by William Boyd
“Sorry?”
“Dymphna told me you and she had a few days there.”
“Did she? Oh. Yeah, it was…you know, nice.”
“Lucky bastard,” Wiles said, ruefully. “I always rather fancied Dymphna.”
Maybe if you changed your hairstyle you might stand more of a chance, Lorimer thought, and then felt a little ashamed at his lack of charity—Wiles was doing him a favour after all, and only because of his unrequited love for Dymphna.
“We’re just, you know, good friends,” Lorimer said, not wanting to close any doors in Wiles’s amatory life. “Nothing special.”
“That’s what they all say.” Wiles shrugged, his eyes sad behind his round frames. “I’ll get back to you. Thanks for the coffee.”
77. The World’s First Loss Adjuster. The very first policy of life insurance was written in England on the 18th June 1853. A man, one William Gibbons, insured his life for the sum 0/383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence for one year. He paid a premium of eight per cent and sixteen underwriters signed the contract. Gibbons died on the 20th May the following year, some four weeks short of the period covered in the insurance policy, and his bereaved family duly submitted a claim. What happened?
The underwriters refused to pay up. They did this on the grounds that a year—strictly defined—is twelve times four weeks—twelve times twenty-eight days—and therefore on the basis of this calculation William Gibbons had in fact lived longer than the ‘strictly defined’ year he had insured his life for, and had thus ‘survived the term’.
What I want to know, Hogg used to say, is the name of the man who came up with that calculation to define a year. Who was the clever devil who decided that the way out of this mess was to strictly define a year? Because whoever it was who decided that a ‘year’ was twelve times twenty-eight days was, in fact, the world’s first loss adjuster. Such a person must have existed and, Hogg would insist, this person is the patron saint of our profession. He certainly disturbed the anticipations of the Gibbons family when they turned up to claim their 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence.
—The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer turned down Lupus Crescent and angled his body into the wind—a snell and scowthering one as they used to say in Inverness—and hauled his coat close about him. Marlobe was right, it was a shite of a day, with dense, rushing clouds showing strong contrasts of luminous white and dark slatey grey. What was happening to the weather? Where was bloody spring? He felt the wind, or the tiny grains of brick and street dust in the wind, make tears smart in his eyes and he turned his face to one side—to see David Watts’s Rolls-Lamborghini or whatever it was silently keeping pace with him, like a limo behind a mafia don out for a stroll. He stopped and the car stopped.
Terry smiled genially as he crossed the street towards him.
“Mr Black. What a day, eh? David would like a word, if that’s all right.”
Lorimer slid into the calfskin interior and smelt and touched the money implicit in every fixture and fitting. He sat back and let Terry cruise him from Pimlico to the south bank of the river. What in God’s name was going on now? On a Saturday, no less. They crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned on to the Albert Embankment, straight on through Stamford Street and Southwark Street, down Tooley Street, passing Tower Bridge to the left.
The car pulled up in front of a warehouse conversion a few hundred yards downstream from Tower Bridge. Tasteful gilt lettering affixed to the sooty brick told him they were at Kendrick Quay. The streets around were deserted of people but, curiously, were full of parked cars. There were many new traffic indicators and signs, islands of neat landscaping, grouped laurels and phormiums, securely staked leafless saplings, newly cast bollards set in newly laid cobbles. And, on every angle of wall, a camera sat, high and out of reach.
Terry pressed a code into a keyboard mounted on a stainless steel plinth and glass doors slid open. They rode up in a lift smelling of glue and glazier’s putty to the fifth floor. Exiting the lift, Lorimer saw a printed sign with an arrow saying ‘Sheer Achimota’ and a weary, zemblan premonition took root in his head.
The ‘Sheer Achimota’ offices were empty apart from some unpacked computer hardware and an ebony desk with a slim, flat phone. The floor-to-ceiling plate-glass curtain wall on the river side looked out on the turbulent and ebbing Thames, the sky still wrought with its billowy juxtapositions of brightness and dark and, square in the middle of the view, was Tower Bridge’s silhouette, irritatingly too familiar an outline, Lorimer thought, and irritatingly too omnipresent. Working in this office for any length of time you would come to hate it: a cliché in your face all day.
