Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

I spend five minutes pottering around admiring Royce Allen’s off-the-peg stuff while his nervous assistant follows me to and fro, nodding when I make little noises of discontent and explaining that (while everything I see is of the highest quality in all respects) the bespoke work is vastly superior. I try on a shirt. It makes me look like a god. I suggest that it’s a little tight under the arms. Yes. Definitely pulling . . . what sort of thread does Royce Allen use in his seams? It feels coarse. The assistant assures me that the thread is the finest baby hair and angora rabbit, the softest known to man. I sigh. It must be the fabric then. A pity. No, no, the fabric is a cotton picked by child slave labourers who wash and moisturise their hands every hour so as to prevent their fingers from roughing the fibres. They bleed, of course, but their blood contains chemicals (owing to a strictly controlled diet) which actually add to the luxuriant mellowness of the weave. The blood is as a matter of course hygenically bleached out with a mineral cleaning agent made from crushed diamond and virgin’s saliva, which adds lustre and radiance, and also gives the finished shirt the toughness of ballistic nylon.

I explain sorrowfully that all this discussion has left me with a dry throat. It is now my intention to return later, or possibly next week, having refreshed my mucous membranes. I am politely disinclined to discuss the matter further. I am so polite as to be almost rude. I cough gently, to remind Royce Allen’s assistant that the absolute last thing I want is further chat, because—possibly owing to the amount of time I spend on the phone firing people and arranging the fate of millions—my larynx is in such terrible agony. He summons a minion (Royce Allen’s shop is awash with minions coming and going clutching swatches and fabrics, and occasionally, from the fitting rooms, there comes the voice of the great man himself: “Freddie! Get the blue flannel for Mr. Custer-Price, please, he needs to see it against the checks,” and Freddie—or Tom, or Phylis, or Betsy, or someone—scurries over and looks the other way so that Mr. Custer-Price is not embarrassed in his partial nudity) and the minion brings a tray of drinks. I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It’s not a wine, it’s a life, right there in the glass. I sip it. Fire and fruit wash over my tongue.

“Oh, that’s actually not bad.” Calumny. I sit. The assistant relaxes a little and asks if I would mind waiting while he fetches Mr. Royce Allen, in person. I decide that I wouldn’t. I sip again. I really wouldn’t.

Royce Allen is a hearty fellow with sausage fingers and the obligatory tape measure around his neck. He is not so much unctuous as balsamic. He eels out of the fitting rooms and gladhands me and confides that he’s been hoping I’d come by ever since he heard I was coming to Haviland. He was concerned that I’d been seduced by that clothbutcher, Daniel Prang. I swear that the false glamour of Prang never appealed even for a second, and he adjudges me not just a powerful man but also—and this is rare, sir, very rare—a man of taste. Daniel Prang (confides Royce Allen) began as a very excellent cobbler; had he stuck to gentlemen’s shoes and boots, all would have been well. The original Prang shoe was a splendid thing, a brogue with fine slim lines and a steel and silver slash across the back of the heel, with a unique crest designed for each customer so that a gentleman’s footprints were instantly recognisable to his friends. Sadly, after a few months, the cleats tended to come loose, and one was forever stopping to examine one’s sole (ahaha, just my little joke, sir, but you see, yes, well of course you do).

In those good old days Royce Allen himself bought shoes at Prang’s, and his crest was a camel passing through the eye of the needle, very droll indeed. Alas, Mr. Prang has upset the natural balance of things by venturing to make gentlemen’s clothing, and it is not a task for which life has equipped him. Royce Allen is delighted that I have the natural acuity and good sense to reject the Prang suit with its modern lines, and determines that I shall have only his best work. He thus dispenses with all the moderate fabrics (read: cheap) and whisks me straight to the last table by his den where he keeps the ones which empty banks and consume the wealth of nations. I ponder, he measures. I cannot decide between the alpaca and cuttlefish (honestly) and the Mylar-silk (very good in summertime), and—since I’m never going to wear them—I order one of each. Royce Allen licks his lips and applauds my boldness. The first fitting will be in three weeks. Royce Allen’s assistant brings me another glass of the red lest my throat should again be giving me trouble after this exertion, and hovers with the bottle in case I need to make any more difficult choices regarding shirts. While we’re in the mood, I toss a couple of the superb off-the-peg jackets on the pile (for casual wear, Mr. Allen) along with some At Work By Allen jeans and some slacks and a pair of Foot By Allen shoes. Royce Allen is so delighted that he throws in a pair of socks. I give him my entirely fictitious address in the nice part of the city and ask if I can pop back in later to pick up the off-the-peg stuff. I’ve got squash in an hour at the Club (I don’t know which club yet, but everyone else obviously does, they nod and bob reverently) and Royce Allen says of course. We shake hands, for which I put down the glass on the sales counter, and the assistant moves forward to grasp it before it can become a hazard. Alas, alack, how do these things happen? I have stepped back into the space he was intending to occupy. Silly me. Perhaps I am clumsy, or supremely confident, or drunk. Certainly, I couldn’t have intended this outcome: the remainder of the bottle (I will linger in the oenophile’s Hell of Corked Vintages for a thousand years) glugs massively over my shirt and down my back.

There is absolute silence. I worry for a moment that the assistant has actually died or gone mad; he’s frozen in place. Then he straightens, murmurs “I’m most terribly sorry” and walks into the back room to gather his things. He does not wait to be told that he’s fired. I hope it’s a drill. I hope he’s going to go and sit in a bar until Royce Allen calls him and tells him to come back to work, the client is gone. I doubt it.

Royce Allen sighs.

“What a muddle,” he says. “Going to the Brandon Club, you said?”

“Yes,” I tell him sadly, “I was.”

“Well, you can’t go like that,” says Royce Allen. He shrugs. “Take the casual now,” he says. “You can pay for it when you come for the first fitting. If you don’t like it, we’ll shove it on the dummy and you can call it a loan, all right?”

I couldn’t possibly, but you must, no, Mr. Allen, sir, I insist, blah blah. We out-polite one another for a while until he puts his foot down and I walk out of his shop wearing a fortune and carrying a change of clothes, and with two glasses of his wine inside me. I’d feel guilty, but he’ll be fine, and he’ll make an extra 5 per cent this year just telling the story to gentlemen in the fitting room. How I Was Took by a Felon, by Royce Allen, and I’d do it again, sir, because that’s how we are in this shop. Oh, no, sir, to be honest, I think we’ll have to go up a grade, that fabric doesn’t do you justice.

I get in a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Brandon Club.

BUDDY KEENE lends me a racquet. He has five, in a thick sack, and he uses a different one depending on mood. His name (Bartholomew Keene) is printed in gold on the bag. Tom Link and Roy Massaman put me on to him by the water fountain: Buddy has too many damn racquets, man he’ll set you up. And he will, because Royce Allen’s craft is all over me, and that’s as much a passport as Libby Lloyd’s whites. The stripes cause a bit of a murmur when they come out.