Ivoria Read online

  “And?”

  “And nothing much. He said some guy had left it in the restaurant, with a tip. The tip was generous, but also he’d tried to get one of the waiters interested in him, and when this man wouldn’t play, the customer promised him some bad luck and took out the counter. He said he had been wanting to get rid of it, it had caused him grief, but you couldn’t pass on something like that to a friend. Couldn’t even just throw it away in case some innocent picked it up. So he left it with the uninterested waiter. But next everyone in the restaurant who had contact with the ivory was getting a bad time - people falling sick, parking fines, stalkers… So what did we think they should do?”

  Laurence had laughed. “You’re making this up.”

  “Well, our waiter probably was.”

  “Like you used to when we were kids.”

  “Oh, were you ever a kid, Laurence? I must’ve missed that.”

  “You still haven’t finished your story.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  “How come you got to take it?”

  “I didn’t. Well. the girl I was with, she said she’d take it off them. She didn’t believe in crap like that. Anyhow. We paid, left, went back to her place.”

  “I hope you’re careful with all these liaisons, Nicolas. Johnnies to the ready.”

  “Thanks. Yes, I’m careful.”

  “So, your inamorata of the afternoon took possession of the fatal ivory.”

  “When we were at the flat - we’d been there about - oh, two hours - the phone went. Her mother had died, suddenly, no warning. About the same time she and I left the restaurant.”

  Laurence pulled a face.

  Nick said, “That was the end of our afternoon. She had to pack for Scotland, go up. She was crying. She’d forgotten all about the piece of ivory. But I took it with me when I left. I was bothered. Just… she might have begun to think it had jinxed her.”

  “But nothing’s happened to you. Not visibly. Or have you turned bright green somewhere?”

  “No. I don’t believe anything will happen, either. Of course, it’s rubbish.”

  “You don’t think it’s rubbish. You are troubled, Nicky. God, I know your troubled look. Claudia used to dread that look. Oh, he’s troubled, she’d say. It was one of the many ways you used to make sure she was always fussing over you.” And Laurence yet again picked up the ivory. “So I’ll take it, shall I? That help?” Laurence had inquired with a deep, patronizing, overacted concern.

  Nick knows that aspect of Laurence, his brother, incredibly well. Along with other aspects.

  He thinks now how he, Nick, did not have to say another word, Laurence had already been pocketing the ivory counter. And Laurence had added, “I’ll see if I can turn anything up on it. It looks, come to think of it, a bit like a bone counter from an old board game, maybe 18th Century African even. Might even be interesting. Anyway, look, here it goes. Safely with me, and out of your self-involved little life. See you, Nicky. And don’t forget your rubbers.”

  2

  Claudia Martin:

  Her first film appearance was at age sixteen, in 1958, in the black and white romantic comedy film The Lion Run. Her best known film, thought in its era very funny and risqué, and still regarded with some respect and affection, was Dizzy, in which she co-starred with Michael Deane. It was released in 1965, about the same time she met and married Joss Lewis, an ‘ordinary’ business man, and then gave birth to her first son, later the historian and writer, Laurence Lewis. Her final film was Last September, Next July, (1977), which she made when already pregnant with her second son, Nicolas. The film was an intense drama, part political thriller and part love story. She was then thirty-five. (Around 1971 Claudia had also borne Joss a daughter, later the actress Serena Claire.)

  Claudia additionally often acted in live theatre at such venues as the Old Vic, and later London’s National Theatre, where she played Sylvie’s nurse in Rasselet’s The Scholar’s Handicap. She was by then forty-eight, and this was her last stage appearance. She died in 1995, aged fifty-three.

  Nick’s memories of his mother were inevitably forged during the eighteen years he knew her. After that they seldom shifted, merely intensifying in some instances, or fading slightly - the normal method with memory. But she had made a great impression on him. She had been reckoned extremely beautiful. Certainly he thought so, though he took her beauty and her cool flamboyance simply as facts, thrilled but never awed by them. She was his mother.

