“That’s whatshisface.”
“Indeed.” I removed the cognac bottle from the table and slipped it beneath the sink.
“The Speaker of the House of Commons?”
“Retired,” I said and turned to see that, far from being distracted by the Great Man, Eric Croft had, without permission, opened my handbag and removed my vodka flask and stolen notebooks.
No word was said. No facial expression suggested anything. He gave me the notebooks without comment and I carried them into my bedroom. I returned to discover he had opened all the windows and was settled at my kitchen table, my gutted handbag abandoned on the chair beside him.
“You are very wilful, Catherine.”
“A little mad, sorry.”
“For God’s sake, don’t hover.” He slid a glass across the table. “Sit.”
I drank the vodka standing up.
“Poor Cat.”
I wished he would not call me Cat. I said: “I will not see a grief counsellor if that is what you’re thinking.” The vodka had a fierce hard solvent burn.
“Where did you ever hear of such a horrid thing?”
“Never mind.”
“The thing is, you see, we must placate the edifice.”
He meant the Swinburne, the great mechanical beast inside its Georgian cube on Lowndes Square, the wires, the trustees, the rules, the stairs, the secrets, Crowley’s Hole where someone hanged themselves, the entire jerry-built mandarin complex of rat runs which is a two-hundred-year-old building in twenty-first-century space. It was a very beautiful, quite astonishing, chaotic, awful thing. I fitted there as I would fit nowhere else on earth.
“I have no choice,” I said. “Where else could I ever be employable?”
“No,” he said, helping himself to another shot. “I have made this much harder on you than I intended. This project is upsetting. Life, death, all that sort of thing. Cat, I am very sorry.”
“Please don’t call me Cat.”
“Is that not your name?”
“There is only one person called me Cat.”
He lowered his lids. Perhaps he was simply holding his temper but he looked, suddenly, unexpectedly like a dreaming Buddha.
I sat, and received a second glass as my reward for my obedience. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s just unthinkable that this is happening to people every day.”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s banal I suppose.”
“I will take the bloody thing away. I am a complete fool.”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Very well,” said Eric.
“Don’t say ‘very well.’ It sounds like you are managing me.”
“Actually, old love, that is my job.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re going to send me to a shrink.”
“Jesus, Cat, I am not going to send you to an anything. Where did you get this nonsense from?”
“When my father died they made us have grief counselling. They would not let us out of the hospital without seeing this cretin from Social Services. They would not give us his clothes even.” I was crying now. I wished I wasn’t. “They tortured him, Eric. They played with him. We had to make them turn off their idiot machines.”
“Cat.”
“Please don’t.”
“Catherine,” he said. “I am sorry. He always called you Cat. To me.”
I immediately felt so sad I could hardly speak. “Did he?”
“To me, yes.”
I was so determined not to bawl, I suppose I glared at him.
“We are going to have a very small team,” he said. “We will have a procedures meeting you can tolerate.”
I had begun to snivel, but I did grasp what he was up to—finding a way for me to continue in employment.
“Ceramics are all Margaret’s friends. I can’t bear it.”
“Hilary isn’t.”
“Heather. The little lesbian.”
“She has a perfectly lovely little baby.”
“Spilled her coffee, that one?”
“Will she be acceptable? Catherine, you really must have mercy on me. Please.”
But I wished to punish him. I could not tolerate him being alive.
“We all miss him, old love. Not like you do. But he was my friend for thirty years.”
“Yes, I know. He loved you. I’m sorry.”
“No, no. Forgive me.”
Sorry, sorry, sorry—how British we were. I thought he was fetching a handkerchief from his pocket, but then I saw it was a small glassine bag filled with white powder.
Of course I was an adult. I knew exactly what it was, but it was giving me an unsafe feeling to watch him tap it up and down. “What’s that?”
“Painkiller.” He spilled a small pile onto the table top, slightly yellow and rather crystalline.
I don’t know him at all, I thought, not really the tiniest bit.
“That was rather risky wasn’t it?” I said.
“Compared to what?” He produced his wallet and found a Barclaycard with which to chop the powder fine. I thought, he means compared to stealing notebooks.
“Jesus, Eric. Stop it.”
But he had no intention of stopping anything. “You know, Catherine,” he said, and he was once again the dreaming Buddha but busy with his chop, chop, chop. “You know when himself wanted a little toot, he would never talk to a dealer.” He smiled directly at me. “No one would ever think of Matthew as a nervous chap, but he was very antsy about drug dealers.”
“You were our drug pimp?”
“Let’s say, every time you had a recreational experience, someone else took care of the low-life aspects.”
He set aside a very small amount of powder, what is called a “bump” by those who know. I thought, I’ll say “no” of course. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet, rolled it up, and hoovered.
“What about me?”
“Very well then, just a little.”
The former speaker of the House was still chipping so I lowered a blind. Then I applied the ten-pound note and felt the cocaine whoosh itself around my nasal cavities and then that lovely medicinal drip down the back of the throat.
“So,” he said, and he was at it with his Barclaycard again. “Here is how I propose we deal with the edifice.”
“OK,” I said when he had finished whatever it was he said.
“OK?”
“Thank you Eric. I’ve been a cow. I’m sorry. Can I have a little more, please Eric?”
He smiled at me, but I must have appeared absolutely wretched with my sunken blackened eyes.
“Do you know why I wanted to meet you in the greasy spoon?”
“The greasy spoon particularly?”
“I had driven the Mini there to give you. Not the easiest thing to do in the circumstances, given it had to be registered first. Did you know when applying to register a rebuilt Mini one must declare whether one’s fucking chassis or monocoque body has been replaced or modified in any way? That took my own mind off things. Anyway I had it parked in front of the greasy spoon. I told you, but you refused to see it.”
“You should have said.”
He helped himself to a big fat line and edged another line towards me. “You saw it.”
“I would have recognized it.”
“He wanted you to have it. Himself.”
It could not possibly be true, but I wanted to believe it just as all stupid people want to believe in what they want.
It was weeks and weeks before I understood Eric had gone up to Beccles and basically stolen our car, but for now I took another line and instructed him to put the remainder well away from me.
“Where is it now, the Mini?”
“I’ll bring it round for you.”
“That’s awfully sweet, but I could not bear to see it.”
“Later.”
“Yes, later.”
“Everything passes,” he said. “You will not feel like this forever.”
But I would. I had no doubt.