White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  After our time on the boat, communication gaps widen further. Weeks turn into months until he contacts me, always with some disarming story that I want to believe, but don’t. When a relationship starts to crumble, you hang on in there, even though the really good times are already consigned to history. There are tantrums and tears when I do see him. I accuse him of infidelity, lying and keeping secrets. He denies, evades, brushes it all off, soothes me temporarily with affection, cuddles – though he’s not so quick to rush me into bed any more and, of course, I won’t ever make the first move, I’m so used to being wooed.

  Out of habit, I distract myself, out most nights, as is Rosemary who has mysteriously acquired a couple of portly, cigar chomping, well-heeled admirers, older married men ‘in property’ driving around in Jaguars and Humber Super Snipes. They like having her on their arm for dinner and cabaret at expensive places like the Talk of the Town in Leicester Square or the Top of the Tower, the revolving restaurant in the newly opened Post Office Tower. There they can eat expensive meals 34 floors up, items such as caviar and huge steaks. Or they take her for meals at the big West End hotels and drop her off early, which seems to please her.

  In an attempt to stop worrying about Jeff I have what is essentially a three-date fling with Dave, a good-looking Carnaby Street shop owner. It ends once we finally get down to it, a deeply unsatisfactory experience, all over in a flash. Never again. Especially since Rosemary arrives home early and catches us at it on the kitchen floor. ‘All I could see was his bum going up and down!’ she chortles the next morning.

  A few weeks later, at a South Ken party I collide with a jaw-droppingly handsome 20-something Iranian, Saeed. Iranians were called Persians then and there seemed to be many in London, rich playboys subsidised by their dads, ostensibly studying but spending all their time gambling and girling and living in splendour in centrally heated flats. Central heating was still a bit of a luxury back then (less than 30 per cent of UK homes boasted a central heating system). Saeed didn’t drink or smoke dope. He’d never even been inside a London pub. Yet he was, beyond any doubt, a love god in the looks stakes (imagine a youthful version of the cricketing Imran Kahn), hence my willingness to stay over at his plushly carpeted, heated pad in South Ken. It has to be said, though, while he wasn’t a never-again disaster like Carnaby Street Dave, his lovemaking skills were pretty average. Vanilla.

  That final year of the ’60s started with a nasty, cold London winter. Snow. Slush. My enthusiasm for my job at the shoe firm had waned too – but it was far too miserable out there to consider a trek round the agencies to hunt for something else. There were forlorn nights that winter when I remained huddled over the two-bar electric heater in the damp, dank flat with only the cat for company until Rosemary, svelte and warm in her expensive fox-fur jacket and high leather boots, blonde hair streaming behind her, would come home from one of her early dinner dates in triumph. She would report a juicy steak au poivre at Le Cellier du Midi up in Hampstead and ‘not even a peck on the cheek’ for the bewitched, wedlocked property mogul. This seemed to be a satisfying experience for her in curious ways I could never quite figure. I know her secret. But definitely not the woman.

  One night, she greets me after work, waving a blue airmail letter with a Turkish stamp. ‘Mehmet’s got a friend who’s coming over next week. He owns a nightclub in Istanbul so he’ll want to go out on the town. Can you come with us, Jacky? He wants to have a good time and I’ve promised Mehmet I’ll show him around.’

  I’ve never met anyone from Turkey before. In truth, I just about know where Turkey is, mostly thanks to the old song ‘Istanbul not Constantinople’. Sometimes you’d see very odd advertisements in the Standard for salespeople to sell ‘luxury goods’ in Turkey and the Far East, no languages needed. Which did make you wonder: did everyone there speak English? But as far as a night on the town went, why ever not?

  A week later, two 30-something men in smartly tailored three-piece suits, white shirts, neat little ties and unfashionably short dark hair, are at our front door, fully primed to escort two swinging London dolly birds around town. The nightclub owner, Huseyin, speaks not a single word of English. He’s not gross – he’s quite pleasant – but we can’t communicate, which is just as well since I find him deeply unfanciable. The other one, however, is different. Ahmet, who has lived in London for many years, is short but very good-looking – and extremely charming. He reeks of Brut aftershave which by the mid-’60s had knocked Old Spice off its perch as the leading aftershave brand available to men hoping to enhance their allure.