Watts stood in a corner, jogging and swaying, headphones plugged in his ears, eyes tightly closed. Terry coughed several times to interrupt the reverie and left them alone. Watts fiddled with his boogie-pack and eventually managed to switch it off. He removed the left earphone and let it dangle on his chest. Lorimer noticed that his hairy cheek patch had gone.
“Lorimer,” Watts greeted him with some enthusiasm. “What do you think, man ?”
“Very panoramic.”
“No. ‘Sheer Achimota’. That’s the name of the management company, the record label, the new band and probably the new album.”
“Catchy.”
Watts roamed the room towards him. “Fucking amazing, man. I sent Terry up to that place in Camden you told me about. He came back with eight carrier bags of C D s. I listened to African music non-stop for…for seventy-eight hours. And, this’ll finish you, guess what?”
“You’re going to Africa?”
“He’s gone.”
“Who?”
“Lucifer.” He tapped his left shoulder, tapped his left cheek. “Old Satan got pissed off and left.” Watts was close to him now and Lorimer could see his eyes were bright. Lorimer wondered if he was on anything or if it was simply the relief of the recently exorcized.
“Thanks to you, Lorimer.”
“No, I can’t take—”
“—Without you, I’d never have heard Sheer Achimota. Without you I wouldn’t have got that ju-ju working for me. Strong African ju-ju scared the shit out of Satan. Thanks to you, Sheer Achimota did it.”
Lorimer checked the room’s exits. “Whatever it takes, Mr Watts.”
“Oi. Call me David. Now, I want you to come and work for me, run Sheer Achimota, sort of chief executive type kind of thing.”
“I’ve already got a job, um, David. But thanks very much.”
“Quit it. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Hundred grand a year.”
“It’s very kind. But—” But I have a life to live.
“Of course I’m still suing bastard Fortress Sure. But that’s nothing against you. I’ve told them to say nothing against Lorimer Black.”
“I recommended they pay you.”
“Sod the money. It’s the mental wear and tear. I was out of my mind with worry, what with the devil on my shoulder, and all. Someone’s got to pay for that stress-load.”
Lorimer thought it best to break things to him easily. “I could hardly leave my job and come and work for you if you are suing the company I was representing in the case.”
“Why not?”
“Well…Not ethical?”
“Where ‘s your home planet, Lorimer? Anyway, no hurry, think about it. It’ll be cool. I’ll pop in from time to time. We could hang out.” He refitted the left earplug. “Could you send Terry in? You can find your own way home, can’t you ? Looking forward to our association, as they say.”
In a pig’s ear, Lorimer thought, as he trudged the deserted streets looking for a taxi, and wondering vaguely if ‘Sheer Achimota’ might exorcize his own set of demons and set some powerful African ju-ju to work on his behalf for a change.
397. De Nerval’s Tray. There is no doubt that de Nerval’s love for Jenny Colon was overwrought and obsessive. Jenny Colon was an actress, and Gerard used to go to the theatre night after night to see her. She had been married, in Gretna Green of all
places, to another actor called Lafont. That marriage ended and she had a protracted liaison with a Dutch banker called Hoppe and many other men before de Nerval arrived in her life. Jenny Colon was described as a ‘type rond et lunaire’. Lunaire? My dictionary only supplies ‘lunar’ and the name of a flower, moonwort. Lunar…That speaks to me, naturally enough, of madness. Enough to drive a man mad.
De Nerval and Jenny Colon started a love affair but it was not long-lived. It ended, according to my biography, when de Nerval, surprising her one day, lunged at her trying to kiss her lips, her lunary lips. Startled, Jenny reflexively pushed him away and Gerard, trying to stay on his feet, clumsily reached out for support and accidentally broke a tray she owned, a precious tray. The relationship never recovered after the silly incident of the broken tray. A few weeks later Jenny left him and married her flautist. But a tray? To let a tray be the final straw, the breaking point. Who knows what deeper motives existed, but I can’t help feeling that more could have been done, that de Nerval could have done more to bring about a reconciliation. It seems to me that Gerard de Nerval didn’t try hard enough—no lovers should let a tray, however precious, come between them.
