us, contempt and pity shining from his eyes. We have no right, he would say solemnly. Such an attitude, such beliefs were deeply, fundamentally unphilosophical. And this was where we – the loss adjusters – came in. We had a vital role to play: we were the people who reminded all the others that nothing in this world is truly certain, we were the rogue element, the unstable factor in the ostensibly stable world of insurance. ‘I am insured – so at least I am safe,’ we like to think. Not so, Hogg would say, shaking a pale finger, uh-uh, no way. We have a philosophical duty to perform when we adjust loss, he told us. When we do our adjustments of loss we frustrate and negate all the bland promises of insurance. We act out in our small way one of the great unbending principles of life: nothing is sure, nothing is certain, nothing is risk-free, nothing is fully covered, nothing is forever. It is a noble calling, he would say, go out into the world and do your duty.
The Book of Transfiguration
Priddion’s Farm, Monken Hadley, turned out to be a sizeable 1920s stockbroker’s villa, brick and pebble-dashed, complete with decorative half-timbering and steepling mock-Elizabethan chimneys. It was set in a large garden of several terraced lawns with a view of a golf course, the Great North Road, and the distant rooftops of High Barnet. Even though Monken Hadley was still a part of the huge city, perched on its very northern fringe, it looked and felt to Lorimer like a toy village, with a village green, a flinty ashlar church – St Mary the Virgin – and a venerable manor house.
Priddion’s Farm was partially screened from the road and its neighbours by dense clumps of laurel and rhododendron and there was an assortment of mature trees – cedar, chestnut, maple, monkey puzzle and weeping ash – strategically scattered about the lawns, doubtless planted as saplings by the wealthy man who had paid for the house to be built.
Lorimer drew his car up beside three others on the gravelled sweep before the front porch and tried to square this bourgeois palace with the Torquil Helvoir-Jayne he thought he knew. He heard laughter and voices and wandered round the side of the house to find a croquet lawn upon which Torquil and another man in pink corduroy trousers were playing a boisterous, profane game of croquet. A thin young woman in jeans, smoking, looked on, laughing nasally from time to time, giving a whoop of encouragement as Torquil first lined up and then powerfully hammered his opponent’s ball away across the lawn and through a border out of sight where it could be heard thumping dully along the paving stones of a lower terrace.
‘You fucking bastard,’ the man in pink trousers bellowed at Torquil, trotting off to find his ball.
‘You owe me thirty quid, you anus,’ Torquil yelled back, lining up his own next shot.
‘Pay up, pay up,’ the young woman shouted, heartily. ‘And make sure you get it in cash, Torquie.’
‘Sounds like fun,’ Lorimer said to the young woman, who turned to look at him incuriously.
‘Potts, say hello to Lorimer,’ Torquil encouraged, ‘there’s a good girl.’
Lorimer unreflectingly offered his hand which, after a surprised pause, was feebly shaken.
‘Lorimer Black,’ he said. ‘Hi.’
‘I’m Potts,’ she said. ‘Don’t you love croquet? Oliver’s useless, such a bad sport.’
‘And this shambling cretin’s Oliver Rollo,’ Torquil said as the young man in pink trousers returned, strolling back with his ball. ‘Lorimer Black. Lorimer was at Glen-almond with Hugh Aberdeen.’
‘How is old Hughie?’ Oliver Rollo said. He was tall, long-armed and quite overweight, twin pink spots on his cheeks, flushed from his short walk back up from the lower terrace. He had a big, loose jaw, thick, dark, hard-to-comb hair and the flies of his pink corduroys gaped undone.
‘I haven’t the faintest,’ Lorimer said. ‘Torquil won’t let go of this idea that I know him.’
‘Right, cuntface, you’ve had it,’ Oliver said, Lorimer quickly realizing he was talking to Torquil. He dropped his ball on the grass and seized his mallet.
‘If you’re going to take a piss in my garden do you mind not fucking exposing yourself,’ Torquil said, pointing at Oliver’s fly ‘Bloody pervert. How do you stand it, Potts?’
‘’Cozc ‘e’s a larverly boy,’ Potts said in the voice of a cockney crone.
‘Because I’ve got a ten-inch dick,’ Oliver Rollo said.
‘Dream on, darling,’ Potts said, acidly, and a cold glance flew between them.