Birdman

19

In 1984 Lucilla Harteveld — age fifty-five, weight eighteen stone — was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital in New Cavendish Street with chest pains. In the coronary care unit an ECG showed she had suffered a mild myocardial infarct. She was pumped with anistreplase and disopyramide. Henrick Harteveld immediately contacted his son.

After a cautious mother — son reunion — Lucilla smelled in her hospital bed, as if she'd done something secret under the covers and was enjoying the discomfort it gave her visitors — Toby and Henrick walked solemnly through Mayfair for dinner in the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Left together, unshepherded by Lucilla for the first time in years, the two men talked until midnight. Henrick, who expected to lose his wife, sat upright in his chair and ordered Perrier-Jouët. Toby confessed he had dropped out of medical school and was spending his days sitting uselessly in the small south-east London flat.

The next day Henrick set to work.

Without consulting Lucilla he floated his pharmaceutical company — Harteveld Chemicals — on the stock market, retaining a majority interest and passing £1.5 million of the profits to his son. He was going over Lucilla's head and it made him tremble — alone in the panelled library, he actually shook with fear and excitement — to think how she would respond to this act of psychosis. To lend the event some respectability he appointed Toby assistant director of marketing, a job so pantomimic that it required him only to put on a suit every few days and show his face at the chrome-and-smoked-glass company headquarters outside Sevenoaks.

And so Toby Harteveld became wealthy.

He temporarily abandoned the tiny flat in Lewisham — with its elderly neighbours and sleepy cats on the walls outside — and acquired the house on Croom's Hill, hiring landscapers and builders, cleaners and gardeners. Using the Harteveld name's high profile in the pharmaceutical industry, he got himself appointed to the private sector steering committee on St Dunstan's Hospital Trust. He threw parties, the villa filled with lofty creatures: heart surgeons and heiresses, shipping magnates and actresses, women who knew how to wear raw silk and men who knew how to summon a wine waiter with a glance. The conversation danced over futures dealings, fringe theatre, dinghy sailing in Kennebunkport. He tried to build form and significance into his life and briefly he was able to maintain the illusion of sanity.

But, as outwardly he struggled towards perfection, as his life acquired the hue of success, inwardly his despair and alienation increased. His secret sickness grew.

None of his acquaintances knew about the girls he paid for, about meeting them in the street and bringing them to Croom's Hill, about sending them naked into the garden to stand until they were blue with cold, so they could come glazed and shivering into his double bed. Or him demanding they lie still and unresponsive, eyes rolled back in their heads.

'I can't, it gives me a headache.'

'Shut up, can't you, just shut up and keep still.'

While he mounted them, still able to reach climax only with his eyes locked tight, turned ferociously inward on fantasy.

One day, as he sat in his temperature-controlled, double-glazed office in Sevenoaks, lunchtime aperitif at his elbow, watching Canadian geese landing on the artificial ponds, he suddenly saw the weight of the burden in a new light. Maybe, he thought, maybe he was incurable. The idea brought him up short. Was it possible, he wondered, that every human is sentenced to a particular lifelong exercise of will, with a duty to accept it with grace and strength? And was it possible that here, in his obsession, he had encountered his own life struggle?

He took a deep breath and straightened in his chair. Very well. He would carry it. He would exist side by side with perpetual restraint and compromise.

But he needed help.

He ran a finger down the tall milky glass of pastis. He needed an end to awareness, and it would have to be better than drink.

Two weeks later he found the safety valve he wanted, dining one night with an ex-Sherborne friend fresh from PhD field research in the rain forests of Tanjung Puting. After dinner the friend collected a small Gladstone bag and put it on the table in front of Harteveld.

'Cocaine, Toby? Or something more escapist? There's opium. Sweet, velvety opium, just, mmm.' He rubbed his fingers together. 'Just caressed out of the land by the Malaysians.'

Harteveld hesitated a moment, then let his eyelids droop down. He opened his hands on the table, palms up in a gesture of relief and gratitude. Here it was, then, what he had been searching for. The good, welcoming shore of escape.