They shook hands. Either Marty was hot, or the other man cold: Marty immediately took the error to be his. A man like Whitehead was surely never too hot or too cold; he controlled his temperature with the same ease he controlled his finances. Hadn’t Toy dropped into their few exchanges in the car the fact that Whitehead had never been seriously ill in his life? Now Marty was face-to-face with the paragon he could believe it. Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.
“I’m Joseph Whitehead,” he said. “Welcome to the Sanctuary.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll have a drink? Celebrate.”
“Yes, please.”
“What will it be?”
Marty’s mind suddenly went blank, and he found himself gaping like a stranded fish. It was Toy, God save him, who suggested:
“Scotch?”
“That’d be fine.”
“The usual for me,” said Whitehead. “Come and sit down, Mr. Strauss.”
They sat. The chairs were comfortable; not antiques, like the tables in the corridors, but functional, modern pieces. The entire room shared this style: it was a working environment, not a museum. The few pictures on the dark blue walls looked, to Marty’s uneducated eye, as recent as the furniture they were large and slapdash. The most prominently placed, and the most representational, was signed Matisse, and pictured a bilious pink Woman sprawled on a bilious yellow chaise tongue.
“Your whisky.”
Marty accepted the glass Toy was offering.
“We had Luther buy you a selection of new clothes; they’re up in your room,” Whitehead was telling Marty. “Just a couple of suits, shirts and so on, to start with. Later on, we’ll maybe send you out shopping for yourself.” He drained his glass of neat vodka before continuing. “Do they still issue suits to prisoners, or did they discontinue that? Smacks of the poorhouse, I suppose. Wouldn’t be too tactful in these enlightened times. People might begin to think you were criminals by necessity-”
Marty wasn’t at all sure about this line of chat: was Whitehead making fun of him? The monologue went on, its tenor quite friendly, while Marty tried to sort out irony from straightforward opinion. It was difficult. He was reminded, in the space of a few minutes listening to Whitehead talk, of how much subtler things were on the outside. By comparison with this man’s shifting, richly inflected talk the cleverest conversationalist in Wandsworth was an amateur. Toy slipped a second large whisky into Marty’s hand, but he scarcely noticed. Whitehead’s voice was hypnotic; and strangely soothing.
“Toy has explained your duties to you, has he?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I want you to make this house your home, Strauss. Become familiar with it. There are one or two places that will be out-of-bounds to you; Toy will tell you where. Please observe those constraints. The rest of the place is at your disposal.”
Marty nodded, and downed his whisky; it ran down his gullet like quicksilver.
“Tomorrow . . .”
Whitehead stood up, the thought unfinished, and returned to the window. The grass shone as though freshly painted.
“. . . we’ll take a walk around the place, you and I.”
“Fine.”
“See what’s to be seen. Introduce you to Bella, and the others.”
There was more staff? Toy hadn’t mentioned them; but inevitably there would be others here: guards, cooks, gardeners. The place probably swarmed with functionaries.
“Come talk to me tomorrow, eh?”
Marty drained the rest of his scotch and Toy gestured that he should stand up. Whitehead seemed suddenly to have lost interest in them both. His assessment was over, at least for today; his thoughts were already elsewhere, his stare directed out of the window at the gleaming lawn.
“Yes, sir. Tomorrow.”
“But before you come-” Whitehead said, glancing around at Marty.
“Yes, sir.”
“Shave off your mustache. Anybody would think you’d got something to hide.”
12
Toy gave Marty a perfunctory tour of the house before taking him upstairs, promising a more thorough walkabout when time wasn’t so pressing. Then he delivered Marty to a long, airy room on the top story, and at the side of the house.
“This is yours,” he said. Luther had left the suitcase and the plastic bag on the bed; their tattiness looked out of place in the sleek utility of the room. It had, like the study, contemporary fittings.