The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby (2 page)

It was not long, ten minutes or so, before Roxanne appeared. We greeted each other. She kissed me on both cheeks, then full on the lips. She did not want to sit down.

‘I have left the car right outside. Let’s go. I want to see the sun set,’ she explained.

‘Don’t you want a drink? Sit down, relax. Listen to the Mozart.’

‘No. Come on or we’ll be too late. I want to drive out past the airport. I want to watch the sun settle behind the Sierras.’

There was no resisting her determination. I caught the boy’s eye. That was not difficult. I felt that he was constantly aware of what was going on and always looking out for the half chance of an assignation. I was probably wrong but that was the way my mind worked. In my trade, you had to be open to all possibilities. The various permutations of human psychology were never far from the front of my mind. I quickly paid the bill, complimented him on his considerate service and tipped him. I noticed the clear expression of pleasure with which he took the compliment and his few paltry euros.

Roxanne and I, holding hands, left.

In general, Belmont was a man of familiar and regular habit. He took coffee at eleven: he went for tapas at a quarter to two. You noticed when he wasn’t there. His death came as a shock. The graveyard poet, Thomas Gray, records the immediately recognisable feeling, ‘One morn I missed him on the customed hill … Another came.’ The following verse announces the sad news, ‘The next with dirges due in sad array/Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne.’ Thus it was with Belmont. It was reported that he fell under a train, that favourite form of murder in the developing lands of the Wild West of America, much neglected though in the chronicles. His foresight of his possible end would have been much more dramatic. He would have half expected to meet his fate stepping towards an acquaintance, holding out his right hand for the affectionate shake, finding it grasped by the other’s left, the right holding the revolver which was to blow his chest away. That was the trademark of Pat Garret’s deputy, Bob Ollinger. To be forcibly nudged off the edge of a platform, cut to pieces and crushed by a slowing train whose momentum although diminishing was definitively awful and as relentless as a juggernaut, was not the way he foresaw his end.

Belmont left the world in the early evening. He had been waiting for a train up from the coast. The platform was reasonably crowded and he was standing in a group of people who huddled at the spot where the rear of the train would halt. As the engine noisily ground its way into the station, there was a surprised cry from Belmont, so it was reported by an onlooker to the police investigator, he seemed to lose his footing, fell towards the track and hit the front of the loco as it trundled past. The huge weight of the train gave him no chance and he was dead within seconds:
peine forte et dure
. He was barely recognisable when I saw his corpse in the morgue the next day. It was listed as a terrible accident. The bystanders were aghast: there were many witness statements. It occurred to no one that he might have been pushed.

Those of us who knew him could not help but wonder. Belmont was careful, constantly aware. We all knew that he was a target: his past was unforgiving. He regarded himself as a sort of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by an umbrella stab on Waterloo Bridge. The ricin-tipped ferule ensured that Markov, as it were, met his Waterloo.

Our reservations about Belmont’s demise were justified. Some days later I heard from Willy in London that a deciphered message on the night of the railway accident listed Belmont as victim in a successful elimination exercise. It came as no shock. The opposition, whatever it was, was unrelentingly active and determined.

Belmont’s fate put us all on alert. Since he had gone, and later we realised that the enemy’s confidence was such that they could list him as victim before the dreadful event, we knew we were all vulnerable. It was necessary to be extremely careful. Whatever organisation it was, they knew their own capabilities, entertained no doubts about their effectiveness, and were quite clearly lethal. By contrast, even though I had the support of a major newspaper in a still powerful country, I knew I was hog-tied by red tape and bureaucratic accountability.

I was simply a journalist. The
London Journal
employed me and provided me with all sorts of cover and excuses for being in surprising places at odd times. My closest friend and confidant was Mark, an entrepreneurial investment manager, who worked in conjunction with an old friend of his: they settled spare cash funds of a number of influential clients in timely, advantageous investments. Mark cultivated his business intelligence sources. He knew people in the financial press, columnists and commentators on the stock market, analysts, traders and brokers. He was an assiduous luncher within the Square Mile and a participant in constant mobile telephone conversations and conference calls. He approached as closely as was possible to the dangerous edge of insider trading. He knew what was going on. His clients prospered. He knew much that was advantageous to me.

