It was the first of many such enquiries that weekend to which he could only give an apologetic “No.” Do you play golf, Harry? No. Follow the rugby? No. Like skiing? No.
“Come on,” said Max. “Let’s go and find Tash.”
Max’s sister was lying on the lawn, propped up on her elbows and gently pushing away the two dogs who, tails thumping on the turf, were attempting to nuzzle into her. Harry could see the attraction. Long brown legs were topped by cropped white shorts, a white cotton shirt was open to reveal the top of her cleavage, the smooth tan broken up here with the faintest of freckles. With her sunglasses perched back on her honey-coloured hair, she looked a picture of health and vitality. But she also looked too disconcertingly like Max for Harry to find her immediately attractive.
To Harry’s surprise, Max twisted her round, sat down on Tash’s stomach and, straddling her, leant in and kissed his sister on the lips, before grabbing her shades and putting them on. “Get off,” she said laughing, wriggling beneath his weight. Max jumped up and walked off, followed swiftly by Tash, who jumped on his back, Max grasping her legs piggyback style, and the two of them trotted off laughing towards the tennis court. Was this what they call horseplay, wondered Harry? He was an only child and had always found sibling relationships both mysterious and fascinating. He called her ‘Moo’ and she called him ‘Squidge’, and before his eyes, Max and Tash seemed to be quickly reverting to their younger selves.
“Do you play tennis, Harry?” Tash had turned, still smiling, walking backwards now, having slid off Max’s back.
“A bit,” replied Harry truthfully, grateful not to have to say ‘no’ again.
“Good, we can have a game later. The Buxtons are coming over. They’re friends of my parents… neighbours.”
The Buxtons duly came over. Pimms was drunk, as if no cliché of an English summer was going to be omitted this weekend, tennis balls smashed tipsily out of the court and into the shrubbery, and England’s dismal batting performance bemoaned. Supper was a drunken affair, with everyone catching up on each other’s lives in bellowing voices, while Harry, feeling excluded from their jovial banter, stroked the head of one of the Setters that had been lain on his lap, the dog’s eyes staring dreamily up at him.
And not just excluded, but somehow meagre and unwholesome as they revealed the details of their lives: rounds of golf at Sunningdale, the debenture at Lords, upcoming summer holidays in villas in the Luberon and Tuscany, weekends here, there and everywhere, and underpinning it all, the sense of invincible wealth: of money earned and now stashed away in perpetuity, and their outlook as cloudless as the weather. He tried not to, but Harry couldn’t help thinking of his mother in Norfolk, getting by on her cleaner’s pay, and never going anywhere further than Cromer for her weekly shop.
It wasn’t until the next day, sitting out under a huge parasol and eating a lunch (he still recalled) of coronation chicken, that Mike – perhaps because other avenues of conversation had dried up – started to take a personal interest in Harry, and in particular Harry’s schooldays with Max. Had he been in any of the teams? No. Not even the house teams? No.
Harry couldn’t see any common ground, and it seems that Mike, dressed in tennis shorts (he had played Natasha before lunch) and a slightly ludicrous sunhat, had come to the same conclusion. He poured another glass of wine and confined himself to remarking about the incredible weather they were having. Was Harry going anywhere for the summer? No.
“Harry’s dad was killed in the Falklands,” Max blurted out, as if he felt the need to make his new friend more interesting to his family.
“Gosh… oh how dreadful,” said Sally, a ladle of coronation chicken now suspended halfway between the platter and her plate, as if to complete the operation would be somehow in bad taste. Harry was aware of a wasp hovering over his wine glass.
“Army? Navy?” said Mike, flushed from the wine and G&T, in a voice that suggested he was familiar with the services.
“Army,” said Harry, batting the wasp away with his hand. “Special Forces.”
This last one was a new lie. Up until now he had been comforted by the fact that it would take a lot of painstaking research for any of his friends – none of whom were given to painstaking research – to unearth a roll call of the Falklands casualties. Nowadays anyone could Google it. Harry hoped that his father being in Special Forces might mean his death was some sort of secret. But now, around this garden table amidst these tipsy strangers, that lie seemed preposterous. But instead of bursting out laughing at the mention of the words ‘special forces’, however, everyone nodded in unison and started eating the salad.
