“Bye-bye,” said Andrew cheerfully. “What were you saying, Colin?”
“I was telling you about the developments. After we had our meeting—that is, the meeting between you and I—at which we reached an understanding, I was called into another—er, meeting. With Mrs. Illkempt and certain others of the Board, as was. The end of the meeting. To be informed, on behalf of Books.”
“How very fascinating. But as you can see, we were just about to go and talk to someone interesting before you arrived, so if you don’t—”
“I’m afraid this is of interest. You see, the loss of the Audubon sale was in the way of a final—er, curtain—um, straw, breaking the camel’s, as it were, back. For the Americans. They’ve withdrawn, in some sense. Money, it seems, has been hemorrhaging, in their expression.”
“Hang on. You’re saying the Americans are pulling out? You mean the Japanese?”
“Withdrawing. Entirely. Yes.”
“But does that mean we’re going under?”
“Not necessarily. A new Board has been formed, and there’s a new stand-in Chairman.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Brooksbank. Which those of us with a sense or history and family can only applaud.”
“Brooksbank, eh? Always seemed harmless enough to me. Bit dim, though. What do you make of all this, Alice?” It had occurred to Andrew that Alice had been uncommonly quiet throughout the exchange.
“It doesn’t really concern me.”
“That’s the spirit! Fuck ’em. Doesn’t matter which bunch of tossers decides what color bog roll we’re going to have. We do the real work.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I’ve been trying—”
“Oh, look,” said Andrew. “Here they come now. Late to their own funeral.”
Madeleine Illkempt, flanked by Butch and Sundance, was making her heavy-haunched way down the stairs. Behind them, looking altogether more satisfied with life, came Brooksbank and a handful of other Enderby managers. Unlike the Americans, these stalwarts had made an attempt to get into the party spirit. Brooksbank himself was wearing a squiggly Jackson Pollock–print T-shirt. One man had donned a large cardboard cutout of a drooping Dalí watch. A middle-aged woman, whom Andrew knew as being vaguely ennobled, had on a pleasing sixties-looking dress in Mondrian squares of primary colors.
News of the startling changes at Enderby’s had quickly worked its way around the room, intensifying the levels of chatter. The new group’s movements were watched with rapt attention. They split up, the Slayer’s team going grumpily toward a long table by the wall, stacked with high-grade nibbles. It so happened that Andrew, Alice, Oakley, and Clerihew were the first to be visited by Brooksbank.
“Ah, Dr. Heathley,” he said to Andrew, ignoring Oakley, who was straining forward. “Fine work on the Audubon catalog. D-damn shame about the cock-up.”
Andrew was surprised and a little embarrassed to be picked out by the man who held, albeit temporarily, the reins of power.
“Yeah, well. I suppose these things happen.”
“No, dear b-boy, I don’t think things do just happen,” said Brooksbank sagely. “Things happen because people make them happen. Or sometimes because p-people stop them from happening.” At that point he looked at Oakley.
“Yes, sir. Well, that’s as may be, but in this case as Andrew—um, Dr. Heathley can confirm—”
“I’m sure he could, sure he could. B-but I may as well tell you now that we’ve b-begun work on a reorganization, which makes all this seem a little p-posthumous.”
“A reorganization? Ah, I quite see that some structure streamlining . . . flatter management—ah, structures was—is—called for.”
“Yes. It was rapidly agreed that your talents are largely wasted up in Books. We really feel you were more in your element down in the Documents Basement.” The eager, thrusting look that Oakley habitually aimed at his superiors changed. His face now wore the blank puzzlement of a severed head the moment after the ax falls.
“N-naturally,” continued Brooksbank, with remorseless cheerfulness, “we can’t guarantee you your old post back as Head of Document Storage, but I’m sure we’ll find something appropriate.”
“Might I ask,” said Oakley, in the dismal tones of defeat, “who will be taking over my position in Books?”
