by Bill James
‘Instead of saying Pre-Raphaelites she’d refer to them as the Pre-Raphaelites, like “fail”. Maybe she was getting at them. I’m not certain. Or just being clumsy to annoy. Was your partner interested in galleries?’
‘I didn’t ask him. He never came with me.’
Manse was delighted to hear that ‘him’ and ‘he’. He would never object in general to same-sex arrangements, which there were many of these days, doing no harm. But, obviously, he would prefer Naomi wanted a man. ‘I’m wondering how it was when you discussed an exhibition. You’d say, “I think I’ll go to a gallery today.” And he’d reply, would he, “Right, till later then, Naomi”? I have the children. Sybil sees them now and again, of course. There’s a definite fondness there, both ways, her to them, them to her. Often she’ll buy them presents, not just at Christmas and birthdays. Have you got children?’
‘He didn’t want them.’
‘Did you? Is that why you broke up?’
She swallowed most of her tea. ‘Who really knows why couples break up – even themselves?’
He considered that very deep. ‘True,’ Manse said. ‘Luckily, my sister will look after the children when I come to London. I can almost always get away for a short while.’
‘Is she fixed up with someone else?’ Naomi asked.
‘Who?’
‘Sybil.’
‘I think she’s got a roofer, or something like that. Most likely he’s doing all right. There’s a lot of rain in North Wales and big winds off the mountains and the sea, plus plenty of slate. I don’t know if he’s insured. They go for metal ladders these days, not wood. How about your ex-partner?’
‘I don’t keep in touch.’
‘Is that because you –’
‘No, I don’t keep in touch.’
‘Are you afraid that if there’s contact you might want things to restart?’
‘When it’s finished it’s finished.’
In some ways Manse liked this. It was another part of her clear and straight outlook. And it should mean this ex-partner would not come nosing about, as long as he understood that when it was finished it was finished. But her words also reached him as blunt and worrying. They meant that if he lost her she’d be gone for keeps. Yes, he needed to be very careful with Naomi. On the other hand, he had to take some risks going after her or she’d never be his to lose.
Chapter Fifteen
2009
Of course, Harpur knew a solo intervention at the charity shop could be regarded as mad – and would be by Rockmain and, probably, Iles: culpably mad. In fact, if Iles had attempted that kind of thing himself, Harpur would have done all he could to stop him, including any necessary brutality. Most probably, though, Iles would not try it. He’d longed to be assured by Rockmain that risk was not required – and had been assured.
Harpur found Rockmain’s jubilant decoding of the phone talk off track and dangerously optimistic. But, Rockmain was the trained and experienced psychologist. The Home Office routinely sent for him to do his mind readings at this kind of crisis. That must mean his record showed he generally got things right. Hadn’t he described how the Home Office came to beg his intervention, and how he’d agreed with gush and conscientiousness? Who was Harpur to disagree with him – and, incidentally, with Iles? Harpur did ask himself the question, and asked it often. He got harsh and deflating answers. This didn’t stop him listing in his head the points where he thought Rockmain had things haywire this time.
1. ‘I want you to fuck off,’ John had replied to the negotiator’s call for ‘closeness’ between them. ‘I don’t want closeness. I want you to fuck off.’ Rockmain believed the way John picked up and stuck to the negotiator’s words revealed a crucial weakness. The word was ‘closeness’ here; elsewhere, ‘natural’, ‘precaution’, ‘circumstances’, ‘as a matter of fact’, and so on. In Rockmain’s guru view, this copy-cat dependence proved John realized he did not control things and must always let the negotiator direct their discussion, and, ultimately, John’s actions. He was boxed in by the negotiator’s words, as much as by the siege force backing him. Rockmain thought John knew it and knew, also, that his next step had to be out of the building with his hands up, followed by the unharmed hostages.