  We take a taxi to the Playboy club, the place Huseyin is desperate to visit. It opened to great fanfare in Park Lane in 1966 and it’s still very much a novelty, with the Bunny Girls serving at the tables in their extremely provocative, specially-fitted outfits (boob-squeezing satin corset, dark tights, high heels and the awful bunny ears and bushy white tail on the derriere) and the reputation of Playboy, with its famous men’s magazine and string of clubs all over the US. But it is really the London Playboy casino that is the main draw – and which will go on to rake in the millions for owner Hugh Hefner and his first foray into Europe.

  I’m curious to have a look, of course, but have no interest whatsoever in gambling (a permanent hangover from my dad’s bookie world and disastrous fall from grace). I decide it’s a place that merits just one visit. Despite all the newspaper hype, once seated at our table with drinks and indifferently prepared meals served by a series of smiling, pert Bunnies (how can they breathe in those corsets?), it seems pretty charmless, a shallow, bland way of – well, selling the idea of a love-in with a good-looking woman already packaged for a man’s delight. There are strict and well publicised rules about the Bunny girls not being able to consort with the customers afterwards (look but don’t touch – oh, yeah?). Funnily enough, the Bunnies themselves eventually move with the times and by the mid-1970s they will join the merry-go-round of the militant trade unions and go on strike. But the overall initial impression that night is of plasticised, packaged sex not quite for sale. It’s quite different from today’s raunchy hen nights, with muscular male strippers being hauled off by over-amorous females for not so discreet personal services.

  The following night, the Turks whisk us to Park Lane again, this time to Trader Vic’s Polynesian-themed bar in the newly built Hilton Hotel, very much one of London’s smartest, upmarket venues. Trader Vic’s was an expensive, special occasion place, a big Saturday night make-an-impression date haunt, quite different to the tiny, dark bistros with gingham tablecloths (menu: prawn cocktail followed by Steak Diane) or local Indian restaurants I was accustomed to. After our session at Trader Vic’s and a couple of luridly coloured cocktails with tiny flags on sticks, Ahmet, who seems to know every doorman or manager wherever we go, suggests we dine at the Lotus House, an expensive and popular Chinese restaurant, one of the first big London eateries to do expensive takeaway deliveries around town. By now, Rosemary is nudging me towards the nightclub owner, for reasons only known to her.

  ‘He really likes you,’ she told me excitedly after the first date. ‘Ahmet rang me at work today and told me. He wants you to come out to Turkey for a holiday as his guest. It’ll all be above board. He’ll pay your fare and everything. You’ll stay at the best hotel at Istanbul. As long as you want. If you like, he’ll take you shopping, buy you new clothes.’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ I snap and it’s the truth. Beyond the Brut and the expensive meals, I detect a whiff of… something extremely dodgy. The words ‘white slave trade’ flash up in big letters in my head. Ahmet had become very pally on the second date, but in a sneaky way. Whenever Rosemary would disappear to the loo, he’d start chatting me up furiously, knowing his friend couldn’t understand a word. ‘Where you work?’ he demands. ‘I pick you up from your office one day after Huseyin goes back.’ No, I assure him, I prefer to come home straight after work. No need to visit my office.

  After one more night out as a foursome, th
is time to a big London Steak House in Kensington High Street, Huseyin leaves town. He says goodbye with a big smile, burbling in Turkish to Ahmet, who translates. ‘He says he hopes very much that you will come to Istanbul as his guest,’ he tells me. ‘He says you are a beautiful lady and he would be proud to show you his city.’ It all sounds like bullshit to me. What’s that saying about a rubbish deal? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Later, as we settle into our creaky single beds, I tell Rosemary exactly what I think.

  ‘It’s so obvious. Get an English girl there, promise her the moon – and then what? Lock you up in a flat and send their mates round? They must think I’m daft if they believe I’d go there.’

  ‘Oh, no, Jacky. They mean it, they’re perfect gentlemen,’ my flatmate assures me. ‘Mehmet knows them very well. You wouldn’t be in any danger if you went there. He just wanted them to see me, make sure I’m OK – and not doing anything.’ There she goes again, pretending to be swinging London’s last remaining virgin. I’m snoring my head off within minutes. I can no longer trust a single word she says and I’m quite capable of making my own decisions anyway. My instincts are sound.

