Not at all like Alice. No one could ever say that her breasts were uninteresting. Not in front of Andrew. Not if they wanted to live. And tonight he had every intention of telling Alice exactly what he thought of her breasts—and all of the rest of her as well, for that matter. Tonight was the great office bacchanalia. Tonight love would stalk the corridors. He had planned what he was going to say. He had to plan it because tonight he was going to use the truth stratagem, and that was always the trickiest to pull off. Yes, he was going to tell her just what he thought; play it honest and up front. Bullshit thrived on spontaneity, but the truth needed devious devices, Byzantine cunning, and subtle words.
Who was he kidding? He was going to get shit-faced on Chablis, tell her he loved her and always had, and pray that he didn’t vomit, belch, dribble, or piss his pants in the process.
The auctioneer arrived. Dear old Crumlish used to do the job, when he was around, but now Books had to get that old fart Phillip Quiller from Furniture to do it for them, as no one else was qualified and never again would be, as the training budget had been slashed by the Slayer. Pity, as Andrew always rather fancied the job himself, while simultaneously seeing clearly quite how ridiculous it would make him in the eyes of the world. Quiller had quavering, moist lips and a shuffling, uncertain gait, but once he reached the podium he assumed a certain pinstriped authority. Which was only natural, as he must have called the numbers a thousand times and it was all as natural and easy for him as breathing.
The magnificent engravings themselves were placed on a table by the side of Quiller’s podium. A video camera was angled down upon them, and the top plate was displayed on a large, obscenely expensive flat-panel screen on the wall behind. Another camera was aimed at the podium, and yet another at the potential bidders, all for the sake of those who wished to follow the proceedings live over the Internet. These sorts of technical innovations had come in with the Americans and had, so far, managed to drain what little capital remained in the company while having at best a minimal effect on business throughput. Oakley was, needless to say, a great enthusiast. The Slayer herself, along with two other troubleshooting Americans known generally (or to Andrew, at any rate) as Butch and Sundance, Parry Brooksbank, and one other distinguished-looking fellow whom Andrew vaguely knew to be important, were also arrayed at the front of the room. The Slayer, with her bulldog scowl jutting aggressively forward and her stoutly spread legs, looked particularly uninviting. Something about her posture made Andrew think of an old joke about a peasant woman sitting knickerless in the market. Keeps the flies off the melons.
In addition to the in-house multimedia effort, there was, as Oakley had predicted, a crew from the BBC and another from Sky News, as well as a weedy phalanx of print journalists taking up much of the back row, like naughty schoolboys. It was all really quite exciting.
“I don’t know about you, Alice,” said Andrew, “but I’m really quite excited.”
“Me too,” she replied, and then, after a pause, “After all, I’ve decided—”
That was as far as she got. There was a noise at the doorway: an urgent murmuring, rising to an insistent whisper, and then a sharp barking noise.
“What the hell’s going on?” said Andrew to the air.
Alice looked toward the door. Oakley and two porters in their London Zookeeper uniforms were attempting to bar the way. The person whose way they were barring was Edward Lynden.
The focus of the entire room had swiveled through 180 degrees. Some had even, not content with craning their necks, actually scraped their chairs around to get a better look. Oakley’s pleading voice came through, interspersed with Lynden’s harsh and commanding tones.
“Please, Mr.—er, sir—Baron Lynden, you really can’t, not at this stage.”
“I can do exactly what I want with my property.”
“But there is an agreement.”
“I didn’t sign anything.”
“A gentleman’s agreement.”
Laughter.
“Perhaps we could discuss this outside, sir,” said one of the porters, an elderly man called Johns who’d been there since the war. He took Lynden’s arm gently.
“Take your hands off me,” said Lynden, with an unspoken additional clause that said, Or I’ll knock you down, old man or not.
And then he had burst through the weak barrier of limbs and protestations. He strode down the central isle between the two blocks of chairs. Alice thought that he may have turned his eyes quickly toward her, but his head did not move. He looked terrifying and magnificent, and she realized again how close she had come to wanting him, to wanting to be with him. She felt a strong desire to go to him, a pull from within herself that she recognized as a purely sexual desire.
He reached the table with the Audubon plates. The room had swung back with him to face the front.
“He’s going to take them,” said Andrew, again aiming at no one in particular. A smile of incredulity stretched across his face. “And he hasn’t signed the waiver. We’re fucked, totally fucked.” The smile became an involuntary grin as he worked out the ramifications. He and Alice had been taken off the organizational side of things. All the paperwork had been done, or left undone, by Oakley, Clerihew, and Ophelia. His own work had been performed to a high standard, he knew that. And it was far from wasted. The Lynden copy had now been documented and described. It existed for scholarship in a way that it hadn’t existed before. His catalog was still a useful and elegant contribution to the world of books. Alice, was, of course, in the clear. She couldn’t be blamed for this mess: She’d secured the sale in the first place and delivered Lynden and the Audubon into the supposed safekeeping of Oakley.
All the while, Lynden was calmly arranging the massive plates between two heavy boards. Quiller was making strange little movements with his red lips, as if kissing the toes of his mistress. Every minute or so, he would take a step toward Lynden and then step back again, in rhythm to some ancient courtly dance. It wasn’t his job to go tackling madmen.
