The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  “Yes,” said Shrieve. “I can see you’re shocked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. I can’t explain why it works. I’m afraid you’d have to come and see us to understand. We like each other very much, we get on very well together. I love her. In her own way, I think she loves me.”

  “I suppose love is rather an advanced idea,” said Edward.

  “Yes, they have nothing to compare with our notions. They recognise sexual passion in the young—they think it’s rather funny, actually. They marry very early, so marriage is usually based simply on physical passion. Then they’re strictly monogamous, and with very few exceptions entirely faithful. It’s all very simple compared to our society. The weddings are tremendous fun—the couple is ridiculed, giggled at, and taken wholly seriously. The laughter is sympathetic, you see.”

  “It sounds marvellous,” said Edward. “I wish my own adolescence had been so ideally simple.”

  “They like their sex,” said Shrieve. “They expect a high standard of performance.”

  “All right, all right,” said Edward. “They can’t be that perfect.”

  Shrieve smiled. “No, they’re not perfect. But they’re very likeable. I love them.”

  “No one could doubt that,” said Edward.

  “Good Lord,” said Shrieve, getting up, “here we’ve been sitting chattering, and it’s almost dusk.” He switched on the

  They blinked at each other under the sudden yellow glare. To Shrieve, Edward looked frighteningly young and almost athletic, poised tensely on the edge of his chair. To Edward, Shrieve seemed scarcely human, the light striking down on his hollow face as on the face of a medieval statue, strong-boned, gaunt, decisive.

  “Are you dining anywhere?” said Shrieve.

  “No.”

  “We could eat together somewhere, perhaps. I’ll just try Jumbo again. He said he’d be in this evening. He made a point of my calling, in fact.”

  He drew the curtains, at once making the room seem smaller and nastier, then dialled the number. As the phone rang, he looked round Weatherby’s flat, thinking how sordid it was to have a love-nest at all.

  Jumbo answered. “Oh, Hugh, dear fellow, I’d just about given you up. What happened? It’s after eight.”

  Jumbo was always reproachful, always managed to make it seem that he was being let down. Shrieve sighed and said, “I tried earlier, but all I got was your maid.”

  “My maid? Oh, yes, of course, my maid.”

  “She said she didn’t take messages, then she went to find you and came back and said ‘Not’ and rang off.”

  “Oh my God,” said Jumbo jovially, “well, we’ll have to have a bit of a parley with her in the morning, won’t we? My goodness, yes.”

  Shrieve raised his eyebrows at the ceiling and said, “What was so urgent, Jumbo? You could just as easily have rung me.”

  “The fact is, old chap, that no, I couldn’t, actually, not at all. It’s all a bit tricky to explain over the phone, but how about you and me having a pint or two one night this week, eh? Got something to tell you.”

  “All right. I’m afraid Wednesday is my only free evening, though.”

  “Wednesday,” said Jumbo importantly. “Half a jiffy while I squint at the old appointments book.” Shrieve could hear pages being turned deliberately loudly. “Why, yes,” said Jumbo at last, “Wednesday I can make it. What a bit of luck, eh? Where shall it be?”

  “Do you want to make it before or after dinner?”

  “After, I’m afraid, old boy. Not a chance before. Working till seven most nights, you know, and then I have to keep another hour free for business drinks. Shall we say nine o’clock? That suit you? And how about somewhere central, eh? See a bit of the old hub of the Empire, dear fellow. There’s a nice little place just off Coventry Street. The Jupiter. How about that?”

  “All right,” said Shrieve. “I expect I’ll be able to find it. Which side of Coventry Street?”

  “Oh my poor dear chap, haven’t been in London for many a long year, have you, eh? It’s in the street which the Brachs Restaurant is on the corner of, if you get my meaning. You can’t miss it.”

  “Very well,” said Shrieve. “Wednesday at nine, then.”

  “Oh, and old boy. You aren’t going to miss the reunion now, are you? We’ve settled for Friday fortnight. Write it down now, won’t you, like a good chappie. Everyone wants to see you again, you know. You mustn’t let us all down.”

  “All right. I hope my conference is over by then, that’s all.”

  “Sure to be, sure to be,” said Jumbo. “Excellent. Jolly good. First class. Very nice to hear your voice again, old boy. Honi soit qui mal y pense, and all that. Sweet dreams.”

