My Name is Legion

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘Nicole Who?’ Lennox was saying, in an implausible imitation of Taylor’s northern accent. This was greeted with a real explosion of laughter. Tony Taylor himself mouthed the words ‘Not true’.

  It had been a mad way of spending two years, and Sinclo would have relinquished it all willingly were it not for one person in whom he had invested, quite against his will, a hopeless love. No love for a woman had ever made him suffer as he now suffered. And, for all his certainties about the pointlessness of his job, and the moral putrescence of the Legion, he knew that he would willingly go into the office as a floor-sweeper if it gave him the chance of daily contact with Rachel Pearl, whose face he could see through the crowd of yahoos, as she sat on her desk top and swung her legs like a schoolgirl.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When the face of Rachel Pearl was in repose, she resembled one of those calm, sad Blessed Virgins in the Byzantine tradition. She looked not unlike the young Madonna depicted in mosaics at Torcello. Certainly no face in Western art since those times had such fixity as hers, such calm seriousness. Brows were drawn with the simplicity of the old icon-painters, arched above ink-black glossy eyes. Her nose was small and pointed. Her lips were the focus of her charm. For most of each day, the mouth was pursed and small and prim. Every now and again, however, it would open in the most radiant of smiles. Then her whole face framed with its dark bob would change. The dark eyes became radiant. The straight nose wrinkled. The intelligent intensity melted into hilarity and the intense iconic Virgin became a laughing schoolgirl.

  It was one day when one of these transformations occurred to her face that Sinclo Manners fell in love with Rachel Pearl. Such was the depth of his feeling, so completely intense was his misery, that he could form no accurate impression of one vital question: whether she was aware of it at all.

  When he joined the paper, Rachel was the only person whom he slightly knew. They had met at Throxton Winnards, the seat of Sinclo’s cousin, Monty Longmore. Rachel had been at university with Monty’s daughter Kitty – a cousin on whom Sinclo had always had rather a crush. They had a knowledge of this shared world. In the alien world of the Legion it was a bond.

  It was perfectly usual for colleagues at the Legion to lunch together, either in the canteen, or at Bin Ends, the unpleasant little wine bar twenty minutes’ very fast walk from LenMar House. The fact that Sinclo and Rachel often lunched together was therefore no cause for remark among their colleagues, who quite often joined the pair for a meal or a drink.

  They’d been meeting most days for nearly two years, and yet Sinclo still found her a totally mysterious character. Loving her to the point of heartbreak, he still did not know her. They had told one another the outline of their lives. He had been a soldier, and the son of a soldier from the kind of impoverished and aristocratic background which it was necessary, in an office context, to play down. Rachel was the daughter of two doctors from Barnes. One of the doctors was the great-grandson of Russian Jews who had come to London at the beginning of the twentieth century. The other was the granddaughter of Polish Jews who had escaped the Continent just in time, in the late thirties. (Most of this side of the family had died in Auschwitz.) Rachel had been educated at St Paul’s School, and gone to Oxford, where she had read Modern Languages. (It was here that she’d befriended his cousin Kitty Chell – one of those passionate friendships formed between opposites.) She was fluent in Italian, German and Prendi; she had smatterings of Russian, Polish and (from a grandmother) Yiddish. She could read Latin and Greek. She was in all obvious senses much cleverer than Sinclo, which was one reason he feared to disclose his heart to her.

  One of her mysteries, to him, was why she wanted to be a journalist at all. To Sinclo, she seemed to take the world more seriously than was quite tolerable, and her decision to immerse herself in the world of the Legion must, he supposed, involve her in almost daily lacerations of soul. True, she did not involve herself with news, or gossip, as such. As arts editor, her responsibility was to ‘sub’ the various regular critics of films, plays and concerts. For the rest, she attended features conferences and put up ideas for articles on, for example, the funding of the Royal Ballet or debates on modern architecture.

