by William Boyd
She glanced at him. “You must tell me about your theory some time.”
He wondered if this was the moment to kiss her, but she was leading him across the road towards the river.
“I live on a houseboat,” she said.
“Amazing,” Adam said, now acknowledging that he was definitely drunkish and thinking: a houseboat, sex on a houseboat.
“I live on a houseboat with my dad.”
Adam said nothing.
“He said nothing.”
“No, good. I think that…You know, cool.”
“I’d like you to meet him, which was why I texted him.”
“Ah-ha. Excellent.”
She unlocked a metal gate and they walked down a sloping metal bridge to a substantial mooring area. There seemed many different types of vessel berthed here in the dark, some with lights shining from their windows, and Adam supposed this was a sort of floating village. They walked along shifting metal gangplanks between the boats.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Nine Elms Pier,” she said. “Apparently there used to be a row of nine elms round about here in the middle of the seventeenth century.”
“Really? Amazing…”
“Hence the name.”
“I think I got that.”
“Not just a pretty face, then.”
Adam said nothing. He could tell she was a bit tense.
They were heading towards a small inlet at the end where some larger vessels were berthed. He saw what looked like a deep-sea trawler and a modified barge and, at the end, what appeared to be a reconditioned naval vessel, still with its battleship-grey paint.
“Here we are,” she said, stopping in front of it. “The good ship Bellerophon. Home sweet home.”
She unlocked another gate and they climbed some steep metal steps on to the deck. Sizeable, Adam thought, looking around him, some sort of minesweeper or large patrol boat, perhaps. Rita opened a bulkhead door and light streamed out. Steep stairs led down.
“Go down backwards,” she said. “The Navy way.”
Adam did as he was told and heard a deep voice saying, “Welcome aboard, matey.”
He found himself in a dark sitting room, with a few low lights burning, narrow with low ceilings but fitted out with an assortment of armchairs on a shaggy dark-brown carpet. One wall was all bookshelves. There was a lingering smell of joss sticks and in one corner was a TV set, the sound turned down.
A gaunt-faced man in his sixties with long, thinning grey hair tied back in a pony-tail heaved himself out of his seat and reached for an arm-crutch before coming over to greet them. Adam noticed there was a wheelchair in the corner of the room. The man moved towards them with obvious difficulty, almost as if he were walking on artificial limbs.
“Dad, this is Primo. Primo, this is my dad, Jeff Nashe.”
“Good to meet you, Primo,” he said, extending and twisting round his left hand in greeting. Adam gripped it and shook it briefly and awkwardly, but Nashe held on to it. “First question: you’re not a fucking copper, are you?”
“I’m a hospital porter.”
Jeff Nashe turned incredulously to his daughter. “Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“At last,” Nashe said. “One with a proper job.”
Adam decided Nashe was a bit stoned as he finally let go of Adam’s hand. He was a strong-faced man with high cheekbones and a sharp, hooked nose, but wasted—he had bags under his eyes, his hair was thin and grizzled in its summer-of-love 19605 pony-tail. But Adam could see from whom Rita derived her bone structure.
“Coffee, tea or a glass of wine?” Rita asked.
“I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine, actually,” Adam said.
“Same here,” Nashe said. “Bring the bottle, darling.”
They settled themselves on chairs in front of the mute TV—a twenty-four-hour news channel, Adam noticed—Nashe kept glancing at it as he rolled himself a cigarette, as if he were waiting for a specific item to come up. He offered Adam his tobacco pouch and roll-up papers. Adam said no thanks.
“You can see I’m semi-crippled,” Nashe said. “Victim of an industrial accident. Seventeen years of litigation.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t give a toss.”
He hauled himself out of the chair again and, not picking up the arm-crutch, crossed the room to the bookcase, at a fair pace, Adam thought, and returned with a book that he dropped in Adam’s lap.
“That was me before the accident,” he said.
Adam looked at the book, a large softback with the title Civic Culture in Late Modernity: the Latin American Challenge, and the author’s name, Jeff Nashe.
