The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “Some.”

  “Then you should come to one of our shows. We opened here on Monday and my guys played up a storm, even if I say so myself. We got a few more dates lined up. Anna knows where and when we’re on. Reckon you’d enjoy yourself.”

  “I don’t know. I have a pretty heavy workload on at the moment.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. All those Sirens and Foreigners dropping like flies. You’re the guy has to sort all that out, ain’tcha?”

  “Well, I think you’ve exaggerated the situation somewhat...”

  Before Parry had a chance to finish the remark, a member of the catering staff appeared in the doorway to announce that dinner was being served. The appropriate sounds of hungry eagerness were made, and everyone trooped out of the library.

  In the dining room, polite but disorderly queues formed for the food table, while in a corner a quartet of Sirens – soprano, alto, tenor, bass –extemporised, their voices enfolding one another in sinuous random harmony. Amid the cluster and jostle of guests Parry became separated from Anna and Reich. He finished his beer shuffling slowly forwards. Reaching the table, he ran his eye over the copious array of foodstuffs before him. The caterers had laid on a spread of Anna’s devising called tapas gust²ri, a mixed selection of Spanish and Romanian dishes that was something of a tradition at Fuentes parties. The combination worked well, the two cuisines being surprisingly compatible. There were stuffed cabbage leaves and cubes of maize polenta, meat-filled flaky pastries and ham-filled bocadillo rolls, rolled herrings and vinegar-marinaded anchovies, small potato omelettes and battered courgettes, plus a range of spicy sausages and an assortment of salads. Parry set about heaping his plate high. Then, furnishing himself with a fresh beer, he headed out onto the terrace.

  He ate alone to start with, perched on the terrace steps, gazing out into the benighted garden. A parade of umbrella pines, illuminated by spotlights at their bases, looked stark and flat, as though part of a stage set rather than real. Between them and beyond, there were intricate dark thickets of rhododendron.

  He was used to eating on his own, and in many ways preferred it. He had never quite mastered the art of filling his mouth and engaging in conversation at the same time. He offered no objection, however, when an elderly Englishman came up and asked to join him. Accompanying the Englishman was a woman young enough to be his granddaughter but too nubile and attentive to be anything other than his wife. Fourth wife, it turned out.

  The two of them proved to be congenial company. The man was an expatriate of aristocratic lineage, almost a caricature of the breed, right down to his pronunciation (“orff” for “off”, “ears” for “yes”). He also dabbled in, as he called it, “matters esoteric”, and it wasn’t long before he was regaling Parry with an account of his investigations into the crop circle phenomenon, to which he had devoted his twenties and thirties and a significant portion of his inheritance. His researches, he said, had led him to conclude that crop circles – genuine crop circles, that is, not the ones proven to have been manmade – were an early attempt by Foreigners to communicate with the peoples of Earth. Having scrupulously measured the geometric shapes that constituted certain cerealogical formations, he had discovered that the ratios between the shapes’ surface areas corresponded precisely to the harmonic fractions by which the notes in the diatonic scale were related to their tonic note. Each formation, looked at in this way, yielded a single musical note. And as the formations grew progressively more elaborate, so they yielded chordal configurations of increasing complexity.

  “Do you see, old chap?” he said. “The golden giants made them. They were forewarning us of their arrival. Preparing the ground, as it were. Do you think it’s any coincidence that crop circles have ceased to appear since the Debut?”

  Parry nodded, although he had always thought that all crop circles were hoaxes and the reason they had stopped appearing was that the people who made them had simply ceased to do so after the Foreigners arrived. Who needed bogus extraterrestrial mysteries when there were genuine extraterrestrial mysteries around?

  “And,” the expatriate continued, “what better way to communicate with us than through the universal language, namely music. I know, I know, the universal language is supposed to be mathematics, but what is music, after all, but a refined form of mathematics?”

