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! I make more such calculations in an hour than Kasparov does in a year. I stretch, then relax – and 35,665 white-collar workers leave their houses a teensy bit early for work. This means that 6,014 of them will feel dyspeptic during the journey because they’ve missed their second piece of toast, or bowl of Fruit ‘n’ Fibre. From which it follows that 2,982 of them will be testy throughout the morning; and therefore 312 of them will say the wrong thing, leading to dismissal; hence one of these 312 will lose the balance of his reason and commit an apparently random and motiveless murder on the way home.
Now, to compute this, together with all the side issues, is unbelievably difficult. For this is not merely aimed at producing the effect of one homicide, oh no. There are many different outcomes that follow on from such a scenario. It isn’t so much a decision tree as a decision forest, with branches parting, and parting and parting into twigs that divide and divide and divide again, some of them only then coming to fruition.
It takes more than mere brainpower, though, to undertake such infinitely subtle and ramified calculations. It takes a kind of flair. An ability to think laterally – and then zoom around a corner; an innate tendency to perceive the tactical move that one of the other seven hasn’t grasped.
A good example of this is the massive double, triple, quadruple – all the way up to nonuple – bluffs that we all engage in, particularly on bank holidays. Naturally one would always like at least some of one’s people to be able to get out of town on a bank holiday, see a little green grass, frolic