Books tended to be very different and, generally, rather smellier. The joy of books was that even an eminently covetable and collectable rare first edition might be had for a couple of hundred pounds, with plenty of less expensive, but still desirable, stuff from twenty or thirty quid. That meant that ordinary people could get in on the game. Ordinary, that is, in relation to wealth: eccentric in most other respects. Weirdos of every hue proliferated: scholars with dirty collars, academics sans academia, twitchers, jerkers, mumblers, fumblers, frotters and feltchers, experts on the Raj, collectors on the rampage. There was a curious anger about the book lot, a conviction that they were being diddled or fiddled or conned; a wariness about the other collectors; a suspicion of the sellers, of the auctioneers, of the world. Andrew had once helped preside over a sale of books about the so-called ‘Great Game’ played by the world powers in nineteenth-century Afghanistan, when one man had produced a huge, antique blunderbuss from beneath a monumental overcoat, and screamed ‘I’ll show you a great game. I’ll show you a great game, BANG! BANG! BANG!’, the bangs emitting not from the burnished barrel of the beautiful brass weapon, but from the pursed mouth of the wielder. It transpired later that the maniac had been driven over the edge by the discovery that his prized copy of Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, being neither that printed by the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in 1886 (£1000), nor the edition produced in the same year in Calcutta by Thacker, Spink & Co (£250), but rather the 1890, Thacker & Co of London edition, was relatively worthless. Yes, passions could rage high in the world of old books. As could the smell. What was it, Andrew often wondered, about book people that made them so neglect personal hygiene? Other types of obsessive managed to change their underwear, brush their teeth, and utilise modern, efficient deodorants, so why not book collectors? Books themselves, of course, could often smell so perhaps there was some semi-conscious attempt at empathy? A brotherhood of mustiness and sticky crevices?
But this was not the usual book crowd, and no pall of odour hung over the room like mustard gas at Ypres. Yes, a reserve of six million quid would tend to keep out the great unwashed. And the Audubon was, anyway, more of an art thing than a book thing. So here were the art crowd, with the more fashionable section excised. Bird paintings were not, after all, at the cutting edge of anything, and so polo-necks and shaven heads were as rare here as auk eggs. This left rather a bland and smug feel to the punters. These were the dull wealthy, and the dull people who worked for the wealthily dull. But a crowd always had something for the connoisseur of amusing visages, and Andrew duly picked out women with heads like cricket bats, and men with features crammed into the middle of their faces like rectums amid fleshy buttocks. He plucked at wattles and toyed with warts; he disarrayed meticulous comb-overs, and came over those in meticulous disarray.
The room held a hundred in reasonable comfort. The best chairs had been brought out, padded red velvet, with carved gilt legs, but Andrew suspected that they weren’t as old as they were supposed to look. The walls were hung with paintings of surpassing Victorian tedium: portraits of elderly, empire-building homosexuals and stout women in hats; invented landscapes that suggested a poverty of imagination of a near cosmic proportion: oh look, a carthorse, a haywain, a tree, a sad-eyed doggy.
Thank Christ for Alice, he thought. She was sitting next to him at the desk along the side of the room where they were preparing to take the telephone bids. She had done something to put right her hair and face and once again her rapturous beauty shone forth upon the world – or so he found himself thinking. He was happy that she had sloughed off the aristo, and even more pleased that she seemed so together about it. The new togetherness stemmed from her cathartic expedition to confront the Dead Boy’s grandmother. She had told him the story. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to say about it, and so said nothing, which turned out to be exactly the right thing.
Well, now everything had been flushed through. No, that wouldn’t do. He didn’t like the thought of Alice as a WC, albeit it a pretty, Pre-Raphaelite sort of WC of the kind patronised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Burne Jones, or Millais, or the other one whose name he tended to forget. Ah, that was it, yes, she had been restored, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and now her true colours could shine through again. Much better, even though you could tell that all of Michelangelo’s women were really men in disguise, with their powerful torsos, thick waists, and wide apart, deeply uninteresting breasts.
