by William Boyd
A woman with wild, backcombed blue-black hair and holding a small sponge asked if she could help. Now that he was amongst actors he fell back on the truth. “I’m with the insurance company,” he said.
“Oh. You’ll want, um, Fred Gladden. If you don’t mind waiting I’ll get someone to find him for you.”
“Thanks.” Lorimer knew from experience that this could take a minute, an hour or might never actually come about, so he moved away and leant against a wall, safe for a while. The minute came and went as he stood there discreetly, arms folded, watching the comings and goings, as meaningful to him as the busy scurryings of an ant colony. Then he suddenly remembered, unprompted, that his father had died a few hours previously and realized that already time had passed when he had not been thinking about him, indeed had completely forgotten about him and his death and this made him unbearably sad. Sad to think how easy it was not to think about Bogdan Blocj, how easy it was to find yourself in a state where you were not regretting that you would never hold his hand again.
His vision shimmered and all the bright lights acquired blurry coronas. He exhaled and inhaled, filling his lungs with air and asked himself what he was doing here, standing around on this film set under false pretences, engaged on this foolish forlorn quest. His father had been dead for a matter of hours, shouldn’t he be doing something respectful, sober, suitably mournful? Such as what? His father wouldn’t care, in fact the old Bogdan Blocj might have approved of something so sexily inopportune, trying to win back his girl…He made another dutiful filial effort, trying to conjure up some idea of the man beyond the idea of ‘Dad’, a man he remembered most readily standing in his brown overall, clipboard in hand, spectacles on the end of his nose, amongst his shelves of well-wrapped cardboard boxes…But nothing else came. The man he knew best had been the smiling, mute invalid, a dapper, silent figure in his blazer and flannels and neat white beard whose twinkeyes seemed to see everything and nothing at all…Jesus Christ, he roused himself, get a grip: he had his own life to live and it was a life that was going downhill fast. Some sort of brakes had to be applied before the whole thing came apart—
Flavia Malinverno entered the room at the far end, carrying a book, and sat down on a wooden form.
He edged closer, circling round and approaching from the side, unchallenged and unquestioned, realizing that in his classically cut suit people might take him for an extra. Flavia was wearing a black wig, bobbed, with a low fringe that seemed to be resting on her improbably long, false eyelashes. She was reading Malign Fiesta by Wyndham Lewis—good for you, girl, he thought, professional, diligent actor—and his heart bulged and sagged with pathetic, humiliating longing for her. But what has anyone in the history of humankind ever been able to do about that sort of thing, he thought as he slid on to the bench beside her—without her looking up and inched along stealthily, who has ever been able to control that category of pure feeling?
“Any good?”
“Well, it’s got bugger all to do with this film, I can tell—”
She looked up at this point and saw him, her mouth tightening at once, her jaw set. Her face was opaque with white panstick makeup, her lipstick was the cherriest of reds and she had a beauty spot in the middle of her left cheek. She wore a dress of taupe crepe de chine and great loops of pearls dangled to her lap.
“Flavia—”
“Lorimer, I told you to stay away from me.”
“No. You have to hear me out.”
“Look, I’m going to call security, I mean it—”
“My father died this morning.”
She sat down slowly. The mention of his father’s death had made tears fill his eyes and he could see that for once, perhaps for the first time ever, she believed him.
“Look, I’m sorry…But that has nothing to do—”
“You’re the one responsible. If you hadn’t told Gilbert nothing would have advanced this far, this fast. You provoked everything.”
She reached into a beaded bag and brought out her cigarettes, lit one and blew a jet of smoke straight out in front of her.
“O K, I shouldn’t have, and I regret it, and I’m sorry if it seemed I was using you. Now you must go away.”
“No. I want to see you again.”
Her jaw dropped in a mock gasp of incredulity. She shook her head as if to dispel a buzzing fly.
“For Christ’s sake, I’m a married woman.”
“But you’re not happy, I know you’re not.”
“Don’t you lecture me on the state of my marriage, chum.”
“Hi. Are you with the Bond Company?” Lorimer looked up to see a young man with thinning blond hair in a leather jacket and jeans standing there with his hand extended. “I’m Fred Gladden,” he said, “Co-producer.”
