Ordinary Thunderstorms

by William Boyd

  17

  THE BATH WAS IDEALLY hot and full enough so that the bubbles came up to his chin. Ingram wallowed, ran his hands over his naked body and felt himself both relax and anticipate. Today was his birthday – he was fifty-nine years old – and he was about to enjoy his birthday present to himself: a most agreeable way, he considered, of entering his sixtieth year.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Meredith had said, appalled, seeing him in a suit and tie on a Saturday morning. ‘I thought we were having lunch.’

  ‘There’s a crisis, darling,’ he had said. ‘Crisis meetings. One of those ghastly days. I’ll be back by six, promise. Oh, and I have to see Pa, as well.’

  ‘Don’t be late,’ she had said. ‘Everyone’ll be here at seven.’

  Ingram picked up a floating sponge and squeezed hot water over his head. This was what he needed after the grim affair that had been Philip Wang’s funeral last week. Putney Vale Crematorium, even on a summer’s day, summed up everything in the word ‘joyless’, Ingram thought. Philip’s mother – a tiny, frail woman, weeping and uncomprehending – had flown over from Hong Kong with his sister. There had been a superb turnout from the boys and girls in the Calenture lab at Oxford. Not such a good showing from head office but then Philip wasn’t really known to them, other than by name and reputation. Ingram had written and read the eulogy himself, concentrating, naturally enough, on his own relationship with Philip. How, in the early days of Calenture-Deutz’s growth, Philip had virtually single-handedly developed the anti-hay fever drug Bynogol in pill form and nasal inhaler – Calenture-Deutz’s first real earner – and the breakthrough discoveries made during that Bynogol process (Ingram was always a bit unsure about the chemistry) had led Philip directly on to evolve Zembla-1, and its subsequent derivatives, into what should prove to be the world’s first truly effective asthma drug. How had he put it at the funeral? ‘Philip’s death was brutal and senseless but everything about his life was the exact opposite. We have lost Philip but the world’s gain will be incalculable.’ Quite nicely phrased, he thought – almost aphoristically balanced: death and life, loss and gain.

  Ingram leaned forward and ran some more hot water into the bath. He remembered that day when Philip had come in to his office, had come up from Oxford to London at very short notice, wanting to talk, he said, about asthma. He was visibly excited and Ingram kept having to tell him to slow down and repeat himself. He had been testing some antigens, he said, tiny spores that provoke the allergic response that is hay fever, with a view to improving Bynogol. In one of the tests he had used some pollen from a type of magnolia that he had collected on his last trip to see his mother in Hong Kong. To his astonishment, this antigen, meant to provoke a hay-fever attack – swelling, mucus, irritation and so forth – had instead produced the opposite effect. Rather than generating the secretion of toxic Th2 cells of a classic allergic attack, benign Th1 cells were secreted in their place. He started talking very fast at this stage about histamines, leukotrienes and IgE antibodies and Ingram told him to stop.

  ‘Words of one syllable, please, Philip,’ he said. ‘I’m not a scientist. What’s all this to do with asthma?’

  Philip drew breath and began to explain. No one really knows why there is a worldwide epidemic of asthma, he said. There are 20 million sufferers in the USA, 5 million in Great Britain, tens of millions of others in the developed world (Ingram was impressed by these numbers). There was a line of thought that saw asthma, an inflammation stimulated by an allergy, as some kind of malfunction of our prehistoric immune system. The immune system defences of early man were meant to be triggered by ancient organisms that no longer exist – organisms that flourished in the primordial mud – but were now being activated by pollens, mites, feline dust, air conditioning, bright sunlight, newspapers, aerosols, cigarette smoke, perfumes, etcetera. Asthma sufferers, in other words, were victims of our malfunctioning, prehistoric immuno-defence systems.

  ‘What is so intriguing,’ Philip continued, his voice rising a register, ‘is that the angiosperm—’

  ‘Angiosperm?’

  ‘Flowering plant. The plant that I used, the Zembla flower—’

  ‘Zembla flower?’

  ‘The magnolia from Hong Kong. Locally it’s known as the Zembla flower. Anyway, this magnolia’s pollen spores are present in the fossil records of the Cretaceous era.’ He spread his hands – it was so obvious.

  ‘Meaning?’ Ingram asked his third question.

