Armadillo

by William Boyd

  ‘I suppose it was a bit risky’ Then she smiled at him, radiantly. ‘Do you suppose it’s because I really do want to have an affair with you, Lorimer?’

  He swallowed. He was breathing faster. He clenched and unclenched his fists – what did one say in response to that sort of remark?

  ‘Flavia – I love you.’ He did not know what made him utter the fateful words, make that timeless declaration – sheer fatigue, probably. The fact that he was getting soaked by the rain.

  ‘No. No, you’ve got to go,’ she said, her voice suddenly nervous, almost hostile. ‘You’d better keep away from me.’

  ‘Why did you kiss me?’

  ‘I was drunk. It was the grappa.’

  ‘That wasn’t a drunken kiss.’

  ‘Well, you’d better forget it, Lorimer Black. And you’d better stay away, I mean if Gilbert saw you –’

  ‘Fuck Gilbert. It’s you I’m thinking about.’

  ‘Go away!’ she hissed at him, and stepped out of the shelter of her tree and strode across the road to her house, not looking back.

  Cursing, Lorimer clambered back into his car and drove away. Anger, frustration, lust, bitterness, helplessness jostled for preeminence in his mind until a newer, more sombre note overshadowed them all: what he was feeling was close to despair. Flavia Malinverno had come into his life and had transformed it – she could not be lost to him.

  ‘Totally out of the question,’ Hogg said, his voice reasonable, brooking no dissent. ‘Who do you think I am? Your mother? Sort out your own problems, for God’s sake.’

  ‘She thinks I’m you. She thinks it was me who did the Dupree adjust. You just have to tell her I wasn’t involved.’

  ‘You can whistle for it, Lorimer. We never, we never go back after an adjust, never deal with the client again, you know that. It can jeopardize everything, ours is a very delicate business. Now, what’s new with Gale-Harlequin?’

  Lorimer blinked, shook his head, he was wordless.

  ‘Spit it out, lad.’

  ‘Some developments. I’ll get back to you.’

  He switched off the phone and accelerated away from the traffic lights at Fulham Broadway. There had to be some way of getting at Hogg, some way of making him go to Mrs Vernon and explain. But whatever that strategy might be it did not bear thinking of at the moment. His utter lack of any ideas brought the despair seeping back.

  Slobodan was standing on the pavement outside the office, smoking, enjoying a breath of fresh air, rocking to and fro on his heels, as Lorimer pulled up.

  ‘You know, I could weep to see a car in that state. It’ll be pure rust in a week. Look at that.’

  True enough, rust flowers were beginning to bloom on the Toyota’s broiled bodywork.

  ‘Is Torquil back?’

  ‘Yeah. Boy, is he putting in the hours. I reckon he’ll pull in two and a half grand this week. He’s in shock at all this dosh he’s making. You see, the trouble with Torquil was that he never realized just how much money working-class people can earn. He thought we were all poor and miserable, scraping a living, looking for handouts.’

  Lorimer thought that this was as profound a statement as Slobodan had ever uttered. He agreed and they went inside where they found Torquil in noisy debate with the other drivers, stretched out on the two sofas, mugs of tea and cigarettes on the go.

  ‘If you do A3, M25 you’re done for. Talking two and a half hours to Gatwick.’

  ‘Trevor two-nine was forty minutes getting through Wandsworth High Street yesterday.’

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘Nightmare.’

  ‘OK. What if you went Battersea, Southfields –’ Torquil suggested.

  ‘Trevor one-five can get you in the back of Gatwick from the Reigate end.’

  ‘– No, listen, then New Maiden, but miss out Chessington and cut down through –’ Torquil looked round and saw Lorimer. ‘Oh hi. Lobby told me you were dropping by. Shall we have a bite?’

  Phil Beazley popped his head out of the control room and beckoned Lorimer over.

  Beazley lowered his voice. ‘We done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Last night. Me and a couple of mates. Gave that motor a right dusting.’

  Lorimer felt a tremor of alarm, of almost shock at what he had done. He had never before ordered violence done on anyone or anything and felt a corresponding loss of innocence. But Rintoul could have killed him, he should not forget that.

  ‘Got a present for you,’ Beazley said, reaching into a pocket and pressing something into Lorimer’s hand. ‘Little souvenir.’