“I think he went that way,” Lorimer said, pointing. “I’m with Equity.” He indicated Flavia. “Some mix-up with her union dues.”
“Oh, right, sorry,” Fred Gladden apologized, needlessly. “They just told me a man in a suit. That way?”
“Yes,” Lorimer said. “He’s carrying a briefcase.”
Fred Gladden strolled off to look for a suited man with a briefcase.
“Look at you,” Flavia said, trying not to smile. “Look how you lie. It’s unbelievable, like a reflex, so fluent.”
“I’m a desperate man,” Lorimer said. “And I think when it comes to duplicity you could teach me a few lessons.”
The brisk young woman in the head set shouted, “Scene 44. Dinner party. Rehearsal.”
Flavia rose to her feet and said. “That’s me. Look, I can’t see you any more, it’s too difficult. There are things I haven’t told…Goodbye.”
“What things you haven’t told?”
Lorimer followed her through to the set. Her dress had a low waist which was fringed and the fringe swayed to and fro with the swing of her hips. He felt a surge of desire for her so palpable that saliva squirted into his mouth.
“Flavia, we must—”
“Go away, Lorimer.”
“I’ll call you.”
“No. It’s finished. It’s too difficult, too dangerous.”
They had reached the set where an elderly, red-faced man was simultaneously talking into a mobile phone and pointing the actors to their allotted seats around the dining table.
“Flavia Malinverno,” he said, “you’re over there, darling. Just tell the lazy bastard to get his arse down here, he’s got a film to direct.”
Flavia glanced round at Lorimer, still behind her.
“Charlie,” she said to the red-faced man, “I think this bloke’s stalking me.”
Red-faced Charlie stepped in front of Lorimer and clicked his phone shut. Lorimer’s eyes followed Flavia, watching her take her place at the dinner party.
“What’s going on, pal?” The suspicion in Charlie’s voice was menacing, clearly a man used to having his orders obeyed.
“What? I’m with the Bond Company, looking for Fred Gladden.”
Lorimer was duly told where he might find Fred Gladden and was obliged to move away. He glanced back only to see Flavia in laughing conversation with the actor sitting beside her and felt a satisfying pang of jealousy. He had achieved a little but it was not enough, a paltry thing, compared with what he dreamed of.
He stepped out of the electric warmth and unreal luminescence of the hospital into the dull and pearly gloom of a Chiswick morning, the low-packed clouds filtering the light shadow-free and he sensed his depression settle weightily on him again as if his pockets were filled with stones. He felt an unreasoning anger build in him against Hogg, realizing, with some degree of shock, that in the end it was only the news of his father’s death that had made Flavia talk to him at all. A final service rendered his son by Bogdan Blocj, from beyond the grave too. It was both sobering and shaming: he had blurted out the news unthinkingly, but it was something that should have been stated to the woman he loved, surely? He felt confident that the shade of Bogdan Blocj, wherever it mi
ght lurk, would not condemn him.
“Thanks, Dad,” he said, looking up, out loud, attracting a few curious glances, “I owe you one.” And he wandered back to his chargrilled Toyota with something of a spring in his step, thinking, wondering what she meant by ‘too difficult, too dangerous’. Difficulties could be overcome and, as for danger, why, danger was a constant in his life.
132. Brown Shoes. I remember the day I thought I had caught Ivan out. He was wearing a hairy, snot-green tweed suit with black brogues. I pointed at them and said, “Ivan, the ultimate sin—black shoes with tweed.”
“Oh, you’re completely wrong, Lorimer, this is very acceptable. I’m glad you noticed it, however. It’s a sign of a deeper malaise, something that’s been worrying me for years.”
“What’s that.”
“It’s been difficult, but I’ve decided that the brown shoe must be condemned. Suede yes, a brown boot—just. But I think the brown shoe is fundamentally below the salt. Something irretrievably petit bourgeois about a brown shoe, quintessentially suburban and infradig. I threw all mine out last week, fourteen pairs, some I’ve had for decades. Threw them in the dustbin. I can’t tell you how relieved I am, the weight off my mind.”