The plates and the boards must have weighed as much as a six-year-old child, thought Andrew, but Lynden picked them up without effort, handling their sheer unwieldy mass with ease. He strode back the way he had come, kicked open the double doors—framed on one side by a rigidly immobile Oakley and on the other by the cowed porters—and then he was gone.
The uproar began the second the actor had left the stage. Andrew swore later that there had been screams; there was certainly a cacophony of jabbering and excited conversation. Oakley was seen to sink to his knees. Clerihew appeared from nowhere and attended to him, Hardy to his Nelson. Andrew saw that he must have come from one of the seats at the back, and now he caught site of Ophelia, a vacant chair next to her. She was sitting with her legs crossed, her face showing a lack of concern positively heroic in the circumstances. She looked as if she were waiting for the girl to bring her a coffee at the hairdresser’s.
“I can’t decide,” said Alice, confidentially, “whether or not this counts as an anticlimax.”
Andrew didn’t answer. He was watching the Slayer. She was grinding her jaws in a circular motion, like a Bosch devil chewing the soul of a sinner.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Complicity
BACK IN OCTOBER, when the party committee was in the second hour of its first meeting, Pam had wanted something traditional: tarts and vicars, sixties, seventies, eighties, Martian invasion, toga.
“We did it all fancy last year and look what happened.” Pam had had her hair done specially for the meeting. Its dense lacquered mass looked solid enough to hold rigidly an arrow or crossbow bolt, should one have been fired by a fellow committee member.
It was true that the Murders in the Rue Morgue theme, suggested in an idle moment by Andrew, who was on last year’s committee, had been a mistake. Only one person had turned up in an orangutan suit; the rest had settled, mystified, for a vaguely olden-days look, with bustles and hats for the girls and frock coats or street-urchin gar
b for the boys, but no one had quite known what was going on. The award for best costume to the orang gained a meager, scattered applause from the crowd. Andrew was afterward convinced that his suggestion had been approved by the committee only because none of them were prepared to admit that they did not know either who had been murdered in the Rue Morgue or by whom.
It was, of course, Andrew who came and triumphed as the villainous primate.
“But this isn’t the Milton Keynes regional office of United Widgets,” said the chair, Humphrey Palfry, a high-up in Antiquities, famed for his bow ties and dandruff. “We are a cultural institution, a cultural institution of national importance. And our party must represent that appropriately.”
“Hear, hear, Humph,” said Ackerly from Paintings. He wasn’t high up at all, and generally agreed with whoever was senior in any situation. “Nor are we the Truss and Prosthetics Manufacturers Association, or a subcontractor making the clip fastenings for Marks and Spencer’s support bras or—”
“Thanks, Roger, I think we get the picture.” Humph had had enough fawning for one lunchtime, what with Ackerly, and what’s-his-name, Cedric or Clarence, from Books.
“Yes. Sorry. But I do actually have an idea.” He didn’t: His boss in Paintings, a Young Turk called Terence Richardson who’d recently become a minor TV celebrity after an appearance on daytime television talking about the sexiness of Monet, had suggested it. With his long dark locks, velvet suits, and air of corrupted innocence, Richardson looked like one of Oscar Wilde’s less debauched accomplices—which was exactly what the TV executives and, it transpired, the single mums, pensioners, and dolemongers wanted from their art experts. His subsequent appearances were marked by a flickering and dimming of the nation’s lights, caused by the power surge as millions of housewives turned up their intimate massage appliances from cruise to ramming speed.
“Oh, yes, and what’s that then, exactly?” said Pam suspiciously. She didn’t look at Ackerly but picked and ate crumbs from the individual pork pie that had fallen and adhered, by virtue of some kind of electrostatic force, to the phlegm-green nylon of her blouse. Humphrey, who’d once, at a Christmas party years ago, when she was still slender-necked, and before her bust had undergone Weimar Republic levels of inflation, taken her rather brutally in the mail room, looked on with distaste and hoped she wouldn’t actually root down into her cleavage for a stray spawnlike globule of glaucous jelly.
“Well, my idea is that everyone has to come as a painting. A famous painting.”
There was a general interested shuffling from the twelve members of the committee. Not at all a bad idea. Perhaps Ackerly wasn’t such an arsehole. People threw in suggestions and then wished they hadn’t been so open-handed. In the past, careers had been made by interesting and original performances at the party. Good ideas were worth their weight in paste and gilt. Clerihew, after a few moments of panic, hit on what he thought would be a surefire showstopper and had to control his urge to shout it out loud. No, this really was a beauty, too good to share. How they would love him; how they would cheer. One in the eye for Andrew. Ha! Monkey suit!
“But not just paintings, surely?” Tessa, from Internet, hadn’t said anything so far, so everyone jumped a little at her high-pitched interjection.
“I beg your pardon?” said Richardson, in a good-to-hear-from-you-at-long-last kind of way. For much of the meeting he’d been surreptitiously eyeing her chest to try to work out if the displacement of the white cotton of her neatly fitted shirt was caused by some seamlike or other protuberance of her undergarment—a mere bra feature—or, more fascinatingly, an eruption of nipple, raw and chafing against the shirt fabric, aching for the mouth, longing for—
“I mean, we could extend it to statues and stuff. Installations or whatever.”