  She had genuinely very fair hair, often bleached for her early films, but which by the year of his birth, (and thereafter until she began to grey at forty-seven) she left alone. Her skin was unusually good, very white, and never inclined to tan, either naturally or cosmetically; ahead of her time in that. The blue of her eyes was compared to violets, as had been those of two much more famous actresses, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor.

  She always publicly declared Joss Lewis was her predestined soul-mate, the prince of her fairy story. But, handsome in his thirties, he gradually lost his looks - as Claudia did not. Ten years her senior, when she was a slim and radiant forty, Joss had become a lumbering, portly fifty-year-old who actually, in the ‘wrong’ light so many photographers seemed capable of accessing, might more logically have represented her father than her fairy-tale prince. But he did at least have the grace to stay rich until her death, when his business interests betrayed him in one of the financial crises of the 1990’s.

  Much later on, Nick sometimes wondered if Claudia took lovers. Wondered if she had had one or two even through Joss’s more physical years.

  The supposition never shocked him. Why would it? Though not disliking his father, he always found Joss slow, if clever in business skills Nick himself neither had nor aspired to. Of course, Nick had wanted to be an actor himself in his youth. His older sister, after all, had been bitten by the vicious asp of acting, (as Claudia’s agent, Torvind Heyler, put it). Serena stuck to her guns and made a career for herself too. But though enchanted as a child, and amused as a boy by the glimpses he had of Claudia’s world of work - at long weekends in Joss’s country houses, or on studio lots at Pinewood or, subsequently, in the US or Italy - Nick never ultimately assayed the necessity of drama school, or even properly responded to occasional slight interest among Claudia’s bevy of producers and directors. He might have made a go of it, he sometimes still thought. Claudia undoubtedly would have helped him as she had her daughter. And like all of Claudia’s children, he had looks and physique, was reasonably well-educated, (if, in Nick’s case, in a very laid-back way) and might have shown talent. Certainly, he could have tried. Yet he never really did. Joss’s verdict on his younger son, as was Laurence’s, encapsulated the idea that Nick had no incentive, no staying power. If not lazy he was too ‘relaxed’. “He should have disowned you when you were fifteen,” Laurence had told Nick when Nick was twenty, and obviously unemployed at anything except the odd sketch, or sketchy story, with few of these even printed - there might have been more if Nick had ever seriously tried to find an agent or a publisher. “Shoved you out to fend for yourself. Then you’d have had to wake up. But oh no. First Dad keeps you, and then Claudia leaves you a bloody fortune. Of course. She knew you had no spine, Nicky. The rest of us could make something for ourselves, but you… As a kid, you couldn’t even tie up the laces on your trainers.”

  There had always been something sour, spiky, between Laurence and Nick. Initially was it only that obvious thing, the jealousy of an older sibling for the baby, abruptly arriving and taking up every inch of maternal space?

  Joss meanwhile was fairly uninclined to either of his sons, though he tolerated Laurence, the bright one – who proceeded through public school and Oxbridge to a prestigious career - with a sort of bovine bonhomie. Serena was Joss’s pet. Despite being a brunette, she was reckoned to look very like Claudia. Although of all of them Nick resembled his mother the most. He had a quieter version of her colouring, fair, pale, and dark-blue eyed. That, and his
inheritance of her fine features, masculinised, had made a lot of people forgive him his noncommittal and unstriking life. A lot of people, if not his family. Even his sister had coined for Nick the Nickname of the Sloth.

  He had been her favourite too, Claudia’s.

  No doubt that rankled. And subsequent events had only clarified Laurence and Serena’s acidity.

  Perhaps characteristically, Nick considered retaliation for their digs and swipes, not to mention for some of the childhood attacks on him, too demanding, too time-consuming. Why go around brooding and plotting. Do good to those that hate you - it was easier. You had to keep propping up grudges, feeding them with all those regurgitated ancient gripes and blows.

