He was loping down the hill at me, glissading in spidery strides. I had not realised till now what an agile creature he must be.
“Afternoon to you, Tim,” he said, with none of the previous day’s deference. “Been cleaning up for God?” he asked, eyeing my broom, then me. “Don’t you shave these days?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m keeping watch over you, Tim. For your safety and comfort. Orders of the Top Floor.”
“I don’t need keeping watch over. I can keep watch over myself. Get out.”
“Jake Merriman thinks you do. He thinks you’re messing him around. He’s ordered me to tag you. Put a bell up your arse was how he put it. I’m at the Crown, day or night.” He shoved a piece of paper at me. “That’s my cell phone. Daniel Moore, room three.” He stabbed his index finger into my chest. “And screw you, actually, Cranmer. Totally screw you. You gave me one and I owe you one. That’s a warning.”
Emma’s ghost was waiting for me in the drawing room. She was seated at the Bechstein on her special stool, thinking her notes aloud with that strict posture she has that nips the waist and spreads the hips. She was wearing all her antique jewellery to please me.
“Have you been flirting with Larry again?” she asked above her music.
But I was in no mood to be laughed at, least of all by her.
Evening fell, but I had already entered the black light of my own soul. Broad daylight would not have saved me. I wandered the house, touching things, opening books and closing them. I cooked myself food and left it uneaten. I put on music and didn’t listen to it. I slept and woke dreaming the same dream that had destroyed my sleep. I returned to the priesthole. What trail was I pursuing, what clues? I was picking through the rubble of my past, looking for the fragments of the bomb that had destroyed it. More than once I rose in despair from my trestle table and placed myself before the old rag of wartime curtain, and my hand braced itself to rip aside the self-imposed barrier to Emma’s forbidden territory. But each time I restrained myself.
6
“Our usual, was it, Mr. Cranmer?”
“If you please, Tom.”
“Expect you’re looking forward to your Senior Citizen’s any day now.”
“Thank you, Tom, I have a few years to wait, and I’m glad to do it.”
Laughter in which I share, for this is our standing bad joke every other Friday when I buy my ticket to Paddington and take my place on the platform among the London suits. And if today had been an ordinary Friday, I am sure I would have fantasised a little, imagining I was still in harness. And Emma in the good days would have playfully straightened my tie for me, and smoothed the lapels of my jacket, and wished me a nice day at the office, darling, before treating me to a last, delicious, disgracefully suggestive kiss. And in the bad days, she would have watched my departure from the shadows of her upper window, unaware apparently that I was watching her also, in the wing mirror of my Sunbeam, knowing that I was leaving her alone all day to her typewriter and telephone, and Larry thirty miles down the road.
But this morning I was feeling, in place of Emma’s amateurish eye, the prickle of professional surveillance on my back. Bartering trivia with a forlorn baronet known locally as poor Percy, who, having inherited a thriving engineering business and run it into the ground, now sold life insurance on commission, I had glimpsed Tom the ticket clerk’s silhouette ease across the window of his office to the telephone and speak into it with his back to me. And as the train pulled out of the station I spotted a man in a country cap and raincoat standing in the car park, zealously waving at a woman a few seats behind me, who paid him not the least attention. He was the same man who had followed me in his Bedford van from the crossroads at the end of my lane.
Arbitrarily I awarded Tom to the police, and the cap and raincoat to Munslow. Good luck to them, I thought. Let all pursuing parties note that on this duty Friday, Tim Cranmer is once more going about his customary business.
I was wearing my blue pinstripe. I dress up to people; I can’t help it. If I am calling on the vicar, I don a tweed suit; watching a cricket match, a blazer and a sporting tie. And if, after four days’ nightmarish incarceration inside my own head, I am attending the bimonthly trustees’ meeting of the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales under the stewardship of Pringle Brothers PLC of Threadneedle Street, I cannot help but look a little like a banker myself as I board the train, study the financial pages of my newspaper, step into the chauffeur-driven car that awaits me among Brunel’s splendid arches, give Pringle’s uniformed doorman good morning, and see reflected in the glass-and-mahogany door the same unoccupied cab with its light off that had followed me all the way from Praed Street.
