But to expect this of Pendel today is to reckon without the black cat, which now bursts its leash and springs at Mickie with claws and teeth bared, ripping into him with a ferocity nobody dreamed Pendel could command. All the guilt he has ever felt about misusing Mickie’s frailty, traducing him, exploiting him, selling him, visiting him in the pit of his blubbering humiliation, comes welling out of Pendel in a sustained salvo of transferred fury.
‘Why I can’t make suits like Armani?’ he repeated, several times, straight into Mickie’s astonished face. ‘Why I can’t make Armani suits? Congratulations, Mickie. You just saved yourself a thousand bucks. So do me a favour. Go down to Armani and buy yourself a suit and don’t come back here. Because Armani makes better Armani suits than I can. The door’s over there.’
Mickie didn’t budge. He was stultified. How on earth did a man of his mountainous dimensions buy himself an Armani suit across the counter? But Pendel couldn’t stop himself. Shame, fury and a premonition of disaster were pulsing uncontrollably in his breast. Mickie my creation. Mickie my failure, my fellow prisoner, my spy, coming here to accuse me in my own safe house!
‘You know what, Mickie? A suit from me, it doesn’t advertise the man, it defines him. Maybe you don’t want to be defined. Maybe there isn’t enough of you to define.’
Laughter from the stalls. There was enough of Mickie to define anything several times over.
‘A suit from me, Mickie, it’s not a drunken scream. It’s line, it’s form, it’s rock of eye, it’s silhouette. It’s the understatement that tells the world what it needs to know about you and no more. Old Braithwaite called it discretion. If somebody notices a suit of mine, I’m embarrassed because there must be something wrong with it. My suits aren’t about improving your appearance or about making you the prettiest boy in the room. My suits are not confrontational. They hint. They imply. They encourage people to come to you. They help you improve your life, pay your debts, be an influence in the world. Because when it’s my turn to follow old Braithwaite to the great sweatshop in the sky, I want to believe there are people down here in the street, walking around, wearing my suits and having a better opinion of themselves on account of them.’
Too much to keep inside me, Mickie. Time you shared the burden. He took a breath and seemed to want to check himself because he gave a kind of hiccough. He began again but Mickie mercifully got there first.
‘Harry,’ he whispered. ‘I swear to God. It’s the pants. That’s all it is. They make me look like an old man. Old before my time. Don’t give me all that philosophical horseshit. I know it already.’
Then a bugle must have sounded in Pendel’s head. He looked round him at the astonished faces of his customers, he looked at Mickie staring at him, clutching the contested alpaca trousers, exactly as he had once clutched to himself the too big orange trousers of his prison uniform as if he were afraid somebody would snatch them from him. He saw Marta, motionless as a sculpture, her smashed face a patchwork of disapproval and alarm. He lowered his fists to his sides and drew himself to his full height as a prelude to standing comfortably.
‘Mickie. Those trousers are going to be perfect,’ he assured him in a gentler tone. ‘I didn’t want us in a houndstooth, but you would have it and you’re not wrong. The entire world will love you in those trousers. The jacket too. Mickie, listen to me. Somebody’s got to be in charge of this suit, you or me. Now who’s it to be?’
‘Jesus,’ Mickie whispered, and slunk out on Rafi’s arm.
The shop emptied and settled for its afternoon sleep, the customers withdrew. Money must be made, mistresses and wives placated, deals struck, horses backed, gossip traded. Marta too had disappeared. Her study time. Gone to put her head inside her books. Back in his cutting room Pendel switched on Stravinsky, cleared his tabletop of brown paper templates, cloth, chalk and scissors. Opening his tailor’s notebook at the back pages he flattened it at the point where his coded jottings began. If he was chastened by his assault on his old friend he did not allow himself to know it. His muse was calling to him.