‘Well they did call it a stroke, Mr Osnard,’ he replied in the bold tone that healthy men adopt for talking of such matters. ‘But myself, if I’m honest, I tend to call it a broken heart brought on by the tragic closing down of our Savile Row premises as a consequence of the punitive taxation. Are we resident here in Panama, Mr Osnard, may I ask without being impertinent, or are we merely passing through?’
‘Hit town couple o’days ago. Expect to be here quite a while.’
‘Then welcome to Panama, sir, and may I possibly have a contact number for you in case we get cut off which I’m afraid is quite a usual event in these parts?’
Both men, as Englishmen, were branded on the tongue. To an Osnard, Pendel’s origins were as unmistakable as his aspirations to escape them. His voice for all its mellowness had never lost the stain of Leman Street in the East End of London. If he got his vowels right, cadence and hiatus let him down. And even if everything was right, he could be a mite ambitious with his vocabulary. To a Pendel, on the other hand, Osnard had the slur of the rude and privileged who ignored Uncle Benny’s bills. But as the two men talked and listened to each other it seemed to Pendel that an agreeable complicity formed between them, as between two exiles, whereby each man gladly set aside his prejudices in favour of a common bond.
‘Staying at the El Panama till my apartment’s ready,’ Osnard explained. ‘Place was supposed to have been ready a month ago.’
‘Always the way, Mr Osnard. Builders the world over. I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again. You can be in Timbuctoo or New York City, I don’t care where you are. There’s no worse trade for inefficiency than a builder’s.’
‘And you’re quietish round five, are you? Not going to be a big stampede around five?’
‘Five o’clock is our happy hour, Mr Osnard. My lunch-time gentlemen are safely back at work and what I call my pre-prandials have not yet come out to play.’ He checked himself with a self-deprecatory laugh. ‘There you are. I’m a liar. It’s a Friday so my pre-prandials go home to their wives. At five o’clock I shall be delighted to offer you my full attention.’
‘You personally? In the flesh? Lot o’ you posh tailors hire flunkeys to do their hard work for ’em.’
‘I’m your old-fashioned sort, I’m afraid, Mr Osnard. Every customer is a challenge to me. I measure, I cut, I fit, and I never mind how many fittings it takes me to produce the best. No part of any suit leaves these premises while it’s being made and I supervise every stage of the making as it goes along.’
‘Okay. How much?’ Osnard demanded. But playfully, not offensively.
Pendel’s good smile widened. If he had been speaking Spanish, which had become his second soul and his preferred one, he would have had no difficulty answering the question. Nobody in Panama is embarrassed about money unless he has run out of it. But your English upper classes were notoriously unpredictable where money was concerned, the richest often being the thriftiest.
‘I provide the best, Mr Osnard. Rolls Royces don’t come free, I always say, and nor does a Pendel & Braithwaite.’
‘So how much?’
‘Well, sir, two and a half thousand dollars for your standard two-piece is about normal, though it could be more depending on cloth and style. A jacket or blazer fifteen hundred, waistcoat six hundred. And since we tend to use the lighter materials, and accordingly recommend a second pair of trousers to match, a special price of eight hundred for the second pair. Is this a shocked silence I’m hearing, Mr Osnard?’
‘Thought the going rate was two grand a pop.’
‘And so it was, sir, until three years ago. Since when, alas, the dollar’s gone through the floor, while we at P&B have been obliged to continue buying the very finest materials, which I need hardly tell you is what we use throughout, irregardless of cost, many of them from Europe, and all of them-‘ He was going to come out with something fancy like ‘hard-currency-related’ but changed his mind. ‘Though I am told, sir, that your top-class off-the-peg these days – I’ll take Ralph Lauren as a benchmark – is pushing the two thousand and in some cases going beyond even that. May I also point out that we provide aftercare, sir? I don’t think you can go back to your average haberdasher and tell him you’re a bit tight round the shoulders, can you? Not for free you can’t. What was it we were thinking of having made exactly?’