Lorimer noticed, and long and thin, the blue veins in her thighs like… He thought for a second, like rivers beneath pack-ice seen from the air.
‘Not David Watts the singer?’ Torquil said, equally impressed. ‘In this flat?’
‘Yes. I’m lending him a CD.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You fuck off.’
‘Lying bastard.’
‘Come and see for yourself.’
Lorimer rejoined Watts, who was now crouched in front of the custom-built shelves containing his CD collection, his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He had already found Kwame Akinlaye – Lorimer shelved his CDs alphabetically and under country of origin.
‘Got a lot of classical,’ Watts observed. ‘Masses of Brazil.’
‘I used only to listen to Central and South American music,’ Lorimer told him. ‘I moved on to Africa about three years ago. Started at Morocco and worked south, around the bulge, you know.’
Watts frowned at him. ‘Interesting. Where are you now?’
‘Ghana. Moving on to Benin. Next week probably.’
‘This is what you call authentic, is it?’
‘Compared to the crap we produce in the West.’
A hastily dressed Irina and Torquil arrived and Lorimer introduced them. Torquil pointed at Watts’ track suit and sang, ‘Come on, you Woo-oolves’. Irina asked for an autograph and so did Torquil, for a person named ‘Amy’. Lorimer realized with something of a shock that this was Torquil’s fourteen-year-old daughter (away at boarding school) – he trusted she wouldn’t ask her father how he came by David Watts’s signature.
‘I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything,’ Watts said, signing his name on two leaves of writing paper. ‘Love in the afternoon, sort of thing.’
‘No, no, we’d finished,’ Torquil said. ‘In fact, you’ve got to be going, haven’t you, Irina? Got to go, yes? Go?’
‘What? Oh, yes, I must go.’ She collected her handbag, said shy goodbyes (Lorimer noticing there was no further physical contact between her and Torquil) and left. Watts accepted one of Torquil’s cigarettes.
‘I’m amazed she knew who you were,’ Torquil said. ‘Irina, I mean. She’s Russian, you see.’
‘Everybody in Russia knows David Watts,’ said David Watts. ‘Sell millions there. Millions.’
‘Really? Tell me, is the Team ever going to get back together?’
‘Over my dead body, mate. They’re thieves, robbers. I’d rather bite my tongue off. I’d rather rip out my windpipe with my bare hands.’
‘Not what you’d call an amicable parting of the ways, then? What’s happened to Tony Anthony?’
Watts did not stay much longer, he seemed troubled by Torquil’s rehashing of the former band’s past history. Lorimer lent him a couple more CDs – a singer from Guinea-Bissau and a predominantly brass band from Sierra Leone. He said he would record them and have Terry drop them back the next day and then asked politely, as if he were a dowager or a maiden aunt, if Lorimer could walk him to his car. Terry saw them coming and heaved himself out of the driver’s seat to open the door.
‘This insurance hassle,’ Watts said, flicking away the butt of his cigarette. ‘I’ve been talking to my people and I think there’s going to be the mother of all law suits if it isn’t paid. Twenty, thirty million.’
‘Fine,’ Lorimer said. ‘We like these matters aired in court.’ That should please Hogg, he was thinking, dolefully.
‘Nothing personal,’ Watts said, ‘but it just doesn’t look good, David Watts being jerked off by a bunch of suits. It doesn’t look cool.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I’ll get these discs back to you tomorrow, mate,’ Watts said stooping into his car. ‘Much obliged, Lorimer – can I call you Lorimer? Could be fruitful. Serendipity. Be in touch.’
The car moved off soundlessly, it seemed, on its wide tyres. People in the street stopped to marvel at it. Lorimer remembered from a recent survey in a Sunday newspaper that David Watts was the 349th richest person in the country.
Lady Haigh was waiting for him in the hall. She was smartly dressed in a green tweed suit, wearing a turban skewered with a ruby-tipped hat pin. Jupiter peered out at him, panting evenly, from behind her legs.
‘Your friend brought a girl back with him this morning.’
‘I can only apologize, Lady Haigh.’
‘He makes a terrible din, clumping around all hours of the day and night.’
‘I’ll tell him to keep quiet.’
‘I find him very uncouth, Lorimer.’
‘So do I, Lady Haigh, so do I.’
389. Serendipity. From Serendip, a former name of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A word coined by Horace Walpole, who had invented it based on a folktale, whose heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not in quest of. Ergo: serendipity, the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.
So