itself couldn’t be better, couldn’t be more perfect. And how would you be pronouncing that, Miss? Flahvia? Or Flayvia?
Marlobe brandished a newspaper at him, the headline exposing some government U-turn on its tax and pension plans.
‘Looks like snow,’ Lorimer said.
‘This country needs a fucking revolution, mate. Sweep them away-politicians, financiers, fat cats, civil servants, toffs, nobs, TV personalities. String ‘em up. Get the people back running things. Hard-working people. You and me. Our sort. Fucking violent bloody revolution.’
‘I know what you mean. Some days –’
‘Got some white carnations for you, mate – special. Fiver. Ta.’
Suspended from his door, held by a strip of festive Xmas sticky tape, was a folded note. It read: ‘My Dear Lorimer, One day soon Jupiter will be all yours. Thank you so much. Yours ever, C. H.’
Lorimer felt useless regrets crowd around him as he read it through again, weighing the consequences of his generosity. If only he had not been so precipitate… Still, he supposed it was a ‘good thing’ he had done. At the very least Jupiter might find his appetite had returned, now his execution had been forestalled.
In his hallway he ritually rested his palm on his three helmets in turn and wondered, suddenly, if Ivan would take them as part-exchange for the Greek one. A swift computation of their collective value told him he would still be some way short of the requisite amount but it would certainly be a leap forward towards his goal. Thus cheered, he put King Johnson Adewale and his Ghana-beat Millionaires on the C D and poured himself a small tumblerful of vodka. Lady C. Haigh. Curious, he had never wondered about her Christian name, never even imagined her with one. ‘C’ – what could it stand for? Charlotte, Celia, Caroline, Cynthia, Charis? A young girl’s name, conjuring up the 1920s and ‘30s, Oxford bags, bright young things, trophy hunts, illicit weekends in provincial riverside hotels… As the vodka hit and the highlife rhythms gently thudded through the flat he allowed himself a small smile of self-congratulation.
Chapter 5
Lorimer set his alarm for an early rise – a mere gesture, this, as he tossed and turned and was wide awake by 4.45. So he read doggedly for a while, managed to doze off again and woke at 7.00 feeling drugged and stupid. He bathed and shaved and changed the linen on his bed, then, like an automaton, he hoovered the flat, wiped down the surfaces in his kitchen, took his shirts and smalls to the laundry, and two suits to the dry cleaners, visited the bank and bought some food at the ShoppaSava on Lupus Street. These mundane rituals of bachelordom did not depress him, rather he saw them as proud domestic testimony to his independence. What was it Joachim had said to Brahms? Frei aber einsam, ‘ Free but lonely.’ Brahms was, perhaps, the greatest bachelor the world had known, he thought now, as he selected some freesias from the ShoppaSava’s newly installed flower stand. Brahms with his genius, his unshakeable routines, his huge dignity and his ineffable sadness. There was the exemplar, this was what he should aspire to, he reflected as he bought some lemony ranunculus and spotted tall apricot tulips, assorted pot plants of the most vivid green, ferns, eucalyptus, gypsophila and ranked boxes of daffodils at one-third the price Marlobe charged. Well enough stocked, he thought, when did they put this in? No carnations, though, that franchise was still securely Marlobe’s.
At the checkout counter he turned and surveyed the patient queues of customers waiting to pay their money – there was no one he recognized, but again he had felt that strange sensation of being observed, as if someone who knew him was lurking near by just out of sight, playing a game with him, seeing just how much time could pass before he was discovered. He waited at the door a while by the news-stand, buying some papers and magazines, but no one emerged who was familiar.
He decided to breakfast at the nearby Café Matisse (Classic British Caffs no. 3), where he ordered a fried egg and bacon sandwich and a cappuccino, and flicked through his weighty pile of reading matter. He preferred the Matisse at this time of day to all others, early, before the shoppers trooped in for elevenses, when the place was mopped and swabbed and relatively smoke-free. He had been coming here for four years, regularly, and had yet to receive even a nod of welcome from