The uniform Pendel had designed for him was particularly splendid. The white breeches, already entrusted to his Italian trouser-makers ensconced a few doors down the corridor behind him, were to be fitted flush against the seat, suitable for standing but not sitting. The tailcoat which Pendel was this minute cutting was white and navy blue with gold epaulettes and braid cuffs, gold frogging and a high Nelsonian collar crusted with oak leaves round ships’ anchors – an imaginative touch of Pendel’s own that had pleased the Admiral’s private secretary when Pendel faxed the drawing to him. Pendel had never entirely understood what Benny meant by rock of eye, but when he looked at that drawing he knew he had it.
And as he went on cutting to the music his back began to arch in empathy until he became Admiral Pendel descending a great staircase for his inaugural ball. Such harmless imaginings in no way impaired his tailor’s skills. Your ideal cutter, he liked to maintain – with acknowledgements to his late partner Braithwaite – is your born impersonator. His job is to place himself in the clothes of whoever he is cutting for and become that person until the rightful owner claims them.
It was in this happy state of transference that Pendel received Osnard’s call. First Marta came on the line. Marta was his receptionist, telephonist, accountant and sandwich-maker, a dour, loyal, half-black little creature with a scarred, lopsided face blotched by skin grafts and bad surgery.
‘Good morning,’ she said in Spanish, in her beautiful voice.
Not ‘Harry’ not ‘Señor Pendel’ – she never did. Just good morning in the voice of an angel, because her voice and eyes were the two parts of her face that had survived unscathed.
‘And good morning to you, Marta.’
‘I’ve got a new customer on the line.’
‘From which side of the bridge?’
This was a running joke they had.
‘Your side. He’s an Osnard.’
‘A what?’
‘Señor Osnard. He’s English. He makes jokes.’
‘What sort of jokes?’
‘You tell me.’
Setting aside his shears, Pendel turned Mahler down to nearly nothing and slid an appointments book and a pencil towards him in that order. At his cutting table, it was known of him, he was a stickler for precision: cloth here, patterns there, invoices and order book over there, everything shipshape. To cut he had donned as usual a black silk-backed waistcoat with a fly front of his own design and making. He liked the air of service it conveyed.
‘So now how are we spelling that, sir?’ he enquired cheerily when Osnard gave his name again.
A smile got into Pendel’s voice when he spoke into the telephone. Total strangers had an immediate feeling of talking to somebody they liked. But Osnard was possessed of the same infectious gift, apparently, because a merriment quickly developed between them which afterwards accounted for the length and ease of their very English conversation.
‘It’s O-S-N at the beginning and A-R-D at the end,’ said Osnard, and something in the way he said it must have struck Pendel as particularly witty because he wrote the name down as Osnard dictated it, in three-letter groups of capitals with an ampersand between.
‘You Pendel or Braithwaite, by the by?’ Osnard asked.
To which Pendel, as often when faced with this question, replied, with a lavishness appropriate to both identities: ‘Well, sir, in a manner of speaking, I’m the two in one. My partner Braithwaite, I’m sad to tell you, has been dead and gone these many years. However I can assure you that his standards are very much alive and well and observed by the house to this day, which is a joy to all who knew him.’
Pendel’s sentences when he was pulling out the stops of his professional identity had the vigour of a man returning to the known world after long exile. Also they possessed more bits than you expected, particularly at the tail end, rather like a passage of concert music which the audience keeps expecting to finish and it won’t.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Osnard replied dropping his tone respectfully after a little pause. ‘What d’he die of?’
And Pendel said to himself: funny how many ask that, but it’s natural when you remember that it comes to all of us sooner or later.