  Tony Taylor’s reaction to such suggestions was a puzzled frown. He would then try to prompt her to produce stories with a ‘loose arts peg’. Her apparent desire to take seriously the pretensions – as everyone on the paper, Sinclo included – imagined them of Brit Art and conceptual artists brought nothing but contempt from the hardfaced men on the back bench. But she did sometimes surprise them by coming up with some good gossip about some contemporary artist: Hans Busch’s love life, for example, or the fantastic sums commanded by this man for his ‘installations’ and ‘concepts’.

  Sinclo could see the advantages for her in being an arts editor. (It was said that L. P. Watson helped her to get the job – he apparently was some friend of her parents. Sinclo discounted, as both painful and improbable, the notion that she’d had to sleep with L.P. in exchange for the post: she was much too serious for such a thing to be remotely possible, and besides, he’d quite often had lunch with Rachel and L.P. and their jokey, mildly flirtatious friendship did not strike him as being that of ex-lovers.) The material advantages of the job were obvious. She was only twenty-eight. She had free access on viewing days to all the good exhibitions before the public saw them. Plays, concerts and films could all be sampled for no money. She had an expense account and could travel everywhere by taxi. While her student contemporaries, some of them, were still living in rented bedsits finishing a thesis on a subject so obscure that no one would read it, she could somehow afford her own flat overlooking the river. She was serious, but she was not unworldly. She enjoyed all this, and she dressed with discreet flair and sexy good taste. And yet, when they lunched à deux, she would often share with Sinclo her sense of despondency at having fallen into Lennox Mark’s ‘honey trap’. Yes, it was beneath her dignity to write four hundred words before lunch about the likely contenders for the Cannes festival – four hundred words which were concerned not with the cinematic skills of those discussed, but entirely with tittle-tattle about their love affairs and feuds, their clothes, or their misbehaviour in restaurants. Such work filled her with priggish shame; but, as she liked to quote, ‘She wept, but she took.’ Intellectual snobbery might make her squirm at her work, but she did not scorn its material rewards. In a metaphor which surprised Sinclo, the first time she deployed it, she scorned the idea of going to work for a more serious newspaper for less money. ‘If you’re going to work in a brothel, you might as well earn the full whack.’

  She had a fascination with money. In one of the conversations in which she had tried to explain conceptual art to Sinclo, she had told him that the huge sums of money which the artists received was part of the point.

  ‘The world’s changed,’ she would tell him with a strange faraway look in her eyes. ‘Money is a very simple way of codifying value. In an aristocratic world, artists needed patrons to produce’ – she’d shrug – ‘an epic, a mass, a painting. We’re not in a world of industrial capitalism, we’re in a post-paper-money, post-industrial, post-modern world. The novel which commands the highest advance is the best novel. The installation in the visual arts fights for its own importance, its own status, by rewarding the artist.’

  ‘You can’t believe that,’ he’d said, staring into the glossy blackness of her eyes and hoping against hope that she did not.

  When she made these points in conversation – the joke about working in a brothel, the defence of art which Sinclo deemed pure chicanery – little dabs of strawberry rouge would appear in her cheeks. This blush had come into her face, too, when referring to men who were interested in her. She’d once told Sinclo about the unwelcome advances of another journalist.

  ‘Can you imagine anything more embarrassing?’ she had asked as these almost consumptive flushes came into her normally pallid face.

  (Was it her way of warning him off
?)

  Sinclo assumed that she had a lover. While he was painstakingly ‘tweaking’ why-oh-why articles, and conversing with their authors by telephone, he would gaze across the open plan of the office to her desk where, much of the time she seemed to do little except read novels in French and German. Sometimes when she was on the telephone he would assume, with the instinctive jealousy of the man in love, that she was speaking to her lover though he had no evidence that such a person existed. The lover took shape in his mind in a manner rather comparable to the idea of God in the minds of eighteenth-century Deists. They had no experience of him, but by positing his existence a number of mysterious holes in their universe could be patched. Her air of unattainability, her sudden decision, if she’d agreed to join a group for dinner, to break away at the last moment, her habit of referring occasionally to ‘ex-boyfriends’ – all these things suggested another life, a shared life with Another. Sinclo feared very much that the love affair was making her unhappy, but although in his fantasy life he was forever ‘rescuing’ her, he believed it was unlikely that she could ever love him. He sometimes wondered if the reason for keeping her lover a secret was that he was famous – Hans Busch, for example.

