Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  Daphne was in the middle of preparing lunch. She had a big bowl on the table in front of her and a spring scale upon which half a pound of warm butter was being weighed. Her hands were covered in flour, and she was wiping them on a towel that bore a printed picture of the Eiffel Tower. She picked up a collection of bracelets and bangles and slipped them all on to her wrist before embracing Dicky.

  ‘You’re early, darling,’ she said as she kissed him and gave me a peck too.

  Dicky brushed flour from his shirt and said, ‘The plane arrived on time. I didn’t allow for that.’

  She asked Dicky if he wanted coffee or wine but she didn’t ask me. She took a glass from the cupboard and an opened bottle of chilled wine from the ice bucket and poured me a generous measure. It was delicious.

  Dicky, rummaging through the kitchen cupboard, said, ‘Where are the blue Spode cups and saucers?’

  ‘They’re in the dishwasher. We only have three left now. You’ll have to use a mug.’

  Dicky sighed the way he did when one of the clerks returned to him top-secret papers he’d left in the copying machine. Then he poured himself a mug of black coffee and we sat down round the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m sorry we can’t go into the sitting room,’ said Daphne. ‘It’s out of use for the time being.’ She looked up at the kitchen clock before deciding it was okay to pour a glass of wine for herself.

  ‘Daphne’s left her ad agency,’ said Dicky. ‘I didn’t tell you, did I? They lost the breakfast food account and had to cut staff. They offered Daphne a golden handshake; five thousand pounds. Not bad, eh?’ Dicky was pressing his ears and gulping, the way he always did after a flight.

  ‘What are you doing now, Daphne?’ I asked.

  Dicky answered for her. ‘She’s stripping. She’s gone into it with another girl from the agency.’ Daphne smiled the sort of smile that showed she’d heard this joke before but she let Dicky squeeze it dry. ‘There’s money in stripping, Daphne says.’ Dicky smiled broadly and put his arm on his wife’s shoulder.

  ‘Furniture,’ said Dicky. ‘The lounge is stacked to the ceiling with antique furniture. They’ll strip the paint off it and polish it up and sell it for a fortune.’

  ‘Not antique furniture,’ said Daphne. ‘Bernard already regards us as philistines. I don’t want him to think I’m a complete barbarian, ruining antiques. It’s secondhand odds and ends, kitchen chairs and tables and so on. No use going round the little shops in Camden Town looking for it. Liz and I go into the country banging on doors. It’s rather fun. You meet the oddest people. Apparently you just dip the furniture into caustic soda and the paint falls off. We’re starting that next week when I’ve got some gloves to protect my hands.’

  ‘I tried it once,’ I said. ‘It was a wooden fireplace. It fell to pieces. It was only fifty years of paintwork that was holding it together.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, Bernard,’ said Daphne. She laughed. ‘You’re discouraging me.’ She poured more wine for me. She didn’t seem at all discouraged.

  ‘Take no notice of Bernard,’ said Dicky. ‘He can’t fix an electric plug without fusing all the lights.’

  ‘We won’t be selling the furniture as perfect,’ said Daphne.

  ‘It’s what all the newly weds are looking for,’ said Dicky. ‘At least it’s one of the things.’ He gave his wife a wink and an affectionate hug. ‘And it looks good. I mean that. It looks very good. Once the girls get decent premises they’ll make a fortune, you mark my words. They were going to call the shop “The Strip Joint” but now we hear someone is using that already.’

  ‘You’re not very tanned, Dicky,’ she said, looking closely at his face. ‘Considering where you’ve been. I thought you’d come back much more tanned than that. Neither is Bernard, she added, glancing at me.

  ‘We’ve been working, old thing, not sunning. Right, Bernard?’ He picked up the cork from the wine Daphne had served me and sniffed at it.

  ‘Right, Dicky.’

  ‘And I saw Henry Tiptree, darling. You remember Henry. He was at Balliol with me.’

  ‘The one who left the BBC because they were all poofs?’

