‘I told you to include the consultants on the distribution lists. Do them all again – now!’ The voice was a bellow. Without expression the woman took the letters and left the room.
‘Lauren,’ – Lawrrahn he pronounced it – ‘she’s a star…’ He enthused like a conductor introducing his soloist, as he looked at the doorway she’d recently walked through ‘…absolute star! She’s a baroness you know…’ he announced turning back to fix me with his pupils – dark as the ink he’d just used to sign the useless letters, ‘… Hereditary, not life. Since her old father died she’s been all on her own.’
I could feel the vatic glare on me now. It was as if I was being given a set of instructions and for the first time I realized that Lauren was about my age.
While the signing had been in progress I’d taken the opportunity to delve into my attaché case and take out my portfolio, all in compact A4 format.
‘Oh, so you’ve brought something to show me.’
I opened it at a very detailed pencil working drawing, a cross-section through a reception desk I’d designed for an advertising agency. I was particularly proud of the piece.
Again, there was a light tap on the door. I thought it was Lauren… in fact I did a double take. The woman standing there seemed to be Lauren but wasn’t Lauren.
‘Ah Martiniqua! This is Pulse. He’s showing me his work and look…’ he jabbed his wedge-shaped digits at the drawing of the reception desk, ‘… he’s been good enough to bring me items of unfinished work. Come!’ He gestured to Martinique to take up position behind his right shoulder.
‘You see, Martinique…’ he continued, index and second finger resting across my drawing and tapping it twice. ‘This is what we in the business call pencilling in.’ He pronounced each vowel and consonant as if he were speaking to a three-year-old.
‘Patrick, I’ve got a meeting at the UN this evening, my driver’s coming in fifteen minutes.’ She spoke in rapid clipped English monotone with an accent I guessed was French. She was wearing a magenta-coloured business suit which had a slight emphasis at the shoulders.
‘…That’s in Whitehall, by the way,’ she added in a whispered in case you didn’t know tone, close to his pink little ear and while stroking the back of her hand across his shoulder. Her eyes adopted an ‘in conference’ mode while his wedge-shaped fingers drummed rhythmically against the acetate sleeve of my portfolio and his mouth formed an ‘O’, but less aggressively this time.
When she’d gone, he simply said, ‘Pulse, when can you join us?’ I loved the ‘us’.
As I packed up my folio and rose from the chair my eye fell upon an oak-framed colour photograph sitting on an antique Georgian blanket box, I hadn’t noticed before. It showed a woman with brunette bobbed hair, skinny scarlet jeans, and a bright pink cotton top with white Aztec pattern. It took no more than a split second to make the connection and unable to stop myself I moved towards it. He saw me staring.
‘… My late wife.’ He said it petulantly as if it should have been obvious to me.
‘What was her name?’ I couldn’t help myself. Oh God, it was none of my business but I could feel the thrill running through my duodenum. I knew the answer.
He spoke it like the automated message on an answerphone, ‘Freia, it’s spelled the German way.’
Six
It had been no contest.
There were two reasons why I’d accepted the job with Patrick, and as I strap-hung on the District Line breathing the bouquet of carbon and halitosis, I compared them. It still wasn’t too late – well it probably was now, I’d made my decision, worked my notice and I wasn’t going back on my word. It was Monday July 23rd and I was on my way to my first day as manager.
First up had been curiosity – rather like with the payphone in Victoria station, only now the feeling was a hundred times more intense. I’d had déjà vu before – we’ve all had it to some extent but this had to be paranormal. The dream had been so clear, then the photograph!
Then there was Patrick. Jesus, the guy was a manipulative rogue if ever I saw one!
I’d consulted my circle of friends. There’d been rumours; Patrick and his wife had split months before her death – though nobody had been sure exactly when that had been, nor how she’d died. At least one story chimed with my nightmare suggesting that she and her new boyfriend had died in a car crash ‘somewhere abroad’, but other avenues of gossip included a brain haemorrhage, heart attack, breast cancer, and choking on a pistachio nut.
