The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  ‘You know, Pulse…’ She looked straight at me with her thousand-year-old eyes.

  It was the first time I’d heard her use my name. ‘… You could make a real difference here – I mean really change things… Look I must go!’

  ‘Oh, I won’t be in tomorrow. I’m going to meet my mother at Victoria coach station.’

  I thought I detected a smile.

  What I’d said was true but it was 5.00pm before I was due at Victoria. I would be taking an early train from Euston and heading north to get the rest of that telephone number.

  Fourteen

  You look familiar.

  I’m on the train, thinking about the twins. What a handful! Never split them – if you’re planning to adopt that is…The man – or woman who comes between kin is in for a rough ride, as PL Travers – the inventor of Mary Poppins – found to her cost.

  Travers, forty, husbandless and childless decides to adopt. Why not? She can afford to bring up a kid on her own. It’s twin boys from Ireland, but she only takes one and never tells him about the other one? Seventeen years later the Irish twin – who has been told he’s got a sibling – turns up at her Chelsea house demanding to see his brother. She sends him packing. Then the first twin comes back, gets wind something’s going on, goes and looks in every pub on the King’s Road, and finds twin number two. They go back to the house, play merry hell and clear off together with number one twin ending up disowning Travers.

  I’m imagining what it would be like looking for a twin. If it’s a case of a choice of six pubs on the King’s Road then the task wouldn’t be too formidable. It’s just looking for someone who looks similar, couldn’t be simpler. Any of us could have one – I mean a twin we hadn’t been told about, which is why I’m so fascinated by the head opposite me.

  The head in front of me is resting, tilted back on the train seat headrest. I know it’s not asleep because the eyes are open. The hands appear to be at prayer, but only for a split second as they come together. Between the palms is a broadsheet newspaper and as the page is turned the hands part, the face disappears and once again I can see the name of the paper – the Telegraph.

  I’m playing at being a spy, because when I look in the train window I can see the man’s reflection, clearly. The head which seems to hover above the passing fields is more distinct than the head which is momentarily revealed to me every four minutes when the pages are turned, and it’s this head which appears to me to be not unlike my own.

  Ah! The palms come together and this time with an air of finality. I see the vertical sliver of paper collapse on itself. The man squeezes his fingers along its folded edge, knocks it into a flat rectangle, dusts it with the back of his hand – as if removing crumbs from its surface – and places it on the table in front of him. You do look familiar, and about my age. The Justice with fair round belly – except it’s not that round.

  The funny thing is your face is still indistinct. You look like a man who’s not quite his own master, which is perhaps why the image of the head outside the carriage window seems so much clearer than the one inside.

  The couple sitting next to us are French. Oh God! I can almost hear you say it. It’s not that the man’s arrogant or that the woman seems to be too submissive, it’s that like me you just don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Not speaking a second language always makes me feel like a provincial. Everyone in London seems to be capable of bursting into a foreign tongue without the slightest provocation, but not me, oh no! What makes it worse is that she’s clearly a fluent English speaker because when she’s not talking to her Frenchie partner she’s reading Cosmopolitan. I think that like me you are a northerner and quite possibly you’re on your way home.

  I smile. Not an invitation sort of smile, not a personal kind, one of those ambiguous sort of smiles, which could be directed at the person sitting opposite you, but a smile more likely to be purely for one’s own consumption. You sigh and look straight at me.

  ‘It’s now or never…’ you say. I agree. ‘The crunch has come,’ you say. You couldn’t be putting it better, I think. ‘There’s a limit to how far a man can be pushed.’ Your priorities are spot on, there’s no denying it.

  ‘I’m going to have it out with my boss.’

  Your spectre outside the carriage window merges with red brick as the train slows into Nuneaton station. The aisles of the carriage are packed with people standing. We’re in the last set of seats at the end of the carriage, and I can just see the wc door wedged open, a man wearing an MUFC shirt sitting on the toilet pan drinking cans of beer, the lobby piled high with huge nylon holdalls. Nobody leaves the train.

