by William Boyd
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Good Man in Africa
On the Yankee Station
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
School Ties
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist
Any Human Heart
Fascination
Bamboo
Restless
For Susan
Ordinary thunderstorms have the capacity to transform themselves into multi-cell storms of ever growing complexity. Such multi-cell storms display a marked increase in severity and their lifetime can be extended by a factor of ten or more. The grandfather of all thunderstorms, however, is the super-cell thunderstorm. It should be noted that even ordinary thunderstorms are capable of mutating into super-cell storms. These storms subside very slowly.
Storm Dynamics and Hail Cascades
by L.D. Sax and W.S. Dutton
1
LET US START WITH the river – all things begin with the river and we shall probably end there, no doubt – but let’s wait and see how we go. Soon, in a minute or two, a young man will come and stand by the river’s edge, here at Chelsea Bridge, in London.
There he is – look – stepping hesitantly down from a taxi, paying the driver, gazing around him, unthinkingly, glancing over at the bright water (it’s a flood tide and the river is unusually high). He’s a tall, pale-faced young man, early thirties, even-featured with tired eyes, his short dark hair neatly cut and edged as if fresh from the barber. He is new to the city, a stranger, and his name is Adam Kindred. He has just been interviewed for a job and feels like seeing the river (the interview having been the usual tense encounter, with a lot at stake), answering a vague desire to ‘get some air’. The recent interview explains why, beneath his expensive trenchcoat, he is wearing a charcoal-grey suit, a maroon tie with a new white shirt and why he’s carrying a glossy solid-looking black briefcase with heavy brass locks and corner trim. He crosses the road, having no idea how his life is about to change in the next few hours – massively, irrevocably – no idea at all.
Adam walked over to the high stone balustrade that curved the roadway into Chelsea Bridge and, leaning on it, looked down at the Thames. The tide was high and still coming in, he saw, the normal flow of water reversed, flotsam moving surprisingly quickly upstream, heading inland, as if the sea were dumping its rubbish in the river rather than the usual, other way round. Adam strolled up the bridge’s wide walkway heading for midstream, his gaze sweeping from the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station (one blurred with a cross-hatching of scaffolding) to the west, past the gold finial of the Peace Pagoda towards the two chimneys of Lots Road Power Station. The plane trees in Battersea Park, on the far bank, were still some way from full leaf – only the horse chestnuts were precociously, densely green. Early May in London … He turned and looked back at the Chelsea shore: more trees – he’d forgotten how leafy some parts of London were, how positively bosky. The roofs of the grand, red brick, riverine Victorian mansion blocks rose above the level of the Embankment’s avenue of planes. How high? Sixty feet? Eighty? Apart from the susurrus of ceaseless traffic, the occasional klaxon and whooping siren, he didn’t feel as if he were in the middle of a huge city at all: the trees, the quiet force of the surging, tidal river beneath his feet, that special luminescence that a body of water throws off, made him grow calmer – he’d been right to come to the river – odd how these instincts mysteriously drive you, he thought.
He walked back, his eye held by a clearly defined, attenuated triangle of waste ground to the west side of Chelsea Bridge, formed by the bridge itself, the water’s edge and the four lanes of the Embankment. It was bulked out with vegetation, dense with long grass and thick unpruned bushes and trees. He thought, idly, that such a patch of land must be worth a tidy fortune in this location, even a thin long triangle of waste ground, and he built, in his mind’s eye, a three-storey wedge of a dozen bijou, balconied apartments. Then he saw that in order to achieve this he’d have to cut down a huge fig tree, close to the bridge – decades old, he reckoned, drawing nearer to it, its big shiny leaves still growing, stiffly fresh. A venerable fig tree by the Thames, he thought: strange – how had it been planted there and what happened to the fruit? He conjured up a vision of a plate of Parma ham and halved fresh figs. Where had he eaten that? On his honeymoon in Portofino with Alexa? Or earlier? On one of his student holidays, perhaps … It was a mistake to think of Alexa, he realised, his new mood of calm replaced at once by one of sadness and anger, so he concentrated instead on the small surges of hunger he was experiencing, and felt, thinking of the figs and Parma ham, a sudden need for Italian food: Italian food of a simple, honest, basic sort – insalata tricolore, pasta alle vongole, scallopine al limone, torta di nonna. That would do nicely.
