Belch.
Archer’s Rolls limousine rounded the corner and pulled to the curb. Vivian opened the rear door for herself before the chauffeur had a chance to get to it. She extended one leg, like a lovely overture, and then bounded out of the car. She was in high spirits, finishing off some laughter caused evidently by a remark Archer had made a moment before. Archer got out on the other side. Vivian, from ten feet away, brought the aim of her eyes around to Nikolai. It was as though he’d been misplaced when playfully, with exaggerated British arch and enunciation, she exclaimed: “Oh, there you are, Nickie darling!” She came to him hand first as though her wrist were a favor, but at the last second she dropped it and proceeded with her mouth. A careful kiss, the merest peck, the kind that wouldn’t disturb her lipstick. “Hi, lover,” she said, reverting, and that put the place and the time and everything back into perspective for Nikolai.
He told her: “You look fetching.”
“Don’t I always,” she said.
“Don’t you,” he agreed, smiling his best smile. However, it was obvious to Nikolai that Vivian had spent time and attention on her appearance. Perhaps because he’d made this day special for her, he thought. She’d given the ends of her straight-to-the-shoulder hair a buoyant flip and done quite a bit more than usual with her makeup, helped her large eyes look huge and decorated their lids with precise smudges of a brilliant blue. She’d also blended on just the right extra amount and shade of pink exactly where high on her cheeks a healthier-than-average flush would show. Her dress was of pale gray silk jersey with a V neckline that showed what she had without showing it.
“Nick,” was Archer’s friendly greeting instead of a plain hello.
“Archer,” Nikolai acknowledged nicely.
The chauffeur got the satchel from the trunk, and Nikolai took it from him. Archer didn’t offer to carry it. It was his belief that the better-bred gentleman never carried anything in public except in an extreme emergency. Whatever he purchased was always sent around or else he had his man with him to do the toting. It was one of the stuffy rules he’d learned very early and felt was worth keeping.
He led the way into number 46 and up one long flight of stairs so plushly runnered they were dangerous. No doubt Archer had been there before, knew the place well. Vivian and Nikolai followed along down an impeccably maintained hallway that ran right and then right again to end up before a varnished oak door that, like all the others they’d passed, bore no name. They entered a reception area where a desk was situated for intercepting but there was no one behind it.
“Beckhurst!” Archer called out.
A vigorous clearing of throat was heard from the adjacent inner office, followed by: “Come in, come in.”
Beckhurst was seated at a George III inlaid mahogany writing table. Archer told him not to get up, and he didn’t try, just offered his limp handshake across the desk when Vivian and Nikolai were introduced. “Sit down, sit down,” Beckhurst said.
Nikolai recalled that when Archer had mentioned this person the night before, this compulsive Fabergé buyer, he’d referred to him as a school chum. Well, either Archer was sipping from the miraculous waters of youth or this fellow Beckhurst was living the fastest, most degenerating life of all time. Beckhurst was eighty-some if he was a day. It was exercise for him to speak. The lids of his ginny eyes glistened wet, and his sallow complexion was camouflaged by the alcoholic bursts of thousands of capillaries. Still in all he yet had most of his hair, combed straight back, and it was not entirely gray. He was also dapperly dressed. Nikolai glanced at Vivian. She was gracefully settled in her armchair and didn’t appear to be concerned a degree by this being Beckhurst. Possibly Archer had told her what to expect. Nikolai looked to Archer, who reassured him with a slight shift of eyes and an almost imperceptible nod.
“Let’s see, yes, let’s see,” Beckhurst said.
Archer opened the satchel and removed the Fabergé objects and placed them one at a time in front of Beckhurst, who had to lean back to get his bare vision focused on them. He put a loupe into the socket of his right eye, sort of tucked it into the folds of the loose skin. When he clenched that eye to hold the loupe the entire right side of his face went ugly, the corner of his mouth became a lopsided hole exposing upper molars and gum, his left nostril closed and his right one was awry and dilated. He hunched over to examine under ten-power magnification the imprints on each of the objects. He seemed particularly appreciative of the Fabergé flower creations, although he didn’t remark. In fact, throughout his appraisal Beckhurst didn’t utter a single word, and when he was done he didn’t declare whether he was satisfied or not. His only punctuation was a deep breath so wheezy that it was harmonic. He took out a gold pocket watch and looked at its face as though it were an old enemy.
Archer reached across the desk, closed the lid on one of the Fabergé maple boxes, and asked: “Genuine, do you think?”
“Genuine, indeed genuine,” Beckhurst nodded jerkily.
“Then you might be interested in purchasing them?”
Beckhurst dug around in the center drawer of the writing table for a small electronic calculator. The well-manicured tips of his rather transparent fingers seemed to randomly massage the calculator’s digits. Nikolai didn’t see how when the device was used like that it could possibly present an accurate total. Beckhurst finally stopped fiddling with it. He raised his eyes and fixed them on Vivian’s plunge and for a long moment was gone from the business on hand.
“Well?” Archer pressed politely.
“Two hundred thousand,” Beckhurst let out.
“How much?” Vivian asked.
