by William Boyd
Hogg settled a large haunch on the corner of his desk. ‘Are you an aficionado of television commercials, Lorimer?’
‘What? Ah, no.’
‘We make the world’s best television commercials in this country.’
‘Do we?’
‘At least we can be proud of something,’ Hogg said with some bitterness, swinging his leg. Lorimer saw that Hogg was wearing slim loafers, very un-naval, no more than slippers, really, which made his feet look small and delicate for such a burly, hefty man. Hogg noticed the direction of his gaze.
‘What the hell are you looking at?’
‘Nothing, Mr Hogg.’
‘You got anything against my shoes?’
‘Not at all.’
‘You shouldn’t stare at people’s feet like that, it’s damned insolent. The height of rudeness.’
‘Sorry, Mr Hogg.’
‘You still got your sleep problems?’
‘Yes, afraid so. I’m going to a sort of clinic, sleep disorder thing, see if I can get it analysed.’
Hogg walked him companionably to the door. ‘Take care of yourself, Lorimer.’ He smiled one of his rare smiles at him – it was as if he were trying out a recently learned facial gesture. ‘You’re an important, nay, a key member of GGH. We want you in tip-top condition. Tip-top, man, tip-top.’
257. Hogg rarely compliments you, and you know that when he does you accept it gracelessly suspiciously, as if you are being set up in some way, or as if a trap has started to spring
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer saw from his map that the hotel was just off the Embankment, just back from the river between Temple Lane and Arundel Street with, perhaps, an angled view of half the National Theatre on the far bank. According to the file it was a development of a property company called Gale-Harlequin PLC and was to be known, improbably, as the Fedora Palace. The building had been three-quarters completed when fire had broken out on the eighth and ninth floors late one night in what was to be the duplex gym and sauna facility. It quickly spread, completely destroying three other furnished and finished floors below with considerable collateral damage due to smoke and the thousands of gallons of water needed to extinguish it. The claim was in for £27 million. A structural engineer’s report indicated that it might be cheaper to demolish the building and start again. This was the new way with insurance: repayment in kind. You ‘lose’ your watch on holiday and make a claim – we give you a new watch, not money. Your hotel burns down and you call the company – why, we rebuild your hotel for you.
Lorimer decided to walk down to the river; it was still cold but there were shreds of lemony sunshine breaking through the ragged clouds that were being bustled westwards across the city by a stiffish breeze. He strode briskly down Beech Street rather enjoying the cold on his face, collar up, hands deep in his flannel-lined pockets. Should have a hat on, eighty per cent of heat lost through the head. What kind of hat, though, with a pin-striped suit and a covert coat? Not a brown trilby, look like he was going to the races. A bowler? He must ask Ivan, or Lady Haigh. Ivan would say a bowler, he knew. In summer you could wear a panama, or could you?
It was round about Smithfield Market that the sensation crept up on him, the strange feeling that he was being followed. It was like those times when you’re convinced someone has called your name, you say ‘Yes?’ and turn but no one steps forward. He sheltered in a shop doorway, looking back the way he came. Strangers hurried by – a girl jogger, a soldier, a beggar, a banker – and continued on their ways. But the sensation was undeniable, all the same: what alerts you? he wondered, what sets it off? A particular pattern of footstep, perhaps, persistently in your aural range, neither overtaking nor falling back. He moved out of his doorway and made for the Fedora Palace – there was no one following him. Fool. He smiled at himself – Hogg’s paranoia was infectious.
From the outside the hotel didn’t look too bad, just blurry soot scorches on the window embrasures up high, but when the site manager showed him round the scarred and blackened gymnasium space, the buckled and blistered floor, he had acknowledged the sheer efficiency of fire, the potency of its destructive force. He peered into the central service and lift shaft: it looked like a smart-bomb had swooped down and detonated itself. The heat had been so intense that the concrete cladding of the shaft had actually started to explode. And concrete is not normally noted for its percussive qualities,’ the manager observed soberly. It was worse on the burnt-out, completed floors: here the damage was recognizably domestic – charred beds, sodden, blackened shreds of carpet and curtain – and, somehow, more pathetically relevant and wasteful. Overlaying it all was the sour, lung-penetrating stink of damp soot and smoke.
‘Well,’ Lorimer said, feebly. ‘About as bad as it gets. When were you meant to open?’
