John Kingsley would always say he was not interested in money, in much the same way that he might say he wasn’t interested in politics or sex. He didn’t think of himself as being materialistic, and he did not for a moment think he was rich. He considered himself, if anything, to be generally a bit strapped for cash. The upkeep of his Mayfair apartment was considerable. The running expenses of the Bentley were colossal yet somehow necessary. His bar bills from the Everlasting Club were heroically ruinous.
His was old money. It came out of the heart of England, originally out of farming and property, and only latterly out of trade. Kingsley could trace his family and their money back to the fifteenth century. Vast acreages of Lincolnshire had brought forth crops and cattle, and been turned into a fortune that had been consolidated and increased through careful husbandry. The family had thrived and aspired and was now well connected with the City, the law, the media, even the army. The Kingsleys’ was an unostentatious wealth. It brought with it responsibilities. The Kingsley family was prudent. They loathed show and waste. Kingsley felt the weight of responsibility perhaps a little less than his ancestors. He wasn’t intending to fritter his money away, but he wanted to have some fun with it.
From the earliest days he had known he was an outsider. At prep school and public school he had always encountered gangs and cliques from which he was barred. He had been bad at sport, academically uninspired, and had lacked the charm or resilience to make his outsider status work for him.
He became a loner. It was not what he would have chosen and yet it suited him. He would have liked to ‘belong’ but he knew of no group that would claim him as their own. He would have been dismayed at this time to be told that he was privileged or that he belonged to any manner of ruling class. He was on the receiving end of a certain number of beatings, a certain amount of bullying. He could see that one or two others suffered more than he did, but that was little consolation. He tried to pretend that his misfortunes were happening to someone else. Sometimes he wished he might be invisible. Sometimes he wished he could cease to be.
He had always been fat. He knew there were no advantages in that state. It gave others an easy opportunity for attack. Fatness was a marker of slowness, dimness, and, eventually, of sexual unattractiveness. He had never wanted to be sexually attractive within the school world of pashes and tarts, but a time came when he looked beyond his school and he knew he wanted to be attractive to women. He wanted to be dashing and clean cut and handsome. It was about then, while still a schoolboy, that he began to go bald.
He was eighteen when he hired his first prostitute. He knew he would never lose his virginity by any more ‘natural’ means. She was not much older than him and her trade name was Gloria. She dressed and spoke rather well. She appeared to have breeding and she was very expensive, though Kingsley was then entirely ignorant of the market rate. Nevertheless, he got what he paid for. She was sympathetic and skilled and unhurried. Kingsley, somewhat to his surprise, found himself perfectly capable in matters of sexual intercourse. His erection was adequate, his staying power good, and his gymnastic ability very impressive for someone of his size and build.
At this time Kingsley’s two favourite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and the Marquis de Sade. Between them, it seemed to him, they might have written the story of his life. He saw himself as part Bertie Wooster (though he had no Jeeves) and part the Duc de Blangis, from One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. He knew the world saw him as a silly ass, a grinning, harmless, overgrown schoolboy who would have been perfectly at home in a world of country houses, maiden aunts and endless, asexual ‘engagements’. But he knew he would have been every bit as at home in the Château of Silling, hiding from the world and its plagues. No, no, he didn’t necessarily want to maim, poison and murder, that would have been going a little far, but he wasn’t averse to a certain amount of orgiastic, godless sex. The chance would have been a fine thing. He didn’t even belong to an equivalent of the Drones, much less to any band of twisted libertines.
From school he went to university and studied law in a halfhearted, inefficient sort of way. He found himself somewhat less of an outsider. Being a poor student put him in company with a lot of good chaps. He joined a couple of dining and debating societies. He enjoyed the dining, though the debating left him cold. He was far less lonely at university, felt himself to be far less of a victim, but he still felt himself barred from the company of women. He knew the problem was within himself. It was because he didn’t know how to talk to women. He didn’t know what they were really like or what they really wanted to talk about. He took a couple of girls out but he was simultaneously too reserved and too intense to make a success of it. He began to see prostitutes on a regular basis.
