CHAPTER FOUR
‘Now, sir. Your vital statistics if I may.’
Pendel had removed Osnard’s jacket for him, observing as he did so a fat brown envelope slotted between the two halves of his wallet. The heat rose from Osnard’s heavy body like heat from a wet spaniel. His nipples, shaded by chaste curls, showed clearly through his sweat-soaked shirt. Pendel placed himself behind him and measured back collar to waist. Neither man spoke. Panamanians in Pendel’s experience enjoyed being measured. Englishmen did not. It had to do with being touched. From the collar again, he took the full length of the back, careful as ever to avoid contact with the rump. Still neither man spoke. He took the centre back seam, then centre back to elbow, then centre back to cuff. He placed himself at Osnard’s side, touched his elbows to raise them and passed the tape beneath his arms and across his nipples. Sometimes with his bachelor gentlemen he navigated a less sensitive route but with Osnard he felt no misgivings. From the shop downstairs they heard the bell ring out and the front door slam accusingly.
‘That Marta?’
‘It was indeed, sir. Going home, no doubt.’
‘She got something on you?’
‘Certainly not. Whatever made you ask that?’
‘Vibe, that’s all.’
‘Well I’m blessed,’ said Pendel, recovering.
‘Thought she had something on me, too.’
‘Good heavens, sir. What could that possibly be?’
‘Don’t owe her money. Never screwed her. Your guess as good as mine.’
The fitting room was a wooden cell about the regulation twelve by nine, built at one end of the Sportsman’s Corner on the upper floor. A cheval mirror, three wall mirrors and a small gilt chair provided the only furnishings. A heavy green curtain did duty for a door. But the Sportsman’s Corner was not a corner at all. It was a long, low timbered attic hideaway with a suggestion of lost childhood about it. Nowhere in the shop had Pendel worked harder to achieve his effect. From brass rails mounted along the wall hung a small army of half-finished suits awaiting the final bugle. Golf shoes, hats and green weatherproofs gleamed from ancient mahogany shelves. Riding boots, whips, spurs, a pair of fine English shotguns, ammunition belts and golf clubs lay about in artful confusion. And in the foreground, in pride of place, loomed a stately hide mounting horse like a horse in a gymnasium, but with a tail and head, on which a sporting gentleman could test the comfort of his breeches, confident that his mount would not disgrace him.
Pendel was racking his brains for a topic. In the fitting room it was his habit to chatter incessantly as a means of dispelling intimacy, but for some reason his customary material eluded him. He resorted to reminiscences of My Early Struggle.
‘Oh, my, did we have to get up early in those days! The freezing dark mornings in Whitechapel, the dew on the cobble, I can feel the cold now. Different today, of course. Hardly a young one going into the trade, I’m told. Not in the East End. Not real tailoring. Too hard for them, I expect. Quite right.’
He was taking the cape measurement, across the back again but this time with Osnard’s arms hanging straight down and the tape going round the outside of them. It was not a measurement he would normally have taken but Osnard was not a normal customer.
‘East End to West End,’ Osnard remarked. ‘Quite a shift.’
‘It was indeed, sir, and I never had cause to rue the day.’
They were face to face and very close. But whereas Osnard’s tight brown eyes seemed to pursue Pendel from every angle, Pendel’s were fixed on the sweat-puckered waistband of the gabardine trousers. He placed the tape round Osnard’s girth and tugged at it.
‘What’s the damage?’ Osnard asked.
‘Let’s say a modest thirty-six plus, sir.’
‘Plus what?’
‘Plus lunch, put it that way, sir,’ said Pendel, and won a much needed laugh.
‘Ever pine for the old country at all?’ Osnard enquired, while Pendel discreetly recorded thirty-eight in his notebook.
‘Not really, sir. No, I don’t think so. Not so’s you’d notice. No,’ he replied, slipping the notebook into his hip pocket.