SIX
"OUR USUAL, WAS it, Mr. Cranmer?"
"If you please, Tom."
"Expect you're looking forward to your Senior Citizen's any day now."
"Thank you, Tom, I have a few years to wait, and I'm glad to do it."
Laughter in which I share, for this is our standing bad joke every other Friday when I buy my ticket to Paddington and take my place on the platform among the London suits. And if today had been an ordinary Friday, I am sure I would have fantasised a little, imagining I was still in harness. And Emma in the good days would have playfully straightened my tie for me, and smoothed the lapels of my jacket, and wished me a nice day at the office, darling, before treating me to a last, delicious, disgracefully suggestive kiss. And in the bad days, she would have watched my departure from the shadows of her upper window, unaware apparently that I was watching her also, in the wing mirror of my Sunbeam, knowing that I was leaving her alone all day to her typewriter and telephone, and Larry thirty miles down the road.
But this morning I was feeling, in place of Emma's amateurish eye, the prickle of professional surveillance on my back. Bartering trivia with a forlorn baronet known locally as poor Percy, who, having inherited a thriving engineering business and run it into the ground, now sold life insurance on commission, I had glimpsed Tom the ticket clerk's silhouette ease across the window of his office to the telephone and speak into it with his back to me. And as the train pulled out of the station I spotted a man in a country cap and raincoat standing in the car park, zealously waving at a woman a few seats behind me, who paid him not the least attention. He was the same man who had followed me in his Bedford van from the crossroads at the end of my lane.
Arbitrarily I awarded Tom to the police, and the cap and raincoat to Munslow. Good luck to them, I thought. Let all pursuing parties note that on this duty Friday, Tim Cranmer is once more going about his customary business.
I was wearing my blue pinstripe. I dress up to people; I can't help it. If I am calling on the vicar, I don a tweed suit; watching a cricket match, a blazer and a sporting tie. And if, after four days' nightmarish incarceration inside my own head, I am attending the bimonthly trustees' meeting of the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales under the stewardship of Pringle Brothers PLC of Threadneedle Street, I cannot help but look a little like a banker myself as I board the train, study the financial pages of my newspaper, step into the chauffeur-driven car that awaits me among Brunel's splendid arches, give Pringle's uniformed doorman good morning, and see reflected in the glass-and-mahogany door the same unoccupied cab with its light off that had followed me all the way from Praed Street.
* * *
"Mr. Cranmer, hellao, reelly grite to see you," Jamie's supine secretary, Pandora, whined in her Roedean Cockney as I entered the leathery Edwardian antechamber of which she was the mistress.
"Hell's teeth, Tim!" cried Jamie Pringle, all sixteen stone of him, in his striped shirt and mulberry braces, as he forced me into touch with a crushing handshake. "Don't tell me it's Friday week already, what, what?"
Pringle's an arsehole, I heard Larry saying in my inner ear. Was. Is now And ever shall be. Amen.
Monty drifted in like his own shadow. He wore a hollowed black waistcoat and stank of the cigarettes he wasn't allowed to smoke on the partners' floor. Monty kept the books and paid our quarterly expenses with cheques that Jamie signed.
After him came Paul Lavender, still shaking from the hazardous voyage by Rolls-Royce from his house in Mount Street. Paul was feline and fair and seventy, and very slow-moving in patent moccasins with languid tassels. His father, our benefactor, had started life as a schoolmaster in Llandudno, before founding a hotel chain and selling it for a hundred million pounds.
After Paul came Dolly and Eunice, his two spinster sisters. Dolly wore a diamond racehorse. Years ago Dolly had won the Derby, or so she claimed, though Eunice swore Dolly had never owned anything larger than an overfed chihuahua.
And after them again came Henry, the Lavenders' family solicitor. It was thanks to Henry that we met so often. And at four hundred pounds an hour, who could blame him?
"Plonk still holding up?" he asked doubtfully as we shook hands.
"Oh, I think so, thank you. Rather well."
"Cheap Frog stuff not pricing you out of the market at all? I must have been reading the wrong newspapers."
"I'm afraid you must, Henry," I said.
* * *
We were seated round the famous Pringle boardroom table. Each of us had before him one copy of the minutes of the last meeting, one statement of the accounts, and one Wedgwood bone china teacup with a sugared shortbread biscuit on the saucer. Pandora poured. Paul rested his head on one bloodless hand and closed his eyes.
Jamie, our chairman, was about to speak. The fists that thirty years ago had clawed muddy rugger balls out of seething scrums converged upon a tiny pair of gold-framed half-lenses and pulled them on ear by ear. The market, Jamie said, was depressed. He held the foreigners to blame:
"What with your Germans refusing to cut their interest rates, your yen going through the roof, and your High Street takings going through the floor—" He peered about him in bemusement, as if he had forgotten where he was. "I'm afraid that U.K. gilts are weathering something of a trough." Then he gave a nod at Henry, who with a frightful clack opened the two levers of a fibreglass document case and read us an interminable report:
Discussion with the local authorities regarding the provision of sports facilities in the inner cities is proceeding at the pace one has to expect of local civil servants, Jamie....
The trust's offer of an extra children's ward at the Lavender Hospital for Mothers cannot be taken further until additional trust monies are set aside for staffing. None are presently available for such a purpose, Jamie....
Our proposal to supply a mobile library to meet the needs of children in illiterate areas has run up against political objections from the local council—one side arguing that the days of free libraries are dead and buried, another that the selection of books should be determined by the county's education authorities, Jamie....
"Bloody bollocks!"
Eunice had exploded. At about this stage in the proceedings, she usually did.
"Our dad would be turning in his grave," she roared in her smothered Welsh accent. "Free books for the ignorant? That's daylight bloody Communism!"
Equally furiously, Dolly disagreed. She usually did.
"That's a living lie, Eunice Lavender. Dad would be standing up and clapping his hands off. Children's what he prayed for with his last breath. He loved us. Didn't he, Paulie?"
But Paul was in some far Wales of his own. His eyes were still closed, and he wore a misty smile.
Jamie Pringle deftly passed the ball to me. "Tim. Very quiet today. Got a view?"
For once my diplomatic skills eluded me. On any other day I could have dredged up a distracting topic for him: pressed Henry to move faster in his dealings with the city authorities, raised an eyebrow at the Pringle administration costs, which were the only item in the accounts to show an increase. But this morning I had too much of Larry in my head. Wherever I looked round the table, I kept seeing him lounging in one of the empty thrones, dressed in my grey suit that he'd never given back, spinning us some story about this chum in Hull.