by William Boyd
He had forgotten: a long-mooted Sunday lunch and he had a horrible feeling it coincided with Barbuda’s half-term or similar exeat. He had noticed a distinct increase of the Barbuda element in his dates with Stella and suspected she was trying to improve lover-daughter relationships. The lowering of spirit he experienced on hearing her voice told him something else too: it was time to bring the affair with Stella Bull to a decent and humane end.
Chapter 17
Dymphna’s journalist friend was called Bram Wiles and he had said he was more than happy to have his brains picked. Consequently, Lorimer had arranged to meet him in the Matisse at midday where and when Lorimer was duly present, his habitual fifteen minutes early in a booth at the rear reading the Guardian, when he felt the shudder of someone sitting down on the bench opposite.
‘Shite of a day’ Marlobe said, filling his pipe with a blunt finger. ‘Your motor looks desperate.’ Lorimer agreed: there had been a thick frost and the harsh wind had risen again. Moreover, the previous night’s combination of rain and freeze seemed to have encouraged the rust to spread on his Toyota, exponentially like bacteria multiplying in a petri dish, and it was now almost completely orange.
Marlobe lit his pipe with great spittley suckings and blowings, turning the immediate area a blurry bluey grey He inhaled his pungent pipe smoke deep into his lungs, Lorimer noticed, as if he were smoking a cigarette.
‘Your Kentish daffodil grower doesn’t stand a monkey’s in this weather.’
‘I’m afraid I’m expecting someone,’ Lorimer said.
‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘I’m having a sort of meeting. He’ll need to sit where you are.’
The sullen Romanian waitress slid his cappuccino across the table at him, making sure some of the foam lapped over the side and pooled in the saucer.
‘What you want?’ she asked Marlobe.
‘Sorry darling.’ Marlobe bared his teeth at her. ‘I’m not stopping long.’ He turned back to Lorimer. ‘Whereas… Whereas your Dutchman is sitting pretty.’
‘Really?’
‘State subsidies. Three guilder per bloom. Your Kentman and your Dutchman are not on a level playing field in the world of daffs.’
This was clearly nonsense but Lorimer did not feel like arguing with Marlobe so he said, vaguely, ‘The weather’s bound to improve.’
Marlobe gave a high screeching laugh at this and banged the tabletop fiercely with his palm.
‘That’s what they said at Dunkirk in 1940. And where did it get them? Tell me this, do you think von Rundstedt stood in the turret of his Panzerkampfwagen and wondered if perhaps it would be a bit milder tomorrow? Eh? Eh?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘That’s the problem with this country. Looking on the bright side. Always looking on the stinking bright side. It’s an illness, a sickness. That’s why this nation is on its knees. On its knees in the gutter looking for scraps.’
A boyish-looking young man approached their booth and said to Marlobe, ‘Are you Lorimer Black? I’m Bram Wiles.’
‘No, I’m Lorimer Black,’ Lorimer said quickly. He had asked the Spanish duenna waitress to direct anyone asking for him to the booth.
Marlobe stood up slowly and glared at Bram Wiles with overt hostility.
‘All fucking right, mate. No hurry. We got all fucking day.’
Wiles visibly flinched and backed off. He had a long blond fringe brushed straight down over his forehead to meet the rims of his round black spectacles. He looked about fourteen.
Marlobe, with even more deliberate, challenging slowness, edged out of the booth and then stood blocking entry for a while as he relit his pipe, matchbox clamped over the bowl, huffing and puffing, and then moved off in a vortexing whirl of smoke, like some warlock in a movie, giving Lorimer the thumbs-up sign.
‘Nice talking to you. Cheers, pal.’
Wiles sat down, coughing, and flapped his hands.
‘Local character,’ Lorimer explained, managing to attract the attention of the sullen Romanian and order another coffee. Bram Wiles had a small goatee but his facial hair was so fine and white-blond that it was only visible at a range of two to three feet. Lorimer often wondered about grown men with long fringes – what did they think was the effect as they ran the comb down their foreheads, spreading their hair flat across their brow? Did they think they looked good, he wondered, did they think it made them more attractive and appealing?
