Baubles
By Patrick Cash

I spent a few years after graduation listlessly drifting through the office temp world, before landing an assistant producer role at a theatre in Islington. Phil was playing Mercutio in an up-and-coming director’s reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, with Lady Gaga songs interspersed into the Shakespearean verse. I was smitten by his quiff of dark red hair, smattering of freckles and evident commitment to the gym. 

At the press night party, I made moon eyes at him from across the room, while we sipped on lukewarm white wine. I assumed he’d be another one of those boys I never quite dared to cross the sacred threshold of conversation with. I was coming out of the disabled toilet when I found Phil next in line. I only managed to say a flustered ‘are you having a good night?’ before he pushed me back in, followed me, and locked the door. 

The affair was inordinately exciting throughout the run, stealing kisses backstage, and after, it evolved into my first long-term relationship. Phil introduced me to his family in Liverpool and took me to the football – he bought me a scarf from a merchandise stall outside the stadium and wrapped it around my neck. ‘Proper red now, Sammy boy,’ he said. I brought him down to meet my mother in Hastings and her two corgis, Peanut and Butter. We walked them along the bracing spray and mostly closed shops of the seafront, and when he took my hand I felt an almost illicit thrill. 

Phil scored an advert for BT and my fixed-term contract was made permanent, so that summer we rented a shoebox flat above a kebab shop. I bought flowers and candles to make it homely, cooking in the tiny kitchen for when Phil got home from filming. I’d never really been happier until, six months into our tenancy, the landlord requested a 35% increase in the rent. 

We staged a protest by printing out posters – NO FAULT EVICTION – and sticking them in the windows when prospective tenants were shown round. But the flat still went to a woman in Dolce & Gabbana who, we overheard, wanted her son to have an authentic student lifestyle. In late November, with three weeks to go before eviction, we’d still not found anything affordable on Rightmove and it was looking likely we’d have to go back to our respective families. 

At the theatre’s annual fundraising dinner, we’d been seated either side of a gentleman named Clive. He was poker thin, probably in his seventies, with a nut brown perma-tan and extraordinarily vibrant blonde hair. He told us over the salmon caviare starter that he’d worked his entire career as a property lawyer, climbing the greasy pole to become a partner in a city firm. His hair had originally been a mere dreary brown, before draining to grey, and since retirement he’d made a liberating visit to the salon, as someone had once told him that blondes had more fun. 

During the lamb cutlets, Phil explained our current renting predicament. Clive speared a lump of tender pink flesh and exclaimed,

‘But darlings, you must come and live with me.’

We discussed his offer very seriously when we got back. I thought that Clive was exactly the sort of person who was prone to making champagne-drunk overly generous promises. But Phil put his hands on my shoulders and said,

‘We could stay together.’

We agreed to at least send a followup email. Clive replied almost instantly and instructed us to come to an early Christmas lunch at an address on Richmond Avenue. In brackets he wrote (where Tony Blair was born). 

The terraced Islington townhouse had twin black sphinxes guarding its porch. Clive opened the door wearing a striped chef’s apron, his tall figure almost touching the lintel. He put the bottle of red we’d agonised over in Sainsbury’s tactfully to one side – ‘to be savoured at a later date’ – and led us through to a warm russet-walled kitchen, full of festive decorations and the scents of roast cooking.

‘Now,’ said Clive. ‘Champagne, wine or gin?’

He overruled our polite request for wine, saying he’d just opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon. As we were sipping our flutes, he showed us the baubles on his Christmas tree. He collected one in each city he visited: ‘Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York…’ After listening attentively to the list, Phil suggested we should see the room. 

‘Oh yes,’ said Clive, as if he’d quite forgotten about the room. ‘Third floor. The Queen’s room. And of course,’ he said, wagging his finger at us as if we were naughty schoolboys, ‘don’t you even dream of paying me any rent.’

