The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  There was silence.

  ‘Full marks for honesty!’ It was the first time Martinique had spoken to the whole group.

  The girls looked at one another while breathing in unison through their noses. Then stared at me as if they hadn’t believed a word. Their blank looks became smirks until the two of them turned into a laughing unit of condemnation.

  There was no pudding. Instead, Martinique produced large brilliantly coloured ceramic bowls containing apples, pears, and a multitude of fruits of which I wasn’t even sure of the names. There was a magnificent fresh pineapple which – as I had never had that either – I studiously avoided, instead selecting for myself a rather small dusty-looking apple.

  ‘It’s a russet!’ Denise was leaning across the table and whispering to me.

  ‘Oh.’

  There was cheese, arranged over at least three wooden boards. I looked around for crackers but couldn’t see any so cut myself a finger of what looked like Caerphilly but no doubt it was the produce of Languedoc cheesemakers. I didn’t dare ask.

  Coffee appeared served in a cafetière. It was strong and I was liberal with the milk. Denise had hers black and seemed to drink it down quite quickly.

  ‘Mocha Sidamo,’ mouthed Patrick staring at her as she did so, clearly enjoying the number of ‘O’s in the name.

  ‘Could I have another of those please?’ Denise held out her cup.

  ‘It’ll keep you awake,’ I said clumsily and a little spoil-sportishly. She gave one of her throaty chuckles and looked at Patrick. His lips formed a daffodil trumpet shape.

  Denise moved her head closer to whisper to Patrick, and once again I had a view of the terrace and the erect carving knife with its blade buried in the teak tray. It was not yet dusk and the light was scintillating on its steel edge. I knew why, and I could feel the vibration in the floor beneath me. It was the underground trains… of course ‘…when they were tunnelling for King’s Cross…’ I looked up through the roof light at a passing airliner – they’d been up there doing that every ninety seconds since 0430hrs and wouldn’t stop until 2330hrs and I’d been sitting down here oblivious. What was beneath the canal, and beyond the crevices in the brick walls of the house? There was a world wider than our little soiree with its talk of dropped stitches, the wrong way to eat asparagus, and whether or not I really had scrounged lire from a newsvendor, or whether Denise had really been to Glyndebourne. For the present anyway, I was happy to belong to both of those worlds.

  Thirteen

  I did not enjoy visiting the basement of the house. It wasn’t just the smell coming from the inspection chamber, nor the knowledge that far beneath my feet were watery culverts and fume-filled chambers. It could be that what unsettled me was the low ceiling, the lack of daylight, the proximity to the neglected garden which imbued it with an air of oppression.

  Or perhaps it was simply the way I was looking at things. The more I recalled my dream, and the more I scrutinized the accumulation of déjà vu events, the further I became convinced that I was being subjected to some kind of paranormal diversion. I’d known people at college who had held séances on wobbly card tables, had dabbled in automatic writing, and people who had boasted of things far darker and more dangerous than either. Of course, my thinking was daft, nothing of the sort was going on and I should pull myself together and get on with the job I was here to do; to run the office.

  But it wasn’t unreasonable that as a sensitive sort of intuitive guy who was hip to the way the house might have been used over its two-hundred-year life I was merely indulging my imagination on the kind of kitchen gossip that might have taken place down here. There were cupboards and drawers, fittings from the eighteenth century and empty of physical objects but most likely full of memories. There were nooks and crannies containing unspoken messages of past liaisons, alcoves where perhaps punishments had been carried out, and as I descended the stone stairs I jumped at the sight of a figure standing at the bottom in front of the photocopier.

  ‘Hello, Al.’

  My voice sounded surprised. It was Monday morning ten o’clock and he didn’t look good.

  ‘… Hello.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m a bit hung-over.’

  ‘Can’t you go back to bed?’

  ‘It’s not that type of hangover.’

  ‘What type is it then?’

  ‘Nervous… got to get up… copy these fashion drawings.’

  ‘But you’re on holiday.’