‘Next month, or thereabouts,’ the site manager said cheerfully. He was not a worried man, it wasn’t his hotel.
‘Who were the contractors?’
It turned out that the fitting-out of various floors had been subcontracted in the interests of speed: the upper floors were being done by a firm called Edmund, Rintoul Ltd.
‘Any problems with them?’
‘Some hassle with a stack of Turkish marble. Delayed. Quarry on strike or something. Usual cock-ups. They had to fly out there theirselves, chase it up.’
Down below in a Portakabin Lorimer was given copies of the relevant contracts, just to be on the safe side, and surrendered his hard hat. Hogg was right: there was a smell off this one and it wasn’t smoke damage. One visit to Edmund, Rintoul Ltd should confirm it, he reckoned. This had the air of an old, familiar scam, some ancient chicanery, but the scale was all wrong – perhaps a modest bit of routine deceit that had gone hideously out of control, exploding into something from a disaster movie. Hogg was over-confident in one area, though: they would be paying out a few red cents on this one; the question was, how much?
He heard the soft chirrup of his mobile phone in his jacket pocket.
‘Hello?’
‘Lorimer Black?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fraught, we’d seal the drain.’
‘Hello there.’
‘You free for lunch? I’ll pop down to you. Cholmondley’s?’
‘Ah. All right. Sounds good.’
‘Brilliant. See you at one.’
Lorimer beeped Helvoir-Jayne back into the ether and frowned to himself, recalling Hogg’s ambiguous suspicions. First day in the office and he wants lunch with Lorimer Black. And where do I happen to be?
Cholmondley’s looked like a cross between a sports pavilion and an oriental brothel. Dark, from the rattan blinds that shrouded the windows and copious date palms in every corner, it boasted roof fans and bamboo furniture warring with battered sporty memorabilia – peat-brown cricket bats and crossed oars, wooden tennis racquets, sepia team photos and ranked split-cane fishing rods. The staff, men and women, wore striped butcher’s aprons and boaters (could you wear a boater with a city suit?). Country and Western ballads thudded almost inaudibly from hidden speakers.
Helvoir-Jayne was already at the table, half way through a celery-sprouting bloody mary and unwrapping the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, just brought to him by a waitress. He waved Lorimer over.
‘Do you want one of these? No? Well, we’ll have a bottle of house red and house white.’ A shocking thought seemed to occur to him, and he froze. ‘It’s not English wine, is it?’
‘No, sir.’ She was foreign, Lorimer heard, a thin, somehow stooped young girl with a sallow, tired face.
‘Thank Christ. Bring the wine then come back in ten minutes.’
Lorimer held out his hand.
‘What’s going on?’ Helvoir-Jayne looked at him, baffled.
‘Welcome to GGH.’ Lorimer kept forgetting they didn’t like to shake hands so he rolled his wrist vaguely, creating a standard gesture of welcome, instead. ‘Missed you at the office.’ He sat down, refusing Helvoir-Jayne’s offe
r of a cigarette. Automatically, he did a quick inventory: maroon, motif-sprinkled, silk tie, off-the-rail pale pink cotton shirt, badly ironed, but monogrammed T HJ, on the lip of the breast pocket, oddly, French cuffs, gold cufflinks, no silly braces, signet ring, tassled loafers, pale blue socks, slightly too small, old, off-the-peg, double-breasted pin-stripe dark blue suit with twin vents, designed for a thinner Helvoir-Jayne than the one opposite him. They were both dressed almost identically, right down to the signet ring; apart from the socks – Lorimer’s were navy blue – and both his double-breasted pin-striped suit and his shirt were hand-made. Furthermore, his shirt had no breast pocket and his monogram – LMBB – which had been discreetly placed on his upper arm, like an inoculation scar, had been removed since the day Ivan Algomir had told him that mono-grammed shirts were irredeemably common.
‘Sorry to bug you on day one,’ Helvoir-Jayne said. ‘By the way, you must, simply must, call me Torquil. Anyway, I had to get out of that place. What a bunch of fucking geeks.’
Torquil. Torquil it would be, then. ‘Who? What geeks?’
‘Our lot. Our colleagues. And that girl, Dinka, Donkna? Where do they dig them up from?’
‘Dymphna. They’re all very good at their job, actually.’
‘Thank God for you, that’s all I can say. Red or white?’