To Harpur, though, these chat extracts said John wanted to take the negotiator on and defeat him – defeat him in the most flagrant and humiliating style by fixing on his own words and shredding their sense. He turned them into a joke. The negotiator says the armed police outside are ‘only a precaution, believe me.’ John seems to agree. ‘Yes, I believe you.’ But what he believes is enormously different from what the negotiator wants him to believe. ‘Yes, I believe you. They’re only a precaution in case you want to shoot my head off.’
And, on the matter of closeness, John’s reply meant something like this. ‘Closeness? Not exactly: I want your distance, your absence.’ John was saying: ‘Stuff closeness. If you’re after closeness you’ll have to come in and get me. And there’ll be big collateral damage to those in here with me when you do. We’re what you could call very close.’ Obviously, he knew the huge, surrounding battalion was not going to fuck off until they’d got him, one way or the other. He could watch it grow and savour its fixedness. He was meant to watch it grow and savour its fixedness. He couldn’t hope. But he might choose to go out blazing away.
2. ‘Unfavourably.’ This Rockmain regarded as the most significant word of the lot. ‘A resolution is possible, John. We mustn’t allow things to turn out unfavourably,’ says the negotiator. And John replies: ‘What does unfavourably mean? Unfavourably means me dead, and maybe others, doesn’t it, Olly?’ Rockmain seemed to think this response showed John was ready to see reality. He couldn’t be put off by soft, vague words like ‘unfavourably’. But it also might have indicated he had become more formidable, more combative, more of a menace. Then, though, in Rockmain’s opinion, he abruptly ceased to be formidable at all. He hinted that the hostages might be already dead. Rockmain decided this was a ‘tease’ and a stupid, panicky one, because the hostages, alive, provided his only real strength. Rockmain deduced John was ‘coming apart, is already a near wreck’. He seemed intelligent enough to recognize this and would soon cave in. He did not want things to end ‘unfavourably’, in the hard and bloody sense of that diplomatic word.
Harpur agreed with part of this analysis – the part saying that John could see exactly and realistically how things were, and wouldn’t be lulled by the lingo of fudge. His ‘tease’, as Rockmain called it, was, yes, a retaliation against the bleakness of his prospects clearly, unflinchingly faced. Perhaps the ‘tease’ was foolish and unconvincing. There had been no sound of shots to suggest any hostage had been killed. Rockmain forecast that John would see the absurdity of his resistance and capitulate. Harpur feared John saw the absurdity of his resistance and might be pushed into the actions of crazed despair, an attempt to turn the absurdity into doomed valour – going down with the ship, falling on his sword, swallowing the cyanide, and other brave and noble terms.
3. ‘A fugue-like progress,’ Rockmain said. Harpur had an idea what a fugue was: a starting melody in a piece of music would be picked up later in the work and get interwoven with a new melody. Perhaps this could reasonably be applied to the John–negotiator exchanges. Yes, perhaps. It was the word ‘progress’ that Harpur couldn’t swallow, though.
4. Rockmain thought John must realize the police needn’t worry much about an inquiry followed by blame if they shot him. Everyone would recognize he was a threat and had to be ‘made safe’. Rockmain believed John wouldn’t choose to be made safe by getting wiped out. Harpur couldn’t see how Rockmain convinced himself of this. The logic seemed to stop, to be replaced by wishfulness, and the dodgy assumption that John must see things as Rockmain saw them.
But would an experienced, star psychologist make that kind of vast, egocentric and elementary error? Harpur dropped into confusion. He could understand, though, how Rockmain convinced Iles. Obsessed by a past disaster, t
he ACC had yearned to be told the siege would work out peacefully. And this Rockmain conveniently and cleverly told him, with gobbledegook knobs on.
Chapter Sixteen
2007
Manse did what he’d promised himself earlier, and just before Naomi’s first visit to his home he mentioned the Pre-Raphaelite originals he had on the walls there. He tried to say it in a matter-of-fact, very, very unblaring way – in fact, he considered he gave it a total absence of blare. Conversational was the tone Manse aimed for. He had thought quite a bit about the actual words.