In at least one respect I was mad. Promo Designs was a slick operation, it would have been a good career move, but I felt driven to seek the truth… Except what was the truth? Was it my suspicions, rumour based on what I heard from others, or was it fact, the kind of fact to be obtained only by qualified people such as police? I knew very well that I wasn’t the person to embark on a full investigation but at the same time I felt I had no choice, I was being drawn into something. The truth would rise to the surface – as by a process of osmosis merely through my presence at Lloyd Lewis Associates.
‘Ooze bundle-o-joy is this?’ The words manhandled me out of my thoughts as a tall uniformed and capped man followed me onto the train at Bank station and was pushing his way down the crowded car identifying items of anonymous luggage which stood by doors. He pointed at a jumbo khaki sausage of a holdall capable of carrying a human body let alone a bomb. A sheepish studenty young man raised his hand.
‘You’re meant to put it theya, not ’ear!’ He pointed to the end of the car, and then to the sign above the heads of the strap-hangers, ‘…Seyz so!’ There was nowhere else the studie could have put it, and as the doors opened at Old Street he hauled his human-sized bale out of the car onto the platform. The doors closed and the train moved off leaving him standing waiting for the next – perhaps less crowded – train.
The second reason – though no less emotionally inspired – was more complex. For all its eccentricities Lloyd Lewis Associates seemed to offer an opportunity. Patrick would get the work in, I would hire and fire, I would turn it round. He would make me associate director – okay, his initial response to that hadn’t been too positive but I would work on him. Promo was predictable, it was the popular perception of what being a designer was all about and for me destined to be ultimately dull, so here I was.
As a boy I’d done well – failed the eleven-plus but at thirteen picked up a scholarship to the local boys’ grammar. I got to be top of the class, there seemed no stopping me, and Mum and Dad fled into their shells in awe of just what kind of erudite only child they’d brought into this world. Dad wanted me to leave school after O Levels, take ‘a good clerking position at Swifts’, the coach works where he was night watchman… ‘summat ta be proud of.’ I wanted to go to art college which needed two A Levels, Mum was all for it so in the end we agreed on a compromise, A Levels in one year at the local tech college – which I did, followed by Art Foundation course, and I got into Leeds – my first choice. Dad was jealous but had to lump it.
It was while I was at Leeds that I got the holiday job in London. I wanted Mum and Dad to come and visit me. Dad wouldn’t, it would have meant time off. Mum did, she bought a hat, and when I met her off the coach in Victoria I realized that, although I’d seen photos of her in a hat – her wedding, my christening and so forth – this was the first time I’d seen her in anything but rollers or headscarf.
At the Spanish artist’s house, I slept in the attic room where the boiler was, Mum in the other room. She was ultra nervous about everything, so when I took her to Flanagan’s in Baker Street she thought it was ‘a dive’ with its sawdust on the floor, waiters in striped kitchen aprons and boaters, until she realized it was deliberate, new, fashionable, and she began to try and relax.
I was showing off – playing the bon viveur, it was the first time I’d ever had any cash to spend and I tucked in to cockles, game pie, and treacle suet pud…
I think I even had half a bottle of stout. I can’t recall what Mum had. Afterwards I took her to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – outdoors in Regents Park.
In the final scenes after Oberon has blessed the three couples, all the other characters have left the stage, and Puck suggests to the audience that what they have just experienced may be nothing but a dream, I could see tears rolling down Mum’s cheeks. ‘No… it’s magical, love,’ she was almost apologetic, but as we clapped our hands with the five hundred other people in the park that evening we both knew only too well what a dream was. When we got back to the Spanish artist’s house I brought up the cockles, game pie, treacle suet pud, and bottle of stout in the downstairs toilet.
