‘Owe not three bad,’ mumbled Dickson in a grovelly sort of way.
‘What doing? Who am brought us you this time?’ The slit of the mouth widened in recognition. ‘We-ell, Mr Puckeroon!’
‘Puck and me bumped into one another in town.’ It sounded like he’d been caught in the act of something and was making excuses.
‘… Hope that didn’t hurt, Mellobydick.’
‘… Not at all, Mr Hood… Puck working here on project.’
‘What projay am this, Mr Puckeroon?’
‘GI Group.’ I didn’t feel like giving details.
‘My mother knew a lot of GIs in the war… Am like.’
I’d forgotten how weird the accent was; Northern Irish, Canadian, New Zealand? It was as if he’d spent his formative years in a cluster of British colonies. The bizarre word arrangements weren’t dialect, they were Hoodspeak.
‘’Ellow, Stripy!’
A huge cat wandered out from behind the console. I expected Hood to kick it, but instead he walked towards it. One step with his right leg while dragging his left leg behind him. He bent down and picked up the creature with a disconcerting gentleness, right hand gripping the front of the feline body, his left smoothing its rear end. He stood there with the giant furry bundle in his arms. The cat’s head was as big as his.
‘… Siamese.’ Hood’s head nodded down at the cat’s head.
What? Pull the other one! This was an oversized nightclub-inhabiting moggie if ever I saw one. He read my thoughts.
‘… Separated from her sister, shortly after birth,’ he insisted. A faint bell rang in my head – not a full-on carillon, more a distant angelus.
‘We nem GI Group, doesn’t we, Mellobydick?’ Dickson stared at the shiny grey floor.
‘… Lots of post for you, Mr Hood. On desk… In office… if that’s all, Mr Hood…?’ Dickson began walking backwards the way we’d come, he looked frightened to turn, as if he expected to be transformed into a pillar of salt.
‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Mr Puckeroon!’
As I followed Dickson back over the dance floor in the direction of the door I heard the almost inaudible mutter.
‘Those GIs were really something.’
As a subdued Dickson drove me back to the railway station I made a silent resolution. There was nothing else for it. I had to come back and get that telephone number, on my own, and soon.
Eleven
‘Lauren’s gone to the bank. Slip upstairs to my apartment, Pulse, and bring me the key…’
I was standing in Patrick’s office. He was sitting behind his walnut leviathan. He hadn’t even looked up from the pages of The Times which lay open, flat, and almost certainly ironed by Lauren who had been here since very early.
‘How did you get on in the city of eternal rain?’ He spoke the words as if he’d just awoken from a year-long sleep. He also sounded smug, it was warm and sunny outside, he’d got both of the floor-length sash windows open at the bottom and I could feel a breeze against my leg. A trio of bees was interesting itself in the honeysuckle grown in pots against the trellis of the neighbouring house. I’d gathered that Patrick hated clutter and that included the balcony. There was no sign of the huge mackerel cat.
‘Very well actually, I…’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me how picturesque terracotta looks when it’s wet.’
‘Very good actually…’
‘… It’s to open the third drawer in my desk, here.’ At last he looked up. I’d almost forgotten what he was asking me to do.
‘The keys to the flat are kept in the top drawer which is always open.’ I stared at him. Why couldn’t he do it himself, or wait till Lauren got back?
There was a rich woodwind sound as he pulled open the top drawer, took out two keys, and held them up in front of him as if he were a pope holding the tip of his paterissa.
‘It’s kept in the steel wall cabinet in the kitchen, third from the right – top row. It’s hollow, antique, like the desk.’ I was already starting to lose track.
‘In order to open the steel wall cabinet, you’ll need another key. That’s kept in the knife drawer which is to the left of the hob top.’ He pointed the keys at me and I took them.
‘Should I knock?’
‘Why?’
‘… I thought Martinique might be there.’ He looked at me as if I was a child who’d asked him something very simple such as ‘why do you wear a tie?’
