The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  There were three waiters standing by the maître d’s table and I was straightaway sure I recognized one of them; a tall, moustachioed, and untrendy young man wearing white shirt and shiny black trousers.

  We returned to the atrium and Patrick gestured towards two leather armchairs which stood either side of a low polished table, and close to one of the marble columns. As I pulled at my chair and squeaked my way into its deep-buttoned hide upholstery he saw me looking at the surface of the marble column.

  ‘Scagliola!’

  ‘Really?’ At first, I’d thought he was calling the waiter.

  ‘It’s not marble.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It’s clay, wedged in such a way that it resembles marble.’ He smiled, pursing his lips and holding me in his gaze, no doubt with a mixture of irritation that I had not known this fact, and benevolence that he was lifting me out of a state of ignorance. ‘… A great favourite of Robert Adam.’ I’d heard of him so I smiled back and nodded.

  The tall moustachioed untrendy waiter I’d recognized in the dining room drifted towards us. I’d remembered at last where I’d seen him before. He was obviously an industrious and versatile young man.

  ‘What are you going to have, Pulse?’ It was a challenge; I hadn’t a clue except I was pretty sure that this time it would not be a pint of ESP.

  ‘A dry sherry for me.’ Patrick’s words contained the inflection that the waiter should have known that.

  ‘The same please.’ I felt dull, not for choosing sherry but for showing lack of originality.

  ‘Are there any women members here?’ I was trying to imagine Lauren sitting here… in fact I was struggling to visualize myself as a member.

  His chair gave a sudden squeak and he looked at me as if I’d questioned his integrity.

  ‘We began admitting women three years ago.’

  ‘I see…’

  ‘We, were the first to do so.’ He made it sound like the Garden of Eden and that the male members had – not without considerable reluctance – agreed to sacrifice the odd rib in order to create female members. ‘I won’t tell you which, because you can look them up but there are already some notable names.’ His mouth formed the ‘O’ shape.

  It was strange sitting there in the atrium, which after all was little more than an oversized hallway. Every room at each level was connected to it. It was a public area, a route, a passageway, a vomitorium, yet it was endowed with a unique and perhaps uncanny sense of privacy.

  ‘I want you to tell me what you think of the gents’ lavatory.’ He said it in exactly the same tone as when talking about his wines, as if he personally had a hand not merely in their use, but in their creation. ‘I shall be remaining in the dining room after lunch so won’t be able to benefit from your opinion so if you wouldn’t mind going now…’

  The toilets were in the basement, two floors down and were to my eye an over-flamboyant and eccentric celebration of the actions of bladder and sphincter. It was the scale of everything that appalled me. The hand basins were the size of the bath in my flat, the wc cubicles, though containing only one fitting, were each large enough to accommodate user plus an audience of six. The urinals resembled the elaborate sepulchral monuments to be found in European cemeteries. Each fitting not only had its pissoir headstone, it had a giant overmantel like a baronial fireplace which had been moulded with cherubs and flowers. All had been cast in fireclay which over the years had acquired a finish like that of gorgonzola cheese.

  In contrast to the abandoned atrium, the library, the semi-deserted lounges and dining room, the lavatory seemed to be a centre of activity. Its heavy panelled cubicle doors bumped with regularity, conversation hummed, and laughter rebounded off the terrazzo and porcelain. Though the room was subterranean, its creator had achieved the effect of warm daylight coming from the ceiling. Bald heads shone, white hair glowed. Every few seconds came the hiss of tap water and the gentle thud of a hand towel being discarded into an open-topped polished wooden bin.

  The walls were furnished entirely with mirror and divided into human-sized sections by way of dark mahogany panelling. The surface of the mirror had become patinated as its precious silver layer trapped behind glass had undergone the gradual process of disintegration. The result of frequent exposure to steam, and to the breath of men, of whom all – almost without exception – had not drawn breath for many years.

  ‘… Quite remarkable, Patrick!’ I voiced my opinion as soon as I entered the atrium and was two tables distant from where he was sitting. His head was tilted backward and he eyed me as if through a set of imaginary cross hairs at the end of his nose. Of course, I should not have raised my voice in such sacred surroundings and I decided not to risk his further disapproval with any detail.

  He was sitting there, right leg bent, grey stripy socked ankle resting on left worsted-clad knee; his right hand cupping the dome of his polished black brogue. Before I had chance to creak my way back into my armchair he rose, the grey worsteds flopping back onto the domes of his polished brogues.

  I followed him back to the dining room where we appeared to have the undivided attention of the moustachioed untrendy waiter. In spite of the fact that he’d served me with half a gallon of ESP over the two sessions at the Stag and Rifle, he showed no sign of recognition.

  ‘I’m going to have the Brussels paté.’

  ‘… I think I’ll have the Dover sole.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it too much as a starter.’ He spoke the phrase as if he were finishing my sentence for me.

  ‘All right I’ll have the Brussels paté.’

  There were no more than a dozen diners and it was already twenty past one. None of the dozen was female.

