Armadillo

by William Boyd

  ‘I’ll pack it up and you can take it away with you,’ he said, turning and shouting up the stairs. ‘Petronella? Champagne, darling, we’ve made a sale. Bring down the Krug.’

  32. George Hogg’s Philosophy of Insurance. What does insurance do, really do ? Hogg would ask us. And we would say, diligently echoing the textbooks, that insurance’s primary function is to substitute certainty for uncertainty as regards the economic consequences of disastrous events. It gives a sense of security in an insecure world. It makes you feel safe, then? Hogg would follow up. Yes, we would reply: something tragic, catastrophic, troublesome or irritating may have occurred but there is recompense in the form of a preordained sum of money. All is not entirely lost. We are covered, after a fashion, protected to a degree against the risk – the bad luck – of a heart attack, a car smash, a disability, a fire, a theft, a loss, things that can, and will, affect us all at some or many times in our lives.

  That attitude, Hogg would say, is fundamentally immoral. Immoral, dishonest and misleading. Such an understanding promotes and bolsters the fond notion that we will all grow up, be happy, healthy, find a job, fall in love, start a family, earn a living, retire, enjoy a ripe old age and die peacefully in our sleep. This is a seductive dream, Hogg would snarl, the most dangerous fantasy. All of us know that, in reality, life never works out like this. So what did we do? We invented insurance – which makes us feel we have half a chance, a shot at achieving it, so that even if something goes wrong – mildly wrong or hideously wrong – we have provided some buffer against random disaster.

  But, Hogg would say, why should a system that we have invented not possess the same properties as the life we lead? Why should insurance be solid and secure? What right do we have to think that the laws of uncertainty which govern the human condition, all human endeavour, all human life, do not apply to this artificial construct, this sop that affects to soften the blows of filthy chance and evil luck?

  Hogg would look at us, contempt and pity shining from his eyes. We have no right, he would say solemnly. Such an attitude, such beliefs were deeply, fundamentally unphilosophical. And this was where we – the loss adjusters – came in. We had a vital role to play: we were the people who reminded all the others that nothing in this world is truly certain, we were the rogue element, the unstable factor in the ostensibly stable world of insurance. ‘I am insured – so at least I am safe,’ we like to think. Not so, Hogg would say, shaking a pale finger, uh-uh, no way. We have a philosophical duty to perform when we adjust loss, he told us. When we do our adjustments of loss we frustrate and negate all the bland promises of insurance. We act out in our small way one of the great unbending principles of life: nothing is sure, nothing is certain, nothing is risk-free, nothing is fully covered, nothing is forever. It is a noble calling, he would say, go out into the world and do your duty.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Priddion’s Farm, Monken Hadley, turned out to be a sizeable 1920s stockbroker’s villa, brick and pebble-dashed, complete with decorative half-timbering and steepling mock-Elizabethan chimneys. It was set in a large garden of several terraced lawns with a view of a golf course, the Great North Road, and the distant rooftops of High Barnet. Even though Monken Hadley was still a part of the huge city, perched on its very northern fringe, it looked and felt to Lorimer like a toy village, with a village green, a flinty ashlar church – St Mary the Virgin – and a venerable manor house.

  Priddion’s Farm was partially screened from the road and its neighbours by dense clumps of laurel and rhododendron and there was an assortment of mature trees – cedar, chestnut, maple, monkey puzzle and weeping ash – strategically scattered about the lawns, doubtless planted as saplings by the wealthy man who had paid for the house to be built.

  Lorimer drew his car up beside three others on the gravelled sweep before the front porch and tried to square this bourgeois palace with the Torquil Helvoir-Jayne he thought he knew. He heard laughter and voices and wandered round the side of the house to find a croquet lawn upon which Torquil and another man in pink corduroy trousers were playing a boisterous, profane game of croquet. A thin young woman in jeans, smoking, looked on, laughing nasally from time to time, giving a whoop of encouragement as Torquil first lined up and then powerfully hammered his opponent’s ball away across the lawn and through a border out of sight where it could be heard thumping dully along the paving stones of a lower terrace.

  ‘You fucking bastard,’ the man in pink trousers bellowed at Torquil, trotting off to find his ball.

  ‘You owe me thirty quid, you anus,’ Torquil yelled back, lining up his own next shot.