Our street – where I lived with my mum and dad – was only half a street. There were twelve red-brick terraced houses – six either side, two-up two-downs with the front door leading straight onto the pavement. Sometime, someone had built a wall across the road. It was so high that even looking out of the window of Mum and Dad’s bedroom I could only see the tops of the houses – little conical roofs disappearing into the distance. There were other children in the street with whom I played, and whose parents’ bedrooms we could sneak into, but nobody could ever really see what was on the other side of the wall. We’d tried to walk round there to look but for some reason always ended up getting lost. I’d asked Mum, she just shook her head.
I was the smallest child in our little street gang and also the lightest, so when we made a human tower one day it was me who had to go on top. I climbed onto the shoulders of the highest boy, grabbed the smooth warm tiles of the sloping parapet, threw my leg over and sat there triumphantly.
‘What can you see?’ they were shouting.
‘Just houses…’ I yelled back, ‘…they’re just houses.’ But what I didn’t tell them was that the houses looked different. They had bay windows; tiny front gardens, ornamental metal gates, and between the pavement and the road there was a strip of green mown grass.
When I told Mum about Lloyd Lewis Associates on the phone – and I always told her everything – she said ‘Oh, love, you could really make something of yourself there! If only your dad could have…’
It was just the two of us; Lauren and me sitting at the white laminate-topped conference table in Patrick’s office at 11.00am; me facing the window, Lauren opposite. The doors to the anteroom and stone landing were standing open and we were waiting and listening. Lauren had said that we had to be there on the dot. I’d arrived at the house well before nine so that had given me plenty of time to get settled in. I’d chosen the drawing board by the window facing out towards the trees, but as I sat and looked out I felt anything but settled.
It was raining, a church clock was striking somewhere in the distance, and as it reached its final stroke it made a duet with the rattle of a Chubb lock being released from somewhere on high within the house. Lauren had told me that Patrick and Martinique had a flat which occupied the top two floors of the house, and it seemed also that Patrick’s three children and Martinique’s son frequently put in appearances in the house. It was going to be interesting.
I heard the sound of a door opening at the top of the landing. Almost immediately it closed, I could hear something which resembled the ticking of an old grandfather clock and I recalled the black polished brogues and the stone steps. Someone was descending. Through the window I could see a cat sitting on the balcony in front of the decorative ironwork, waiting to be let in. It was the largest domestic cat I’d ever seen and with its black and silver stripes it resembled a giant furry mackerel. I wondered how it had got there in the first place.
The ticking clock ceased, and the floorboard I recalled which had creaked just before my interview, creaked again.
‘Typical English weather!’ The male voice snapped as if it was not suffering fools gladly.
‘Oh, Patrick… your eye! What happened?’ Lauren sounded emotional.
I turned, rising as I did – my hand outstretched to greet. The figure which had entered the room was dressed exactly as I had seen it a month ago – except I was sure that now the stripes of the club tie were running right-to-left instead of left-to-right. But there was something extraordinary. Patrick’s right eye was concealed behind a pad of blindingly white lint, upholstered with cotton wool and fastened across the face with clear medical tape.
‘It’s nothing!’ He raised his right hand as if in benediction.
‘But what happened?’
‘My grandson did it.’ He sniffed through his flattened nose, pouted his lips and sat down in mystifying silence. The offence was no doubt in the process of being dealt with by law, and Patrick was almost certainly struggling to come to terms with the nature of such a filial crime.
‘But he’s only two!’
The cat on the balcony put its face a nudge away from the glass of the window. Its head looked like a rather damp striped medicine ball.
Patrick, it transpired, had been to Pizza Express with Jen, one of his daughters, and her two-year old. Somehow the infant had taken possession of the menu – slashing the air around it with laminated plastic. I winced at the vision of pepperoni, sloppy Giuseppe, and sliced human cornea.
‘Are you settling in?’ He one-eyed me.
‘Very well,’ I lied. He sounded as if he didn’t give a shiny shoe either way.
