Bastian thanks his dad. Then he says, “Is that what we’re meeting Agatha for today?”
“What? Oh, no, no. It’s all this awful business with her sisters. You see, you think I’m a glorified conveyancer, but really it’s probate I’ve had to specialize in.”
Bastian knows that Agatha Howard’s sisters have been contesting their father’s will, and suing her about various things, for years. Tobias rarely discusses the details of the dispute but he does speak about some of the people involved, particularly the three sisters: Angel, Chelsea, and Victoria.
“I do want to introduce you to Agatha, though. If you do want to stay on, you should meet her at some point.”
Bastian realizes that he knows all sorts of information about Agatha Howard’s business and her legal disputes, but he has never heard his father speak about her as a person.
“What’s she like?” he asks.
“In what sense?”
“In the sense of her personality.”
Tobias laughs.
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
“What do you mean?”
“She tries very hard,” Tobias says. Then he laughs again.
Bastian begins to laugh too, prompted by his father’s bizarre response. Bastian asks his dad what he’s getting at.
“She thinks she’s very sophisticated, much more sophisticated than her sisters. But really, they’re not so different.” Tobias glances at his son and detects that he is still confused. “They’re very showy. All of them.”
“Okay,” says Bastian, still unsure. “I’ll wait and see.”
The walk takes them through Soho, along Old Compton Street. Bastian hadn’t thought this through when he suggested they walk. There are sex shops and gay bars, and men sitting outside cafes with their arms around each other, watching passers-by. He feels suddenly alarmed that people might think he and his dad are a couple, and he momentarily tries to work out how best to outwardly present a filial relationship, before telling himself not to be so ridiculous.
Then they pass the club, and Bastian remembers the room he found upstairs with the camp beds. Bastian told his dad about what he saw that night. Bastian had expected his dad – or anyone he told—to think he’d been hallucinating, and for this reason he was reluctant to mention the incident at all. At first he just tried to forget about it. But the memory didn’t lie still, or slowly diminish. It began to breathe within him and reach around for other memories to attach itself to, like ivy between a line of trees. Bastian found the memory in unexpected places or, rather, it appeared while he was thinking about all sorts of other, unconnected things. He was in the corner shop and saw a box of rubber cleaning gloves, and he thought of the pair of marigolds the woman wore. He went shopping for camping gear and remembered the mattresses, arranged side by side. Even takeaway boxes, or a certain kind of industrial-looking carpet. And whenever he read anything on the internet about displaced people, or illegal migrants, he thought about that room.
In the end, Bastian did tell his dad. It was a couple of months ago now, and Tobias responded strangely.
“When was this?” he asked.
Bastian searched his mind for the precise date. “End of June,” he said. “I can’t be more precise than that without looking back through my texts, which I can do if you need me to.”
“No, no, I was just curious.”
“I mentioned it because I thought Agatha Howard might own the building.”
“She does.”
“And it was really weird. Do you have any idea what was going on?”
“It sounds to me like a gang of domestic staff had been put up there.”
“Right. Well, erm, that’s not usual, is it?”
“I don’t know how usual it is, but it’s certainly illegal.”
“Yeah, it didn’t seem quite right to me.”
“I’ll speak to Agatha about it when I see her next.”
That’s where the conversation ended. Bastian wonders whether that’s what his dad will be discussing with Agatha Howard today. Either way, he has a strong sense that he has discharged himself of any duty he might have had to report what he had seen, whatever it was that he had seen.
They cross over Regent Street into Mayfair, and arrive at the club before Agatha. Bastian waits in the lobby while his dad finds an appropriate table at which to greet his guest. Bastian settles himself on an uncomfortable, creaking antique chair, and gets out his phone. Glenda has messaged back.
Not free but would be lovely to see you! Going for dinner with my mate Lorenzo (you’ve met him briefly, I think) and he says he’s happy for you to come too. Meet at the Behn for a drink first and we’ll go over to the restaurant together. It is called Feast and sounds … intriguing …
She has sent him a couple of reviews and Bastian reads them. It sounds bizarre. Feast comprises one long table situated in a disused Soho theater. Everyone who comes sits on benches and eats cuts of meat from one animal that has been slow-cooked for hours. Where you sit at the table affects both the price and the cut of meat you get served. It is meant to mimic some historical custom, where your social rank determined what portion of the animal you got, and when. Instead of the determining factor being social rank, you simply pay a different price. It meant you could choose to pay a lot and sit at the top of the table and eat fillet steaks, or you could pay very little and sit at the lowest end of the table and eat the cheaper cuts. The “social enterprise” part of the concept was that right