He wandered into Chelsea and almost immediately in the quiet streets behind the Royal Hospital found, to his considerable astonishment, an Italian restaurant – as if he were in a fairy tale. There it was, tucked under yellow awnings badged with a Venetian lion, in a narrow street of white stucco and beige-brick terraced houses – it seemed an anomaly, a fantasy. No shops, no pub, no other restaurant in sight – how had it managed to establish itself here amongst the residents? Adam looked at his watch – 6.20 – a bit early to eat but he was genuinely hungry now and he could see there were already a few other customers inside. Then a smiling, tanned man came to the door and held it open for him, urging, ‘Come in, sir, come in, yes, we are open, come in, come in.’ This man took his coat from him, hung it on a peg and ushered him past the small bar through to the light L-shaped room, shouting genial instructions and rebukes at the other waiters, as if Adam were his most cherished regular and was being inconvenienced by their inefficiency in some way.
He sat Adam down at a table for two with his back to the street outside. He offered to look after Adam’s briefcase but Adam decided it would stay with him as he took the proffered menu and glanced around. Eight tourists – four men, four women – sat at a large round table, eating silently, all dressed in blue with identical blue tote bags at their feet, and there was another solitary man sitting two tables away along from him, who had taken his spectacles off and was dabbing his face with a tissue. He looked agitated, ill at ease in some way, and he glanced over as he replaced his spectacles. As their eyes met the man gave that inclination of the head, the small smile of acknowledgement – the solidarity of the solitary diner – that says I am not sad or lonely, this is something that I have happily chosen to do, just like you. He had a couple of folders and other papers spread on the table in front of him. Adam smiled back.
Adam ate the house salad – spinach, bacon, shaved parmesan and a creamy dressing – and was halfway through his scallopine al vitello (green beans, roast potatoes on the side) when the other solitary diner leant over and asked him if he knew the exact time. His accent was American, his English flawless. Adam told him – 6.52 – the man carefully adjusted his watch and they inevitably began to talk. The man introduced himself as Dr Philip Wang. Adam reciprocated and supplied the information that this was his first trip to London since he had been a child. Dr Wang confirmed that he too knew very little of the city. He lived and worked in Oxford – paying only short, infrequent visits to London, a day or two at a time, when he had to see patients taking part in a research project he was running. Adam said he’d come to London from America, was applying for a job here, wanting to ‘relocate’, to come back home, as it were.
‘A job?’ Dr Wang asked, looking at his smart suit. ‘Are you in finance?’ His speculation seemed
to carry with it a tone of disapproval.
‘No, a university job – a research fellowship – at Imperial College,’ Adam added, wondering if he might now be vindicated. ‘I just came from the interview.’
‘Good school,’ Wang said, distantly, then, ‘Yeah …’ as if his mind was on something else, then, collecting himself, asked politely, ‘How did it go?’
Adam shrugged and said he could never predict these things. The three people who had interviewed him – two men and a woman with a near-shaven head – had given nothing away, being almost absurdly polite and formal, so unlike his former American colleagues, Adam had thought at the time.
‘Imperial College. So, you’re a scientist,’ Wang said. ‘So am I. What’s your field?’
‘Climatology,’ Adam said. ‘What about you?’
Wang thought for a second as if he wasn’t sure of the answer. ‘Immunology, I guess, yeah … Or you could say I was an allergist,’ he said, then glancing at his newly adjusted watch said he’d better go, had work to do, calls to make. He paid his bill, in cash, and clumsily gathered up his papers, spilling sheaves on the floor, stooping to pick them up, muttering to himself – suddenly he seemed more than a little distracted again, as if, now the meal had come to an end, his real life had recommenced with its many pressures and anxieties. Finally he stood and shook Adam’s hand, wishing him luck, hoping he had got the job. ‘I have a good feeling about it,’ Wang added, illogically, ‘a real good feeling.’