“Three hundred thousand,” Beckhurst grumbled as though he resented having to repeat himself.
Vivian thought she should again ask how much on the chance Beckhurst might unmindfully up his offer another hundred, but then she didn’t want to risk jarring him back to two hundred. “Done at three hundred,” she said.
“Done, done,” Beckhurst agreed with absolutely no enthusiasm.
“How would you prefer payment?” Archer asked Vivian.
“Cashier’s check and immediately,” she replied.
Beckhurst couldn’t have been more accommodating nor more immediate. From his shirt pocket he produced a once-folded check, which he handed to Vivian. Vivian glanced at it and showed it to Nikolai. It was a cashier’s check made out to cash to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds. Nikolai believed that Beckhurst’s having the check all made out and ready was too much of a coincidence. He was about to mention that when his voice box felt as though it had just become wrapped, tied, and knotted, and now wasn’t that Grandfather Maksim gesticulating in protest and bobbing back and forth across the front of his mind? Nikolai watched the check disappear into Vivian’s gray suede clutch.
Perfunctory thanks and goodbyes. The Fabergé objects were left behind. Nikolai, Archer, and Vivian were again out on Bruton Street. “What a nice older gentleman,” Vivian said. “I’d much rather do business with his sort than with some bleeding dealer.”
“Where to now?” Archer asked. The curbside passenger door of his Rolls was open.
“First to the bank, then let’s pay bills,” Vivian said and ducked in to take her middle position on the plush. Nikolai and Archer flanked her. When the Rolls got under way she hooked an arm left and right, beamed a grateful smile Archer’s way, then sent an equal to Nikolai, but his with a bit of lascivious eyework in it. Nikolai was still suffering his cruller affliction. He asked if Archer had any kind of fizzy water in the car. Archer surpassed that. He opened a compartment to reveal a magnum of champagne bedded in shaved ice, its neck already peeled and its cork just popped. Archer’s man had timed those preparations exactly. All Archer had to do was give the cork a finesseful twist to have a barely visible vapor wisp up out of the bottle like some at-long-last-released specter. Archer distributed the glasses, filled them, then proposed: “To solvency!”
“To solvency!” they toasted conspirator
ially and gulped down about half of that pouring.
“May I belch?” Nikolai asked.
“May I join you?” Vivian asked and did. Her belch didn’t match the explosiveness of Nikolai’s but was a sort of liberated empty stomach growl that had a bit of melody to it.
Archer pretended to find them both in bad form. “Gawd!” he exclaimed.
“You should talk,” Vivian chided. “You, the Western Hemisphere’s all-time champion belcher, and, I might add, wind-breaker.”
“Shall I let one go?” Archer asked.
“No!” Vivian laughed and went suddenly straight-faced as she turned to Nikolai, “Quick, down with the windows before he shatters them!”
The Rolls pulled up and double-parked in front of Vivian’s bank. She was happy to go in. Her deposit was instantly honored. She wrote two checks against it that zeroed out the first and second and third mortgages owed on her London flat and her house in Devon. While seated at the bank officer’s desk awaiting the details of those arrangements she decided to use more than her knees. A gleaming cylinder of lipstick seemed to accidentally drop from her purse. She bent over to retrieve it, thus fully utilizing her plunge. The bank officer’s eyes went for it. His Adam’s apple disappeared twice below his shirt collar. He was the one who’d had no sympathy and been unaffected by her earlier that week. Vivian gave him an indignant humph and communicated hard-eyed that in another breath she was of a mind to register a complaint to his most superior superior. His efficiency was a plea, she thought. He swiftly supplied her with a sheaf of blank checks, suggested an interest-bearing account, reassured her she would never have any hitches, he’d personally see to it.
“You’ve personally seen to it, all right,” Vivian told him and on that made her exit to another flute of Taittinger. She noticed from the level in the bottle that Nikolai and Archer had been at it. Nikolai was grinning as if he’d just come from the dentist and been shot with novocaine on both sides. Archer’s ears were almost a flamingo shade headed for cerise, a giveaway. They were chatting on about weapons, Archer extolling the merits of a certain over-and-under twelve-gauge that Purdy had made for him a dozen or so years ago. Next time they were in the country Archer would show it to him, even promised to let him have a try with it. Nikolai said his experience had been mainly with rifles and pistols. Had Archer ever shot a Makarov SL? Archer admitted he didn’t believe he had, said he’d never been much for handguns but Vivian was, Vivian was an excellent shot, a natural, watch out for her.
Vivian reached to Nikolai’s inside jacket pocket for his pen. It was a ballpoint. She detested ballpoints; they wouldn’t write when there was even the slightest amount of oil on the paper, such as when she’d put some lotion on her hands. She helped herself to Archer’s inside jacket pocket for his fountain pen, a black-lacquered eighteen-karat-gold Dupont. Archer ordered them by the dozen, was constantly losing them, leaving them on someone’s desk. Vivian used the back of one of her new checks to jot a list of her debtors. Not to remind herself—she knew them well—but just to determine what would be the most convenient order of payment. She numbered them. While Archer and Nikolai continued on about guns across her face she instructed the chauffeur.
