I pulled the handle of the drawer. It ran smoothly, softly, and it kept running, I kept pulling and it wasn’t until I had three feet of the drawer open that I could see its back. That was right, Patrick had said something about the desk having being designed to take rolled up maps… but the top drawer – the one which contained the apartment keys was shallow. This was going to take longer than fifteen minutes.
Inside the map drawer was an intricate mosaic of notepaper, envelopes, greetings cards, and notebooks which had been painstakingly stacked. I glanced at a few cards, written notes and picked up one of the notebooks. It was packed with handwritten names, addresses, telephone numbers; I would need to work faster, I would also need to work on a hunch rather than to a system. There was a set of notebooks from Oyez stationers, marbled covers and endpapers, six inches by four. They were different from everything else in the drawer and all different colours. They seemed to be full of handwritten jottings of a personal nature; ‘…heat, light, Freia, my mother, La Gomera’ were words that caught my eye… I could feel myself being drawn in…
No, this was what I was looking for. A notebook, marbled cover – not unlike the texture of the porcelain in the toilets at Patrick’s club. There were lists of telephone numbers – just numbers, nothing else. They were sitting there covering each page as if they were secret codes. I scanned them, turning pages. Each number had a symbol next to it, ‘phi, chi, psi, omega’, he’d categorized them. There were only ten pages – fifteen lines on each, so no more than a hundred and fifty numbers.
When I saw it, the thrill was like jumping into cold water, it was surprise but somehow, I’d just known it would be there; 01-241-0167. It was in the Omega category.
As I closed the notebook I dropped it onto the floor as I heard a loud report from the hallway below. Someone was rapping on the front door. Held in a state of deep freeze I stood looking at the notebook by my right stockinged foot and listening. It was okay it was just a courier. I could hear Lauren’s voice in the Hall – ‘Could you put it down there please.’
‘Nah probs dahlynn, just sahn ’ere…’ I heard the front door close and began breathing again. But there was something else; the courier’s voice had been replaced by another male voice. Fuck, it was Patrick!
‘… Are those the Fired Earth samples, Lauren? Is Pulse around?’
‘He’s around somewhere.’ Somewhere? She was covering for me.
I could hear the leather brogues tapping and squeaking over the stone floor. A pause as he would be peering into the main studio, and then the sound I was dreading. It was like a grim cleaner scraping and sweeping each stone step with a besom. He was coming, he was coming, he was coming and there was nothing I could do. I just had sufficient time to replace the notebook where I’d found it, push the drawer back into the depths of the walnut monster and lock it.
The logical thing to have done next would have been to bluff it out. To go forward and greet him, ‘Hello, Patrick, I was just searching for those photos of GI Group you were looking at yesterday.’ But just as I had lost my sense of time, my logic also had evaporated. I had to avoid contact with him, at any cost, and the result of my instinct was to force me into an even more impossible situation. As I heard him pass through the outer lobby I ducked down behind the desk and crawled into the knee space where I had left my boots minutes earlier.
Squatting, I turned my body so I was facing outward. In front of me was Patrick’s dock-leaf coloured swivel chair, and beyond that was the central lower part of the medieval wall tapestry. I could see the lion’s tail, the bottom of the richly patterned lady’s dress and in front of that squatting – just like me – was the monkey, his haunches bent, his paws like mine resting on the floor in front of him. There was silence as if Patrick was standing by the door to the room sensing, looking around him, and wondering where Pulse was.
The space I was occupying was restricted by the height of the desk; it was three feet wide and almost five feet deep – practically the footprint of a wc cubicle. I could smell wood polish, carpet, shoe leather and – quite possibly – a trace of dog shit. I heard a floorboard creak – not the one in the antechamber, there was another I knew about over by the right-hand window. So, he was there, looking outside… or perhaps not, perhaps he was staring at the desk, his highly-developed and sociopathic sixth sense telling him that there was something wrong, that he needed to take care. I began to experience an unexpected relative sense of safety.
Knee space was an inadequate description for my refuge. Crouching there with my back almost touching the front panel of the desk, I realized that if I extended my arm fully in front of me it would not touch the knee of a person sitting at the desk – even with the chair fully drawn up. If one was alone one could stretch, out or lie in the foetal position and enjoy some degree of comfort. Were this entire object to be transported to the underpass at Waterloo Station a homeless person could live within it in comparative luxury and enjoy almost unlimited storage for their miserable possessions.
I could hear, feel footsteps close to my right ear, see grey worsted trouser material, hear the squeak of the dock-leaf deep-buttoned leather as it was pulled, pushed, and an abrupt rush of air as the bulk of a human occupied the chair in front of me. My secret chamber was plunged into gloom yet I was able to make out the curve of human buttocks against leather, worsted cloth drawn taut, and there was a notion of the faint line of a silver trouser crease.
I was visited by the awful realization that not only had I tampered with his private belongings, I had now secreted myself within his personal space. If he thought he was alone – which I sincerely hoped he did – then supposing he indulged in behaviour that one would only in the knowledge that one was alone? What if he did something unseemly?