  ‘Not really, it was a deal with dad – when I swapped courses – that I do the degree in two years, that means working through most of the holiday.’ His voice sounded as if it was in danger of disintegrating altogether.

  ‘I see. I’m impressed at your perspicacity…’ I said it in what I imagined was a pseudo toffee-nosed voice. ‘… I’m also impressed that you’ve got the hang of that zoom function, I haven’t.’

  ‘Easy, main menu, button ‘A’; then scroll down.’

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’ I’d witnessed hangovers like that before… Perfectly balanced young men pacing the room, hearts hammering, insisting on being taken to A&E. I’d wondered whether he was going to have a panic attack but demonstrating the zoom function seemed to have calmed him a bit.

  ‘The thing is… Dad, have you seen him this morning?’

  ‘You’re allowed some holiday, surely?’

  ‘I’m not sure what kind of mood he’s going to be in.’

  I recalled the scene with the carving knife.

  ‘It was my twenty-first last night.’

  ‘Oh! Congratulations.’

  ‘Well it didn’t go quite to plan…’

  Evidently Patrick had booked Langleys Bar whose staff had laid on a buffet – predominantly carnivorous – for him and Martinique, the twins, and a mere fifty of Al’s friends who had each been issued with printed invites. As the evening progressed, more of Al’s friends plus hangers-on kept arriving until the bar was packed with two hundred. As it was Sunday there was no proper security arrangement, and the few staff remaining were unable to cope. Many of the gatecrashers were helping themselves from the bar; others had arrived already swigging from bottles they’d been carrying in the street. The hall porter had attempted to stem the flow by locking the revolving doors, but a crush built outside. Someone claimed they needed to leave in an emergency so the door had to be opened again.

  Patrick was delighted. He was about to give a speech, and an audience of two hundred plus would almost certainly do it justice.

  ‘Jesus, it was embarrassing…’ Al was looking over his shoulder and up the stairs in case there was the creak of leather brogues about to descend to the basement. ‘… It wasn’t about me, it was all about him!’

  The speech – it transpired – had contained phrases such as ‘rite of passage’, words such as ‘sturdy’, ‘thrusting’, and ‘decisive’ had occurred at frequent intervals. There had been a dire warning ‘zero tolerance of failure’, and an enigmatically chilling reference to ‘bull’s blood’. ‘I personally will be still roaring at ninety,’ Patrick had informed the mass of cheering, booing, and football rattling youth.

  ‘It was like Dad was on steroids!’ Al’s voice had risen so high it must have been audible from the top of the stair. I put my finger to my lips in a rather bossy gesture.

  ‘You know he flunked architecture school?’ said Al as if desperately trying to change subject. I did vaguely. ‘He went to work for Varcellus in California. That’s all the public remembers so it didn’t matter. That’s why he’s so intolerant of failure.’

  What was worrying Al wasn’t that the party had been gatecrashed, it was the fact that the two hundred insurgents had left the building before Patrick had finished his speech and with Al crowd-surfing on their upturned hands.

  ‘I didn’t want to go, they forced me. It was great though, we
went to a warehouse party – there were several hundred there. It was fantastic music… it wasn’t just the music it was the way the DJs were playing it. Warehouse music they call it – some people just say ‘house music’. It’s the thing in Chicago.’

  I’d been to the Hacienda when it opened a couple of years ago – hardly anybody there. A lot of people didn’t like it – ‘Ooo ah dorn’t lahk this… loouks lahk an aerporrrt carrr parrrk.’

  ‘It gets packed now,’ insisted Al, ‘the “Haci” was ahead of its time.’

  ‘Is that yooou, Al?’ A voice sounded down the stairs.

  ‘Do you want me to hide you, is there a rear exit?’ I whispered.

  ‘No!’ I replied loudly to the disembodied voice from upstairs.

  Something furry brushed my trousers and swaggered up the stone stairs. A second later I heard Lauren’s voice.

  ‘Hellowe, Mackerel!’