‘You don’t seem to know a lot about women.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘Have you got children?’ He said it as if he was throwing something at me.
‘No.’
‘I’ve got three. Take your time.’ He made it sound almost provocative. ‘…Have a look at the roof garden,’ he purred.
I left the room in a mixture of uncertainty and embarrassment. Perhaps that’s what he wanted… Me the intruder, him sitting downstairs visualizing my every movement while he pretended to read The Times. Perhaps the answer lay in the roof garden.
I tapped my way up the two remaining flights of steps and stopped outside the door which led to the flat. It felt unsatisfactory coming to a stop like that, a blank white wall, a black-painted door. In a house like this I would have expected more ceremony. In the days before the apartment existed there would have been an open landing with three bedrooms and from that a narrow stair leading up to three further loft bedrooms. A five-storey house like this would have had at least two live-in servants and they wouldn’t have had a room each.
I had the two keys in my hand; a Yale, and a Chubb. I tried the Chubb; the mechanism rolled over – satisfying, almost noiseless like a gear change in the hand of a competent driver. I could imagine the moistness of the oil in its internal works. Nobody was at home, I could feel it. I turned the Yale, pushed the door with my right hand. The sensation was like lifting the top of an exquisitely-made jewellery box; soft, silent, a close fit. There was a scent of vanilla and for the second time I forgot about the rotten pheasant niff from below.
Inside, the floor was covered with carpet the colour and texture of peach skin. There was little similarity with the weird world of below. It seemed normal; a normal domain for normal people, neat, tasteful, ordered – even slightly dull. There was still a white wall regime, but not totalitarian, and here and there was even a hint of taupe. The paintings and drawings had a more human quality; street scenes in black ink, traditional watercolours, still lifes. All the doors in the flat were standing open exactly one foot.
The storey where I was standing was made up entirely of bedrooms; one single, one guest double with en suite, a family bathroom, and the master with en suite. As I peered round one of the doors I could see that furniture was fitted and all puzzlingly pale – it was difficult to see what was wardrobe and what was wall. There were no hand-tooled leather headboards, no lascivious carvings.
I padded upstairs where I found a similar narrative of calm… A further bedroom – a single this time with a separate shower and WC. Perhaps all these rooms would be in use when the three children were here, and Lauren had said that Martinique’s son visited a lot… Maybe he slept on the sofa – unless two of the children shared the guest room. One of the children was married wasn’t she… did the husband ever stay, and if so where did the menu-wielding two-year-old take its rest?
There was a separate sitting room at the front of the house whose door, like the others, stood open just far enough for me to see that part of its ceiling followed the line of the sloping roof. The rest of the apartment was open-plan; a kitchen facing outboard, and a dining area – inboard, but directly under a large light cannon, and adjacent to a set of French doors leading out onto a roof terrace. I put my hand on the backrest of one of the eight black Eames dining chairs arranged around the white-topped dining table. There was no sunlight falling directly onto the table but the interior space see
med to be full of brightness. By midday it would be like a hothouse but then I noticed – just under the lip of the light cannon – the protruding edge of a power-operated brise soleil. It was clever, a space which spoke of well-defined activities but without ostentation… A world away from the abandoned garden and the Parsifal bench below.
I clicked open the steel-framed French door and stepped onto the white terrazzo-paved terrace. The inboard wall was white-painted render, the party wall rendered in fair-faced sand and cement. Against the white wall stood a circular table surrounded by six white Panton chairs. At the centre of the white table was a wooden tray – made from chunky pieces of teak half-housed so it looked like a giant waffle with a thick rim. The rear parapet wall had been removed and replaced with white-painted horizontal railings of the type seen on ocean liners of the 1930s, and giving an uninterrupted view north. In the morning sun the treetops seemed to have acquired the illuminance of fool’s gold.
I closed the French doors, crossed the dining area and, as I looked upward through the light cannon, I could see the tiny profile of an airliner. Simultaneously there was a stroboscopic flicker coming through the open door of the sitting room as the plane passed in front of the sun. I thought of the inspection chamber fifty feet below me, and a hundred feet below that the canal.
