Free Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant Page A

please—but look how it’s ended!—and she, happy, I-know-what-age-I-am Molly, will show who’s the best one here by enjoying summer nights walking barefoot to her flat in the next street (and probably, not to put too fine a point on it, also turning down a drunken Howie last night). Molly has the advantage of having been wanted and having refused, whereas I—well we don’t need to go into that.
    â€˜You know’, Molly pursues her point. It’s obvious I’m depressed and low in self-esteem and this is justthe moment to rub in my minimal knowledge of Henry James. I nod, looking blank and mutter something about Helena Bonham Carter in the film—at the time, as it comes back to me, I’d thought the rich heiress should have been murdered for being so genteel, unable to declare her feelings: why should we all wait for her to die of TB?
    â€˜You see, Kate Croy was a new type of young woman.’ Molly sits forward, eyes shining. Abstinence has made her hair grow blonder, I think nastily, and then wonder if she dyed it when Howie stumbled into W9.
    â€˜What was new about Kate Croy?’ I say. ‘She just wanted to get married, didn’t she? And she wanted to be rich. What’s new about that?’
    â€˜She wanted desperately to get away from her deadly Edwardian aunt’s control’, enthused Molly. ‘She wanted to marry Merton Densher, who edited a radical newspaper …’
    All this is coming back to Old Leftie Howie again. ‘Where does this become like what’s happened to me?’ I snap.
    â€˜Because when the American heiress Milly Theale turns up’, Molly spells out, ‘Kate grabs her opportunity. Like a modern girl might. She’ll engineer a way to get the American’s money.’
    â€˜And who’s playing the part of Milly Theale?’ I enquired. (I loathe and detest the Creative Writing lectures Molly gives.) ‘Why the hell should I be interested in
The Wings of the Dove?
What can it have to do with me?’
    â€˜You’re Milly Theale’, my editor friend pounces. Now, as if overcome by a modest self-satisfaction at her superior knowledge of The Master, she reaches for the sandals and slips blotched and swollen feet into them. Then, unable to resist, she glances at me to gauge my reaction.
    â€˜Milly Theale? Me?’ I’ve fallen into a trap I know, but what on earth is Molly on about?
    Me, Scarlett, ex-wife of a man so poor that my ‘pay-out’ from the divorce consisted of half the mortgage payments on the horrible Hammersmith flat we had miserably shared. In order to avoid my having to fork out, the flat was sold, the mortgage paid off, and precisely zero funds remained.
    Me an heiress. You must be joking.
    Then I remembered. I’m worth (on paper, as Stefan Mocny would inevitably term it) no less than three-quarters of a million pounds—with the odd forty-nine thousand, nine hundred etc. etc. to play around with on top of the three quarter mill. To most inhabitants of the Third—and Second and agood few in the First—World I’m a bloody heiress. Now I’m growing a little more interested in how Kate Croy (raven-haired, scheming Helena Bonham Carter) cooked up a plan to get my fortune off me.
    â€˜Kate persuaded Merton Densher to go along with the infatuation Milly had for him’, Molly says. ‘She went on acting as a friend to the rich girl, and encouraged her to believe that Merton returned her love for him. The three of them went to Venice together.’
    â€˜Wicked’, say I. I’m enjoying myself now. ‘And did it work? Did the heiress give all her money to Merton Densher, just like that?’ (I couldn’t help thinking, I freely admit, that Henry James must have lost his marbles when he wrote this one. I mean, it all sounds too easy, doesn’t it?)
    â€˜She died’, Molly said, and her voice is so serious I can’t help