“All brown shoes?”
“Yes. No gentleman should wear a brown shoe, ever. The brown shoe is finished. The brown shoe, Lorimer, has got to go.”
—The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer wrote out a cheque for £3,000 and handed it apologetically to Ivan Algomir.
“Charge me interest on the balance, Ivan, please. I’ll pay you the rest as soon as I can - some sort of administrative snarl-up in the office.”
Ivan folded the cheque and put it in his pocket, ruefully. “I’d appreciate it, old chap. This will help, though. They’re like starving wolves following a stagecoach, the Revenue, if you throw them a scrap from time to time you might just escape.”
Another ghastly embarrassment down to Hogg, Lorimer thought. First he destroys my love life, now he’s jeopardizing my friendships.
“I feel terrible about this, Ivan. What if I returned the helmet?”
“Good God, it’s only money, Lorimer. I’ll elude them. I must say you look smart.”
Lorimer told him where he was going: Lady Sherriffmuir’s ‘At Home’.
“In Kensington,” he said. “Look, I’ve had the cuffs altered.”
Lorimer held up the sleeves of his suit coat to show single-button cuffs that actually unbuttoned. Ivan had told him how he abominated the two-, three—or four-button cuff as pretentious and arriviste. A cuff was a cuff: it was there to allow you to fold up your sleeve, not as decoration.
“The shirt is first rate,” Ivan said. Lorimer had had them made to Ivan’s design also, the collar deliberately miscut so that the point on one side rode over the revere a little awkwardly and untidily but, as Ivan pointed out, it was a defect that only arose with hand-made shirts, and what was the purpose of having hand-made shirts if they could not be recognized as such. “Only people who have handmade shirts themselves will recognize the problem,” Ivan assured him, “but they’re the only people you want to notice.”
Lorimer lifted his trouser leg to show off his midnight blue socks.
“Shoes are only just passable,” Ivan said. “Thank God you’ve got no tassles but I don’t know if I like these American loafers. Very nouveau. Still.”
“I think they’re right for this City crowd.”
“Just. Good God, what’s that tie?”
“My school. Balcairn.” Actually it was a tie he had had his tailor make up for him. Navy blue with thin bands of mauve and an unidentifiable crest.
“Take it off at once. I’ll lend you another. School ties are for schoolboys and schoolmasters. No grown man should be seen dead in a school tie. Same goes for regimental and club ties. Appalling bad taste.”
Ivan came back with a tie in lime green silk covered in a motif of tiny blue spiders. “Bit of fun. It is an ‘At Home’, after all.” Ivan looked him up and down in a kindly, almost proprietorial way, the old knight sending out his squire to joust in the lists of High Society.
“Very good, Lorimer. Even I can’t find much fault.”
Chapter 16
For Lorimer, the notion of an ‘At Home’ summoned up images of half a dozen bottles of Chardonnay chilling in the fridge, perhaps a bowl of punch, peanuts and crisps, a few olives, a couple of baguettes sliced into roundels and a demilune of brie. The moment the bearskinned guardsman pushed open the door to the front courtyard of the Sherriffmuir mansion Lorimer knew that he and Lady Fiona might as well be talking a different language. On either side of the flagged path to the columned entry porch were, immediately to his left, a fakir on a bed of nails, opposite him a troupe of dusky tumblers leaping off shoulders or hurling each other into triple somersaults. Beyond them was a fire-eater blasting his gasoline breath into the night sky, a snake charmer tootling his flute at a swaying cobra and a Cossack with a small bear on the end of a chain tottering around on its hind legs as a fellow Cossack played a squeezebox accordion.
In the hall a team of girls in dominoes and black cat suits relieved guests of their coats and handed out numbered tokens, before inviting them to stroll a gauntlet of tuxedoed, smiling waiters holding out trays of champagne, bellinis, bucks fizz, mineral water or fuming pewter mugs of mulled wine.
Lady Fiona Sherriffmuir, her son Toby and her daughter Annabel waited beyond the libation-bearers in front of a set of mahogany double doors. Lorimer advanced towards them across the shiny checkerboard marble, champagne in hand, his steps ringing out, worrying that the steels in his shoes might be carving out fine chips from the polished, gleaming squares.