He was occasionally ashamed of himself, but not sufficiently ashamed to stop. It made him happy. It took a great weight off his mind. He stopped trying to date girls from the university. It seemed a needlessly complicated transaction compared to the simple certainties of paying for sex. Sex with prostitutes wasn’t cheap but he knew he might have spent just as much money taking out girls who would decline to give him what he wanted. He found it therefore best to take food and wine in the good company of men from his college. The arrangement seemed to work.
He left Cambridge with a poor degree but with a number of good male friends, and he went to work for a firm of commodity brokers whose managing director was a friend of the family. The work was menial, undemanding, and very far from the centre of power. Kingsley soon discovered that he could do his work every bit as well with a hangover as without one. It was a discovery that changed his life. His days may have been full of drudgery, but his nights were even fuller of food, drink and sex. He paid the going rate for each. You could not expect to eat without paying for your food, and Kingsley did not expect to have sex without paying for a prostitute.
He told nobody about his sexual adventures. There was nobody he would have wanted to tell. His companions were exclusively male and invariably drunk. They would have been surprised to find that Kingsley had a libido, much less a sex life.
There were, admittedly, times when it seemed to Kingsley that his life was not an entirely proper or admirable one, consisting as it largely did of sloth, gluttony and lust. Yet it was a better life than he’d known until then and he had no intention of changing it. He might have been prepared to admit that something was missing but he would not have admitted that it was a lack of love. Kingsley was absolutely certain that love only happened to other people. He might have confessed to wanting a sense of belonging, a sense of community, although he still had no idea to what form of community he might belong.
For a while he wondered if the world of espionage was one in which he might thrive. He had always kept secrets. He had always kept his own counsel. He had always been adept at knowing, thinking and feeling more than other people gave him credit for. Yet he could still feel no allegiance to any particular side. He didn’t want to betray anyone or anything, yet the idea of playing all ends against some ‘middle’ of his own devising had enormous appeal. He felt he might thrive in an atmosphere of intelligence and counter-intelligence, of double and triple bluff. He could see the attractions of serving some higher, or deeper, power, of putting through an agenda that did not depend only on the obvious and the stated.
All this, however, seemed to be irrelevant in his current situation. His work amid the commodities offered no scope for deception or intrigue. A world in which a man’s word was supposedly his bond offered few opportunities; and however much he might have wished it, nobody ever tried to ‘recruit’ him.
He had been to visit a prostitute in one of the better streets in Islington. He was something of a regular there. She was painfully thin, and bony and very young. He suspected she might be a drug addict and the thought excited him. He was leaving her flat, walking quickly away, head and eyes down, when he heard a brisk step and then a brisk voice behind him. At first Kingsley thought it might be a pimp or a policeman, some force of retribution, but the voice sounded friendly and it was calling him by name. Kingsley turned round to see a man he was certain he’d never met before. He was about sixty, white-haired, raffish, immaculate in blazer and MCC tie.
‘John,’ the man said. ‘You probably don’t remember me. Friend of your father’s. I was at your christening. Radcliffe’s the name.’
They shook hands. Kingsley was still cautious. He still thought this encounter might have something to do with his recent departure from the prostitute’s flat. Perhaps he had not left enough money as a tip, or perhaps committed some other unwitting indiscretion. But this man was claiming to be a friend of his father’s. That sounded ominous. He certainly didn’t want details of his sexual practices getting back to the family in Lincolnshire.
‘What do you want?’ Kingsley said rather sharply.
‘A chat,’ said Radcliffe.
‘I’ve just been …'
‘I know where you’ve just been.’
‘Are you spying on me?’ Kingsley said, trying to sound angry and affronted. ‘Is it something to do with my father?’
