsive but occasionally frightening.
    I sound jaded. I
was
jaded. Sex as a leisure activity is great fun when one’s young, but as the years pass, one’s horizons alter, one’s needs change and one becomes more complex, less easily satisfied. One simply cannot, if one wants to be a mature human being, continue to think of sex as being in the same league as getting drunk in a pub on a Saturday night. The whole subject then becomes murky, fraught with ambiguity and eventually painful. Yes, I was jaded. I was sure too that I was not