  When I got back upstairs I went into the butler’s pantry office and found Lauren typing away. She was talking to Bea who was standing with her back to the window.

  ‘Have you seen Al?’ Lauren looked up at me.

  ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘Have you seen Da-ad?’ Bea asked. Her expression was not dissimilar to the one Patrick had used when he made his – no doubt legendary by now – remark about asparagus.

  ‘Briefly…’

  ‘Did he mention Langleys? I’ve been telling Lauren…’ Lauren looked at me with the kind of expression which might accompany an announcement of disinheritance, and containing the message that somehow, I was responsible.

  Bea left the room and slammed the front door behind her without saying anything further. I was glad. I was also glad that I had met both Bea and Jen at the same time when five minutes later the front door opened and Jen came in. Had I not done so then I would have wondered why ‘she’ was asking me the same question twice.

  ‘Have you seen Da-ad?’ I felt like a fish in a small tank swimming around with no chance of escape.

  ‘Briefly…’

  ‘Did he mention Langleys?’

  ‘No… Not on babe duty then?’ I asked cheekily changing the subject.

  ‘He’s at nursery… almost three now. Then we’ve got Suzi, the au pair, so frees me up nicely to get on designing power stations. How’s GI Group going?’ I was probably imagining it but her emphasis on the words ‘GI’ sounded a little disparaging.

  ‘Good… I’m going to need at least one assistant.’

  ‘Oh, Dad won’t like that. I’ve heard that they’ve got a woman CEO and good for her. That’s why Dad didn’t want anything to do with it… doesn’t want a woman telling him what to do.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘… Must dash.’

  ‘Me too…’ The front door slammed and Jen was gone.

  ‘Fancy a drink later?’ The voice was once again a conspiratorial whisper. I did.

  Well ‘Da-ad’ was going to have to lump it because any moment now there would be a knock on the front door and it was going to be Przemyslaw – Polish according to Lauren – who I would be interviewing and would hopefully be my man to help with GI Group.

  The person who I opened the front door to looked as if he’d come straight from doing national service in the South African army; khaki cargoes, matching open-necked pilot shirt, desert boots, and blond hair styled in a feather cut and resting on top of both his ears.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Jim!’, at least that’s what I heard him say. What he’d actually said was ‘Shem’.

  ‘It’s unpronounceable so people call me “Shem” – nearest English pronunciation is Shemiswaaf.’

  ‘Okay, come in, come in!’

  He’d answered my advert in BD but I’d done research on him and been told he was ‘shit hot’. We sat in the main studio, me facing the window while he leafed through his work. He didn’t smile and I got the feeling that he thought I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what he had to show me, which – given the strength of the reference I already had – was true.

  What was making me edgy was what Patrick was going to say, how the two of them would get on, and my confidence on that score wasn’t being helped by what I was picking up about him. He lived on the eighteenth floor of a council tower block in Finsbury Park, was an active member of the Socialist Worker Party, swore by ‘eel pie-n-mash’, and judging by the amount of sniffing, foot-tapping, and grimacing he was doing he either had some sort of drug habit or he didn’t think much of what he saw, me included.

  The thought occurred to me that given my background I could easily be him. I didn’t think there was a cat in hell’s chance of him taking the job if I offered it, and he wasn’t going to be easy to handle, but I needed somebody quickly. Either I could search further, and lose time, or I could take a calculated risk and go along with the copper-bottomed reference. I offered him the job and, much to my surprise, he took it.

  It was the Stag and Rifle again. I didn’t mind. I preferred walking uphill to down. After no more than a week at Lloyd Lewis Associates I was beginning to get used to Lauren’s notion of ‘up here’ and ‘down there’ – her ‘down there’ would mean W4 of course, but I did wonder how Belgravia fitted in with that classification.

