Rory's Boys

by Alan Clark

  A wave of irritation rose and choked me. I considered throwing my coffee against the wall, but I’d already ruined the Berber rug today and the place would be a wreck at this rate. So I ripped off the iPod and threw Kanye West and Lady Gaga instead. It buggered the iPod but it did the business. I fetched the guitar from under the bed and treated Alma to my cover of A Man’s A Man For A’ That.

  Faisal appeared at the top of the glass staircase, holding a big plastic container.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You all right? Where have you been?’

  ‘Went for a walk with Elspeth,’ I said. ‘What’s that you’ve got?’

  ‘Heavy-duty carpet cleaner. Been to Homebase.’

  We looked down at the Berber rug, like policemen examining a corpse.

  ‘Really sorry about that,’ I said. ‘Let me give you a hand.’

  Faisal mixed the stuff into a basin of water and found two sponges. We got down on our hands and knees and began to scrub gently. We worked in silence for a few minutes, then he stopped and looked up at me.

  ‘Look, I just made a mistake. A bad one I know, but still just a mistake,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve so little experience of these things.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can sort this.’

  And the two of us bent our heads again and kept on scrubbing.

  NINE

  It was all because she’d looked a bit like June Whitfield. Darling Junie as the daft old sod called her. Neatly tailored, comfy white hair, just the sort you’d imagine writing for Saga Magazine. That was why he’d let his guard down. She’d been doing one of those ‘alive and kicking’ pieces. Vic agreed to these sometimes, usually in some posh restaurant on the assumption that they’d pick up the bill. But he’d had a chesty cough and asked her to come to Mount Royal instead. From the comfort of the Red Damask Drawing-Room, with Vic dosed up on Benylin, they’d set off on the usual Cook’s Tour of his life and career. They’d ascended his peaks and sunk into his troughs. They’d hacked through the jungle of statistics on his Top Ten hits, album sales and Royal Command performances. They’d bumped into the usual crew; Frank, Dino, Sammy, Larry and Viv, Noel, Johnnie Gielgud, and of course the blessed Alma, the singer not the cat. They’d even waved, from afar, at the ex-Mrs d’Orsay in sunny Ibiza.

  Naturally, the woman had asked about the house and Vic had described his current business project, renovating it into apartments for retired people. Then, just as Elspeth had done with me, she’d gushed that she’d absolutely adore to live here one day.

  Vic had tapped the side of his blocked nose, winked and croaked, ‘Bachelors only honey.’

  Later, he’d blamed the combination of the Benylin and the two stonking glasses of Rioja he’d had at lunch. But in those three words, he’d outed both Mount Royal and himself. Bugger Saga, the woman must have thought as she started dialling numbers in Wapping.

  Three hundred years ago, my fat-cat ancestor had named his house after the legend that Henry VIII had bolted up here to slaughter some deer after his first glimpse of Anne of Cleves. That was now to be changed at the click of a mouse by some wee spiv at an Apple Mac in Docklands. The next morning, for eight million Sun readers crunching their Shreddies and lighting their first roll-up, Mount Royal was re-christened Withering Heights!

  Under that banner, the sub-head read ‘Queen of Croon? Vic d’Orsay opens old folks home for gays.’ The rest was no more than a scissors-and-paste job about Vic’s career, Granny’s loony doings and a couple of lines about me. But by lunchtime, nearly every other paper, TV and radio station had picked it up. The office phone rang non-stop. Eventually I pulled it out of the wall, but that just transferred the problem to the front gates. Bruce Willis waddled into the office, sweating heavily as usual. There were about twenty of them outside plus a few more with cameras up in the oak trees. The rooks were furious. Bruce said he’d threatened them with garrotting, disembowelment and other tricks picked up in Die Hard With A Vengeance. But he’d feel a lot happier with back-up from his mates Lance and Jason, ex-territorials who didn’t take no bull from nobody. Then he flushed a little and said that though he himself was a thousand percent red-blooded male, his philosophy was live-and-let-live; his neighbours in Dalston were two lovely lads with the neatest garden in the street.

