Horse Under Water

48 Ivor Butcher entertains

I stepped through the aeroplane door at London Airport and watched the rain swirling across the shiny apron. The mainplanes shed little niagaras, and the ground hostess clamped her collar in her fist and screwed up her face in the teeth of the rainstorm. Jean was waiting for me in the lounge with a heavy briefcase.

It was the beginning of a week of hard work; we had the first meeting of the Strutton Committee. It went as all first meetings go; people requiring definitions, and asking for copies of memos that had long since been lost. Dawlish and I made a good team; I turned the major objections into minor objections and Dawlish’s speciality was ironing out minor objections. As these combined committees go, it was successful enough but I could see that O’Brien was going to make trouble for us. He insisted upon all kinds of procedural rigmarole hoping that Dawlish would get flustered or annoyed or both. But Dawlish had been weaned on this sort of thing. He let O’Brien talk himself to a standstill and then paused a long time before saying, ‘Oh yes?’ as though he wasn’t sure that O’Brien had made his point. Then Dawlish made his point all over again in careful measured syntax as though speaking to a child. Dawlish would rather split his trousers than an infinitive. I tell you it was a pleasure to watch him handle it.

Bernhard was a new, intelligent youth that Charlotte Street had recruited in my absence. He was a tall, good-looking boy who wore woollen shirts, went to see films with writing on them and was apt to use one long word where eight short ones would do. I told him to start investigating all Smith’s holdings. Smith employed a legal staff to wrap up his companies in holding companies, and other holding companies’ companies. It would be a long task.

On Thursday morning Ivor Butcher phoned. He used one of the outside phones which was listed as a Detective Agency in the G.P.O. list. Jean said that I would see him at an S.W. 7 address at 8.30 p.m.

I was busy all that afternoon. At 7.30 I closed and locked the I.B.M. machine which we used to correlate most of the secret information we held in the building. Without it our file cards were meaningless collections of street numbers, road names, photos, and data.

I’d submitted a superficial report of the Albufeira situation; I marked the Alforreca file ‘closed’ and submitted it to Dawlish for initialling. He chiselled his signature into the little manilla rectangle without comment, then gave the file to Alice, but his eyes never left mine.

Number 37 Little Charton Mews is one of a labyrinth of cobbled cul-de-sacs in that section of Kensington where having a garage as a living-room is celebrated by planting a rose bush in a painted barrel. Outside, two men in short lambswool coats poured whisky from a hip-flask into glasses. I tapped lightly on the brass-plated doorknocker and a man in a rubber gorilla mask opened the door. ‘Come one come all,’ he said. His voice vibrated and boomed inside the thin rubber.

‘Popsies to the right, booze straight on.’ He smelled of Algerian wine.

There was a dense scrum of party-goers — men with regimental ties and girls with velvet gloves up to the armpit.

Someone behind me was using words like ‘quasi-humanist’ and ‘empirical’ and a man who was using two hands to drink his beer said, ‘… so what; does Picasso understand me?’

I reached the big table at the far end. Behind it was a man with a paisley scarf inside an open-neck shirt.

He said, ‘There’s only gin, beer, tonic, and …’ he shook a bottle of sherry viciously, ‘… sherry.’ He held it up to what light there was and said ‘sherry’ again. A girl with a long ivory cigarette-holder said, ‘But I like my body better than I like yours.’

I took my drink and wandered off through a doorway into a tiny kitchen. A girl with smudged mascara was eating pilchards out of a tin and sobbing. I turned round. The girl who liked her body was talking about automatic chokes.

Nowhere did I see Ivor Butcher. It was just as crowded upstairs except for a small room at the end of the passage. Inside were three young men in jeans and thick sweaters. The blue TV set had its controls set to give a narrow distorted image and its sound turned down. The soft music of Mingus came from the gramophone. They turned their heads slowly towards me. One face removed its dark glasses, ‘You’re standing there like it’s another channel, dad.’

‘Sorry fellers,’ I said, and closed the door on the gentle fug of reefer smoke. I finally found Ivor Butcher downstairs. In the centre of the crush half a dozen couples danced very slowly so as not to get their clothes slashed by diamond rings. Ivor Butcher was dancing rather unsteadily with a short girl who had green eyes, a large body and a small evening gown.

‘Great to see you pal,’ Ivor Butcher said in a slurred voice. ‘Swell party?’

‘Fascinating,’ I said. He grew with pride and I decided that hyperbole had outlived its usefulness as a means of communication. After his dance Ivor Butcher wanted a word with me. He went out to my car with uncertain steps. The man in the gorilla mask was holding the shoulders of a girl who was being spectacularly ill.