  He went on in this vein, expanding his crop-circle theory to take in Pythagoras’s observation that the distances between the planets of the solar system matched, with uncanny accuracy, the intervals between the notes of the diatonic scale (“The Music of the Spheres. Literally!”), and Parry interjected comments from time to time but for the most part was content to listen, playing audience to the expatriate’s lecturer. The nubile fourth wife, meanwhile, gazed at her husband with a fond, doting smile, looking as if she had been indulging him in his whims and fancies not for years but for decades.

  Eventually, however, the expatriate brought the focus of the conversation around to the shinjus. He and his wife had been out of town for a couple of weeks and had returned yesterday to find all this hullabaloo going on. Perhaps the captain might explain what was up?

  Parry did so as succinctly as he could, but as he spoke he could hear a certain testiness entering his voice, as it had done earlier. With no Anna on hand to intercede and maintain harmony, he felt it wise to curtail the conversation. As soon as he politely could, he made his excuses to the expatriate and his wife. Beg pardon. Call of nature.

  Indoors, he fetched himself yet another beer, then began wandering from room to room, threading his way among the guests. Not in a mood to talk to anyone else just then, he adopted a purposeful air so that people would assume he was on his way somewhere, circulating rather than circling. He came across Cecilia, flirting flagrantly with a young man whom he recognised as an up-and-coming Hollywood actor and who was paying less attention to Cecilia than he was to smoothing an errant lock of hair repeatedly away from his face. Cecilia glanced away from the actor’s bland, girlish features just long enough to flash a smile at Parry. The smile begged not to be interrupted, please, so Parry carried on.

  He wound up back in the library, which, without actually being designated as such, was being used as the quiet room at the party, somewhere calm, a haven from the throng where people could talk without raising their voices. He whiled away a few minutes examining the shelves of LP’s that had so impressed Reich. Anna had told him once how her husband would seldom listen to the records, as they were too brittle and valuable to risk damaging them by playing them, even on a top-of-the-range hi-fi. She had also told him how Fuentes kept a professional discophile on permanent retainer to scour the auction rooms of the world on his behalf, searching out rarities and classics and collectibles.

  What must it be like, Parry wondered, to have so much money that you could buy things not because you desired them necessarily, or because they were of any practical use to you, but simply so that you could claim ownership of them. It had probably never occurred to Fuentes, a man for whom introspection was anathema, to ask himself this.

  There are certain people who appear to have been born with a single purpose in life, human heat-seeking missiles who from the moment of launch hurtle unerringly towards their predestined target. Fuentes had been one. His career-path described a smooth, upward trajectory from early apprenticeship to the worldly acme of material success and riches and power. He had started out at the age of sixteen working on building sites in and around Madrid, by the age of twenty had become a site foreman, and – such was his forcefulness and inner drive – by the age of twenty-three was managing a construction company of his own. There followed a crescendo of takeovers and acquisitions and expansions, until by the time he reached his early thirties Fuentes was Spain’s foremost construction-industry mogul and fast becoming one of the most powerful and influential figures in the European business world, a man to whom other moguls looked in order to gauge their own next moves. His every decision seemed as astute as it was lu
crative. To take just one example, his development of a rapid-setting, polymer-toughened concrete put him in a prime position to exploit the suddenly-burgeoning demand for sea-defence technology. As the atmosphere warmed and the West Antarctic ice-shelf melted and the oceans swelled, brimming onto the land faster than anyone had predicted or suspected, prudent countries – England, for its sins, not among them – busied themselves erecting dykes to protect low-lying coastal regions. Fuentes, having foreseen this necessity, was quick to take advantage of it. He had also been one of the first to devise a practical, marketable application for crystech. When, not long after the Debut, the Foreigners presented every government on Earth with specimens of a type of crystal whose growth could be stimulated and manipulated through the use of sound, Fuentes was among the many pre-eminent industrialists and inventors entrusted with the task of experimenting with the stuff and discovering what it might be capable of. His R&D laboratories soon came up with a method of growing crystech subaquatically on a vast scale, and this process swiftly supplanted his own concrete as the basis-material for erecting sea defences, as well as providing a straightforward and versatile means of laying the foundations of resort-cities, which were just then in the planning stages. Fuentes, therefore, was partly responsible for the construction of New Venice and its counterparts elsewhere in the world, and, in return, his role in the building of the resort-cities earned him a nickname – the Crystech Caballero – and several further huge sums to add to his already colossal fortune.

