Benjamin Black - The Lemur

David ordered peppermint tea. He was dressed in a dark wool suit and a white silk shirt and silk tie. His watch was a Patek Philippe, one of the more discreet models. His mother pampered him; he was her only weakness.

“David has some news for you,” she said now. “Haven’t you, darling?”

The young man raised his eyebrows and briefly closed his eyes, his version of a shrug. “I thought you would have told him yourself by now, you’re so excited about it,” he said.

Louise turned to her husband. “David is joining the foundation.”

He looked at her blankly. “The foundation?”

“For goodness’ sake, John! The Mulholland Trust. In fact, he’s going to be the new director.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say- oh?”

“I thought you were the director.”

“I was. It was becoming too much for me, I told you that. From now on I’ll take a back seat.”

“Isn’t he”-Glass took a small pleasure in speaking pointedly of his stepson as if he were not there-“isn’t he a little young, to take on so great a responsibility?”

David laughed shortly, for some reason of his own, and sipped his tea.

“I’ll still be there, to help him, at first,” Louise said, sharply. She always resented being required to explain herself. “Besides, there’s the staff. They’re all experienced people.”

Glass contemplated the young man sitting with his back to the window and smirking. “Well,” he said, lifting his wineglass, “congratulations, young man.” He tended not to address his stepson by name, if he could help it.

“Thanks, Dad,” David said, with high sarcasm, and lifted his teacup to return the toast.

Suddenly Glass remembered the first time he and Louise had met, one April afternoon at John Huston’s mansion near Loughrea in the wet and stormy west of Ireland. He had been a precocious nineteen, and had come to interview the film director for the Irish Times. Bill Mulholland and his daughter were there. They had ridden over from the mansion down the valley that Mulholland had recently purchased, and Louise wore stained jodhpurs and a green silk scarf knotted at her throat. She was barely seventeen. Her skin was flushed pink from the ride, and there was a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her perfect nose, and Glass could hardly speak from the effort of trying not to stare at her. Huston, the old satyr, saw at a glance what was going on in the young man’s breast, and grinned his orangutan’s grin and handed him a dry martini and said: “Here, son, have a bracer.”

David Sinclair had finished his tea and now he rose, shooting his cuffs. He had to be somewhere, he said smoothly, giving the impression that it was somewhere much too important for its name to be spoken aloud in public. Glass saw how pleased with himself he was. Director of the Mulholland Trust at the age of-what was he?-twenty-three? Young enough, Glass thought with satisfaction, to make a serious mess of it. His mother, of course, would shield him from the worst of his mistakes, but Big Bill, the founder of the Trust, was not as fond of his grandson as Louise would wish him to be, and Big Bill was not a great forgiver.

When the young man had gone Louise signaled for the check and turned to her husband and said: “I wonder if you realize how clearly you betray your jealousy.”

Glass stared. “Who am I jealous of?”

She handed her platinum credit card to the waiter, who went away and came back in a moment with the receipt. She signed her fine, firm signature and he gave her the copy and departed. Glass watched as she folded the receipt carefully four times lengthwise and then slipped the spill she had made into her purse. That was Louise’s way: fold and file, fold and file. “I’m surprised Amex haven’t done a card specially for you,” Glass said mildly. “In Kryptonite, perhaps.” She ignored this; his barbed jokes she always ignored. She looked down at the tablecloth, fingering the weave of it. “The Trust does valuable work, you know,” she said, “more than valuable, not least in helping to resolve that late, nasty little conflict in your native land.”

He marvelled always at the way she spoke, in molded sentences, with such preciseness, making such nice discriminations; her three years of study in England, a postgraduate course among the Oxford logical positivists, had honed her diction to a gleaming keenness.

“I know,” he said, trying not to sound petulant, “I know what the Trust does.”

She brushed his protest aside. “You, of course, are too cynical and, yes, too jealous, to acknowledge the importance of what we do. Frankly, I don’t care. I long ago stopped caring what you think or don’t think. But I won’t have you trying to infect my son with your bitterness. Your failures are not his fault-they’re no one’s fault but your own. So keep your sarcasm to yourself.” She lifted her eyes from the tablecloth and looked at him. Her gaze was as blank as the face of her son’s expensive watch, with a myriad unseen, infinitely intricate movements going on behind it. “Do you understand?”

“I’m going out to smoke a cigarette,” he said.

The rain had stopped and the street was steaming under watery sunlight. He walked back to the office, the chill of early spring striking at him through the light stuff of his jacket. He was thinking of Dylan Riley, picturing him in some Village loft hunched over his machines, the screens throwing their nocturnal radiance onto his face and printing their images on the shiny dark ovals of his eyes. It was to be a week before Glass would hear from him again, and then he would learn how sharp and penetrating was the Lemur’s bite.

Glass had spent the week in his office, trying his best to get used to it, to the plate glass and the steel, to the deadened air, to, above all, the heady elevation. He tried to keep office hours, breezing in at nine but slouching out again morosely five or six hours later. One day, when it occurred to him that there was no one to challenge him, he smoked a cigarette, leaning back luxuriously on his chair with his feet on the desk and his ankles crossed. No forbidden cigarette ever, including the ones he used to pilfer from his father’s coat pocket when he was a ten-year-old, had tasted so sweet, so dangerous, so sexy.

Presently, however, he saw the problems he had given himself. How was he to get rid of the smell of smoke, since the windows up here were sealed tight? The telltale stink would probably cling on for weeks in this endlessly recycled air. And in the more immediate term, what was he to do with the ash or-Jesus!-with the stub? In the end he fashioned a makeshift ashtray from the foil of a Hershey bar wrapper that someone had left in the wastepaper basket, feeling as proudly resourceful and inventive as Robinson Crusoe. When he was finished he folded the wrapper as neatly as Louise would have done and put it in his pocket-surprising how much heat had been left in the stubbed-out butt-and crept with a felon’s circumspection to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall and emptied the contents of the foil into the lavatory bowl. But of course the filter tip was too buoyant to go down-even some of the ash stayed on the surface of the water-and in the end, after repeated, vain, flushings, he had to fish the soggy thing out and wrap it in a wad of toilet tissue and carry it back to the office and throw it in the waste bin where, he gloomily supposed, some cleaner or busybody janitor would nose it out and denounce him.

What about real addicts, he wondered, poor wretches hooked on heroin or crack cocaine-or that new stuff, something meth-were their lives a series of grimly comic frustrations and inept subterfuges? He supposed they must be, though he supposed, too, that junkies would not see the funny side of things. Not that he was laughing, exactly.