Adam was halfway through his tiramisu when he noticed that Wang had left something behind: a transparent plastic zippable folder under the seat between their tables, half obscured by the hanging flap of the tablecloth. He reached for it and saw that on the front was a small pocket that contained Wang’s business card. Adam extracted it and read: ‘DR PHILIP Y. WANG MD, PhD (Yale), FBSI, MAAI’, and under that ‘Head of Research & Development CALENTURE-DEUTZ plc’. On the reverse there were two addresses with phone numbers, one in the Cherwell Business Park, Oxford (Unit 10) and the other in London – Anne Boleyn House, Sloane Avenue, SW3.
As he paid his bill, pleased to remember his new pin code, tapping it without hesitation into the handset, Adam asked if Dr Wang was a regular customer and was informed that he’d never been seen in the restaurant before. Adam decided he’d drop the file off himself – it seemed a friendly and helpful thing to do, especially as Wang had been so enthusiastic about his career prospects – and asked directions to Sloane Avenue.
Walking along the King’s Road, still busy with shoppers (almost exclusively French or Spanish, it seemed), Adam thought suddenly that perhaps Wang had deliberately left his file for him to discover. He wondered if it was a way of seeing him again: two lonely men in the city, wanting some company … Was it, even, a gay thing, a ploy? Adam had sometimes wondered if there was something about him that gay men found attractive. He could recall three precise occasions when he had been flirted with and another when a man had waited for him outside the lavatory of a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona and had forced a kiss on him. Adam didn’t think Wang was gay – no, that was preposterous – but he decided it would be wise to phone ahead and so eased Wang’s card out of its tight plastic niche, sat down on a wooden bench outside a pub, fished out his mobile phone and made the call.
‘Philip Wang.’
‘Dr Wang, it’s Adam Kindred. We just met at the restaurant—’
‘Of course – and you have my file. Thank you so much. I just called them and they told me you had it.’
‘I thought it’d be quicker if I dropped it off.’
‘That’s so kind of you. Please come up and have a drink – oh, there’s someone at the door. That’s not you, is it?’
Adam laughed, said he thought he was five minutes or so away and clicked his phone shut. Come up and have a drink – perfectly friendly, no sexual innuendo there – but perhaps it was the American accent, professionally flat, giving away nothing, that made Adam think that Wang had been insufficiently surprised to hear he was on his way round …
Anne Boleyn House was an imposing, almost fortress-like 1930s art deco block of service flats with a small semicircle of box-hedged drive-in and a uniformed porter in the lobby sitting behind a long marble-topped counter. Adam signed his name in a register and was directed to Flat G 14 on the seventh floor. After his phone call he had thought over the necessity of seeing Wang again – he could have safely left the file with the porter, he now realised – but he had nothing else to do and he didn’t particularly want to go back to his modest hotel in Pimlico: a drink or two with Wang would kill some time and, besides, Wang seemed an interesting and educated man.
Adam stepped out of the lift into a wholly featureless long corridor – dark parquet, pistachio walls, identical flush doors differentiated only by their number. Like cells, he thought, or, in a film, it might have been a lazy art director’s vision of Kafkaesque conformity. And there was an unpleasant nose-tickling, odorous overlay – of wax polish mingled with potent, bleachy lavatory cleanser. Small glaringly bright lights set into the ceiling lit the way to Flat G 14, where the corridor made a right-angled turn to reveal another length of soulless, service-flat perspective. A glowing green exit light shone at its end.
Adam saw that Wang had left his door slightly ajar – a sign of welcome? – but he rang the bell all the same, thinking that it wouldn’t do simply to walk in. He heard Wang come through a door, heard a door close, but no call of ‘Adam? Do come in, please.’
He rang the bell again.
‘Hello?’ Adam pushed the door slightly. ‘Dr Wang? Philip?’
He opened the door and stepped into a small, boxy living room. Two armchairs close to a coffee table, a huge flat-screen TV, some dried flowers in straw vases. A small galley kitchen behind two louvred half-doors. Adam set his briefcase down by the coffee table and placed Wang’s file beside a fan of golfing magazines, all smiling men in pastel colours brandishing their clubs. Then he heard Wang’s voice, low and urgent.
‘Adam? I’m in here …’
The next room. No, please, not the bedroom, surely? Adam thought to himself, urgently regretting coming up as he stepped over to the door and pushed it open.