“Yes, you may. You see, I recalled that several months ago we had effectively dismissed one of the great stalwarts of the Books Department, a man with an exemplary record of both connoisseurship and good business sense, on the grounds—reading between the lines of the report I received—that he had formed what is often referred to these days as a same-sex attachment. Of course that was never explicitly stated; no one was quite foolish enough to make that mistake. But the implication was clear. Well, I’m afraid that I find that entirely unacceptable, and now I am in a position to do something about it. I have made an offer and it has been accepted.”
“You’re talking about Crumlish? Garnett Crumlish?” said Andrew, who was already in a state of such intense physical and mental bliss that he felt he might have some kind of emission. He looked at Alice, who also wore a huge smile. Alice Sui Generis, she was thinking. We’ve recently acquired our first Oik. And look, he’s to be your intimate desk chum. How affecting. The same delicious thought occurred to Alice and Andrew at the same time: Crumlish had been elbowed out on the trumped-up grounds that he had sexually harassed Clerihew. Now he was being brought back to life because Brooksbank thought he was a gay martyr.
“Quite,” said Brooksbank.
“But those rumors—” began Oakley, only to trail off. Brooksbank looked at Oakley, waiting for him to finish. But what, thought Andrew, could he say? Those rumors were baseless and made up by myself and my cocksucking lickspittle, Clerihew? Oh, the joy, the joy. Oakley seemed physically to shrink before them, melting like a salted slug.
Brooksbank chatted a little more with Alice and Andrew, telling them a few juicy details about the fall of the Americans and their Japanese puppet masters. He made little effort to keep the snobbish contempt from his voice. It seemed that all the innovations introduced, and in particular the on-line auction and other Internet-based projects, were more responsible for the collapse than the Audubon failure. A little nipping and tucking, he thought, would return them to modest profitability in no time. But that wasn’t what they wanted, no glory in modest profits and a stable share of the market, so off they had gone.
“Well,” he said, after a few minutes, “must be doing my rounds. N-noblesse oblige and all that. Frightfully nice conversing.”
Then he was gone. Gone too was Oakley. How had that happened? He had simply disappeared. Dragged down, Faustlike, by devils, thought Andrew, to his subterranean document hell. Alice squeezed his hand.
“I’ve arranged to meet Odette and Leo in the Mitre,” she said.
“What, now? But things have hardly got going here. All that free champagne. And I’ve got to go and gloat. Tonight will be a night of gloating. Don’t you see? Nearly all the baddies have been beaten. How often does that happen in real life?”
“We . . . you can always come back. It’s . . . I’ve got to talk about . . . about something important. With all of you. I’ve been trying to tell you all day.”
At long last Andrew was listening to her.
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you in the Mitre.”
“You can’t do that. Tell me now.”
“Let’s go. We’ll be there in a minute.”
On the way out, they passed the Slayer and her acolytes. Andrew, now worried and annoyed by Alice but still exultant over the humiliation and downfall of Oakley, could not resist swaying over toward them.
“I’ve got it!” he said in a loud and friendly voice. “I was wondering all evening, and now I see it. Very clever.”
“What are you talking about?” Illkempt replied, black eyes glowering beneath heavy lids. She was only slightly incommoded by the presence of most of a vol-au-vent in her large mou
th.
“Your . . . costume. You’ve come as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Genius, sheer genius.”
He had no time to wait for a reply, or even to see if understanding dawned, before Alice pulled him away, anxious not to keep Odette waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Two Interesting Occurrences
LEAVING THE PARTY when they did meant that Alice and Andrew missed two interesting occurrences. The first was the return of Garnett Crumlish, elegantly dressed in a top hat and tails, his patent-leather shoes glittering with the lights of the chandeliers.
“The Degas people will think I’m from a Manet, and the Manet from a Degas,” he’d said as his wife, Jessie, fussed over him, sprucing and defluffing. “Anyway, what do they expect with such short notice?”