Early on he’d considered something like, ‘As chance would have it, I been able to bring together quite a few actual Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the result of a fortunate mateyness with an art dealer called Jack Lamb who by a wonderful slab of luck, Naomi, happens to be local. They hang in various rooms of the house and in the stairwell. The children as well as myself are extremely fond of them.’
He thought that by stating the pictures had come to him only via a couple of happy flukes, he wouldn’t seem big-headed and boastful to her. Big-headedness and boastfulness Manse truly despised. These remarks would make it sound like anyone could of built up this collection – as long as they loved the Pre-Raphaelites, obviously, and knew Jack. Then, if Manse brought the children in, it would give a sort of pleasant, family touch, and ‘extremely fond of’ might be what somebody would say about an old labrador or cat or battered but very much loved sitting-room couch, nothing high-falutin or swank-based. He felt pretty certain he’d come across that opening statement, ‘As chance would have it’, spoken by a woman at the golf club in just the chatty way he was after, or a character in some TV play about classy people, poised and very handy with phrases.
Of course, by the time Naomi came to Shale’s house she and he were pretty well established with each other –what many would refer to as ‘an item’, though Manse considered this quite a vulgar term, like comparing two people to something on a shopping list. The main purpose of the visit was not to show her the art but to meet Laurent and Matilda. This he regarded as an important move. When the children heard she had come all that distance from London in the train, they would understand it must be a serious carry-on, not a slight and temporary job.
Manse knew they’d behave OK when introduced to this new face. They always did with new faces. He told them he’d met Naomi in a gallery containing top grade Pre-Raphaelite works. He thought this helped the children realize that the relationship had true quality, and with an art side. Manse was sure it did. It had grown in a gradual but very sure manner. Laurent and Matilda knew the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ because Manse had often told them most of the paintings in the house came from that group. He also told them not to talk about the collection outside because you didn’t want some villain breaking in when the house was empty and taking the fucking lot in a van.
He drove the Jaguar down to the station to meet Naomi. The children was at school. The train journey gave Manse another of them cash problems, like with the poster-prints. Should he ask if he could pay for her ticket, first class, naturally? And again he decided no. He knew her much better now, didn’t he, and had a very strong idea she would be insulted if he offered. It could make her seem like freight he’d ordered being sent by rail. But she wanted to come to his home, and paying for her own ticket would prove this. That would most probably be as she considered it.
While he waited outside the station he tried once more to prepare his words about the art on the walls at home. He’d come to think that his first effort wouldn’t do. He could see a bad flaw in the comments about chance and luck, and he knew Naomi would spot it, also. In Mansel’s opinion she had quite a head on her. Possibly he would not of been attracted to her if not, despite her lovely looks and cleverness with fashion. The thing was, Manse had grown to realize that chance and luck wouldn’t be no use on their own. There needed to be money, and very good money, to buy the pictures from Jack Lamb. So, it would be stupid to pretend anyone might of got a collection of Pre-Raphaelites together as long as they bumped into him locally. Bumping into him wasn’t the main thing at all, nor the localness. Having enough moolah for that grasping, crooked bastard, Lamb, was.
Manse altered his art statement. In the car on their way to his house he said, ‘I forget whether I ever mentioned to you, Naomi, that, over the years, I been able to lay my hands on several original Pre-Raphaelite pix and I know you’ll be interested to see whether I’ve hung them in the best light and so on.’ He thought she’d decide he had only been able to afford the pictures in instalments, not a Mr Big splashing the loot around willy-nilly, but a Mr Little-by-little. In fact, because of the sodding prices Lamb wanted, it hadn’t been little-by-little but big-by-bloody-big. This way of describing things kept some of the luck idea in them words, ‘been able to lay my hands on’, which sounded like he saw a chance and grabbed it. That was as far as the luck part of it went, though. He wouldn’t overdo it.
