the staff. Mind you, he had outlasted them all: the turnover of personnel at the Matisse was extraordinary. He saw that the rangy South African girl was still here and the lugubrious Romanian too. He wondered vaguely if the tiny Portuguese one had left, the one who flirted with the bikers – the wealthy middle-aged men, paunchy in their leathers, who descended in a group at prearranged times of the week to drink coffee and stare lovingly at their immaculate Harleys, all spangling chrome, parked up on the pavement in full view. Maybe she had indeed gone, perhaps she’d trapped one of these portly, well-heeled free-spirits into marriage? For he saw there was a new girl doing the front half: she looked darkly Latin, with long, wiry hair, the slim body of a sixteen-year-old but the face of a haughty duenna.
‘Thanks,’ he said to the Romanian as she suddenly clattered his sandwich down in front of him. She swept off as ever, wordlessly, with a toss of her blue-black hair.
The Matisse owed its name to a single reproduction of that Master’s work, a late-period blue nude which hung on the wall between the ladies’ and gents’ lavatories. Its cuisine was notionally Italian but the menu boasted many a familiar English standard – cod and chips, lamb chops and roast potatoes, apple pie and custard. As far as he could discern, not a single Italian currently worked in the place but it must have been the traces of that influence, perhaps lingering on in the basement kitchen, that ensured at least the coffee’s surprising excellence. He ordered another cappuccino and watched the customers come and go. Everyone smoked in the Matisse, apart from him; it almost seemed to be a condition of entry. The counter staff and the waitresses smoked during their breaks and every customer, young and old, male or female, fervently followed suit as if they used the place as a brief smoking respite from their otherwise smokeless days. He looked around him now at the types scattered around the big gloomy rectangular room. A middle-aged couple – style: Eastern European intellectual – the man looking uncannily like Bertolt Brecht, both bespectacled, both in drab zip-up waterproof jackets. A table of four consumptive hippies, three men with lank hair and poor beards and a girl (rolling her own), bead-swagged with a flower tattooed on her throat. In one of the booths down the side was the obligatory lost-waif couple, two chalk-faced girls, black-clad, talking worriedly in furious whispers – too young, in trouble, pimp-fodder. And behind them a man smoking a tiny pipe who looked like a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, tangle-haired with big muddy shoes, unshaven, wearing a collarless shirt and baggy corduroy suit. At the counter two unnaturally tall girls were smoking and paying. Breastless, hipless, they had swan necks and tiny heads – models, he assumed, there must be an agency near by – they drifted in and out of the Matisse all day, these lanky, freakish females, not beautiful, just differently made from all the other women in the world. All human life ventured into the smoky interior of the Matisse at some stage; if you sat long enough you would see everyone, every prototype the human species had to offer, every product of the gene pool, rich or poor, blessed or afflicted – which was the key to the place’s strange and enduring allure, in his opinion. Even he, he realized, must sometimes attract such idle speculation – who is the quiet young man in the pin-stripe suit? A journalist on an upmarket weekly? A lawyer? A Eurobond dealer? – with his dry cleaning and pile of newsprint.
‘Fancy a drink this evening? Torquil asked, leaning round Lorimer’s office door. Then coming in and mooching about as they talked, fingering a picture frame (Paul Klee) and leaving it a degree or two awry, touching the leaves of his potted plants, drumming a rhythm on the flat top of his PC.
‘Great,’ Lorimer said with scant enthusiasm.
‘Where is everybody?’ Torquil said. ‘Haven’t seen you for days. Never known an office like it, all this coming and going.’
‘We’re all on various jobs,’ Lorimer explained. ‘All over the place. Dymphna’s in Dubai, Shane’s in Exeter, Ian’s in Glasgow –’
‘I don’t think our Dymphna likes me at all,’ Torquil said, then grinned. ‘A cross I shall just have to bear. What’re you up to?’
‘Tidying up a few things,’ Lorimer said ambiguously – Hogg was