  ‘It started as a Whig club.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘… Civil servants – particularly Foreign Office, although some of them don’t actually work in the Foreign Office building – you’ll soon learn what that means… Now it’s predominantly politicians.’

  ‘Is Martinique a member?’ I realized my faux pas straight away. As a UN employee neither he nor she would be telling people even if she was. He ignored it.

  ‘I’m going to have rib of beef.’

  ‘I think I’ll have sea bass.’

  I could see the wine waiter approaching – not Moustachio, a smaller bald man; older. He was carrying two bottles, one in an ice bucket – both already opened. The bald man hovered directly above Patrick’s glass, Patrick nodded, the man poured, the mulberry-hued liquid gurgled. There was no scrutiny of label, no tasting; he must have ordered, and tasted in the atrium while I’d been downstairs. The bald waiter filled my glass from the second bottle.

  ‘It’s Sauvignon Blanc, a Bordeaux; you’ll like it.’ It was an order, how had he known I would choose fish? There was something of decayed glamour, wine and witchery about it all.

  ‘Your good health Patrick… Thank you!’ I tried hard to make it sound sincere.

  He fixed me with a sudden look of fury, a look I’d not seen before. He put his wine glass down, and with a great deal of care placed both hands on the white tablecloth, outside the rectangle formed by the cutlery, so that his square fingers were in perfect alignment with the knives and forks. It was as if he were an actor waiting in the wings, inflating himself with the oxygen of the character and was going to soar above his audience. He tilted his head so that I could see the bony tumulus of his Adam’s apple. Before he spoke he gave a strange smile.

  ‘I know exactly how clever I am, Pulse.’ The skin around his mouth adopted the dark fissured appearance of the anus of some unknown creature. ‘What I’m trying to find out is how clever you are.’

  I stared at him feeling helpless. He’d been working up to this.

  ‘I’m a straightforward man,’ he continued, ‘I believe in being open with people; open, honest, and transparent.’ He pronounced the la
st three words as if they were the closing phrase of a sanctified credo.

  ‘… Of course!’ I could hear a slight indignation in my voice.

  ‘It’s my expectation that you and I have that characteristic in common. Any working relationship is a form of partnership… as intense as any marriage,’ his smile widened in an air of self-congratulation as if he had proved the first stage of a long and complex equation. ‘Its survival depends entirely upon trust. Each party needs to trust the other a hundred per cent.’

  He knew that I was feeling out of my depth because he’d spotted that my relationship with Denise was a casual one. There was no commitment, he knew it, and I knew it. He was in possession of a voice of authority, he the master, me the pupil, I couldn’t dispute it.

  The moustachioed waiter appeared and served the paté and toast.

  ‘I get the feeling… sometimes – that you like to play your cards rather close to your chest.’ His smile was still a knowing one, but it had changed into a different kind of knowing. He caught me by surprise.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to think that you were hiding anything from me…’ He stared at me with his black pupils.

  ‘… Because if I did think that, and I found that I was correct, then I’d have you thrown out of the front door just like that! How do you like the Brussels paté?’

  I did enjoy the paté and I ate in silence wondering what to say next. He helped me out, but it didn’t feel like help.

  ‘It’s quiet today because of the vote in the House.’ He said it as if he sensed that I was upset and was offering words of calm. If they were intended as such they weren’t having that effect. I’d suspected that he was a rogue, but for the first time I felt that I was sitting opposite a man who possessed little or no empathy with other humans. Quite possibly he was a man whose emotions were not genuine, and in order to give himself human credentials he had to play-act, to fake, to indulge in the histrionic.

  I’d decided which way I was going to vote. Just because I’d drawn a blank with the telephone number from Hood’s noticeboard didn’t mean to say I’d come to a dead end. There was another pathway to explore, it would have signposts and at least one of those signposts could well be hidden in the third drawer down in Patrick’s desk – the locked one. When I had finished this nice lunch and while Patrick was with his undisclosed and mysterious colleague I would be searching the drawer.

  Eighteen

  I sat on the tube as it wormed its way north from Leicester Square, trying to calm myself. The sanctimoniousness of the man! He’d no right to imply that I might be untrustworthy, to give me a moral lecture. There’d been no outright accusation, no allegation, but there was the implication that I had built a wall around myself – never mind the fact that he was a past-master at constructing his own ramparts – and that he was doing me a service by trying to breach it. Between now and when I got back to the office I needed to achieve perfect balance between anger and enterprise. It would be no good flying into a temper and rifling his drawer out of revenge.

  As I stared mournfully in front of me I became aware that the woman sitting opposite me was dressed entirely in yellow. Yellow flared trousers and a kind of oilskin top and matching sou’wester. She was sitting primly holding on her lap a large Hessian bag boldly embroidered in a kaleidoscope of colours. Further down the tube car was a large bearded man, very drunk, and who was attempting to sit on everybody’s knees. Travellers were using a patent technique of dealing with his advances by holding up their hands, palms outward. This had the effect of bouncing the bearded drunkard, either to the person opposite, or rolling him onto the person next door. The man seemed helpless, like a giant hairy skittle waiting to be struck by a bowl. When he reached me, I followed suit with the other passengers sending him reeling across to the lady in yellow who hadn’t cottoned on to the technique. The man sat buried in her multi-coloured Hessian and yellow flared lap looking gratefully around him.

