“May we see his photograph?” I inquire.
We all agree the resemblance, while not literal, is powerful enough to be interesting. When we consider the images of Johnny and Nicky side by side—don’t ask me how I came by the Nicky pic!—Johnny has the requisite floppy pale hair, but is considerably more fleshly than the original golden boy. Part must be due to the aging process—Johnny is thirty-nine, Nicky only just in his twenties in the fading shot from an early camera phone—but part must also be temperament. Nicky was one of those classic wiry English youths who live for cricket and have twelve sisters and a farty old Labrador called Rags back home at The Cedars, Lower Bummington-on-Stour—to be honest, I may have nicked some of this commentary from a log of Daisy’s on the record remarks. Johnny, meanwhile, seems more like someone who lives for the tea interval. Not fat—that would be going too far—we can settle for well-covered! Solid, if you want to put a positive spin on the accretions of adipose tissue. But the look in the eyes, we all agree, is strikingly similar. A certain assuredness in the gaze. A sense of entitlement, would you call it?
“In three words?” says the telly, who has lately become fond of this game. “Rich. Posh. Twats.”
“Harsh,” is my comment. “From the upper echelons, doubtless. Some family money, very probably. But the Golden Nicky was a good egg.”
Almost as an afterthought, the toothbrush mentions Johnny is divorced. There’s a daughter, eight, who lives with the mother, although she stays with Johnny every other weekend.
“Problem?” says the toothbrush when we all fall silent.
“Not ideal,” I am forced to admit.
“Yeah, but what is?” says the TV set. “You see it all the time. Mixed families. Three kids by different dads. Bob’s your auntie. It’s the modern way.”
“I suppose you can’t help watching too much television if you are a television,” says the microwave, and is so pleased by its remark it chucks in a ping.
But the TV is undoubtedly correct. Modern life is complicated. Few things are straightforward. Ideal is for the birds.
(It’s hard for me to accept this, and I struggle with it daily; the refrigeration cycle at the heart of my existence being so very simple, unvarying and, dare I say it, even a little bit beautiful. If the publisher of this volume has been too cheap to include one, there are many excellent diagrams available on the internet!)
“He seems like an okay chappie,” says the toothbrush, “but here’s the thing. He likes ice cream. I mean he loves ice cream. He’s like a total ice cream fiend!”
When no one says anything, it adds: “I can’t believe you’re not seeing this! It’s a match made in Häagen-Dazs!”
We agree the idea of Daisy and Johnny has potential, and I must say, speaking personally, a relationship based on ice cream does make sense for a machine whose raison d’être is keeping things cold. However, we all recall the Owen debacle, so I do some heavy duty due diligence on the divorcé (the second failed marriage we have encountered in these pages. Yes, life is complicated. Life is complicated! Life. Is. Complicated).
Johnny, it turns out, is an antique dealer. That is to say he has a half-share in an antique dealing business. From what it’s possible to gather—the finances are somewhat opaque—his business partner Jamie (they met at school) spends much of his time in Suffolk breeding racehorses when he is not in Devon racing his powerboat or in Switzerland visiting his money.
Honestly. What are they like? These rich, posh, twa—Englishmen!
When I drop into the showroom in a backwater of Chelsea for a “live read” as the poker players have it—and cheers, btw, to the security system for the entrée—Johnny is to be found alone at the back of the shop with his feet up on a desk leafing through the property porn in Country Life. In reverse order, the apparel is as follows: brown suede shoes, yellow socks, burgundy cords, lilac shirt, navy blue blazer with shiny buttons featuring anchors, no tie. It seems to me to be the uniform of a much older man—but then I am a fridge-freezer and not Signor Gucci.
Now a heavy sigh escapes his lips. He must be reasonably confident there are no customers in the house because what happens next is startling.
Closing the magazine and climbing to his feet, in a loud voice somewhere just short of a yell, he exclaims: “Oh… pissflaps!”
And then he adds, perhaps just to underscore the sentiment, “Sodding, bollocking, buggering, cunting, pissflaps!”
The formulation is so strikingly similar to bollocking cockpuffins that—I know it’s a daft thing to say—a small shiver runs up my pipework.
I realize you cannot build a lifetime of happiness on a penchant for ice cream and a tendency to pottymouth, but it’s a start, wouldn’t you say?
A spin through the electronic trail—thanks are owed to phones, laptops and an almost obsolete BlackBerry—reveals a more nuanced picture: Johnny had a conventional upper middle-class upbringing in the home counties followed by a minor public school, before dropping out of Bristol university in favor of running a nightclub in that city, the first of several joint ventures with Jamie the moneyed classmate. There was a wine club, some internet start-ups and an on-demand housekeeping service for busy yuppies (as they were then called). The pattern was broadly that Jamie put up the money and took the lion’s share of the (slender, if any) profits or (more commonly) absorbed the losses while Johnny’s role was to glad-hand the human assets, be they investors, computer geeks, or suppliers wondering when their latest invoice would be settled. The two friends did nothing illegal, so far as one can tell, their activities falling into the general category of “commerce” in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Romantically, a similar picture emerges from the record. A series of respectable ventures, all entered into with good faith, it would appear—no