  With all the fuss, I’d forgotten to tell Elspeth what had happened. She’d gone down the hill to get her magazines and had to fight her way back in.

  ‘One wee tyke asked me if I was a lesbian,’ she said on reaching the sanctuary of the office. ‘But The Lady can deliver a hefty whack.’

  She was more concerned about having had her picture taken, in case it might be seen back in Bute. Vic promised her it was really pictures of elderly gents they were after, preferably in full drag cutting roses. Elspeth wanted to know what we were going to do. I asked if she had any suggestions. She looked hard at me, in the way she’d always done if I’d posed a question to which any decent Church of Scotland boy should have known the answer.

  ‘If you believe in this place, then tell the truth and shame the devil’, she said. ‘I’ll away and make us a wee pot of tea. A lesbian indeed. Do I look like a lesbian?’

  There was the sudden roar of an engine. Big Frankie rode the lilac scooter across the East Court and out onto the carriage circle. Cameras starting flashing in the oaks, making them look like Christmas trees. He stopped just inside the gates and leaned back in the saddle. He pouted and preened, teased and tantalized, both hands dangling in his crotch. He opened the neck of the red leathers and slowly pulled the zip lower and lower till his great black belly spilled out like a hernia. The oaks went berserk. Then he blew them a kiss and rode back into the East Court.

  ‘I’m not sure that was helpful, Frankie,’ I shouted from my hiding-place in the office doorway.

  ‘Ainsley Harriott’s like a busted flush,’ he grinned. ‘There’s a vacancy for an ethnic celebrity-chef. Why not Big Frankie Beckles? We’re famous boss. We got fifteen minutes. Enjoy!’

  He wasn’t wrong. We made all the tea-time news bulletins, usually as the last item, the ‘would you believe it?’ slot, often occupied by skate-boarding dachshunds or disabled kids who’d done a bungee-jump.

  I didn’t sleep well. Faisal, thank God, had gone to a conference in north Wales. I hoped they were all too wrapped up in their microbes and viruses to see newspapers or watch TV. My brain was buzzing like a hedge-trimmer. I kept getting up to peek out the window in case a reporter had his nose pressed against it. It was reassuring to see the light in Bruce Willis’s caravan, though he’d be safe back in Dalston now. At night we’d acquired a young bloke, tall and skinny with piercings, tattoos and a deathly pale skin. He only grunted the odd monosyllable and I’d decided he sat in the caravan drinking the blood of virgins or pulling the wings off bats. Tonight though, I was glad the Vampire was out there.

  Next morning, we were even in the broadsheets; I’d finally got myself in The Times after all. But poor Frankie; there were no pix of him anywhere and Elspeth had been spared exposure on the Isle of Bute.

  Marcus Leigh called on my mobile.

  ‘Well, this is a jolly bad show isn’t it?’ he said briskly. ‘I bumped into the Lord Chancellor in St. James’s Square. He asked if I’d put my name down for “Withering Heights.”’

  ‘Did you tell him you had?’ I asked.

  ‘I most certainly did not.’

  ‘You still with us then, Marcus?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I very much want to be with you, as I made clear at the Reform,’ he said slowly ‘But I simply couldn’t cope with being an attraction in a media circus. That’s not what I was looking for at all.’

  He offered his advice. As with his suggestions on what to order for lunch, this came across as compulsory. Like Elspeth, he said there was no point in denying the truth. If we did, they’d be crawling over us like midges forever. We must issue a bald statement verifying the esse
nce of the article, then refuse to comment further.

  ‘I’ll have to see how things develop,’ he concluded, ‘before committing myself further. Frightfully sorry, but I’m sure you understand.’

  By the middle of the next day, seven potential residents had called to cancel their interviews. None made any bones about why.

  ‘I’m perfectly happy to be open in private,’ said one member of the House of Lords, ‘but not to the world, his wife and his feral children. I have non-executive directorships to protect. Several of the companies do business in the Middle East. It’s just not on.’