Torquil was eating spicy Cumberland sausages with mash; Lorimer was pushing bits of over-dressed, char-grilled Thai chicken salad around a black papier maché bowl when the waitress approached with a jar of mustard on a saucer.
‘We’ll have another bottle of red,’ Torquil said, accepting the mustard, then,’Hold your horses, my lovely. This is French mustard. I want English.’
‘This is only one we have.’ She sounded Eastern European to Lorimer’s ear. She seemed to be carrying a whole history of weariness on her back. She had a thin face with a pointed chin, not unattractive in its enervated way, with dark shadows under her big eyes. A small mole high on her left cheek oddly exoticized the drabness and the fatigue she seemed to personify. Lorimer felt a thin lariat of kinship snake out, joining him to her.
‘Go and get some English mustard.’
‘I telling you we don’ have no –’
‘OK, bring me some bloody tomato sauce then. Ketchup? Red stuff in a bottle? Fucking ridiculous.’ Torquil sawed off a plug of sausage and ate, not fully closing his mouth. ‘Call the place Cholmondley’s, staff it with foreigners and don’t serve English mustard.’ He stopped chewing. ‘Don’t you know Hughie Aberdeen? Weren’t you engaged to his sister, or something?’
‘No. I don’t –’
‘I thought you were at Glenalmond. Hogg said you went to school in Scotland.’
‘Yes. Balcairn.’
‘Balcairn?’
‘Shut down now. Near Tomintoul. Smallish place. Catholic. Run by a bunch of monks.’
‘You a left-footer, then? Monks, suffering Christ. Give me the creeps.’
‘Lapsed. It was a funny old place.’
‘I think my wife’s a Catholic. Catholic-ish. Keen on Gregorian chants, plainsong, that sort of thing. No I don’t want the ketchup. Take it away. Yes, I have finished.’
The waitress silently, stoically removed their plates, Torquil still chewing as he reached for his cigarettes. He set fire to one, squinting after the waitress.
‘She’s actually got quite a nice little bum, for such a sourpuss.’ He took a deep breath, inflating his chest hugely. ‘Balcairn. I think I might have known someone who went there. I went to a place called Newbold House. In Northoooomberland. Sure you don’t want some of this red? What do you make of your man Hogg?’
‘Hogg is a law unto himself,’ Lorimer said carefully.
‘Fearsome reputation in the Fort, I must say. No. Take them away. I will call you when we want menus. Take them away. What is she? Some sort of Polish, German, Hungarian or what?’ He leant forward. ‘No, seriously, I’ll be relying on you, Lorimer, in the early days, just to, you know, steer me right. Specially regarding Hogg. Not totally clear on this loss adjustment lark. Don’t want to fall foul of him, that’s for sure.’
‘Absolutely.’
Lorimer was only certain of one thing – that he did not want to be this man’s ally; riding shotgun for Torquil Helvoir-Jayne did not appeal. He looked across at him now as he sat there, picking at his teeth for shreds of spicy Cumberland sausage. He was overweight and had straight, thinning brown hair brushed back from his frowning brow.
‘You got kids, Lorimer?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Wise man. I’ve got three. And I’ll be forty in six weeks. What’s it all about, eh?’
‘Boys or girls?’
‘Jesus. Forty years old. Practically falling off the perch. Do you shoot?’
‘Not any more. Bust an ear-drum. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Shame. My father-in-law has a decent place in Gloucestershire. Still, you must come and have dinner.’
‘With your father-in-law?’
‘No. No, me and the wife, me trouble-and-strife. Hello! Yes, you. Menu. Men-you. Fucking hell.’ He turned amiably to Lorimer. ‘Well, maybe it’ll be all right after all. Two of us against the world. D’you want a port or brandy? Armagnac or anything?’
44. The Short Curriculum Vitae.
Name: Lorimer M. B. Black.
Age: 31.
Current employment: Senior Loss Adjuster, GGH Ltd.
Education: St Barnabus, Fulham. 11 GCSEs, 4 A-levels (Maths, Economics, English Literature, History of Art).
Foundation modular BSc degree course in Applied Mathematics and Fine Art at the North Caledonia Institute of Science and Technology (now the University of Ross and Cromarty).
Employment history: Trainee Insurance Assessor, Clerical and Medical (3 yrs); Insurance Valuer, Fortress Sure (2 yrs); Loss Adjuster, GGH Ltd (5yrs). Hobbies:
collecting antique helmets.
