The Gilded Ones Page 3

  Something had put a premature end to this architectural development. I could only speculate. Time and money are the usual reasons for abandoned projects, but in those days disease and sudden death were just as likely. Cholera was always a creeping shadow.

  I was soaking. The walk from the tube station had made me feel as if I’d just stepped out of a hot bath, and the humidity inside my trousers was making the hairs on my legs prickle. I’d unwound my tie while swaying along on the tube, shrugged off my jacket as I padded up the hill. My attaché case felt as if it had changed back into the bovine creature from which it had been crafted, and the metal core of its handle was biting into my right hand. I’d threaded my jacket through the handle and it looked rather naff, like those touristy people who walk around with the arms of their pullovers tied round their waists.

  Each property of the terrace had two steps leading up to the front door, and I could see more steps disappearing down to the right – no doubt leading to cellars. I looked for a nameplate but there was nothing except a wrought-iron bell which felt surprisingly cool to my fingers. It was in the form of a bull’s head, and in order to pull it I had to grasp the bull’s horns.

  I stepped back and stood still long enough to feel the sun burning my left cheek before the black shiny door swung inwards. I was blinded, the space beyond the door was a rectangle of dark and I could see nothing except a hand holding a sparkling tumbler of water. I stood there like a mirage-hallucinating Bedouin.

  ‘You look hot, you’ll need this!’ The voice was female, deep – almost tessitura. I put my attaché case down, took the glass in my right hand and practically downed it in one. I was parched – hadn’t got used to this new habit of carrying bottled water, and gulped at it, conscious of my Adam’s apple welting away.

  ‘Cheers!’ I couldn’t think of anything more imaginative to say.

  An aircraft passed in front of the sun and for a split second I caught sight of my benefactor…Tallish, slim, and hair worn in a dark bob.

  ‘I’m Pulse… Interview.’ As I moved forward out of the sun I could see that she was dressed in the manner of the waitress of a pre-war tearoom; white blouse, black skirt, black stockings, patent shoes – some kind of crossover strap black top. I didn’t offer my hand because I assumed she was a domestic servant. Instead I picked up my attaché case and followed her inside.

  ‘You saved my life,’ I tittered wetly as she took the tumbler from my hand. I suddenly realized how cold it was in the house, the chilled water sloshing around in my stomach made me shiver and I reached for my jacket.

  Outside on the steps and away from the traffic it had seemed quiet, while in here there was a curious echo from the stone floor and bare white-painted plaster walls. I was conscious of a smell coming from somewhere, something not nice… Not the usual drain smell, this was a stench.

  I had never eaten pheasant, nor had I ever smelt it. My mum and dad had always assumed that that kind of food was not for their class of people. We weren’t country folk and I’d never taken the initiative to try it for myself. But I’d read that it needed to be well hung. ‘Under-hung poultry is for the bourgeoisie…’ the article had said, ‘the posher you are, the longer you hang it, and if you’re really upper class you get your servants to pick the maggots out of it.’ This was what I imagined well-hung pheasant might smell like… rotten, even gangrenous.

  ‘Mr Lloyd Lewis will see you shortly.’ The contrast with this morning’s trendy little adventure made me want to giggle. Surely life here couldn’t be that formal? I followed the woman along the hall towards – on the left – a stone stair leading up, and – to the right – a narrower corridor with two steps leading down to the rear of the house. She turned to her right and steered me into a large light-filled room, and for the first time I could see her face; features dignified but pale. There was a small purplish bruise on the flesh under her right ear.

  The room I found myself in was like many London townhouses in that the wall dividing front reception room from rear had been removed making a serviceable studio. There were four pale-green drawing boards, white work trolleys, and black upholstered drafting stools. In the rear half of the room several tables had been put together to form a conference table. Like the hall, the walls were naked painted plaster, and as I shifted my feet looking for somewhere to put my attaché case, my boots clonked on timber boards stained the colour of molasses. Somewhere above my head a door slammed violently.