Not at all like Alice. No one could ever say that her breasts were uninteresting. Not in front of Andrew. Not if they wanted to live. And tonight he had every intention of telling Alice exactly what he thought of her breasts, and all of the rest of her as well, for that matter. Tonight was the great office bacchanalia. Tonight love would stalk the corridors. He had planned what he was going to say. He had to plan it because tonight he was going to use the truth stratagem, and that was always the trickiest to pull off. Yes, he was going to tell her just what he thought; play it honest and up front. Bullshit thrived on spontaneity, but the truth needed devious devices, Byzantine cunning, and subtle words.
Who was he kidding? He was going to get shit-faced on Chablis and tell her he loved her and always had, and pray that he didn’t vomit, belch, dribble or piss his pants in the process.
The auctioneer arrived. Dear old Crumlish used to do the job, when he was around, but now Books had to get in that old fart Phillip Quiller from Furniture to do it for them, as no one else was qualified, and never again would be as the training budget had been slashed by the Slayer. Pity, as Andrew always rather fancied the job himself, whilst simultaneously seeing clearly quite how ridiculous it would make him in the eyes of the world. Quiller had quavering, moist lips and a shuffling, uncertain gait, but once he reached the podium he assumed a certain pinstriped authority. Which was only natural, as he must have called the numbers a thousand times and it was all as natural and easy for him as breathing.
The magnificent engravings themselves were placed on a table by the side of Quiller’s podium. A video camera was angled down upon them, and the top plate was displayed on a large, obscenely expensive flat-panel screen on the wall behind. Another camera was aimed at the podium, and yet another at the potential bidders, all for the sake of those who wished to follow the proceedings live over the internet. These sorts of technical innovations had come in with the Americans and had, so far, managed to drain what little capital remained in the company whilst having at best a minimal effect on business throughput. Oakley was, needless to say, a great enthusiast. The Slayer herself, along with two other troubleshooting Americans, known generally (or to Andrew, at any rate) as Butch and Sundance, Parry Brooksbank and one other distinguished-looking fellow, who Andrew vaguely knew to be important, were also arrayed at the front of the room. The Slayer, with her bulldog scowl jutting aggressively forward, and her stoutly spread legs, looked particularly uninviting. Something about her posture made Andrew think of an old joke about a peasant woman sitting knickerless in the market. Keeps the flies off the melons.
In addition to the in-house multimedia effort, there was, as Oakley had predicted, a crew from the BBC and another from Sky News, as well as a weedy phalanx of print journalists taking up much of the back row, like naughty schoolboys. It was all really quite exciting.
‘I don’t know about you, Alice,’ said Andrew, ‘but I’m really quite excited.’
‘Me too,’ she replied, and then after a pause, ‘After all, I’ve decided that …’ but that was as far as she got. There was a noise at the doorway. An urgent murmuring, rising to an insistent whisper. And then a sharp barking noise.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ said Andrew to the air.
Alice looked towards the door. Oakley and two porters in their London Zookeeper uniforms were attempting to bar the way. The person whose way they were barring was Edward Lynden.
The focus of the entire room had swivelled through one hundred and eighty degrees. Some had even, not content with craning their necks, actually scraped
their chairs around to get a better look. Oakley’s pleading voice came through, interspersed with Lynden’s harsh and commanding tones.
‘Please, Mister, er sir, Baron, Lynden, you really can’t, not at this stage.’
‘I can do exactly what I want with my property.’
‘But there is an agreement.’
‘I didn’t sign anything.’
‘A gentlemen’s agreement.’
Laughter.
‘Perhaps we could discuss this outside, sir,’ said one of the porters, an elderly man called Johns, who’d been there since the war. He gently took Lynden’s arm.
‘Take your hands off me,’ said Lynden, with an unspoken additional clause that said ‘or I’ll knock you down, old man or not.’
And then he burst through the weak barrier of limbs and protestations. He strode down the central aisle between the two blocks of chairs. Alice thought that he may have glanced quickly out of the corner of his eye towards her, but his head did not move. He looked terrifying and magnificent, and she realised again how close she had come to wanting him, to wanting to be with him. She felt a strong desire to go to him, a pull from within herself, which she recognised as purely sexual.