  Yet just a couple of weeks later, when I get an unexpected phone call at work from Ahmet, asking if I’ll see him on Saturday night, I make a huge blunder. I go. There’s still a big Jeff-sized gap in my life and it’s one of Rosemary’s weekends in Guildford. He drives me – in his very racy cream-coloured Alfa Romeo – to a beautiful restaurant on the Thames, quite a long way out of London. He talks endlessly of Istanbul, how beautiful it is, how warm, how so many young women like me go there, love it. He’s planning to drive there soon. It would take a few days but it would be a lovely holiday. Come with me, he says beguilingly over the rum baba I’m greedily forking for my dessert.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t. I’ve had my holiday this year.’ He seems to accept this but then, on the drive back, he silkily suggests we stop off at a nearby waterside hotel for the night. ‘No, thanks,’ I tell him. I have not, for some reason, seen this coming, focusing only on the event itself. I don’t perceive myself as an acquisitive woman, but nevertheless I have the expectation that it is my right to be wined and dined by any prospective suitor, regardless if I fancy them or not.

  ‘Why?’ he wants to know. ‘You look like you like me: I can tell.’

  ‘Oh, I like you but I’ve got a boyfriend,’ I inform him smugly.

  He ignores this. He isn’t going to give up that easily. ‘It’s Rosemary. You don’t want her to know you like me. You think she like me, don’t you?’

  Oh, God. Will he just shut it? Finally, we’re in St John’s Wood. Merciful escape ahead. As he pulls the car up outside the flat, an irrational, stupid impulse takes over. I dive into my handbag. ‘Look,’ I tell him, producing a crumpled Polaroid of Jeff I’ve kept there for some reason. I shove it right under his nose. This’ll get the message through. ‘This is my boyfriend. I sleep with him, no one else.’

  Big, big blunder. Red rag to a bull. He flicks the photo away and I dive to retrieve it.

  ‘Hah! Your boyfriend! I fuck him, the Englishman!’ I’m not quite expecting the idea of him fucking my fast-disappearing Brit bloke. It’s a disturbing image.

  Shocked, I reach for the handle of the car door. But he’s faster than me. Ahmet grabs me, tries to force me into a kiss, and while I manage to wriggle away, avert my head in the confined space, there’s a nasty, short, feverish tussle. Heaven knows how I do it but I somehow release the door handle and with one final, angry gesture as I leave the car, he reaches out, grabs my hair, tugs – and oh, the shame – the perilously constructed edifice that is my big blonde hairdo falls apart. The hairpiece flies off. I stumble out, dishevelled and humiliated, into the night, onto the pavement, my false hairpiece now lying in disgrace near my front door. Goodbye, blondie. Hello, dirty brown roots. As a lucky afterthought, he leans forward, chucks my precious quilted Chanel bag into the gutter – and screeches off with all speed.

  It’s horrible. He hasn’t hurt me. And it could have been so much worse had we not been in a parked car outside my flat. I’m pretty sure he could have tried to rape me. But the humiliation, the dislodgement of my hairpiece, lying there on the pavement like an abandoned kipper, are quite enough. And the comment about fucking an Englishman has rattled me no end. I’ve known about homosexuality since I was a kid. My dad would always take the piss out of the male dancers on the telly. ‘Ooh, look at the nancy boys,’ he’d say in affected mimicry, so typical of the prejudices of his era and his background. But at this point, I had never considered the idea that a man who’d invite me into bed would also think about bedding a man. Bisexuality was not a word you heard openly bandied around then. I totter upstairs, collapse on my bed. What were these guys like?

  The next morning, the phone rings at 7 am, waking me through the paper-thin partition wall. I don’t pick up. It’s Ahmet. He leaves a message. He’s really sorry, he shouldn’t have done that. ‘Please forgive me, Jacky,’ he’s saying. ‘I didn’t mean any harm.’

  Oh really? Then, it starts to sink in. Now, I start to get it – well, some of it. The ‘fuck the Englishman’ is still fresh in my mind. I figure he was trying to keep me sweet – perhaps by sleeping with me as a softening-up ploy? – for the other guy, the nightclub boss. Essentially, he’s a pimp, a procurer. It was clear there was some sort of financial relationship between the two men. I’d already noticed that he acted more like a gofer around him than a friend. And nightclub man Huseyin had paid for everything with noticeably thick wads of cash. Now, of course, Ahmet’s blown it. No nooky for him but much worse, no Jacky for nightclub man either.

