dear friend. And, and it’s got some of its plume left.’
‘Nonsense.’ Lorimer approached. Some strands of horsehair trailed from the spike. ‘Come off it.’
‘I could sell it to three museums tomorrow. No, four. All right, twenty-five. Can’t say fairer. I’m making almost nothing.’
‘Unfortunately, I’ve just bought a house.’
‘Man of property. Where?’
‘Ah… Docklands,’ Lorimer lied.
‘I don’t know a soul who lives in Docklands. I mean, isn’t it just a teensy bit vulgaire?’
‘It’s an investment.’ He picked the helmet up. It was surprisingly light, one cut sheet of bronze, beaten thin, then shaped to fit a man’s head, to cover everything from the nape of the neck and the jawbone up. He knew infallibly whenever he wanted to buy a helmet – the urge to put it on was overpowering.
‘Funerary, of course,’ Ivan said, breathing smoke at him. ‘You could chop through this with a bread knife – no protection at all’
‘But the illusion of protection. The almost perfect illusion.’
‘Fat lot of good that’d do you.’
‘It’s all we’ve got in the end, isn’t it? The illusion.’
‘Far too profound for me, dear Lorimer. It is a lovely thing, though.’
Lorimer replaced it on its stand. ‘Can I think about it?’
‘As long as you don’t take for ever. Ah, here we are.’
Petronella, Ivan’s remarkably tall, plain wife, with a rippling swathe of thick, dry, blonde hair down to her waist, came percussively down the stairs with a tray of coffee cups and a steaming cafetière.
‘That’s the last of the Brazil. Good afternoon, Mr Black.’
‘We call him Lorimer, Petronella. No standing on ceremony.’
270. The current collection: a German black sallet; a burgonet (possibly French, somewhat corroded) and, my special favourite, a barbute, Italian, marred only by the absence of the rosette rivets and so ringed with holes. It was the strange music of this lost vocabulary that drew me first to armour, to see what things these magical words actually described, to discover what was a pauldron, a couter, a vambrace and fauld, or tasset, poleyn and greave, beavor, salleret, gorget and besague. I derive a genuine thrill when Ivan says to me: ‘I’ve an interesting basinet with letten fleurons and with, astonishingly, the original aventail – though of course the vervelles are missing,’ and I know exactly – exactly – what he means. To own an armour, a suit entire, is an impossible fantasy (though I once bought a vambrace and couter of a child’s armour, and a shaffron from a German horse armour) so I settled instead for armour of the head, on helms and helmets, developing a particular taste for visorless helmets, the sallets and kettle hats, basinets, casques, spangenhelms and morions, burgonets, barbutes and – another dream, this – the frog-mouthed and the great helms.
The Book of Transfiguration
Stella shifted beside him, her knee touching his thigh, making it hot almost immediately, so he slid another couple of inches away from her. She was asleep, soundly, deeply, a small snore gently emanating from time to time. He squinted at the luminous figures on his watch dial. Ten to four: the endless dark centre of the night, that period of time when it is too early to get up, too late to read or work. Perhaps he should make a cup of tea? It was at moments like these that Alan had told him consciously to note and analyse what was going on in his mind, systematically, one by one. So what was going on in there?… The sex had been good enough, sufficiently prolonged to send Mrs Stella Bull off to sleep almost immediately, Lorimer reflected. He had been intensely irritated by the visit to his family but that always applied, and, equally true, seeing his father like that always unsettled him, but that was hardly out of the ordinary… He enumerated other subject headings. Health: fair. Emotional? Nothing, as it should be. Work? Mr Dupree’s death – very bad. Hogg, Helvoir-Jayne – all a bit uncertain, unresolved, there. Hogg seemed more than usually on edge and that communicated itself to everyone. And now the Dupree business… Solvency? There would be no bonus now on the Dupree case even if Hogg had been prepared to share it with him; Hogg wouldn’t let him deal with the estate – that was normal practice, it would go through now, unadjusted. The house in Silvertown had swallowed up almost all his capital, but there would be more work along shortly. So what was it? What was there in that macédoine of niggles and worries, shames, resentments