“Mr. Cranmer, hellao, reelly grite to see you,” Jamie’s supine secretary, Pandora, whined in her Roedean Cockney as I entered the leathery Edwardian antechamber of which she was the mistress.
“Hell’s teeth, Tim!” cried Jamie Pringle, all sixteen stone of him, in his striped shirt and mulberry braces, as he forced me into touch with a crushing handshake. “Don’t tell me it’s Friday week already, what, what?”
Pringle’s an arsehole, I heard Larry saying in my inner ear. Was. Is now. And ever shall be. Amen.
Monty drifted in like his own shadow. He wore a hollowed black waistcoat and stank of the cigarettes he wasn’t allowed to smoke on the partners’ floor. Monty kept the books and paid our quarterly expenses with cheques that Jamie signed.
After him came Paul Lavender, still shaking from the hazardous voyage by Rolls-Royce from his house in Mount Street. Paul was feline and fair and seventy, and very slow-moving in patent moccasins with languid tassels. His father, our benefactor, had started life as a schoolmaster in Llandudno, before founding a hotel chain and selling it for a hundred million pounds.
After Paul came Dolly and Eunice, his two spinster sisters. Dolly wore a diamond racehorse. Years ago Dolly had won the Derby, or so she claimed, though Eunice swore Dolly had never owned anything larger than an overfed chihuahua.
And after them again came Henry, the Lavenders’ family solicitor. It was thanks to Henry that we met so often. And at four hundred pounds an hour, who could blame him?
“Plonk still holding up?” he asked doubtfully as we shook hands.
“Oh, I think so, thank you. Rather well.”
“Cheap Frog stuff not pricing you out of the market at all? I must have been reading the wrong newspapers.”
“I’m afraid you must, Henry,” I said.
We were seated round the famous Pringle boardroom table. Each of us had before him one copy of the minutes of the last meeting, one statement of the accounts, and one Wedgwood bone china teacup with a sugared shortbread biscuit on the saucer. Pandora poured. Paul rested his head on one bloodless hand and closed his eyes.
Jamie, our chairman, was about to speak. The fists that thirty years ago had clawed muddy rugger balls out of seething scrums converged upon a tiny pair of gold-framed half-lenses and pulled them on ear by ear. The market, Jamie said, was depressed. He held the foreigners to blame:
“What with your Germans refusing to cut their interest rates, your yen going through the roof, and your High Street takings going through the floor—” He peered about him in bemusement, as if he had forgotten where he was. “I’m afraid that U.K. gilts are weathering something of a trough.” Then he gave a nod at Henry, who with a frightful clack opened the two levers of a fibreglass document case and read us an interminable report:
Discussion with the local authorities regarding the provision of sports facilities in the inner cities is proceeding at the pace one has to expect of local civil servants, Jamie. . . .
The trust’s offer of an extra children’s ward at the Lavender Hospital for Mothers cannot be taken further until additional trust monies are set aside for staffing. None are presently available for such a purpose, Jamie. . . .
Our proposal to supply a mobile library to meet the needs of children in illiter
ate areas has run up against political objections from the local council—one side arguing that the days of free libraries are dead and buried, another that the selection of books should be determined by the county’s education authorities, Jamie. . . .
“Bloody bollocks!”
Eunice had exploded. At about this stage in the proceedings, she usually did.
“Our dad would be turning in his grave,” she roared in her smothered Welsh accent. “Free books for the ignorant? That’s daylight bloody Communism!”
Equally furiously, Dolly disagreed. She usually did.
“That’s a living lie, Eunice Lavender. Dad would be standing up and clapping his hands off. Children’s what he prayed for with his last breath. He loved us. Didn’t he, Paulie?”
But Paul was in some far Wales of his own. His eyes were still closed, and he wore a misty smile.
Jamie Pringle deftly passed the ball to me. “Tim. Very quiet today. Got a view?”
