And as he went on cutting to the music, his back began to arch in empathy until he became Admiral Pendel descending a great staircase for his inaugural ball. Such harmless imaginings in no way impaired his tailor’s skills. Your ideal cutter, he liked to maintain—with acknowledgements to his late partner, Braithwaite—is your born impersonator. His job is to place himself in the clothes of whomever he is cutting for, and become that person until the rightful owner claims them.
It was in this happy state of transference that Pendel received Osnard’s call. First Marta came on the line. Marta was his receptionist, telephonist, accountant and sandwich maker, a dour, loyal, half-black little creature with a scarred, lopsided face blotched by skin grafts and bad surgery.
“Good morning,” she said in Spanish, in her beautiful voice.
Not “Harry,” not “Señor Pendel”—she never did. Just good morning in the voice of an angel, because her voice and eyes were the two parts of her face that had survived unscathed.
“And good morning to you, Marta.”
“I’ve got a new customer on the line.”
“From which side of the bridge?”
This was a running joke they had.
“Your side. He’s an Osnard.”
“A what?”
“Señor Osnard. He’s English. He makes jokes.”
“What sort of jokes?”
“You tell me.”
Setting aside his shears, Pendel turned Mahler down to nearly nothing and slid an appointments book and a pencil towards him in that order. At his cutting table, it was known of him, he was a stickler for precision: cloth here, patterns there, invoices and order book over there, everything shipshape. To cut, he had donned as usual a black silk-backed waistcoat with a fly front, of his own design and making. He liked the air of service it conveyed.
“So now how are we spelling that, sir?” he enquired cheerily when Osnard gave his name again.
A smile got into Pendel’s voice when he spoke into the telephone. Total strangers had an immediate feeling of talking to somebody they liked. But Osnard was possessed of the same infectious gift, apparently, because a merriment quickly developed between them which afterwards accounted for the length and ease of their very English conversation.
“It’s O-S-N at the beginning and A-R-D at the end,” said Osnard, and something in the way he said it must have struck Pendel as particularly witty, because he wrote the name down as Osnard dictated it, in three-letter groups of capitals with an ampersand between.
“You Pendel or Braithwaite, by the by?” Osnard asked.
To which Pendel, as often when faced with this question, replied, with a lavishness appropriate to both identities: “Well, sir, in a manner of speaking, I’m the two in one. My partner Braithwaite, I’m sad to tell you, has been dead and gone these many years. However, I can assure you that his standards are very much alive and well and observed by the house to this day, which is a joy to all who knew him.”
Pendel’s sentences when he was pulling out the stops of his professional identity had the vigour of a man returning to the known world after long exile. Also they possessed more bits than you expected, particularly at the tail end, rather like a passage of concert music which the audience keeps expecting to finish and it won’t.
“Sorry to hear that,” Osnard replied, dropping his tone respectfully after a little pause. “What d’he die of?”
And Pendel said to himself: Funny how many ask that, but it’s natural when you remember that it comes to all of us sooner or later.
“Well, they did call it a stroke, Mr. Osnard,” he replied in the bold tone that healthy men adopt for talking of such matters. “But myself, if I’m honest, I tend to call it a broken heart brought on by the tragic closing down of our Savile Row premises as a consequence of the punitive taxation. Are we resident here in Panama, Mr. Osnard, may I ask without being impertinent, or are we merely passing through?”
“Hit town couple o’ days ago. Expect to be here quite a while.”
“Then welcome to Panama, sir, and may I possibly have a contact number for you in case we get cut off, which I’m afraid is quite a usual event in these parts?”
Both men, as Englishmen, were branded on the tongue. To an Osnard, Pendel’s origins were as unmistakable as his aspirations to escape them. His voice for all its mellowness had never lost the stain of Leman Street in the East End of London. If he got his vowels right, cadence and hiatus let him down. And even if everything was right, he could be a mite ambitious with his vocabulary. To a Pendel, on the other hand, Osnard had the slur of the rude and privileged who ignored Uncle Benny’s bills. But as the two men talked and listened to each other, it seemed to Pendel that an agreeable complicity formed between them, as between two exiles, whereby each man gladly set aside his prejudices in favour of a common bond.
