The silence around Brenda’s quiet voice purred softly; my breathing seemed very loud. The young man — his name was Steve — stood by with canvas bags into which he put the banded stacks as she finished with them. It was a scene that was part of the surreality that was by now the usual thing for me — just another sequence of moments in the new life and death of Jonathan Fitch.
After a while the counting and bagging stopped, the three of us went back to the teller’s window, the bags were sealed, and Brenda stamped my deposit slip. ‘That’s the biggest I’ve had so far today,’ she said.
‘How was it for you?’ I said.
‘Just numbers. In this job you’ve got to stop thinking of money as money or you’ll go crazy.’
As I was about to leave the bank with my empty trolley a man I took to be the manager came out of his office. ‘Mr Fitch,’ he said, taking me in with a practised smile. I was in non-business mode: Mr Scruffy. ‘I’m Henry Dargent, Branch Manager here. I don’t believe we’ve actually met before.’
‘How do you do?’ I said, and we shook hands.
‘You know, Mr Fitch, the interest on your Classic Account scarcely offers an appropriate return on the sort of money you’ve just deposited. Our advisers are always available to help you with a financial programme.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to explore various possibilities.’ I was already feeling burdened by the money. I went back to the flat with the trolley but I couldn’t bear to stay there. The place was filled with the goneness of Serafina but saying that doesn’t begin to describe how it was. I was used to being there alone for hours on end while she was busy with dinners at the Vegemania but her presence was always there. I know I sound gross talking about food so much but the kitchen particularly was ghastly now that she hadn’t been in it and wouldn’t be in it, handling things in that good way of hers, maybe singing softly to herself while she cooked. Gone, gone, gone.
I put a few things in a weekend bag and walked down Earl’s Court Road to Penywern. Some of the tall white Victorian houses with pillared and balconied fronts were hotels and I cruised slowly past them waiting for one of them to reach out and pull me in.
LORD JIM HOTEL, said the gilded letters on a green awning. Lord Jim! Conrad’s flawed hero, Chief Mate of the Patna, who abandoned what he thought was a sinking ship and left hundreds of Mecca-bound pilgrims to their fate. Quite an august entrance with broad steps, two white urns filled with healthy-looking vines, and three sturdy white pillars. Through the glass doors I saw an Art Deco chandelier, three tiers like an upside-down wedding cake and all pinky-orange and glittering like a beacon of tranquillity and elsewhere-ness.
There was a beautiful black-haired girl at the Reception window. ‘Are your people from Bombay?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I was born here.’
‘Have you read Lord Jim?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did the hotel come to have this name?’
‘The original owners were Polish and they were big Conrad fans.’
‘Did they ever abandon ship?’
‘I don’t know.’
A room with a shower and toilet was forty-five pounds. There was a ten-pound deposit for use of the telephone. ‘How long will you be staying?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Can I tell you later?’
‘All right. Checkout time is twelve noon.’ She gave me the key to Room Twenty-one on the second floor and I took the lift up to it. By now I had settled into my new mode of perception, an ad hoc kind of thing in which each sequence put itself together in its own way. I opened the door into the high-ceilinged room and breathed a little sigh.
This was a quiet place that had nothing in it that was personal to anyone; it was not the big blast of reality (and surreality) that waited outside; it was the limited reality of a small hotel room, like a simple melody played on a bamboo flute, cool as the plashing of water falling from level to level in the ferny-dappled sunlight of a garden. The soap dispenser over the sink charmed me. The upholstered headboard of the bed offered a muted view of distant mountains and winding rivers. The wallpaper gave me no backtalk, the bedspread and the carpet effaced themselves in pinks and greys. A print on the wall showed a foreground of something botanical, cow parsley for all I knew, with what might have been the South Downs in the distance.
The mirror on the door had no pretensions to deep insights and contented itself with a generalised and simplified me. I looked out of the window and saw two chestnut trees. ‘Yes!’ I said, and took off my shoes and lay back on the bed. I notice that men in films often put their feet on a bedspread without taking off their shoes. Another thing they do in films in moments of stress or heavy portent is go to the sink and splash cold water over their faces and the backs of their necks. I don’t do that either.
I had a half hour before I had to leave for my consultation with Jim Reilly; I rang the desk and asked the beautiful black-haired girl to call me in thirty minutes, then on an impulse I checked the two drawers of the bedside table for a Gideon Bible. There was none. I closed my eyes and had a tiny kip in which I dreamed of a dark place where I saw, far away, the green glow of Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s desk lamp.
16. Objectives?
I took the Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate and the Central Line from there to Chancery Lane. The afternoon reality was a low-budget sort of thing; I wasn’t sure that everything I saw even had a back to it. None of the people in the underground had speaking parts and many of the faces were blank. The Gray’s Inn Road scenery had been done without much detail — a shop that sold secondhand office furnishings and another that cut keys were fairly realistic but I doubted that the doors actually opened and closed. The Morgenstern building was a little more convincing — a pseudo-Bauhaus thing with practical glass doors.
The security man at the reception desk looked me over critically but I brazened it out, signed in, and took the lift to the third floor. ‘Jonathan Fitch to see Jim Reilly,’ I said to the smart young woman who greeted me. She asked me if I’d like a coffee, I said yes, and she showed me to a conference room filled with business-grade sunlight.
Jim Reilly appeared shortly; he looked and sounded pretty much like me. There are probably a lot of people in the potential-realising-and-maximising-business who look and sound like us — decent, clean-cut types with good teeth, firm handshakes, and clear eyes that don’t blink too much. Jim had about two kilos of bumph under his arm which he laid on the dark and shining table. He took a sheet from the top and handed it to me. ‘I’ve put together a little agenda here’, he said, ‘of the points I’d like to cover in this first meeting.’ I looked at the agenda:
1 MORGENSTERN — WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE OFFER
2 CLIENT HISTORY
3 CLIENT OBJECTIVES
4 INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY — BUILDING THE PYRAMID
5 PORTFOLIO PRIORITIES — CAPITAL GROWTH OR INCOME?
And so on for a dozen or more points. My eyes travelled down the agenda but my mind had already fixed on Point 3: CLIENT OBJECTIVES! Did I have any, and what were they? The smart young woman brought in coffee and I drank it while Jim Reilly went on for quite a long time like a TV with the sound turned off. Every now and then he paused to remove some of the papers from the top of the two-kilo stack and place them before me while I nodded or tilted my head to one side appreciatively and made such verbal responses as my mouth could manage. Objectives!