Free Confessions of a Sugar Mummy by Emma Tennant Page B

thinking these people who devote their lives to literature really do believe the characters they read about exist, don’t they?
    Something makes me uneasy and I can’t say what. I—as Milly Theale—am going to come badly out of this, that’s all I know.
    â€˜It worked’, Molly goes on in her sepulchral way. ‘She left all her money to Merton. He and Kate were free to marry …’
    â€˜And then something horrible happened to Kate I suppose’, I say as lightly as possible. I’ve been identifying with Kate all along and it’s been a shock to find I’m the daughter of a Chicago meat-packer, or whatever old Mr Theale must have been in order to enrich his daughter so splendidly. ‘Poor Kate gets a fatal illness next’, I hazard.
    â€˜No. It’s quite simple. She smells a rat—Merton is a bit funny, you know, not as affectionate as she had hoped.’ ‘So what does she do?’
    â€˜She tests him by accusing him of having fallen in love.’ ‘With Milly?’
    â€˜No. It’s more subtle than that. With the memory of Milly. And he can’t deny it.’
    To my horror I see Molly’s eyes have filled with tears. Even when replaying
Gone With The Wind
or working on the sequel with the now elderly author, I have never seen Molly cry.
    â€˜That’s terrible’, I say. ‘So you mean … if I’m the heiress and Alain is Merton Densher—and if I give him all my money he’ll fall for me in the end?’
    â€˜Alain and Claire made a plan together’, Molly says. ‘Alain would go to London to find somewhere or someone—anything to get them housed and more secure in the future—and you just happened to be in the right place at the right time.’
    â€˜So he plays along that he’s interested in me.
    â€˜Exactly’, says Molly, ‘and he may be, for all I know. But he and Claire will use you—just as Kate and Merton used Milly Theale.’
    â€˜So what do I have to do?’ I say, and I know Molly has won hands down on this one and I should have tried harder at Holland Park comp to read Henry James (but it was always
To Kill a Mocking Bird
that we were given. I can’t remember anything about that, either).
    â€˜You need to die’, Molly says. And then, as if we’ve actually become victims of that silly melodramatic plot, we laugh and laugh and Molly says she’s late for the office and I have to go to the laundrette—so, I must believe, life just has to go on.

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20
    As I’ve been reminded in the short space of time since suffering the excitement and subsequent disappointment of going out to dinner (Wow! An old colleague, Henrietta Shaw, remarked yesterday when asking me round for a Scrabble evening, only to be told—rather grandly I admit—that I had a dinner date already. ‘Wow’ was said sarcastically, but there was an unmistakable hint of envy there too) I’ve been made aware there are questions concerning Alain that urgently need to be answered. Particularly since he’s called this morning with all the promptitude of a well-bred chauffeur and asked what time he should come round in the car so we can set off for a viewing ofsuitable properties. Oh my God, what have I done? How much ‘equity’ does he think he’s getting—and does he even know what equity is? No wonder he’s ready to go: my stiff upper lip at his assertion that his wife would live in any property I bought has left him as unworried as can be. Not for the first time I curse my ‘good manners’ and the restraint imposed on me by some invisible martinet of a mother. (In fact, my own mother was calm and liked a good laugh and a huge gin before supper; where the hell does my good behaviour come from?)
    So, for potential Sugar Mummies (those without the self-abandon of, say, Gloria, who cries and