‘Don’t know her.’
‘The Probation Officer. A very serious lady who thought I was destined for the bad.’
‘Go to the Club Unión for dinner ever? Take a guest?’
‘Very rarely. Not in my present state of economic health, I’ll put it that way.’
‘If I’d ordered ten suits instead o’ two and I was free for dinner, would you take me there?’
Osnard was pulling on his jacket. Best to let him do it for himself, thought Pendel, restraining his eternal impulse to be of service.
‘I might. It depends,’ he replied cautiously.
‘And you’d ring Louisa. “Darling, great news, I’ve flogged ten suits to a mad Brit and I’m buying him dinner at the Club Unión.” ‘
‘I might.’
‘How would she take it?’
‘She varies.’
Osnard slipped a hand into his jacket, drew out the brown envelope that Pendel had already glimpsed and handed it to him.
‘Five grand on account o’ two suits. No need for a receipt. More where it came from. Plus a couple o’ hundred extra for the nosebag.’
Pendel was still wearing his fly-fronted waistcoat so he slipped the envelope into the hip pocket of his trousers where his notebook was.
‘In Panama everyone knows Harry Pendel,’ Osnard was saying. ‘Hide somewhere, they’ll see us hiding. Go somewhere you’re known, they won’t think twice about us.’
They were face to face again. Seen closer, Osnard’s was lit with suppressed excitement. Pendel, always quick to empathise, felt himself brighten in its glow. They went downstairs so that he could call Louisa from his cutting room while Osnard tested his weight on a furled umbrella marked ‘as carried by the Queen’s Brigade of Guards’.
‘You and you alone know, Harry,’ Louisa said into Pendel’s hot left ear. Her mother’s voice. Socialism and Bible School.
‘Know what, Lou? What am I supposed to know?’ – jokey, always hoping for a laugh. ‘You know me, Lou. I don’t know anything. I’m dead ignorant.’
On the telephone she could hand out pauses like prison time.
‘You alone, Harry, know what it is worth to you to desert your family for the night and go to your club and amuse yourself among other men and women instead of being a presence to those who love you, Harry.’
Her voice dropped into tenderness and he nearly died for her. But as usual she couldn’t do the tender words.
‘Harry?’ – as if she were still waiting for him.
‘Yes, darling?’
‘You have no call to blandish me, Harry,’ she retorted, which was her way of saying ‘darling’ back. But whatever else she was proposing to say, she didn’t say it.
‘We’ve got the whole weekend, Lou. It’s not as if I was doing a bunk or something.’ A pause as wide as the Pacific. ‘How was old Ernie today? He’s a great man, Louisa. I don’t know why I tease you about him. He’s right up there with your father. I should be sitting at his feet.’
It’s her sister, he thought. Whenever she gets angry, it’s because she’s jealous of her sister for putting herself about.
‘He’s given me five thousand dollars on account, Lou’ – begging her approval – ‘cash in my pocket. He’s lonely. He wants a bit of company. What am I supposed to do? Shove him out into the night, tell him thank you for buying ten suits from me, now go out and find yourself a woman?’
‘Harry, you don’t have to tell him anything of the kind. You are welcome to bring him home to us. If we are not acceptable, then please do what you must do and don’t punish yourself for it.’
And the same tenderness in her voice again, the Louisa that she longed to be rather than the one who spoke for her.
‘No problems?’ Osnard asked lightly.
He had found the hospitality whisky and two glasses. He handed one to Pendel.
‘Everything hunkydory, thank you. She’s a woman in a million.’
Pendel stood alone in the stockroom. He took off his day suit and out of blind habit hung it on its hanger, the trousers from the metal clips, the jacket nice and square. To replace it he chose a powder blue mohair, single-breasted, that he had cut for himself to Mozart six months ago and never worn, fearing it was flashy. His face in the mirror startled him with its normality. Why haven’t you changed colour, shape, size? What else has to happen to you before something happens to you? You get up in the morning. Your bank manager confirms the end of the world is at hand. You go to the shop and in marches an English spy who mugs you with your past and tells you he wants to make you rich and keep you as you are.