I crossed to the knife drawer, opened, and took out the key for the steel cupboard. I removed the knobbly desk key, locked cupboard, replaced key in knife drawer, walked downstairs, pulled the apartment door closed behind me, turned the Chubb, and tapped my way back down to Patrick’s office. The whole operation had taken precisely seven minutes. I handed him the knobbly key, he took it, closed his fist around it and looked at me as if he were about to accuse me of something.
‘I’m hosting supper,’ he said it as if he were announcing his intention to preside over mass at St Peter’s in Rome. ‘…on Saturday. I hope you will come,’ he whispered.
‘Er… my friend’s coming for the weekend; we were hoping to have dinner somewhere.’ The eyes fixed me, black with what seemed to me a combination of curiosity and fury.
‘Per-haps you and your friend can come. My children will be here, and…’ he sniffed hard and pouted with his upper lip, ‘… Martinique’s son.’ The trace of a smile – not kindly – appeared on his face.
‘What!… is your friend’s name?’ As he emphasized the ‘friend’ his nose seemed flatter, his neck goiterous, as if it had been injected with pure suspicion.
‘Denise.’
‘French names do so become a woman I think, don’t you?’ The fury abruptly evaporated, the nose seemed fleshier, the neck more relaxed. The curiosity remained and was joined by apparent celebration in the form of the ‘O’ sound and the motion of his lips. The dock-leaf leather under his backside squeaked appreciatively.
‘… Seven o’clock.’
It was not clear whether or not it would be a joint effort with Martinique, no mention of her name had been made other than the curt reference to her son.
Twelve
Denise and I had talked for quite a time about what we should take to Patrick’s supper event. Wine was out of the question after what Lauren had told me; home-made chutney? Home-made anything could end up having gallons of scorn poured over it if Patrick had anything to do with it. In the end we settled for 160-gram Traditional Shortbread Fingers from Fortnum and Mason. It was after all only a token.
Denise and I weren’t really an item. I’d known her for years and the relationship was what some people might – and inaccurately so – refer to as ‘off and on’. We saw one another anywhere between a few times a year and once every few years. She was a maverick… Failed to complete her degree because – by her own admission – she was busy having at least one abortion, finally giving birth to a son who, evidently, was fortunate to have survived. She too had only just come through the ordeal but in doing so had an out-of-body experience.
Her revelation held me in a state of awe and inadequacy. I was receptive to the notion of paranormal happenings but doubtful that they would ever happen to me. But more so because as a man I knew that I would never undergo either an abortion or a near-death experience as a result of childbirth. ‘Living real life’, she called it.
It wasn’t as brutal as it sounded to say that, as a painter, she was talentless. She’d never properly tapped into the creative side of her personality. She was an accomplished cook, but more interestingly an incontinent collector of husbands having recently divorced number three, and to both of our credits in the adultery stakes we had only ever liaised in the periods between husbands. ‘I’m between husbands,’ she would say – ‘… resting dahling, but it’s not much of a rest!’
‘Why don’t you get married?’ she was always saying to me.
‘Why do you get married?’ I would reply.
Denise’s talent in life was in finding folk to fill the gaps in her own, and like a conductor brings in the right instruments at the right time she seemed to do it with people.
I’d never hung out with her at college because she would have thought I was a swot, while she was living her authentic sensual life. Dad was a high-grade civil servant… mum ran a smallholding; pigs, cows, sheep – so Denise grew up a country girl, and that’s exactly what she looked like; round-headed, apple-cheeked, rabbity hair so soft it wouldn’t do anything, and after she’d stayed the night at my place I would find hair pins everywhere.
She worked in advertising for a couple of companies, didn’t like being told what to do, found an admiring middle-aged businessman who believed she could bring in work, turn it round, make a profit. They were right, she did, and I admired her for it. It seemed to me that somewhere here was a parallel – well a kind of mirror in that Patrick was setting me up in business. He’d get the work in, I’d turn it round. Everything was there for me, it was just up to me, if I was up to it.