  “Goodbye,” said Shrieve.

  “Toodle-oo,” said Jumbo.

  “There’s something very peculiar about that man,” said Shrieve, putting the receiver down. “If that was his maid before, I’ll eat a solar topee for dinner. Where shall we go?”

  He put on a coat and despite Edward’s protest wrapped a scarf round his neck.

  “I’ve got to keep fit,” he said grimly as they started down the stairs. “God only knows what strains and stresses we’re going to have to put up with in the next few weeks.”

  His use of the plural made Edward glow with pleasure. He had to clear his throat before he could say, “I believe there’s a very nice little French place around here somewhere.”

  6

  MR LEONARD BRACHS’S origin was unknown. There were those who took one look at the pictures which appeared from time to time in the papers and said “Jew”, as though that settled the matter. But Mr Brachs was not a Jew, was not, in fact, even Jewish as far as anyone could discover. Although his name suggested that he probably came from somewhere between Bavaria and Bulgaria, it couldn’t be said with any assurance that he was so much as middle-European. Some said he was a gipsy, others that he was the illegitimate son of a deposed monarch, still others that he was an ex-Nazi in impeccable disguise. Very little indeed was known of Mr Brachs, except that no one had heard of him before the war and that after it he was not only there, but there with a great deal of money. There were whispers of enormous profits from scrap-metal, of black-market beef on a scale to stagger the imagination, of fleets of lorries running on illegal petrol, and herds of prime cattle in the Highlands.

  The mystery of Mr Brachs demanded explanation, yet none was ever forthcoming. People spoke of him with awe or bitterness or rage or wonder, but no one actually knew anything about him at all. Interviewed once by a hopeful girl reporter for one of the more sensational Sunday papers, Mr Brachs had been charming but quite unhelpful. “I am trying,” the girl had explained with all the earnestness of a recent second-class graduate of the London School of Economics, “to get an angle which will make you really vivid to our readers, sir.” Mr Brachs had spread his hands in a gesture which expressed willingness to help while deprecating the idea that any reader could possibly be interested in anyone so unremarkable as himself. Part of the unpublished interview had read:

  “Where were you born, Mr Brachs?”

  “Ah, my mother!”

  “Yes. But where were you born?”

  “I tried so hard to be a devoted son.”

  “Were you a devoted son?”

  “What son is ever as devoted as he should be to the source of his being?”

  “Mr Brachs, do you have a photograph of your mother we could publish? I’m sure our readers would love that.”

  “Ah she was so beautiful! But when she was young, when she was eighteen, before she was married, before I was born, she was exquisite, exquisite!”

  The reporter noted that at this moment his eyes seemed full of tears.

  “She would have won a beauty competition,” he said.

  “But do you have her photograph?”

  “Her image is engraved for ever on my heart.”

  Mr Brachs spoke with an accent, though it was less an accent proper than an absence of accent, an indefi
nable neutrality of tone. There were, too, idiosyncrasies of grammar (though these may have been deliberate), and he had a taste for puns. Beyond these small eccentricities, however, Mr Brachs presented an impenetrable front. No matter what the weather, the state of the market or the balance of power between nations, there was always a thoroughly mean look on his dark, well-fleshed face. He was rarely seen to smile, except in front of cameras, when he smiled continually. His expensively oiled black hair was brushed straight back, and he had thick lenses in the heavy black frames of his glasses. His eyes were impossible to meet behind the distortion, but they seemed to be grey.

