them the satisfaction of believing that I think them quality.
And, of course, it’s the same for them. I know – it’s crazy. Crazy that the Bollam sisters – these virtually psychotic twins from St Nevis who sit all day, every day, in a Streatham bedsit knitting dolls of ‘the Redeemer’, and who share a bizarre kind of joint mind (speaking in unison, prescience and so forth) – should despite everything feel capable of being slighted socially! As if anyone would ever invite those two to any social function whatsoever. A turkey-pluckers’ whist drive is as elevated and rarefied, in respect of the Bollam sisters, as one of Lady Bob’s soirées would be for Dooley.
Yet, that being noted, it is an index of just how repugnant everything Dooley does is that even these two weirdo, humanoid knitting machines are still concerned to distance themselves from him.
So it goes on. We all tiptoe around one another, dancing our little dance, the two-step of arrogance and conceit. One of us will orchestrate a calculated snub, and then the rest of us will respond. There will be a rapprochement, an olive branch offered by one or perhaps two of us. A new clique will be constructed on the basis of mutually assured destruction.
We believe in it at the time. Believe that this collusion of interests is for ever, as thick as family blood that has coagulated over centuries. Yet invariably it will all be picked away at within days, weeks at the outside, creating a ragged, exposed patch, a new area of potential healing.
Just occasionally these manoeuvres will get something like serious. There’s a particular L-shaped axis of cliquishness that is dangerous. It begins with the Bollam sisters, snags in Lechmere – the insipid, compliant dunderhead – and then . . . and then (and you really would have thought that this would immediately act as a limpet mine planted on the very hull of their social ambition) . . . the three of them start extending their feelers towards Dooley. Dooley! What a joke, what a sick bloody joke!
To think of it, the Bollam sisters’ people, many thousands of them – at least 150,000 individuals would be required – approaching Dooley’s people at cocktail parties, union meetings, in bars and restaurants. Then, figuratively speaking, offering up to Dooley’s lot the baboon’s arse of acknowledged inferiority, in some crude way that even Dooley’s people can understand. 147,000 invitations here, 270,000 confidences there, a myriad fatuous compliments in the middle. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand of Lechmere’s people will be deployed as well, to write grovel letters or open doors.
It should be funny, because they haven’t a hope in hell of achieving anything. The minute they start deploying their people like this they drag them down to Dooley’s level, rather than yanking his sots, moochers and social-security claimants up to theirs. But what I don’t find funny at all is the way that this appears to place Colin Purves and me in some sort of clubbable relation to one another. Not that I dislike Colin Purves: in his own way he has a certain – albeit narrow – sympathy. It’s just that his more rentier character-traits make him utterly and incontrovertibly unsuitable company for someone of Lady Bob’s breeding.
What little progress I have made with Lady Bob over the years would be shot to pieces if she were to suspect that Colin Purves and I were anything more than acquaintances. Not that she would do anything crass – like have her people actively cut my people. It’s just that I can imagine – visualise even – the tiny individual crystals of hoar frost that would begin to coalesce around her sense of froideur towards me. She is that subtle and refined a person.
But if I feel genuine venom to any particular individual over the way this scenario plays itself out, it’s towards Lechmere. Lechmere, who should know better. Lechmere, who should be capable of being more steadfast. Lechmere, who has pretensions towards a higher kind of refinement. What with his collection of old silverware and his hunting prints. Lechmere, leaning against his invitation-encrusted mantelpiece, hands plunged deep into his grey-flannel bags, so he can jingle with his small change of maiden aunts and titled second cousins. Lechmere, who has the faint – but for all that distinct – whiff of new money about him.
This was dumped on him by a stepfather, of all people. A stepfather who made his money in construction, of all things. Con-struc-tion! Well, my dear, the word itself has a put-together feel about it. So you see, I cannot cede anything to Lechmere in the way of handicapping, even though on the face of it he’s closer to Lady Bob and the Recorder (I believe many, many of their respective people are on Christian-name terms) than I am. For the truth of the matter is that he has secrets of his own to protect.
If only Lechmere’s stepdaddy could have seen the uses his money has been put to. Lechmere gave up his job at the Treasury tout de suite. Now he fritters his time away between the bookanistes on the Farringdon Road and those chi-chi little antique joints in Camden Passage.
Can you squeeze in a little closer towards me? That’s it, lean forward, because this really is intended for your ears alone. I would only dream of vouchsafing this to someone like yourself, someone with whom I have struck up an immediate rapport, someone who’s a good listener. Further, you can take it as read that for me to divulge an intimate suspicion of this order is tantamount to my assuming that a corresponding intimacy exists between the two of us . . .
Anyway, the nub of it is this: I suspect Lechmere of being a practising homosexual. You don’t seem shocked. Well, of course I suppose you know nothing of all this. But let me tell you that among the eight of us it’s common knowledge that more of Lechmere’s people are homosexual than anyone else’s. 15,394, to be precise.
What’s more, I know that he has a fair few voyeurs on his books. No, dammit. That’s the core of my suspicion – Lechmere’s voyeurs. When I mull it over I don’t think Lechmere’s homosexuals are either here or there. After all, we all have our homosexuals (I have over half a million practising and getting on for a quarter of a million latent), and bloody useful they are at times. I wouldn’t want to be without mine. They give more parties than the straights, and they’re excellent for close, subtle work: the spreading of malicious gossip, the Chinese whispering of slurs, and the making of just the right kind of insinuations. Spend a great deal more of their time on office politics to boot.
So you see, I’ve nothing against a toad in the hole – even if he’s one of Lechmere’s. No, no, the thing is the voyeurs. Why has Lechmere acquired so many voyeurs, so many people who like to watch? The only answer I can come up with is that at some deep and magical level of thought he feels that if he can watch us more than we watch him we won’t be able to find out what he’s doing with his pork sword.
Personally, I’m rather stunned that he still has the energy for it. What’s more, I’m sure that it corrupts his vision as far as dictating the more subtle movements of his people are concerned. If he’s bumping and boring around like that, leaning over some bloody rent boy, how can he conceivably be alive to the nuances of 2,947 unreturned phone calls? Or 45,709 bad birthday presents? Let alone 17,578,582 gestures of dismissal.
The work demands attention. Being one of the only eight people in London is like some massive game of go. No, go isn’t the right analogy at all, because people – whether controlled or not – are no mere counters. Each one, after all, has his or her own potentiality. It would be worse than pointless to deploy 4, 732 throat-cutting gestures, where what was required were a mere 219 diplomatic overtures by the Right People.
No, perhaps a better way of understanding it is chess. But then, chess isn’t played by eight players using thirteen million pieces between them. Who could possibly quantify the permutations that such a game represents; the googolplex available moves. I’ve heard it said that the brains of grand masters are uncoupled from time as ordinary people understand it. That the many many thousands of calculations they make, gambits they follow through, could only take place in parallel to one another, like many little rivulets of thought running down some hillside of cogitation.
Pah!
