by A. N. Wilson
It was somewhere in the Brompton Road that a passer-by stooped to find him. Before that, he had run, then staggered through half-lit streets, feeling blood and the capacity for coherent attention drain from him. He passed out in the gutter. They never were able to find his ear, but – though he carried a scar in his throat for life – the wound came nowhere near his jugular. As a nurse remarked in Casualty, he’d been lucky. The doctor who gave evidence to the police said it was almost as if someone had been playing. Whoever manipulated the knife would appear to have shown, not pathological violence so much as heartless frivolity.
TWO
‘The first question,’ said Lennox Mark, ‘is this. Why is there anything at all?’
Lionel Watson did not overtly sigh, but he felt a lowering of the spirits. During any meal with the proprietor, there would in all likelihood come a moment when the Eternal Verities were debated.
‘You haven’t,’ added the proprietor, ‘finished your steak.’
They had already had the roast of the day (which was lamb) as their starter. Then some potato soup – with extra croutons. Double helpings of smoked salmon. Then Lennox had asked for the steaks. With chips.
Lionel tried to keep up with his paymaster on these occasions but at a certain point his body simply refused to take in any more food. It was not, especially, that he felt sick. That would come later. It was that the colloquialism about feeling full really was true. He believed that if he were at that moment put under anaesthetic and cut open, the surgeon would find a stomach stretched to capacity with potatoes, chewed meat and fish. Something like a queue of the stuff had formed in his oesophagus; every yard of intestine felt as if weighed with it, while beyond the stomach the colon filled with the processed reject.
Just as some women, lunching with Lionel, would know that there would be a point in the meal when a hand would begin its exploratory work beneath tablecloth and skirt-hem, so Lionel himself knew that when he was almost breathless with the proprietor’s hospitality, the question of God would be placed on the table, as unwelcome at this juncture as another bowl of spuds.
‘May I?’ asked Lennox Mark, taking Lionel’s cold sirloin and slithering it on to his own plate.
‘You would concede,’ he insisted, ‘that existence itself is fairly mysterious. There doesn’t need to be anything.’
He cut the steak into manageable mouthfuls, placed the knife sideways on the side of the plate in the American fashion and with his large, pudgy right hand brought a forkful to his lips.
Seated, Lennox Mark had a certain dignity, since his markedly short legs were not in evidence. He wore expansive double-breasted suits of a pale grey suggestive of summer wear or tropical kit, whatever the season. His face was fleshy, but not especially fat. He had a very big head, with a massive jaw. White hair was swept back from an apparently untroubled, anyway unwrinkled, forehead. In the massiveness, even monstrousness, of his skull, the eyes, always seeming slightly sore, as if mild conjunctivitis could not be banished, looked small. His nose was blubbery, and had a suggestion of the later, more syphilitic portraits of Henry VIII. Lionel Watson had more than once pointed out the likeness of their proprietor to a Holbein: it was one of the jokes he shared with Mary Much.
‘It depends,’ said Lionel, ‘what you mean by need. Existence is what there is. For many of us that’s tautology, but – literally, it goes without saying. You don’t need to speculate about whether it is necessary, nor whether it has a cause. We are not looking for explanations.’
Lionel Watson, at fifty-three, was the same age as his proprietor, but in various ways he had weathered less well. There was a tremendous weariness, an ennui, in his face – which was meant by nature to be the face of a thin man. The heaviness around cheek, jowl and chin hung superfluously and reproachfully. He was not a healthy colour – the veins in his cheeks were burst, many of them. His brow was furrowed. He was half bald, and a great quantity of dandruff and scurf fell on to the dark pinstripe which was his habitual wear.
‘You would admit,’ said Lennox, ‘that it would be easier if there wasn’t anything at all?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Neater.’ He spoke with his mouth full, so the word was semi-audible. ‘Less bother.’
‘To whom?’
‘Ah!’ said Lennox with a gleam.
The disconcerting thing about these discussions was that they were not random. Lennox Mark, huffing and panting through a thousand luncheons, was in quest of the person who could persuade him that God did not exist. The Hound of Heaven pursued the proprietor of News Incorporated, down the nights and down the days.