I thought I’d give Denise a quiet tour round the ground floor and basement before we went up to the apartment.
‘You’re getting better,’ she exclaimed as she peered round my drawing board and stared unseeingly at a floor plan of GI Group.
‘Ahem!’ There was a creak of leather brogue by the open studio door. He must have been in the basement while the two of us let ourselves in at the front door.
‘Patrick Lloyd Lewis, (Conservative)’ he advanced towards Denise his hand aiming for hers. He took it, broad thumb pressing down on her fingers while his four square digits played with their underside. He leaned forward, brought her hand to his ‘O’ shaped lips, and still holding her hand…
‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ He hadn’t. Denise’s top lip puckered, then she broke into one of her deep throaty chuckles. I’d never figured out whether this liberated laughter was a sign of mateyness, woman-of-the-worldishness, or proof of a deep understanding of human nature. Whichever it was, it was Denise, and when it happened in restaurants, which was often, I was always aware of the furrowings which appeared on the foreheads of nearby diners.
His lips were still nuzzling her fingers when he turned his face to me.
‘You’ve been keeping her very close to your chest.’ It was delivered in exactly the same tone as ‘I’ve been having a few moments with my late wife.’ I was amused at his skilful self-contradiction and laughed. I noticed the pinkness of his ear and recalled that gentle brush from the back of Martinique’s fingers she’d given his shoulder during my interview.
Denise laughed also, this time less throatily, and without warning the ‘O’ shape of the lips took on the dark fissured texture of the anus of some unknown creature.
‘Come!’ he bellowed as if he’d had enough of all that. We followed, out of the studio; Patrick, Denise, and me as vanguard walking up the four flights of stone steps. Patrick was dressed in navy blazer, grey worsteds, but his tie had undergone yet another minute change. Its stripes ran horizontally instead of the usual diagonal.
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br /> ‘You have to be fit to live here!’ I commented lamely as he opened the apartment door. The aroma of vanilla was still there but was overlaid with something dark, animalistic, but nevertheless appetizing.
‘Oooh, but I am.’ Patrick’s reply was followed by another catarrh-driven chuckle from Denise. I arrived at the top of the final stair in time to see Martinique with a metal ladle in her hand and wearing a navy and white striped apron which reached to her mid calf. On her head was a white chef’s hat – not a tall toque, just a short one. Her complexion had acquired the shine and hue of olive oil.
‘Martiniqua! Look who I’ve brought,’ he announced. It was two minutes past seven. I got the feeling we were early.
‘Hellowe,’
‘Helloo.’
‘Hello.’
‘I know I look like the chef but I’m not… Not even a sous – more a kitchen porter…’ She pulled the hat from her head and tossed her bobbed hair into shape. Again, it struck me how similar were the styles of her and Lauren. But it proved the point that making people wear a uniform doesn’t make them all look the same. Lauren walked with her head forward, hair like a helmet – a soft one swishing from left to right. She would never shake her head in such a carefree manner.
‘It’s Laurie’s meal really; he’s gone to fetch his knives.’
I had a mental picture involving fire-eating and knife-throwing, but Martinique explained that Laurie was in London doing a catering course. ‘I hope you like beef.’ Denise and I nodded but Denise looked surprised. Martinique seemed to read her thought.
‘It’s Sunday lunch really – transposed to Saturday evening. Lunchtime is too early to expect all the family to get here, and we’ve got another celebration tomorrow evening.’ I heard Patrick inhaling grandly as he left the room. I was looking forward to meeting Laurie.
I sneaked the shortbread onto a nearby shelf while Denise assured Martinique that one of her three brothers had done a catering course, and was now professor of philosophy at Arcadia Uni, Ohio. I wondered whether the two of them would get on, after all, they both had sons of about the same age.
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