Although Mark was younger than me, I had known him for years and cared for him intensely. We had many of the same interests intellectually and the same sense of humour. He was easy to work with. We knew each other’s mind. We shared interests in ideas, social and political: we read and discussed Chomsky, Edward Said and the Hitchens brothers. We followed the progress of the contemporary novel and talked about poetry. Mark was a poet himself: he had no collection out but had published one or two poems in the
Times Literary Supplement
. Thus our interests coincided. I had first met him four or five years ago, at lunch in a restaurant, the Gay Hussar, with a crowd of friends. We had sat opposite each other, and, from the very first, conversation flowed. There was an immediate empathy. Our friendship was established. There was always an urgent need to communicate ideas. At a distance, when travelling, we kept in touch by email and phone. The constant cut and thrust of debate was an essential part of our intellectual survival: we both depended on it.

Mark was an elegant, somewhat unconventionally dressed Anglo–American. When we first met he must have been about twenty-eight. He had originated in Los Angeles, Culver City, the inspiration of an American father and English mother. His early years were spent on the East Coast, New York and Boston. Then his father split and his mother returned to England. Mark kept his contact with the States, returned there often, and was looked after by his father’s family, especially by his grandparents. He spoke with a traditional, well-educated English voice slightly softened by American accent and idiom. That, together with his good looks and gentle manners, proved fatally attractive in the sport of love, and a succession of women fell for him. During those days in Seville, just after Belmont’s death, I was glad Mark was not around. I should have feared his effect on Roxanne. I knew instinctively that she would have been attracted to him. More than at any other time, I could not have survived Mark’s competition. My renewed affair with Roxanne enabled me to come to terms with Belmont’s extinction. His death depressed me more than I had expected or realised. Thoughts of mortality made me gloomy. Roxanne saved me from myself, and her expert attentions in the practice of the art of love gave me consolation and pleasure. Together we recaptured the original thrill of our relationship. It was renewal, reawakening.

I had expected my three days back in Seville to be fun. I had looked forward to meeting Roxanne again although I could not have predicted that we were to take up where we had left off in our sexual life. I should have known. Her sexual voracity was always wild, exuberant. Why should she have changed? She was her old seductive self. She took the initiative: I responded. That was the nature, the balance of our relationship. What I had not foreseen was the shock of Belmont’s death, murder, assassination – I had difficulty giving his demise a name when speaking of it to colleagues and friends. The image of his mangled corpse that I had seen and identified in the hospital morgue simply haunted me. I had experienced that common feeling. That corpse was not Belmont. Where was the essence of the man? Where was that wearied, sad spirit, that dejected soul? Roxanne helped me; she distracted me, although sometimes in those brief moments of post-coital
tristesse
, I was more deeply depressed than I had ever been.

Back in London, I immediately contacted Mark. It was always good to hear him. As I have said, we enjoyed a remarkable empathy. I told him what had happened. I described Belmont’s body in the morgue. For me, it was a sort of exorcism. He listened with sympathetic attention and heard me out. He fulfilled the role of analyst. I hinted at my intimacies with Roxanne without revealing the details. Mark’s imagination was good enough to see what would have happened. There was some part of my life with Roxanne that I wanted kept from him. I was deeply suspicious of his rivalry. I nursed a suppressed knowledge inside myself that he would prove a threat to the stability of my very existence with Roxanne. I knew instinctively that he would revolt, surreptitiously, insidiously. His loyalty to me would vanish, his sincerity diminish, change, into deception. I should stand betrayed. Of course, when I considered all these thoughts objectively, I regarded them as nonsense. Rationale and objectivity have no chance against feeling and prejudice. As much as I loved Mark – and love is the right word: respect, admiration, regard, all do not go far enough to define what I felt – I was convinced that this was the one area where I could not trust him. It did not worry me unduly. I regarded it as usual. In affairs of the heart, everything is unpredictable, and the hunting ground is open to all comers. I had no illusions. I realised that if Mark were to be smitten by Roxanne, there was nothing to be done. It was best for me to keep them apart for my own peace of mind and the quality of my own love life.