Lionel Watson remembered reading a Graham Greene novel in which the hero was in love with a married woman. He believed she had another lover, and he set a detective on her. In fact, she was going to visit a professional atheist to convince herself that there was no God. If she could only convince herself, she would be free to disregard a vow she had made to God that she would stop seeing her lover.
Lennox Mark was fatter – Lionel imagined – than the woman in the book, and it was hard to imagine him having a love affair. Lionel had not fathomed from what moral hook the proprietor would exempt himself if he could embrace total unbelief. They had often, over the cheese, the puddings and the savouries, run round Dostoevsky’s contention that if God did not exist, anything would be permitted.
In what sort of moral universe The Daily Legion would be permitted, L. P. Watson, its leading columnist, did not like to speculate.
THREE
While Lennox Mark lingered out luncheon at the Savoy Grill with Lionel Watson, his wife, at home, was about to have an afternoon bath – when the front door buzzer interrupted her.
Since the Filipinos had staged their truly unpardonable walkout four days ago, Martina Mark had run the bath herself. Well, whatever anyone might suppose, she was capable of turning a tap. Half-dressed, she was still an impressive sight after all these years, as half a dozen mirrors attested, while she drifted from bathroom to bedroom and pressed the device on an adjacent landing to answer the peremptory entryphone.
Carefully coppered hair, so skilfully done by Franco of Sloane Street that even the most malicious of women had taken it for genuine chestnut, clustered round that pale, clever face. The eyes had worn their expression of frozen surprise for some years now, rising to positive astonishment after a second lift was deemed advisable by the brilliant Mr Aziz of E. 65th Street. Her lips were frozen in an everlasting scarlet moue. The nose was at least a centimetre shorter than it had been during a wretched adolescence and young womanhood. Had the surgeons left that nose in the state in which first Nature, then a brutal man, had shaped it, Martina’s face would have told, rather than concealed, its story; one would have read dignity and sorrow rather than the studied pertness, both of cartilage and manner, which was presented. Some years ago, almost imperceptibly, the face had passed through the stage where it might plausibly deceive the short-sighted to one where it made no pretence at reality, as such. Rather, it challenged the observer: so – which would you rather? A woman who let herself go? Yes, it’s art. So have almost all fashions, whether of coiffeur or couturier, for the previous five centuries been art. It was a hauntingly intelligent mask through which eyes caught an approving glimpse of themselves in a mirror, as all-but-motionless lips said, ‘Yes?’ into the entryphone.
She was lighting a long American cigarette as she spoke.
Cigarettes, by the way, were no more harmful than crossing the street, as the Daily and Sunday Legions both reminded readers on a frequent basis. (They made no mention of the extensive tobacco farms owned by Lennox Mark’s family in the northern region of Zinariya.) The Puritans who wanted to interfere in people’s lives with their bogus statistics and sob stories about Auntie dying of cancer should just SHUT UP. It was the God-given right of every English man and English woman to smoke cigarettes. What else in hell’s name had Magna Carta been for? Okay, L. P. Watson went too far in his columns, advocating ‘
Fags for Kids’ in primary schools, but Christ, that man was bloody funny.
‘Yup? Yup?’ she said impatiently into the device.
When the police interviewed her, they asked why she had not noticed, on the tiny screen identifying callers by a concealed camera, that this was a different delivery boy. She was damned if she was going to explain to a policeman that without contact lenses she could hardly see the fucking screen, let alone make out the smudged little figures on it. Besides, she had learnt early in life not to make too much distinction between one visitor and another.
So, bare-legged and bare-footed, she had said, ‘I’ll be down’ into the receiver. Then she drifted down to open the door.
FOUR
‘No money? Whaddya mean, no money? There can’t be no money!’
Lennox Mark was shouting. He’d left the Savoy Grill, and L. P. Watson, and was alone in the back of the Bentley, which purred eastward. He eschewed a receiver, using the type of mobile which allowed him to speak aloud without an instrument. It gave him the appearance of a madman talking to himself.
