Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

15. The Lord Jim Hotel

Was it actually Mr Rinyo-Clacton? At first I didn’t want to know, I just wanted to shut him out of my consciousness. Then I had to know; I turned around and went out into Earl’s Court Road and stood looking into the Vegemania. In a few minutes I saw him stick his head into the restaurant from the hallway. Rima pointed to the clock and said they weren’t open yet and he withdrew. I turned away quickly and walked down Earl’s Court Road without looking back.

Why was he here? Was he going to turn up wherever I happened to be from now on? What did he want at the Vegemania? Serafina? Was he going to suck up my whole life like a vampire before he killed me? Serafina! I could see him having lunch at the Vegemania, complimenting her on her cooking, being charming, chatting her up and inviting her to the opera, the ballet, whatever. There’s nothing you can do about it, I told myself — the shop and the restaurant are open to the public and you can’t prevent Serafina from talking to him. Don’t think about it now, put it out of your mind and get on with whatever you were going to do today.

Around me a sketchy surreality put itself together with sounds and colours, buildings, cars, faces, footsteps, and the smell of exhaust fumes and roasting chestnuts. Contracting to be dead in one year definitely made everything look different; gigantic soft watches draped over trees and a downpour of bowler-hatted men with umbrellas would not have surprised me.

Steady on, I said to myself. Right now we’ve got to decide what to do with the money. You’ve got nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand, five hundred pounds and a whole year to live, less one day. Right, I said. A tall rucksacked girl with her blonde hair in two plaits strode past me swinging her mineral water. What if I were to live more than a year? Nobody could be dead sure of anything in this life: Mr Rinyo-Clacton might choke on a pearl in one of his oysters and never get around to harvesting me at all.

I bought a copy of the Financial Times and ran my eye over the front page. Nash & Weapman saw the recession receding; Morgenstern was expecting a downturn in the upturn. Morgenstern seemed to me the brighter of the two so I went back to the flat, averted my eyes from the plants, and rang them up. I told the telephonist I needed some investment advice and she turned me over to a Mr Reilly.

‘Jim Reilly here,’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’ He had an Excelsior kind of voice.

‘I’ve come into some money,’ I said, ‘and I need investment advice.’

‘Yes. And how did you hear of us, Mr Fitch?’

‘I saw your firm quoted in the Financial Times.’

‘Right. I’m sure we can work something out for you, Jonathan. Just so I can begin to put a frame around this, may I ask what sort of amount you’re thinking of investing?’

‘Close to a million, give or take a few bundles.’

‘I see. That kind of money has considerable potential, Jonathan, and our job is not simply to realise that potential — what we’re here for is to maximise it.’

‘That’s what I want, Jim: maximisation of my potential.’

‘We’re going to give it our best shot, Jonathan, and we’ve got a pretty good track record. This is going to require careful planning, and the best way to begin is for you and I to meet … ’

‘You and me to meet,’ I said. ‘Sorry to be pedantic.’

‘No problem. As I was saying, the best way to begin is for the two of us to meet here at our offices so we can look at your whole financial picture and assess your needs as fully as possible. Would that be convenient for you?’

‘Fine. When can you see me?’

‘I’ve got a cancellation at three o’clock this afternoon. How’s that for you?’

‘That’s good. You’re in Gray’s Inn Road, nearest tube station Chancery Lane?’

‘That’s it. Coming up Gray’s Inn Road from the tube station you’ll see a modern building on the right. We’re on the third floor.’

There was still the matter of the shopping trolley and three carrier bags full of banknotes. I trundled the lot over to Lloyds, made out a deposit slip, and queued up at a window. An alert-looking young member of the staff approached and became interested in the trolley. I opened the flap and showed him the contents. ‘You think they’re real?’ I said.

‘Not my problem. Do you want to deposit that in your account?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll have to be counted. Come with me, please.’ He recruited a teller named Brenda and we went to a room where my seventy-nine sealed packets and the one opened one were unpacked and laid out on a desk.

‘Aren’t there a lot of fake fifties about now?’ I said to Brenda. ‘Won’t you have to put them under ultra-violet light or something?’

‘Not unless they feel funny.’ She sighed, tore open the sealed packets, and began to count the nineteen thousand, nine hundred and fifty fifty-pound notes. She was wearing a navy-blue woollen dress and a little string of pearls; her dark hair was cut in a Lulu-style bob. Her hands were graceful and articulate, her long fingers themselves seeming to count as she murmured hundreds into thousands and replaced the elastic band around each stack as she finished. While pondering the paperness of money, I thought of Serafina peeling onions and the way her hand took hold of a potato.