‘No, it’s nothing to do with your father, and I’d scarcely say we’ve been spying on you, although we do know quite a lot about you.’ ‘What exactly do you know?’
‘It’s perfectly all right,’ said Radcliffe. ‘There’s no need to be defensive. We rather like what we know.’
‘What do you like? Who is this mysterious “we”? What exactly are you playing at?’
‘I could explain more easily over a drink.’
Kingsley grudgingly agreed. They went to a small, dark pub that Kingsley had never seen before and Radcliffe told him all about the Everlasting Club, and after a couple of hours Kingsley had been well and truly recruited.
What Radcliffe was offering sounded good, but not too good to be true. Kingsley had always somehow imagined that there might be a place for him in some club or society or cabal. Inevitably it must be secret or else he would have found it sooner. It was a place for people like him, he thought, for people who connected with pleasure and history, people who were special. His own isolation and intermittent misery, he now saw, were necessary emblems of his specialness.
Radcliffe hinted that the Everlasting Club had riper, more oblique objectives than simple hedonism. He spoke of dark forces, of the old gods, of immortality, of portentous indirections, of dark rituals. Kingsley lapped it up.
The rise from ordinary member to Chief Carver was swift yet, in Kingsley’s opinion, not so very surprising. At times he felt himself to be a walking embodiment of the Everlasting Club: proudly English, profoundly civilised, yet in touch with deep Dionysian roots; plump and smooth on the surface, yet filled with convoluted desires and tastes. The Everlasting Club became his life. He became his role. He no longer had room or time for other interests and activities. His existence outside the Everlasting Club withered away. He resigned from his job, much to his family’s displeasure. But he no longer cared what his family thought. He had all he needed or desired. He had arrived and come home. He felt like some restored monarch who had once again taken up the reins of his kingdom after a long and ignominious exile.
And now he was at Heathrow airport. He was meeting a plane, meeting someone from the States, someone who did not know he was about to be met: Frank Marcel.
Frank did not discuss the mating habits of the praying mantis with his air hostess. He didn’t know what they were. Frank had always made a point of treating well the people who served him, whether they were bringing him drinks on a plane or working for him in one of the Golden Boys. Frank liked to tip well, but not too well. Extravagant tipping was phoney and vulgar. Frank did not want to be thought phoney and vulgar.
He would be landing in London soon. He loved London, his wife’s home town, more or less. He loved the culture, the history, the tradition, the accents, the cheery Cockneys, the English gents, the politeness, the good manners. In truth, Frank liked the idea better than the reality. The England he knew was that of Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens, especially as it might appear in a well-made TV adaptation.
Despite this affection, he had only been to England a couple of times before, once when he met Mary and once on an abortive business trip. Some years ago there had been talk of opening one or two Golden Boys in England. He’d flown over to meet with some money men. He’d eaten in some of the fast food outlets that would have been his competitors and he had thought at first there would be no problem. All the chains in England served glop. All the serving staff were sullen louts. A chain that provided wholesome food cheerfully served would surely clean up. But as the trip progressed it became increasingly apparent that nobody in England wanted wholesome food. They wanted glop. And if there was such a thing as a cheerful waiter or waitress anywhere in the whole of England, he or she was doing a fine job of laying low. Frank backed out of the deal, deciding to stick with the country he knew best.
He knew this current trip to England was in some danger of being a wild-goose chase. He knew Virgil was somewhere in England, London he assumed, and that he had an invitation to a party or club or something, but that was all he did know. He had no idea which party or club it was. He didn’t know which hotel Virgil was staying in He didn’t know what plans Virgil had for after the party. But Frank wasn’t too worried. Virgil had a way of making himself conspicuous. Virgil stood out in a crowd, any crowd. Frank had a feeling he’d find his son somehow. And even if he failed to find Virgil it was a whole lot easier to think about the madness of Leo and the polluted food at this distance than it was back home.