  The woman put the glass tumbler down on the nearest desktop. ‘I need to close the shutters,’ she said as if she’d received an invisible order.

  She moved towards the two tall windows which faced the street and where the shutters, consisting of four stripped wooden panels, hung in pairs. Each pair met in the middle and when standing open they stacked like a concertina. While she folded the panels of the right-hand window, I peered through the left one. There was a sound from above like someone dropping a heavy piece of furniture.

  The woman gently bumped each shutter leaf until they met in the middle. She clanged the black-painted metal arm across the closed leaves where it clicked home into its metallic partner. When she repeated the process with the second window I turned and moved towards the rear part of the room where there was a single window of similar width and height.

  Through the window and one storey below I glimpsed the grey-green fuzz of a neglected garden; threadbare lawn, smashed terracotta pots and tangled buddleia. I could see an old wooden bench, which judging from its size might have been fashioned for a performance of Parsifal. There was a hollow thud from above as if someone had collapsed onto the floor.

  ‘Patrick needs a little longer,’ she said as she dropped the final metal shutter arm into place and the room was shrouded in near darkness. My watch said 7.30 and I didn’t have anything planned, but it had already been a long day and I was still suffering from the after effects of the dream. I was beginning to regret having come.

  The room had the sensation of no work having taken place in it for years. There were no noticeboards, no calendars, no Post-it notes, not a pencil out of place. Each desk had a shiny black telephone – the coiled wire between phone and handset all facing the same way.

  Though the objects themselves were redolent of a modern office, the way they had been arranged spoke of the cells of monks, and possessed all the quirkiness of contraptions used by medieval scribes as might be seen on the vellum of illuminated manuscripts. The smell of rank poultry seemed worse than ever.

  ‘Leave your case where it is.’ Her voice had taken on a curtness that made my buttocks tingle inside my boxer shorts, and as I followed her from darkened room into gloomy hall I had the disconcerting feeling that I was no longer in control of events, they were controlling me.

  I followed along the stone corridor onto the stair head where the woman began stepping carefully down a flight of worn treads leading to the basement. I waited until the top of her bobbed head was level with my waist before I did likewise. We were in perfect step with one another, as if we were only one person descending to an unknown region. I heard another thump from above – and something else I was unable to identify, something shrill.

  The hum I could hear below me was coming from a large photocopying machine in an alcove directly opposite the bottom of the stair. From ahead I could hear the metallic trilling of a fridge, and the soft tinkling of water bottles. The woman must have been down here when I had pulled on the bull’s head bell.

  She led me into a large low space, the footprint of the one above, its walls painted but instead of smooth plaster they were rough brick. The crannies and crevices within hinted at further unexplored spaces behind, as if there were somehow two worlds here, one visible, the other hidden.

  The main source of light was from a window in the rear wall beneath which stood a white table the size of four doors laid flat. Whatever happened down here clearly took place round this table.

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nbsp; ‘Samples library…’ She was looking at me closely, watching my every response. I could see it now, Sanderson, Liberty, Bruno Triplet, Zimmer & Rhodes; fabrics, they were all there, folded on shelves and hanging from racks, while on the lower shelves were carpet fragments, tufted, loop pile, sisal, and coir. There was an extensive section of hard finishes; ceramic tiles, porcelain, marble, thermoplastic, real linoleum. I was used to working with materials like this and for a moment my anxiety lessened. A smell of linseed oil hung in the air and briefly I forgot the stench of fowl.

  Through the rear window I could see the garden, and in that strange ethereal light one experiences in a north-facing garden at 7.45pm after a blindingly hot day, the Parsifal bench looked odder than ever. Just under the front lip of its seat was an inscription which looked as if it had been burnt into the surface of the wood with a cattle branding iron; CARVED FROM THE TIMBERS OF HMS BLOODAXE. I turned to face the woman, half expecting an explanation but she seemed to be intent only on watching me. Her demeanour was of domestic servant but I had the uncanny feeling that inside lurked something with a greater authority.