  Whoever it was had not made her happy. She carried about not merely a cynical dissatisfaction with her work, but a much more general melancholy, which was why, when those beautiful smiles dispelled the gloom, the moment appeared magical. During Lennox Mark’s speech, Sinclo stared at her, but she either did not see him or chose not to return his gaze. This evening, she looked almost lachrymose. Sinclo wondered whether this expression was caused merely by the essential cruelty of the occasion, which was disgusting him too (the public guillotining of poor Tony Taylor), or whether it was born of that deeper, sadder inner mystery of hers which in his fantasy life he longed to salve.

  After the applause, the thumping of desks, after Taylor’s own (feeble, embarrassingly) speech, and the cheers, the large room susurrated to the general murmur. By the time Sinclo squeezed through the crowd, several colleagues were grouped round Rachel. A general proposal was in the air that they all should pile into a taxi and dine at a newly opened club in Soho.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too bad at this time of night,’ said Peg Montgomery. She was considerably older than Sinclo, this doyenne of the Killer Interviewer. He was bad at judging ages. She’d more than once indicated that she fancied him. She smoked so much that her breath was acrid, something of which she must have been aware since she ate Polo mints even while swigging the fizzy wine. She had a friz of dyed blonde hair, and her teeth stuck out, but this was not unsexy. Her breasts were large and round. Her face had extraordinary coarseness, and yet the attention paid to it with make-up on eyes, cheeks, lips, all signalled a disarming willingness to be viewed as a baby doll – the sort of inflatable lifesize porno-doll which lonely men ‘use’. Like three-quarters of Peg’s male colleagues, Sinclo had often wondered what would happen if he got drunk and had half a chance with her.

  He realized, as he piled into a taxi with Peg, that he was not quite as sober as he had imagined. There were four of them in the cab. He felt her thigh squeezing against his, but he took no more notice than if she had been a mattress or a dog. In his reverie, he wished he had been more forceful and got into Rachel’s taxi. He saw only her face, intent and serious, somewhere beyond the raindrops of Jamaica Road, the floodlit, sodden Tower Bridge, the hissing tarmac of the Embankment, the wet, cloudy orange sky over Soho, which they eventually reached when a sum showed on the meter which was equal to the amount given to an old-age pensioner each week by the state. It was half past nine by the time any of them piled on to the pavement outside the club; ten fifteen before they got a table. He tried to make his enquiry as casual as possible when he asked what had happened to Rachel.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Peg, squeezing his arm and refilling his glass with Australian red. ‘Aren’t we gorgeous enough for you?’

  They all laughed. He felt his misery coming out as humourlessness, stuffiness. He must have been drunk, because he found himself reading and rereading the label on the wine bottle ‘Wattles McLaren Vale Grenache Shiraz 2000’. His mind left the company. He and Rachel had become ‘Rhone rangers’, growing wine in Australia. They were dressed rather like pioneers in some American children’s story. The outback setting of the winery was bright and drenched with sun. Rachel had that smile on her face.

  Peg and two of the men at the table were shouting rubbish about the Legion overtaking the Mail in the circulation war.

  ‘Lennie’s got tricks up his sleeve,’ said one of the men.

  (All Legion employees referred to Lennox Mark as Lennie, though few would say so to his face.)

  ‘I’ll get this Jucker Worledge to sort out the paper.’

  This sentence, said by another of the men in a very poor imitation of Lennox’s voice, made everyone yelp with laughter.

  ‘It’s still Muchie-Muchie who hires and fires,’ said another knowingly.

  The positively ancient questions about Mary Much were then aired: whether she was a lesbian, having it off with Martina; whether she was Lennox Mark’s mistress …

  ‘She gets what she wants without doing it,’ said another drunken journalist. They were too far gone in drink to be careful of their words because Sinclo sometimes had lunch with Mary Much.

  Someone else was asking, ‘I wonder what Derek’ – Worledge – ‘had to do to Muchie-Muchie to get the editorship of the Legion?’

