‘Thought you might pump Marta: sidelights on student activism. Bomb factories in the classroom.’
‘Oh. Good. Right.’
‘Want to get the relationship on a formal basis, Harry. So do I. Sign you up, brief you, pay you, show you a couple o’ the tricks. Don’t like the trail getting cold.’
‘It’s any day now, Andy. It’s like I said. I’m not the rash sort. I reflect.’
‘They’re upping the terms by ten per cent. Help you concentrate your mind. Want me to run ’em by you?’
Osnard ran ’em by him anyway, mumbling through his cupped hand like someone working on his teeth with a toothpick, this much down, this much set against your loan each month, cash bonuses payable depending on the quality o’ the product, London’s sole discretion, gratuity o’ so much.
‘Should be out o’ the woods in three years max,’ he said.
‘Or less if I’m lucky, Andy.’
‘Or smart,’ said Osnard.
‘Harry.’
It is an hour later but Pendel is too estranged to go home, so he is back in his cutting room with his dinner jacket and Bach.
‘Harry.’
The voice that is addressing him is Louisa’s from the first time they went to bed together, really went, not just fingers and tongues and listening for her parents’ car coming back from the movie, but completely naked in Harry’s bed in his grotty attic flat in Calidonia where he’s tailoring at night after selling ready-mades all day for a clever Syrian haberdasher called Alto. Their first effort has not been blessed by success. Both are shy, both late-developers, held back by too many household ghosts.
‘Harry.’
‘Yes, darling.’ Darling never came naturally to either of them. Not at the beginning, not today.
‘If Mr Braithwaite gave you your first break, and took you into his house, and put you through night school, and won you away from that wicked Uncle Benny of yours, he has my vote alive or dead,’
‘I’m very glad you feel that, darling.’
‘You should honour and revere him and tell our children about him as they grow up, so that they know how a good Samaritan can save a young orphan’s life.’
‘Arthur Braithwaite was the only moral man I knew until I met your father, Lou,’ Pendel assures her devoutly in return.
And I meant it, Lou! Pendel implores her frantically in his mind, as he closes the shears on the shoulder of the left sleeve. Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it’s for!
‘I’ll tell her,’ Pendel announces aloud as Bach elevates him to a plane of perfect truthfulness. And for a dreadful moment of self-indulgence he seriously contemplates throwing aside every wise precept he has lived by and making a full confession of his sins to his life’s partner. Or nearly full. A quorum.
Louisa, I’ve got to tell you something which is frankly a bit of a facer. What you know about me is not strictly kosher as regards all the details. It’s more in the line of what I’d like to have been, if all things had been a bit more equal than they were.
I haven’t got the vocabulary, he thinks. I’ve never confessed anything in my life, except the once for Uncle Benny. Where would I stop? And when would she ever believe me again, about anything? In horror he paints the war party in his imagination, one of Louisa’s Trust-in-Jesus sessions but full dress, with the servants banished from the house and the family nucleus gathered round the table with its hands together and Louisa with her back stiff and her mouth shrunk with fear because deep down the truth scares her more than it does me. Last time it was Mark who had to own up to spraying ‘bollocks’ on the gatepost of his school. The time before it was Hannah who had poured a can of quick-drying paint down the sink as an act of vengeance against one of the maids.
But today it’s our own Harry in the hot seat, explaining to his beloved children that Daddy, for the entire length of his marriage to Mummy and for all the time the children have been old enough to listen to him, has been telling some highly ornamented porky-pies about our great family hero and role model, the non-existent Mr Braithwaite, rest his soul. And that, far from being Braithwaite’s favoured son, your father and husband devoted nine hundred and twelve formative days and nights to an in-depth study of the brickwork of Her Maj-esty’s houses of correction.