  ‘Listen toots, you have to understand how things used to be for these guys,’ Vic said when I’d put the phone down. ‘They were criminals till they were thirty or forty. Some of them have never got the chill of that out of their bones, however cosy things might be now. The shame may have gone, but the embarrassment’s still there like a ball and chain. They learn to drag it around, but they never entirely lose it.’

  We’d always realized that our plans for Mount Royal would be newsworthy. There were dozens of such places in the States and a few in Europe but for your deep-fried British bigot we could be a freak show. We’d never expected to keep it secret in the longer term, sooner or later, we’d be outed, but we wanted it later. Not that we weren’t proud of what we were doing; I’d had a nice dream about Prince William coming to cut the ribbon, Big Frankie bobbing as he presented the bouquet, Elspeth with her hair actually done, that sort of thing. But Vic and I had agreed that, until everybody had been planted-in and well watered, we’d keep the species of our elderly flowers to ourselves. Anyway, the sort who could pay our fees would expect discretion like they’d expect their hotel bed turned down and a chocolate on their pillow.

  But now this. So far, I’d stayed remarkably calm. I’d not lost it with Vic like I’d lost it with Faisal. Not gone for Option Three. Not called him a silly old bastard who’d just fucked up everything. All the more admirable since he’d not actually delivered a proper apology. The less convenient side of Vic’s sunny disposition was an ability to delete bad stuff from his consciousness; the glass couldn’t just be half-full, it had to be up to the brim with a cherry and a wee paper parasol. Admittedly though, he had seemed a bit subdued today and there hadn’t been a Rat Pack anecdote for forty-eight hours. But by the evening, we’d notched up fifteen cancellations and just as I put down the phone on the latest refusenik, Vic strolled back into the office with a bottle of whisky and two glasses.

  ‘What’s up toots?’

  The gastric reflux heard its cue and made its entrance. Yep, here we go.

  ‘I’ll fucking tell you what’s up. How could you have been so idiotic? You’ve been giving press interviews for fifty years and you slip up now. All this work. All this time. All this money; most of it your own. And at the eleventh hour, you’ve blown it because you’d overdosed on Benylin. Jesus, Victor. Withering Heights! Well done.’

  ‘It would have come out somewhere along the line. We always knew that, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, but not now!’ I yelled. ‘Not one punter has signed on the dotted line. Not one. This whole thing could yet go down the toilet and you’ll have flushed it, you stupid old man.’

  Vic’s smile snuffed out completely. I’d often been rude about his age, but never seriously, never cruelly. But I mean, well, was I wrong? He said it was the Benylin, but wasn’t it maybe just the brain cells dying? I was used to working with sharp, clever operators in their prime. For the first time it hit me that I’d soon be surrounded by people who might be starting to lose the plot. Would senility leak silently into the air like carbon monoxide, till I started taking a nap in the afternoons and going to bed at half-past ten? Christ, what had I done?

  Vic picked up the whisky bottle from the desk.

  ‘Think I’ll find a quiet corner of the garden and finish this off. Might put a slug of Benylin in it too.’

  ‘Try an overdose,’ I snapped.

  *

  Dolores Potts stood framed in the office doorway, the evening sun shimmering in a halo round her dark head. Madonna With A Trowel. She’d developed a habit of popping in, usually at the end of the day. She’d always have some excuse, but I sensed that was all they were. I’d give her a glass of wine and we’d chat about her plans for the gardens. She was clever, sparky, a laugh. I’d come to quite look forward to it.

  ‘Bad moment?’ she asked. ‘Got some invoices from the nurseries.’

  As well as The Archers vowels, she spoke in the new received pronunciation in which the letters t and g were dead and gone and r was in intensive care. It was a shame. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I yearned for Dolores Potts to be without a flaw. She was so beautiful that even the smallest imperfection seemed like an outrage.

  I snatched the invoices, rammed them in a drawer and grabbed a bottle from the fridge.

  ‘One of those reporters asked me if I was a lesbian,’ she said. ‘Do I look like a lesbian?’

  ‘Don’t take it personally, they’re asking everyone,’ I replied. ‘Are you a lesbian?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she smiled, draping herself across a chair and staring at me with her big eyes. ‘I tried it once but it made my teeth chatter. Besides I like cock too much.’