  ‘Pay up, pay up,’ the young woman shouted, heartily. ‘And make sure you get it in cash, Torquie.’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ Lorimer said to the young woman, who turned to look at him incuriously.

  ‘Potts, say hello to Lorimer,’ Torquil encouraged, ‘there’s a good girl.’

  Lorimer unreflectingly offered his hand which, after a surprised pause, was feebly shaken.

  ‘Lorimer Black,’ he said. ‘Hi.’

  ‘I’m Potts,’ she said. ‘Don’t you love croquet? Oliver’s useless, such a bad sport.’

  ‘And this shambling cretin’s Oliver Rollo,’ Torquil said as the young man in pink trousers returned, strolling back with his ball. ‘Lorimer Black. Lorimer was at Glen-almond with Hugh Aberdeen.’

  ‘How is old Hughie?’ Oliver Rollo said. He was tall, long-armed and quite overweight, twin pink spots on his cheeks, flushed from his short walk back up from the lower terrace. He had a big, loose jaw, thick, dark, hard-to-comb hair and the flies of his pink corduroys gaped undone.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest,’ Lorimer said. ‘Torquil won’t let go of this idea that I know him.’

  ‘Right, cuntface, you’ve had it,’ Oliver said, Lorimer quickly realizing he was talking to Torquil. He dropped his ball on the grass and seized his mallet.

  ‘If you’re going to take a piss in my garden do you mind not fucking exposing yourself,’ Torquil said, pointing at Oliver’s fly ‘Bloody pervert. How do you stand it, Potts?’

  ‘’Cozc ‘e’s a larverly boy,’ Potts said in the voice of a cockney crone.

  ‘Because I’ve got a ten-inch dick,’ Oliver Rollo said.

  ‘Dream on, darling,’ Potts said, acidly, and a cold glance flew between them.

  A cheerful-looking, matronly young woman bounced out of the French windows that gave on to the croquet lawn. She had a big, shapeless bosom beneath a baggy, bright jumper covered in blue stars and dry blonde hair held off her face with an Alice band. Her cheeks were flaky with what looked like mild eczema and she had a waning cold sore at the side of her mouth. But her smile was warm and genuine.

  ‘Lorimer Black, I presume,’ she said, shaking his hand in orthodox manner. ‘I’m Jennifer – Binnie.’

  There was a full-throated roar of disappointment from behind as Torquil missed a sitter. ‘Fuckfuck FUCK!’

  ‘Boys,’ Jennifer-Binnie called. ‘Neighbours, remember? And language, please.’ She turned back to Lorimer. ‘Your girlfriend’s just called from the station. Do you want me to collect her?’

  ‘Sorry? Who?’

  Before Lorimer could ask further, Torquil was by his side, a hand squeezing his shoulder.

  ‘We’ll pick her up,’ he said. ‘Come along, Lorimer.’

  As they drove to High Barnet in Torquil’s car Torquil apologized. He seemed excited, Lorimer thought, coiled and tense with a kind of manic energy.

  ‘I should have checked first, I suppose,’ he said, uncon-vincingly. ‘I had no time to clear things with you. Thought we’d be able to busk it. I told Binnie you’d only just started going out.’ He grinned, salaciously. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be sleeping together.’

  ‘And just who is my girlfriend this weekend?’

  ‘Irina. The Russian bint. You remember?’

  ‘The sad one.’ Lorimer frowned.

  ‘I couldn’t ask her on h
er own, could I? What would Binnie think?’ He patted Lorimer’s knee. ‘Don’t worry, I only got the idea yesterday. I didn’t have you lined up as chaperon all along.’

  ‘Fine.’ Lorimer wasn’t so sure about this. But it explained Torquil’s unnatural glee.

  ‘She seemed a bit lonely, you know. Friendless. I thought this would cheer her up. But obviously I had to come up with something more persuasive for the Binns.’

  ‘Obviously’

  ‘Oh, and I should apologize that the dinner’s black tie. One of Binnie’s little fads.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And I apologize for the house too, while I’m in contrite mood.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You see, it was left to Binnie by an uncle of hers, a distant uncle.’ He stopped talking and looked at Lorimer with an expression close to shock. ‘You don’t seriously think I’d choose to live in Barnet, do you? As soon as the market recovers I’m flogging it.’

  He pulled up outside High Barnet tube station and they saw Irina waiting alone at the bus stop, wearing a duffle coat and carrying a red nylon backpack. Lorimer sat and watched Torquil go to greet her, kiss her on each cheek and talk urgently for a few minutes, Irina nodding wordlessly at his instructions, before he led her back to the car.

