Fascinated

  ‘It’s easy enough to buy friends,’ says Conrad, rather defensively, and hooks a nostril with a fingernail.

  ‘She must have broken one or two hearts …’ suggests Frank.

  ‘She’s breaking my heart,’ says Conrad. ‘I want to see her get married to someone with a respectable fortune.’

  This fails to answer Frank’s question but succeeds, nonetheless, in reminding him of Conrad’s ambitions for his daughter. She’s required to hoist the old devil into the aristocracy by giving herself in wedlock to one of its favourite sons.

  ‘Did anyone approach you?’ enquires Conrad darkly, pulling and bending his mighty nose.

  ‘No,’ says Frank. He frowns. A young Jamaican stopped them on the pavement near Liberty’s, whistled at Frank and flicked his tongue at Valentine, whispering obscenities as he slouched away through the crowd. Walking down Jermyn Street a gang of workmen mewed and moaned, stamping their boots on the scaffolding as Valentine passed beneath them. She offers no acknowledgement to these rude salutes. They never fail to startle Frank but Valentine seems not to notice them. Waiters linger at her table, loom on her shoulder, hoping to peek down the front of her dress as they make suggestions from the menu. Salesmen crouch beneath her skirt, stroking her legs with fluttering fingers, helping to fit her with shoes and sandals. Valentine pays them no attention.

  ‘Paul Gauguin. 1893. “Sister of Anna the Javanese”. Brown girl in red armchair with blue monkey,’ continues Conrad.

  Frank cranes his neck at an ebonised wood frame with incised and painted ecclesiastical decoration finished with a Chinese porcelain panel set in a polished brass mount.

  ‘He was a postman. Died of the pox,’ says Conrad helpfully.

  ‘Where are they?’ says Frank, at last. ‘Where are the paintings?’

  ‘Bank vault!’ shouts Conrad, pulling away and marching around his gallery. ‘It’s obvious! You can’t hang a Monet on the wall like a Royal Lifeboat calendar!’

  ‘It’s a waste!’ declares Frank, refusing to be bullied by the bellowing curator of this empty and worthless museum.

  ‘I know that!’ growls Conrad impatiently. ‘You think I like it? I thought it would be different. I thought the money would make life easy. Do you know how much these paintings are worth? Millions. They’re worth millions and I can’t afford to look at them for fear of some little fart who can’t tell a Braque from a lavatory wall stealing them from under my nose. I’m worth a sodding fortune and I spend all my time trying to hide from the riff-raff. It was different when Dawn was alive. It made sense. Now I only have Valentine …’

  ‘I’ll watch her for you,’ says Frank and hopes to conceal his infatuation from the baleful stare of her father by moving briskly away and pretending to ponder Pablo Picasso. 1920. ‘Still Life with Violin’.

  The days slip away and Frank’s interest in his new career quickly becomes a fascination. He tries to conceal his feelings, even from himself, and takes great care not to give Conrad doubts about the wisdom of renting friends. But he’s bolder with Webster and coaxes him to talk of the past, enduring the stories of blood and thunder in the hope that he’ll think of happier times when he dangled Valentine from his knees and made the pilgrimage to school to watch her tumble in the egg-and-spoon race.

  His patience is rewarded one night in the attic when Webster, holding court from his hammock, begins working his way through an alphabet of crimes and punishments. A is for Arson. B is for Blackmail and Buggery. C is for Corporal Punishment – Dawn made several spanking movies. Discipline Dormitory and The Mississippi Paddle Screamer are Webster’s particular favourites.

  Frank is fighting to stay awake, comfortable in a hump-backed chair, picking at the bowl of biscuits that Webster makes the maids provide against the dangers of night starvation.

  D is for Drugs. E is for Embezzlement, Extortion, Embowelling and Execution. F is for Flogging and Forgery.

  Frank closes his eyes and lets a biscuit slip through his fingers. He drifts on the edge of sleep when Webster reaches K for Kidnap and suddenly thinks of Valentine.

  ‘I remember a time when we thought she’d been kidnapped from school!’ he says with a grin. ‘She must have been eight or nine years old. Dawn had been dead for a couple of years and Conrad was still in mourning.’