For once my diplomatic skills eluded me. On any other day I could have dredged up a distracting topic for him: pressed Henry to move faster in his dealings with the city authorities, raised an eyebrow at the Pringle administration costs, which were the only item in the accounts to show an increase. But this morning I had too much of Larry in my head. Wherever I looked round the table, I kept seeing him lounging in one of the empty thrones, dressed in my grey suit that he’d never given back, spinning us some story about this chum in Hull.
“Monty. Your shout,” Jamie ordered.
So Monty dutifully cleared his throat, seized a piece of paper from a pile before him, and treated us to a report on our distributable income. But alas, after deduction of charges, costs, and sundry disbursements, there was for the tenth meeting running no income to distribute. Not even the House of Pringle had yet come up with a formula for distributing percentages of nothing to the Poor and Needy Gentlefolk of Wales as defined by the Borders Act of whenever it was.
We lunched. That much I know. In the panelled sanctum where we always lunched. We were served by Mrs. Peters in white gloves, and we polished off a couple of magnums of the 1955 Cheval Blanc, which the trust had thoughtfully laid down twenty years ago for the resuscitation of its hard-pressed officers. But I forget, thank God, almost everything of our dreadful conversation. Dolly hated niggers: I remember that. Eunice thought them lovely. Monty thought they were all right in Africa. Paul preserved his mandarin smile. A splendid ship’s clock, which by tradition determined House of Pringle time, kept noisy record of our progress. By two-thirty, Dolly and Eunice had stormed out in a red-faced huff. By three, Paul had remembered something he had to do, or was it somewhere he had to go, or someone to meet? Must be his barber, he decided. Henry and Monty left with him, Henry murmuring outstanding matters in his ear at four hundred pounds an hour, and Monty desperate for the first of a large number of cigarettes to get him back to par.
Jamie and I sat pensively over our decanter of partners’ port.
“Jolly good, then,” he said profoundly. “Yes. Well, then. Cheers. Here’s to us.”
In a moment, if I did nothing to stop him, he was going to launch himself upon the great issues of our time: the cockiness of women, the mystery of where North Sea oil profits had gone—he gravely feared to the unemployed—or how decent banking had been ruined by the computer. And in thirty minutes exactly, Pandora would pop her stupid pedigree face round the door and remind Mr. Jamie that he had another meeting before close of play: which was Pringle Brothers code for “The chauffeur is waiting to drive you to the airport for your golf at St. Andrew’s” or “You promised to take me to Deauville for the weekend.”
I asked after Henrietta, Jamie’s wife. I always did, and dared not vary the ritual.
“Henrietta is bloody marvellous, thank you,” Jamie replied defensively. “Hunt’s imploring her to stay on, but old Hen isn’t sure she wants to. Getting a bit tired, frankly, of the Antis buggering everything up.”
I asked after his children.
“Kids are doing splendidly, Tim, thank you. Marcus is captain o’
Fives, Penny’s coming out next spring. Not real coming out, not the way the girls did it in our day. But a lot better than nothing,” he added, and gazed wistfully past me at the illustrious names of Pringle’s Fallen of Two Wars.
I asked whether he’d seen any of the mob recently, meaning our crowd at Oxford. Not since the Oriel bash at Boodle’s, he replied. I asked who had been there. It took me two more moves before, seemingly off his own bat, he was talking about Larry. And really it was no great work of art on my part, because in our year if you talked old buddies, sooner or later you talked Larry.
“Extraordinary chap,” Jamie pronounced with the absolute certainty of his kind. “Gifted, vast talents, charm. Decent Christian background, father in the Church, all that. But no stability. In life, if you haven’t got stability, got nothing. Pinko one week, chucking it all in next. Chucked it in for good this time. Coms are all capitalists now. Worse than the bloody Yanks.” And then, almost too easily, as if my guardian angel were whispering in his ear: “Came to see me not long ago. Bit seedy, I thought. Bit hangdog. Certain awareness of having backed the wrong side there, I rather think. Natural enough when you look at it.”
I let out a delighted laugh. “Jamie! You’re not telling me Larry’s become a capitalist entrepreneur, are you? I think that’s too ripe.”