“Yes, of course. I always meant those too,” said Ackerly, anxious not to help out Tessa but, rather, to avoid having to share the glory for coming up with the concept.
“I still don’t see what’s wrong with tarts and vicars,” tried Pam, for one last time. But history was against her, and it was not her role to stand in its way.
So, pictures, statues, and, improbably, installations it was, or, to give it the resonant title announced in the Christmas Party Newsletter (meticulously produced by Clerihew in PDF format for electronic distribution, with paper copies available on request for the Luddites), Art Moves Among Us.
AFTER THE ABORTED sale, Andrew and Alice went back to their desks. The Books people not directly involved clustered around to find out why they had returned so soon. Heads shook in disbelief. Bemused, embarrassed laughter rippled through them.
“And you know,” said Andrew, “he hadn’t signed the fucking contract. No indemnity. Nothing. The bloke’s just taken his toys and gone home, leaving us to pick up the bill, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“Looks bad for the boss,” said someone.
“Wouldn’t be in his shoes,” said another.
“He’ll find a way of wriggling out of it. Some other poor bugger’s gonna take the rap.”
At that moment Ophelia and Clerihew came in. Ophelia wore her look of studied neutrality, her veneer unscratchable. Clerihew looked like a dog on his way to the vet’s, given the gift of awareness that it can only mean either the big sleep or the unkindest cut of all.
“So, Cornelius,” said Andrew brightly, “another triumph of organization for Books, eh? And I thought the whole point of you and Mr. Oakley was that you made the trains run on time?”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t be quite so smug,” Clerihew replied, with venom. “After all, if any names have been associated with the whole Audubon project, they are yours and ALICE’S. I was brought in at a late stage, when, it seems to me, most of the damage had already been done.”
If Andrew looked for support from his colleagues, he looked in vain. They began to melt back to their own desks. Oakley remained the man in charge, and Clerihew was still his bulldog. The Audubon disaster might well mean heads had to roll, and, if only for the time being, Oakley still held the ax.
Andrew looked, and was, betrayed.
“You know what, Andrew?” said Alice. “I don’t feel like the canteen today. I know it’s a bit early, but why don’t we go for a sandwich at Cranks?”
“Christ, I’m still digesting one of their whole-meal scones I swallowed last week. Did I ever tell you that they use osmium, the heaviest element so far discovered, in their recipes?”
“Yes, I think you might have mentioned it. But it’s not, by the way.” They were in the lift by now.
“Not what?”
“The heaviest element.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What is then?”
“Gravitron.”
“Gravitron! You made that up.”
“Didn’t.”
“Did.”
“Airhead.”
“Bimbo.”
They were out in the street, walking closely together, the sleeves of their winter coats touching.
“I thought you never went to Cranks,” said Andrew, “because it was too near to where . . . near to—”
“Where Matija Abdic was killed.”
“Yes, there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use his name. His real name.”
“It’s how I think of him now. And yes, it’s near where he was killed. But now I don’t mind so much.”
After a few moments, Andrew said, “I still think osmium’s funnier. Gravitron just hasn’t got that smack of authenticity. Sounds like something Superman’s enemies use against him. You know, renders him sterile or disarrays his coiffure.”
“Don’t care. S’true.”
“True shmoo. I’m not risking another scone. Don’t like the idea of them hunting in packs inside me. They communicate, you know.”
“What, using electric currants?”
“Is that supposed to be a—”
“You could always jam the frequency.”
“All right, all right, ha-ha-ha. Scones, currants, jam, I get it. Don’t you know that punning is for boys? Anyway, I think I’ll have some of their cheesecake instead. It’s what they use to isolate the core in nuclear submarines.”
THEY GOT BACK to the office at two-thirty, but it was quite clear that no work was going to be done at Enderby’s that day. From the moment they entered the lobby, now richly decorated with tasteful baubles (some dating back to the very invention of Christmas in darkest Victorian times), ivy, and, of special interest to Andrew, mistletoe, it was clear that, notwithstanding the shock of the Audubon mishap, from here on in it was going to be party party party.
Books was humming. The women were clustered together talking about what they’d be wearing; the men were joking and generally mucking about. Term was ending, and joy abounded. But not quite everywhere: Andrew could see Oakley pacing in his office, while Clerihew sat and watched. Clerihew looked more worried than ever, but Oakley had his cunning fox face on, which was perturbing.
“I haven’t asked you yet what you’re going as tonight,” said Alice. “You didn’t seem to bring anything in with you.”
It was true that while most people (including Alice herself) had arrived with large bags and boxes, Andrew had only his usual small rucksack.
“Don’t want to give the game away just yet. But this year it’s nothing special. You wouldn’t believe the animosity you attract for winning first prize. Everyone hates you. Been there, done that. I thought just a token effort, this year. But what about you? You could do Joseph Wright of Derby’s Experiment with an Air Pump, I suppose. That’s science, after all.”
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