There was the gentle woodwind note of the top drawer being opened. There was a silence and I began to pray that he had not noticed that the apartment keys were missing. I was overtaken by another thought which was accompanied by a marked temperature change in my body. When I’d been examining the contents of the locked drawer I’d failed to take into consideration the exact nature of my surroundings. The desk sat in perfect alignment with the left-hand window of the room. Someone walking along the opposite side of the road would have been able to look up through the window and see me bending over the open drawer. Patrick often walked there, enjoying being under the trees. On more than one occasion I’d seen him stand – and perhaps with more than a little pride – look up at the house.
The left trousered leg stretched itself, and I involuntarily moved my head to the left so that my ear was resting against the vertical wood panel of the drawer pedestal. The polished wood was smooth against my cheek. What an irony that inches away from my ear was evidence… shit, not evidence, not yet, it was still only a clue, I needed more.
I became aware that my ear was somehow enclosed by the wood. There was a small recess. As the leg of the sitter withdrew itself I turned my head and was able to feel with my right hand. It was a handle, a recessed handle. There was a secret drawer concealed in the volume of space that lay behind the shallow top drawer. It was invisible, even to a person glancing into the knee space from the front of the desk.
Directly above my head I could hear soft thumps. Of course, there were letters, put there by Lauren for Patrick to sign. I could almost feel him reading the letters – and even though alone – ostentatiously signing them. ‘The use of bastard forms’, was one of his criticisms of people’s handwriting, and as I squatted in trepidation below I derived a morsel of amusement from the fact that though many might well use bastard forms, the signature above was undoubtedly being formed by a bastard.
‘These will all have to be done again!’
It was a bellow clearly meant to be audible from the butler’s pantry below. The chair lurched backwards, the grey worsteds lengthened, flopped over the twin domes of the black brogues. I moved forward onto all fours and listened as t
he footsteps left the room, the creaking board in the antechamber creaked; tap tap chug, this time it was the sound of shoe leather on stone, descending.
I tumbled out of my hiding place, forced my body into a vertical position, and winced at the pain that only five minutes of squatting could inflict. I dodged back under the desk and snatched my boots, skipped through the anteroom circumventing the squeaky board, and bending down to hide the boots, this time behind the door. I could hear voices below, the bovine bellow, and the calm tessitura in response. I raced up the stairs to the apartment door; the male voice below was softer now. In went the Chubb, then the Yale. I breathed the vanilla – there was something different about it, tobacco. Once in the kitchen I slid open the knife drawer. There were several knives lying on the work surface which I was sure hadn’t been there twenty minutes ago. I unlocked the steel cupboard and hung up the key. I locked, replaced the key in the knife drawer and carefully slid it shut. As I did so I experienced a sensation as if someone was pouring a jug of iced water on top of my head. There was a voice in the flat.
It was coming from the sitting room and as I made my escape past the door I could hear a high-pitched whining sound, impossible to tell whether male or female, but as the words came through the door I knew who it was.
‘Debrouillarde! Aguerrie aux moeurs de la rue,’ then it continued in English, ‘I don’t want you to marry that man. There’s something evil about him!’
I tore down the stairs out onto the stone landing, turned, did the Yale, then the Chubb and, taking the steps two at a time, I arrived at the door of the antechamber. God be praised the voices downstairs were still going! I retrieved my boots and raced to the stair head… Oh Christ the apartment keys! I hurled myself back through the antechamber again avoiding the creaky board, pulled open the top drawer of the desk and replaced them. I hadn’t deserved such luck, the two voices on the ground floor were getting fainter; they were descending to the basement.
My boots back on my feet, back at ground level and endowed with a new confidence I tiptoed to the front door, opened it slowly like someone would if they were using a key from the outside – as if I had just returned from going out to buy a newspaper – then I slammed it and strode down to the basement smiling broadly, if a little zanily.
At the foot of the stairs I paused and looked through the door into the samples library. Lauren was leaning over the large white table which was covered with discarded corrugated cardboard and brown paper. In the centre of the brownish debris were stacks of patterned tiles.
‘Come and have a look at these new Fired Earth samples, Pulse.’ As I came nearer I smiled into his eyes but it was impossible to tell from the black pupils whether the wolf knew that he had just made a kill, or not.
Nineteen
When I caught sight of my mother through the studio window I wondered what she was doing. She was standing on the pavement waving and pointing towards the front door and looking ‘put out’ as she might say. She wasn’t really upset, and when I opened the front door I soon grasped that she hadn’t seen the bull’s head bell, her knock on the door had been so slight and I’d been buried so deep in my thoughts I hadn’t heard.
Evidently out of the parade of new friends she’d made on the bus journey was a woman whose son was a civil engineer in Kuwait.
‘The Emir’s palace, you wouldn’t believe it… A hundred square miles of marble, imagine that!’
A tour of Lloyd Lewis Associates studio was going to be a let-down after that. She was hunching her shoulders as we stood in the cool gloom of the hallway. Wearing her ‘azure cloud’ summer coat from Debenhams I could tell she was feeling the cold inside the house. She tapped her feet.