  ‘Fuck, you’re coarse,’ I said, my Calvinist gene stirring in its sleep. ‘Are all your generation like that now?’

  ‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘Don’t really bother with them as a rule. I’ve always gone for older men. Mind if I light up?’

  She didn’t wait for permission. My impulse was to stop her, but Dolores Potts carried an odd kind of authority. As if she were the boss and I the employee, as if this were her house, not mine. Whenever we talked, she always deflected questions about her background. She claimed to be just a country girl from the middle of nowhere. Except that she wasn’t, I’d have laid good money on that.

  ‘So you don’t like women any more than I do then?’ she said.

  ‘That’s an odd question on a day when I’m all over the papers as a card-carrying poof,’ I replied.

  ‘Well I tried it. Just wondered if you ever had?’

  ‘A few times actually,’ I heard myself say, aware that I said it as a boast.

  ‘I bet you broke some hearts.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I smiled.

  ‘Oh I’m sure you broke at least one or two,’ she teased. She flicked her ash into an empty coffee-cup, never letting the big eyes leave mine. For a moment, I imagined I saw something hard and cold in them, but then it vanished.

  There had been more than a few women in fact. A dozen maybe. After Morag Proudie, it’d taken me several years to try again; not till I was in Oz and Matty Rice had broken what I’d thought of as my heart. It had been planned as a major plank of my reinvention. At first it hadn’t been a total disaster, physically at least. I’d closed my eyes and thought of dinky Dustin Hoffman or that other Rory, the hunky folk-singer of my teenage fantasies. I’d closed my eyes and tried to kid myself. It had sort of worked for a while then, like a medicine you take too often, it gradually lost its power and you learn to accept you’re incurable. Since then, as my charms and my bank account had reached their zenith, I’d often been chased by women whose ears hadn’t been whispered in. I’d always been flattered even though I’d decided never to unhook another Ann Summers crotchless suspender-thong. But I wondered if it were happening again, here and now. Madonna With A Trowel was gazing at me through her veil of cigarette smoke. Despite what she knew of me, did Dolores Potts want my body? She asked how serious the press exposure was. I said I didn’t know yet, but it might be. She said I should try to relax. I went to the fridge to get us a second bottle.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said the husky voice behind me. ‘I know a better way.’

  She reached for my hand. Shite. But then she led me from the office and out into the Italian Garden. We stopped at the long flowerbed below the Orangery; she’d been planting here, spades and forks rested on the grass, their day
’s work done.

  ‘Do what I do,’ said Dolores Potts.

  She pushed up her sleeves and lay flat on her stomach at the edge of the lawn. Closing her eyes, she plunged both arms elbowdeep into the newly-turned ground. For a few moments, she held them there then pulled back out and began to knead the rich dark soil like flour, letting it run through her fingers and back to where it belonged. Then she submerged her dirty brown limbs once again.

  ‘Do it,’ she said, her eyes still shut. So I did. Together we lay face-down on the evening grass, half-buried in the earth of Mount Royal.

  ‘Feel better?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Hold on then,’ said Dolores Potts. ‘Just hold on to what you’re feeling now. The rest doesn’t matter a damn.’

  *

  Later, I ate alone in the flat. Faisal was still somewhere among the men of Harlech, presumably in blissful ignorance. I’d thought about calling and crying on his shoulder. That was what partnerships were for, wasn’t it? In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health? I’d not had many shoulders available as a rule, so I might as well enjoy the perk. He was going to find out sooner or later and might be cross I’d not rung. But for some reason I didn’t.

  I made cheese on toast and gave Alma had her usual fishy muck. I imagined mild reproach in her slitty eyes and wondered if she expected fresh fish, being a cat from Harrods. Oh dear, I really ought to learn to cook. After that day at school when Elspeth had snatched away the recipe book and ordered me into my rugby kit, I’d steered clear of it, like a rock on which my machismo might founder. But it was never too late. Maybe Big Frankie would teach me a few simple dishes.