  ‘You remember Lorimer, don’t you?’ Torquil said, smiling benignly as Irina climbed into the back seat.

  ‘I think you were in restaurant,’ she said, anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ Lorimer said. ‘That’s me. Good to see you again.’

  Lorimer buckled on the sporran and checked its positioning over his groin in the full-length mirror. He was pleased to be wearing a kilt again after so many years and surprised, as he always was, by the transformation it wrought on him – he almost didn’t recognize himself. He squared his shoulders, contemplating his reflection: the short black jacket with its silver buttons, the dark green of the tartan (Hunting Stewart, there was no Black Watch at the dress-hire agency), the knee-length white socks and their gartering of laces, criss-crossed above his ankles. This was, to his mind, as close to the Platonic ‘Lorimer Black’ as he had ever desired, as complete a metamorphosis as he could ever have wished for. His pleasure in his appearance momentarily dispelled the depression that was gathering within him at the prospect of the evening ahead.

  He was sleeping in a room at the end of a long L-shaped corridor on the house’s second floor, under the eaves, a big atticy room with two dormer windows and with clearly unnecessary beam work supporting the ceiling but designed to foster an impression of antiquity. Torquil had apologized for the beams and for the half-timbering outside, for the brass sconces in the passageways and for the plum-coloured bathroom suite and the bidet when he had shown Lorimer his room. He continued to blame everything on the execrable taste of Binnie’s distant uncle (‘Nouveau riche, lived in Rhodesia half his life’), taking no responsibility at all for the appearance of his own home. Lorimer paced back from the mirror and turned sharply on his heel, admiring the perfect way the pleats of his kilt fanned out and swirled as he swung his hips.

  He stepped out into the corridor and saw that Torquil was at the far end, minus his dinner jacket, holding the hand of a small, fair-haired boy in pyjamas who looked about seven years old.

  ‘This is Lorimer,’ Torquil said. ‘Say hello to Lorimer, he’s sleeping next door to you.’

  The little boy’s eyes were wide at Lorimer’s Caledonian resplendency.

  ‘Hello,’ Lorimer said. ‘I know who you are, you’re Sholto.’

  ‘Sholto, the famous bedwetter,’ said his father, whereupon Sholto started to cry.

  ‘It’s not fair, Daddy,’ Lorimer heard him wail as Torquil bustled his son into his bedroom. ‘I can’t help it, Daddy.’

  ‘Don’t be such a sissy. Take a joke, can’t you? Jesus Christ.’

  Downstairs in the drawing room curtains were closed, candles were lit and there was a fire going, a real fire, Lorimer noticed, and gathered in front of it were Binnie, Potts, Oliver and another couple, introduced as Neil and Liza Pawson, the headmaster of a local school and his wife. Everyone was smoking except for Neil Pawson.

  ‘I do love a man in a kilt,’ Liza Pawson said, with forced bravura as he came in. She was a lean, bespectacled woman with a long, stretched neck, whose massive tension was clearly visible, a cursive blue vein throbbing in her temple. Her dress was daintily floral, spruced up with a homemade hint of evening lace added at neck and wrists.

  ‘You’ve got to have the right arse for a kilt,’ said Oliver Rollo, throwing his cigarette end into the fire. ‘That’s essential.’

  Lorimer could have sworn, inwardly, that at the mention of the word ‘arse’ a sudden coolness seemed to spread across his buttocks.

  ‘Och aye, he’s a true Scot,’ Potts said, standing behind him, the pleated hem of his kilt held high in her hands, ‘he’s no wearing knickers.’

  Somehow Lorimer’s smile stayed pasted to his face, his scorching embarrassment was covered by the explosion of nervous laughter that followed and the loudly genial chiding of the irrepressible Potts and her famously naughty pranks. Lorimer’s hand was still shaking slightly as he poured himself a huge vodka at the drinks table, tucked slightly out of sight behind a baby grand covered in framed photographs.

  ‘I understand your friend is from Russia,’ Neil Pawson said, padding over for a refill. He seemed a blurry, indistinct, fair man, freckled, with dense blond eyebrows and a boyish lick of pepper and salt hair swept across his forehead.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your, ah, girlfriend. Binnie tells me she never wants to go back to Russia.’