The words were a yelp of despair: they were also his creed, this howled double negative. There couldn’t be no money – just as there couldn’t be no God. Money had always come from somewhere. Always. If not hard cash, then something more important: the capacity to reassure someone else to part with some of theirs, some punter, banker, some stupid bastard, some sap.
The mobile mumbled back its devastating words. Kurtmeyer at his least helpful.
‘But you told me the Scouse deal was in the bag!’ yelled Lennox, adding in a whisper, ‘In the bag!’ because he had suddenly met, in the driving mirror, the eyes of his driver Tom. It was intensely painful, suddenly, that this man, a driver who was paid £14,000 p.a., should have heard those words ‘no money’, and, with a glimpse, seen through the rich man who leaned against the flesh-coloured leather seats in the back of the limo.
‘We – that is News Incorporated – never tied up the details … Sky … Moon …’
Kurtmeyer was saying that all the other production companies had a pre-negotiated deal with one of the more prestigious football clubs … Arsenal … Man U …
Scouse TV, which News Incorporated had bought as a shell two years before, had actually no hope of outbidding any of its serious rivals.
‘But I bought a fucking football team – Scunthorpe Athleticals … You made me go to Scunthorpe, and get myself photographed in the local paper.’
‘It’s one of the NI titles, boss.’
Kurtmeyer chose Lennox’s most vulnerable moments to call him ‘boss’. He quietly reminded him that the purchase of Scunthorpe Athleticals had been his own idea, foisted on him by the editor of The Daily Legion. Both Spottiswood and Kurtmeyer himself had been against the purchase.
Lennox allowed whole weeks to pass in which the complexities and details of his financial affairs were blurred in his mind. Kurtmeyer or Spottiswood, or their combined genius, usually saw him out of the worst crises. For the past ten days, in spite of their giving no indication that this was the case, he had allowed himself to think that one of the two men would produce a miracle. The money from the Scouse deal – a television franchise which would give them exclusive rights over some of the key FA fixtures – would have compensated some of the horrendous losses at the Legions.
‘Another option …’ Kurtmeyer was saying, ‘would be to abolish the Sunday as of now – just merge the two titles.’
‘Jesus.’
‘You’d be saving the salaries of two hundred overpaid fuckers.’
‘Okay,’ Lennox shouted, ‘okay.’
Kurtmeyer said what everyone always said about Blimby, the editor of The Sunday Legion.
‘Then let’s sack Blimby.’
‘The drawback,’ Kurtmeyer’s gentle voice reminded him, ‘is that you have yet to announce the sacking of Tony. If you sack the editor of the Daily and the editor of the Sunday in one week, it might look like panic.’
‘I haven’t told Tony he’s sacked,’ said Lennox.
‘But you’ve offered his job to Worledge. You’re dining with Worledge next week – no?’
‘And Blimby. Christ – maybe we don’t need to sack Blimby?’
‘But you could tell them at the dinner – about the merger of the titles. Get Worledge to wield the axe – he’s a cruel bastard. He’ll enjoy the sackings.’
He wanted to yell at Kurtmeyer – It’s all right for you, it’s not your buggering money that’s going down the pan! Such moments, however, brought the dreadful sense of void – it wasn’t his money either. There was no money. In the pit of his stomach he had the sense, like the knowledge in childhood that he had angered his old man, that a Reckoning approached. Kurtmeyer was burring and buzzing about printing bills unpaid, overdrafts extended to pay Legion salaries, advertising revenues down. Lennox Mark thought not of this or that creditor refusing to wait any longer. Instead he was possessed by a generalized sense of doom.
‘Are there really …’ his voice croaked as he asked it, ‘no funds … anywhere?’
Pudgy fingers shook as they reached for the emergency comfort-bagel, oozing cream cheese, which he had been balancing on a trouser-knee. It was between fat thumb and stout white forefinger. That swooping emptiness, that horrifying sense of putting his foot on what he had supposed firm ground and finding nothing but air … that falling, falling …
The bagel was gone in two mouthfuls.
Now, what in hell was he going to eat? The Bentley was wedged in traffic, approaching the Tower of London. They were quarter, maybe half an hour from LenMar House, the penthouse office, the fridge, and the caviar.