  ‘Is it just this boss you don’t get on with?’ I ask impertinently.

  ‘They’ve all been bloody difficult,’ you snap. You’re right.

  ‘It’s all about the basic pupil–master relationship.’ I sit up in my seat, paying you every attention now. ‘The master is always jealous of his pupil,’ you’re so adamant.

  ‘Not proud then – I mean if they do well?’

  ‘They might say they’re proud, but there’s this basic fear.’ You may have got something there. I must be frowning and I can see you’re thinking that I need more explanation, and I have a distinct feeling you’re going to give it me.

  ‘Titian feared that Peterzano would become more successful than him, and we know for definite that Peterzano was green at the gills about Caravaggio’s achievements. Pieter Brueghel 1 was always worried that Pieter Brueghel 2 would do better than him, Pieter Brueghel 2 was jealous of Pieter Brueghel 3, and Jan Brueghel was always in two minds about whether Ambrosius would do better than any of them. In the end, they could have all saved getting themselves into an untidy tizzy because PB 1 hung onto his reign as the family painting king. Then there’s Joseph Albers and Robert Rauschenberg… and the Formbys…’ Obviously an afterthought.

  ‘What, George?’

  ‘…They were both called George.’

  ‘…The famous one?’

  ‘Ah! That depends what you call fame.’

  ‘…The one who played the banjo.’

  ‘Ukulele actually…’

  ‘All right, ukulele.’

  ‘Ah! But they both played ukuleles.’ You look smug. ‘The point I’m making is that the leaning on the lamp post one we’ve all heard of stole his father’s clothes.’

  ‘…Really?’

  ‘…Well, stole his father’s act – the hat, the ukulele, the grin, the double entendres. The reason we know George the younger is TV and radio. His father was the bigger star, got paid more, and got a much grander monument to him in Warrington churchyard. Wee George just gets a tiny inscription. Dad died young, before George the younger launched his career. You can imagine the professional rivalry if he hadn’t popped it when he did. Not getting on with your boss is career envy, believe you me.’

  ‘Ere, you two!’ I look up and see the red-faced man in the MUFC shirt looking down at me, hands supporting himself on the table top ‘… Yer, you two…’ He stares beerily, from me to you. He’s vacated his porcelain throne and he’s squeezing his way down the aisle giving audience to whoever’s eye he catches. Again… ‘You two, you’re like two peas in a pod, two eggs in a box.’ He wrenches his red hands away from the table and continues his swaying journey.

  You go back to your newspaper. When we arrive at the station you’re standing right behind me as we shuffle along waiting to leave the train. Once I’ve climbed down onto the platform I look round to say goodbye but you’ve vanished.

  Fifteen

  As I walked down the platform towards the barrier, two questions were nagging me. The first – what the hell was I doing here, in this northern city and quite likely heading for danger – was the easy one. Though I was here by the sheer force of compulsion, the logical side of my brain was aware that almost certainly I was not going to prove or solve a c
rime. I wasn’t a detective and had no intention of playing at being one.

  I wasn’t going to be doing any record-checking on Freia’s death, or funeral, I wouldn’t have known where to start. I was following a lead which by sheer chance had been revealed to me, that was all. I had two choices; i) ignore it and spend the rest of my life speculating as to what might be the connection between Freia and Hood, ii) give in to my curiosity and get nearer to the truth. I had chosen number two.

  The second imponderable was the existence of Lloyd Lewis Associates. One person I’d talked to had described it as ‘a practice run for gentlemen by gentlemen,’ and I could see why. Patrick’s previous crew had obviously abandoned ship and it wasn’t difficult to see why that had happened. But why carry on when it wasn’t a source of income to him? Wouldn’t he be better clearing off to one of his tax havens, or retiring to look after his vineyards… And what about Lauren? She couldn’t type; she was supposed to be a writer but didn’t seem to have published anything, and the treatment from Patrick! Why did she put up with it? She had means.