The Book of Transfiguration
It was dark by 4.30 and Marlobe’s flower cabin had its lights on – a warm, brilliantly coloured cave, all shades of red and yellow, mauves and flame-orange – when Lorimer paused to buy a rare bunch of white tulips. Marlobe was in loud and cheery humour as he talked to one of his regulars, a thin young man with an oddly dished face caused by the absence of all top teeth. As Marlobe selected and wrapped the bouquet, Lorimer divined that the topic for discussion this evening was ‘The Ideal Wife’. Marlobe could hardly get the words out for laughing.
‘– No, no, I tell you she has to be stacked, right? Dead heat in a Zeppelin race, yeah? And she’s got to be three foot tall, right? For easy blow-jobs. And she’s got to have a flat head – right? – so I can put me beer bottle down while she’s sucking me off.’
‘That’s disgusting, that is,’ the young man slushed.
‘Wait on. Also, also, she’d have to own a pub, right? The pub would be hers. And, after sex, she’d have to turn into a pizza.’
‘Gaw, that’s disgusting, that is.’
‘Those do not merit the designation “flower”, mate,’ Marlobe said to Lorimer, still chortling. ‘I wouldn’t wipe me arse on those. Don’t know how they crept in.’
‘I get it: turn into a pizza,’ Slushing-Voice said. ‘So you can eat her, right? What about a kebab? Kebab would be great. I love a kebab.’
‘A steak pie,’ Marlobe bellowed, ‘even better.’
‘I happen to like white flowers,’ Lorimer said, bravely, impassively, but he could not be heard above the general merriment.
92. No Deep Slumber. After your firstfew visits to the Institute of Lucid Dreams Alan had a better idea of your problem. The electroencephalogram – the EEG – is the tool that unlocks the sleeping persona, is how we discover the electrophysiology of sleep. The printout of your EEG patterns shows us what is the nature of the activity going on in your head. Alan told you that when you are asleep your EEG patterns show that you seem to be in a near permanent pre-arousal state, that it is very rare to see any EEG stage 4.
– EEG stage4? you asked, alarmed.
– What we call deep slumber.
– No deep slumber? I have little or no deep slumber? Is that bad?
– Well, nothing worth writing home about.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lady Haigh ambushed him as he was going through the post in the hall. Bill, bill, circular, freesheet, bill, circular…
‘Lorimer, dear, you really must come and see this, it’s extraordinary.’
Lorimer obediently entered her flat. In the sitting room her ancient dog, Jupiter, lolled panting on a hair-clogged velvet cushion in front of a soundless black and white TV. Lady Haigh’s imposing, cracked-leather, winged armchair was flanked by two single-bar electric fires and lit by an early-model cantilevered reading lamp. The rest of the furniture was almost invisible beneath piles of books and sheaves of magazine and newspaper clippings – Lady Haigh was an avid snipper-outer of articles that caught her interest, and loath to throw them away. Lorimer followed her through into the kitchen, its antiquated components burnished and scoured to museum-standard levels of cleanliness. Beside the thrumming fridge was a plastic basin full of Jupiter’s dog food – giving off an astringent, gamey smell – and beside it a cat-litter (for Jupiter, also, he supposed; Lady Haigh detested cats, ‘Selfish, selfish creatures’). She wrestled with the numerous locks and chains on her back door, opened them and, picking up a battery torch, led Lorimer out into the night, down the iron steps over the basement well to her patch of rear garden. Lady Haigh, Lorimer knew, slept in the basement but he had never ventured or been invited down there. From here the one window he could see was stoutly barred, the glass opaque with grime.
The garden was bounded by the angled walls and recent extensions of the abutting houses, and at its end was overlooked by the rear elevations and small curtained windows of the houses in the parallel street. Great brittle tangles of clematis teetered on the rotting wooden fences that marked the garden’s narrow rectangular boundary, and in one corner a gnarled acacia gamely grew, each year producing noticeably fewer leaves and more sterile boughs, though it added, in summer, a hopeful, trembling presence of pale green leaves against the dirty, crumbling brickwork. Lorimer had a view of the small garden from his bathroom and he had to admit that, when the acacia was in leaf and the clematis was out, and the hydrangeas, and the sun angled down to strike the green turf, Lady Haigh’s little verdant rectangle did possess a form of wild invitation that, like all green things growing in the city, did console and modestly enchant.