Wiles may have looked like a fourth-former but his mind was sharp and acute enough. Lorimer simply laid all the facts out before him, Wiles asking all the right questions. Lorimer did not speculate or air his own hunches or suspicions, merely told the story of the Fedora Palace affair as it had unfolded. At one stage Wiles took out a notebook and jotted down the relevant names.
‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, I must say’ Wiles considered. ‘I’ll make a few calls, check a few records.
We may stumble across a clue.’ He put away his pen. ‘If there is something hot then I can write about it, yeah? That’s understood. It would be my story, to place where I wanted.’
‘In principle,’ Lorimer said cautiously, in the face of this freelance zeal. ‘Let’s see what we get first. My job maybe at stake.’
‘Don’t worry’ Wiles said cheerfully ‘I wouldn’t implicate you in any way. I always protect my sources.’ He looked at his notes. ‘What about this Rintoul fellow?’
‘I think Gale-Harlequin are suing him. I’d go easy with him, if I were you. Bit of a wide boy.’
‘Right. Point taken.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘So, how was Tenerife?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dymphna told me you and she had a few days there.’
‘Did she? Oh. Yeah, it was… you know, nice.’
‘Lucky bastard,’ Wiles said, ruefully. ‘I always rather fancied Dymphna.’
Maybe if you changed your hairstyle you might stand more of a chance, Lorimer thought, and then felt a little ashamed at his lack of charity – Wiles was doing him a favour after all, and only because of his unrequited love for Dymphna.
‘We’re just, you know, good friends,’ Lorimer said, not wanting to close any doors in Wiles’s amatory life.
‘Nothing special.’
‘That’s what they all say.’ Wiles shrugged, his eyes sad behind his round frames. ‘I’ll get back to you. Thanks for the coffee.’
77. The World’s First Loss Adjuster. The very first policy of life insurance was written in England on the 18th June 1853. A man, one William Gibbons, insured his life for the sum of 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence for one year. He paid a premium of eight per cent and sixteen underwriters signed the contract. Gibbons died on the 20th May the following year, some four weeks short of the period covered in the insurance policy, and his bereaved family duly submitted a claim. What happened?
The underwriters refused to pay up. They did this on the grounds that a year – strictly defined – is twelve times four weeks – twelve times twenty-eight days – and therefore on the basis of this calculation William Gibbons had in fact lived longer than the ‘strictly defined’ year he had insured his life for, and had thus ‘survived the term’.
What I want to know, Hogg used to say, is the name of the man who came up with that calculation to define a year. Who was the clever devil who decided that the way out of this mess was to strictly define a year? Because whoever it was who decided that a ‘year’ was twelve times twenty-eight days was, in fact, the world’s first loss adjuster. Such a person must have existed and, Hogg would insist, this person is the patron saint of our profession. He certainly disturbed the anticipations of the Gibbons family when they turned up to claim their 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer turned down Lupus Crescent and angled his body into the wind – a snell and scowthering one as they used to say in Inverness – and hauled his coat close about him. Marlobe was rig
ht, it was a shite of a day with dense, rushing clouds showing strong contrasts of luminous white and dark slatey grey What was happening to the weather? Where was bloody spring? He felt the wind, or the tiny grains of brick and street dust in the wind, make tears smart in his eyes and he turned his face to one side – to see David Watts’s Rolls-Lamborghini or whatever it was silently keeping pace with him, like a limo behind a mafia don out for a stroll. He stopped and the car stopped.
Terry smiled genially as he crossed the street towards him.
‘Mr Black. What a day, eh? David would like a word, if that’s all right’
Lorimer slid into the calfskin interior and smelt and touched the money implicit in every fixture and fitting. He sat back and let Terry cruise him from Pimlico to the south bank of the river. What in God’s name was going on now? On a Saturday, no less. They crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned on to the Albert Embankment, straight on through Stamford Street and Southwark Street, down Tooley Street, passing Tower Bridge to the left.
The car pulled up in front of a warehouse conversion a few hundred yards downstream from Tower Bridge. Tasteful gilt lettering affixed to the sooty brick told him they were at Kendrick Quay. The streets around were deserted of people but, curiously were full of parked cars. There were many new traffic indicators and signs, islands of neat landscaping, grouped laurels and phormiums, securely staked leafless saplings, newly cast bollards set in newly laid cobbles. And, on every angle of wall, a camera sat, high and out of reach.