  Lorimer opened his hand to reveal a chrome three-pointed star set in a circle. The logo of the Mercedes-Benz company.

  ‘I snapped it off the bonnet before we went to work with the sledgehammers and the rivet gun.’

  Lorimer swallowed. ‘Rintoul drives a BMW. I told you.’

  ‘No. You said a Merc. Definite. I remember. Anyway we never saw no BMW.’

  Lorimer nodded slowly, taking this in. ‘Never mind, Phil. Good work. We’ll say that takes care of the loan.’

  ‘You’re a gent, Milo. Lobby’ll be pleased.’

  ‘You all right?’ Torquil asked as they walked along the road to the Filmer Café. ‘You look a bit out of it. Knackered. Still not sleeping?’

  ‘Sleep is the least of my problems,’ he said.

  The Filmer (Classic British Caffs no.11) was busy and stiflingly warm, condensation beading and dripping from all its windows, steam and fumes coiling from shuddering pots and pans on the big cooker at the rear, a blurry fug of cigarette smoke adding to the generally cloudy smudged feel of the place. It was run by a couple from Gibraltar and the Union Jack was much in evidence. Union Jack bunting looped across the windows and draped the portrait of Winston Churchill on the rear wall, little Union Jacks fluttered amidst the condiments and sauce bottles in the centre of the tables, the staff sported shiny P VC Union Jack aprons. Torquil removed his jacket and slung it over the back of the chair. Lorimer saw he was wearing a sweater and corduroys, no tie, and he needed a shave. He ordered bacon, sausage, egg, beans and chips with sliced white bread on the side. Lorimer asked for a glass of milk – he seemed to have lost his appetite, these days.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ Lorimer asked, handing over an invitation which had arrived in the morning’s mail.

  ‘Lady Sherriffmuir.’ Torquil read, ‘“At Home for Toby and Amabel”… Are you sure this is meant for you?’

  ‘It has my name on the top, Torquil.’

  I suppose mine’ll have gone to bloody Binnie. Damn. Hell! Why’s he asking you? Have you met him?’

  ‘Just the once.’

  ‘Must have made quite an impression. Very honoured. ‘

  ‘I can’t quite understand why, either.’

  ‘He’s got a lovely place in Kensington…’ Torquil frowned as if the concept of ‘home’ troubled him. He pouted, then pursed his lips, poured some salt on the table top and dabbed at it with a forefinger.

  ‘Anything on your mind?’ Lorimer prompted.

  Torquil licked his salted forefinger. ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, Lorimer, but I’m going to move in with Lobby’

  ‘Absolutely fine with me. No problem. When?’

  ‘It’s easier for me working nights, you see. It’s just more practical. I just don’t want you to feel –’

  ‘Excellent idea.’

  ‘I mean if you want me to stay on, I wouldn’t dream of moving. I would hate to –’

  ‘No, makes much more sense.’

  ‘Very good of you.’ Torquil beamed, hugely relieved. ‘Have you any idea how much money I’m going to make this week? I mean if I get a few more airport jobs and good night work I could be talking over two grand. Phil Beazley’s going to get me some pills to keep me awake.’

  He talked on in tones of astonishment about his good fortune, and how he owed it all to Lorimer. Binnie would get her money, he said, and taking account of running costs a
t this rate he could have, cash in hand, maybe a thousand pounds a week, easy.

  ‘Apparently you pay hardly any tax,’ he said. ‘You declare about one-tenth of what you earn, and write off all your expenses – fuel, insurance – against it. And I’ve got no time to spend anything, anyway. Never been so flush. Never had so much folding money in my life.’

  Lorimer thought Torquil and Slobodan would co-exist perfectly: they both smoked too much, drank to excess, they ate the same food, enjoyed the same middle-of-the-road rock music, shared the same defiantly sexist attitude to women, were not readers, indifferent to things cultural, were mildly racist, uninterested in current affairs and both unreflectingly voted Conservative. Apart from their accents, and the strata separating them socially, they could have been cut from the same cloth.

  Torquil pushed away his empty plate, popped the folded square of bread that had polished it greaseless into his mouth, and reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘You know,’ he said, chewing ruminatively ‘if I minicabbed hard for six months I could take the rest of the year off. Never need to sell a line of insurance again.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ Lorimer said, ‘can you cast your mind back to the Fedora Palace deal?’