“Game of croquet after? Harry… Squidge?” said Tash, breaking the spell.
“Excellent idea, Moo,” said Max.
Harry nodded enthusiastically. Weirdly croquet was one sport – if sport was what it was – that he was naturally quite good at. They’d played it at school and at friends’ houses, usually while drunk or stoned. But that afternoon he allowed Max and Tash to take a commanding lead as he deliberately fluffed his shots. And when his ball was posted, he excused himself and went indoors. If they wanted to laugh about him now, Harry’s dad in the Special Forces, it would be safe to do so.
He excused himself and went up to his room, a large sunny bedroom that overlooked the lawn, to pack. He could see them all bent over their mallets, seemingly absorbed in the game. Mike was sitting with his ridiculous straw hat pulled over his face, asleep by the look of it.
Max’s room was across the landing, a strangely impersonal space for what was a childhood bedroom, as if all the mementoes had been stripped out, the past erased – everything except three team photographs from school. The rugby first XV, with Max grinning on the far left of the back row. The cricket X1, Max again peripheral, but still part of the team. The hockey X1… ditto.
Natasha’s room was further down the landing; Harry had already poked his nose in there the evening before. This was much more what a one-time teenager’s room should look like: a chaotic mix of pop-star posters (there was a particularly large one of Damon Albarn), horse-riding rosettes and snapshots of Tash and her friends goofing around. There was even a teddy bear propped on a chair in the corner. But it was the room next door that interested Harry.
Where the rest of the woodwork on the landing had at some time in the recent past been given fresh coats of white paint, this door had been left alone, scuffed and yellowing, with two stickers on adjoining panels: ‘Acid… Happy Mondays… E’s the thing. He tried the handle. It was locked.
And then he remembered something – in fact he remembered something he had recalled before but then forgotten. He trotted downstairs and into the room where Mike had been watching cricket and where Harry recalled seeing a collection of family photographs in silver frames arranged across the top of a grand piano.
Recent ones of the family on holiday somewhere sunny. A wedding photograph of Max and Rachel – both looking extraordinarily glamorous but also wearing expressions that suggested that the whole thing was one big joke – or perhaps that was just Harry putting a retrospective gloss on what he now knew of their marriage. Rachel in her wedding dress with its plunging neckline, plunging to places he knew only too well. He suddenly felt intrusive, guilty in a way that he somehow didn’t when rolling around in Max’s bed with his wife.
Towards the back of the piano, records of further family holidays with Max and Tash now teenagers – Tash was perhaps thirteen, to judge by the not-long budded breasts barely justifying the bikini top. Max, Harry knew, was four years older, which would make him seventeen or thereabouts, a hairless, well-honed adolescent torso and an unruly mop where now it was carefully groomed. He was sitting at a table, lifting the lobster tail that was on his plate so that the camera could catch it, and grinning at the person taking the picture. Tash was at the far end of the table, looking at Max, and between them was another boy, a couple of years younger than Max perhaps, also topless and also looking at Max. He was f
iner boned, more feminine than his brother, with a sardonic twist to his lips – but definitely from the same stock.
Harry tried to remember his name. Funny how you know all the older children at school, but the younger ones barely registered. Nick was it? Why did he think it was Nick? And there, as further proof, was a double portrait of Max and his brother dressed in suits, as they would have done when travelling to school at the beginning of term. And right at the back, Max, his brother and Tash as children – Tash looked about four or five – posed in a row and smiling dutifully at the photographer.
Harry drove back to London so he couldn’t see Max’s face as he asked, “Don’t you have a younger brother?”
“Had a younger brother. Nicky…” said Max.
“Nick… I thought so… Oh God, sorry. You mean…”
“He died when he was eighteen… drowned in his own puke the silly bugger…”
Harry had guessed that he was dead. When he had rejoined the family in the garden they suddenly seemed revealed to him in a new light. Mike was drinking too much, Sally seemed ineffably sad, the crows’ feet around eyes and mouth not from smiling but from sobbing uncontrollably, alone in the endless afternoons. And Tash’s gaiety and horseplay now seemed forced. Only Max seemed the same: unmovable, steady, unaffected.
