Eve White: Literary Agent

from HOPES AND FEARS

She chose an Italian restaurant just off the High Street and found a table by the window. As she began to eat her meal she watched the prostitutes in the doorway opposite. She knew them to be prostitutes from having seen them soliciting potential customers. One of the girls appeared almost elegant. She looked intelligent and cool and she could have passed for any up-and-coming executive in an office. Lydia wondered if she really was tough and crude, as they were always portrayed, or was she just like any other woman – herself, for instance? Did the prostitute have opinions and hopes, aspirations for a happy life? Do men aspire to a happy life, or a successful one? she wondered. Chris had desperately wanted success, but he couldn’t really work out how to achieve it. Lydia wanted happiness, yet she couldn’t get that right either, anymore than Chris could. She thought about Daniel. On one level his life was a success. He was one of the highest paid creative directors in London, perhaps the world. He didn’t seem to be particularly pleased by this – or by anything. Then surprisingly, she saw him – not just in her mind, but in reality – across the road, talking to the prostitute. With a cold hand clutching her heart, she watched as he spoke to the woman briefly. The prostitute nodded and they turned and went upstairs together. For a long time she stopped eating. She may have stopped breathing. Her instinctive sense of outrage was so deep and violent – and she knew, entirely at odds with her ‘modern, liberated’ view of sex – that she was locked in a terrible, silent struggle; her body against her brain. Her body revolted at the knowledge that Daniel was at this moment engaged with the prostitute – probably exactly as he had been with her the other night. Her brain reminded her that they had no claims on each other; they had not even confessed love. Their sexual relationship was unconventional, to say the least, but regardless of all that modern, tolerant stuff that she was supposed to believe in, she couldn’t, simply couldn’t bear the knowledge of what he was doing at this very moment: she kept seeing vivid pictures of it, like repeating images in a rock video, edited to pulsating music. Was he kissing her? Did men do that with prostitutes? She’d heard it cost more. Cost would not worry Daniel, but kissing wasn’t really his style. She thought of the other physical intimacies which she knew were his style. The images wouldn’t stop. Eating was loathsome. She pushed the food away, paid the bill and left, ignoring the waitress’s timid queries about whether everything was all right. On the way home she was sick. She’d never been sick in the street before and knew she should be ashamed. People would think she was drunk. But she was laid low – so low – so entirely, unequivocally low with humiliation, that it didn’t seem to matter what people thought.