  Torquil winced. ‘You see, the trouble was I never asked any advice. I’d just had a bit of a shameful bollocking from Simon about my attitude, not pulling my weight, lack of initiative and all that, so when what’s-his-name – Gale – suddenly said he would pay that huge premium in the interests of speeding things up, I jumped at it.’

  ‘You and Gale cooked it up between you.’

  ‘I mentioned a figure and he mentioned a higher one. I mean, it’s plain business sense, isn’t it. You don’t take less,’ he frowned, ‘do you? I mean it was a hotel, for God’s sake. Bricks and mortar, state of the art. What could go wrong?’

  ‘What was Gale’s hurry?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just wanted it done quickly. Seemed reasonable to me. I thought I’d done everyone a favour and earned a nice sum of money for the Fort. Nobody said anything at the time, not a word of caution. Rubber-stamped all round.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m well out of that business, I tell you. I’d better go. Got a wait and return to Bexley this after.’

  He had dreamt about tennis, his only sport, looking down at himself as he served, as if from a specially positioned video camera, watching the fluffy yellow ball fly up to meet him and then hearing – very clearly – the swish and bite of the racquet strings as they cut over the ball with brutal severity sending it arcing away with its devilish spin, one of his rarely achieved unplayable second serves, not fast, but deep and with a bend on it like a banana, hitting the court surface (red clay) and kicking off at a different angle, and with somehow greater speed and height, as if some kind of booster spring mechanism had been released in the ball itself, importing that physics-defying extra few m.p.h. of velocity. His partner in this dream game had not been Alan, his usual opponent, but Shane Ashgable – whom he had not played before because Shane fancied himself as a tennis player. But Shane could not cope with these serves at all, as they came looping deceptively over the net at him, his timing and positioning hopelessly, laughably, wrong.

  Lorimer rubbed his eyes and duly jotted the dream down in his diary. Was it lucid? Borderline – certainly his serves were surreally consistent and on target but he could not recall actually willing them to bend and kick like that. And it was not strictly true that tennis was his only sport, he liked athletics too – more precisely, he liked watching athletics on television. But he had been good at the javelin while at school, on distant sports days, hurling it further than stronger, beefier boys. Like a golf swing a javelin throw relied more on timing and positioning rather than brute strength. In the same way that diminutive golfers effortlessly drove the ball fifty yards further than burlier players so the javelin-thrower knew it was not about gritted teeth and testosterone. When the throw was correct you saw it in the way the spear behaved, almost vibrating with pleasure, as all the power in the arm and shoulders was transferred precisely – in a complex equation, a mysterious combination of torque, moment of release, angle of delivery – to two metres of sharpened aluminium pole soaring through the air.

  The tennis dream, he knew, was always a harbinger of summer – still months away, he realized – but perhaps it was a good omen, now, a crack in the permafrost. For him the first tennis dream of winter was like the first swallow or first cuckoo, a sign that sap was somewhere rising. Perhaps it was because he had learned and played his best tennis in summer in Scotland when he had been at college. Here was the source of its seasonal associations: the mixed double tennis league matches played on long summer evenings against the local tennis clubs – Fochabers, Forres, Elgin and Rothes – against solicitors and their elegant, thin-wristed wives, young farmers and their strapping girlfriends. Ginger beer shandy on clubhouse verandahs as the Scottish dusk struggled feebly to establish itself against a northern sun unwilling to dip below the horizon. Patches of sweat on the embroidered bodices of dental nurses, the dark damp fringes of hotel receptionists, a bloom of clay dust on the shiny shaved calves of ruthless schoolgirl aces, the residue that washed off later in the shower tray like red gold, panned. Tennis was summer, civility, sweat and sex, and the memories of the occasional stroke perfectly executed – weight on the right leg, racquet prepared for an age, leaning into the backhand, head down, the stiff-armed follow-through, the wrong-footing, the gentle applause, the incredulous cries of ‘Shot!’ That was all you needed, really, those tennis court epiphanies were what you really sought…

  He felt his bladder distended, switched on the light and unplugged himself, reaching for his dressing gown. On the way back from the dazzling lavatory he thought he made out someone sitting among the winking lights of the monitor banks.

  ‘Hey, Alan,’ he said, wandering over, pleased to see him. ‘Up late.’