Late one morning, Mark and I were walking slowly down Cheapside deep in conversation about T. S. Eliot’s view of London. Mark reminded me that Eliot had edited the
Criterion
from the end of one nervous breakdown to the beginning of another, or from the end of one world war to the beginning of another. We decided to go for a drink in one of the City’s champagne bars. The one we chose was subterranean, smart, modern, clean. We went down its steps and decided to sit at a table rather than stand at the bar. ‘Pelham Rigby! Good to see you. What are you doing here? I thought you were abroad.’ I had turned quickly at the sound of my name to identify the owner of the brash voice that had addressed me. I was conscious that others in the bar had heard my name and, as usual, I did not like the situation. I do not like my name.  There is nothing wrong with my surname, I suppose, but Pelham is ridiculous. I sound like someone out of a Jane Austen novel. Some way back, generations in the past, relations on my mother’s side of the family were connected with a prime minister whose name was Pelham. My parents revived his name and gave it to me. I think it sounds awful and is extremely pretentious. At school I tried to change it and wanted everyone to call me Bill, from William, my second name, but no one would. They knew I was Pelham. The name was different. They all thought it a laugh, and so that is what they called me whether I liked it or not.

I did not want to meet anyone. What I needed to do was talk to Mark. That was my restorative, the palliative for my pain. Belmont’s death hurt me. My time with Roxanne, although intensely enjoyable, was disturbing. I desperately needed to get over my Seville trip. I felt on edge, uncertain, extremely nervous, and I could not work out any really good reason why.

The person who hailed me was an old City acquaintance, a man I had known, never very well, for years. He was a banker for one of the ancient City houses and had worked overseas in Hong Kong and Jakarta. At times he had been useful to me in finding contacts who could help during those risky days when Hong Kong was given over to the Chinese government. I could never have been close to him. So far as I was concerned, he was alien. We had no common interests outside the professional world of finance and news information. You could never talk to him about art, literature or the condition of your soul. In conversation with Mark, the last thing I wanted was to meet this philistine. Yet there he was. The situation required quick footwork.

‘Charles, lovely to see you,’ I said. ‘Look I can’t chat at the moment. I’ve got some catching up to do with Mark here.’ Mark nodded to him but made no move to join in the exchange or shake his hand.

‘Of course. I’ll leave you two to it. But you were in Seville, weren’t you? Just for the record, you’ll want to know that the banking rumour is that there is big money, really big money, bound up in that Seville murder, if that’s what it was. Nobody in the City believes it was an accident.’

‘Charles, I’ll ring you later on. Sorry to be anti-social.’

He smiled and made a careless gesture, sat on a stool at the bar and started talking to the barman. Not a bad man after all, I thought, understanding and diplomatic. That must be why he has done so well in that revered, established firm of his.

‘Well,’ I said to Mark, ‘that’s interesting. What was Belmont up to? If Charles’s information is correct, this business is not going to be run-of-the-mill. If the banking world is involved directly there’s definitely something extremely fishy going on. It’s not the usual drugs or weapons scenario.’

‘How would Belmont have been involved? There would have to be something very personal about the business. Belmont was certainly not well off. It could figure. He was probably thinking of his retirement plans, pension and stuff. What was he doing in Seville anyway? Was he still working for our crowd?’

‘I think he certainly was but in a sort of desultory way. He knew what was going on by what he said to me and was still in touch with Willy. You’re probably right. Perhaps he was trying to sort out his finances for his later years. It’s very odd. Why bump off someone like that? Was it something from the past catching up with him? He couldn’t have been very harmful to anyone. The fuss that his murder makes is not worth its bother. There must be something more to his walking off the stage than a petty difference about a bit of cash. So, as Charles says, it’s got to be big money.’

Mark thought for a moment. ‘You must follow this up. Belmont must have been dabbling in something big.’

Charles had been joined by a couple of young men in suits and a smartly dressed woman aged about thirty: they looked like a cabaret act about to start a striptease. The group shifted to a table, sat down, and began a boisterous, jokey, conversation. I thought it not a good time to go back to Charles and enquire further about the fate of Belmont.

‘I’ll ring Charles later on this afternoon. He probably won’t mind talking on the phone. If it’s all a widely dispersed banking rumour, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll then ring you on your mobile.’

We sat there drinking a perfectly acceptable but ordinary Moët. The stairs that ascended to the pavement were flooded in sunshine. It was a brilliant day outside and I was beginning to regret not being in the open air. Mark felt the same and we decided to take a walk down towards the Bank of England.