  ‘No, darling; Henry. Tall, thin, reddish hair. Looks a bit of a twit. His cousin is a duke. Henry’s the one who always used to bring you those huge boxes of Belgian handmade chocolates, remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Daphne.

  ‘And you always took the chocolates to your mother. Then Henry was posted off somewhere and you made me buy them for her. Belgian chocolates. They cost me a fortune.’

  ‘Yes, and then when we got married you told her the shop didn’t sell them any more and you got her Black Magic instead.’

  ‘Well, they cost an absolute fortune,’ said Dicky. ‘Anyway Henry is in Mexico now and let us borrow his car. And I managed to get a trip to Los Angeles and I got you everything on your list except the pillowcases from Robinson’s. They didn’t have the exact colour of the sample you gave me. They were more purple than mauve, so I didn’t buy them.’

  ‘You are sweet, darling,’ said Daphne. ‘He is so sweet,’ she told me.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘And I got a dozen of those masks the Mexicans make out of old tin cans, and I got six silver-plated bracelets in the market. So that’s the Christmas-present list taken care of.’

  ‘I ordered a whole salmon for Thursday,’ said Daphne. ‘But I can’t think of an extra girl for Bernard.’

  ‘I should have told you,’ said Dicky, turning to me. ‘You’re invited for dinner Thursday. Are you free?’

  ‘I imagine I am,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And don’t worry about an extra girl for him,’ said Dicky. ‘He’s having it away with one of the girls in the office.’ There was a note of bitterness in Dicky’s voice. Daphne detected it too. She looked at him sharply; for Dicky’s affections had wandered lately and Daphne had discovered it. She drained her wineglass.

  ‘How nice,’ Daphne said icily, pouring herself another drink. ‘What’s her name, Bernard?’

  ‘Her name is Gloria,’ said Dicky before I replied.

  ‘Is that the one you wanted as your secretary?’ said Daphne. She stood with the bottle in her hand, waiting for the reply.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Dicky. ‘It was Bret who wanted to foist her on to me but I wasn’t having her.’ Having tried to appease Daphne, he turned to me and said, ‘No offence to you, old man. I’m sure she’s a very nice girl.’

  ‘That’s perfect,’ said Daphne. She poured me some more wine. ‘It will be nice to meet her. I remember Dicky saying she was a wonderful typist.’ I could tell that Daphne was far from convinced of Dicky’s innocence.

  ‘She’ll come to dinner, your friend Gloria?’ Dicky asked, watching me carefully.

  ‘Gloria? Oh, of course she will,’ I said. ‘She’ll go anywhere for a free meal.’

  ‘That’s not very gallant of you, Bernard,’ said Daphne.

  ‘We’ll be here,’ I heard myself saying. I don’t know why I say such things, except that Dicky always brings out the worst in me. I hardly knew Gloria. I’d only spoken to her twice, and then it was just to tell her to hurry up with my typing.

  9

  It was good to be back in London again. First I opened the shutters in every room and let in the afternoon sunlight. I just couldn’t get used to going home to a dark, silent house. It seemed such a short time ago that it was echoing with the sound of the children, nanny and Fiona my wife.

  For lunch I made myself a cup of tea and balanced the contents of a tin of sardines on two very stale wholemeal biscuits. It was hot and airless in the top-floor room I used as a study. I opened the window and let in the sounds of London on a Sunday afternoon. I could hear the distant cries of children playing in the street, and the recorded carillon of an ice-cream pedlar. I phoned the office and told them I was home. The duty clerk sounded tired and bored but I resisted his attempt to engage me in conversation about the climate of Mexico at this time of year.


  While eating my sardines I opened the stack of mail. Apart from bills for gas, electricity and wine, most of the mail was coloured advertising brochures; head waiters leered at credit cards, famous chefs offered a ‘library’ of cookbooks, pigskin wallets came free with magazine subscriptions, and there was a chance to hear all the Beethoven symphonies as I’d never heard them before. On my desk-pad the Portuguese cleaning lady – Mrs Dias – had pencilled a list of people who’d phoned during her daily visits. Her handwriting was rather uncertain, but I recognized no one there I felt like phoning except for my mother. I called her and chatted. I had a word with the children too. They seemed happy enough but I could hear the nanny prompting them from time to time.