A part of him wished Mary had come too. He’d asked her to, but she said she wanted to stay and finalise arrangements for the surprise party. Frank found this pretty silly now that the surprise element had been blown, but he didn’t need a fight about it. Given how lousy things were between him and Mary it was touching that she still wanted to give him surprises. At least he could leave her and be confident that she wasn’t screwing Leo, and her absence gave him the hope of scoring with a buxom English rose who liked rich, middle-aged Americans.
He carried only one small case of hand luggage so was soon through passports and immigration. He glided through the crowds and made for the car hire desk. There was only one girl working there and several customers waiting so he had to stand in a short line. This was irritating, but none of the other companies’ desks looked any easier. He had to wait. Then he felt someone touch him on the arm.
‘Mr Marcel. Mr Frank Marcel, isn’t it?’
‘Why yes.’
‘You probably don’t remember me. My name’s Kingsley.’
Frank smiled pleasantly and shook this guy Kingsley by the hand. It made him feel like a real cosmopolitan. He’d just stepped off the plane in a strange continent, only been on terra firma a few minutes, and here he was running into somebody he knew; except that he didn’t have a clue who Kingsley was, and was pretty certain he’d never set eyes on him before.
‘I ate at your restaurant once,’ said Kingsley.
‘A Golden Boy?’ Frank asked, feeling considerably less cosmopolitan.
‘No, no. At Trimalchio’s.’
‘Ah.’ Frank beamed with pleasure. ‘I hope you enjoyed it.’
‘I certainly did,’ said Kingsley. ‘I most certainly did. It’s good to see you again. Small world.’
Frank still didn’t think he’d ever seen Kingsley before, but there were many nights when he hung out at Trimalchio’s and fell into conversation with whoever was there. It was easy to forget a face. Besides, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would have a reason for pretending to know him if they didn’t.
‘Are you in England for long?’ Kingsley enquired.
‘Just a few days, I expect.’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘Oh, a little of each I hope.’
‘Well, nice to have run into you. Enjoy your stay. Probably see you again in some other airport. Bye now.’
Kingsley turned to leave but then casually, too casually if Frank had but known, had a better idea.
‘I say,’ said Kingsley, ‘if you’re in need of transport into town my chauffeur’s waiting outside. If you’d do me the honour I could drop you at your hotel.’
The girl at the car hire desk still looked busy, and a telephone beside her had started to ring. A ride into town sounded like a good idea, then he could hire a car at the hotel. He thanked Kingsley and accepted. He was delighted. This was the life.
Butterworth was waiting with the Bentley (the Mercedes being otherwise employed) and he drove Frank and Kingsley into London. Their conversation was friendly and uncomplicated. They talked about food. Kingsley said there were lots of really fine new restaurants opening up all the time all over London if you only knew where to look. They discussed developments in the California wine trade, what Robert Mondavi was up to these days, and how much scope for development there was in South American vineyards. Kingsley decried the number of fake American restaurants in London; bad English food dressed up as bad American food. Frank nodded his head in sad agreement.
He said nothing about his real reason for visiting England. He said nothing about Virgil and certainly nothing about Leo’s activities in the kitchen at Trimalchio’s. This was not something you discussed with a stranger, especially not with one who said how much he’d enjoyed eating at your restaurant.
Frank found Kingsley to be a proper English gentleman. He seemed to have good breeding. He seemed like Frank’s idea of an aristocrat. And if Kingsley could give him the names of the interesting new restaurants in town, that might be as good a place as any to start looking for Virgil. Kingsley was happy to do so. He said Frank must join him one night as his guest. Frank said, fine. It came as no surprise therefore, that when they arrived in central London Kingsley suggested they have a ‘quick one’.
‘I love a good English pub,’ Frank said.
‘I’m not much of a pub man myself,’ said Kingsley, ‘but we could always try my club.’
