Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online

paranoid thought that he’s going through my papers, to see what I pay for insurance or, worst of all, how much the flat cost me all of six years ago).
    â€˜Seven hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine’, Martin snaps for the third time. Then he turns menacingly towards me and says ‘
a very
good offer’, as if I’ve been let off a jail sentence and told I’m going on a free holiday instead.
    â€˜Scarlett!’ In comes Stefan, just seconds before the looming figure of Nyan collides in the doorway with Rudolf Hess on parole, i.e. Stefan’s assistant Bill. I can’t help wondering how Bill’s mother—or grandmother, it must have been; it’s difficult to get the generations right as you grow old—could have found a German to give her a baby, unless of course she’d been a spy …
    That’s the trouble with me. I can’t help daydreaming at all the most important points in life—like going out with someone you might, just might,like. Or hearing about a gigantic offer on your flat, one that can change your life forever. Maybe I’m in shock … that’s what this odd, fuzzy feeling must be.
    Through all the fog I can see, however, that Stefan is now standing closer to Martin than a few seconds ago. He’s totting up the price of the house when it’s a ‘family house’ (although few families would be able to afford it) and I even hear him say to Martin that he ‘could make something of this’. It’s become clear by the way Martin nods and pretends to consider this suggestion from Stefan that they know each other well already.
    A silence falls. Nyan has elbowed aside Penis and Bum (survival of the fittest I suppose) and even blue-eyed Bill finds himself at the back of the queue.
    Panic. What the hell am I meant to do?
    Of course I know what they want me to do. If I say ‘yes’, Stefan will make a mint by transforming poor old Saltram Crescent into a cross between a Dominican monastery, a mosque and a rajah’s palace. Employment, obviously, for Stefan’s workforce—perhaps unsurprisingly there have been no commissions since the
riad.
Alain had told me that, laughing, back in La Speranza (self-deprecating of course); he meant his tiles had put people off. He even went on to joke that there hadbeen massive complaints to Brent Council from the pebble-dashed dwellers of All Souls Road and Ravensworth Terrace.
    So my acceptance would keep a lot of people in work. It’s already clear that Martin from Crookstons is going to benefit from this arrangement as well. As for Mr Nyan, his pale eyes would twinkle if they could. ‘There’s a real shortage of family houses in W9’, Martin is saying, as I still linger on the landing. ‘It’s what everyone is looking for.’
    Yet I feel a pang. Here is where I thought I might make a go of an Independent Life (don’t ask), and it’s good to have friends (well, mainly Molly) and the laundrette and the park, even if it sucks—it makes me feel healthy to go round it twice and clock up a few miles.
    Aren’t you meant to think of things like that when you’re selling? What about the human side? Is Money really so ice cold that I have to choose between freezing to death and being rich or actually getting colder as I grow old with not enough to heat my bedsit from a lousy pension?
    â€˜I’m sure Alain will want to design tiles especially for this project’, Stefan says. (He must have noticed the way I looked at Alain at lunch.) Maybe that helps me come out with my answer.
    Before Stefan can go on about a new learning curve—before Nyan can say how many hundreds of thousands need to be ‘thrown at’ my flat—and, most of all, before I can outline my plan to Alain—I just know I have to have time.
    â€˜I’ll think about it’, I say.

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    After that offer from the