‘So now – Kurt – are you listening?’
Kurtmeyer was listening as Lennox Mark spoke the hateful truth to the back of his chauffeur’s head.
‘Incorporated – News Incorporated – the TV company, the fucking football club – all my newspapers – Gloss, the magazines – they are all dependent on what we can get out of Africa? From Zinariya, from Bindiga?’
Kurtmeyer seemed to think this a fair assessment of things.
Jesus, what would his old great-grandfather have said, Lennox Mark the First, he who first gouged out the red earth of Kanni-Karkara and opened the copper mines? What would the old patriarch have thought about a Lennox Mark, in the third millennium, going cap in hand to a crooked nigger like Bindiga?
Lennox rapped Tom on the shoulder and said, ‘If we pass a food shop – any kind of place – I need something to eat.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Why not sell Scouse while we’re at it? Sell Scunthorpe Athleticals?’ he bellowed to the air. He knew the answer before Kurtmeyer had given it. Spottiswood had been trying for months to find buyers for the crap TV company and even crapper football club.
Twenty minutes later, LenMar House, all twenty-five storeys of it lit up in the murky Bermondsey afternoon, came into view. Tom had stopped the Bentley outside a takeaway in the Jamaica Road, and bought three meat pies for the boss to chomp during the final leg of the journey. Lennox Mark’s mouth, though not for long, was full, as the Bentley swerved into the forecourt, and he could ask, of no one in particular, ‘What the fuck?’ The smooth progress of the chairman and proprietor of News Incorporated towards the automatic glass doors and the uniformed commissionaire was being impeded by a group of angry demonstrators – a crowd of between fifty and a hundred people. And head and shoulders above the crowd was the tall, scrawny figure of the man whom Lennox saw as his nemesis, his guilty conscience, his visitant from a disapproving God.
FIVE
‘Granville.’
That was all he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Granville. Gottya food. Innit.’
The voice was the parody of rough cockney; but then, so were the voices of a million others in London. It was only when Martina quizzed him again that she became puzzled.
‘You mean, you’re from Granville Stoppard?’
‘Tha
t’s right, madam.’
This appeared to be spoken by another young man, an officer in the Brigade of Guards, a public schoolboy.
‘I’ll be right down.’
Martina’s suspicions – how did she put it to the police afterwards? – were hardly aroused by the way a delivery boy spoke. She had other things on her mind.
She would lie to the police. She would have to. Yet it was true that, as she drifted downstairs towards the boy, she was not interested in his personality. She had, while running the bath, been concentrating her mind on the newspapers in which she took so much more intelligent, so much better informed, an interest than her husband did.
It need hardly be said that it was her decision to sack Anthony Taylor and put in Worledge as editor of the Daily. The little coterie known as Martina’s Court made those sort of decisions, while Kurtmeyer – sometimes Spottiswood, sometimes the pair of them – bleated about the boring stuff. Lennie, who owned over forty periodicals, knew hardly any journalists, except those, such as L.P., procured for him by his wife or by Mary Much.
Lennie met everyone, or rather, Everyone: those in his own terminology who were Big Hitters. Yet while meeting Everyone, he knew No One. He had no intimates. This was one of the first things about him which Martina had intuited: the knowledge from the first gave her enormous power. She marched into virgin territory to colonize and plant her flag, rather as his forebears, having the geological flair, and the sheer cheek, to understand the meaning of those red hills in an unclaimed part of West Africa, had proclaimed themselves lords and owners of the mines of Kanni-Karkara.
Through the reinforced iron gates, which she had just opened for the young psychopath, had strode others whose psychopathic tendencies, creatively used, had taken them to triumphant heights: the present Prime Minister, and the one before that; the new Leader of the Opposition, and the two before that; any number of Foreign Secretaries, Chancellors of the Exchequer, ambassadors and peers had trodden the short gravel path between the little row of tubbed bay trees and listened patiently while Lennie and Martina told them what to think about the world. Film stars, television luminaries, foreign heads of state, playwrights – even novelists of a certain type – had trooped in to the fashionable evenings up the very steps now trodden by the youth with his bagful of lobsters.