Ordinary Thunderstorms

3

UNDERPANTS OR NO UNDERPANTS? Ingram Fryzer pondered to himself, staring at the long rank of two dozen suits hanging in the cupboard in his dressing room. He was wearing a cream shirt with a tie already knotted at the throat and his usual navy-blue long socks, socks that came up to the knee. Ingram had a horror of showing white hairy shin between sock-top and trouser cuff when sitting down, legs crossed — it was in some ways the besetting and prototypical English sartorial sin. Sartorial sin, he smiled to himself, or should that be sartorial shin? No matter, when he sat in meetings with rich and powerful men and saw them shift legs, re-cross their thighs and expose two inches of etiolated shank, he found he immediately thought less of such people — this kind of lapse said something about them. However, the matter of underpants was an irreducibly personal issue — it was unthinkable that anyone in his company would ever guess that their chairman and chief executive officer was naked beneath his perfectly tailored trousers, that his cock and balls hung free.

Ingram deliberated further on this pleasant dilemma — underpants or no underpants — imagining the potential stimuli that awaited him that day. He loved the way the glans of his penis would rub against the material of his trousers, or snag itself for a second on a raised seam — at such moments you could never be sure that a semi-erection might spontaneously occur and of course this possibility raised the stakes, particularly if you were about to go in to an important meeting. The whole texture — every nuance — of the business day was immeasurably different if you were naked beneath your trousers. Unejournee defrottis-frotta, as a French friend had termed it, and Ingram enjoyed the sophisticated pretension this title conferred on his little vice. He had made his mind up — no underpants it would be — and he selected a Prince of Wales check suit, pulled on the trousers, fitted his red braces to them and slipped on the jacket. He chose a pair of dark-brown, tasselled loafers and went downstairs to the full English breakfast that Maria-Rosa had waiting for him promptly at 7.30, Monday to Friday.

On the way to the office he asked Luigi to stop the car at Holborn Underground station. He often did this — rode the Tube to work for a few stops while Luigi took the car on — particularly on days he wasn’t wearing underpants. He liked to mix with the ‘people’, look around him at the various types of human being on display and wonder what kind of lives they led. Not that he had any contempt for them or felt any comfortable superiority — it was simply a matter of anthropological curiosity, intrigued by these other members of his species — and he thought that, as a person, he was all the better for it, as no one else he knew in his social and economic class did the same. For ten minutes or so he became another faceless commuter on the Central Line going to work.

He stood in the crowded compartment looking around him, curiously, innocently. There were two pretty-ish girls not far away, in suits, listening to their music, plugged into their tiny earphones. Smartly dressed, jewellery, quite heavy make-up…One of them glanced blankly at him, as if aware of his gaze, and then looked away. Ingram felt his cock stir and he wondered if this might be a day for Phyllis also. My god, what was wrong with him? Did other men in their fifty-ninth year think so constantly of sex? What was that expression, that term? Yes — was he an ‘erotomane’? Not the worst category of sexual offender in which to be classified but sometimes he wondered if there were something clinically wrong, or diagnosable, about his obsessions…Then again, he reflected, as he walked up the steps leading out of Bank Station and saw the glass tower that contained his company — CALENTURE-DEUTZ pic — on several of whose floors some 200 of his employees were settling down to their day’s work, perhaps such feelings, such urges, were entirely healthy and normal.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he saw both Burton Keegan and Paul de Freitas waiting for him in the lobby. As he strode towards them he consciously began to run through the worst possible scenarios, preparing himself: his wife, his children — maimed, dead; an industrial accident at the Oxford laboratories, contamination, plague; some terrible stockmarket upheaval; a boardroom putsch — ruin…

“Burton, Paul,” he said, keeping his features as impassive as theirs, “good morning. It can only be bad news.”

Keegan glanced at de Freitas — who would be the messenger? Keegan stepped forward on de Freitas’s nod.

“Philip Wang is dead,” Keegan muttered in a low voice. “Murdered.”