  ‘Meaning that this magnolia was one of the very, very earliest angiosperms. That it, if you like, seems to produce a “memory” response in our immune system, the immune system “remembers” this trigger from the Cretaceous past, making it react properly. Nice Thi cells not nasty Th2.’ He paused and when he spoke again, his voice trembled. ‘I think we may, just possibly, have found a way of controlling bronchial asthma.’

  ‘So what do you want?’ Ingram asked, carefully.

  ‘Money,’ Philip said, faintly apologetically, ‘to see if there’s some way of replicating the effect of this Hong Kong Zembla flower on asthma sufferers. Set up trials, start testing on animals. Go to phase one, in other words.’

  Ingram thought: all those millions upon millions of asthma sufferers … If Calenture-Deutz could fabricate a drug that they would be happy to use … Anything Calenture-Deutz could do to alleviate their misery had to be worth pursuing. So he had provided Philip with his necessary initial funding and the Zembla development had begun in earnest. They applied to the FDA for an Inaugural New Drug Licence and it was granted. Then to his complete astonishment, about three months later, Ingram had received a call from Alfredo Rilke with an offer to buy 20 per cent of Calenture-Deutz stock and pump real investment into the development of Zembla. Ingram had never asked Alfredo how he had learnt of Zembla’s existence but it seemed both a prudent and lucrative idea. So Calenture-Deutz and Rilke Pharmaceutical had become partners.

  There was a polite rap on the bathroom door and Phyllis came in. She was wearing a lemon-yellow cardigan and chocolate-brown slacks.

  ‘How are we doing, Jack?’ she asked. She was a small, plump, full-breasted woman with a great quiff of reddish blonde hair swept up in a frosted, billow-effect around her pretty face. ‘Out we get – turn into a jelly fish, you will.’ She had a deep voice for a small woman – probably an ex-smoker, Ingram thought – one that he found made her cockney accent more raucous and agreeably lewd, somehow.

  He stepped meekly out of the bath and she advanced on him with a towel and began to dry him.

  ‘Someone’s growing a little pot belly, Jack-me-lad,’ she said, patting his stomach. ‘Hello, hello, what’ve we got here, then?’

  Ingram counted out the four 50-pound notes and laid them discreetly on Phyllis’s dresser. It seemed unspeakably cheap for the thirty minutes or so of intense sexual pleasure he had enjoyed with her. He checked his hair in the mirror – he looked a little flushed, still – and adjusted his tie-knot.

  ‘That was wonderful, Phyllis,’ he said, adding another £50. ‘Tremendous.’

  ‘You can fuck me any day you want, Jack, darling,’ she said, slipping naked out of the bed. She gave him a kiss and squeezed his balls, making him flinch, then laugh. ‘Ta muchly,’ she said, picking up the money. ‘Close the door behind you, Jack dear, there’s a love.’ She put the notes in a large wallet. ‘Give us a bell any time – don’t forget, twenty-four hours notice.’

  On the Tube back to Victoria, Ingram thought back, with nostalgic pleasure, over the various sex acts he’d performed with Phyllis that morning and marvelled, as he always did when he left her, that he’d found her at all. For five years before Phyllis he had enjoyed the professional services of Nerys, a Welsh woman, with a thick, singing Welsh accent, who had a couple of rooms in Soho. When she told him she was going back to Swansea to look after her grandchildren Ingram felt some key component of his life was being removed. ‘Don’t worry, lovely,’ she had said, ‘I’ll find you a perfect substitute,’ and it
was Nerys who had introduced him to Phyllis. Networking, he supposed, everyone did it … He kept his Nerys name – ‘Jack’ – and the relationship, such as it was, flourished and endured – perhaps even better than it had been with Nerys.

  How come? he wondered. He didn’t want to delve too deeply into the reasons why he found the Neryses and the Phyllises of this world so sexually alluring. He wasn’t a fool: he knew absolutely that on one level it was all about class. It was because they were working class – because they were ‘common’ – that he was excited by them: the terrible decor of their rooms, their funny names, their culture, their accents, their grammar, their language. He suspected also that it was something to do with his schooldays, his prep school, the onset of puberty and all that – not wanting to delve too deeply … Didn’t someone say that what attracted you sexually as a thirteen-year-old haunted you all your adult life? A friend’s mother, an aunt, a sibling’s nanny, an au pair, an under-matron, a girl working in the school kitchen … What set these time bombs ticking in your sexual psyche? How could you know when and how they would detonate?