He made sure he let Naomi seem the true expert on art, not himself, by saying he wanted her advice on how to hang the works in his property. Calling them by that slangy term ‘pix’ should prove he wasn’t stuck up about the pictures. He hoped she would not remember he’d bought a couple of posters himself on that first day together after the gallery, the Millais Ophelia and D.G. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. It had been just a move to make himself seem the same as her, really, so they could both leave the building carrying the prints rolled up in their cardboard containers. Obviously, he could not hang them in his home. They would of looked extremely production line against the genuine originals. That is, if they was genuine. You could never be completely certain when you was dealing with that sod, Jack Lamb. Manse had given the posters, still in the container, to a charity shop in the North Bewick district. The shop might get a tenner for them and send it to Africa to help beat the drought.
Naomi’s own property in London was nowhere near as big as Manse’s ex-St James’s rectory, but OK just the same, in Manse’s view. They’d gone there by taxi after that first visit to the gallery and shop and café. She had a flat in Ealing, which he regarded as generally speaking a very decent district for London. You could see people here walking to the shops without getting knife-mugged, at least in daylight. Naomi and Manse had certainly not made love in the flat on that opening visit. He would of regarded that as bad-mannered and rabbity, even though he guessed she might not of minded, and even expected it.
Manse had to consider what kind of life and trouble he could be drawing her into. That helped slow him. Although for most of the time he felt he wanted her long-term, moments came when he wondered whether that would be fair to Naomi. This was another reason not to hurry her. She seemed a gallery person. Also, she had a job as a consultant, she said, on a London ‘celebrity sheet’. He didn’t really grasp what that meant, but he thought she wouldn’t know much re the kind of filthy domain wars that could go on in streets, public parks and music festivals.
On a second trip to London to see her several weeks later matters changed. By then she’d had the posters she bought framed and they hung in her sitting room. Manse thought they looked reasonably all right, as far as prints could. It would be wrong and unkind for him to go on and on in his mind about them being naff. Clearly, he would never say to her that they was only copies. She had chosen white frames which suited the pictures damn well, helping to bring out their colours, especially blue, in the way frames should. Because of the happy and exciting time they had together on that second visit to her flat, the posters in the sitting room didn’t really matter, anyway.
That repeat visit could be regarded as the true start of things between them, he thought. Her trip now to his home could be seen as carrying matters quite a long way forward. He felt sure Naomi would like his home, the onetime rectory. The clergyman and his family who used to live in Manse’s house had been moved to a smaller place. The church found running this property too expensive. He thought there might be a bit of what might be called a parable about mo
dern Britain in that. The church could not afford the seven-bedroom house – lighting, heating, repairs, cleaning. A substances lord such as Manse, could. In some ways this saddened him. Many would regard the situation as a sign of bad decline. However, he had to admit he enjoyed owning the residence. Denzil Lake used to have a flat on the top floor, empty now. Manse hoped it might be really helpful for the children when they was older and maybe applying for jobs to have ‘St James’s Old Rectory’ as the address on their letters.
Usually, Manse felt he wouldn’t want them to follow him in the kind of career he had, although it did mean he could live in a large place and keep them in that pretty good private school, Bracken Collegiate, where the uniform was blue edged with black, nothing gaudy. Gaudiness he hated. Because of the good earnings from his business Shale hoped he could buy a splendid education for Laurent and Matilda, even including university, and so turn them away from the business that paid for the splendid education. He realized a lot of people would regard this as strange, one end of the idea pissing on the other. But you could sometimes run into such a mix-up in modern life, known as the twenty-first millennium. If they went to university he wouldn’t want them climbing spires or jumping into rivers like some students did as pranks. These students longed to be daredevils and get noticed by the media, but daredevils could hurt their-selves owing to the height of spires with poor footholds or rat disease in rivers.
The thing about Laurent and Matilda when Shale brought somebody quite unknown to meet them such as Naomi now was they didn’t ask the same questions as they asked the one before or the one before that. The questions was really completely right for this person. Manse thought it proved the value of Bracken Collegiate. The school did not have actual lessons in politeness, but by what could be called the atmosphere there it seemed to give them a bright habit of interest in other people, or a good show of that.