Passing Speakers' Corner and entering Park Lane, Steve had the rare and transient pleasure of engaging third gear. He glanced sideways. He changed down. In the days when he'd played squash regularly, and tried tennis out for a while, Steve had given a lot of thought to the question of where the power came from, on the shot: wrist or arm? Take a cloth serviette. You can throw that into somebody's face as hard as you like and it's nothing: just a powderpuff. But with a good flick of the wrist you can bloody their nose or blacken their eye. As he pulled away from the lights by the Dorchester, Scozzy changed from first to second and with a flick of the wrist gave his passenger four knuckles right across the cheekbone. 13 's head smacked into the side window and then bounced back again.
'Jesus. What was that for?'
'Never keep me waiting. Never do it, mate. Never.'
13 sat there blinking and feeling his cheek. This was all he fucking needed. He was going to get beaten up tonight by Crash and Rooster-Booster anyway, as it was. To mark his appearance in court. 13 said, 'That really hurt, man.'
Of course you'd never get a meter. So 13 could just drive round Berkeley Square as fast as he dared for as long as it took while Steve went to pay his call on Mrs. V.
'See? All in the wrist, that,' said Steve. 'All in the wrist.'
Anita Verulam's basement office was, as usual, a two-room altar of middle class and Middle Eastern gratitude and praise. Cellophaned bouquets, professionally gift-wrapped boxes of chocolates and bottles of champagne, various hampers and caskets: all these were offerings from the opulent households which Mrs. Verulam supplied with maids, cooks, chars, nannies, nurses, drivers, gardeners, hewers of wood and drawers of water, batmen, bondmen, gentlemen's gentlemen-and anyone else who came under the heading of help. In the saunas and restaurants and department-store coffee shops of West London the name of Mrs. Verulam was mouthed in sacred whispers by wealthy housewives, all of them, by now, crack delegators, their homes thrumming empires of monosyllabic vassalage. Had these ladies been a little bit crazier, and a lot richer, they might have built 'shrines' to Mrs. Verulam, in attics, in disused guest rooms. The help she dealt in was exclusively foreign. Foreign help was actually helpful, foreign cleaning ladies could actually clean: they knew how you did it. Whereas the cleaning gene had long absented itself from the indigenous DNA. This was unfortunate, if you took the long view at the big picture. Cleaning, in planetary terms, and unlike other sectors, held wonderful promise. Cleaning was obviously going to be huge. Lady Demeter Barry had never set eyes on Mrs. Verulam, but on the telephone she poured her heart out to her three times a week.
Steve said, 'Did you take a look in the file for us?' Us came naturally: it was less culpable somehow.
The cigarette in her mouth wagged up and down as she said, 'When were they married exactly?'
He gave the month and the year.
'It seems to have got steadily choppier. A whole stream of walkouts.' Mrs. Verulam was a fifty-year-old widow in a pink two-piece suit; when Mr. Verulam was alive she had walked with address into a certain kind of drawing room-Paris, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Milan. 'It's not Lady Demeter. No complaints there.' Her voice was warmly emphysemic, but her eyes were hooded and cold. Often during their encounters here Mrs. Verulam talked on, holding the telephone at arm's length while a baffled female larynx, a marooned existence, wailed or pleaded into the air, as if seized at the throat by her painted fingers. 'It's him they don't like. No children,' she added pitilessly.
'Do you think he uh…?'
'My little Spanish ladies and Portuguese ladies are sometimes very religious. They'll walk out on a couple if they think the rhythm method is being used. And of course Demeter's Catholic, isn't she? The otherthing about these little ladies is that they're astonishingly discreet. Even to me. What we need,' she said, re-consulting the folder, 'is a Filipino. Or a Colombian.'
Steve nodded approvingly. He understood. Filipinos, Colombians: you could lean on them with threats of deportation. You know: Been here long, have we, Charito?
'Mm, lots. Ah, Ancilla. Good. I'll talk to Ancilla and let you know.'
'Appreciate it, Mrs. V. How's our friend Nigel?'
'Yes, thank you for that, Steve.'
'I had a word with him.'
'Good as gold now. Quiet as a mouse after ten o'clock.'
'Yeah, well. I had a quiet word with him.'
They looked at each other. Mrs. Verulam was a modern person, and routinely traded in information; and if it had ever struck her as odd or unprofessional it struck her that way no longer. She too was childless. There was an affinity between the Barnardo boy and Anita Verulam. Because the family was one thing and they were the other.
On the way out Steve wondered if Mrs. V had any idea just how loud it had been-his quiet word with Nigel. Nigel was a rich hippy who lived in the flat above Mrs. Verulam's best friend, another widow, called Aramintha. It was once Nigel's habit to play classical music, mostly Mahler, at full volume, well into the small hours. Aramintha tried everything. She asked Nigel nicely; she asked him not so nicely; she got the landlord to ask him; she got the police to ask him; she asked Nigel nicely again. All of Aramintha's entreaties were to no avail. Until Steve smashed his door down at three in the morning and went in there with Clasford and T, and kicked fucking Nigel out of bed and dragged him across the fucking floor by his fucking hair and put his fucking head on the . . . What did they do? Oh yeah. Jammed his head between the amp and the CD player while they shattered them with baseball bats. And Steve cracked his fucking elbow into Nigel's fucking mouth and told him, at full volume-no noise after ten. Good as gold now, and very polite on the stairs. It wasn't the first time Scozzy had helped out Mrs. V. She had a few bob and liked the sort of young man who gave trouble.
He climbed into the Cosworth, next to 13, and said, 'Warlock.'
At four-fifteen Lizzete showed up with Marius, who wore a green sash athwart his burgundy blazer to commemorate some extraordinary achievement in art or football, and Richard was relieved of Marco and all further duties. He went upstairs. Upstairs consisted of his and Gina's cramped bedroom, plus a little stall in the corner with a shower and a canin it. He undressed and redressed quickly, although there was plenty of time, and as if he felt cold suddenly, although the room was warm. Richard had had a more than averagely bad afternoon. After three he realized that his book-review roster was all out of synch. He was obliged to free his mind of The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller and The Unfortunate Lover: William Davenant, Shakespeare's Bastard and hastily reacquaint it with Robert Southey: Gentleman Poet, on which he was meant to write seven hundred words in the next seventy minutes. He achieved this while also smoking fifteen cigarettes with his head more or less out of the window and while also conducting some kind of conversation with Marco, who, that day, was being especially clinging and garrulous and ill. The last sentence took him a quarter of an hour and caused him to draw blood on his bitten fingertips . . . Richard had to do the room over before he found a pair of white shorts; he had to upend the laundry basket and shake it out onto the bathroom tiles before he found a pair of white socks, which cracked and creaked to his touch. It didn't strike him then, even though Gina was in his thoughts, as she would be, in their bedroom: it didn't quite strike him then that everything was getting less clear, less bright-even the universe of his laundry, over which Gina presided with decreasing gravity, like a divinity insufficiently prayed to, who no longer felt gripped by the force of the covenant, who no longer felt gripped by belief. If Gina was cheating on him, then she would be cheating on him on Fridays. Friday was consecrated as Gina's day to herself: no one was allowed in the flat, without warning, until teatime, when the boys came home from school. This was their agreement-of a year's standing. Richard went to the Tantalus Press or The Little Magazine or the Adam and Eve. But for a while he didn't go anywhere, and lurked outside, watching. Gina would regularly glance out of the window and see cigarette smoke wafting from the off-white Prelude, as it then was, before that car collapsed and they bought the tomato-red Maestro.