—The Book of Transfiguration
He filled the afternoon with the mundane business of modern life: paying bills, cleaning his home, shopping for food, tidying things away, visiting launderette and dry-cleaner, retrieving money from automated teller machine, eating a sandwich—banal activities that had the curious property of being immensely satisfying and reassuring, but only after they were over, Lorimer realized. He telephoned his mother and learned that his father was to be cremated on Monday afternoon at Putney Vale crematorium. His mother said there was no need for him to attend if he was too busy and he had felt hurt and almost insulted at her needless consideration. He told her he would be there.
It grew dark early and the wind angrily rattled the window frames of the front room. He opened a Californian Caber net, put some meditative Monteverdi on the C D player, then changed it for Bola Folarin and Accra 57. Bola was renowned for his excessive use of drummers, utilizing every combination known to Western groups but supplementing them with the dry bass of the talking drums of the West African hinterland and the staccato contralto of the tom-toms. Something in those atavistic rhythms combined with the wine made him restless, made him indulge in a fit, a seizure of pure painful longing—‘Sheer Achimota’ at work, he wondered?—and, spontaneously, he hauled on his coat and scarf, corked the wine bottle and jammed it in a pocket, and headed out into the wild night to find his rust-boltered Toyota.
In Chalk Farm the wind seemed even stronger, explained by Chalk Farm being higher, he supposed, and the lime tree branches above his parked car creaked and thrashed in the gale-force gusts. He swigged Cabernet and stared at the large bay windows of what he took to be the Malinverno flat. There was a kind of fretted oriental screen that obscured the bottom third of the window pane, but the head and shoulders were visible of anyone who stood up. He could see Gilbert Malinverno pacing about—indeed, he had been watching him for the last half hour as he practised his juggling (perhaps the musical had been abandoned?), flinging handfuls of multi-coloured balls up into the air and changing effortlessly the patterns and directions of their flow. It was a real talent, he grudgingly conceded. Then Malinverno had stopped practising and from the focus of his gaze Lorimer assumed someone else had entered the room. He had been pacing to and fro gesticulating wildly for ten minutes now and at first Lorimer had imagined this was some form of juggler’s exercise, but then had concluded, after a series of angry jabbing pointings, that Malinverno was in fact shouting at someone, and that someone was, doubtless, Flavia.
Lorimer wanted to hurl his wine bottle through the window and take the brute on and break his bones…He gulped at his Cabernet and was wondering how much longer he could realistically spend out here in his car when he saw the front door of the house open and Flavia run down the steps and go striding off down the hill. In a second Lorimer was out of his car and closing on her.
She turned a corner before he could reach her and entered a small parade of shops, going into a brightly lit 24-hour supermarket called Emporio Mondiale. Lorimer followed her in, after only the briefest of hesitations, but she was nowhere to be seen. Blinking in the brilliant white light, he carefully checked a few of the labyrinth of tall aisles—teetering battlements of sanitary napkins and toilet rolls, kitchen towels, disposable nappies and dog biscuits. Then he saw her bent over an ice-cream freezer, rummaging in its lower depths, and backed off, a little breathless, then composed himself, but when he advanced forward again she had gone.
He headed straight to the checkout, where a solitary Ethiopian girl was patiently counting through a mass of brown coins that an old lady was unearthing from a cavernous handbag—but no Flavia. Christ, where was she? Perhaps she’d gone back out the entrance? And he raced back the way he had come. Then he saw her: vanishing down a side alley that led to the newspapers. He decided that a flanking move was the correct choice here and so ducked down breads and breakfast cereals, heading for the spice jar whirligig and the cabinet of dreadful salads.
He turned the corner at the bottom and she fired a blast of air freshener at him. Pjffft. He caught a farinaceous gust of sweet-smelling violets full in the face and sneezed several times.
