The next morning Jimmy saw Connor in his office. He talked about the friction that existed between himself and Tony Ruddle. It seemed to be personal, he said, a matter of chemistry. There had been, and he paused, outbursts.
Connor’s head lifted slowly, but he didn’t say anything. At times he could seem almost oriental. The half-moon eyelids. The use of silence.
Jimmy waited.
At last Connor spoke. ‘I believe Mr Ruddle’s having some kind of domestic problem. His wife.’
‘I see.’ Jimmy thought he’d probably said enough. ‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want anything to jeopardise the project.’
Connor nodded. ‘I appreciate that.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ Jimmy said, ‘how’s it going?’
Connor’s veiled look cleared. He rose to his feet and began to pace up and down in front of the blinds, his arms behind his back, his left wrist enclosed in his right hand. ‘You know, James,’ he said, excited suddenly, ‘I hadn’t imagined the scale of it.’
‘The scale?’
Connor said that Lambert had taken him to see the project at the beginning of the week.
‘What’s it like?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Peaceful.’ Connor smiled.
He had watched subjects sleeping in their private cubicles, he said. It was a strange sight. Outside the ward a control room had been set up. The subjects were kept under strict medical surveillance. They were also monitored on video. Lambert had hired three assistants who worked round the clock, in shifts. Every night they processed between twenty and twenty-five people. That was, roughly speaking, one hundred and fifty people a week. Six hundred a month.
‘In mid-July,’ Connor said, ‘we hit two thousand.’
‘July? I thought it was a three-month programme.’
‘Since it seems to be running so smoothly,’ Connor said, ‘I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t extend it for another month.’ He stopped and looked at Jimmy levelly, from under his heavy eyelids. ‘Can you?’
‘Well, no.’ Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘Do you think I could see it too, sir?’
‘No, I’m afraid that —’
‘I’d be very interested,’ Jimmy said. ‘After all,’ he added gently, ‘it was my idea.’
‘I’m aware of that. But Lambert’s in charge up there and this is his directive. “No sightseeing tours” was how he put it.’
No sightseeing tours. Jimmy could imagine Lambert using those exact words. He was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. His involvement in the project had never been one hundred per cent. There are things I’m keeping from you.
‘By the way,’ he said, brightening a little, ‘did you hear about the balloons?’
Connor nodded.
The day before, a dozen of the Kwench! balloons had been caught in a freak air current over Central London. Swooping down into Westminster, almost to ground level, they had bombarded Prince Charles as he arrived at the Abbey for a memorial service. The balloons had appeared on TV as the last item in the early evening news, the anchorman referring to Kwench! in passing as a ‘marketing phenomenon’. That morning the Mirror had published a photograph of Prince Charles looking startled as a Kwench! balloon bounced off his shoulder. Jimmy was thinking of having T-shirts printed. The national media had become involved, the Royal Family too. There was no doubt about it. Kwench! was well and truly launched.
The Carbonated Brain
On a humid evening halfway through June, Jimmy ran up the steps that led out of Piccadilly Circus tube. A man stood on the street-corner, selling Japanese-style paper fans; the heatwave was in its second week. Jimmy turned north, loosening his tie. Simone had invited him to an opening, and he was late, as usual. It had been a momentous day, though. Truly momentous. At a meeting of the project team that morning he had finally been able to demonstrate the impact Kwench! had had on the soft-drinks market in the six weeks since its launch. The Nielsen off-trade figures had come in, revealing widespread availability in supermarkets throughout the country. The on-trade figures were looking healthy too. Kwench! appeared to have cannibalised almost every sector of the market: the fruit carbonates, obviously, but also the lemonades, the juices, and even, to some extent, power brands like Coke and Pepsi. Sales were a staggering 24 per cent ahead of budget, a statistic that could only partly be explained by the hot weather. Jimmy’s personal contribution to this early success couldn’t be quantified, of course, but, then again, it couldn’t be underestimated either. Just recently, with Tony Ruddle still away on holiday — some kind of rest-cure, presumably — there had been talk of a re-shuffle. According to one rumour, Jimmy was being considered for a promotion in the autumn. As a member of Connor’s inner circle, as Connor’s protégé, in fact, he was beginning to feel that there was no limit to what he might achieve.
Seven-thirty was striking as he arrived at the gallery, and it was so crowded that people had spilled out on to the pavement. Jimmy pushed through the glass doors and on into a huge white space where spotlights burned like miniature suns. Simone was deep in conversation with two men. One of them had eyes that seemed to float in their sockets, as if suspended in formaldehyde. Jimmy decided not to interrupt — at least, not for the time being. Instead, he moved towards the bar.
He drank his first drink quickly, and was just reaching for a second when he noticed an old woman standing at his shoulder. Her eyebrows had been drawn on in brown, and she was smoking a cigarette in an extravagantly long tortoiseshell cigarette-holder. But it was her glasses that intrigued him most: with their dark-yellow lenses and their thick black frames, they looked as if they might have been made during the fifties, in a city like Istanbul or Tel Aviv.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people who wear sunglasses at night,’ she said when he complimented her on her appearance. ‘They’re for my eyesight. I have photophobia.’ She looked past him, into the room, and, drawing on her cigarette, let the smoke dribble from one corner of her mouth. ‘Ah, here’s my niece.’
They were joined by a girl in her early twenties, wearing a sleeveless orange dress. Her hair was black, and hung in tangled ropes below her shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes looked shaded-in, as if she had not been sleeping well.
‘This wine,’ and she made a face, ‘it’s foul.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said the older woman, though she didn’t seem particularly disturbed by it.
‘I wish they had Kwench!.’ The girl turned to Jimmy. ‘It’s a new soft drink. You should try it.’
Jimmy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
‘What,’ the girl said. Because he was staring at her, not saying anything.
‘Kwench!?’ the old woman said. ‘What’s Kwench!?’
The girl began to explain Kwench! to her aunt. Jimmy was still staring at the girl. Could she really be one of his ambassadors? She was certainly saying the right things. But maybe that was just a coincidence; after all, the secretary on the tube would have sounded exactly the same. That orange dress, though — was that coincidental too?