  In spite of her abruptness – which I took to be a characteristic of the upper classes – and general strangeness, there was something about her I liked, but I couldn’t decide whether the tittle-tattle in the pub was revenge on Patrick, or whether I was being fed information for a specific reason. I’d begun to wonder if the practice existed solely for Patrick’s pleasure. A menagerie of strange animals, and his own private theatre where comedy and tragedy were to be acted out by unsuspecting individuals. I had begun to fear that perhaps Patrick was a magnet and I a hapless iron filing.

  As I stepped down onto the station platform I was praying that I would be back on this very spot in not much more than half an hour. It would take me ten minutes to get to Brazzers in a taxi and my heart was going like a bongo. I could barely hear the loudspeaker announcements which flooded into one another as I hurried across the concourse to the taxi rank. A few feet in front of me a tall black guy with a ‘fro’ dropped a king-size bottle of Coke onto the tarmac, its plastic cracking and its contents foaming angrily across the pavement.

  Sitting in the back of the cab on the acrylic plaid rug inhaling the air freshener, the enormity of what I was doing struck me. I had no business to be going to Brazzers, and if I was caught, no explanation no matter how ingenious would save me. There was no Plan B; I would have to take the consequences.

  Just because there was no Plan B, didn’t mean to say that I didn’t have a Plan A. I’d brought along my own wad of fake mail – junk I’d been collecting for a week. As I entered the Formica-lined office I would wave it at the girl on the desk as I sailed through, and on to Hoodie’s office. I’d reckoned that I could be in and out of the building in under four minutes. No doubt an insurance underwriter would have a formula by which they could calculate my level of risk, but for me it was going to be all about confidence, that and a quiet prayer that Hood – or Dickson – were not on the premises.

  I could see the taxi driver scrutinising me in his mirror. To give my journey plausibility I’d told him that I was an interior designer – doing some work at the club.

  ‘Ahh, interior design, I know!’

  He said it as if he’d just identified a particular football team or a make of car. ‘…Wood floor, white walls, downlighters; that’s it, isn’t it?’ A smile of recognition appeared on his face like a quiz contestant who, confident that he’d given the right answer, knew that the prize would soon be his.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I conceded.

  He seemed to be driving like hell, down street after street of desperate pink terraces, past high walls that looked like prisons, through a wasteland of demolished buildings, past factories with castle-like towers, past cranes, past smoking fires. I could see the moors in the distance and I felt a sudden need to go to the lavatory.

  Abruptly he veered left and I heard/felt the tearing of coke cinders under car tyres – heard the ratchetting of the handbrake.

  ‘Can you wait please; I’ll be fifteen minutes at most.’

  ‘Pay me for what you’ve had and I’ll wait.’

  I paid, opened the door, stepped out, slammed, and crunched my way across the cinders. I glanced back at him, staring after me perhaps wondering why I hadn’t gone in through the main door on the road. My heart was hammering.

  I walked down the flight of calcined stone steps, double speed. Along the subterranean corridor of saliva-coloured glazed brick. There’d be no going to the toilet this time. I opened the steel-panelled door. Inside it was the same girl sitting at the desk, bottle-red quiff – shiny green fat-shouldered jacket. She was on the telephone.

  ‘Mail for Mr Hood!’ I waved the fan of bogus letters. ‘I’ll put them on his desk.’ She didn’t even look up. As I pulled open the door leading to the dimly lit corridor I was hit by a wave of adrenalin. Supposing Hood had seen me arrive and was following me, dragging his bad leg behind his good one?

  I stopped at the painted door on my right, as if to sniff the air around me, and felt it with my hand just as I’d watched Dickson do, as if checking that it was sound. I had to knock, if Hood was in there I was fucked, but I had to know. Think positive! Think of that insurance risk assessment, the chances of him being in there were… I knocked… waited… silence. There was a squeak as I squeezed the aluminium handle, opened, and poked a light switch on the left-hand wall.