There was a framed picture of Liza Minnelli in Cabaret on the first landing. We climbed the immaculate white carpeted stairs, following the curved mahogany banister – all of the windows facing the street had their blinds closed, as if the house was hiding itself. Through one half-open door I glimpsed a solarium. The Queen’s room boasted a kingsize bed and an ensuite. Next to the balcony door stood a life-size cardboard cutout of Liza Minnelli from the 1972 TV special, Liza with a Z. 

Phil opened the door and we went out into the cold air, to look over Barnard Park, and beyond to the scrapers of the City. 

‘What do you think?’ he asked. 

‘Nothing comes for free.’

‘But he doesn’t want any rent.’ He looked so excited. ‘Can you imagine how much we’d save, Sammy? I’ll get a couple of ads, you’ll produce a hit show. We could get a deposit for our own place. We could become real people.’

I gazed into his eyes and let the vision fleetingly into my own mind. I heard a knocking sound and turned to see the breeze banging Liza gently against the wall. It looked for all the world like she was nodding.

*

We moved in our belongings before Christmas but our tenancy, so to speak, didn’t start in earnest until January. Clive assigned me the first floor dining room for my work-from-home days, where the walls were painted peach and covered with elegant draughtsman sketches of male nudes. I found a Zoom angle that didn’t include a muscular buttock in the background, and I’d just finished my first production call of the day, when Clive came in and asked if I’d like a glass of champagne. 

I looked at the time, which was just past eleven, and said, ‘maybe later?’

He seemed vaguely disappointed. 

‘Well, if you change you mind…’

‘I’ll let you know,’ I said, nodding enthusiastically. 

I usually got up before Phil, and in the second week I was juicing oranges in the kitchen while Clive was poring over the morning papers. It was only when he stood up that I noticed he wasn’t wearing any trousers beneath his pink shirt. 

‘I hope you don’t mind my négligée, darling,’ he said. 

‘Of course not,’ I said, carefully not looking where he was gesturing. ‘It’s your house.’

‘I just like to be free and breezy,’ he said, coming to stand closer. He rather loomed over me. I laughed and concentrated on the juicer. 

‘Turn that way again, darling,’ he said. 

‘What way?’

‘The light just caught your face in this beautiful chiaroscuro.’ 

Clive made a square box in the air with his hands and squinted at me through it. I glanced back at him nervously, my hand still full of pulp on the juicer, until he was distracted by the chorus to Liza’s Mein Herr blaring through the house. He said it was an urgent business call but, from what I could hear down the corridor, it mostly seemed to involve ordering wine deliveries. 

Around 11am, Clive came into the dining room with a sketch pad and a small sherry, and announced he was going to paint me. ‘Just pretend I’m not here, darling,’ he said, settling into the chair opposite me. ‘If I could have my life again, I’d devote it to art,’ he said, before appearing to reflect on this position. ‘But then I wouldn’t have this £5 million house.’ He made a slight moue. ‘You win some, you lose some.’

It was quite embarrassing having somebody listen to my work. The theatre had recently lost funding and, in desperation, the Artistic Director had decided to appeal cynically to the pink pound by programming a hastily conceptualised summer show named Hunks in Trunks – with no particular plot to speak of, and featuring tightly clad six-packed actors dancing to contemporary pop songs. Clive adored the sound of it and said he was going to book front row tickets.

In our room that evening, I told Phil about Clive wanting to paint me. He had an upcoming audition for Edgar in King Lear at a West End theatre that could be his big break, and he was practising his speech. 

‘Well,’ he said, putting down his script and climbing on the bed with me. ‘I’d paint you too, if I had the chance.’

I put my hand behind his neck and drew him closer. 

‘How would you paint me?’