‘Bare stone?’ The practice couldn’t have been doing well if the boss couldn’t afford carpets for a house as grand as this.
‘Keep your coat on for now, Mum.’ She followed me into the studio.
‘Lovely,’ she said. It was the size of the rooms, the fireplaces, and the tall windows with their wooden shutters which seemed to impress her.
‘… So, you have to open and close them every evening and morning?’ I demonstrated, it was six o’clock and time to close down anyway, Lauren had already gone home.
‘It’s just like it must have been a hundred years ago. I se-e-e, it’s like a museum!’ She said it as if she’d just solved the final Daily Mail crossword clue.
‘Ahem!’ There was a creak of leather brogue by the open studio door. He must have been in the basement while I’d been letting mum in at the front door.
‘Patrick Lloyd Lewis!’ (Conservative) he advanced towards Mum 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 – unless he was referring to her knitting accomplishments… Mum’s top lip puckered, then she broke into one of her giggles.
Mum’s giggles were rare, in fact the only time I heard them was when I was a child, and her fourteen-stone sister would come to stay. The three of us would sit on the sofa – me trapped in the middle, the two of them giggling away. I also imagine that she’d done plenty of giggling when Dad had been courting her so it was with mixed emotions that I now heard her.
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,’ and ‘you sometimes play your cards very close…’
I noticed the pinkness of his ear and recalled the gentle brush from the back of Martinique’s fingers along his shoulder during my interview. I laughed at his apparent self-contradiction. Mum laughed easily, less of a giggle this time.
As if he had suddenly become tired of small talk and was implying we should get down to business the ‘O’ shape of his lips distorted as if it were the fissured texture around the anus of some unknown creature.
‘Come!’ he bellowed.
We followed, out of the studio, Patrick, Mum, and me as vanguard – up four flights of stone steps. Patrick was dressed in navy blazer, grey worsteds, but his tie had undergone a change. Its stripes ran left to right instead of the usual right to left or the horizontal. I struggled to imagine some significance for this change in pattern and gave up.
‘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 by something dark, animalistic, and there was still that hint of tobacco.
‘Oooh, but I am.’ Patrick’s reply was succeeded by another giggle from Mum.
There seemed to be no one else in the flat, but after this afternoon’s experience I decided that one could never quite be sure. Patrick stopped and turned towards us, blocking our progress further into the flat. Evidently our visit was to be confined to the sitting room and he gestured with his hand towards the open door.
‘Sit anywhere you like.’ He spoke as if it were intended as a challenge, moving as he did so inside the doorway where he stood watching while Mum and I hovered wondering where to sit.
Because that afternoon the door to the sitting room had been shut, and during my fleeting previous visit it had been open but only one foot, I was unfamiliar with the space. The room took up the full width of the house, but because a third of its ceiling sloped upward from just above the low windows it felt smaller than the piano nobile two floors below. From front to back, both side walls were lined with storage units – as was the space under the two windows, with a mixture of open shelves, and closed cupboards. The only free wall was on the inboard one behind where Patrick was standing. There was apparently no TV or hi-fi, and the focal point of the space was a large table made from some dark deeply figured wood which seemed to hover
six inches above the thick apricot-hued carpet. There were no pictures on the walls.
Mum was drifting around the room looking as if she’d been coerced into playing an extravagant game of musical chairs. Her outstretched hand was moving backwards and forwards patting each seating option in turn.
Under the window was a four-seater sofa upholstered in a fabric not unlike Patrick’s trousers. It was so enormous that removal men couldn’t have brought it up the stairs and it must have been craned in through the roof when the apartment was being built. There were two matching chairs each large enough to accommodate two persons, but what was attracting Mum’s attention were the three remaining seats; a Le Cobusier lounger in pale brown leather, a giant suede pouffe, and an Eames swivel armchair, rosewood upholstered in shiny black leather. The triple bus journey and the vision of the Emir’s palace seemed to have endowed Mum with an even greater sense of adventure. She decided upon the Eames armchair.
But instead of placing a hand on either arm and gently lowering herself into it she attempted to kneel on the seat, grasping the headrest in the way that a small child might throw its arms round the neck of a rocking horse. As she transferred all twelve stone of her weight onto the seat it began to revolve – azure soft-touch fabric against leather and rosewood, slowly at first, but as she tried to turn over, faster and faster.
‘Oh… oh… oh…!’ there was more giggling. Patrick advanced and planted two masterful navy-blazered arms either side of her onto the arms of the chair, and the Eames, complete with occupant, stopped dead. Mum suddenly had the weary look of a bewildered elderly person being stretchered by an A&E team into an ambulance and I felt sorry for her.
‘Perhaps the sofa!’ thundered Patrick.
I helped Mum out of the Eames, took her coat and she perched on the sofa’s edge, while I sat in one of the huge adjacent chairs.
‘Oh, I like your wardrobe, Patrick!’
The Gilded Ones Page 14