Terry pressed a code into a keyboard mounted on a stainless steel plinth and glass doors slid open. They rode up in a lift smelling of glue and glazier’s putty to the fifth floor. Exiting the lift, Lorimer saw a printed sign with an arrow saying ‘Sheer Achimota’ and a weary, zemblan premonition took root in his head.
The ‘Sheer Achimota’ offices were empty apart from some unpacked computer hardware and an ebony desk with a slim, flat phone. The floor-to-ceiling plate-glass curtain wall on the river side looked out on the turbulent and ebbing Thames, the sky still wrought with its billowy juxtapositions of brightness and dark and, square in the middle of the view, was Tower Bridge’s silhouette, irritatingly too familiar an outline, Lorimer thought, and irritatingly too omnipresent. Working in this office for any length of time you would come to hate it: a cliché in your face all day.
Watts stood in a corner, jogging and swaying, headphones plugged in his ears, eyes tightly closed. Terry coughed several times to interrupt the reverie and left them alone. Watts fiddled with his boogie-pack and eventually managed to switch it off. He removed the left earphone and let it dangle on his chest. Lorimer noticed that his hairy cheek patch had gone.
‘Lorimer,’ Watts greeted him with some enthusiasm. ‘What do you think, man?’
‘Very panoramic.’
‘No. “Sheer Achimota”. That’s the name of the management company, the record label, the new band and probably the new album.’
‘Catchy.’
Watts roamed the room towards him. ‘Fucking amazing, man. I sent Terry up to that place in Camden you told me about. He came back with eight carrier bags of C D s. I listened to African music non-stop for… for seventy-eight hours. And, this’ll finish you, guess what?’
‘You’re going to Africa?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Who?’
‘Lucifer.’ He tapped his left shoulder, tapped his left cheek. ‘Old Satan got pissed off and left.’ Watts was close to him now and Lorimer could see his eyes were bright. Lorimer wondered if he was on anything or if it was simply the relief of the recently exorcized.
‘Thanks to you, Lorimer.’
‘No, I can’t take –’
‘– Without you, I’d never have heard Sheer Achimota. Without you I wouldn’t have got that ju-ju working for me. Strong African ju-ju scared the shit out of Satan. Thanks to you, Sheer Achimota did it.’
Lorimer checked the room’s exits. ‘Whatever it takes, Mr Watts.’
‘Oi. Call me David. Now, I want you to come and work for me, run Sheer Achimota, sort of chief executive type kind of thing.’
‘I’ve already got a job, um, David. But thanks very much.’
‘Quit it. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Hundred grand a year.’
‘It’s very kind. But –’ But I have a life to live.
‘Of course I’m still suing bastard Fortress Sure. But that’s nothing against you. I’ve told them to say nothing against Lorimer Black.’
‘I recommended they pay you.’
‘Sod the money. It’s the mental wear and tear. I was out of my mind with worry, what with the devil on my shoulder, and all. Someone’s got to pay for that stress-load.’
Lorimer thought it best to break things to him easily. ‘I could hardly leave my job and come and work for you if you are suing the company I was representing in the case.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well…Not ethical?’
‘Where’s your home planet, Lorimer? Anyway, no hurry, think about it. It’ll be cool. I’ll pop in from time to time. We could hang out.’ He refitted the left earplug. ‘Could you send Terry in? You can find your own way home, can’t you? Looking forward to our association, as they say.’
In a pig’s ear, Lorimer thought, as he trudged the deserted streets looking for a taxi, and wondering vaguely if ‘Sheer Achimota’ might exorcize his own set of demons and set some powerful African ju-ju to work on his behalf for a change.
397. De Nerval’s Tray. There is no doubt that de Nerval’s love for Jenny Colon was overwrought and obsessive. Jenny Colon was an actress, and Gérard used to go to the theatre night after night to see her. She had been married, in Gretna Green of all places, to another actor called Lafont. That marriage ended and she had a protracted liaison with a Dutch banker called Hoppe and many other men before de Nerval arrived in her life. Jenny Colon was described as a ‘ type rond et lunaire’. Lunaire ? My dictionary only supplies ‘lunar’ and the name of a flower, moonwort. Lunar… That speaks to me, naturally enough, of madness. Enough to drive a man mad.
