He uttered a cry similar to that of a hurdler who has jumped too close to the ultimate hurdle. All his mother’s money had gone to one Arthur Plumbley.
‘I don’t even know an Arthur Plumbley,’ Billing mumbled, bowing his head towards the shining surface of mahogany. So she did hate me after all. Now it’s proved beyond doubt. Mother – I! Your son, Hugh! Maybe she believed, or came to believe, that I jogged the ladder.
‘Arthur Plumbley was a friend of your mother’s,’ offered Mr Grimsdale Junior, in a tone of irreproachable seriousness. He had trained himself to have no gestures. The voice and the suit did it all for him. ‘He is blind.’ The pale hands rested.
Billing looked up. ‘Arthur Plumbley? Say, was he – is he a bald guy? Furry white tongue?’
‘He could be described as “a bald guy”, yes.’ Distasteful tone clearly implying he couldn’t. ‘He amused your mother in her last years.’ It was a sentence Billing tried in his dismay to commit to memory. There might be a song in it.
‘Shit,’ said Billing. ‘I met the old bastard at the funeral.’ He began to laugh. Like his mother, he had his areas of insincerity. Grimsdale Junior’s hands continued to rest, not unsympathetically.
Billing made his way towards Holborn Viaduct, dodging St Paul’s. The pavements were broken. Old men in fur hats gathered to complain and spit in the street. He bought a pair of Scholls insoles size ten from an Indian-run chemist’s shop. They had a tartan pattern. He went to a hotel to fit them into his worn shoes, then decided to have lunch there to cheer himself up.
‘One must stay personally happy if possible,’ he told Grimsdale Junior before leaving the lawyers’ offices. ‘My mother was not herself. It’s dreadful for me to look back now and realise that both my mother and my father – before he died, of course – were victims of a kind of undiagnosed compulsive madness.’
Grimsdale Junior did not understand that sort of talk. He replied in a firm voice, ‘The passing on of money is a serious matter, Mr Billing.’
‘I was talking of the passing on of genetic material,’ said Billing equally firmly, and became frightened by his own answer.
The waiters in the hotel restaurant were slack. Over curried parsnip soup, Billing watched the youngest and palest waiter loading red wine into a refrigerated display counter.
‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.
The palest waiter slightly altered his expression, perhaps to its fullest capacity, to indicate that he knew a daft question when he heard one.
‘We just put it in here.’
‘That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’
‘Well, I was ordered to, like.’
‘By whom?’
‘The Filipinos, of course.’
Although the soup was quite good, Billing decided that neither London nor chilled red wine were for him; within twenty-four hours he was back in New York, flying standby. A violent shooting, with a man and a woman killed – one of them black, one white, for equality’s sake – had just taken place and Manhattan was in a tense mood. Billing went to the fourteenth floor of the building off Times Square where his music agency was sited. While he was collecting the latest royalties due to him on ‘Side Show’, he saw an old friend of his, Neil Epoxa (born Neil Caractacus in Beirut), in the outer office. Neil had been a successful singer. Now he was an unsuccessful singer, working in a night club up on the East Side. Once Epoxa and Billing had shared confidences – about sex partners, even about earnings. Never since had Billing been so rash with his secrets.
Still, he was glad to see Epoxa. The money Epoxa was collecting from the agency made him friendly towards Billing. He was high, too, as Billing discovered.
They took a cab to a large apartment building on Riverside Drive where Epoxa was living with an older woman whom he introduced as Laxmi. Laxmi was tawny and flat-chested and wore a tawny cord suit, supported by much jewellery. She kissed Epoxa, then Billing, thrusting a neat little tongue into his mouth. It was three in the afternoon. Tongue-time already? Billing wondered; he never understood how others lived. A party appeared to be in progress. People moved about the rooms galvanising themselves into youthful postures to loud music. The furniture, a sort of cream colour, had been bought on the previous day, it seemed. It even smelt new.
‘You’re British, how charming,’ said Laxmi, taking Billing’s arm and sinking claws into it. In her other hand she clutched a toy dog, the coat of which had been dyed a flourescent purple. Laxmi appeared to have forgotten she was carrying it. ‘The Britishers are so aware. My husband Norm is a Britisher. Well, in fact, he’s Danish. He’s around some place. Always making money. Do you do that, Heck? How was the flight? We’re forever travelling around Europe. I just love the place. Ever seen the dervish house in Bukhara? I said to Norm, “Buy that” when I saw it.’ She gave a laugh like the smothered bark of a toy dog.
He remembered the American habit of quoting something the speaker had previously said, as if holding it up for the listener to determine whether the remark was witty or downright stupid. He said nothing.
She showed him round the reception rooms, pointing out art objects, stepping over bodies when necessary, still clutching him tight. ‘Aren’t you glad to be back in the Land of the Free, Herb?’
‘Hugh.’
‘This picture I bet you’ll recognise. The bridge at Mostar. The famous bridge. You’re an aware person. I’m sure you recognise it. Hand-painted. But this next one is from Russia. It’s actually painted on wood. A kind of wood. Marquetry, I believe. You can see. I did not like Russian food. I threw up. That’s from India – the tablecloth. Norm was sick most of the time in Delhi. Then you ought to see this. It’s from Armenia.’
Laxmi stood him in front of a picture with a chartreuse background, while saying in an aside to a young woman leaning against the wall, ‘Betty-Ann, why don’t you take a shower and freshen up, and stop screwing around with that shit cap.’ Her tone had the lightness of a mother addressing a son in a dog food commercial. To Billing she said, ‘It’s Turkish, as I was saying. It’s a straw picture and it actually depicts the estuary Turks harvesting the straw in their boats. Isn’t that cute?’
‘Which estuary is that?’
‘I think that’s what they were called. Norm is so restless. He’s often planning next year’s vacation before we’re through this one.’ She laughed, a hard dry sound like dog biscuits falling into a plastic bowl.
Billing muttered something which avoided reference to Norm’s possible mental state. Neil Epoxa was nowhere in sight.
‘We have some really fine Brazilian butterflies – fab, as you Britishers say – in the bedroom.’ She glanced around the crowded room, but apparently saw no one to whom she wanted to speak. ‘Wouldn’t you like to look them over, Hen?’
He was interested to examine the flat-chestedness at first hand, so he went along. The nipples were a cheerful pink. Laxmi made passing reference to this subject just before she commenced a thorough licking operation involving all Billing’s willing body, saying, ‘Sometimes I wish my boobs were just slightly bigger – but Norm would probably never make it at all if they were.’
The toy dog lay on the quilted bed with them. After he had made love with Laxmi, Billing studied her husband’s little bookcase by the side of the bed. Supermarket Philosophy, Silt, Norwegian Painting: The Golden Age, Straw Pictures: An Estuarine Art, Old Slovenian Ceremonies, Nebraska in the Bronze Age. Considering that he now had a fair picture of the absent Norm, Billing turned back to Laxmi, to find her lighting a joint. As she passed it over to him, he began to contemplate what he should do next.