But Jamie, though he could laugh like a maniac without warning—and usually without humour—only helped himself to more port and waxed more sonorous. “Don’t know what he’s become, to be frank. Not my business. More than a mere entrepreneur, that’s for sure. Something bit more eloquent of the moment, if you ask me,” he added darkly, ramming the decanter at me as if he never wanted to see it again. “Not a lot of due respect there either, to be frank.”
“Oh dear,” I said.
“Rather exaggerated idea of himself.” A resentful swallow of port. “Bit of overcompensation going on. Lot of crap about our duty to help the newly freed nations find their feet, right old wrongs, establish norms of social justice. Asked me whether I intended to pass by on the other side. ‘Steady on, old boy,’ I said. ‘Hang about. Weren’t you one of the chaps who gave the Sovs a bit of a leg up? You’ve got me a bit foxed, if you don’t mind my saying. Bit stumped. Confused.’”
I leaned forward, showing him that I was all attention. I composed my face into an expression of fascinated, sycophantic incredulity. I strove with all my body language to will his damned story out of the fogged thickets of his lonely little mind: “Go on, Jamie. This is riveting. More.”
“Only duty I’ve got is to this house, I told him. Wouldn’t listen. I thought he was an intellectual sort of chap. How can you be an intellectual, not listen? Talked straight through me. Called me an ostrich. I’m not an ostrich. I’m a family man. Pathetic.”
“But what on earth did he want you to do, Jamie? Turn over Pringle Brothers to Oxfam?” It flitted through my mind as I said this that it wouldn’t be at all a bad idea. But my face, if it was doing its job, revealed only my sincere sympathy that Jamie should have been the target of such bad form.
A half minute’s silence while he rounded up his intellectual resources. “Soviet Communist Party was going private. Right?”
“Right.”
“That was the story. Selling off Party property. Buildings. Rest homes, offices, transport, sports palaces, schools, hospitals, foreign embassies, land galore, priceless paintings, Fabergé, Christ knows what. Billions of dollars of the stuff. Make sense?”
“Indeed it does. Russia Limited. It began in secret with Gorbachev, then it ran riot.”
“How Larry got in on the act, anybody’s bloody guess. Pringle Brothers doesn’t have his connections, pleased to say.” Yet another huge swallow of port. “Wouldn’t want ’em. Wouldn’t touch ’em with a barge pole, thank you. No way, José.”
“But, Jamie—” I dared not sound as if I cared, though my time was running out. “But, Jimmin
y”—his Oxford nickname—“sport, what was he asking you to do? Buy the Kremlin? I’m fascinated.”
Jamie’s reddened gaze fixed itself once more on his company’s Roll of Honour. “You still working for whoever you used to be working for?”
I hesitated. Jamie had once applied to join us, but without success. Since then he had tossed me the odd snippet from time to time, usually after we had had the same information better and earlier from other sources. Did he relish our mystique or resent it? Would he tell me more if I answered yes? I chose the middle path.
“Just the odd bit of this and that, Jamie. Nothing onerous. Listen, you’re killing me with curiosity. What on earth was Larry up to?”
A delay for more port and grimacing.
“I’m sorry?”
“Two cracks of the whip. Phoned me a couple of years ago, talked a lot of crap about wanting to put a nice piece of business in my way, was I game, matter of several millions, old-pals act, come and see me next time he was in town, bugger all happened. Went off the air.”
“And the second bout? When was that?”
I scarcely knew which to press harder: the what or the when. But Jamie took the decision for me.
“Larry Pettifer was up to the following,” he announced in an alarming boom. “Larry Pettifer claimed that he had been authorised, by a certain ex-Soviet state agency, name not supplied—correction, by persons in that agency, their names also not supplied—to conduct a dialogue with this house, concerning the possibility of opening an account with this house—series of accounts: offshore, naturally— whereby this house would receive substantial sums of hard currency from sources not accurately defined—would in effect hold said monies on a no-name basis—and make certain disbursements in accordance with such instructions as would from time to time be received by this house from persons entrusted with a certain code word or letter reference, which would be matched by a similar code word or letter reference held by this house. The disbursements would be substantial, but they would never exceed assets, and we would never be asked for credit.”