He reached the table with the Audubon plates. The room had swung back with him to face the front.
‘He’s going to take them,’ said Andrew, again aiming at no one in particular. A smile of incredulity stretched across his face. ‘And he hasn’t signed the waiver. We’re fucked. Totally fucked.’
The smile became an involuntary grin as he worked out the ramifications. He and Alice had been taken off the organisational side of things. All of the paperwork had been ‘done’, or left undone, by Oakley, Clerihew and Ophelia. His own work had been performed to a high standard, he knew that. And it was far from wasted. The Lynden copy had now been documented and described. It existed for scholarship in a way that it hadn’t existed before. His catalogue was still a useful and elegant contribution to the world of books. Alice, was, of course, in the clear. She couldn’t be blamed for this mess: she’d secured the sale in the first place, delivered Lynden and the Audubon into the supposedly safekeeping of Oakley.
All the while Lynden was calmly arranging the massive plates between two heavy boards. Quiller was making strange little movements with his red lips, as if kissing the toes of his mistress. Every minute or so he would take a step towards Lynden and then step back again, in rhythm to some ancient, courtly dance. Well, it wasn’t his job to go rugby-tackling madmen.
The plates and the boards must have weighed as much as a six-year-old child, thought Andrew, but Lynden picked them up without effort, handling their sheer unwieldy mass with ease. He strode back the way he had come, kicked open the double doors, framed on one side by a rigidly immobile Oakley and on the other by the cowed porters. And then he was gone.
The uproar began the second the actor had left the stage. Andrew swore later that there had been screams; there was certainly a cacophony of jabbering and excited conversation. Oakley was seen to sink to his knees. Clerihew appeared from nowhere and attended to him, Hardy to his Nelson. Andrew saw that he must have come from one of the seats at the back, and now he caught sight of Ophelia, a vacant chair next to her. She was sitting with her legs crossed, her face showing a lack of concern positively heroic in the circumstances. She looked as if she were waiting for the girl to bring her a coffee at the hairdresser’s.
‘I can’t decide,’ said Alice, confidentially, ‘whether or not this counts as an anticlimax.’
Andrew didn’t answer. He was watching the Slayer. She was grinding her jaws in a circular motion, like a Bosch devil chewing the soul of a sinner.
TWENTY-THREE
Complicity
Pam had wanted something traditional: tarts and vicars, sixties, seventies, eighties, Martian invasion, toga. The party committee was in the second hour of its first meeting, back in October, and was becoming restless.
‘We did it all poncy last year and look what happened.’ Pam had had her hair done specially for the meeting. Its dense and lacquered mass looked solid enough to hold rigidly an arrow or crossbow bolt, should one have been fired by a fellow committee member.
It was true that The Murders in the Rue Morgue theme, suggested in an idle moment by Andrew, who was on last year’s committee, had been a mistake. Only one person had turned up in an orang-utan suit, and the rest had settled, mystified, for a vaguely ‘olden days’ look, with bustles and hats for the girls and frockcoats, or street urchin garbs for the boys; but no one had quite known what was going on, and the award for best costume to the orang gained a meagre, scattered applause from the crowd. Andrew was afterwards convinced that his suggestion was only approved by the committee because none of them were prepared to admit that they did not know either who had been murdered on the Rue Morgue, nor by whom.
It was, of course, Andrew who came and triumphed, as the villainous primate.
‘But this isn’t the Milton Keynes regional office of United Widgets,’ said the Chair, Humphrey Palfry, a high-up in Antiquities, famed for his bow ties and dandruff. ‘We are a cultural institution; a cultural institution of national importance. And our party must represent that appropriately.’
‘Here here, Humph,’ said Ackerly from Paintings. He wasn’t high up at all, and generally agreed with whoever was senior in any situation. ‘Nor are we the Truss and Prosthetics Manufacturers Association, or a subcontractor making the clip fastenings for Marks and Spencer’s support bras or …’
‘Thanks, Roger, I think we get the picture.’ Humph had had enough fawning for one lunchtime, what with Ackerly, and what’s-his-name, Cedric or Clarence, from Books.