“Fascinating,” Adam said.
“Forty-two universities, polytechnics and colleges had that book on their reading lists in the 19705.”
Rita came through at this point with the bottle of wine and three glasses. She switched off the TV and replaced the book in the bookshelf.
“Sorry,” she said. “He always does that.”
“Because it’s important to me,” Nashe said petulantly. “I know he thinks I’m some kind of saddo, has-been loser. I don’t want your boyfriend’s pity.”
“He’s not my boyfriend and he doesn’t pity you,” Rita said with some heat. “OK? So sit down and have a glass of wine.”
He complied and Rita poured the wine. They all had a sip and Rita topped them up.
“So, Primo,” Nashe said. “Who did you vote for at the last election?”
Up on deck there was a breeze coming down the river from the west. The leaves in Rita’s deck-garden stirred and rustled, the palms clattering drily, clicking like knitting needles. Rita and Adam were sitting in the middle of this makeshift shrubbery, up by the forward gun-emplacement, smoking a joint. The tide was rising and below him Adam could feel the Bellerophon beginning to heave herself off the mud.
“I don’t usually smoke,” Rita said. “And I shouldn’t let him wind me up like that. But I wanted you to meet him—just to let you know, put you in the picture. He was behaving fairly badly tonight—a bit too bloody pleased with himself—mostly he’s much easier with guests.” She inhaled and passed the joint to Adam, who puffed dutifully at it and handed it back. He couldn’t tell if it was having any effect.
“Sometimes I just need to get out of my head for a few minutes.” She exhaled and looked over at him. “Lovely evening.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Adam said. “Don’t worry, officer.”
“Thank you, kind sir.” She smiled at him and inclined her head in a little bow of acknowledgement.
“What happened to your father?” he asked.
“He was a lecturer in Latin American studies at East Battersea Polytechnic,” she paused. “And one night he fell down the stairs to the library and badly hurt his back.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. He sued, they appealed, he won. He hasn’t worked since. That was the industrial accident.” She took a big hit on her joint.
“Latin American studies. So that’s why your brother’s called Ernes to.”
“Ernesto Guevara Nashe. I’m called after one ‘Margarita Camilo’—she was in the Sierra Maestra mountains with Castro’s rebel army. Margarita Camilo Nashe at your service.”
“Right,” Adam was thinking. So it’s Margarita…“So there’s a strong Spanish, Latin American connection in the Nashe family.”
“No, no, he’s never been to either Central or South America.”
“But he taught Latin American studies. And the book.”
“Let’s say there was an opening in academic life in the late sixties. A career opportunity. He was a historian who couldn’t find employment anywhere. They set up a Latin American studies department at East Battersea and they offered him a job…” She shrugged. “Suddenly he became a Latin American expert. To be fair he loved it—he was a kind of virtual revolutionary until he fell down the stairs.”
“Does he speak Spanish?”
“Do you?” She laughed loudly at the idea. “Habla espanol, amigo!” she said. The drug was beginning to work its narcotic magic. Adam was beginning to understand why Rita became a policewoman.
“I’d better go,” Adam said and stood up—and staggered as the Bellerophon heaved herself free from the Thames mud and was buoyant. Rita caught him.
Their kiss was, for Adam, a great, heady release—of pleasure, of desire for Rita. He felt a kind of fizzing through his gut and loins as her tongue searched deep into his mouth and he held her to him strongly. But at the same time as he was thinking this is wonderful—another part of his brain was saying: this is a bit sudden, all a bit rushed.
They broke apart.
“This is all a bit sudden, a bit rushed,” Rita said. “But I’m not complaining.”
“I was sort of thinking the same.”
“You could come back down below,” she said. “I’m a big girl—do have my own room.”
“Maybe not tonight, I think.”
“That is sensible, Primo Belem, wise man. Thank you. Yes.” She was high.