  That, at any rate, was the official version of Fuentes’s career. The unofficial version, which Parry had gleaned in dribs and drabs from Anna, was a less sanitised and salutary tale of back-door deals, intimidation of trade unions, blackmail, bribes, payoffs, payola. Fuentes had done nothing that could strictly speaking be described as illegal, nothing that was not commonplace within the world of corporate business, nothing that could be denounced as anything worse than sharp practices. Yet there was no doubting that he had in his time been a man who would stop at nothing to further his own interests and augment his income. That, as Anna had said, was how you had to be in order to survive and flourish in the world within which her husband had moved.

  Yet, for all that he had achieved and accumulated (and setting aside for the moment how he had achieved and accumulated it), Fuentes had never struck Parry as a contented man. He had worked hard and relentlessly to extend his business empire and acquire wealth but had seldom paused to enjoy the benefits of his work. As for his family, they had been almost incidental to his life, impinging on it without significantly affecting it. It seemed to Parry that, for Fuentes, Anna and Cecilia had been mere accoutrements – not the core of his existence, as they should have been, but just two more additions to his prestige, two more possessions that had been drawn into his orbit, two more moons orbiting the great Saturn of Hector Fuentes.

  On one occasion Anna had confessed to Parry that it wasn’t her husband’s indifference to her and Cecilia that she minded so much as the fact that they seemed so dispensable to him. It was as if Fuentes would have been happy to have any two people fulfilling the roles of wife and child, so long as they were respectful and respectable and did not inconvenience or embarrass or compromise him. She was sure that he did love them both, in his own way, but he was a man who lived inside his head most of the time, absorbed with whatever deal or bid or project he was currently masterminding. Things that were happening in the wider world preoccupied him. Things that were happening immediately around him he barely noticed. His greatest passion was the thrill of being Hector Fuentes. Other interests, like his family, came a poor second.

  Like his family, or like his LP’s, Parry thought. Kept immaculately but not enjoyed, not cherished.

  The obvious question, of course, was what had Anna seen in Fuentes in the first place. What appeal could such a man – so aloof, so self-obsessed – have had for her? When Parry had put this to her on one occasion, phrasing the question delicately so as not to sound incredulous, all she had said was that a man like him could not understand how attractive a man like Fuentes could be to women. Money, status, a few years’ seniority and a certain dark streak of ruthlessness were all compelling traits, not least to the former Anna Enescu, who, born and brought up in a council slum on the southern outskirts of Bucharest, had scaled the cliff-face of European society from its very bottom to its very top using the only tools available to her, looks and sheer determination. The moment she met Fuentes, she had said, she had sensed in him something she recognised in herself, a kindred trait. And thereafter Parry had been reluctant to probe her any further on the subject, feeling he had strayed into an area he would rather remain ignorant about. There were aspects of Anna that did not tally with his preferred image of her, and so he chose to disregard them.

  Parry looked down to find the beer bottle in his hand empty. He had no memory of draining it. Time for another. He felt reckless, and knew that the alcohol was responsible and also that he had achieved the requisite level of inebriation not to care. Back to the dining room he went and, grabbing a fresh beer, coasted through to the living room, where he found, among others, Guthrie Reich.

  The trad-music promoter was surrounded by a small gaggle of guests and regaling them with some anecdote or other. Probably telling them about his rough, tough L.A. upbringing, Parry thought acerbically. He moved away to a corner of the room, and set to watching the jabbering faces of all the guests, careful to avoid catching anyone’s eye. The lingua franca here was English, but English spoken in such a range of accents and threaded through with strands of so many other different national tongues that, to his ears, nothing anyone was saying seemed intelligible. All he could hear was a gathered mass of superficially senseless sentences, a glossy, lulling glossolalia.