“Staying at the El Panama till my apartment’s ready,” Osnard explained. “Place was supposed to have been ready a month ago.”
“Always the way, Mr. Osnard. Builders the world over. I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again. You can be in Timbuktu or New York City, I don’t care where you are. There’s no worse trade for inefficiency than a builder’s.”
“And you’re quietish round five, are you? Not going to be a big stampede around five?”
“Five o’clock is our happy hour, Mr. Osnard. My lunchtime gentlemen are safely back at work and what I call my preprandials have not yet come out to play.” He checked himself with a selfdeprecating laugh. “There you are. I’m a liar. It’s a Friday, so my preprandials go home to their wives. At five o’clock I shall be delighted to offer you my full attention.”
“You personally? In the flesh? Lot o’ you posh tailors hire flunkeys to do their hard work for ’em.”
“I’m your old-fashioned sort, I’m afraid, Mr. Osnard. Every customer is a challenge to me. I measure, I cut, I fit, and I never mind how many fittings it takes me to produce the best. No part of any suit leaves these premises while it’s being made, and I supervise every stage of the making as it goes along.”
“Okay. How much?” Osnard demanded. But playfully, not offensively.
Pendel’s good smile widened. If he had been speaking Spanish, which had become his second soul and his preferred one, he would have had no difficulty answering the question. Nobody in Panama is embarrassed about money unless he has run out of it. But your English upper classes were notoriously unpredictable where money was concerned, the richest often being the thriftiest.
“I provide the best, Mr. Osnard. Rolls-Royces don’t come free, I always say, and nor does a Pendel & Braithwaite.”
“So how much?”
“Well, sir, two and a half thousand dollars for your standard twopiece is about normal, though it could be more, depending on cloth and style. A jacket or blazer fifteen hundred, waistcoat six hundred. And since we tend to use the lighter materials, and accordingly recommend a second pair of trousers to match, a special price of eight hundred for the second pair. Is this a shocked silence I’m hearing, Mr. Osnard?”
“Thought the going rate was two grand a pop.”
“And so it was, sir, until three years ago. Since then, alas, the dollar’s gone through the floor, while we at P & B have been obliged to continue buying the very finest materials, which I need hardly tell you is what we use throughout, irregardless of cost, many of them from Europe, and all of them—” He was going to come out with something fancy, like “hard-currency-related,” but changed his mind. “Though I am told, sir, that your top-class off-the-peg these days—I’ll take Ralph Lauren as a benchmark— is pushing the two thousand and in some cases going beyond even that. May I also point out that we provide aftercare, sir? I don’t think you can go back to your average haberdasher and tell him you’re a bit tight round the shoulders, can you? Not for free you can’t. What was it we were thinking of having made exactly?”
“Me? Oh, usual sort of thing. Start with a couple o’ lounge suits, see how they go. A
fter that it’s the full Monty.”
“ ‘The full Monty,’ ” Pendel repeated in awe, as memories of Uncle Benny nearly drowned him. “It must be twenty years since I heard that expression, Mr. Osnard. Bless my soul. The full Monty. My goodness me.”
Here again, any other tailor might reasonably have contained his enthusiasm and returned to his naval uniform. And so on any other day might Pendel. An appointment had been made, the price acknowledged, social preliminaries exchanged. But Pendel was enjoying himself. His visit to the bank had left him feeling lonely. He had few English customers and fewer English friends. Louisa, guided by her late father’s ghost, did not encourage them.
“And P & B are still the only show in town, that right?” Osnard was asking. “Tailors to Panama’s best and brightest fat cats and so forth?”
Pendel smiled at fat cat. “We like to think so, sir. We’re not complacent, but we’re proud of our achievements. It wasn’t all roses these last ten years, I can assure you. There’s not a lot of taste in Panama, to be frank. Or there wasn’t until we came along. We had to educate them before we could sell to them. All that money for a suit? They thought we were mad or worse. Then gradually it took on, till there was no stopping it, I’m pleased to say. They began to understand we don’t just throw a suit at them and ask for the money; we provide maintenance, we alter, we’re always there when they come back, we’re friends and supporters, we’re human beings. You’re not a gentleman of the press by any chance, are you, sir? We were rather tickled recently by an article that appeared in our local edition of the Miami Herald—I don’t know whether it chanced to catch your eye.”