  As she moved back to the centre of the room my eye was caught by a dark fret-cut Oriental screen, through which I could see daylight coming from the front window. Why was there a fully made-up double bed behind the screen? My eye was distracted as my ear was entrapped by a scraping sound coming from the subterranean area outside, and I had the fleeting impression of a human form passing the window.

  The woman led me out of the room and along the corridor to the rear of the building. Behind me I could hear feet grittily stamping up the outside front steps, the rasping of a key in the front door above our heads, followed by squeaking shoes and the sound of something being dragged across the stone floor.

  At the end of the corridor I could see a door. The woman opened, entered, and held it so I could follow. The space inside measured four feet by eight and appeared to contain nothing more than a toilet and washbasin. She indicated that I should close the door behind us, and as I did so I noticed that hanging on the wall behind the door was a bicycle whose shiny metal pedals looked virgin. I’d been a keen cyclist and in an inexplicable gesture my left forefinger and thumb gently squeezed the bike’s chain. As I looked at the drizzle of clear oil which had oozed onto my index finger I realized how uneasy I felt standing so close to the woman in somewhere which had been designed as a place of privacy for one person.

  Without sound or warning she reached behind her and grasped what looked like a crowbar. I recoiled, and in stepping backwards noticed beneath my feet the distinct line of an inspection chamber. She placed her legs apart – feet firmly planted on the tiles, and with the clanging a tram makes as it passes over a rail junction she prised away the two-inch thick lid releasing the source of the stench.

  ‘The Canal!’ Her voice had acquired the sonority of a Russian Orthodox priest in full incantation.

  ‘But we’re on a hill… I didn’t know there was a canal.’ I leaned forward, gagged and turned away trying to disguise it as a cough. Attempting not to breathe I looked back and down into blackness slicked with tiny silver lights.

  ‘… London’s twenty-seven lost rivers, it’s one of them.’ She looked at me sharply as if I should have known. ‘When they were tunnelling for King’s Cross railway station they canalized it.’ I tried to picture the procession of torch-lit narrow boats, bargees lying on outstretched planks and ‘driving’ the boat with their feet while the horses were led over the surface.

  I wondered about offering to help her replace the heavy cover but she clearly had her own way of doing it. For a moment I thought I heard a roaring – not from below but coming from way above. It was the kind of bellowing some bovine creature might make.

  ‘Mr Lloyd Lewis will see you now.’

  Five

  ‘Mr Lloyd Lewis will see you now.’ The emphasis was on the last word.

  Assuming that she would be escorting me upstairs I walked to the bottom of the stone steps and waited.

  ‘Up two flights, through the door on the left and it’s the door straight in front of you… don’t forget to knock on the second door.’

  It was eight o’clock as I walked back up the stairs to the ground floor, along the hall corridor, and while running my right index finger up the curved wooden handrail I tentatively tapped up the stone steps towards the first floor. I’d got halfway up the first flight when I realized that my attaché case was still where I’d left it on the floor of the main studio. I pussyfooted back down and retraced my steps at double speed feeling that now I was late.

  At the top of the first flight I paused. The stone stair continued up to further floors while to my left I could see a wood-panelled door standing one foot ajar. I pushed without knocking – exactly as I had been told, crossed the threshold from stone onto thick grey carpet and found myself in a small anteroom which contained a dark Jacobean-style wooden chest and two club chairs upholstered in deep-buttoned leather the colour of dried blood.

  The walls were painted in a substance unknown to me which seemed to give the room the kind of luminescence of which one was unsure just what was wall, and what might be space beyond. Hovering in front of the walls were three tapestries; the first in blue silks was of a woman examining her face in a handmirror, the second showed a bull’s head, while a third depicted a unicorn being devoured by a lion and a bull while being observed by a dog, a monkey, and a trio of rabbits. As I leaned forward to get a closer look at the third hanging a floorboard creaked beneath the carpet upon which I was standing and I was conscious of another sound, a faint groaning which seemed to come from the room beyond.