The months had not been easy for Crumlish or for his wife. He’d made a little money from casual book dealing, but somehow the faintly sordid trailing through house clearances and charity shops on the lookout for first editions felt like one step up from vagrancy. The looks of recognition he got from former trade contacts, the quasi-tramps in frayed shirts and stained ties who’d come in to Enderby’s with thirty or forty quid’s worth of books, was more than he could take. Would he soon look like them, smell like them? Yes, of course he would.
So why not embrace it? He took to whiling away afternoons in the park with a bottle of British sherry, the carnation in his lapel slowly browning.
Jessie could do nothing for him. They weren’t soulmates; she looked after him, and there was no way to iron or clean or cook a way out of this disaster. Another year and he might well have been dead.
He entered quietly, acknowledging with polite nods those of his acquaintance who stared at him in astonishment. With each step he took, he gained in confidence, and by the time he plucked his first glass of champagne from a passing tray, performing, as he did, an elegant half turn, he felt almost as if he had never been away. His careful eye took in the splendor around him, the glory and chaos of costume, the intricate infrastructure of friendships, alliances, feuds, manifest in the pattern of bodies. He saw immediately the isolated group of Americans and touched his hat brim with the silver boss on his cane. Illkempt champed and looked away.
The same careful eye could hardly fail to spot the extraordinary group made up of—what? Two Sebastians obviously, couldn’t miss those arrows, and, yes, two Venuses, judging by the beauty of one and the scallops of the other.
“Pam,” he murmured, smiling to himself, “you really are a genius.” But he looked sadly at the plumper of the two Sebastians.
He carried in his pocket a bundle of love letters, rather earnest and imploring, craving only that he should think to look the way of his devoted slave and promising a range of delights almost certainly beyond the young man’s abilities to deliver. Crumlish brought them with him not for the purposes of blackmail, or even to support his reinstatement. That all seemed quite adequately taken care of. Of course Brooksbank was an idiot, but at least he was one of our idiots. No, he brought them to return them to the sender, in case he should suffer unnecessarily. Garnett had more than earned his reputation as a wit, perhaps even that of a bitch, but his swordplay, like that of Zorro (a childhood hero), was designed only to leave his monogram cut into the clothing of the victim and never to eviscerate. He had no intention of harming poor Clerihew.
Nor did he ever get the chance to return the letters, for Clerihew was shortly to be at the center of the second interesting occurrence. On leaving Andrew, Alice, and Oakley, he had gone to stand close beside Richardson, Ophelia, and Spam, where Crumlish now found him.
Richardson was even more annoyed than Ophelia at having a comedy double and was rather better equipped for dealing with it. When Pam had stopped her good-natured pointing, ooing, and cackling at the new arrival, and when it had become clear that he wasn’t about to go of his own accord, Richardson turned smilingly toward Clerihew, whose jaw was clamped tightly shut.
“Exactly which Saint Sebastian are you?”
“What?”
“Well, you are a little . . . limp for either of the Mantegnas: I thought myself about coming as the Louvre Sebastian, the one in the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna gets a horrid shaft in the face—”
“I’m just a Sebastian. I don’t know which one. But it was my idea before yours. You stole it.”
“Please, young man, I haven’t finished yet. You really can’t be the Perugino, or the wonderful Puget bronze in Vienna. The Hans Holbein altarpiece? No, really, no. What about the Hendrik Terbrugghen? Could be, could be. He has a certain . . . earthiness. But again, no. You haven’t quite the . . . delineation.”
Richardson’s performance had, by this time, attracted a small but appreciative audience. Garnett Crumlish was among them, drawn into the circle, although he declined to join in the tittering. The victim had blushed a deep scarlet, and Crumlish was perhaps the only one there who saw it as the mark not of embarrassment but rage: a consuming, destructive fury. Did Clerihew notice Garnett there, among the crowd? Could that have added to the tempest of emotions bringing him to the brink of action? One would need access to his medical notes, or to the psychiatric report prepared for his trial, to give a firm answer to that question.
