With a grunt of exasperation, he refolded the telegram, selected a plain white envelope from a drawer of his desk, put the telegram inside it and fed the envelope into the right-hand hip pocket of the Pendel & Braithwaite trousers that he had charged to London as a necessary operational expense. Returning to the strongroom he picked up a shabby leather briefcase that was by intent the very opposite of official, set it on the shelf and with yet another key from his ring opened the green wall-safe, which contained a stiff-backed ledger and thick bundles of fifty-dollar bills – hundreds being by his own edict to London too suspect to negotiate without making yourself conspicuous.
By the bulkhead light in the ceiling above him he turned up the current page of the ledger. It was divided into three columns of handwritten figures. The left-hand column was headed H for Harry, the right-hand column A for Andy. The centre column, which contained the largest sums, was headed Income. Neat bubbles and lines of the kind beloved of sexologists directed its resources to left and right. Having studied all three columns in aggrieved silence, Osnard took a pencil from his pocket and reluctantly wrote a 7 in the centre column, drew a bubble round it and added a line to the left of its circumference, awarding it to column H for Harry. Then he wrote a 3 and, in happier vein, directed it to column A for Andy. Humming to himself, he counted seven thousand dollars from the safe into the floppy bag. After it he tossed in the fly spray and other bits and pieces from the shelf. Disdainfully. As if he despised them, which indeed he did. He closed the bag, locked the safe, then the strongroom and finally the front door.
A full moon smiled on him as he stepped into the street. A starry sky arched over the bay, and was mirrored by the lights of waiting ships strung across the black horizon. He hailed a clapped-out Pontiac cab, gave an address. Soon he was rattling along the airport road, watching anxiously for a mauve-neon Cupid firing its penile arrow towards the bungalows of love it advertised. His features, discovered by the beam of an opposing car, had hardened. His small dark eyes, as they maintained their wary watch on the driver’s mirrors, caught fire with every passing light. Chance favours only the prepared mind, he recited to himself. It was the favourite dictum of a science master at his prep school who, having flogged him black and blue, suggested they make up their differences by taking off their clothes.
Somewhere near Watford just north of London there is an Osnard Hall. To reach it you negotiate a hectic bypass, then swing sharply through a rundown housing estate called Elm Glade, because that was where the ancient elms once stood. The Hall has had more lives in its last fifty years than in its previous four centuries: now an old people’s home, now an institute for young offenders, now a stable for racing greyhounds and most recently, under the stewardship of Osnard’s gloomy elder brother Lindsay, a sanctuary of meditation for followers of an Eastern sect.
For a while, through each of these transformations, Osnards as far away as India and Argentina divided up the rent, argued over the upkeep and whether a surviving nanny should receive her pension. But gradually, like the house that had spawned them, they fell into disrepair or simply gave up the struggle to survive. An Osnard uncle took his bit to Kenya and lost it. An Osnard cousin thought he could lord it over the Australians, bought an ostrich farm and paid the price. An Osnard lawyer raided the family trust, stole what he had not already dissipated through incompetent investment, then put a bullet through his head. Osnards who had not gone down with the Titanic went down with Lloyd’s. Gloomy Lindsay, never one for half-measures, put on the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and hanged himself from the one sound cherry tree that remained in the walled garden.
Only Osnard’s parents, self-impoverished, remained infuriatingly alive, his father on a mortgaged family estate in Spain, eking out the dregs of his fortune and sponging off his Spanish relatives; his mother in Brighton where she shared genteel squalor with a chihuahua and a bottle of gin.