She walked him back through the marina along the gangways to the shore, holding on to his arm with both hands, her head on his shoulder. They kissed again, with more deliberateness, a more conscious savouring of their lips and tongues in contact. What was it about kissing? Adam thought. How could it seem so important, this meeting of four lips, two mouths, two tongues? Sometimes those first kisses can turn your head, Adam realised, recognising the absurd weakness in himself that made him want to have his head turned, to say something declarative to her, to register the emotion he was feeling. After two kisses?—ridiculous, he thought. He resisted.
45
THERE WAS NO DOUBT THAT THE NEW ADVERTORIAL WAS IMPRESSIVE, Ingram thought—and well designed, and classy, and highly effective. Two smiling, adorable, blonde children, a boy and a girl, looking up fondly at a really incredibly attractive—not to say stunningly beautiful—young mother, looking down equally fondly at them. The colours were lambent, radiant: golds, creams, the palest yellows. “AN END TO ASTHMA?” was the heading in bold, writ large, confident in dark forest-green. There was a sententious quotation from him, something about being a force for good in a dangerous world, signed Ingram Fryzer, Chairman and CEO of Calenture-Deutz, and even his actual signature underneath it. Where had they taken that from? he wondered. Then he recalled it was routinely reproduced on all the brochures the company sent out. Yes, everything about the advertorial looked big, caring, a brighter future almost within our grasp. This could be the life we all could lead, the pages said, implicitly: let’s not waste any more time, for the sakes of pretty children and beautiful mothers like these. We don’t want them to suffer.
Ingram closed the magazine. He should feel proud, he supposed—this drug had been developed by his company, his team (with help from Rilke Pharmaceuticals, of course) and its success would rebound hugely in his and Calenture-Deutz’s favour…He flicked back to the ad—interesting, no Rilke logo, just Calenture-Deutz’s. In the proof he’d been shown by Rilke that day the inference was that this was a fight being led by Rilke Pharma. Perhaps Alfredo was shrewdly hedging his bets, waiting for the submissions to go through, get the rubber stamp before he re-directed the limelight.
Ingram sighed audibly—he was always sighing in Lachlan’s waiting room, he realised, but this time he was alone. He should feel proud, yes, dammit—years of work and toil, millions of pounds of investment and the drug was perhaps only a few weeks, some months or so, away from licensing. Good would be done in the world, suffering would be eased, mankind’s lot would be more bearable, this vale of tears less burdensome—and yet he felt unhappy, morose, powerless, even angry. How had he allowed this to happen? How come Burton Keegan and Alfredo Rilke were calling all the shots?…He knew immediately the simple, brutal answer to his outraged question—money. Maybe that was what was affecting his mood. Guilt. They had given him so much money that he had allowed himself to be neutered. That’s what he was: a eunuch. A eunuch chairman, a testicularly challenged CEO—
“You’ll have had your tea, Ingram,” Dr Lachlan McTurk said in the quavering voice of a Scottish miser, beckoning him with one finger into his consulting room.
Ingram showed him the pages in the magazine. “Have you seen this?” he asked.
“Not until now—but half a dozen of my patients have already asked me for your wonder drug. There have been articles in the press hailing it. Congratulations—it looks like being a monster.”
“Thank you. Yes, I suppose…” Ingram waited for the warm glow of pride, that little kick of self-esteem, but it resolutely would not come. He felt flat, depressed.
“And I suppose you’re going to make truly disgusting amounts of money,” Lachlan said, rummaging among his notes.
“Possibly,” Ingram said. “But the question is: will I live to display it?”
“Display your money?”
“I meant to say ‘enjoy’…” Ingram said, frowning.
“Enjoy it and display it—conspicuous consumption.” Lachlan laughed, genuinely, a surprisingly girlish giggle from such a large man. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Cholesterol’s a bit high—join the club. Gamma-GT’s at the top end of the range—cut down a tad on the booze. You’re not overweight for a man of your age. Nothing showed up in the tests. Clean bill of health in my book.”