The silence around Brenda’s quiet voice purred softly; my breathing seemed very loud. The young man — his name was Steve — stood by with canvas bags into which he put the banded stacks as she finished with them. It was a scene that was part of the surreality that was by now the usual thing for me — just another sequence of moments in the new life and death of Jonathan Fitch.

After a while the counting and bagging stopped, the three of us went back to the teller’s window, the bags were sealed, and Brenda stamped my deposit slip. ‘That’s the biggest I’ve had so far today,’ she said.

‘How was it for you?’ I said.

‘Just numbers. In this job you’ve got to stop thinking of money as money or you’ll go crazy.’

As I was about to leave the bank with my empty trolley a man I took to be the manager came out of his office. ‘Mr Fitch,’ he said, taking me in with a practised smile. I was in non-business mode: Mr Scruffy. ‘I’m Henry Dargent, Branch Manager here. I don’t believe we’ve actually met before.’

‘How do you do?’ I said, and we shook hands.

‘You know, Mr Fitch, the interest on your Classic Account scarcely offers an appropriate return on the sort of money you’ve just deposited. Our advisers are always available to help you with a financial programme.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to explore various possibilities.’ I was already feeling burdened by the money. I went back to the flat with the trolley but I couldn’t bear to stay there. The place was filled with the goneness of Serafina but saying that doesn’t begin to describe how it was. I was used to being there alone for hours on end while she was busy with dinners at the Vegemania but her presence was always there. I know I sound gross talking about food so much but the kitchen particularly was ghastly now that she hadn’t been in it and wouldn’t be in it, handling things in that good way of hers, maybe singing softly to herself while she cooked. Gone, gone, gone.

I put a few things in a weekend bag and walked down Earl’s Court Road to Penywern. Some of the tall white Victorian houses with pillared and balconied fronts were hotels and I cruised slowly past them waiting for one of them to reach out and pull me in.

LORD JIM HOTEL, said the gilded letters on a green awning. Lord Jim! Conrad’s flawed hero, Chief Mate of the Patna, who abandoned what he thought was a sinking ship and left hundreds of Mecca-bound pilgrims to their fate. Quite an august entrance with broad steps, two white urns filled with healthy-looking vines, and three sturdy white pillars. Through the glass doors I saw an Art Deco chandelier, three tiers like an upside-down wedding cake and all pinky-orange and glittering like a beacon of tranquillity and elsewhere-ness.

There was a beautiful black-haired girl at the Reception window. ‘Are your people from Bombay?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I was born here.’

‘Have you read Lord Jim?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did the hotel come to have this name?’

‘The original owners were Polish and they were big Conrad fans.’

‘Did they ever abandon ship?’

‘I don’t know.’

A room with a shower and toilet was forty-five pounds. There was a ten-pound deposit for use of the telephone. ‘How long will you be staying?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. Can I tell you later?’

‘All right. Checkout time is twelve noon.’ She gave me the key to Room Twenty-one on the second floor and I took the lift up to it. By now I had settled into my new mode of perception, an ad hoc kind of thing in which each sequence put itself together in its own way. I opened the door into the high-ceilinged room and breathed a little sigh.

This was a quiet place that had nothing in it that was personal to anyone; it was not the big blast of reality (and surreality) that waited outside; it was the limited reality of a small hotel room, like a simple melody played on a bamboo flute, cool as the plashing of water falling from level to level in the ferny-dappled sunlight of a garden. The soap dispenser over the sink charmed me. The upholstered headboard of the bed offered a muted view of distant mountains and winding rivers. The wallpaper gave me no backtalk, the bedspread and the carpet effaced themselves in pinks and greys. A print on the wall showed a foreground of something botanical, cow parsley for all I knew, with what might have been the South Downs in the distance.

The mirror on the door had no pretensions to deep insights and contented itself with a generalised and simplified me. I looked out of the window and saw two chestnut trees. ‘Yes!’ I said, and took off my shoes and lay back on the bed. I notice that men in films often put their feet on a bedspread without taking off their shoes. Another thing they do in films in moments of stress or heavy portent is go to the sink and splash cold water over their faces and the backs of their necks. I don’t do that either.

I had a half hour before I had to leave for my consultation with Jim Reilly; I rang the desk and asked the beautiful black-haired girl to call me in thirty minutes, then on an impulse I checked the two drawers of the bedside table for a Gideon Bible. There was none. I closed my eyes and had a tiny kip in which I dreamed of a dark place where I saw, far away, the green glow of Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s desk lamp.