The traffic was dreadful, as usual, but the Rolls kept its dignity as it made its way from one of Vivian’s creditors to another, from bookmaker to Asprey’s, from Forthum’s to Culpepper’s, from another bookmaker to Hatchard’s to the White House to Smythson’s, from the upper half of a rundown house in Maida Vale, where she paid Gareth, the medium tout, what she owed him for the past month’s few winners, to a garage in Pimlico that had worked on her Bent two and a half years ago and had given up on her. She paid her accounts at Harrods and a really old, old one for a great many flowers she’d ordered from Pulbrook & Gould on a day when she’d felt only bouquets would lift her. She’d almost forgotten that one. It was pre-Nikolai, seemed like another age. Her final payoff was at Brooks’s, Archer’s club, where she left in separate envelopes checks to cover the markers she’d given for her poker losses three nights previous. Couldn’t say she was a welcher. Then she copped Archer’s Dupont, clipped it into Nikolai’s inside jacket pocket, and announced: “I’m famished.”
They lunched at the Connaught. Although they had no reservations and arrived past the time when serving was over, Archer’s presence was like a credential that got them pleasantly welcomed and shown down the narrow oak-paneled hallway to the dining room. Archer, now in his element, indicated a freshly linened table by a window, and as they were being seated he palmed a twenty to the maître d’hôtel.
Nikolai felt several degrees more important than usual. He’d lunched here a few times with Churcher at the expense of the Soviet government but had always been made to wait. He casually surveyed the room. Vacant set tables, fewer guests than waiters, those mostly middle-aged women, menopaused well-offs, diffidently dressed, small-talking over tea and allowing nibbles of butter cookies to dissolve in their mouths. Nikolai, influenced by a morning and noon of too much champagne, thought how it might be fun to be a snob for a while, one who wouldn’t admit to liking anything much and nothing anyone else did, who suffered ennui to such an extent he seemed to float around, whose wit was amusingly pessimistic and something to be wary of, the possessor of a vast, piercing vocabulary. That sort. Nikolai checked the edges of his shirt cuffs to make sure they weren’t soiled. He heard himself say, “Nothing, thank you,” in response to the question of a drink before lunch.
They ordered. Vivian ordered too much. Throughout the meal she seemed edgy and often removed. She hardly touched her food. The waiter took notice and inquired if there was anything wrong. She replied vaguely, as though she saw no reason why he should ask. Several times she went off on a side road of thought, then returned and talked a lot, strung her sentences and subjects together like a train made up of different types and shades of cars. She went from mentioning that in her opinion it was morbid for someone to pay over fifty thousand pounds for the death mask of John Keats to saying that she believed there had been numerous incidents of human parthenogenesis, times when women became pregnant with no male involvement, and thus quite possibly the immaculate conception had been an electrical occurrence. What did they think Napoleon really died of? Before either Nikolai or Archer could reply Vivian was off on the fact that Picasso’s father, Ruiz, had been a worker in a factory that turned out forgeries of Spanish art, Goyas and things, she supposed. Then, after a pause so brief it couldn’t have accommodated more than half a thought, she stated that Vita Sackville-West and Lady Elsie Mendl were two of her all-time favorite women, although Vita might have been happier had she come out for her sexual preferences a bit more and spent less time in gardens, Vivian said.
For dessert she chose three different cakes, a lemon tart, and a huge blob of trifle from the trolley and ignored them all. She was again off on one of her pensive journeys, far away this time. She came back very abruptly. “I don’t owe a soul,” she blurted. Her hodgepodge of thoughts had coalesced into that one. It wasn’t a painful realization, but neither was it comfortable for her. “I don’t owe a bloody soul,” she said, apparently disconsolate. Quickly, self-consciously, she dispelled the evidence, pulled up the corners of her mouth to make a nice smile for Nikolai, and told him: “Thanks to you, Nickie dear.” To dilute her insincerity she reached over and gave the back of his neck a few loving kneads. Her gold bangles collided on her arm. The ring of them seemed excessively loud. She began eating the trifle, an excuse that allowed her to mull.
The changes Vivian had just gone through hadn’t been missed by Nikolai. He didn’t quite understand them but was not entirely off the mark. She was, he thought, suffering the shock of solvency. It was an unfamiliar condition for her, but she’d get used to it and be happier. The woman I love, he thought as he studied her. Today she had a tinge of darkness half-mooned below her eyes. Without makeup it would have been more discernible. A penalty for last night’s indulgences that a deep uninterrupted sleep toni
ght could erase. If that was possible. She didn’t seem to know her limitations. Nor, for that matter, did he. What was it about their chemistries combined that enabled them to pull through the tiny openings of their vulnerabilities such swollen knots of pleasure, insatiably, time and time again? It wasn’t lack of fulfillment that drove them. It was quality of feeling, perhaps the disbelief of it. Nikolai wanted so much to please her, to continue pleasing her with such intensity. Not that it made him feel like more of a man. Actually, it caused him to identify more closely with what it was like to be a woman.
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