Clive had a personal hairdresser named Giovanni who came every month to do his roots and treated us with an icy coolness. On the mornings Clive decided to sketch me I genuinely did sometimes forget he was there. He became quite wrapped up in the progress of Hunks and offered acidic opinions on the lead producer who he thought, from listening to our Zoom calls, was a nasty piece of work. He offered to ‘pull some strings’ on the various arts boards he sat on and get her sacked – he drew his index finger dramatically across his throat – but I said I didn’t think that’d be necessary. 

We drank an enormous amount with him in the evenings. I once woke up in the night with acid reflux from the champagne and thought someone was in the room, only to realise it was just Liza Minnelli. Clive told us about his early life, how his father had taken silk as a Queen’s Counsel, and growing up he’d find him weeping in the kitchen. Whenever Phil mentioned acting, Clive rambled on how he’d played a ‘famously waspish’ Caliban in his Cambridge college production of The Tempest. Occasionally – particularly after the King Lear disappointment – Phil went silent following this story and then abruptly left the room. I just hoped Clive was too foggy with drink to notice. 

Phil was cast as a giant chicken in an advert for Nationwide and was away filming for Pride. I came back after midnight, flushed from dancing with friends in the warm June rain, an Alice band in my hair, and heard Maybe This Time playing in the kitchen. I went into the room, where Clive was sitting at the table with an open bottle of champagne. He looked up and smiled vaguely. 

‘Drink, darling?’

I sat down at the table and accepted a glass. Maybe This Time finished and immediately restarted itself. Clive was telling me about once playing Caliban again, when he mentioned that he’d been lovers with Prospero. 

‘Everyone adored Robin,’ he said, staring at our reflections on the dark kitchen window as if he’d travelled back to where that college play lived in his mind. ‘But last I heard he married a Russian heiress.’

‘It’s never too late,’ I said. 

Clive looked at me gravely. 

‘Would you date me?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’m with Phil.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes.’

Clive seemed to contemplate this answer, then said, ‘you know darling, I’ve been thinking about our painting.’ I wasn’t sure when the painting had become a collective effort. ‘It’s very hard to get the anatomy right.’ He gestured at the vest I was wearing. ‘Do you think tomorrow you might pose for an hour with your top off?’ I stared at him and he raised his hands, waggling the fingers. ‘No funny business.’

Clive had converted a spare bedroom on the first floor into a studio, and I went down there in the late morning. As I unbuttoned my shirt, I looked at the mysterious white sheet covering the large canvas on its easel. Clive spent some time adjusting my pose so that I best caught the morning light. 

‘You are a spry little thing,’ he said. 

About half an hour into the session, Clive asked if I might remove my jeans. ‘Oh no, that’s not on the cards, Clive,’ I said. 

‘But it’s a nude, darling.’

‘Well you’ll have to – use your imagination.’

‘You will of course be paid,’ he said. ‘£500?’

I looked at him. 

‘No,’ he said. ‘£1000.’

I thought how this sum would bolster our savings account. 

‘Only the buttocks,’ I said. 

Clive shrugged. 

I took my jeans, boxers and socks off, and kept my hands cupped over my penis and balls, as I lay face down on the rococo chaise longue. ‘Perfect,’ I heard Clive say from across the room. I was still hungover from the night before, and I must have dozed off listening to his pencil busily scratching at the pad. I woke up to raised voices outside the room. ‘Why is he naked?’ Phil was saying. 

I pulled on my clothes and hurried out onto the landing. Clive seemed quite unflappable, even steely, in the face of Phil’s wrath and I saw the hard property lawyer in his past. ‘Art needs what art needs,’ he said, waving his pencil. 

I intervened and took Phil upstairs to our room, where I explained that it’d been my choice. His anger faded to a wide-eyed hurt. 

‘I should be the only who sees you naked,’ he said. 

When I came down later, Clive approached me conspiratorially in the hallway. ‘I hope I didn’t get his knickers in a twist, darling,’ he said, with a slight grin of triumph. He pushed a rolled-up bundle of banknotes into my jeans pocket – ‘for your troubles’ – and winked as if we were now joined in some scandalous joke. 