  If little was known of its builder, everyone was clear that the Brachs empire was huge. It was run from the Brachs Building in Coventry Street, a giant glass skyscraper which was an important landmark in the busy redevelopment of central London in which Mr Brachs himself played a considerable role. On the ground floor of the Building was a self-service restaurant of the type that had made the name Brachs famous throughout the country. Employing mainly immigrant labour, these restaurants provided an identical menu to customers in over three hundred British towns. On the first floor was a grander restaurant, The Hearts Of Oak: here one was served by waitresses, and a man with a silver-plated corkscrew on a silver-plated chain strode majestically about offering the carte des vins. There were private banqueting rooms for hire, too. The next two floors contained the headquarters of the chain of restaurants. Floors five to seven were occupied by Brachs Enterprises Incorporated: it was from here that much of London’s future architecture was planned and the rents of large estates were raised in accordance with the generous provisions of the 1957 Rent Act. Above the real estate came the Free (England) Company. The bottling was done in Fulham, but master-plans for increasing the already vast sales were adumbrated here. The fifteenth floor belonged to Brachs Holdings Limited: outside the lift were over two hundred brass plates with the names of subsidiary companies through which were managed the controlling interests in several insurance firms, and very large holdings in the electronics and motor industries. The sixteenth and seventeenth floors were given over to a recent branching out into the teenage clothes market: already a chain of stores in all the large industrial complexes was selling goods with the Brachs label. (“Brachs’s Jeans Fit Tighter” was the simple slogan of the firm: nothing was said about the durability of the trousers, it being assumed that by the time they were worn out the owners would have grown out of them either physically or emotionally.) The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth floors were allotted to Champney, Morrison, Dulake and Co, a long-established musical agency which Mr Brachs had taken over (much to the surprise of Champney, Morrison, Dulake, their heirs and partners) some five years earlier. On these three floors were auditioned, trained, made and broken the singers who could induce teenagers to buy hundreds of thousands of their records. Nervous youths making their way into the Brachs Building, clutching guitars or sheets of music, even the glossy cases of chrome mouth-organs, were a regular attraction of Coventry Street. A very few of them would emerge later with resplendently spangled suits, new names, new hair-styles and, briefly, entirely new lives.

  On the top two floors, below the inevitable hut which housed the lift machinery (apparently designed in honour of the typical war-time pill-box), were Mr Brachs’s office and apartment. The office was as long as the Building, with a fine view over the city Mr Brachs was so actively reshaping. In an adjoining office worked a flurry of cowed secretaries, presided over by a confidential clerk whose official salary was ten thousand pounds a year and who had never been bribed. Some of the cowed secretaries and a few equally cowed directors of the many subsidiary companies had occasional access to Mr Brachs’s office, but never to the floor above. It was rumoured that Mr Brachs had hired a New York decorator to prepare this holy of holies, and that not merely the taps of the bath, but the bath itself was of beaten gold. Like most of the stories about Mr Brachs, there seemed no way of finding out whether or not this was true. Mr Brachs was not a conversational man, and spoke to his subordinates on all but the most important matters by closed-circuit television. Though rumour about the apartment was rife, no one could be found who had actually entered it.

  By night the Building glowed a subdued amber from lights hidden behind the exterior cross-beams of bronze. At the very top, above the lift machinery, a red neon sign announced alternately BRACHS and FREE. Since this could be read as FREE BRACHS, the Building was known to some as The Prison. It was jokingly said that the neon sign was switched off by Mr Brachs personally when he went to bed. At street-level, tall panes of amber-tinted glass revealed a brightly-lit multilevel interior where thousands of Brachs Special Dinners were eaten nightly. Remarkably for London, the self-service restaurant stayed open all night, even on Sundays.

  Edward was sitting at a long counter drinking Free (only soft drinks were served on the ground floors of Brachs restaurants) and waiting for Pete and Judy. They were already twenty minutes late, but he scarcely noticed, his mind busy with possible signatories of Shrieve’s letter to The Times. He didn’t know anyone of any importance at all, he decided: he thought he was glad that this should be so, but wasn’t quite sure. Looking along the counter he wondered if any of the six or seven negroes eating there were from Shrieve’s colony, were Luagabu, perhaps. Then he debated the possibility of getting Mr Brachs to sign the letter. His name was everywhere, he surely couldn’t object to having it in The Times, too.

  “Hi,” said Pete, briefly resting a hand on Edward’s shoulder. “Sorry we’re late.” He was carrying a trumpet case.

  “Hi, Pete. Hi, Judy. I’ve eaten, but I’ll sit and watch you, if you like.”

  “No,” said Judy. “We’ve eaten, too. Edward, this is Frank Barrett, the drummer we told you about.”

  Barrett nodded briefly. He was ginger-haired, with a squashed nose. Pete had spoken of him rather scornfully, Edward remembered.

  “Hi, Frank. Heard a lot about you.” In their world shaking hands was rigorously out.

  “Look, Edward,” said Pete, “we’ve got a gig at the Racket in about ten minutes. Hope you’re not planning on going anywhere, because you can’t.”

  “No. Sounds great. Where’s the Racket?”

  “Not far,” said Judy. “Frank’s arranged a spot from eleven to twelve.”