  It was late by now. Cigarettes had been lit, and congealed fragments of lamb’s shank or char-grilled tuna littered the plates of the jaded crowd. They all began to make suggestions. Sinclo felt so utterly bereft, so completely desolated by Rachel’s absence, that he filled his glass and decided to join in the talk. His own ingeniously obscene suggestion of what Worledge had been made to do to bring Mary Much to a climax and guarantee his position as editor was filthier than anything dreamed up by the others. It created a roar at the table. As they laughed, he thought that the filthy idea was one he wouldn’t mind trying with Mary Much. Or with any woman, come to that. He did not resist when Peg Montgomery slipped her sausagey fingers with their scarlet talons into his trouser pocket.

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the kitchen at Redgauntlet Road, eight staff worked busily, preparing the evening’s entertainments.

  ‘Is that enough ice?’ asked Piet sharply.

  The Constancios, a Brazilian couple who had been installed in the Marks’ service for a fortnight, were not used to being spoken to in such a tone by a mere boy, but for some reason they accepted his authority. Maria José, who had worked in embassies, and big hotels, and who knew how to serve caviar, checked nervously in the ice-buckets which supported the vast mounds of grey, glistening roe. There were only twenty to dine, but this amount of caviar would have fed twice the number. The hired waiters and waitresses seemed equally in awe of Piet’s expertise, especially when they had heard the accounts of Helene, the beaky Bulgarian who was now a resident housemaid, and who appeared to be in love with Piet.

  On days when Mrs Mark lost her rag, or Frau Fax was being more than usually short-tempered, or – perhaps the worst of all – when Mr Lennox threw food, Piet was a source of strength.

  Helene was a young woman with a sympathetic smile. Her thin, sensitive face would have been conventionally beautiful were it not for an enormous nose. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was tied in a pony-tail. The temporary Greek waiter fancied her, but it was clear from the way she spoke about Piet that the Greek did not stand a chance.

  ‘In Africa, he prince – Prince Tuli. His father king. They have big, big palace, many wives, servants, concubines.’

  She smiled at the thought. The other servants, as she had told them, had realized that if Piet (or Prince Tuli) so commanded, she would willingly volunteer to become a concubine of his.

  ‘Tuli was only eleven years old when he have wife – it is part of a ceremony, you know, to show, like he becomes man. She, his first
wife, she is big lady, very big boobs. Piet, when he was boy in Africa, he was allowed any woman he liked. The king, his dad, sent him to England. He was at Eton. Prince Charles, Prince William, he knew them all – they went to the Drones Club together. But then there was revolution in his country. No way would Prince Tuli be a puppet to General Bindiga like Prince Charles a puppet to Blair. Prince Charles’s cock’s the size of a shrimp – Piet’s seen it in the showers after polo matches. So Piet left Eton and he’s working on his own now. He’s in disguise – no one’s meant to know who he is.’

  The others were too polite to question any of this when, with whispered giggles, both salacious and profoundly impressed, Helene had told them. Piet at the time had been upstairs. He had found out Martina’s password on her computer, and had been checking her e-mails. In the course of his researches he had found out why Mr Constancio – Pedro – had left his last job. This was another reason why the couple, well past their fiftieth birthday, treated the young man with a certain deference.

  So, the servants stared about at the banquet – the caviar, the baron of beef, the huge ham, the great vats of potatoes, the oozing vacherins, the hunks of fruit-cake, looking as if hacked for giants.

  Piet’s phone rang. Toodle-pip.

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

  All admired his beautiful public-school English. You only got that from going to Eton.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he told them. ‘Helene – come.’

  And he led his willing handmaid into the hall to greet the guests.

  ‘Have they all met her before?’ asked Helene.

  Piet shook his head and smiled wickedly. In his white coat, buttoned to the throat, and his white gloves, he was magnificently handsome. His long neck jutted from the uniform. His hair had been cut quite short by the man who cut Mary Much. His grey-blue eyes looked from the hall to the drawing room, where Frau Fax, in a cocktail dress, was fortifying herself with a glass of Schnapps.