“Must have missed it.”
“Well, let me put it this way, Mr. Osnard. I’ll be serious, if you don’t mind. We dress presidents, lawyers, bankers, bishops, members of legislative assemblies, generals and admirals. We dress whoever appreciates a bespoke suit and can pay for it irregardless of colour, creed or reputation. How does that sound?”
“Promising, actually. Very promising. Five o’clock, then. Happy hour. Osnard.”
“Five o’clock it is, Mr. Osnard. I look forward to it.”
“Makes two of us.”
“Another fine new customer, then, Marta,” Pendel told her when she came in with some bills.
But nothing he ever said to Marta was quite natural. Neither was the way she heard him: mauled head cocked away from him, the wise dark eyes on something else, curtains of black hair to hide the worst of her.
And that was that. Vain fool that he afterwards called himself, Pendel was amused and flattered. This Osnard was evidently a card, and Pendel loved a card the way Uncle Benny had, and the Brits, whatever Louisa and her late father might say about them, made better cards than most. Perhaps after all these years of turning his back on the old country it wasn’t such a bad place after all. He made nothing of Osnard’s reticence about the nature of his business. A lot of his customers were reticent, others should have been who weren’t. He was amused; he was not prescient. And on putting down the telephone, he went back to his admiral’s uniform until the Happy Friday midday rush began, because that was what Friday lunchtime was called until Osnard came along and ruined the last of Pendel’s innocence.
And today, who should be heading the parade but the one and only Rafi Domingo himself, billed as Panama’s leading playboy, and one of Louisa’s pet hates.
“Señor Domingo, sir!”—opening his arms—“superb to see you, and looking shamefully youthful with it, if I may say so!”—a quick lowering of the voice—“and may I remind you, Rafi, that the late Mr. Braithwaite’s definition of our perfect gentleman”—deferentially pinching at the lower sleeve of Rafi’s blazer—“is a thumb knuckle’s width of shirt cuff, never more?”
After which they try on Rafi’s new dinner jacket, which needs trying for no reason except to show it off to the other Friday customers, who by this time have started to gather in the shop, with their mobile telephones and cigarette smoke and bawdy chatter and heroic stories of deals and sexual conquests. Next in line is Aristides the braguetazo, which means he married for money and is for this reason regarded by his friends as something of a male martyr. Then comes Ricardo-call-me-Ricki, who in a short but profitable reign in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Public Works awarded himself the right to build every road in Panama from now until eternity. Ricki is accompanied by Teddy, alias the Bear, Panama’s most hated newspaper columnist and undoubtedly its ugliest, bringing his own lonely chill with him, but Pendel is not affected by it.
“Teddy, fabled scribe and keeper of reputations. Give life a pause, sir. Rest our weary soul.”
And hot on their heels comes Philip, sometime health minister under Noriega—or was it education? “Marta, a glass for His Excellency! And a morning suit, please, also for His Excellency— one last fitting and I think we’re home.” He drops his voice. “And my congratulations, Philip. I hear she’s highly mischievous, very beautiful, and adores you,” he murmurs in a graceful reference to Philip’s newest chiquilla.
These and other brave men pass blithely in and out of Pendel’s emporium on the last Happy Friday in human history. And Pendel, as he moves nimbly among them, laughing, selling, quoting the wise words of dear old Arthur Braithwaite, borrows their delight and honours them.