  “Oh, one of those places,” said Edward.

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “The manager’s a friend of mine.”

  “Come on,” said Pete, “we’d better hustle.”

  They went up Rupert Street and across Shaftesbury Avenue into Soho. In a street full of record and clothes shops, Italian restaurants and French groceries, a cursive sign in yellow neon announced “The Racket” over a plate-glass window stuck with advertisements for dances and pop concerts. Inside there was a florid coffee machine, worked by a girl with a dyed blonde bouffant hairdo too big for her pinched little face, and a long red formica counter edged with chrome. Teenage boys and girls in smart shirts and fluffy sweaters gazed at each other with carefully posed calm over cups of coffee and bottles of Free.

  Barrett led the way past the counter and down some steps to a large cellar, the walls of which were dark blue. It was lit by two orange globes, one at each side of the stand on which a three-piece band, trumpet, clarinet and electric guitar, was playing loudly and crudely. Twenty or thirty people were grouped about the cellar, listening with empty faces or jiving together with neat precise movements. The girls mostly wore white make-up and dyed hairdos like that of the girl who worked the coffee machine upstairs; their skirts were short and twisted prettily from their hips in the dance. The men were in closely tailored slacks or jeans; some wore leather or suede jackets, or unbuttoned cardigans, but most were in short-sleeved, open-necked shirts. Neither sports coat nor grey flannel trousers were to be seen.

  The music rose to a deafening climax, then subsided into a coarse major chord, held too long and dominated brutally by the trumpet. A short, bald man, with a cigarette betwe
en his lips, came over to Barrett and said, “This your lot?”

  “There should be another one somewhere,” said Barrett. “Just let me get used to the light, and I’ll spot him.”

  A rangy man in spectacles made his way through the remains of the dance (some continued, as though music was unnecessary, to twirl and twiddle like clockwork dolls) and came up to them.

  “Here he is,” said Barrett. “Hi, Greg. This is Pete. I told you about him. And this is Judy, she just listens. And this is—what’s your name again?”

  “Edward.”

  “Glad to know you, Ed,” said the tall man. “I’m Greg.”

  “What d’you play?”

  “Tenor.”

  Edward liked the saxophone, it was right for his kind of music. He wasn’t so sure, though, about having both piano and drums. A drummer was often just an unnecessary loudness in the background. The kids liked a heavy beat, true, but for real music the piano ought to be able to handle everything that was needed. Of course, a little quiet brushwork was often a steadying, even a vital, contribution to the whole. It all depended on the drummer.

  “O.K., you’re on,” said the man with the cigarette. “There’s another group coming in after you.”

  “Who’s leading?” said Edward.

  These casual gatherings of musicians who didn’t know each other could work out well sometimes, but they could also be terrible.

  When they had arranged themselves on the stand to their mutual satisfaction, Barrett said, “Pete, Ed. This is a place the kids like to jive in. None of the far-out stuff. Greg leads, then Ed, then Pete. Right? What do we all know? We begin with something trad, right, then move into what we like. See how it goes.”

  “Not the goddam Saints,” said Pete, blowing softly through his trumpet and fingering the stops.

  “‘Dark Town Strutters Ball’,” said Barrett. “B flat.”

  They went off into the old New Orleans number with plenty of vigour, Pete and Greg eyeing each other a little, wondering how they were going to balance the two horns. Edward concentrated on a rich but basically simple background of chords, with occasional treble adornments: he was listening to the others, trying to feel his way into their styles. The main job of the pianist to begin with was to support the front-line players. After a ragged opening, Greg’s solo was conventional but musical, giving odd hints that he might have real power for later on. Edward backed him softly, more for himself than the saxophone, then broke into his own solo, keeping within the limits Barrett had set, allowing himself only one break into a fast series of off-beat minor chords that quickly resolved into the major. As Pete took over Edward glanced at Barrett to see if it had been all right. Barrett, who was using too much cymbal, Edward thought, nodded but gave a couple of rim-shots and grimaced to indicate that the minor chords had been too far out. Edward looked round the floor, backing Pete automatically (they had played this number so often it was impossible for either of them to interest the other with it any more), and saw that there were fewer dancers than before his solo. He shrugged at Barrett and raised his eyebrows expressively. Barrett cymballed on without comment. The hell with the Racket, thought Edward.