1998 - Armadillo

by William Boyd

  “What do you make of this?” Lorimer asked, handing over an invitation which had arrived in the morning’s mail.

  “Lady Sherriffmuir.” Torquil read, “‘At Home for Toby and Annabel’…Are you sure this is meant for you?”

  “It has my name on the top, Torquil.”

  “I suppose mine’ll have gone to bloody Binnie. Damn. Hell! Why’s he asking you? Have you met him?”

  “Just the once.”

  “Must have made quite an impression. Very honoured.”

  “I can’t quite understand why, either.”

  “He’s got a lovely place in Kensington…” Torquil frowned as if the concept of’ home’ troubled him. He pouted, then pursed his lips, poured some salt on the table top and dabbed at it with a forefinger.

  “Anything on your mind?” Lorimer prompted.

  Torquil licked his salted forefinger. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, Lorimer, but I’m going to move in with Lobby.”

  “Absolutely, fine with me. No problem. When?”

  “It’s easier for me working nights, you see. It’s just more practical. I just don’t want you to feel—”

  “Excellent idea.”

  “I mean if you want me to stay on, I wouldn’t dream of moving. I would hate to—”

  “No, makes much more sense.”

  “Very good of you.” Torquil beamed, hugely relieved. “Have you any idea how much money I’m going to make this week? I mean if I get a few more airport jobs and good night work I could be talking over two grand. Phil Beazley’s going to get me some pills to keep me awake.”

  He talked on in tones of astonishment about his good fortune, and how he owed it all to Lorimer. Binnie would get her money, he said, and taking account of running costs at this rate he could have, cash in hand, maybe a thousand pounds a week, easy.

  “Apparently you pay hardly any tax,” he said. “You declare about one-tenth of what you earn, and write off all your expenses—fuel, insurance—against it. And I’ve got no time to spend anything, anyway. Never been so flush. Never had so much folding money in my life.”

  Lorimer thought Torquil and Slobodan would co-exist perfectly: they both smoked too much, drank to excess, they ate the same food, enjoyed the same middle-of-the-road rock music, shared the same defiantly sexist attitude to women, were not readers, indifferent to things cultural, were mildly racist, uninterested in current affairs and both unreflectingly voted Conservative. Apart from their accents, and the strata separating them socially, they could have been cut from the same cloth.

  Torquil pushed away his empty plate, popped the folded square of bread that had polished it greaseless into his mouth, and reached for his cigarettes.

  “You know,” he said, chewing ruminatively, “if I mini-cabbed hard for six months I could take the rest of the year off. Never need to sell a line of insurance again.”

  “Talking of which,” Lorimer said, “can you cast your mind back to the Fedora Palace deal?”

  Torquil winced. “You see, the trouble was I never asked any advice. I’d just had a bit of a shameful bollocking from Simon about my attitude, not pulling my weight, lack of initiative and all that, so when what’s-his-name—Gale—suddenly said he would pay that huge premium in the interests of speeding things up, I jumped at it.”

  “You and Gale cooked it up between you.”

  “I mentioned a figure and he mentioned a higher one. I mean, it’s plain business sense, isn’t it. You don’t take less,” he frowned, “do you ? I mean it was a hotel, for God’s sake. Bricks and mortar, state of the art. What could go wrong?”

  “What was Gale’s hurry?”

  “I don’t know. He just wanted it done quickly. Seemed reasonable to me. I thought I’d done everyone a favour and earned a nice sum of money for the Fort. Nobody said anything at the time, not a word of caution. Rubber-stamped all round.” He looked at his watch. “I’m well out of that business, I tell you. I’d better go. Got a wait and return to Bexley this after.”