  He stepped out of the train on to the platform – he took careful precautions on his journeys to and from Phyllis – Shoreditch not being somewhere he frequented, normally. Luigi parked in a square not far from the station. Ingram would say he had a meeting that would last a couple of hours and he wasn’t to be disturbed. He’d walk to the Underground station on a circuitous route and always return to the car by a different one.

  He paused on the station concourse for a second and briefly closed his eyes, remembering Phyllis’s generous, well-padded body, her gentle mockery. Sex was fun, a bit of a lark, robustly uncomplicated – no need for PRO-Vyril’s stealthy, chemical helping hand. He headed out of the station, wondering if she ever thought about him after he’d left – her ‘Jack’ – and if she ever speculated about who he really was (he took no ID with him, another precaution, just cash). No, he thought, this was the punter’s typical, sad fantasy – all she wanted was her 200 quid because another ‘Jack’ was due. He wasn’t that vain, that naïve – thank god! Still, sometimes he wondered …

  Her husband, Wesley – he knew his name – was a despatcher for a minicab firm, absent about twelve hours a day, and Phyllis had decided to make the family home in Shoreditch generate some income while he was at work. Only once had he met another client, coming to the house as he was leaving – another man his age, grey-haired, in his fifties, his whole demeanour reeking of upper-middle-classdom: the dark suit and banded tie, the covert coat, the briefcase. A QC? A senior civil servant? Politician? Banker? Harley Street doctor? They had ignored each other utterly, as if they were both invisible – ghosts. But it was a jolt: a tangible reminder that Phyllis sold her time and her body to others. How did we find our Phyllises, he wondered? What led us to these accommodating professionals?

  Luigi was waiting with the car in Eccleston Square.

  ‘You have one call, signore,’ he said, handing Ingram his mobile phone. ‘Signor Rilke.’

  Ingram called back. ‘Alfredo, you’re here – wonderful. I was expecting you on Monday.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I had a meeting,’ Ingram improvised quickly. ‘I had to see a doctor. About my son,’ he added, taking the heat off himself.

  ‘Is that your homosexual son?’

  ‘Yes – my “gay” son. All very troublesome and complex.’ Ingram rather wished he hadn’t embarked on this lie.

  ‘Has he got AIDS?’

  ‘No, no – nothing like that. Anyway, let’s—’

  ‘I’m at the Firststopotel, Cromwell Road.’

  ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  Alfredo Rilke only stayed in chain hotels – Marriott, Hilton, Schooner Inns, Novotel – but he always took an entire floor and however many rooms that floor contained. When he arrived, Ingram was shown up to the fifth floor and one of Alfredo’s youthful associates – a young man in jeans with an earpiece and a thin stick-microphone at his mouth – led him down a featureless corridor to one of the rooms and left him there with a smile and a small bow from the waist.

  Alfredo Rilke opened the door himself before Ingram could knock. They embraced, diffidently, more a clasping of the upper arms and a leaning in to each other than anything else – their faces did not touch – Rilke patting him reassuringly on a shoulder blade and steering him into the dark room, curtains drawn.

  Rilke was a tall, heavily built man in his early sixties, bespectacled, smiling, avuncular, bald with a neat semicircular ruff of unnaturally dark hair that started above one ear and circumnavigated the back of his head to the other. He moved slowly and deliberately as if he were on the verge of frailty. It was an illusion: Ingram had seen him playing energetic tennis in Grand Cayman and the US Virgin Islands, hitting the ball with real force. But off the tennis court he feigned this quasi-senility – a way of reassuring and disarming his colleagues, rivals and competitors, Ingram supposed. Alfredo Rilke seemed like a rapidly ageing man – exactly what he wanted people to think.

  ‘Sit down, Ingram, sit down.’

  Ingram did, noting that the bedroom had been converted, somewhat half-heartedly, into a sitting room – the bed pushed back to the side wall, some chairs and a coffee table added.

  ‘Help yourself to a drink, Ingram,’ Rilke said, opening the door of the mini-bar. ‘I have to make one phone call. I’ll be two minutes.’