‘Yes. Sorry. But I do actually have an idea.’ He didn’t: his boss in Paintings, a young Turk called Terence Richardson, who’d recently become a minor TV celebrity after an appearance on daytime television talking about the sexiness of Monet, had suggested it. With his long, dark locks, his velvet suits, and his air of corrupted innocence, Richardson looked like one of Oscar Wilde’s less debauched accomplices. Which was exactly what the TV executives and, it transpired, the single mums, pensioners and dolemongers wanted from their art experts. His subsequent appearances were marked by a flickering and dimming of the nation’s lights, caused by the power surge as millions of housewives turned up their intimate massage appliances from ‘cruise’ to ‘ramming speed’.
‘Oh yes, and what’s that then, exactly?’ asked Pam, suspiciously. She didn’t look at Ackerly, but picked and ate the crumbs from the individual pork pie that had fallen and adhered, by virtue of some kind of electrostatic force, to the phlegm-green nylon of her blouse. Humphrey – who’d once, at a Christmas party years ago, when she was still slender-necked, and before her bust had undergone the Weimar Republic levels of inflation, taken her rather brutally in the mail room – looked on with distaste, and hoped she wouldn’t actually root down into her cleavage for a stray, spawnlike globule of glaucous jelly.
‘Well, my idea is that everyone has to come as a painting. A famous painting.’
There was a general interested shuffling from the twelve members of the committee. Not at all a bad idea. Perhaps Ackerly wasn’t such an arsehole. People threw in suggestions, and then wished they hadn’t been so open handed. In the past careers had been made by interesting and original performances at the party. Good ideas were worth their weight in paste and gilt. Clerihew, after a few moments of panic, hit on what he thought would be a sure-fire showstopper and had to control his urge to shout it out loud. No, this really was a beauty. Too good to share. How they would love him; how they would cheer. One in the eye for Andrew. Ha! Monkey suit!
‘But not just paintings, surely?’ Tessa, from IT hadn’t said anything so far, and so everyone jumped a little at her high-pitched interjection.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Richardson, in a good-to-hear-from-you-at-long-last kind of way. For much of the meeting he’d been surreptitiously eyeing her chest to try to work ou
t if the displacement of the white cotton of her neatly-fitted shirt was caused by some seamlike or other protuberance of her undergarment – a mere bra feature, or, more fascinatingly, an eruption of nipple, raw and chaffing against the shirt fabric, aching for the mouth, longing for …
‘I mean, we could extend it to statues and stuff. Installations or whatever.’
‘Yes, of course. I always meant those too,’ said Ackerly, anxious, not to help out Tessa, but rather to avoid having to share the glory for coming up with the concept.
‘I still don’t see what’s wrong with tarts and vicars,’ tried Pam, for one last time. But history was against her, and it was not her role to stand in its way.
So, pictures, statues and, improbably, installations it was, or, to give it the resonant title announced in the Christmas Party newsletter (meticulously produced by Clerihew in Pdf format for electronic distribution, with paper copies available on request for the Luddites), ART MOVES AMONG US.
After the aborted sale, Andrew and Alice went back to their desks. The Books people not directly involved in the sale clustered round to find out why they had returned so soon. Heads shook in disbelief. Bemused, embarrassed laughter rippled through them.
‘And you know,’ said Andrew, ‘he hadn’t signed the fucking contract. No indemnity. Nothing. The bloke’s just taken his toys and gone home, leaving us to pick up the bill, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.’
‘Looks bad for the boss,’ said someone.
‘Wouldn’t be in his shoes,’ said another.
‘He’ll find a way of wriggling out of it. Some other poor bugger’s gonna take the rap.’
At that moment Ophelia and Clerihew came in. Ophelia wore her look of studied neutrality, her veneer unscratchable. Clerihew looked like a dog on his way to the vets, given the gift of awareness that it can only mean either the big sleep or the unkindest cut of all.
‘So, Cornelius,’ said Andrew, brightly, ‘another triumph of organisation for Books, eh? And I thought the whole point of you and Mister Oakley was that you made the trains run on time?’
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