‘I know it’s absurd to fall in love with a prostitute. It’s a thankless task. It’s madness. There’s no possible joy in it. The woman you love sells herself to other men. She will tell you that she’s only selling her body, but you know it’s more complex than that. It really isn’t possible for anyone to constantly have sex with unknown men, day after day, night after night, in hotel rooms, in rented flats, in the backs of cars, without losing something vital. I don’t know what you’d call that something, but sooner or later it just disappears. It trickles away.
‘I got angry with her sometimes but I never tried to change her, never tried to make her stop. There were times when I’d want to hurt someone, her or her clients. But I never did. I just kept on making shoes for her to be fucked in, and the only one who got hurt was me.’
‘How did Ruth die?’ I asked. I feared the worst: suicide or drugs or Aids, something lurid and dramatic.
‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘Banal, yes?’
‘No, not banal,’ I said.
‘She was the only person in the world I ever needed, the only person who ever needed me.’
‘Hey, Harold,’ I said. ‘Catherine and I need you. We need you to carry on making shoes.’
It was supposed to be something of a joke, an attempt to make him feel needed without sounding too sentimental, and maybe it worked.
‘Just before you arrived that first day,’ he said, ‘I was seriously contemplating suicide. I still think about it. It feels like a real option. But you came into the shop, asked about the shoes, and I thought possibly, just possibly, there might be some point carrying on. And possibly, just possibly there is. So long as I can carry on making shoes, practising my art, having someone like Catherine to wear them, then maybe …’
I tried to make light of what he was saying. I’d never wanted to be beholden to Harold Wilmer in the first place; now it looked as though he was trying to make me responsible for whether he lived or died.
Nevertheless, I found myself saying, ‘Hey, Harold, you can’t commit suicide until you’ve made Catherine at least another hundred pairs of shoes.’
Harold gave a wispy, resilient little smile and told me to come back in a week with Catherine when he’d have a brand new pair of shoes to show us.
Eleven
There have been times in my life when I’ve thought of becoming professionally involved with women’s feet. I’ve wondered what it might be like to be a chiropodist, a reflexologist, even, conceivably, a pedicurist.
But chiropody would have been no good because it involves looking at feet that have something wrong with them. There might be some satisfaction in improving them, in making them healthy again, but the daily grind of foot imperfections would have been intolerable.
Reflexology might have been better in that you would encounter a cross-section of feet, and some of these would no doubt be very attractive. But my observations tell me that the percentage of attractive feet in the world is remarkably small, and you’d still have to spend a lot of time feeling the pressure points on a lot of mundane, not to say downright ugly, feet.
A shoe-shop job would certainly have been appealing, especially if you were working in a place that sold really exotic footwear to really glamorous women. But the main problem there (apart from the obvious one that shoe-shop assistants obviously earn a pittance) was that I might like the job too much for my own good. Put me in a situation where I’m crouched on the floor with some gorgeous foot, helping its owner try on some beautiful creation in wonderful, soft red leather with black silk ankle straps and, frankly, I don’t know that I could keep up my professional manner.
All the above problems would apply to being a pedicurist and, besides, I think that most women are sufficiently aware of the intimate and sensual nature of the foot not to be all that keen to have some strange man fiddling around with their toes.
I’m sure that being a shoe designer, or even the right sort of shoemaker, would have fulfilled a lot of my needs. But I never had any talent for it. I’m a connoisseur not a creator, a willing member of the audience, but not a provider of the entertainment.
So I did what I did, this responsible but dull job I’ve spoken of. I was a manager, I suppose, a financial manager. There were people around me, of more or less equal status, who called themselves planners and analysts. Some called themselves executives. But if anybody outside of work ever asked me what I did for a living, I’d say I worked in an office. That was as much information as anybody needed, and certainly as much as I wanted to give.
I worked with a certain number of women. Some of them were attractive and some of them occasionally (very occasionally) wore FMs. I looked but I didn’t touch. I was appreciative but I kept it to myself. I wasn’t sure what the consequences would have been of having my colleagues know that I was a foot and shoe fetishist, but I didn’t want to find out.
There’s a story in Ali MacGraw’s autobiography about when she goes to model for Salvador Dali. She walks into his suite at the St Regis Hotel. She’s wearing a fake Chanel suit and flattened pearl ear-rings. The room’s full of strange ill-matched Spanish furniture, and Mozart is playing on a tiny transistor radio.
Immediately he asks her to take off all her clothes. She’s reluctant, a little scared, but she is a model after all. Dali is a major artist, she would certainly like to be immortalized, and even if the old guy is up to no good she reckons she’s young enough and strong enough to fight him off. She strips as requested.
He tells her to sit at one of the tables and he takes his place opposite her. She sits down on a wrought-iron chair, adopts a pose, shoulders back, head up. The metal strips of the chair press into her body. She is very uncomfortable. Dali stares hard at her. Well, yes, that’s all right, that’s what artists are supposed to do. He picks up a stick of charcoal, rolls it between his fingers and immediately drops it at her feet. She moves as though to pick it up. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t move. Hold the pose.’
She does as he tells her. He bends down to pick up the charcoal, goes on all fours, starts crawling around under the table. Poor old devil, she thinks. Then she becomes aware that something very strange is happening. At floor level, under the table where she can’t see, Salvador Dali, the great artist, is breathing a little heavily, is making a slurping noise, and is methodically sucking each of her toes in turn.
You see, if I’d been an artist it might all have been all right. Strange fetishistic stuff is fine if you’re a genius. It’s regarded as par for the course. And there are probably quite a few jobs, arty, trendy, creative, media-type jobs where nobody would bat an eyelid, where a fetish would be regarded as desirable and interesting; but I was never in one of those jobs and I never really wanted to be. Frankly, I was always glad to have a few secrets that I kept from the people I worked with, to have something that was uniquely and covertly mine.
Twelve
It is a short step from being a student of one’s own life to being its curator; hence my archive. I feel ready to talk about my archive now. Fetishists, I understand, tend to be great accumulators, great keepers of files and samples, photographs and cuttings, and I was no exception. My archive was large and impressive and I did from time to time feel the urge to share it with someone. I can’t think of any circumstances in which I’d have brought a man to look at it. It was the sort of place I’d only bring a woman, and even then only the right sort of woman, someone like Catherine, although I knew there was nobody exactly like her.
Let’s imagine you were such a woman. Let’s imagine I had invited you to my house to see my archive. How would it be? It would be much like this. We would go by taxi to the small terraced house in West London where I live. We would enter the hall and I would probably invite you into the living room and offer you a drink. At first all you’d see would be a bachelor’s place, a moderately expensive hi-fi, a cheap colour TV, a few items of chrome and leather furniture that some people would probably consider a bit naff and dated. It would not look like the obvious place for a collection of sexual exotica. It would seem far too mundane and ordinary. You might notice the Allen Jones print on the wall and that would be a clue, but even so it would all seem surprisingly homely. You would be reassured or disappointed depending on your disposition. (Catherine, when I finally persuaded her to come to my house, was taut with nervousness.) I wouldn’t try to force you into anything. Only after a drink or two, and only if you were still sure you wanted to press on, would I invite you down to the cellar where the archive was kept.