De Nerval and Jenny Colon started a love affair but it was not long-lived. It ended, according to my biography, when de Nerval, surprising her one day, lunged at her trying to kiss her lips, her lunary lips. Startled, Jenny reflexively pushed him away and Gérard, trying to stay on his feet, clumsily reached out for support and accidentally broke a tray she owned, a precious tray. The relationship never recovered after the silly incident of the broken tray. A few weeks later Jenny left him and married her flautist. But a tray? To let a tray be the final straw, the breaking point. Who knows what deeper motives existed, but I can’t help feeling that more could have been done, that de Nerval could have done more to bring about a reconciliation. It seems to me that Gérard de Nerval didn’t try hard enough – no lovers should let a tray, however precious, come between them.
The Book of Transfiguration
He filled the afternoon with the mundane business of modern life: paying bills, cleaning his home, shopping for food, tidying things away, visiting launderette and dry-cleaner, retrieving money from automated teller machine, eating a sandwich – banal activities that had the curious property of being immensely satisfying and reassuring, but only after they were over, Lorimer realized. He telephoned his mother and learned that his father was to be cremated on Monday afternoon at Putney Vale crematorium. His mother said there was no need for him to attend if he was too busy and he had felt hurt and almost insulted at her needless consideration. He told her he would be there.
It grew dark early and the wind angrily rattled the window frames of the front room. He opened a Californian Cabernet, put some meditative Monteverdi on the C D player, then changed it for Bola Folarin and Accra 57. Bola was renowned for his excessive use of drummers, utilizing every combination known to Western groups but supplementing them with the dry bass of the talking drums of the West African hinterland and the staccato contralto of the tom-toms. Something in those atavistic rhythms
combined with the wine made him restless, made him indulge in a fit, a seizure of pure painful longing – ‘Sheer Achimota’ at work, he wondered? –and, spontaneously, he hauled on his coat and scarf, corked the wine bottle and jammed it in a pocket, and headed out into the wild night to find his rust-boltered Toyota.
In Chalk Farm the wind seemed even stronger, explained by Chalk Farm being higher, he supposed, and the lime tree branches above his parked car creaked and thrashed in the gale-force gusts. He swigged Cabernet and stared at the large bay windows of what he took to be the Malinverno flat. There was a kind of fretted oriental screen that obscured the bottom third of the window pane, but the head and shoulders were visible of anyone who stood up. He could see Gilbert Malinverno pacing about – indeed, he had been watching him for the last half hour as he practised his juggling (perhaps the musical had been abandoned?), flinging handfuls of multicoloured balls up into the air and changing effortlessly the patterns and directions of their flow. It was a real talent, he grudgingly conceded. Then Malinverno had stopped practising and from the focus of his gaze Lorimer assumed someone else had entered the room. He had been pacing to and fro gesticulating wildly for ten minutes now and at first Lorimer had imagined this was some form of juggler’s exercise, but then had concluded, after a series of angry jabbing pointings, that Malinverno was in fact shouting at someone, and that someone was, doubtless, Flavia.
Lorimer wanted to hurl his wine bottle through the window and take the brute on and break his bones… He gulped at his Cabernet and was wondering how much longer he could realistically spend out here in his car when he saw the front door of the house open and Flavia run down the steps and go striding off down the hill. In a second Lorimer was out of his car and closing on her.
She turned a corner before he could reach her and entered a small parade of shops, going into a brightly lit 24-hour supermarket called Emporio Mondiale. Lorimer followed her in, after only the briefest of hesitations, but she was nowhere to be seen. Blinking in the brilliant white light, he carefully checked a few of the labyrinth of tall aisles – teetering battlements of sanitary napkins and toilet rolls, kitchen towels, disposable nappies and dog biscuits. Then he saw her bent over an ice-cream freezer, rummaging in its lower depths, and backed off, a little breathless, then composed himself, but when he advanced forward again she had gone.