It was in late June that I was offered an interview for a producer role at the National. I half-wondered if Clive had had a word in somebody’s ear. I spent days prepping in our room and Phil gave me a rather stern mock interview. They wanted to do the first round over Zoom, so I settled myself in good time in the living room, running over speculative answers in my head. The three people on the panel seemed lovely and we spent a bit of time chit-chatting to put me at ease. I was halfway through my first answer and thinking ‘oh my god, this is actually going well’ when I was interrupted by Liza Minnelli singing the chorus to Mein Herr. Clive had left his phone in the dining room. I competed with Liza, raising my voice as she sung louder and faster, when the door swung open and Clive entered in his négligée, holding a half-drunk glass of champagne. I was frantically trying to blur my background as he came into full view of the screen, stopping to answer the phone with an elated cry of ‘Geoffrey!’

After the interview, I sat with my head in my hands. I would never become a real person. I left the dining room, and heard Clive call ‘Samuel!’ from the studio. I went into the room, and he declared that his magnum opus was finally completed. He pulled the sheet away from the easel with a showman flourish and I gazed at a giant eagle holding a naked youth – bearing a passing resemblance to myself – in its talons. It seemed like a lot of brush strokes had gone into the buttocks. 

‘Do you know the myth of Ganymede?’ asked Clive, standing close. 

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. 

‘Terribly erotic. I’ve opened a bottle of Dom P. to celebrate. I know it’s not twelve yet, but –’ he put a finger to his lips ‘– I won’t tell anybody.’

I stared at the outstretched glass of champagne, muttered a curt excuse, and left the house. I walked the grand old leafy streets of Islington until I’d calmed down. 

*

It appeared the one line we couldn’t cross was to criticise Clive’s artwork, and the atmosphere went rather downhill after the great unveiling. He grunted in response to my questions in the mornings and theatrically left the room when I started juicing oranges. His diary suddenly filled up with evening social engagements. We knew we were on borrowed time and weren’t surprised when we were called into the kitchen one July lunchtime to discuss our living arrangement. Giovanni had been round that day to touch up Clive’s roots and his hair was in little bunches of tin foil. He had a bottle of champagne open and pointedly didn’t offer either of us a glass. 

‘I’m going on holiday,’ he said, topping up his flute. ‘My baubles are calling me. A fresh one is needed.’

He began talking about the baubles he’d collected, and Phil interrupted him to ask, 

‘Clive, what did you want to say about our living situation?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a wonderful innings, boys. But I think when I get back we should have all moved on.’

We scoured the renting websites and, with the money we’d saved, we could afford the deposit and two months’ down payment for a houseshare room in Streatham. We looked sadly at the huge dent it had made in our savings account when we transferred. Phil and I sat on our bags below the two black sphinxes outside Clive’s house, surrounded by cardboard boxes, waiting for the hired van. 

‘Will we ever have our own home,’ I said. 

Phil put his arm around me. 

‘You’re my home.’

To everyone’s surprise, not least my own, Hunks in Trunks sold out its run that summer and we obtained funding for a national tour, arguing that it was pivotal viewing for underserved LGBTQIA+ communities. I hesitantly suggested to Phil that he might want to audition. ‘Well, it’s not exactly Shakespeare,’ he said, when he clinched the role of Dancer 5. ‘But it’s a job.’

We didn’t return to London until Christmas, when an invitation dropped into both our inboxes from Clive to come for Sunday lunch. I feared that my nude might be on display in the entrance hall, but I fortunately couldn’t spot any sign of it. Clive seemed to be in high spirits and the champagne was generously flowing again. He showed us the new bauble he’d picked up in Kuala Lumpur, and as it swung and glittered in the light, I heard another set of footsteps coming down the stairs. 

‘Oh darlings,’ said Clive, hanging the ball back on the tree. ‘I must introduce you to my younger model.’