  ‘Arl-in-yellooo,’ his voice strangely gentle as he attempted to encircle her neck with his tweedy arm.

  ‘Get off me you bastard.’

  Several hands waved in her direction in an apology for assistance, but with a jolt of the train he was up and rolling on his way. Once again, I tried to focus on the problem in question.

  When I’d calmed down I would have three choices; i) to take it that Patrick had shown sincere fatherly concern for his and my relationship, that I should be grateful for advice and learn from it, ii) that I should continue to harbour my suspicions of him but do nothing further at present, iii) to use the energy from my present anger to take my search for to the truth up to the next level. By the time I let myself in through the front door of the office I had chosen number three.

  As soon as I opened the black-painted front door I could hear the slow tap tap chug of the golf ball typewriter coming from the butler’s pantry.

  ‘Hello, Lauren, how are you?’ I probably sounded tense, perhaps even breathless.

  ‘Behind, hmm.’

  ‘Patrick says he’s coming back later.’ I said it as a half question – a tiny inflexion at the end of the sentence.

  ‘He’s back at four, yes.’ It was exactly 3.00pm. I had one hour to do something which I calculated was going to take me no more than fifteen minutes.

  ‘I’ve just got to check something before Patrick gets back.’ I hoped my voice sounded casual. I was glad Lauren was ‘behind’, it probably meant that she wouldn’t be moving from her seat for at least the next twenty minutes.

  I’d worked out that once I’d got the apartment keys from the top drawer in Patrick’s desk I could be in and out of his flat in three minutes. If I was going to complete this little project in fifteen minutes that gave me… another three minutes to return the knobbly key to the cabinet upstairs and that would give me nine minutes to find what I was looking for. If I overran it wouldn’t matter… in principle anyway, but I didn’t want Lauren getting suspicious – or catch me red-handed because it was far too early for explanations. I had no Plan B. All factors considered the chances of getting caught were low but I needed to concentrate on staying cool.

  Because the day was mainly a non-work day I hadn’t brought my attaché case, so I went straight up to Patrick’s office, taking care to walk on the creaky floorboard. Just for the exercise I tried the third drawer down, it was locked. I opened the top drawer, removed the two apartment keys and at the same time taking off my Chelsea boots which I placed together in the knee and leg refuge under the giant walnut desk. In stocking feet I retraced my steps, this time avoiding the creaky board. I paused on the landing; the tap tap chug was coming from the butler’s pantry below. I raced up the stone steps to the apartment door and once again paused and listened to the remote percussion coming from the butler’s pantry. I inserted the Chubb and gently turned, it clicked almost noiselessly. I repeated the process with the Yale and there was that delicious tiny sucking noise as if I was removing the exquisitely fitting lid of a secret jewellery case. I inhaled the scent of vanilla and as I did so I suddenly felt my confidence running away like sand through an hourglass.

  What I was doing was bold beyond reason. If I was caught dismissal was a certainty, but what would dismissal actually consist of? It would be something infinitely more complex than the word it conveyed. To the rest of the world I would be a loathsome snooper, an invader and someone completely in the wrong, Patrick would be seen as an honourable defender of his property. Of course, he wouldn’t go to the police; he wouldn’t need them to assure him of his rights. I would be the cornered cowering child persisting with my pitiful excuses. What would be of much greater value to him would be my confession accompanied perhaps by my breaking down in tears on his shoulder.

  ‘What ever possessed you, Pulse, don’t I pay you enough?’ He would say, while possibly even giving my back a fatherly pat.

  In the space that existed between us he would know what he had done,
and he would know that… somehow, I knew. But what had he done? Any crime he had committed would be absolved by the fact that I’d broken his trust, that’s what his monologue in the club had been all about. It had been a declaration of moral immunity. There was no turning back.

  I sprinted up the stairs into the kitchen and across to the knife drawer… Removed the key for the steel wall cabinet and opened it, noticing as I did that the knobbly key for the desk was no longer hanging on the extreme right hook, it had swapped places with another key in the centre of the row. I pocketed the knobbly key, locked the steel cabinet and replaced its key in the knife drawer. My hands were shaking and heart belting so fast I needed a split second to calm myself. Yes, I’d done everything right, so I padded down the stairs, pulled the exquisitely fitting door of the flat closed behind me, locked the Chubb, and after a moment’s pause pussy-footed back down to Patrick’s office, remembering to avoid the creaky floorboard in the antechamber. At the last second before I entered I glanced through the crack between door and jamb in case Lauren was in there. No, I could hear the tap tap chug. I’d taken under three minutes so far.

  I had to hold my left finger and thumb either side of the escutcheon to steady the knobbly key as I inserted it into the lock. It wouldn’t turn, I started to panic… try the other way, yes! Of course, he’d said, early 17th century it was a feature of the cabinet workshops in that eastern part of France, they produced locks which opened right to left – ‘sinister’, he’d boasted.