“I still get these frantic itches. This blood-spotting on my pillow. Very unsettling, you know,” Ingram said, more plaintively than he meant. He didn’t feel a stoic today. “Also, I keep making these slips with words. I think I’m saying one word but I’m actually using another.”
“Ah. Catachresis.”
“Is that what I have?”
“No, no,” Lachlan said, quickly. “That’s just the linguistic term for the phenomenon: a paradoxical use of words, you know, in error. A kind of innocent mixed-metaphor effect. ‘Display’ for ‘enjoy’ is rather good, in fact.”
“But sometimes I’ve meant to say ‘conversation’ and have said ‘temperature’. There is no logic.”
“Everything’s connected, particularly between words. Perhaps you were unconsciously recalling a particularly ‘hot’ conversation.”
“If everything’s connected, do you think this ‘catachresis’ is connected with the blood-spotting and the itches?”
Lachlan looked at him closely, almost suspiciously. “What I could do, of course, is give you a very powerful anti-depressant. You’ll be walking on air.”
“No thanks.” Pull yourself together, man, Ingram told himself. “I’m relieved. Thank you, Lachlan. Very grateful.”
“Let me know when your wonder drug’s about to hit the market. I’ll buy some shares.”
Ingram tugged on his socks, aware that his low mood had returned, if in fact it had ever left him. Maybe he should have taken Lachlan up on his offer of some happy pills—a little bit of chemical euphoria might be what he needed. He stood up and slipped his feet into his loafers and reached for his tie. Even this session with Phyllis hadn’t really cheered him up. She came into the room now, wearing a long silk dressing gown, red with snarling, scaly golden dragons. She had a clinking glass in each hand.
“Large vodka and tonic, squire,” she said, handing his over. “Cheers, Jack.” She blew him a kiss. “No extra charge.”
They touched the rims of their glasses and Ingram took two large gulps, enjoying the hit and the clear dry taste of the vodka.
“Phyllis,” he said, feigning spontaneity, “I was just thinking: would you ever contemplate—I mean, do you think we might be able to arrange a little holiday together?” He started putting on his tie. “Short break. Four or five days. Somewhere far away, sunny.”
“I have done holidays with some of my gents, yeah. Nice change of scene for us all.”
She sat down on the bed and allowed her dressing gown to fall open so he could see her left breast.
“Where are we
thinking about, love?” she asked.
“Morocco, I thought, there’s a super hotel—”
“Nah—don’t do the Med.”
“Florida? The Caribbean? South Africa?”
“More interesting.”
“I’d already be at the villa—”
“Hotel. Not villa holidays, darling. No room service.”
“Yes, hotel. And you fly in separately—”
“Business class,” she pulled the lapels of her dressing gown together.
“Goes without saying. We spend three or four blissful days together. You fly out.”
“I don’t think so, Jack. I lose money on these holidays. And it’s never really that enjoyable for me, to tell the truth. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“We could go radio if you prefer—I mean east: Sri Lanka, Thailand.”
“No. Best forget it.”
She stood and came over to him, frowning, pretending to show concern, rubbing his cheek with her knuckles.
“What’s brought this on, Jack-me-lad? Thought you wasn’t quite your old perky self.”
Ingram made up some story about pressure of work—he had told her once he was a pharmacist, he remembered. He said he was going to sell the shop—that was it, sell the business, he improvised—treat himself to a holiday.
“You built it up—you deserve the rewards,” she said. “You save your money. You earned it. You couldn’t really afford me on one of these trips. Wouldn’t like to take it off you.”
“Fine, no problem. You’re probably right.”
On the Tube train back to Victoria, Ingram felt his spirits lifting somewhat, even though Phyllis had quashed his plans. The idea had come to him a few days ago, and he wondered exactly why. Maybe it was just the simple need for change—a temporary change in his life with a new, very short-term, complication-free partner (he knew Meredith would suspect nothing—he was always flying off abroad to conferences and meetings). Bit of sea and sun, good food, good wine, vigorous uncomplicated sex on demand…Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea—there were other ‘Phyllises’ out there in the world…