  I’d been so engrossed in the tapestries that I’d failed to notice that the final door was standing wide open. Through the opening I could see three tall piano-nobile windows in the front of the house. The low sun gave the room beyond the feeling of silent incandescence, and the foliage across the road the strange appearance of honey fungus.

  I was so bewitched that I’d taken three steps into the room before I was aware I’d forgotten to knock. It seemed deserted except for a giant elaborately decorated walnut desk behind which hung a further tapestry covering the entire wall.

  The tapestry’s centrepiece was a lady wearing a conical headdress and standing in front of a pointed tent decorated with blue fleurs-de-lis. She was being attended by a smaller female who was holding open the lid of a carved casket. On the right of the composition was a unicorn, rearing on hind legs, while to the left of the picture was a lion also rampant and in the act of pawing at the cloak of the principle lady. Before I could retrace my steps in order to knock, I saw that I was not alone in the room.

  Seated behind the desk but turned sideways and leaning forward so that his salt-and-pepper-haired head seemed to be about to disappear into the mouth of the lion was a man. His face was obscured by his hands.

  As if on cue he turned towards me and still remaining seated he murmured as if to some other unseen person who was also in the room, ‘I was just having a few moments alone with my late wife.’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ I mouthed – the ‘yes’ came out like the sound from a distressed Chihuahua, the ‘of course’ as if to reassure him that it was perfectly normal for job interviews to be preceded by a short period of devotions for the departed.

  After a further interval while I stood feeling like an intruder he got up, stamped round the walnut monster and held out his hand.

  ‘Patrick Lloyd Lewis!’ He said it exactly like the returning officer announcing the election results at a town hall – ‘Patrick Lloyd Lewis (Conservative)…’

  The man in front of me was five-foot nine, stocky with a thick neck, and wearing a navy club blazer, diagonally striped tie, grey worsted trousers, and black highly polished brogues. As his hand snapped shut on mine I found it difficult to meet his eyes, both iris and pupil seemed to be entirely black.

  ‘Sit
down, Pulse,’ – he pronounced it Palsse – ‘and tell me all about yourself.’ He gestured towards the wooden-seated captain’s chair on ‘my’ side of the great walnut barrier reef. His was a high-backed swivel chair upholstered in deep-buttoned leather the colour of dock leaves, and his ‘all about myself’ sounded like a statement of intent and that he would be satisfied with nothing less than my entire life story.

  ‘Well, I’ve been working…’

  ‘I’m fifty-eight,’ he cut in as if it were the prelude to a proposal of marriage, the subtext of which might be – and quite youthful with it wouldn’t you say? Come to think of it his face did have a young look, but the flat nose, the wide chin gave it a kind of subcutaneous juvenility as if it was capable if renewing itself every so often in the way that a chelonian might shed its skin. There was a perceptible whiff of cologne.

  ‘Well, I’ve been working…’

  ‘They sometimes call me Probus you know.’ As he pronounced the ‘O’ I heard the familiar lip-sucking noise I’d identified over the telephone at Victoria station.

  There was a soft tap at the door and the woman entered, gliding towards the walnut fortress. In her right hand were several freshly typed letters which she placed in front of Patrick, setting them down on a large pad of white blotting paper its edges bound in black leather. He leaned backwards, while the dock-leaf chair leather creaked under the strain. His lips resumed the ‘O’ shape, but it was no longer the moist naughtiness of ‘they call me Probus’, there was something dangerous in the expression. The mouth had taken on the dark fissured texture of the anus of some unknown creature.

  The woman remained standing, while the man’s right hand reached for the maroon Mont Blanc – an elongated egg of a fountain pen which was resting impertinently alongside the blotting pad. The eyes gave a vatic glare towards the woman as wedge-shaped fingers twisted the cap off the pen. He gave each letter perfunctory scrutiny and with an almost comical flourish signed them, the pen making the near inaudible sound of ink and metal on ever-so-slightly textured cream notepaper. He held them out for the woman to take.