  ‘Was she snatched?’ says Frank, awake again and wiping his hands on his knees. He imagines a black Mercedes screeching away down a gravel drive with the tiny, terrified face of a child screaming for help at the rear window.

  ‘No!’ grins Webster. ‘She was hiding in the boiler room. She’d sent the ransom note herself – the letters had been cut from her school history books. We never found out why she wanted the money. They said she was seeking attention – the death of her mother must have left its mark. The school matron took a special interest – she’d studied Freud at some evening class. She was a very handsome sort of woman with a lot of freckles and the habit of wearing her hair in a braid. I don’t remember her name. The older girls called her Bunty. Conrad sent me down there to sort her out …’

  ‘She must have been a difficult child,’ suggests Frank.

  ‘Valentine?’ says Webster, still dreaming of his afternoon with the matron. ‘Hah! She was a demon!’ He rummages for his wallet and offers Frank a tiny snapshot of Valentine the schoolgirl.

  Frank takes the tattered picture and holds it tenderly in his palm. Here is the kidnap victim, dressed in a drab school uniform, trailing a satchel by a broken strap. A dark and precocious nymphet, gangly as a cranefly, with her hair held in place by a length of white ribbon.

  M is for Murder, Mickey Finn and Mutilation. N is for Nark. Webster continues the alphabet, rocking slowly in his hammock, as Frank slips the photograph into his pocket.

  ‘Have you ever feasted by starlight in the mountains of Turkistan?’ Valentine asks, without warning, one afternoon as they pause for coffee and pastries in a half-empty restaurant at the top of her favourite department store. She is sitting flanked by shopping bags, elbows propped on the table, nursing a cup in her hands.

  ‘No,’ says Frank.

  Valentine snorts with contempt and looks around the restaurant as if seeking more interesting company. ‘Tell me about your wife,’ she demands, settling on him again.

  The question takes him by surprise. He glances up from his plate and tries to read her eyes. Her hair has been pulled from her face and sculpted into a snail resting against the back of her head, revealing the shape of her ears and the pale stalk of her neck. Her eyes stare back, dark and unblinking, over the rim of her cup.

  ‘What do you need to know?’

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I’m just taking a friendly interest.’

  ‘We met at a charity dinner organised by the Citrus Growers Guild,’ says Frank. She was with a man called Charlie Collins who was something special in marmalades.

  Jessica ditched him the following week but for the first few months of Frank’s courtship Charlie was writing Jessica letters in which he threatened to kill himself unless she married him. Jessica saved the letters and used to read them aloud to friends. Everyone laughed except Frank who felt depressed by her cruelty, glimpsing something of his own fate if he should ever fall from favour. Charlie, as Frank remembers it, met and married the winner of the Miss Marmalade contest the following summer and Jessica threw the letters away.

  ‘An office romance!’ mutters Valentine with a scowl of general disapproval. ‘I should have guessed it was an office romance.’

  ‘We never worked together. She was helping to raise money for the Ethiopian famine-relief appeal.’

  ‘Did she ever visit Ethiopia?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you in love?’

  Frank considers the question. We all like to think we’re in love. It’s a social obligation. Falling in love makes you ordinary, respectable, demonstrates that you’re not a threat to the rest of the rookery. Falling in love i
s a cheap song, a novelty sweatshirt, a TV game show.

  ‘We were married,’ he says simply. And, yes, he was in love with his wife and she was in love with him.

  ‘So why did she run away with another man?’

  ‘I used to get drunk and knock her around,’ says Frank, to keep her quiet. He’s tired of this interrogation. ‘I like to hear her scream.’ He picks up a little fork and cracks open his pastry, lifting the flaking crust to inspect its slippery, scented fruit. He’s disappointed. It looks like sweet, boiled apricot.

  ‘You’re not the kind to get drunk. You like to keep control. You probably hogtied her to a chair or made her walk on a leather leash.’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘You look like a manacle man.’

  ‘Shut up and eat,’ says Frank.

  ‘Do you want her back again?’