  ‘Sometimes I pop in while you’re all sleeping, just to check up on my guinea pigs. That was some dream you were having.’ He pointed to the jagged line of a printout.

  ‘I was playing tennis.’

  ‘Against Miss Whatshername? Zuleika Dobson, isn’t it? Coffee?’

  ‘Flavia Malinverno. Most amusing. Yes please.’

  Alan poured him a papercupful from a flask. He was wearing, Lorimer noticed, black leather trousers and a satiny Hawaiian shirt, gold chains glittered at his neck.

  ‘Busy night?’

  ‘Darling, I could have danced till dawn. That was a peach of a lucid dream last time.’

  ‘Which did feature Miss Flavia Malinverno,’ Lorimer said with some bitter longing. Then suddenly, for no particular reason, he told Alan about Flavia, the meetings, the kiss, the news about the ‘affair’, Gilbert’s madjealousy, Flavia’s sudden reticence.

  ‘Married women, Lorimer, you should know better.’

  ‘She’s not happy with him, I know. He’s a fraud, completely vain, I could tell. There was something between us, something real, in spite of the duplicity. But she’s denying it. Sorry, I’m boring you.’

  Alan covered his yawn with four fingers. ‘It is very early in the morning.’

  Lorimer felt he might never sleep again.

  ‘What do I do, Alan? You are my best friend. You’re meant to solve these problems for me.’

  Alan patted his knee. ‘Well, they do tell me faint heart never won fair maid.’

  212. The Television Set. All that was in your head was the deafening noise of the television set and the constant bellowing, cheering, whistling and catcalling that accompanied it. The whole college seemed to have assembled in the common room to watch – what? A football match? Miss World? The Eurovision Song Contest? Formula I? You could hear the slap of your bare feet on the lino as you drew near, could hear the noise levels increase and the rays of white light shining down from the fluorescent strips seemed to spear into your brain like elongated acupuncture needles. Joyce was terrified, crying; you were sick, sick with your r
age and fury, and all you knew was that the noise of the television set had to stop. You halted at the door and your right hand reached out for the door knob. You saw your hand grip the doorknob, turn it and push the door open and suddenly you were walking into the common room, shouting for silence, striding into the centre of the crowded room, a hundred pairs of eyes turning towards you.

  The Book of Transfiguration

  Chapter 15

  ‘Hello? Milo? Milo? Hello, Milo?’

  ‘Hello, Mum. I can hear you.’ She had called him on the mobile, the only number of his that the family possessed. He felt as if the air were being slowly sucked out of his lungs – it had to be bad news. He was driving along the Embankment heading west, the river on his left, the morning blowy, grey and heavily overcast, if marginally milder.

  ‘Everything OK, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, everything’s fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Did Lobby call you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh… Bit of sad news.’

  Something to do with Slobodan, then, that was less worrying. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your dad passed away last night.’

  ‘Oh God. Jesus.’ He began to brake.

  ‘Yes. Very quiet, very peaceful. It’s a blessing, Milo.’

  ‘Yes, Mum. You all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, me. Everyone’s here. Well, the girls are.’

  ‘Should…Ah, should I come round?’

  ‘No point. He’s not here any more. They took him.’

  He felt his face tighten. ‘I’ll call later, Mum. I’m in traffic.’

  ‘Sorry to bother you, darling. Bye.’

  Lorimer slowed down and bumped up on to the pavement, switching on his hazard lights. He walked to the stone balustrade, leant upon it and looked down at the wide brown river. The tide was high but, aptly, on the turn, the water now flowing vigorously east, to the sea. He urged tears to come, but they would not. Well, he thought, that’s it: Bogdan Blocj, RIP. He stared at the Thames and tried to think of something profound, some line of poetry, but all that came into his head were facts about Chelsea Embankment (built in 1871-4, cost a quarter of a million pounds, designed by someone called Bazalgette) that had lodged in his brain from some book he had read ages ago. Poor Dad, he thought, poor old fellow – it hadn’t been any kind of life at all, he considered, the last decade. Maybe it was a blessing, a blessing to the five women who had looked after him all those years, feeding him, dressing him, cleaning him, moving him about the house like a potted plant. There was a little consolation, however, Lorimer thought, in the time they had spent together the other day, when he had held his father’s hand, just the two of them alone, feeling his dry, clean hand in his and sensing the slight responsive squeeze. Some comfort in that.