Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  Sursok’s nickname was Midas. The financial deal that clinched his fortune was the sale of his family bank in Syria to HCB. Having worked behind the closed doors of the world’s most powerful banks he finally moved from Lazard’s investment bank to an arm of the Dutch HCB bank in London. He was made one of its vice-presidents and used his investment to become HCB’s largest private shareholder.

  For several months Sursok had been suffering from insomnia. The sleeplessness was not related to finance. It was stoked by the fear that he was not revered enough by everybody. Sitting on the edge of his bed that night Sursok stared ahead in the unyielding grip of envy. The man stalking his thoughts was a banking colleague on the executive board of HCB called Johannes Caspers.

  Sursok’s growing obsession with Caspers was provoked by an odd rivalry. Eddie Sursok hosted parties. He did not attend them himself. This was no surprise to people who had known him from his youth. As a young man he used to pay for orgies in which he did not take part. To control them was enough. These days his parties were for private clients and for corporations. They were competitive celebrity events judged by the wattage of wealth in attendance. Over the years, Sursok’s parties had become the object of much speculation in the press. How much did he spend? Which tycoons and magnates attended? The events received double-page spreads in the Tatler, Vogue and Harpers and Queen.

  A year earlier Sursok had entered into light-hearted competition with one of the Russian oligarchs. The oligarch entertained his guests with a huge retro Soviet-style party. A version of the Red Army Choir sang and Soviet-style guards strolled up and down with white wolves on leashes. Sursok retaliated by hiring Salton Heath for the weekend, a vast tank-training ground scarred with caterpillar tracks. His party organisers recreated the Kosovo war zone with camouflage and flak jackets as requirements for the guests. Helicopter trips over the area were arranged. Tanks were provided which, depending on the outcome of the games, could eventually be blown up. Party-goers all agreed that there was something unbelievably sexy about the combination of mud, camouflage gear and exhausted officers reviewing battle tactics in the military tents provided. Sursok was gratified to have been considered the winner in this competition.

  This year, however, Sursok’s event organisers had made a spectacular bungle of everything and he felt humiliated. They had hired a specially adapted twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Rotherhithe. But the theme of the party was a mish-mash of circus, geisha girls and fin de siècle Paris. Besides which the media, in the light of the credit crunch, had turned against these displays of conspicuous consumption. The press response had been scathing. The tabloids ran headlines like ‘Sir-Put-A-Sock-In-It Eddie’ and ‘Sur-plus Moneybags Party from Hell’. The broadsheets and glossy magazines were equally dismissive.

  Johannes Caspers, his colleague on the executive board of HCB, was also famous for hosting parties. His gatherings attracted the intelligentsia. Caspers was a warm-hearted benefactor to Nobel laureates, musicians and painters of international standing. Opera and ballet were his great passions. In the programmes of the Royal Opera House he was frequently acknowledged and thanked for his patronage.

  Eddie Sursok pulled out the notices sent to him by his clippings service and laid them out on the bedside table next to him. His party had been a fiasco. The black hairs on the back of his hands stood up as he read the coverage. The word ‘vulgar’ cropped up more than once. The word ‘philistine’ particularly stuck in his craw, giving him a physical feeling of choking. Quite by chance the event shared pages with glowing references to Johnny Caspers, who had organised bank sponsorship for a new and much-praised production of Così Fan Tutte at Covent Garden. Comparisons were made between the two men. Caspers was referred to as a man of culture and intellect. The sight of Caspers’ picture smiling up at him from the newspaper snagged at Sursok’s heart. He tried to push his feelings of anger down. For Sursok it was the live burial of jealousy. Resentment glowed inside him like the embers of a fire.

  He went to bed and lay there awake. The next morning was Sunday. By ten o’clock Khaled had left. Sursok was still in bed. For months he had been brooding on how to reclaim his reputation. That evening was to see the first of his attempts to match Caspers in terms of intellect and culture. It was an area new to Sursok. He had donated a room to the British Library. There was to be a dinner there in his honour. He would make one of his few public appearances.

  Chapter Nine

  That same Sunday morning Johannes Caspers was at home in Chiswick working on the guest list for one of his country weekends. His son Felix lounged on the sofa. The sun caught the highlights in Felix’s blond hair as he flicked through GQ magazine. Caspers glanced over at him. These days there was a persistent tension between father and son. Caspers tried not to let his disappointment with Felix’s choice of career show too much but the truth was that it puzzled and depressed him. Felix had refused to go to university and instead had become a pilot, which seemed to Caspers a second-rate profession unworthy of his son’s talents. As an adolescent he had seemed so full of promise.

  As he looked at his son’s fresh, slightly spoiled face, Caspers remembered the particular summer at their country home in Wiltshire when things had started to go wrong. Felix’s mother Lillian was serving wine to some guests near their small outdoor swimming pool. Felix was about fourteen. He had gone for a swim. He came out of the pool with tendrils of his fair hair darkened by the water and sticking to his forehead and neck. One of the guests leaning forward to help Felix out of the pool was the architect Michael Feynite.