“Oh Christ, sorry. Was it drugs?” asked Harry, moving over to the slow lane to allow the tailgaters to pass.
“Uppers, downers, e, speed, hash, but mainly alcohol. The toxicology report…” Max stopped and cleared his throat before continuing. “He was taking a holiday down in Cornwall after his A-levels, a week-long party by all accounts. They found him one morning…”
“Shit,” said Harry, casting a glance at Max. He was looking stonily ahead.
“We don’t really talk about it.”
CHAPTER SIX
In Geneva, Max jogs back to his flat, showers, changes and, less than an hour later, is buzzed through a door of bullet-proof glass. Here he is eyeballed by a burly unsmiling man squeezed into a uniform that is supposed to suggest some sort of connection with the police.
The man nods at him, another glass door slides open and Max steps into a carpeted reception panelled with light oak, watched at each ceiling corner by a CCTV camera. To the right of the reception desk is a doorway to a corridor, but it’s framed by a metal detector like the ones at airports, through which he must walk, having first divested himself of his watch, crammed money clip, keys and iPhone. A middle-aged receptionist asks him to wait a moment, gesturing to a leather couch in front of coffee table on which jewellery auction catalogues from Sotheby’s and Christie’s are neatly stacked.
He picks one up but almost at once a severe-looking woman in her thirties, with bunched strawberry blonde hair and a white smock rather like a dental nurse, steps into the room and holds out a small cold bony hand. Gretchen, remembers Max, that’s the name of Dieter’s assistant. The name seems so right for her. He follows her through an open solid steel door, which she closes after them and locks.
Dieter, no jacket and in rolled shirt sleeves, is standing stock still in front of a fluorescent lamp, staring intently at a small gem through his jeweller’s loupe, thick lines spreading out from the corners of his eyes after decades of inspecting diamonds in this way. Maybe he was even born squinting into a magnifying glass. Gretchen simply stands in front of him until he notices her. He then looks up, and then at Max. “Mr Max. How are we?”
Dieter is a geeky geochemist at heart, overlain with a veneer of business acumen picked up while working in Antwerp and New York. Science rather than money is his driving force, and although Max is only a new and distinctly small-time downstream client, Dieter likes him because Max listens to him explain his love affair with diamonds, unlike those other grabby middlemen who beat a path to his cutting shop-cum-showroom in Geneva.
Max wants to learn about stones. He is genuinely fascinated and awestruck when Dieter speaks of some diamonds being almost as old as the earth, formed out of the immense heat and pressure of ancient eruptions or meteorite strikes.
And Max is genuinely interested. He admires people who know stuff.
“What is it?” he asks of the clear diamond that Dieter is now popping into a plastic pouch and handing to his white-coated assistant. Without a word she takes it into a back room, having first closed a solid-steel barred gate behind as quietly as it is possible to close a solid-steel barred gate.
“Oh, that’s nothing much, part of a batch that came in this morning. But you, my friend, are in luck. Or maybe. How much do you have to spend?”
“Now that, my friend, is the eternal question.”
He likes to call Dieter ‘my friend’ as if saying it will make it real, and gratifyingly Dieter seemed to have picked up the habit too. He reminds Max of the swots at school – the academic boys who would initially assume that Max was one of ‘the lads’ – a chancer hoping to steal their homework or pick their brains. Max wanted to do neither, just win them round by showing interest and erudition of his own. He knows how to be popular with all sorts of people; winning them round, that was the game.
It had been like that with Harry. When they had met up again by chance after school and university – it was a summer night outside a pub in Fulham – the ‘Sloaney Pony’ everybody called it – Harry was a raving leftie. It must have been after the Gulf War in 2003 because Harry was full of it – how Tony Blair was a liar who should be tried for war crimes, and so on. Max had been shocked by his opinions being uttered in a pub like this, where England’s performance in the rugby or cricket was a more usual topic of conversation, but he was also intrigued. He didn’t shout Harry down, like some of his party, but asked him questions.