3
It was entirely appropriate, in Pendel’s later opinion, that Osnard’s arrival at P & B should have been accompanied by a clap of thunder and what Uncle Benny would have called the trimmings. It had been a sparkly Panamanian afternoon in the wet season till then, with a nice splash of sunshine and two pretty girls peering into the window of Sally’s Giftique across the road. And the bougainvillea in next door’s garden so lovely you wanted to bite it. Then at three minutes to five—Pendel had somehow never doubted that Osnard would be punctual—along comes a brown Ford hatchback with an Avis sticker on the back window and pulls into the space reserved for customers. And this easygoing face with a cap of black hair on top of it, planted like a Halloween pumpkin in the windscreen. Why on earth Pendel should have thought Halloween he couldn’t fathom, but he thought it. It must have been the round black eyes, he told himself afterwards.
At which moment the lights go out on Panama.
And all it is, it’s this one perfectly defined rain cloud, no bigger than Hannah’s hand, getting in front of the sun. And the next second it’s your six-inch raindrops pumping up and down like bobbins on the front steps, and the thunder and lightning setting off every car alarm in the street, and the drain covers bursting their housings and slithering like discuses down the road in the brown current, and the palm fronds and trash cans adding their unlovely contribution, and the black fellows in capes who always appear out of nowhere whenever there’s a downpour, flogging you golf umbrellas through your car window or offering to push you to higher ground for a dollar so that you don’t get your distributor wet.
And one of these fellows is already putting the hard word on pumpkin-face as he sits inside his car fifteen yards from the steps, waiting for Armageddon to blow over. But Armageddon takes its time on account of there being very little wind. Pumpkin-face tries to ignore black fellow. Black fellow doesn’t budge. Pumpkin-face relents, delves inside his jacket—he’s wearing one, not usual for Panama unless you’re somebody or a bodyguard—extracts his wallet, extracts a banknote from said wallet, restores said wallet to inside pocket left, lowers window enough for black fellow to poke brolly into car and pumpkin-face to exchange pleasantries and give him ten bucks without getting soaked. Manoeuvre completed. Note for the record: pumpkin-face speaks Spanish although he’s only just arrived here.
And Pendel smiles. Actually smiles in anticipation, beyond the smile that is always written on his face.
“Younger than I thought,” he calls aloud to Marta’s shapely back as she crouches in her glass box, anxiously checking through her lottery tickets for the winning numbers that she never has.
Approvingly. As if he were gazing upon extra years
of selling suits to Osnard and enjoying Osnard’s friendship instead of recognising him at once for what he was: a customer from hell.
And having ventured this observation to Marta and received no reply beyond an empathetic lifting of the dark head, Pendel arranged himself, as always for a new account, in the attitude in which he wished to be discovered.
For just as life had trained him to rely on first impressions, so he set a similar value on the first impression he made on other people. Nobody, for instance, expects a tailor to be sitting down. But Pendel had long ago determined that P & B should be an oasis of tranquillity in a bustling world. Therefore he made a point of being discovered in his old porter’s chair, most likely with a copy of the day before yesterday’s Times spread on his lap.
And he didn’t mind at all if there was a tray of tea on the table in front of him, as there was now, perched among old copies of Illustrated London News and Country Life, with a real silver teapot on it, and some nice fresh cucumber sandwiches, extra thin, which Marta had made to perfection in her kitchen—where, at her own insistence, she was confined for the first nervous stages of any new customer’s appearance lest the presence of a badly scarred woman of mixed race should prove threatening to white male Panamanian pride in the throes of self-adornment. Also she liked to read her books there, because he had finally got her studying again. Psychology and Social History and another one he always forgot. He had wanted her to do Law, but she had refused point-blank on the grounds that lawyers were liars.
“It is not appropriate,” she would say, in her carefully honed, ironic Spanish, “that the daughter of a black carpenter should debase herself for money.”
There are several ways for a large-bodied young man with a blueand-white bookmaker’s brolly to get out of a small car in pelting rain. Osnard’s—if it was he—was ingenious but flawed. His strategy was to start opening the umbrella inside the car and reverse buttocks-first in an ungainly crouch, at the same time whisking the brolly after and over him while opening it the rest of the way in a single triumphant flourish. But either Osnard or the brolly jammed in the doorway, so that for a moment all Pendel saw of him was a broad English bum covered by brown gabardine trousers cut too deep in the crotch and a twin-vented matching jacket shot to rags by rainfire.