William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

“Angiosperm?”

“Flowering plant. The plant that I used, the Zembla flower—”

“Zembla flower?”

“The magnolia from Hong Kong. Locally it’s known as the Zembla flower. Anyway, this magnolia’s pollen spores are present in the fossil records of the Cretaceous era.” He spread his hands — it was so obvious.

“Meaning?” Ingram asked his third question.

“Meaning that this magnolia was one of the very, very earliest angiosperms. That it, if you like, seems to produce a ‘memory’ response in our immune system, the immune system ‘remembers’ this trigger from the Cretaceous past, making it react properly. Nice Thi cells not nasty Th2.” He paused and when he spoke again, his voice trembled. “I think we may, just possibly, have found a way of controlling bronchial asthma.”

“So what do you want?” Ingram asked, carefully.

“Money,” Philip said, faintly apologetically, “to see if there’s some way of replicating the effect of this Hong Kong Zembla flower on asthma sufferers. Set up trials, start testing on animals. Go to phase one, in other words.”

Ingram thought: all those millions upon millions of asthma sufferers…If Calenture-Deutz could fabricate a drug that they would be happy to use…Anything Calenture-Deutz could do to alleviate their misery had to be worth pursuing. So he had provided Philip with his necessary initial funding and the Zembla development had begun in earnest. They applied to the PDA for an Inaugural New Drug Licence and it was granted. Then to his complete astonishment, about three months later, Ingram had received a call from Alfredo Rilke with an offer to buy 20 per cent of Calenture-Deutz stock and pump real investment into the development of Zembla. Ingram had never asked Alfredo how he had learnt of Zembla’s existence but it seemed both a prudent and lucrative idea. So Calenture-Deutz and Rilke Pharmaceutical had become partners.

There was a polite rap on the bathroom door and Phyllis came in. She was wearing a lemon-yellow cardigan and chocolate-brown slacks.

“How are we doing, Jack?” she asked. She was a small, plump, full-breasted woman with a great quiff of reddish blonde hair swept up in a frosted, billow-effect around her pretty face. “Out we get — turn into a jelly fish, you will.” She had a deep voice for a small woman — probably an ex-smoker, Ingram thought — one that he found made her cockney accent more raucous and agreeably lewd, somehow.

He stepped meekly out of the bath and she advanced on him with a towel and began to dry him.

“Someone’s growing a little pot belly, Jack-me-lad,” she said, patting his stomach. “Hello, hello, what’ve we got here, then?”

♦

Ingram counted out the four 50-pound notes and laid them discreetly on Phyllis’s dresser. It seemed unspeakably cheap for the thirty minutes or so of intense sexual pleasure he had enjoyed with her. He checked his hair in the mirror — he looked a little flushed, still — and adjusted his tie-knot.

“That was wonderful, Phyllis,” he said, adding another “Tremendous.”

“You can fuck me any day you want, Jack, darling,” she said, slipping naked out of the bed. She gave him a kiss and squeezed his balls, making him flinch, then laugh. “Ta muchly,” she said, picking up the money. “Close the door behind you, Jack dear, there’s a love.” She put the notes in a large wallet. “Give us a bell any time — don’t forget, twenty-four hours notice.”

On the Tube back to Victoria, Ingram thought back, with nostalgic pleasure, over the various sex acts he’d performed with Phyllis that morning and marvelled, as he always did when he left her, that he’d found her at all. For five years before Phyllis he had enjoyed the professional services of Nerys, a Welsh woman, with a thick, singing Welsh accent, who had a couple of rooms in Soho. When she told him she was going back to Swansea to look after her grandchildren Ingram felt some key component of his life was being removed. “Don’t worry, lovely,” she had said, “I’ll find you a perfect substitute,” and it was Nerys who had introduced him to Phyllis. Networking, he supposed, everyone did it…He kept his Nerys name—“Jack”—and the relationship, such as it was, flourished and endured — perhaps even better than it had been with Nerys.

How come? he wondered. He didn’t want to delve too deeply into the reasons why he found the Neryses and the Phyllises of this world so sexually alluring. He wasn’t a fool: he knew absolutely that on one level it was all about class. It was because they were working class — because they were ‘common’—that he was excited by them: the terrible decor of their rooms, their funny names, their culture, their accents, their grammar, their language. He suspected also that it was something to do with his schooldays, his prep school, the onset of puberty and all that — not wanting to delve too deeply…Didn’t someone say that what attracted you sexually as a thirteen-year-old haunted you all your adult life? A friend’s mother, an aunt, a sibling’s nanny, an au pair, an under-matron, a girl working in the school kitchen…What set these time bombs ticking in your sexual psyche? How could you know when and how they would detonate?

He stepped out of the train on to the platform — he took careful precautions on his journeys to and from Phyllis — Shoreditch not being somewhere he frequented, normally. Luigi parked in a square not far from the station. Ingram would say he had a meeting that would last a couple of hours and he wasn’t to be disturbed. He’d walk to the Underground station on a circuitous route and always return to the car by a different one.

He paused on the station concourse for a second and briefly closed his eyes, remembering Phyllis’s generous, well-padded body, her gentle mockery. Sex was fun, a bit of a lark, robustly uncomplicated — no need for PRO-Vyril’s stealthy, chemical helping hand. He headed out of the station, wondering if she ever thought about him after he’d left — her ‘Jack’—and if she ever speculated about who he really was (he took no ID with him, another precaution, just cash). No, he thought, this was the punter’s typical, sad fantasy — all she wanted was her 200 quid because another ‘Jack’ was due. He wasn’t that vain, that naive — thank god! Still, sometimes he wondered…

Her husband, Wesley — he knew his name — was a despatcher for a minicab firm, absent about twelve hours a day, and Phyllis had decided to make the family home in Shoreditch generate some income while he was at work. Only once had he met another client, coming to the house as he was leaving — another man his age, grey-haired, in his fifties, his whole demeanour reeking of upper-middle — classdom: the dark suit and banded tie, the covert coat, the briefcase. A QC? A senior civil servant? Politician? Banker? Harley Street doctor? They had ignored each other utterly, as if they were both invisible — ghosts. But it was a jolt: a tangible reminder that Phyllis sold her time and her body to others. How did we find our Phyllises, he wondered? What led us to these accommodating professionals?

Luigi was waiting with the car in Eccleston Square.

“You have one call, signore,” he said, handing Ingram his mobile phone. “Signer Rilke.”

Ingrain called back. “Alfredo, you’re here — wonderful. I was expecting you on Monday.”

“Where were you?”

“I had a meeting,” Ingram improvised quickly. “I had to see a doctor. About my son,” he added, taking the heat off himself.

“Is that your homosexual son?”

“Yes — my ‘gay’ son. All very troublesome and complex.” Ingram rather wished he hadn’t embarked on this lie.

“Has he got AIDS?”

“No, no — nothing like that. Anyway, let’s—”