  ‘Oh, your hand is all cold and wet,’ Feynite laughed as he took the boy’s hand. Felix’s white skin glistened with drops of water and beneath his ribcage the dip of his stomach was pulsating. Caspers could remember the look of admiration on Feynite’s face.

  ‘Look at that skinny torso.’ Lillian Caspers was standing on the grass smiling as she placed her hands on either side of her son’s wet ribs.

  ‘You look like the poet Shelley,’ commented Feynite.

  Felix was tall for his age and slender. How could the boy be so slim? It gave him an ethereal quality. If he was a girl there might have been worries about anorexia. Felix was almost too perfect. He seemed like an affront to the gods.

  That Friday evening at dinner Felix looked particularly charming with his dark blue prayer hat jammed over his fair curls. Opposite Felix sat Michael Feynite, someone Caspers had known from the years when Feynite was the youthful lover of a famous ballet critic.

  Feynite leaned across the table and tried to engage Felix in conversation. Caspers could remember the whole exchange.

  ‘What are you going to do when you leave school?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I might go and work in Surinam for my gap year before university. Dad still has family there.’ The Caspers family originated from the long-established Jewish community in Surinam.

  ‘Ah yes, of course, the Third World,’ said Feynite, with a hint of scorn. ‘The finishing school for the British middle classes.’

  Felix had looked at Feynite with puzzled curiosity for a moment then turned away a little uncertainly. A young man with tight wavy hair and a sly smile had joined the party. He was a university student and sat next to Felix impressing him with stories of his Oxford escapades. The two of them began to grow boisterous and noisy as they exchanged anecdotes about yobbos and chavs and losers and the poor in general.

  Michael Feynite was now quite drunk on Polish vodka. He faced Felix.

  ‘I see your private school is raising you to be a snob.’

  Felix flushed and defended himself then turned back to his friend. The dinner party had reached the stage, during dessert, when it generated a steady warmth like a banked down fire.

  ‘Would you all like to come into the music room?’ Johnny Caspers stood up smiling after coffee had been served. ‘Felix has promised to sing for us before we are entertained by the professionals.’

  The song was called ‘The Lightning Tr
ee’. Felix did not seem at all shy. He sang with passion and vehemence in a tuneful voice that was piercing and frail as crystal:

  In the middle of a field stands a lightning tree

  Its limbs all torn from the day it was born

  For the tree was born in a thunderstorm.

  Grow grow the lightning tree

  It’s never too late for you and me.

  The guests smiled and applauded Felix who went over and sprawled on the sofa with his head against his mother’s arm. Then everyone settled down to listen to two members of the Royal Opera Company sing the duet from The Pearl Fishers.

  At the end of the evening they had all gone back inside after saying goodbye to their guests. Felix could hardly wait till his parents had shut the front door behind them. The boy stood in the spacious hall its walls covered with family photographs, portraits and paintings. Before they had time to switch the hall lights off and go into the front room, he turned to them, an extraordinary livid pallor on his face and his lip trembling:

  ‘You’ve brought me up to be a snob,’ he said with an anguish his parents could distinguish even in the dim light of the hall. ‘You sent me to a school that would ensure I became a snob.’

  Lillian tried to put her hand on his shoulder. He shook it off. ‘But darling we are just trying to give you the best education.’

  ‘No. Everything you do and say is snobbish. That man Feynite was right. You’re always on about the right kind of people.’

  His parents were taken aback. Their son was staring at them, his eyes darting from one to the other as if two dangerous strangers had walked through the front door. Later that night they heard him sobbing in his room. His mother tried to go in but he had locked the door.

  ‘Oh go away. Get away from me.’ His voice sounded high and childish.

  It was from that night on that Caspers’ relationship with his son had started to deteriorate.

  Felix began to spend time with Michael Feynite, the very man who had accused him of snobbery. Feynite introduced him to a drag-act pub on the Isle of Dogs and Felix was enchanted with the risqué, illicit excitement of it all. Feynite also introduced him to some gay activists who lived over a radical bookshop in Camden.

  Before long Caspers noticed that his son was beginning to get a certain look in his eyes: a clean, morning-fresh look; the look of someone who is beginning to believe in something. He was disturbed that Felix was disappearing for whole weekends attending loved-up raves, but other parents of teenagers reassured him that this was par for the course.

  *

  One night when his parents were at the opera Felix went upstairs and put on a white towelling dressing-gown. He went into the bathroom. The cleaner had been. It was spotless. There was a shiny green sink with tiny bars of soap, thick green hand towels hanging on the rail and a thick green spongy carpet underfoot. Upstairs, each of the bedrooms had the same décor: floor-length floral curtains with a ruched pelmet and matching floral coverlets on the beds. It all felt sound-proofed. He felt that even if he screamed the sound would not be able to penetrate the weight of the silence.