  ‘Did you like it in Mexico?’ said Sally.

  ‘It was very hot,’ I said.

  ‘Grandma said you’d take us to the seaside when you got back.’

  ‘Is that where you want to go?’

  ‘You’ve been away a long time, Daddy.’

  ‘I’ll take you to the seaside.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  ‘Billy said you’d say that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m a rotten father.’

  ‘Are we coming home?’

  ‘Yes, very soon.’

  It was only after I’d showered and changed my clothes that I noticed the cream-coloured envelope propped in front of the clock. Mrs Dias would naturally think of the clock as the place to which the human eye most readily returned.

  Phone me home or office as soon as you return. Many matters to discuss. David.

  It had been delivered by hand. The envelope bore a bright-red ‘Urgent’ sticker and the message was written in ink on a heavy handmade paper that matched the envelope. I recognized the stationery even without the engraved address and the artistic picture of the house that adorned it. The prospect of a discussion with my father-in-law, Mr David Timothy Kimber-Hutchinson, philanthropist, philosopher, tycoon and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, was not my idea of a welcome home. But I couldn’t think of any excuse for avoiding it so I phoned and agreed to drive down to him without delay.

  His house was built on a tree-covered hillside not far from the place where the ancient Roman highway of Stane Street surmounted the Downs. It was a Jacobean mansion, so restored over the ages that very little of the original sixteenth-century building remained. But priority had been given to the corporeal things of life, so that the roof never leaked and the plumbing, the heating and the electricity supply always provided a level of comfort rarely encountered in English country houses.

  Sometimes I wondered how much money went through his hands for him to be able to run this place with its desirable living accommodation for the servants, a self-contained wing for his guests and heated stabling for his horses. I parked my battered Ford between Kimber-Hutchinson’s silver Rolls and his wife’s Jaguar. The Kimber-Hutchinsons wouldn’t have a foreign car. It wasn’t simply a matter of patriotism, the old man once told me; it would upset some of his customers. Poor fellow, he needed handmade shoes because of his ‘awkward feet’ and Savile Row suits because he wasn’t lucky enough to have the figure for ready-made ones. Cheap wine played havoc with his stomach so he drank expensive ones, and because he couldn’t fit into economy-size airline seats he was forced to go everywhere first class. Poor David, he envied people like me, he was always telling me so.

  David – he liked me to call him David; ‘father-in-law’ being too specific, ‘father’ too inaccurate, ‘Mr Kimber-Hutchinson’ too cumbersome and ‘Kimber’ a form of address reserved for his intimates – was waiting for me in the studio. The studio was a luxuriously converted barn. At one end there was a huge north-facing window and an easel where he liked to stand and paint water-colours that were snapped up at good prices by executives of the companies with which he did business. Under the skylight there was a large wooden rostrum that was said to have come from the Paris studio of Maillol, a sculptor who’d devoted his life to loving portrayals of the female nude. I’d once asked David what he used it for but got only the vaguest of answers.

  ‘Come in and sit down, Bernard old chap.’ He was working on a painting when I got there, but he was not at the easel. He was seated at a small table, a drawing board resting on his knees, while he pencilled in the outlines of a landscape with horses. On the table there were half a dozen enlarged photos of the same view, photos of horses and a sheet of tracing paper from which he’d worked. ‘You’ve discovered my little secret,’ he said without looking up from his sketch. ‘I always start off from photographs. No sense in not using all the help you can get. Michelangelo would have used a camera when doing the Sistine Chapel ceiling had he got the chance.’

  Since David Kimber-Hutchinson showed no sign of revealing more about Michelangelo’s frustrated technological aspirations, I grunted and sat down while he finished drawing the horse. Although it was a faithful reproduction of the horse in the photo, David’s traced drawing of it looked wooden and stunted. He was obviously aware of this, for he was redrawing the outline to extend its legs, but that didn’t seem to improve it.