  He had dreamt about tennis, his only sport, looking down at himself as he served, as if from a specially positioned video camera, watching the fluffy yellow ball fly up to meet him and then hearing—very clearly—the swish and bite of the racquet strings as they cut over the ball with brutal severity, sending it arcing away with its devilish spin, one of his rarely achieved unplayable second serves, not fast, but deep and with a bend on it like a banana, hitting the court surface (red clay) and kicking off at a different angle, and with somehow greater speed and height, as if some kind of booster spring mechanism had been released in the ball itself, importing that physics-defying extra few m.p.h. of velocity. His partner in this dream game had not been Alan, his usual opponent, but Shane Ashgable—whom he had not played before because Shane fancied himself as a tennis player. But Shane could not cope with these serves at all, as they came looping deceptively over the net at him, his timing and positioning hopelessly, laughably, wrong.

  Lorimer rubbed his eyes and duly jotted the dream down in his diary. Was it lucid? Borderline—certainly his serves were surreally consistent and on target but he could not recall actually willing them to bend and kick like that. And it was not strictly true that tennis was his only sport, he liked athletics too—more precisely, he liked watching athletics on television. But he had been good at the javelin while at school, on distant sports days, hurling it further than stronger, beefier boys. Like a golf swing a javelin throw relied more on timing and positioning rather than brute strength. In the same way that diminutive golfers effortlessly drove the ball fifty yards further than burlier players so the javelin-thrower knew it was not about gritted teeth and testosterone. When the throw was correct you saw it in the way the spear behaved, almost vibrating with pleasure, as all the power in the arm and shoulders was transferred precisely—in a complex equation, a mysterious combination of torque, moment of release, angle of delivery—to two metres of sharpened aluminium pole soaring through the air.

  The tennis dream, he knew, was always a harbinger of summer—still months away, he realized—but perhaps it was a good omen, now, a crack in the permafrost. For him the first tennis dream of winter was like the first swallow or first cuckoo, a sign that sap was somewhere rising. Perhaps it was because he had learned and played his best tennis in summer in Scotland when he had been at college. Here was the source of its seasonal associations: the mixed double tennis league matches played on long summer evenings against the local tennis clubs—Fochabers, Forres, Elgin and Rothes—against solicitors and their elegant, thin-wristed wives, young farmers and their strapping girlfriends. Ginger beer shandy on clubhouse verandahs as the Scottish dusk struggled feebly to establish itself against a northern sun unwilling to dip below the horizon. Patches of sweat on the embroidered bodices of dental nurses, the dark damp fringes of hotel receptionists, a bloom of clay dust on the shiny shaved calves of ruthless schoolgirl aces, the residue that washed off later in the shower tray like red gold, panned. Tennis was summer, civility, sweat and sex, and the memories of the occasional stroke perfectly executed—weight on the right leg, racquet prepared for an age, leaning into the backhand, head down, the stiff-armed follow-through, the wrong-footing, the gentle applause, the incredulous cries of “Shot!” That was all you needed, really, those tennis court epiphanies were what you really sought…

  He felt his bladder distended, switched on the light and unplugged himself, reaching for his dressing gown. On the way back from the dazzling lavatory he thought he made out someone sitting among the winking lights of the monitor banks.

  “Hey, Alan,” he said, wandering over, pleased to see him. “Up late.”

  “Sometimes I pop in while you’re all sleeping, just to check up on my guinea pigs. That was some dream you were having.” He pointed to the jagged line of a printout.

  “I was playing tennis.”

  “Against Miss Whatshername ? Zuleika Dobson, isn’t it ? Coffee ?”

  “Flavia Malinverno. Most amusing. Y
es please.”

  Alan poured him a papercupful from a flask. He was wearing, Lorimer noticed, black leather trousers and a satiny Hawaiian shirt, gold chains glittered at his neck.

  “Busy night?”

  “Darling, I could have danced till dawn. That was a peach of a lucid dream last time.”

  “Which did feature Miss Flavia Malinverno,” Lorimer said with some bitter longing. Then suddenly, for no particular reason, he told Alan about Flavia, the meetings, the kiss, the news about the ‘affair’, Gilbert’s mad jealousy, Flavia’s sudden reticence.