  Rilke went into the next-door room and Ingram poured himself a tonic water, and sat down, waiting. He knew a certain amount about Alfredo Rilke, but he always felt he knew only half of what he really should. He’d tried to find out more, had other people try on his behalf to find out more, but the story remained frustratingly the same, fundamentally unchanging, full of gaps and unanswered questions – over the years very little detail had been added to the Rilke biography.

  Alfredo’s father, Gunther Rilke, had arrived in Uruguay (from Switzerland, by all accounts, though all that was very vague also) in 1946. He almost immediately married a Uruguayan, Asuncion Salgueiro, the only daughter of the owner of a small company producing fungicides and fertilisers, servicing the Latin American coffee industry. Alfredo was born in 1947 and his brother, Cesario, in 1950. Alfredo Rilke took over his father-in-law’s company in 1970, Cesario having died in a plane crash in 1969, and changed the name to Rilke Farmacéutico S.A.

  He made his first fortune in the following decade with a cheap contraceptive pill and a powerful anti-depressant, surviving a series of lawsuits for patent infringement brought against him by Roche, Searle, Syntex and others.

  Rilke himself left Uruguay and became permanently nonresident in 1982, choosing to live, henceforth, on board a series of large, regularly changed yachts that permanently cruised the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, within easy two-hour reach of a dozen airports and the company jet. Rilke Pharmaceutical was born at that moment and a series of smaller pharmaceutical companies were steadily acquired in the USA, France and Italy. By the late 1990s Rilke Pharma was listed as one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the world.

  And that was really about all he or anyone knew, Ingram thought, dissatisfied. Perhaps that was what happened when you lived ‘nowhere’ for a quarter of a century – you became very hard to pin down, in every sense of the expression. Except that the pharmaceutical world knew that patents on Rilke Pharma’s big drugs, the blockbusters, that provided the massive cash flow for the continued acquisitions – the oral contraceptive, an ACE inhibitor, a retroviral and a new series of ‘me-too’ anti-depressants – were all coming to the end of their licence period. Rilke Pharma needed a new blockbuster drug and that was when they had approached Calenture-Deutz and offered to invest heavily in the clinical trials and research of Zembla-4 …

  Ingram looked up as Rilke returned – he was apologising generously as he came through the door, carrying a file from which he spread documents on the coffee table. They were full-colour, mock-up, two-page advertorials. Each page ha
d in bold type the message: ‘AN END TO ASTHMA?’. Ingram scanned through them: the usual bland advertorial pap – ‘Renowned scientists in our research laboratories’; ‘The struggle to rid the world of this debilitating disease’ – and pictures of serious-looking men in white coats peering into microscopes, holding up test tubes, healthy people enjoying enviable lifestyles on ranches and at the seaside. The pages concluded with heartfelt assurances of the continued fight against these chronic ailments (money no object) threatening the good life. It was all subtext. Here and there the name ‘Zembla-4’ cropped up. No claims were made, but the promise was vaguely implicit: just give us time, we and our handsome, white-coated scientists are working on it.

  ‘Very impressive,’ Ingram said, ‘but a little premature, no?’ It had not escaped his notice that each advertisement featured the familiar logo: the red-circled, blue, scribbled ‘R’ of Rilke Pharmaceuticals. As far as Ingram was aware Calenture-Deutz still owned Zembla and all its derivatives, one through four. He decided to say nothing.

  ‘You may be right,’ Rilke said in his usual humble, non-confrontational manner. ‘It was just that Burton told me that Zembla-4 was close to ready. Third stage clinical trials complete. The documentation ready to be sent in to the FDA at Rockville … We’ve found in the past that an early, vague, very vague, advertorial campaign – with the usual brief-summary caveats, of course,’ he pointed to a dense inch-thick footnote at the end of each advertorial page, ‘can make a significant difference. Everything seems to speed up, we’ve found.’

  ‘Burton told you that, did he?’ Ingram said, a little stiffly. ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Keegan and de Freitas – I’d like them off the board.’

  ‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid, Ingram,’ Rilke said, with an ingénue’s smile of apology.

  It was at moments like these that Ingram found it helpful to remind himself that Alfredo Rilke had enriched the Fryzer family to the tune of some £100 million. It made bitter pills very easy to swallow. He changed his tone.