‘My club’; it had such a ring to it, so English and reassuring and traditional. Frank was thrilled. He was a little concerned when Kingsley told him that black tie was required, but cheered up again when he was assured they’d have a spare suit in his size at the club. He found it very strange that he had to be blindfolded before he could be driven there, but he decided to roll with it as a piece of old-fashioned English quaintness, and he joked happily as Kingsley tied a black silk scarf over his eyes.
A little later, in the bar of the Everlasting Club, in his borrowed togs, Frank was in seventh heaven; all those jolly English chaps, those fine, ringing, English voices, all that décor. He loved the panelling, the hunting prints, the stone fireplace, and the thick, atmospheric smog. It was like having walked into a modern dress Shakespeare play, almost. Where was Falstaff? Where was Sir Toby Belch? There were voices raised loud in laughter and debate, there were logs blazing, and there was a whole bunch of drinks he’d never tried before; pale ale, scrumpy, Drambuie. All this was fine by him.
Frank talked to one or two Pickwickian types whose accents were as rich as Stilton soaked in port. He couldn’t catch everything they said, but he smiled and nodded and tried to give the impression that he was having a good time, which he was. One remark he did catch was, ‘You should have been here earlier, the Earl of Sandwich was in,’ and everyone around him had juddered with laughter. He juddered too and although he didn’t see the joke he wouldn’t have been so dumb as to ask anyone to explain it to him. They did explain certain things, however. Kingsley described the origins and principles of the Everlasting Club, its perpetuation over the centuries, just as he had explained them to Virgil. Frank was impressed beyond belief. It stirred dynastic ambitions in his heart, that the Golden Boy chain might run in perpetuity, year after year, generation after generation, father to son, for ever and ever.
Frank was alarmed when someone standing next to him at the bar finished a pint of beer, then unzipped his flies and pissed into the now empty beer glass. For one vile moment it looked as though he was going to drink that as well, but he placed the full glass of urine on the bar and went into the dining-room. Nobody except Frank batted an eyelid.
Frank soon went into the dining-room too, at Kingsley’s insistent invitation. He loved the oak refectory table and the rakish, Hogarthian look of the diners. He was especially taken by the nude girl in the centre of the table. That was a great, sexy idea. He’d suggest that to Virgil, make it an occasional feature at Trimalchio’s. He loved the way all the guys at the table carried on eating, completely ignoring the gorgeous female body. The English had such class.
So did their food. There was so much more to English cuisine, he told himself, than roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and here he was about to explore some of its wilder shores. In a very short time he had eaten otter, goat intestine, some of that soup that tasted of liver, and a mixed grill. Some of it was kind of weird, some a little disgusting, but Frank was too good a guest not to eat it up heartily. And some of it was great. He especially enjoyed the sausages in the mixed grill. The meal was not identical to the one Virgil had eaten but many of the dishes were the same, and the overall effect extremely similar. Just as Virgil had done, Frank thought how fascinated Leo would have been by all this spectacle and flavour, then he remembered he was no longer thinking of Leo with the affection he once had.
Thoughts of Leo threatened to ruin Frank’s meal. He tried to clear his mind. He took a big swig of the wine in his glass, a damson and pear spumante. Back home Frank was known as a guy with an iron constitution. He wasn’t a hell-raiser, quite the reverse, but he was a guy who could put away more than his share of booze and very often did. But however much he drank, he never got wild or out of control, nor did he ever throw up, and he certainly never passed out. At home, with three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch inside him, he looked and acted more sober than Virgil ever looked or acted. Tonight at the Everlasting Club however, things were to be a little different.
It only happened because he was feeling so good. He was having the time of his life. He was tucking into a plate of sea urchins and bilberries and he was feeling a little light-headed and suddenly he was gripped by an overwhelming sense of belonging.
‘Look, fellers,’ he said, ‘I want in.’
There were a dozen or so members eating at the table, including Radcliffe, the white-haired, aristocratic one who had authored the history of the Everlasting Club. He was in a thoughtful, watchful mood tonight and he said little. Mostly he and the others tried to ignore Frank and they were succeeding admirably.