  “Married women, Lorimer, you should know better.”

  “She’s not happy with him, I know. He’s a fraud, completely vain, I could tell. There was something between us, something real, in spite of the duplicity. But she’s denying it. Sorry, I’m boring you.”

  Alan covered his yawn with four fingers. “It is very early in the morning.”

  Lorimer felt he might never sleep again.

  “What do I do, Alan? You are my best friend. You’re meant to solve these problems for me.”

  Alan patted his knee. “Well, they do tell me faint heart never won fair maid.”

  212. The Television Set. All that was in your head was the deafening noise of the television set and the constant bellowing, cheering, whistling and catcalling that accompanied it. The whole college seemed to have assembled in the common room to watch—what? A football match? Miss World? The Eurovision Song Contest? Formula 1? You could hear the slap of your bare feet on the lino as you drew near, could hear the noise levels increase and the rays of white light shining down from the fluorescent strips seemed to spear into your brain like elongated acupuncture needles. Joyce was terrified, crying; you were sick, sick with your rage and fury, and all you knew was that the noise of the television set had to stop. You halted at the door and your right hand reached out for the door knob. You saw your hand grip the doorknob, turn it and push the door open and suddenly you were walking into the common room, shouting for silence, striding into the centre of the crowded room, a hundred pairs of eyes turning towards you.

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  Chapter 15

  Hello? Milo? Milo? Hello, Milo?”

  “Hello, Mum. I can hear you.” She had called him on the mobile, the only number of his that the family possessed. He felt as if the air were being slowly sucked out of his lungs—it had to be bad news. He was driving along the Embankment heading west, the river on his left, the morning blowy, grey and heavily overcast, if marginally milder.

  “Everything O K, Mum ?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Did Lobby call you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh…Bit of sad news.”

  Something to do with Slobodan, then, that was less worrying. “What is it?”

  “Your dad passed away last night.”

  “Oh God. Jesus.” He began to brake.

  “Yes. Very quiet, very peaceful. It’s a blessing, Milo.”

  “Yes, Mum. You all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, me. Everyone’s here. Well, the girls are.”

  “Should…Ah, should I come round?”

  “No point. He’s not here any more. They took him.”

  He felt his face tighten. “I’ll call later, Mum. I’m in traffic.”

  “Sorry to bother you, darling. Bye.”

  Lorimer slowed down and bumped up on to the pavement, switching on his hazard lights. He walked to the stone balustrade, leant upon it and looked down at the wide brown river. The tide was high but, aptly, on the turn, the water now flowing vigorously east, to the sea. He urged tears to come, but they would not. Well, he thought, that’s it: Bogdan Blocj, RIP. He stared at the Thames and tried to think of something profound, some line of poetry, but all that came into his head were facts about Chelsea Embankment (built in 1871-4, cost a quarter of a million pounds, designed by someone called Bazalgette) that had lodged in his brain from some book he had read ages ago. Poor Dad, he thought, poor old fellow—it hadn’t been any kind of life at all, he considered, the last decade. Maybe it was a blessing, a blessing to the five women who had looked after him all those years, feeding him, dressing him, cleaning him, moving him about the house like a potted plant. There was a little consolation, however, Lorimer thought, in the time they had spent together the other day, when he had held his father’s hand, just the two of them alone, feeling his dry, clean hand in his and sensing the slight responsive squeeze. Some comfort in that.

  A wooden box bumped up against one of the supports of Albert Bridge and then the current rushed it speedily downstream. Lorimer’s eye seized hungrily on it and freighted it with sententious symbolism: that’s us, he thought, flotsam and jetsam on the tide, hurried along to our ultimate destination, held up here, whooshed along there, stalled in an eddy for a while then flipped over a weir, unable to control our progress until we wind up in the calm estuary heading for the open sea, which is boundless and endless…

  The wooden box banged against a pier and was caught and scraped along the wall beneath him. He read the letters branded on to the box’s side, ‘Chateau Cheval Blanc 1982’. Only in Chelsea, he thought; there was clearly flotsam and flotsam.