  He pauses. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly. He feels like a man who is stirring from an anaesthetic and, despite the pain and the shock of the light, he’s reluctant to be submerged again.

  ‘You don’t want her back,’ she declares triumphantly, taking his hesitation as doubt. ‘She can’t be trusted. It wouldn’t work.’ She picks up a fork and mutilates her own choice of pastry, a peculiar whipped-cream concoction smothered in toasted almond flakes.

  ‘Thanks for the advice.’

  Valentine sucks her fingertips and kisses the corner of her napkin. ‘You’d be all right for a couple of weeks while she acted the part of the cute, repentant little wife and baked your favourite puddings and took extra care while she ironed your shirts and all that other stuff …’ She stops short for dramatic effect and folds the napkin into a square.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, just when you thought you were safe again, you’d wake up in the middle of the night and catch her calling his name in her sleep. Or she’d cry out the name of some other man that you didn’t even know existed while she was getting her Saturday poke. And you’d never know what she was thinking when she stared at you over the branflakes in the morning and you saw that dreamy, faraway look in her eyes and pretty soon she’d start driving you crazy and you’d want to beat out her brains.’

  ‘That’s very encouraging.’

  ‘It’s true,’ says Valentine. ‘You’d start looking for bruises and love bites when you caught her in the bath. You’d get paranoid when she tried out new little tricks in bed. You’d go crazy!’

  Frank pushes away his plate, spilling his fork, scattering crumbs, and looks around the room. He feels awkward and out of place in this hushed atmosphere surrounded by knots of whispering women peeking at pastries and preening themselves.

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘You’ve got to do something for your own self-respect. You’ve got to show them how you feel about letting them crap all over you. You’re walking around like a corpse that can’t find a comfortable coffin …’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, for Chrissakes!’ he shouts impatiently, surprising a group of elderly women at the next table. ‘You want me to kick down the door to his office, drag him downstairs and break his nose?’

  ‘Yeah!’ grins Valentine. ‘Something like that.’

  They are sitting in the Bentley, trapped in the early evening traffic, heading north towards the Marylebone Road. A fine freezing rain drifts through the beams of the headlamps. The pavements are crowded with workers, escaping computers and counters, bodies bent to the rain like sickles, their faces pinched with a cold despair. They’ve been sitting in silence for several minutes, staring out at the darkness, when Valentine opens the glove compartment and slowly pulls out a gun. It’s a stainless-steel Colt Mustang, big enough to kill a man but small enough to fit her fist. She weighs it in the palm of her hand, curls her fingers over the barrel.

  ‘What’s happening?’ says Frank. His heart skips a beat and his shoulders tighten, pulling him away from the seat.

  ‘I’m looking for cigarettes,’ she says innocently, squinting into the glove compartment and finding a pack of Silk Cut. She takes a cigarette, lights it and sucks greedily on the smoke. The automatic remains in her hand.

  ‘Do you know how to use it?’ he says, trying to call her bluff, uncertain why she’s chosen this moment to show him that she carries a weapon.

  Valentine tilts back her head and grins, flicking her tongue against her teeth. ‘It’s easy. You pull it out of your handbag and total strangers wet their shoes. It isn’t loaded,’ she adds wistfully. ‘Webster wouldn’t give me the ammo.’ She drops the Colt carelessly into her lap and snaps shut the glove compartment.

  ‘Remind me to buy him a drink,’ says Frank thankfully, sinking into the seat again.

  ‘Cigarette?’ she says, holding out the pack and flipping the lid with her thumb.

  Frank shakes his head and peers anxiously into the street, staring through the windscreen at the floating beads of rain. ‘We turn left at the next junction and the office is a couple of hundred yards beyond Huckleberry Hotdog and Bagel King …’

  The traffic begins to bump and grind forward and the Bentley, jumping a set of lights, swings left, clips the kerb and slithers to a halt against a bollard.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ says Valentine as Frank starts to climb from the car.

  ‘You’re staying here,’ growls Frank.

  Valentine leans against him and catches him by the wrist. ‘Take the gun,’ she says urgently, pressing the weapon into his hand.

  ‘It’s empty.’

  Valentine smiles and snorts smoke. ‘So what? You can’t shoot.’