  That Sunday I stay at home, only running out across the road briefly to Panzer to buy Nimble bread (‘slice for slice, fewer calories than ordinary bread’) and Italian salami Milano (an odd breakfast but one which sustains me through many years of hangovers). The phone rings continuously every hour, on the hour. But there are no more messages. And Rosemary doesn’t return that night: she’s obviously going straight to work from Surrey on Monday morning.

  At work I’m off-kilter, my equilibrium shaken by all the things that have been running through my mind and the realisation that I don’t always know the score with men. My boss is off at some big sporting event, the level of complaints has temporarily tailed off so I’m more or less left to my own devices. What was I doing? Why was I pretending to myself that Jeff was my boyfriend when I hardly saw him, never knew what he was up to? And then I do something I should have done months ago: I dial Jeff’s office number and instead of merely mumbling my thanks when told he’s not there, I scream at the smug girl answering the phone: ‘You tell Jeff to bloody ring me – or I’m coming down there!’ I know where the office is. It’s in Kilburn. Ages ago, I got the address, sneaking one of Jeff’s business cards from his wallet and writing it down when he was sleeping on the boat.

  Lunch time. No call comes through. Action. I hail a black cab outside the office and head for Kilburn. Then, from a red call box, I ring Jeff’s office again. This time, he picks up. He’s expecting something like this. OK, he says somewhat soberly, meet me in the car park at the back of the office building. And there, in the office car park, Jeff, immaculate in his smart grey suit from Cue, stands there and reveals the truth. All of it. He’s lived, on and off, with a widow in Pinner in her semi for several years. They go back a long way. She was the best friend of a girl he’d got into trouble when he was much younger. He still went up to see the boy in Scotland every year, but there was no relationship with the boy’s mum. It had started to go wrong with Mrs Pinner long before he met me. But whenever he said he wanted to leave, she’d gone potty, so he’d hung on. And then… well, he loved me. I knew that, didn’t I? But once he’d started the new company, he’d fallen hard for his secretary, Maureen (the smug girl taking my calls). And now he’d left Pinner and moved in with Maureen. Into her flat.

  Yes, he was truly sorry. He should have done something
about it before. But he had too much going on, what with work and the sailing. ‘Anyway, Jack, you’ve still got it all going for you, haven’t you? You’ve got a great job, a flat – and you’re gorgeous, anyway!’

  Typical Jeff. Brush aside all negatives. Flatter like crazy. The reality was: work alongside randy, raunchy Jeff and you had his attention and his body. Later I discovered from one of his other conquests that I was far from the only girl in the office that he’d shagged. What narked me was that smug Maureen had somehow got him to move on. But in truth, I’d never tried or aimed for that, had I? I’d just gone along for the ride.

  I am quite stunned at this betrayal. Back in my cubbyhole at work, my typewriter littered with scribbled notes to ring angry customers, I try my best to analyse it all. I hadn’t been faithful, had I? So what did I expect? I could see he was a bit of a lecher when I met him. Yet I allowed myself to be seduced by – an experienced seducer. There was no logic to any of it. Perhaps I’d clung to the idea of the relationship rather than the reality for too long. Until the penny dropped.

  Isn’t it funny how in life, if one thing goes badly wrong, there’s sure to be another disaster hot on its heels? That same night, I get back to the flat to find a somewhat puzzled Rosemary. An enormous bouquet of red roses has been delivered that afternoon, left on our doorstep, addressed to me. The card attached says: ‘Sorry, Jacky. Let me make it up to you, love and kisses, Ahmet.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Rosemary wants to know. I can see by her expression she’s really narked that he’s sent them to me – not her. The ego of this woman, her duplicity and delight at winding men up: it’s just too much for me. I don’t bother to fill her in on the story of the hairpiece and the tussle. Probably because of my distress about Jeff, all my anger and frustration flies out, in a torrent of abuse. I let rip. Completely. Mine own executioner, really… what the fuck is she doing, pairing me off with those tossers? Anyone can see what they were doing, trying to get me to Istanbul, so they can do God knows what. And what’s all this crap about being faithful to Mehmet when she’s having it off with Mr Thumb-less? Does she think I’m stupid?