  I closed the door behind me and crossed to the notice board. There was so much blood pounding through my head I could barely see the odds and sods of paper. There it was, FREIA LLOYD-LEWIS 01– I fumbled for my notebook and copied it, my hand was shaking so much I wasn’t even forming the numerals properly; 01-241-0167. I rammed the notebook back into my bag, strode towards the door, hand on the handle. I was listening – just in case – and I was sure I could hear the distant mewing of a cat. Gingerly I opened the door, closed behind me, and almost stopped dead. To my right where the corridor turned I could see on the wall an enormous shadow of a cat, tail erect and quivering. I heard a voice.

  ‘Ellowe Stripy!’

  I ran, ran on tiptoe, ran like Sir Giles in The Hound of the Baskervilles on the edge of the moor, and running for his life, I ran tugging open the door for the safety of the Formica office.

  ‘Job done!’ I yelled. The green and red figure was still on the phone.

  I wrenched open the steel-clad outer door, and once past the window I broke into a sprint, past saliva-coloured bricks, up calcined stone steps, and back onto the cinders where I stopped in disbelief. The taxi had gone.

  Again, I ran, across cinders, past stained and rusted containers and out onto the main road. I looked left but there was nothing, just moor. I looked right, along a seemingly endless wall of crumbling brick. I was on the edge of panic.

  On the opposite side of the road I could see a bus shelter of steel and smashed glass. I ran over to it, dodged inside and crouched below the level of its window. I was now directly opposite the main entrance door to the club, double-panelled doors in dark wood, the name Brazzers a semicircle of pink neon above it. I prayed that I was invisible. There was no traffic, no people.

  The chances of a bus seemed remote, and as I looked at my watch I was amazed to see it was still only just gone eleven in the morning. The taxi driver had just been nervous. Taking me to a club whose owner had a notorious reputation was one thing, waiting outside there for me to emerge was perhaps tempting providence too far.

  There was a timetable, but illegible through glass which, like that of the shelter, was not only broken but seemed to have been smeared with a variety of substances that had the look of human bodily fluids. As I squatted trying to peer through the mess of the window and listening for a noise that might be a bus I saw a sight, heard a sound which caught my breath.

  Emerging through the gap in the wall, like an oil slick crawling up a Saudi-Arabian beach, was a black Mercedes limousine. I could hear the
cinders crunching under its tyres. If it turned left its occupant would not see me, if it came right and past the shelter I would be visible.

  It sat there – no other traffic, so no flashing indicator. I looked at my watch; fifteen seconds, thirty, forty-five. One minute, one minute fifteen. It was Hood, it had to be, and somehow, he knew I was there, I could feel it… he was making me sweat. One minute thirty, one minute forty-five, two minutes precisely and the car lurched left and tore away towards the moor. I saw an orange and cream double-decker bus and I all but rushed out into the road in an effort to ensure it stopped.

  I paid, sat down among the six old age pensioners on the lower deck and began to breathe normally. I had the number at last.

  Sixteen

  When I arrived back at Euston it was 2.30pm so I took the tube to Green Park and wandered about, looking for somewhere for late lunch. I’d been too full of nervous energy to eat anything up until now, but the feel of space in the park, the movement of the air, and the distant drone of traffic was beginning to calm me.

  I found the café I’d remembered from some months before. It was timber with pointy roofs, criss-cross metal bracing and had a clunky wooden floor which gave it an odd atmosphere of impermanence. I decided I would sit outside at the timber-slatted tables in one of those aluminium-framed chairs with webbing made from thick red plastic.

  Inside, the array of baguettes was formidable; avocado and bacon, stilton and beetroot, brie and walnut… I chose one containing giant shavings of very yellow cheddar smeared with pickle whose simple geometry of cubes and spheres spoke to me of Branston. Comfort rather than adventure was on the agenda after the stress of the morning.