‘I can only stay five min—’
Philip Wang lay on top of his bed in a widening pool of blood. He was alive, very conscious, and a hand, flipper-like, gestured Adam towards him. The room had been trashed, two small filing cabinets up-ended and emptied, drawers from a bedside table tipped out, a wardrobe cleared with a swipe or two, clothes and hangers scattered.
Wang pointed to his left side. Adam hadn’t noticed – the handle of a knife protruded from Wang’s sopping sweater.
‘Pull it out,’ Wang said. His face showed signs of a beating – his spectacles distorted but unbroken, a trickle of blood from a nostril, a split lip, a red impact-circle on a cheekbone.
‘Are you sure?’ Adam said.
‘Please, now …’
With fluttering hands he seemed to guide Adam’s right hand to the hilt of the knife. Adam gripped it loosely.
‘I don’t think this is the sort of thing—’
‘One quick movement,’ Wang said and coughed. A little blood overflowed from his mouth down his chin.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Adam repeated. ‘I don’t know if it’s the correct—’
‘Now!’
Without further thought Adam gripped the knife and drew it out, as easily as if from a scabbard. It was a breadknife, he noticed, as a surge of released blood followed the withdrawal, travelling up the blade and wetting Adam’s knuckles, warmly.
‘I’ll call the police,’ Adam said and placed the knife down, unthinkingly wiping his dripping fingers on the coverlet.
‘The file,’ Wang said, fingers twitching, moving, as if tapping at an invisible keyboard.
‘I have it.’
‘Whatever you do, don’t—’ Wang died then, with a short gasp of what seemed like exasperation.
Adam stepped away, appalled,
horrified, stumbled against a pile of Wang’s jackets and trousers, and went back into the living room, looking for a phone. He saw it sitting on a neat, purpose-built shelf by the door and as he reached for the receiver saw that there was still some blood on his hand, still dripping from an unwiped finger. Some drops fell on the telephone.
‘Shit …’ he said, realising this was his first articulated expression of shock. What in the name of fuck was going on?
Then he heard the window in Wang’s bedroom open and somebody step heavily inside. And the terror he was feeling left in an instant. Or at least he thought it was the window – maybe it was from the bathroom – but he had heard the clunking sound of a catch being released, one of those brass handles that secured the mass-produced steel-framed and many-paned glass windows that gave Anne Boleyn House its slightly depressed, institutional air.
Adam grabbed his briefcase and Wang’s file and left the flat rapidly, closing the door behind him with a bang. He looked towards the lifts and then decided against them, turning the corner and striding normally, not running, not unduly fast, towards the green exit light and the fire stairs.
He descended seven floors of the dimly lit stone stairs without seeing anyone and emerged on to a side street behind Anne Boleyn House beside four towering grey rubbish bins on sturdy rubber wheels. There was a powerful smell of decomposing food that made Adam gag and he spat, squatting down to open his briefcase and slip Wang’s file inside. He looked up to see two young chefs in their white jackets and blue checkerboard trousers lighting up cigarettes in a doorway a few yards off.
‘Stinks, dunnit?’ one of them called over with a grin on his face.
Adam gave them a thumbs-up and headed off, still at what he imagined was an easy saunter, in the opposite direction.
He wandered Chelsea’s streets for a while, aimlessly, trying to sort things out in his mind, trying to make some sense of what he had witnessed and what had taken place. His head was jangled, a shocking, fractured mosaic of recent images – Wang’s battered face, the hilt of the breadknife, his twitching, tapping hand gesture – but he was not too jangled to realise what he had just done and the consequences of his importunate, natural reactions. He should never have obeyed Wang’s instruction, he now realised. He should never have pulled the knife out, never – he should have simply gone to the telephone and dialled 911 – 999, rather. Now he had traces of Wang’s blood on his hands and under his fingernails and, even worse, his fingerprints were on the fucking knife itself. But what else could anyone have done in such a situation? another side of his brain yelled at him, in frustrated rage. You had no choice: it was a dying, agonised man’s last request. Wang had practically fitted his fingers around the knife’s hilt, begging him to pull it out, begging him –