  He was wearing a dark-blue artist’s smock over his yellow cashmere rollneck and riding breeches. His face was flushed. I guessed he’d just got back from a canter over the Downs. It was rather as if he’d arranged things so that I would see him tracing his pictures. Perhaps he thought I would admire such acquired trickery more than mere talent. A man could not take credit for talent in the way he could for cunning.

  Eventually he abandoned his attempt and put the pencil down on the table in front of him. ‘I can never draw horses,’ he said. ‘It’s just not fair. No artist loved horses as I do, or knew as much about them. But even when I use photos I can’t damn well draw them. It’s not fair.’

  I’d never heard him appeal to equity before. Usually he upheld the ultimate justice of market forces and even the survival of the fittest. ‘Perhaps it’s because you trace photos,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should trace paintings.’

  He looked at me, trying to decide whether to take offence, but my face was blank and he said, ‘I might try that. Trace a Stubbs or something, just to get some idea of the trade secrets. Ummm. It’s all tricks, you know. A Royal Academy painter admitted that to me once. Painting is just learning a set of tricks, just like playing the stock exchange.’

  ‘They are tricks I will never master,’ I admitted.

  ‘Easy enough to do, Bernard. Easy enough to do.’ He took off his artist’s smock and smiled. He liked to hear that his achievements were beyond other men; especially he liked to be praised about his skills with horses. He was up every morning grooming his horses and he endured the long drive to his London office for the sake of seeing his horses. More than once he’d told me that he liked horses better than he liked people. ‘They never lie to you, horses,’ he said. ‘They never try to swindle you.’

  He spoke without looking up from his board. ‘So you’re still driving that old Ford,’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to get a Volvo.’

  ‘I cancelled the order,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a big car now.’

  ‘And a big car costs money, more than you can afford,’ he said with that directness that you could always count upon. ‘You should see the bills I pay on that Rolls. I had to replace the fire-extinguisher last month and that cost me seventy-eight pounds.’

  ‘It might be worth that if you are on fire,’ I said.

  ‘Have a drink, Bernard. It’s a tiring drive from London. How did you come, Kingston bypass? Full of weekend drivers, was it? “Murder mile” they call it, that bit south of Kingston Vale. I’ve seen a dozen cars crunched together on that stretch of road. The lights change at Robin Hood Gate and they go mad.’

  ‘Coming in this direction it wasn’t too bad,’ I said.

  He went over to an old cupboard that contained jars full of brushes and tubes of paint and bottles of turpentine and linseed oil for the times when he worked in
oils. From a compartment in the cupboard he got a glass and a bottle of drink. ‘You’re a whisky and soda man, as I remember. Lots of soda and lots of whisky.’ He laughed and poured a huge Scotch. He had me summed up nicely. ‘Teacher’s all right?’ He handed it to me without waiting for a reply. ‘No ice over here.’

  ‘Thanks.’ It was a cheap tumbler, not the Waterford he used at his dinner table. This David who painted here in his studio was a different David – an artist, a plain man with earthy pleasures and simple tastes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A big car is no use to you now that you’re on your own. The big house will be a burden too. I’ve scribbled out some figures to show you.’

  ‘Have you?’ I said.

  He got a piece of paper from the table and sank down on the sofa, studying the piece of paper as if he’d never seen it before. ‘You bought the house four years ago, and property has been sticky ever since then. I warned you about that at the time, as I remember. The way the market is now, you’ll be lucky to get your money back.’ He looked at me.

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘And when you take into account inflation and loss of earnings on capital it’s been a bad investment. But you’ll have to grin and bear it, I’m afraid. The important thing is to reduce your outgoings. Get on to a house agent first thing in the morning, Bernard. Get that house on the market. And find yourself a small service flat; bedroom, sitting room and a kitchen, that’s all you need. In fact, I wonder if you really need a kitchen.’ When I didn’t respond, he said, ‘I’ve jotted down the phone numbers of a couple of house agents I do business with. You don’t want to go to the first people you happen upon. Too many Jews in that line of business.’ A smile. ‘Oh, I forgot, you like Jews, don’t you?’