‘Well,’ said The Fat Controller eventually, his voice a tiny bit calmer, ‘what do you think?’
‘I think it's a silly idea,’ said the Money Critic, ‘and it'll never catch on.’
Ian sidled over to the window and stood gazing out over the large courtyard. Near the entrance to the theatre, at the Moorgate end of the development, a small bar had opened for business although it wasn't yet five. Some twenty or thirty office workers had escaped to have a drink and they stood by concrete tubs full of shrubbery, clutching lagers in their hands. One of them, Ian observed, was a young woman not unlike Jane Carter. He pondered their future together, he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked forward to tearing both it and her, apart.
CHAPTER TEN. THE NORTH LONDON BOOK OF THE DEAD (REPRISE)
The dreamer finds housed within himself — occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain — holding, perhaps, from that station a detestable commerce with his own heart — some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated — still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible even that — even this mere numeric double of his own consciousness — might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes it and confounds it? How again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These however, are horrors from the kingdom of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment and gloomily retire from exposition.
Jane and I were married within three months of that afternoon when I stood, staring out over the City and listening while The Fat Controller attempted to bully the Money Critic into giving a favourable verdict on ‘Yum-Yum’. Needless to say, the Money Critic's appreciation of it was right, ‘Yum-Yum’ was a total flop. The launch coincided neatly with a recession and a dramatic downturn in the demand for innovatory financial products.
The sixty standing booths commissioned by D.F.& L. and constructed by a team sub-contracted through Steve Souvanis had been erected all over London. For a while they were an oddity, commented upon in the local press. People would stand in them looking out through the perspex sides at the world passing by and grazing on the edible literature provided. But soon the booths became scratched, tarnished and conveniently whited-out, conveniently for the people who became their chief occupants, that is.
The capital's hardcore junkies had already sicked on to the useful character of the booths but once they were partially opaque they became a beacon for every street dragon-chaser, crack head and needle freak in the metropolis. The conveniently sited shelf was ideal for cooking up a shot, or assembling the fag ash needed for the base of a crack pipe; and the booths’ ambiguous transparency — it was far easier to look out of them than to look in — meant that the police could be spotted a mile off.
Soon it was so bad that the booths were overflowing with drifts of used syringes and crumpled up bits of tin foil. D.F.& L.’s site permission was revoked and Souvanis's team had the mournful task of doing the rounds disassembling them. They ended up, back with the other platonic forms, in the dusty Clacton warehouse.
Despite this The Fat Controller didn't give up on ‘Yum-Yum’. He was amused by the junkies’ occupation of the standing booths. In fact, he even encouraged it, exerting influence on his secret cabal of addicts via the redoubtable Dr Gyggle. He remained convinced that the whole débâcle was purely a function of the unfortunate way that ‘Yum-Yum’ had become fixed in the public's mind as a name for the first truly edible financial product and he continued to bully Hal Gainsby at D.F.& L. to set up naming group after naming group, in a vain attempt to come up with something better.
I wanted our wedding to be a subdued registry office affair but Jane's parents were set on a big bash. A marquee was erected on the spacious lawn of their Surrey home, caterers were hired and invitations printed for four hundred. There was hardly anyone that I wanted to invite — my life hadn't exactly tricked me out with a gallery of amusing pals, only a gallimaufry of grotesques.
Naturally Samuel Northcliffe came. He both escorted my mother and acted as best man. At the church in Reigate he stood rigidly next to me as we eyeballed the pained wooden Christ-figure nailed up over the altar. When I glanced down during the service, I saw that his left hand — as large and inert as a wheel of Gouda cheese — was casually arranged so as to ward off the evil eye from the approximate region of his testicles.
I didn't invite Gyggle — that would have been pushing it. Although Jane had never followed through with her voluntary work at the Lurie Foundation Hospital — her assessment having concluded in exactly the way he suspected it would — she'd have recalled him immediately. He's not the sort of man who blends into a crowd, however large and jolly it may be. I felt, quite reasonably, that Jane might be a little disturbed to discover exactly how it was that our particular affinity had been elected.
Jane was a beautiful bride, radiant in a cream satin dress she had helped to sew herself. At the end of the service when she lifted up her veil so that I could kiss her, I was struck anew by the absolutely trusting and direct expression on her face.
She was very excited — almost over-excited. It was a sunny enough day for it and the guests spread out from the marquee mingling on the dappled lawn; small children pissed in the pampas grass and tipsy elderly aunts either laughed or cried, as the spirit moved them.
The speeches were better than average. Jane's father, who was a stockbroker in the City before he retired, had made the classics his hobby, consequently his text was littered with clever literary allusions and poetical tropes. It went down very well, as did Samuel Northcliffe's.
If Jane's parents had had any doubts about their daughter marrying me — and I know for a fact that they did, they were as snobbish as any of the English and despite my mother's impeccable breeding, had hoped for a better match for their daughter than an hereditary marketing man — they were dispelled by the information that my guardian was Mr Samuel Northcliffe.
It must have been about the third or fourth time Jane took me back to her parents’ house for dinner when this came out.
‘Northcliffe, you say? Hmm.’ Mr Carter was prodding the unseasonable fire in the grate as he spoke, a sherry glass dangling from his signet-ringed hand. ‘I knew him slightly when I was in the City, he's prominent in a Lloyd's syndicate that I had connections with — a rather imposing man, isn't he?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘he can be a little overbearing, although he doesn't mean to be.’
‘And you say he was a friend of your father's?’
‘I believe so. They met when my father ran a marketing agency in the sixties.’
‘Of course, of course. And after your parents were separated he took an interest in your education?’
‘Oh very much so, in fact, I'd say I pretty much owe where I am today to him.’
‘Really, really.’ He dabbled some more with the poker while Jane and I exchanged the conspiratorial glances of lovers on the sofa.
When he finally showed up at the wedding, I could tell that my father-in-law-soon-to-be and his old City cronies were overawed by him. He was looking his chic best, immaculately attired in a sweeping swallow-tailed cut-away, a black cravat secured with a emerald stick pin, canary-yellow silk waistcoat, spongebag trousers and huge leather shoes complete with white spats fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons. My mother was on his arm and she too smart and elegant, having for so long been burnished by association.