“I don’t like being followed,” she said, replacing the aerosol. She was wearing sunglasses and a bulky old leather jacket with a hood and many zips. He was sure her eyes would be red and weepy beneath the opaque green glass.
“What’s he done to you?” Lorimer blurted out. “If he’s hit you—I’ll—”
“He’s actually been talking about you, or rather shouting about you, for the last half hour. That’s why I had to get out. He claims he saw you at some smart party.”
“You do know that he attacked me. Tried to club me on the head.” All his old outrage returned. “After you had told him about our so-called affair.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your husband tried to hit me over the head with a club.”
“Gilbert?—”
“What did you tell him we’d been up to?”
“He was in a terrible rage and I was frightened. And angry—so, well, I made all sorts of things up, said it had been going on for over a year. Maybe that’s what set him off? He did go thundering out of the house. Was it you who knocked his teeth out? He said he’d been mugged.”
“It was self-defence. He tried to hit me with one of his fucking juggling clubs.”
“There’s a lot of pent-up rage in you, isn’t there, Lorimer?” She took down another aerosol spray from the shelf and enveloped him in a cloud of something piney.
“Don’t! For God’s sake!”
“We can’t see each other.” She glanced nervously over her shoulder. “God knows what would happen if he came into the shop now.”
“Does he hit you?”
“He’s incredibly fit and strong. Sometimes he gets me in these grips. Shakes me about, twists my arms.”
“Animal.” Lorimer felt a form of pure rage sluice through him, of the sort crusaders might have experienced at the sight of a holy shrine desecrated, he imagined. He rummaged in his pockets and took out his bunch of keys, threading two off and holding them out to her.
“Take them, please. If you ever need a place to be safe, to get away from him where he can’t find you. You can go here.”
She did not take them. “What is this?”
“It’s a house I’ve bought. Pretty much empty. In Silvertown, a place called Albion Village, number 3. You can go there, escape him if he gets violent again.”
“Silvertown ? Albion Village ? What kind of a place is that ? Sounds like a children’s book.”
“Sort of development near Albert Dock, by the City airport.”
“One of those modern developments ? Little boxes ?”
“Well…yes. Sort of ‘Why do you want to buy a little cardboard house like tha
t, miles from anywhere, when you’ve got a perfectly good place in Pimlico? I don’t get it.”
He sighed. He felt a sudden urge to tell her, especially as she now reached out and took his keys.
“It’s…It’s something to do with me. It makes me feel—I don’t know—safe. Safer, I suppose. It’s my insurance. There’s always somewhere I can go and start again.”
“Sounds more like a place to go and hide. What are you hiding from, Lorimer Black?”
“My name’s not Lorimer Black. I mean it is, I changed it, but I wasn’t born Lorimer Black.” He knew he was going to tell her. “My real name is Milomre Blocj. I was born here but in fact I’m a Transnistrian. I come from a family of Transnistrian Gypsies.”
“And I come from a planet called Zog in a far-flung galaxy,” she said.
“It’s true.”
“Piss off out of it.”
“IT’S TRUE!”
A few puzzled shoppers looked round. A lanky Pakistani with his name on a plastic badge came to investigate. He gestured at the shelves.
“All these items are for sale, you know.”
“Still making up our mind, thank you,” Flavia said, with a winning smile.
“Milomre?” She pronounced it carefully.
“Yes.”
“Transnistria.”
“Transnistria. It’s a real place, or was. On the west shore of the Black Sea. My family call me Milo.”
“Milo…I prefer that. How fascinating. Why are you telling me this, Milo?”
“I don’t know. It’s always been a secret. I’ve never told anyone before. I suppose I must want you to know.”
“Think it’ll win me over? Well, you’re wrong.”
“Take your sunglasses off for a second, please.”
“No.” She reached for a can of spray starch and Lorimer backed off.
She bought some spaghetti, ajar of sauce and a bottle of Valpoli-cella. Lorimer walked back up the road with her. A few heavy drops of rain began to smack on to the pavement.
“You’re not going to cook supper for him, are you?” Lorimer asked scornfully. “After what he’s done to you? How pathetic.”