  His gaze roved back to Reich, still in the throes of narration. No, he did not like the American. That smug, easy confidence. The way he had manhandled Anna like that. His familiarity with her. His intimacy.

  Where did that intimacy come from? It might be that that was how Reich behaved with every woman. Equally, there might be more to it. Was it possible that he and Anna were more than friends? Could it be that –

  “Earth to Jack? Come in, Jack.”

  Parry blinked and twitched his head. Cecilia was standing in front of him, a bottle of beer in each hand.

  “Verily, good knight, thou wast kilometres away!” She proffered one of the bottles to him. “Here. For you.”

  “And that other beer is the same one from earlier?” he said, taking the proffered bottle.

  “Of course,” she replied, wide-eyed.

  The identical patina of condensation on both bottles told Parry otherwise, but he let it pass.

  “And I’m not even going to ask how you got this one,” he said.

  “I have my ways.”

  Naturally she did. Getting whatever she wanted was in Cecilia’s genes.

  “You know, you look like you could do with a bit of fresh air,” she said. “How about a stroll?”

  “Yes. Why not? A stroll would be nice.”

  “Have you ever seen our marine feature?”

  “Heard about it, never seen it.”

  “Come along, then.”

  26. Nocturne

  THEY DESCENDED THE steps of the terrace and moved across the lawn, away from the brightness and hubbub of the party, into the dark and shadowed hush of the grounds. It was the route Parry used to take after his trysts with Anna, although the circumstances now, of course, could not have been more different. This, if it was anything, was the opposite of a tryst. The anti-tryst.

  As they joined a path that looped into the trees, he asked Cecilia about the young actor she had been talking to. Any luck? She replied that he was gay, and after a moment’s pause qualified the assertion with: “Well, probably. He certainly wasn’t interested in me.” Parry averred that he seemed too interested in himself to be interested in anyone else, and added that if he wasn’t gay he must be pretty stupid, to be o
blivious to the charms of so beautiful and intelligent a young woman. Cecilia laughed, but not too scornfully, and said, “Thou art so corny, Sir Jack.”

  The path diverged. Right led to nowhere but the side gate. They went left. Enough illumination from the garden spotlights and the windows of the house filtered through the pines and rhododendra for them to be able to see their way and walk without stumbling. Soon they were approaching a wall of opaque black crystech about five metres high, its rugged, irregular planes glinting like onyx. The wall curved, and the path curved with it, terminating at the mouth of a tunnel. Here, Cecilia touched a switch on a panel set into the crystech, and uncertain blue light filled the tunnel from its further end, reflecting off the rough-faceted interior, rippling and restless.

  The tunnel was tall enough to pass through without ducking, but broad enough to permit only single-file traffic. Cecilia went in first. Parry followed. They emerged the other end onto a crescent-shaped strip of sand that rimmed one end of an oval pool of saltwater. The sand, smooth and pale, sloped into the pool, continuing for a few metres before terminating at a narrow spiny reef of coral. The water was clear up to this point, then, suddenly and steeply deepening, went a murky turquoise.

  The pool was approximately twenty metres across on its longest diameter. Its depths glowed with artificial subaquatic light and pulsed to the rhythm of hidden turbines which switched direction every few seconds, generating a sea-like swell-and-subside that sent delicate, frilly waves lapping up onto the sand. The crystech wall rose sheer around, forming an amphitheatrical enclosure.

  The water teemed with life. In the shallows starfish fondled their way across the sand’s rugose terrain, moving among darting shrimp and stolid molluscs. Above the fingers of coral, shoals of tiny silvery fish coalesced and dispersed and coalesced again, mercurial in both hue and disposition. Beyond the reef, larger creatures lurked and circled, stirred from somnolence by the abrupt arrival of a false new day. A pair of thick-lipped, multicoloured wrasse bumbled curiously around each other, nose-to-tail like greeting dogs, and something like a black dinner-plate with fins drifted gently around, as though in a state of profound cogitation. Anemones clung to the wall just below the waterline, some of them with their tentacles out and wafting, others budded as tightly as cherries.