  ‘Probably. I mean, probably not.’

  Neil Pawson smiled at him, amiably. ‘Binnie says she’s over here studying music. What’s her instrument? I’m a bit of an amateur musician myself. What does she play?’

  Lorimer quickly ran through an entire orchestra of instruments before settling on the saxophone, for some reason.

  ‘The saxophone.’

  ‘Unusual choice. I’m a clarinet.’

  He had to get away from this man. ‘She plays many instruments,’ Lorimer said, recklessly. ‘Almost all of them: violin, timpani, bassoon. Strings, generally, ah, and oboe. The flute,’ he said with relief, remembering. ‘The flute is her instrument.’

  ‘Not the saxophone, then?’

  ‘No. Yes. Sometimes. Ah, there she is.’

  Lorimer went enthusiastically to greet her, but saw Torquil was right behind, solicitous palm at the small of her back, saying, ‘Now who hasn’t met Lorimer’s young lady, Irina?’ She was wearing a silvery satin blouse that made her skin appear even more blanched and bloodless, despite the lurid gash of her lipstick and the heavy blue shadow on her lids. In the subsequent shiftings and displacements that took place with these new arrivals being admitted to the circle, Lorimer found himself in a corner beside Binnie, glowing warmly pink, larger and more substantial somehow, in a voluminous dress made of quilted maroon velvet fitted with a bizarre short cape-effect around the shoulders, heavily embroidered. It made him feel hot just looking at her and he spread his legs slightly beneath his kilt, feeling his balls hang free, cooling. Marvellous garment.

  ‘– So pleased you could come, Lorimer,’ Binnie was saying, tiny pearls of sweat trapped in the downy hair of her upper lip. ‘You’re the only person I’ve ever met from Torquil’s work. He says you’re his only friend in the office.’

  ‘I am? He does?’

  ‘He says no one else has anything in common with him.’

  He glanced over at Torquil who was handing round a bowl of quail’s eggs, leering at Potts, who had removed the shimmering, chiffony scarf that had been draped around her shoulders earlier, to reveal her modest cleavage.

  ‘I say, tits out, Potts,’ Lorimer heard Torquil observe, genially. ‘Oliver’s in luck tonight, eh?’

  ‘Have a good look,’ she said and with a finger hooked forward the front of her dress. Torquil took full advantage.
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  ‘Damn, you’re wearing a bra.’

  ‘Isn’t Potts a scream,’ Binnie said to Lorimer, beneath the ensuing laughter. ‘Such a sweet girl.’

  ‘Why does everyone call her Potts? Because she’s potty?’

  ‘It’s her name – Annabelle Potts. How long have you and Irina been going out?’

  ‘Who? Oooh, not long.’

  ‘Torquil says he can hear the distant chiming of wedding bells.’ Binnie looked sideways at him, mischievously.

  ‘Does he? Bit premature, I would say.’

  ‘Such a pretty girl. I do love that Russian look.’

  At dinner Lorimer was placed between Binnie and Potts; Torquil was flanked by Irina and Liza Pawson. An absurdly tall girl called Philippa was introduced to the company as the cook and she also served and cleared plates, with help from Binnie. They started with a tasteless, still partially frozen vegetable terrine and progressed to over-cooked salmon and new potatoes. There were eight open bottles of wine, four white and four red, placed randomly about the table and Lorimer found he was drinking almost uncontrollably, taking every opportunity to top up Binnie and Potts before refilling his own empty glass. Gradually, the desired anaesthetizing of the senses began to creep over him and an attendant mood of indifference replaced his earlier social terror. He was not relaxed but he ceased to care any more, ceased to worry.

  Potts was rummaging for another cigarette in her handbag so Lorimer reached over for a candle. To his astonishment he saw Torquil place another four open bottles – two white, two red – on the table as Philippa cleared the remains of the salmon. There were now so many bottles on the table that he could only see the heads of the people opposite. Potts waved her cigarette negatively at the cheese, so Binnie set it down in front of him.

  ‘– Couldn’t stand Verbier any more, too many grockles,’ Potts was saying, ‘so I said to Ollie, what about Val d’Isère? But he can’t stand the French schoolkids barging the queues. I said give me French schoolkids to German schoolkids – or do I mean Swiss? Anyway, I said, what about the States? And he practically had a fit. So we’re going to Andorra – anyway, peace at last.’