Not that Harry could see past Max’s expensive suit, not for a while anyway. Harry was a freelance journalist back then – writing interviews with visiting French film directors and selling them to the broadsheets for a pittance. He lived in Fulham with a bunch of other losers, whose main pastime seemed to be smoking spliffs and getting drunk. Wouldn’t he like to earn some proper money, Max used to ask? And the message coming back from those small blue unhappy eyes was that, ‘Yes… I really would like to. Show me the way.’
“Gretchen!” Dieter calls, raising his soft voice. Gretchen appears at the barred door. In her white coat and glasses, Max has an unwanted flashback to some porn video he has watched in the dim and distant past – one of the ones which actually bothered with a storyline. Hot Dentists on the Job, or Horny Medical Examination or something like that, a little light fiction before everyone is naked and getting down to the business. Meat and two veg, as Harry calls it. Harry’s funny like that.
Rachel made him give up pornography. Or rather, about a month before their wedding – on a Saturday morning, he recalls – she appeared at his front door with a battered old suitcase from God knows where. She then went through the house picking up DVDs, old VHSs, magazines – even long-discarded copies of Esquire and Loaded – and piled them all into the suitcase.
“No more wanking off at photographs,” she said. “Or videos.” And she had driven Max and the suitcase down to the tip in Wandsworth, and chucked the whole lot into the skip marked ‘household waste’. Hot Dentists and Horny Nurses were recycled, and Max has been as good as his word. He never watches the stuff unless he can’t help it – which usually means Simon and his ever more freakish discoveries from the outer reaches of the Internet.
“Can you get me the New York pink?” Dieter asks Gretchen and she walks off briskly. He can see that Dieter is excited by something, and it’s not his assistant. Are they having a relationship? Dieter seems so asexual, it’s hard to tell. Perhaps he’s gay. Perhaps he fancies Max. Well, that can’t be bad for business.
“While she’s getting that one,” says Dieter. “Let me show you something else.”
He shakes the mouse across the desktop and starts clicking around on his computer screen until the picture he wants appears. It’s of a massive, pink uncut diamond. �
�I bought this about two months ago,” he says.
“It’s huge,” says Max peering at the pink rock with its sharp edges and uneven shape. “How many carats is she?”
“One hundred uncut.”
Max duly whistles, but instead of looking proud, Dieter seems preoccupied, even a little worried. “We’ve been cutting and polishing it and so far so good, but large stones can be treacherous.”
“Yes,” says Max, who has heard about the risks of cutting large stones. “Remind me.” The role of student is hard to shake off.
Dieter turns off the computer screen, and looks where his hand rests on the mouse. “Who knows what flaws lie beneath such beauty,” he says dramatically, making it sound somehow tragic in his Germanic accent. But then it could be tragic. “Knots… fractures… we could be cutting and – kapow! – diamond dust. Shattered bits that might polish up into a cheap little engagement ring that you’d struggle to get 300 euros for.” He shrugs.
“That’s the risk – but upside is also great for the brave diamantaire. How much did you pay for it?”
“Ha… not so fast,” says Dieter, taking off his glasses and polishing them with a cloth. “Anyway I have a good feeling about this one. I can’t see any clouds or anything explosive, and if my hunch is correct, we are working our way towards a healthy octahedron, in which case there shouldn’t be too much wastage.” He pauses for effect. “When I do model it into a beautiful vivid fifty-carat pear-shaped pendant fit for the Sultan of Brunei, then we can talk about price. Perhaps I can give it a name – that has to be good for an extra half a million. Queen of the River perhaps – it’s alluvial, you know. It was found in a river.”
Max knows what an alluvial diamond is, because Dieter has also explained this to him before on several occasions. Most diamonds are mined, after tens of millions of dollars have been poured into geological surveys in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet – Siberia, the Barrens Sea, the Kalahari Desert. But sometimes… sometimes somebody out for a day’s fishing on a river in somewhere sunny like Brazil sees something glinting beneath the surface of the water, and then they and their family never have to work again.
The Concierge Page 4