  Outside the house the air was better, and the higher you climbed the fresher it became. That didn’t apply to the lower three stories of the house of course but even after this short time I’d found that I’d stopped noticing the foetid stench. I’d wondered whether it was just me. Denise hadn’t mentioned it, but what about my other friends – parties at weekends? Had I begun to carry this smell around with me, like a goatherd might have a peculiar scent, or a fishmonger? Is it Caliban who perpetually smells of fish? Was it going to be occupational in the way that a plumber reeks of ozone, electricians are accompanied by an acrid burning, or archivists who give off the claustrophobia of hammered vellum?

  It was warm, had been raining, and once again I could smell jasmine, mock orange, and honeysuckle, but this time I was aware of the sourness of mahonia blossom. It was growing in the border directly opposite the front door of the pub where last week the denim-clad red-headed male had been standing.

  I studied the pub sign which I hadn’t taken in during our previous visit. It was a skilful reinterpretation of David Hockney’s 1975 Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge which contains a series of perspective impossibilities. In the original Hockney – or Hogarth, whichever you like – an innkeeper’s wife is shown leaning out of a first-floor window holding a taper and lighting the pipe of a shepherd who is standing on a hill a mile away. The Stag and Rifle’s artist had shown the same woman pointing a rifle which appeared to be an inch away from the head of an out-of-scale stag standing on a snow-covered mountain top, five miles away. Separating the two subjects was a complex system of rivers, ravines, evergreen trees, and the mountains had the look of oyster shells stacked on the ice of a fishmonger’s stall. Something familiar about the landscape gave me a small wave of nausea.

  I’d taken the precaution of telling Lauren that I would be ‘going on somewhere afterwards’ so she didn’t think I was hankering after another free taxi ride halfway home. She also seemed to have been thinking ahead and announced that she was going on to Highgate… A relief as it meant that when we left we would each be walking to different tube stations.

  ‘… Two ESP!’ Her fingers shot up in a victory sign to the barman as we edged our way through the mass of bodies. I was about to try and shoulder across to collect them while she found a seat when she added. ‘… It’s okay he’ll bring them, hmm.’ We sat down – same banquette seats. The stags’ heads were louring down at me, unsurprisingly with the identical expressions as on our previous visit.

  How the place could be so packed at six o’clock on a Monday evening I couldn’t fathom. They didn’t seem to be the same people as last week either – less blue denim, more
Samsonite, reps no doubt, and perhaps of the heat-seeking variety. The Loyal Order of Moose wasn’t meeting because the notice read, The Whixall Peat Moss Residents’ Association Meeting will begin promptly at 6.00pm.

  There was a narrow gallery with a dark-oak balustrade running off the stairwell above which I’d failed to notice last week. One of the bar staff, an untrendy moustachioed youth wearing a white pilot shirt and shiny black trousers brought the two glasses of flat golden liquid and I paid.

  ‘How’s GI Group?’

  ‘Well I think I’ve made a good start…’

  ‘I bet you’re dying to know about the twins.’

  I was more interested to hear about Freia, but I had to admit that Bea and Jen had occupied more than the odd moment in my mind since the Asparagus Dinner.

  ‘Bea looks very like His Lordship and Jen more like Freia – so you’d assume that Bea was more like Patrick in personality, yes?’

  ‘That’s what I’d thought,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well you’d be wrong. That’s the mistake everybody makes. Jen’s the quiet one, silent but deadly if you ask me… of course they’re both loose cannons.’

  If she were really asking me I’d say that they were both deadly, and both meticulously aimed cannons, but what I really wanted to ask her was how she knew what Freia’s personality was like?

  ‘Everybody’s jealous of Freia – she’s dead and she left a memory of a very warm loving person. Bea has this really weird idea that Jen is trying to recreate Freia by acting like her, yes.’

  ‘Really…’ Actually, I’d decided that the more free-spirited of the duo was Bea, the journalist, but I supposed that was the trap to which Lauren was referring. Twins I’d decided could be confusing in many ways. I wondered whether they were confusing to one another. Might they be suspicious of one another or could they be united in their suspicions of their father? I gave up… Imagine splitting twins? People had done it, not just governments, totalitarian regimes, but hapless warm-hearted adopting parents had done it to their cost and ended up being hated by both siblings.