  280. Lysergic acid diethylamide. I once asked Alan if my light-sleeping problem, my REM sleep overload and imbalance, could be a sign of neurosis, of some deep, unacknowledged mental crisis, of impending mental breakdown, say.

  “Not in your case, I think,” Alan said, frowning hard. “No, I think we have to look elsewhere. It is true that depressed people sleep less but then they experience little REM sleep which is often taken as an indication that REM sleep is absolutely vital for our well-being in some mysterious way, as if we need to dream, in a fundamental physiological sense.” He paused. “There’s only one drug that’s been discovered that seems to promote REM sleep and that’s lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD as it is more commonly known. Have you ever taken LSD?”

  “Only once.”

  “How was it?”

  “It changed my life.”

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  According to Flavia Malinverno the film she was working on—Malign Fiesta was a ‘very loose adaptation’ of a novel by Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer with whom Lorimer was not familiar. As he found a parking spot not far from the empty hospital in Chiswick where much of the shooting was taking place, and duly parked the rapidly rusting Toyota, Lorimer considered he might appropriate the title for his own autobiography, should he ever write one—it seemed to capture the spirit of recent weeks. He wandered towards the hospital past the straggling row of trucks, clapped-out buses, campervans and groups of people in anoraks and windcheaters chatting to each other and drinking from plastic cups—all the signs that announced that a motion picture was being filmed in your neighbourhood. Their lack of purpose, the lethargy, the air of resigned inertia reminded him of a disbanded circus awaiting news of its next destination, or a column of reasonably well-to-do refugees halted at a roadblock for days as officials and militia haggled over whether the motley crew should be allowed across the frontier.

  A shivering young guy, ill-dressed against the weather, in just a sweater and a baseball cap, with dripping nose and walkie-talkie, asked if he could help Lorimer in any way. Lorimer had once done an adjust on a film company and had mooched around several film sets in the course of it and so knew what the magic password was, the one that opened every door.

  “Equity,” he said.

  “The actors are in the main building,” said the young guy, sniffing robustly and swallowing. “You’ll see the signs.”

  He followed meandering black cables as thick as his arm into the semi-circular drive, under the grandly columned entrance and in through the main doors. The hall was brilliant with huge arc lights all pointing at an impressive central staircase that swept up and divided against the rear wall, decked with flowers as if for a ball or wedding. Many dozens of people stood ar
ound looking at a woman who was fiddling with the flowers and a man with a hand-held vacuum cleaner who was hoovering up every trace of dust and lint from the carpet. From somewhere came a busy sound of energetic hammering. He was the only person in a suit and stood out markedly amongst so much leather and suede, foul-weather gear and leisure wear.

  A brisk young woman wearing a headset and carrying a styrofoam cup approached.

  “Can I help?”

  “Equity,” he said.

  “Actors that way,” she said, pointing through an ornate doorway.

  Lorimer obediently headed off, passing thirty feet of trestle table with many urns and plates, trays and baskets of high-calorie food. People stood in front of it, sampling, munching, sipping, slurping, waiting. He heard a man shout, “Kill that blonde, Jim!” but no one paid any attention.

  Flavia had told him that the film was a romantic comedy and the next room, he guessed, contained the set that would concern her and where she would utter her immortal line about Tyimotheh’s subterfuge. There was a glossy dining table with sixteen chairs and laid for a substantial meal, if the ranked silverware was anything to go by. More people were polishing crystal glasses and touching up and adjusting the floral table centres. Beyond this set was a long, high-ceilinged room that must have been an old hospital ward, divided down the middle by a row of bulb-ringed dressing tables and racks of clothes. Here he encountered his first actors—men and women in evening clothes of the 19205, having their hair combed, lipstick retouched, jewellery fastened and checked against the evidence contained in many polaroid photographs.