  He sat at his mother’s dressing-table and applied water-based white make-up all over his face. He made his eyes the shape of almond kernels, outlining them with black eye-liner. Then came the lipstick and the brilliant red rosebud mouth and an eye-mask of red blusher powder that he applied with a soft brush. He leaned back from the mirror. The trick was to keep his face tilted downwards to conceal the Adam’s apple. There was a special cream he had heard about that helped with any five o’clock shadow but he did not need that yet. As soon as the make-up was complete he experienced a calm elation.

  He realised that he should have put the make-up on after he dressed so as not to soil the dress. The scarlet silk evening gown belonged to his mother. He held it up to examine the huge loose sleeves. That day he had taken five-foot lengths of black hair from the school drama cupboard. The extensions were fastened to a small black cap with stripes of fake hand-sewn pearls which had been used by the boy playing Juliet in the school play. He pinned the hairpiece on and flirted with his reflection. A geisha shot back a knowing look from the mirror which gave him the uplifting sensation of a cocaine high. He stood up and thrust out his pert butt. For a while he remained posed like that with his head at a slight tilt, his finger held to his chin.

  He muttered some words that he vaguely remembered hearing a rabbi recite once:

  I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.

  As the lily among thorns so is my love among the daughters.

  He did not know how long he had been standing there. In a sudden panic lest his parents return, he ran to the bathroom and slapped onto his face the greasy cleansing cream from a Max Factor jar also borrowed from the school drama department. He scrubbed his face clean with cotton wool. By the time his parents returned Felix was back in his jeans, sprawled in front of the television, eating potted shrimps and watching Holby City.

  Later there was a terrible row at the Caspers’ house, when Felix refused point-blank to go to university. His father was appalled, but Felix insisted he wanted to do something practical and useful. He enrolled with British Airways to train as a pilot. As Caspers looked over at his son, now absorbed in his magazine, he wondered how Felix, with his sharp angelic features and delicate body, could be responsible for piloting the huge weight of an aircraft from continent to continent.

  *

  The phone rang and Johnny answered it. It was Stephen Butterfield, one of his banking colleagues on the executive branch of HCB. Butterfield was at Heathrow airport and wanted to come and see him straight away.

  Unexpected calls from banking colleagues on a Sunday had become more frequent since the downturn of the global economy. Twenty minutes later Johnny answered the ring at the door to find Stephen Butterfield standing on the doorstep dressed in a black pin-stripe suit and tie and carrying a briefcase which contained his laptop. Caspers was surprised to see that he carried with him a tightly furled four-foot-long scarlet umbrella that was completely out of character and made him look a little mad. A small suitcase on wheels stood at his side. Butterfield was out of breath and apologetic.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my turning up unexpectedly like this. I’ve come straight from the airport.’ Caspers stepped back, withdrawing instinctively from the terrible innocence that always seemed to be plastered over Butterfield’s face.

  ‘Not at all. Not at all.’ He gestured for Butterfield to come in and placed a solicitous hand on his arm as he led the way into the living room. The room was furnished with enormous comfortable sofas upholstered in plain cream-coloured material. Stephen acknowledged Felix with a nod and a smile and sank into one of them. Felix regarded him with barely concealed distaste. Caspers went over to the decanters on the dresser.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Oh … er … thank you, Johnny,’ said Butterfield gratefully in his mild voice. ‘A whisky would be very nice.’ He leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him, his thick neck bunching up at the back over his stiff white collar.

  As Caspers poured the drink he glanced with concern at his colleague. Apart from the turmoil in the banking industry it was only six weeks since the brutally sudden death of Stephen’s wife in a boating accident. Caspers had not seen him since the funeral, when the gentle, heavily-built man had wandered, stunned and bereft, amongst the mourners in the rain. His thin fair hair seemed to have become colourless overnight. Rain and tears were caught in his pale gingerish eyelashes and on his puffy cheeks as he nodded his head in acceptance of condolences.

  Caspers guessed that this visit was triggered by loneliness or some sort of trouble at the bank. Butterfield was based in the main Amsterdam headquarters. He handed him a heavy tumbler of whisky.

  ‘How is Amsterdam? I wanted to talk to you about the bid for Sarcele. It’s been in our sights for some time. It could become a giant company on the NASDAQ. Bigger than Microsoft – but no-one wants to take ris
ks at the moment. The other thing we need to talk about is the Sursok shipping deals. They could incur massive losses if not properly handled.’

  Butterfield looked up:

  ‘Oh. Could you help me have a look at Sursok’s shipping deals? It’s just that my … er ... mind hasn’t been quite on the ball lately.’

  His bottom lip quivered and there was an oddly childish expression in the small blue eyes that was both pleading and full of wonder.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love.’

  Caspers tried to conceal his shock. Even Felix looked up with curiosity. Butterfield continued, blurting everything out in a rush, staring straight ahead:

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me. My marriage to Margaret was good. I suppose we had become complacent, but there was never any question of infidelity on either side. Little irritations, you know … just the normal sort of thing.’ He looked up at Johnny and paused before saying, ‘I haven’t had feelings like this … for thirty years. It is like being reborn. She’s an American … Hetty, that is. And she’s a September 11 survivor. She was on the ground floor of the second Twin Tower. She just got out in time.’ A look of sympathetic awe came over his face.