‘This is my kind of place,’ Frank said more loudly. ‘You guys are my kind of guys. All my life I’ve been looking for a place like this. It feels like coming home.’
Kingsley, seated beside him, leaned over and said very gently in his ear, ‘No, Frank, this is not how we do things.’
It did no good.
‘Oh come on,’ said Frank, ‘damn your English reserve. I know that’s just a cover anyway. I think people should tell each other when they’re feeling good. I’m feeling good. I’m feeling great. I want in. How do I get to be a member of this joint?’
‘Not like this, Frank,’ said Kingsley. ‘Please.’
‘No, really, what do I have to do? Get references? I’ll get references. Show you my credit rating? My credit rating is good, I mean good. You want to see me dance across the room with a bunch of gardenias up my ass? Then pass me the gardenias. Come on, fellers. Loosen up. Give me a break. Make me one of you.’
Frank was aware that he was being a little loud, but he couldn’t see that was any big deal. There were plenty of guys in the club being a whole lot louder than he was. He could hear them. But the guys at the table, at least the ones who were still awake and able to focus their eyes, were looking deeply offended, Radcliffe especially.
Had Frank been sober he would surely have realised that increased volume and mounting hysteria were not the way to win over frosty dinner companions. But he got it into his head that he could thaw them with an old party trick he’d perfected on business trips and sales conferences.
‘You’ll love this, guys,’ he insisted.
He asked the waiter to bring him a large glass pitcher, and when it came he toddled into the bar with it, telling the members around the dining-table not to worry, he’d be right back, and they shouldn’t go away. He reached the bar and asked a barman to fill the pitcher with twenty-six half measures of twenty-six different drinks, one for each letter of the alphabet. So the barman began with apricot brandy, Benedictine, Campari, Dubonnet, eggnog, framboise, and moved alphabetically via mescal, Noilly Prat, ouzo and Pernod, to vodka, whisky, xampan, Yquem and zubrovka. One or two he felt were cheating slightly; the Irish whiskey and the Jamaican rum, but ‘i’ and ‘j’ were always tricky. Nor had he ever come across Quinta do Noval or Underberg before, but he was happy to give them a whirl. And at least there were plenty of old favourites like gin, hock, rum, slivovitz and tequila. The set was completed by kiimmel, and half a pint of lager.
The cocktail certainly looked convincingly evil as it wallowed there in the pitcher, primarily brown, murky, a head of scum on the top and filaments of liqueur woven through its depths. Still, Frank wasn’t worrying. He’d done this before and he knew, he knew with absolute conviction, that this trick couldn’t fail to impress.
He returned to the dining-room. He was pleased to see that nobody had left, though one had fallen asleep. He climbed on the table, unsurely, treading on the hand of the naked, female table adornment, and he yelled, ‘Check this out, fellers!’ and began to down the entire contents of the jug in one slow but relentless act of swallowing.
The other diners did indeed look up at Frank but it was not with approval. Normally when Frank performed this feat there were guys cheering him on, stamping, beating fists and glasses and beer cans on the table. Even as the first few mouthfuls slid down his gullet, Frank knew that something was wrong, and not only with his audience.
It must have been the flight, he thought rapidly, the change of climate, the unusual English food. As the drink hit his stomach the smoky atmosphere of the room seemed to thicken, to become a good deal smokier. Soon it was turning black. Frank was passing out, and firm hands caught him as he tumbled from the table.
When he awoke many hours later he was in an unfamiliar bed and an unknown hotel room. Nausea, muscular pain, headache and remorse campaigned through his body and soul. It was going to be a long and dirty war. He did not leave his bed, in fact could barely open his eyes, for the next forty-eight hours. Even as he lay there, hoping that merciful oblivion might claim him, it crossed his mind that this was not the most orthodox way for a loving father to seek out his son’s business advice.