I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 20 in the series.
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Esther Freud wrote a novel with the fabulous title Hideous Kinky. Published in 1992, it was sort of about her own life growing up in Morocco and later turned into a film. I learned this – it passed me by at the time – after reading her short story Bodyguards, which appears in Time Out London Stories Volume 2, published in 2000.
I also learned that Freud is a daughter of painter Lucien Freud (she would be, hissed the pleb devil on my shoulder) and a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud (ditto) and it goes on. I liked her more, though, after reading that her early acting career included bit parts in The Bill and Doctor Who.
The Bodyguards is my selection from the Time Out collection, partly because there haven’t been enough women in this dodgy London Fiction series, partly because Freud was among the roughly 50 per cent of its contributors I haven’t known, met or tried to avoid at some point in my life, and partly because, well, it was my favourite of the female-authored efforts.
It’s only seven pages long and draws you quickly and cleverly into the sliver of London life inhabited by Freud’s main character, Kate, and Lizzie, her friend in need of escape from a boyfriend with an axe.
“Kate lived alone in Belgravia at the far end of a narrow, cobbled mews. It was a tiny flat above a garage, where her father had lived before moving to Hong Kong. The flat looked dazzling when you first went in, all buttermilk and white, but as soon as you sat down on the ruined sofa and felt the icy breeze through the patio doors you realised that the thin matt paint was an illusion and underneath everything was dilapidated and damp.”
The know the sort of mews, you might have even wandered down one, but you’ve never been inside one of the flats – until now. Next door lives a chauffeur who looks after a Rolls Royce but hardly ever gets to drive it. Then there’s a place that belongs to the Crown Prince of Kuwait, though he is never there – only his bodyguards, who give Freud’s story its title and take an unwelcome chatty interest in Kate and her life.
Kate is the throes of a break-up with a boyfriend called Edward, who had taken her to Covent Garden and the at-risk Electric Cinema and then gone off her. She is concerned for Lizzie, but also “glad to feel sorry for someone else for a change”. Lizzie was “all powdery and soft” in her distress. The intimacy between the women extends to Kate normally chatting with Lizzie when letting her use her bath and even sharing her bed with her, though both “tried to hold themselves from falling towards each other” when together between the sheets. And Kate doesn’t reveal to Lizzie that Edward has dumped her.
Their feelings about different parts of London are defined by past experiences in them, specifically bad experiences with men. These rule out going to Kilburn, Kentish Town and Chelsea, though Kate can’t keep away from Vauxhall, where Edward lives, and, after all, a friend of hers is at Camberwell School of Art.
As she pines and pretends, Lizzie does her own pretending, while, unlike her host, also quite fancying taking up an invitation from one of the bodyguards to go out for a drink.
Kate buys food in Soho to cook for Lizzie, but when she gets home, Lizzie has gone out. Kate goes to Brick Lane and feels foolish for getting there too early. The story skilfully shows the contrasts and the tensions between the two women and the social landscape of the London they inhabit. And all in round about 3,000 words.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.