  Frank tries to restore the gun to its hiding place but Valentine pulls it from his hand and pokes it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘I don’t need it …’ he protests.

  ‘Take it,’ she whispers, sealing his mouth with her fingertips. ‘You might learn something.’

  He leaves the warmth of the car and walks quickly towards his target. The rain stings his hands and face. The gun in his pocket pulls him along, drags him forward and starts shouting warnings into the street. ‘Take cover! Run for your lives! This man is crazy and dangerous!’ No one but Frank is listening.

  A few yards from Bagel King a mad old woman with bird’s nest hair is clasping a skeleton youth by the neck as he pukes capaciously into the gutter. She shakes him gently, muttering words of encouragement as nervous people slosh around them, tilting their umbrellas like shields. Frank hurries past, the gun in his pocket cursing and broadcasting muffled threats.

  The Fancy Wholesale Tropical Fruits Corporation is a plain block of concrete and glass, wedged in a terrace of shanty shopfronts. A flight of marble steps to the door. A polished brass plate on the wall.

  He clatters up the steps and strides through the door into a brightly lit arena where a young woman sits at a glass reception desk reading Hello! magazine. She’s wearing a thin white shirt and a grey skirt. A black cardigan hangs from her chair. She turns her head and scowls at the draught sweeping in from the street, glances vacantly at the gunman, recognises him, smiles briefly and returns to her magazine.

  Frank watches her for a moment, head bent forward, dark hair hooked behind one ear, her red mouth softly popping and pouting as she struggles to follow the magazine story. He’s been away from the place for two weeks and she probably didn’t know he was missing.

  ‘Freeze!’ shouts the voice in his pocket. ‘Don’t move and you won’t get hurt!’

  ‘Is Bassett still here?’ says Frank cheerfully, knocking the rain from his sleeves. He takes a step forward, gazing down through the glass desk at the pale curve of her legs. She has kicked off one shoe and curls the bare foot around her calf, absently stroking herself with her toes.

  ‘I think he’s in his office,’ she says, leaning sideways to reach for the phone. ‘Shall I check for you?’

  ‘Nah!’ sneers the beast in his pocket. ‘Stand on the chair and pull up your skirt! We wanna take a look at your legs!’

  ‘No, thanks,’ says Frank. �
�I’m already late for the meeting.’

  She sighs, exhausted by the effort of shifting her weight across the desk, and drops the receiver into its cradle.

  Frank hurries towards the lift, changes his mind at the last moment, collides with a frazzled palm in a heavy Romano-plastic tub, glances back at the girl, grins, twists on his heel and disappears through a door to the stairs. On this cold winter’s evening the building already feels deserted. The broad corridors are empty. A few lights still shine through the frosted-glass doors. His own office is dark and the door closed against him. He stifles the urge to check his desk and presses forward in search of his quarry.

  These corridors have a particular smell that he’s never quite identified. It’s like a mixture of stale food and damp linen and the dusty, flea-bitten velvet you find in old theatres. It seems to seep from the walls and the worn industrial carpet. He’s spent seven years of his life walking these corridors, sitting at the same desk in the same office with the gloomy fluorescent ceiling panels and the window that’s rusted shut and the framed print of Turpin’s ‘Urpflanze’ hanging above his head; sweating out flow charts and progress reports, harvest potentials, market predictions; sticking his hand up the coffee machine, groping for the little cup that always gets caught in the same position.

  ‘Hey, Frank!’

  Frank swings around, startled, to find Horace Larkson standing at the end of the corridor. Larkson from Soft Fruits and Summer Berries and the man most likely to succeed in the battle for the bottled bilberry market. He’s wearing the same old familiar blue suit and the pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that neatly divide the polished peanut shape of his face. He’s clutching his raincoat and a bulging briefcase, reluctant to abandon his work for fear it will vanish overnight.

  ‘Did you finish the pineapple project yet?’ he calls down the corridor in a voice loud enough to raise the dead. ‘I’d appreciate some help on that report for the Gooseberry Guild if you can spare the time.’

  ‘It’s finished,’ says Frank, forcing a smile.