  Only once long ago had Nick altered course in his attitude. That was in the days and months after Claudia’s death. He had felt then - what was it he wrote in his notebook? - broken in half by her going. So unexpected, so entirely unlooked for, unplanned for. He too young to think such a death possible, she too comparatively young for him to have to think of it. She would always have been there. Changing only a very little. Sometimes saying, with a soft laugh, that she should veil all her mirrors not to see the lines - one day she would be brave and have a face-lift, better safe than sad. But when she said this, he would never see any lines on her face, he never had, and not a mark on her lovely hands, not an extra inch on her waist, or rumple in the straight elasticity of her back, or her two perfect, slender ankles rising from the high-heeled shoes.

  He could recall death’s aftermath, Laurence white and strained, and Serena, who in her private life was always called Reenie, sobbing and then hugging Joss. And Joss wandering around like a zombie, a robot with a blanked-out screen. And the inescapable pain inside Nick; rigid, a steel spike. He had thought it would never lessen. It was there always, even when he slept and dreamed of different things. Always there like a low thin sound, a type of tinnitus of the emotional ear.

  But really, what he remembered most of all was not crying, not even when he was alone, not being able to cry, wondering if he should be able to. It was too horrible and impossible to cry over. It was a sort of death of him. Broken in half, and half of him gone, because that half had been Claudia. And all those flowers, flowers everywhere, sent for the funeral, from theatre people and movie people and fans, always more and more from fans. And how the flowers were so beautiful, and then you had to watch them die there on the lawn, by the gates, in the cemetery. Bit by bit, until they were rotten, and vanished, just the paper left and the paper ribbon and brown wisps blowing about.

  He had hated Laurence then, Nick believed. Yet the hatred would not last, just as the steel spike miraculously, over the year, dissolved, leaving only a bitter afterglow just visible on the mind’s horizon.

  So that was the only time for hating. Although Laurence, indubitably, came to hate even more enduringly Nick, when the terms of the will were revealed. Claudia had been wealthy in her own right. And though she left her estate, any subsequent royalties or bonanzas, jointly among Joss, Laurence and Serena, to Nick she had left almost a million pounds, all secured and suitably invested, yielding an income that even if, as Reenie put it, he never shifted his Sloth’s backside, should keep him in great comfort for an indefinite number of long, trouble-free lifetimes.

  3

  He sees Debby almost always on a Monday or Tuesday afternoon, twice a month. She works from home then, so can take a couple of hours off.

  She wears her hair in a long highlighted bob, and opens the door wearing a black silk dressing-gown, with an embroidered dragon on the pocket over her left breast.

  “Hi, Nick. Lovely to see you.”

  She is always friendly in a business-like way.

  They go through into the bathroom, strip off and have slightly rough sex under the shower. Debby as a rule likes the shower best, he suspects because it is much handier to disguise his visit and/or clear up after he has gone. Last year, once, they did go to bed, but she had a whole day then. She has told him she prefers sex in daylight, likes to sleep at night. Her life seems very well organised, and her flat is pleasant and spotless, thanks to an unmet cleaning woman Debby calls Jeeves. Or perhaps that really is the woman’s name.

  They have tea before Nick leaves and the envelope, (in Debby’s case stuffed with euros) is on the tray. Debby never slops tea over on the envelope, it goes without saying. The envelope she employs is always of thick cream-laid paper, too, whereas Jazz, for example, uses a plain thin manila. Lilian, on the other hand, never bothers with envelopes, she pushes the money untidily in a transparent bag from the bank. Or there is Sonia, who hands it over shyly if directly they are alone, tied with a real ribbon, usually red, sometimes orange. Sonia is now a personnel manager, but in her past has been an actress, even seen on TV. She once admitted to Nick the ribbon was based on something from a play she had acted in.

  He does see others too, but they are mostly more irregular. Some like to go out first to drink or eat or dance, like Jazz. Some vanish from his life altogether, a few of these even calling him to say farewell and why - a move to the States or Saudi Arabia, a marriage, a returned lover of a less professional sort. Even, on one occasion, the purchase of two rescued dogs, who had, it seemed, a bone to pick with any male, the bone preferably being the male’s, and laid bare by their teeth. (This last Nick considers might have been some kind of lie with a subtext. Since that particular woman, a twenty-two year old who had inherited a nine bedroom house at Seven Oaks, tended to forget she had to pay him - he never reminded her - perhaps as if she wished they could have had more than a supplier-client relationship.)