“I’m Lorimer Black,” he managed to say to Lady Fiona, a bosomy, statuesque woman in a sheath of petrol-blue shot-silk. She had a tiny, perfect nose with highly flared nostrils and one of the best sets of teeth Lorimer had seen outside a Hollywood movie. Her grey-blonde hair was swept back from her high, smooth brow and two waves curled behind her ears, the better to set off the starbursts of emerald clipped to her lobes.
“How is Angus, the old rascal?” she asked, leaning forward to kiss Lorimer lightly on both cheeks. “So sorry he hasn’t come. Goodness I haven’t seen you since Mustique, you must have been thirteen or fourteen.”
“Oh, Mustique,” Lorimer said. “Great.”
“You probably won’t remember Toby or Annabel, they were just babies.”
“Just babies, probably,” Lorimer muttered.
Toby was a gangly, loose-lipped eighteen-year-old with baddish acne. Annabel was a haunted-looking, hard-faced drug addict in a white trouser suit, chewing her lip and fiddling with the bracelets on her wrists. She could have been a decade older than her brother, as far as Lorimer could judge, her young face full of bitter worldliness.
“Hi,” Toby said. “Good to see you again.”
“Yeah, hi,” Annabel said and, like her mother, kissed him on both cheeks. “How’s Lulu? Is she coming?”
“Lulu? Great,” Lorimer said, thankfully hearing others on his heels, Lady Fiona crying behind him, “Giovanni! Silvana!”
“Tell Lulu to call me,” Annabel said, lowering her voice. “I’ve got something for her.”
“Super,” Lorimer said, nodded vigorously and then moved through into the first of a series of reception rooms - a drawing room, a library and a ballroom—which in turn gave on to a tented marquee pitched over the lawn of the rear garden, where food of all types could be obtained and there were fifty or so round tables with gold chairs for those who wanted to sit and eat. Not to say that food was unavailable in every other room, patrolled as they were by more waiters with trays of miniature crab cakes, miniature cheese burgers, miniature pizzas. There were also quails’ eggs, plovers’ eggs and gulls’ eggs, cocktail sausages, vegetarian cocktail sausages, goujons of sole, haddock and monkfish with assorted dips, chicken satay and doubtless many other nibbles that Lorimer did not spot and either sample or hungr
ily note.
The rooms were already comfortably full; Lorimer calculating quickly as he passed through them that at least three hundred people must have been in the house, not counting staff. In the drawing room some red-sashed Aztecs strummed guitars and snorted into nose flutes. In the library there was non-stop cabaret, currently a magician performing tricks with a length of washing line and scissors, and in the ballroom a jazz pianist picked out easy-listening standards on a grand piano in the middle of the sprung floor.
Lorimer wandered curiously amongst the throng—men in dark suits, women in elaborate finery—unnoticed, unrecognized and unspoken-to. By the time he reached the marquee where half a dozen chefs stood behind hot plates serving everything from penne arrabiata to Lancashire hotpot—he had drunk three glasses of champagne and was wondering if he could decently leave. He retraced his steps—in the library there was another man doing astonishing balloon sculptures, squeakily producing a giraffe, an Eiffel Tower and an octopus in about ten seconds—but he saw that the Sherriffmuirs were still at their station and guests were still arriving. So he drank another glass of champagne and ate some mini-hamburgers to neutralize the alcohol.
He was staring at a picture, trying to decide if it was a Canaletto or a Guardi, when he felt a hand squeeze his left buttock and turned round to find Potts standing there with a look of faux innocence on her face and a cigarette in her hand.
“I thought I recognized that bum,” she said. “What a treat.”
“Hello—or rather, congratulations. Is Oliver here?”
“God, wash your mouth out. I couldn’t go through with the wedding. I sort of freaked out at the last minute and Mummy was furious but I couldn’t imagine wedded bliss as Mrs Oliver Rollo. Sorry, not for the Potts.”
“What drama.”
“It was. And it means I’m footloose and fancy free, Mr Black.”