‘I’ve got something very interesting for you, a client in your neck of the woods.’ He studied me with his cyclopean eye. He hadn’t a clue where my neck of the woods was, I hadn’t told him, and he’d never even looked at my CV.
The telephone on the walnut desk rang.
‘Get that would you.’
Lauren rose, walked to the desk, picked up the receiver.
‘Lloyd Lewis Associates…’ Her voice was an echo of his (Conservative).
‘Tell me, Pulse, do you drive around London?’ I didn’t, I used public transport.
‘It’s for you, Patrick.’ Lauren stood holding the handset, but she was looking in my direction as if there was a hidden message somewhere for me.
Patrick rose, walked to the desk, picked up the phone. I could see the trace of a smile on Lauren’s face.
‘Lloyd Lewis.’
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‘I’m doing the drawings right now.’ His voice was curt.
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‘Yes.’… Slightly less curt.
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‘Yes, promise.’
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‘Pro-mise…’ I sensed a touch of supplication in his voice.
There was the clunk of plastic on finely polished wood as he dropped the receiver onto the tabletop then scooped it back onto the handset. He returned to the head of the table, making a dusting motion with his hands as he sat down.
‘My mother’s kitchen…’ He said it as if he were talking about someone who was having to undergo repeat surgery for a rare and probably incurable condition. I wondered whether she would ever see it finished. He continued.
‘You’re familiar with GI Group.’ It was rhetorical. I wasn’t.
‘Bicycles, domestic cookers – old tech. They want to get rid of their metal-bashing image. I want you to go take a brief.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘The No-o-o-orth of England!’ He pronounced the ‘o’ with an elongated shudder.
‘Can I take Lauren?’
‘Certainly not!’
It was agreed that I would go tomorrow, on the train. An inland north-west town – as I gather they used to say in radio announcements during the war, and in point of fact some considerable miles north-west of my neck of the woods. I was looking forward to it.
‘… Fancy going for a drink later?’ When I was back downstairs Lauren’s voice was a mock-conspiratorial whisper.
‘…Ye-es, okay!’
&nbs
p; I was looking forward to that as well.
Seven
It had stopped raining and there was a glimmer of sun behind low cloud. The air seemed to have acquired a new density of heat and as we walked uphill into the wynds above the house, it seemed almost as if it were releasing its special scents; jasmine, mock orange, and honeysuckle.
The Stag and… ‘something’ Lauren had said. I hadn’t got the measure of her at all. A month ago, she’d looked every bit the domestic servant, today she’d refined the image into a John Lewis sales assistant; black skirt, black stockings, patent shoes, and in spite of the warm weather a close-fitting grey cotton turtleneck. There was something I liked about her, at the same time I got the feeling she was out to impress, lighting her little fires, always creating a smoke of mystery.
In the space of the few minutes it took us to reach the pub she’d confided that there was a nuclear submarine stuck under the North Pole which ‘could go up any time’, that she’d got information about the Russian economy which could have a catastrophic effect on the UK stock market, that she had been party to information that a previous Chancellor of the Exchequer had had his wife murdered. The Lord Lucanish rumours seemed childish – but you know, even nursery rhymes can prove unsettling to an adult and it all served to increase my general feeling of unease. Whatever the case, it appeared that Lauren saw ‘information’ as her currency. It was going to be an interesting hour or so. Given the circumstances of my being at Lloyd Lewis Associates in the first place I found the third piece of her information particularly off-putting.
The pub was Edwardian – outside it was all orange rubbed brick and glazed chocolate-coloured tiles. There was a sense of candy-coloured artificiality about everything. Perhaps it was the warm air, the condensation of heavy scents, and the glittering from the stippled glass windows… Perhaps it was just the feeling of first day in a new job? On the pavement stood an ‘A’ blackboard chalked with the message ‘no live music, no jukebox… perfect peace!’ The place would be deserted. I was wrong, it was heaving.
The Gilded Ones Page 4