  He got into all this almost by accident. An attractive girl had picked him up. She was a handful of years older than he - he was then seventeen. Until then he had had very little sex, not because it was never freely offered, it often was, but through an initial reserve on his part. This he never analysed. It had nothing to do with alarm at HIV AIDS or STD’s, of which he was aware and from which he protected himself and any partner as a matter of routine. Nor was or is he uncomfortable with the sexual act in any willing form. Indeed he has found from the first he has a natural aptitude, a talent for it. He assumes he prefers, and always did, an orderliness in this area too, as with his own apartment. This is superficially like Debby’s attitude but this never occurs to him, for he is not remotely like Debby in any fundamental way. The first girl who paid, when he was seventeen, being herself experienced, only believed she should do so. He has, now, to keep a ‘desk’ diary for such meetings, not wanting anything to overlap or be forgotten. There is no other woman in his life. That is, no woman only there as lover, friend or relationship. Would there, now, even be space for one?

  It is sunset when he leaves Debby. Nick strolls over a bridge. Cars stream by in a toxic river of fumes, roaring, firing off sharp splashes of light. Every pedestrian too, almost, is hurrying, quick-marching.

  A beggar lurches by with a blanket on his shoulder. He and it seemed stained by tar. He leers at Nick. “Got the price of a sandwich, mate?” Nick hands him a tenner, and the man screws it up inside his coat. As sometimes happens he snarls, “Fuck off then, you cunt,” and bundles away.

  Nick has reached the black sphynx on the Embankment when his mobile jitters against his thigh.

  “Hi.” He does not recognise the caller’s number.

  Nor the female voice which now sounds in his ear.

  “Is that Nicolas?”

  Some new ploy of BT?

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Oh stop being stupid, Nicolas. You know who this is.” He does not. And who, apart from strangers, (or Laurence sometimes) ever calls him by his unabbreviated name? “OK,” he says.

  “I want to know where he is,” says the female voice harshly. She seems angry or upset.

  “Who?”

  Then she screams into the phone so Nick holds it away from his ear. “I don’t want bloody excuses! Who do you think? What have you done - what has he done?”

&nbs
p; Nick looks out at the darkening river and the thousand and one gleams across the water. He can smell smoke and hot chestnuts, (do they still do those?), and petrol and chemicals and fried onions from some obscure vent, and cold.

  Calmly Nick says to the unknown, maddened woman, “I couldn’t say if he’s done anything. I definitely haven’t. I think you have a wrong number. Take care.” He cuts her off then. Inside eleven seconds the phone sputters again. He turns it off. It is intriguing he, the wrong number, should have the same name as the one she meant to call. Besides, she called the same wrong number again, so obviously still reckons it is the right one.

  He eats dinner alone in a wine bar at Covent Garden, and idly mentally selects one of the waiters for the role of the man who spoke about the ivory counter. This waiter is black and seems to have a French accent. That might fit the scenario. There is another waiter too, a likely candidate for the role of the first waiter, who the customer fancied and then passed the fatal ivory.

  This exercise amuses Nick while he waits for his meal, but his mind then starts straying back to the short story he is working on. It is more interesting to him than the invented story he gave Laurence. He has lied to Laurence off and on always, Nick acknowledges. Begun in childhood, no doubt in self defence against Laurence’s bullying, Nick has continued the custom unworriedly. None of the lies matter much, and Laurence, he is fairly sure, rarely believes them. Yet it affords Nick some kind of obscure pleasure to do this to Laurence still, even now it is no longer necessary. It is a game, a mind-stretching work-out, maybe needful in another way – as a writer, even a mostly unpublished and intermittent one.

  He pays the bill with a credit card. Debby’s payment stays in his jacket. Black night has settled on the city. There is a movie at the Cellar, just along from Bush House, he might as well go and see that. Two weeks back they had one of Claudia’s old films showing, and he went twice. Topaz it was called. She was about twenty, blonde as lemon ice.