“I have it,” said Richardson finally, “you’re the Antonio del Pollaiuolo Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, painted in tempera on wood in 1475 and hanging in our own dear National Gallery. Am I right?”
“I told you I’m not—”
“Yes,” said Richardson, playing now to the crowd by walking around Clerihew like a tour guide, “I see now the fluidity of the forms, the graceful integration of the loincloth with the supple sensuality and, might I say, suggestive fecundity of the loins. And, remember, the Pollaiuolo Sebastian is set on a high post, so the archers and crossbowmen must shoot upward, which helps to explain the curious lack of turgidity in the shafts themselves. But most of all we have the magnificent head: serene, beatific, safe in the knowledge that, as the first Christian martyr, he is also the first soul to be saved, the first human being to be guaranteed everlasting glory in the presence of God.”
Richardson lowered his eyes in mock reverence, and a ripple of applause passed through the audience, before it began to break up. They may, to be fair, have thought that the whole thing was prepared in advance by the participants: After all, two such contrasting pairs as these Venuses and Sebastians could not, surely, be the product of chance?
It may have been to Ophelia’s credit that well before the conclusion of the performance she was bored. Bored and annoyed: If she wanted lectures on art history she could always go to a lecture on art history. As Richardson turned, she looked over his shoulder into Clerihew’s eyes. Was that a look of sympathy she sent him? Or simply the fleeting absence of active hostility that had so often beguiled and misled her admirers?
But now her eyes acquired another look entirely: surprise, shock, horror, all within a second.
Clerihew, his face twisted into rage, wrenched one of the arrows from his pink chest and launched himself at Richardson. The point was sharp, but the shaft was of flimsy balsa wood and as Clerihew thrust it into Richardson’s neck it broke in two. But now Clerihew was on Richardson’s back, screaming like a maniac.
“My idea! My idea! Shaft you, Shaft you, aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, shaft you, you fucking shafter, you shafted me! Aaaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Get him off me!” Richardson screamed in turn, twisting and writhing and flapping ineffectually at the monster on his back.
Initially, the crowd thought this was all part of the act and laughed, albeit nervously. It was only when Clerihew managed to pry one of Richardson’s darts free and stab him with it several times in the shoulder, chest, and neck area, drawing blood from the long shallow wounds, that they realized that this was not a planned part of the evening’s entertainment. In the scramble, Clerihew’s loincloth came free, revealing his dimpled buttocks and hairless cleft. Gagging disgust was added to the gasps of astonishme
nt and shouts of encouragement.
Crumlish acted first. With surprising strength he pulled the now-naked Clerihew away bodily. Richardson collapsed immediately on his face. Clerihew also fell to the ground, his passion spent. There was no need for the two burly porters, one dressed as Henry VIII, and one as some or other pope, to sit on him, but sit on him they did, until the police and the ambulance arrived.
“Well, my pretty,” said Crumlish to Ophelia, “I see a tray of unattended drinks. Perhaps we should go and attend them.”
She took his arm, and they walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Mitre
THE MITRE was half empty despite the Friday night. The Enderby’s lot were, of course, partying or stabbing each other with arrows, and those other local workers who had been in had mostly moved on to brighter lights or gone home to dimmer ones. The short walk from Enderby’s had been bitterly cold, and Alice was glad to take Andrew’s proffered arm. There was the usual performance with Andrew’s spectacles misting up as they got into the pub, but that was soon settled and they found Leo and Odette sitting together at a quiet table by the wall. Alice took off her coat.
“Well,” said Leo, “I believe that may be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He kissed her. The dress drew every set of bleary eyes in the place. “You look like an Aztec goddess.”
“Quite enough of that!” said Odette sharply. And then, to Alice, “So you found something to wear, then?”
“Mummy let me borrow it. Thanks for coming.”
Andrew got a round in. “Okay, princess,” he said, setting down the four drinks, spilling a little of each with a tremor that almost certainly signified nothing, “what’s this all about, then? You’ve whipped us up into a frenzy of expectation, so it better be good.”
Slave to Love Page 29
