William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

RITA NASHE WAS TRYING to explain to Vikram why she so hated cricket, why cricket in any form, ancient or contemporary, was anathema to her, when the call came through. They were parked just off the King’s Road round the corner from a Starbucks where they had managed to grab a couple of coffees before it closed. Rita acknowledged the call — they were on their way to a ‘cocktail party’ in Anne Boleyn House, Sloane Avenue. She jotted down the details in her notebook, then started the car.

“Cocktail party,” she said to Vikram.

“Sorry?”

“Domestic. That’s what we call them in Chelsea.”

“Cool. I’ll remember that: ‘cocktail party’.”

She drove easily to Sloane Avenue — no need for lights or siren. A woman had called the station complaining about loud thuds and hangings in the flat above and then small stains appearing in her ceiling. She pulled up opposite the entryway and headed for the front lobby, Vikram following some way behind — he seemed to have become stuck in his seat belt — not the most agile of young men. Her mobile rang.

“Rita, I can’t find my specs.”

“Dad, I’m working. What about your spares?”

“I don’t have a fucking spare set, that’s the point. I wouldn’t be calling you if I had.”

She paused at the front door to let Vikram catch up with her.

“Have you looked,” she asked her father, her voice full of impromptu speculation, “in the front bulkhead cupboard where we keep the tins?” She could practically hear his brain churning faster.

“Why,” he said, angrily, “why would they be in the bulkhead cupboard with the tins?…”

“You left them there once before, I remember.”

“Did I? Oh…OK, I’ll check.”

She closed her phone, smiling: she had hidden his spectacles in the front bulkhead cupboard, herself, to punish him for his general rudeness and selfish behaviour. Ninety per cent of the nagging irritants in his life were her responsibility — he had no idea — and he had never noticed how these irritants diminished as his moods became sunnier. He was an intelligent man, she told herself as she and Vikram pushed through the glass doors into the lobby, he really should have figured it out by now.

At the wide marble counter the porter looked surprised to see two police — a policewoman and a policeman — confronting him and, when told the trivial reason for their presence, couldn’t understand why the complainant (difficult old woman) hadn’t simply called down to the front desk — that’s what he was there for, after all. Rita said there was some mention of stains appearing on the ceiling — she checked her notebook. Flat F 14.

“What flat’s above F 14?”

“G 14.”

She and Vikram travelled upwards in the lift.

“Wouldn’t mind a little place here,” Vikram said. “Studio apartment, Chelsea, King’s Road…”

“Wouldn’t we all, Vik, wouldn’t we all.”

The door to G 14 was slightly ajar — Rita thought that was strange. She told Vikram to wait outside and she went in — lights were on and the place had been thoroughly ransacked. Burglary, she thought at once, though the widespread trashing seemed to say that someone had been looking for something specific and hadn’t found it. TV still there, DVD player. Maybe not…

When she saw the dead man in the bedroom, lying supine on the soaking red sheets, she realised the source of the stains on the ceiling below — she had seen a few dead and injured bodies in her police career but was always surprised at the amount of blood the average human being could spill. She held her nose and swallowed, feeling a small swoon of light-headedness hit her. She breathed shallowly as she stood in the door, letting the sudden tremble in her body subside, and looked around quickly — again, everything turned upside down and the paned door to the small balcony was open, she could hear the traffic on Sloane Avenue, and the muslin curtains stirred and filled like sails in the night breeze.

She walked carefully back through the flat to the main door where she clicked on her PR and called the station duty officer at Chelsea.

“Anything interesting?” Vikram asked.

UNDERPANTS OR NO UNDERPANTS? Ingram Fryzer pondered to himself, staring at the long rank of two dozen suits hanging in the cupboard in his dressing room. He was wearing a cream shirt with a tie already knotted at the throat and his usual navy-blue long socks, socks that came up to the knee. Ingram had a horror of showing white hairy shin between sock-top and trouser cuff when sitting down, legs crossed — it was in some ways the besetting and prototypical English sartorial sin. Sartorial sin, he smiled to himself, or should that be sartorial shin? No matter, when he sat in meetings with rich and powerful men and saw them shift legs, re-cross their thighs and expose two inches of etiolated shank, he found he immediately thought less of such people — this kind of lapse said something about them. However, the matter of underpants was an irreducibly personal issue — it was unthinkable that anyone in his company would ever guess that their chairman and chief executive officer was naked beneath his perfectly tailored trousers, that his cock and balls hung free.

Ingram deliberated further on this pleasant dilemma — underpants or no underpants — imagining the potential stimuli that awaited him that day. He loved the way the glans of his penis would rub against the material of his trousers, or snag itself for a second on a raised seam — at such moments you could never be sure that a semi-erection might spontaneously occur and of course this possibility raised the stakes, particularly if you were about to go in to an important meeting. The whole texture — every nuance — of the business day was immeasurably different if you were naked beneath your trousers. Unejournee defrottis-frotta , as a French friend had termed it, and Ingram enjoyed the sophisticated pretension this title conferred on his little vice. He had made his mind up — no underpants it would be — and he selected a Prince of Wales check suit, pulled on the trousers, fitted his red braces to them and slipped on the jacket. He chose a pair of dark-brown, tasselled loafers and went downstairs to the full English breakfast that Maria-Rosa had waiting for him promptly at 7.30, Monday to Friday.

On the way to the office he asked Luigi to stop the car at Holborn Underground station. He often did this — rode the Tube to work for a few stops while Luigi took the car on — particularly on days he wasn’t wearing underpants. He liked to mix with the ‘people’, look around him at the various types of human being on display and wonder what kind of lives they led. Not that he had any contempt for them or felt any comfortable superiority — it was simply a matter of anthropological curiosity, intrigued by these other members of his species — and he thought that, as a person, he was all the better for it, as no one else he knew in his social and economic class did the same. For ten minutes or so he became another faceless commuter on the Central Line going to work.

He stood in the crowded compartment looking around him, curiously, innocently. There were two pretty-ish girls not far away, in suits, listening to their music, plugged into their tiny earphones. Smartly dressed, jewellery, quite heavy make-up…One of them glanced blankly at him, as if aware of his gaze, and then looked away. Ingram felt his cock stir and he wondered if this might be a day for Phyllis also. My god, what was wrong with him? Did other men in their fifty-ninth year think so constantly of sex? What was that expression, that term? Yes — was he an ‘erotomane’? Not the worst category of sexual offender in which to be classified but sometimes he wondered if there were something clinically wrong, or diagnosable, about his obsessions…Then again, he reflected, as he walked up the steps leading out of Bank Station and saw the glass tower that contained his company — CALENTURE-DEUTZ pic — on several of whose floors some 200 of his employees were settling down to their day’s work, perhaps such feelings, such urges, were entirely healthy and normal.