The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby

Praise for Brian Martin

‘Brian Martin has waited too long to write his first book. He should give his vivid imagination another outing soon’
Spectator

‘Brian Martin's
North
spins a ripe, Fowlesian tale of sexual and spiritual intrigue’ Boyd Tonkin
, Independent

‘Martin's crisp, lofty prose is a great success’
New Statesman

‘Offers an intricate dance of love, or lovers, somewhat in the manner of Shakespearean comedy … agreeable and amusing’ Allan Massie
, Scotsman

Seville was at its grandest. The evening possessed a clear, bright light that burnished everything it touched. The tall palm trees stood in lines, sentinels outside the high walls of Moorish buildings. Geometrical patterns of trickling water in straight conduits and crossing, intersecting, clipped bushes, decorated its adjoining gardens. The one-way traffic system flowed ceaselessly. Tourists ambled to and fro around the hotels, fanning themselves with guide-maps and information bulletins in the late heat that would soon rapidly cool.

The Alfonso XIII, by far the best hotel in Seville, offered me rest and succour. Once it had been a royal palace: now it was a sumptuous hotel, cool and luxurious, spacious with handsome interiors. It was here that I used to meet Roxanne in the early evening during those months that I lived and worked in Seville. A central court accommodated breakfast and dining tables interspersed with exotic potted plants and
pots de fleurs.
Henry Miller abhorred the spruceness of northern France’s small towns and villages. Their civic pride insisted on tidiness, a well-ordered presentation to a visiting, watching world. ‘
Je m’en fous de la civilisation Européenne
,’ he declaimed. But here in this elegant courtyard everything was in order, nothing out of place: the panoply of flowers was perfect. There were no Henry Millers or any of his Bohemian friends under the vast awning that had been unfurled across the court to shield the patrons from the afternoon sun.

All the best American features of hotel comfort had been incorporated in the makeover to convert the palace into the city’s finest place to stay. Ease and elegance were its hallmarks; and it was here that I had arranged to meet Roxanne.

I worked for the
London Journal
. I had started out as an ordinary news reporter but had stumbled on a story to do with money laundering through businesses run in Auckland. The masterminds behind the scam had calculated that New Zealand being off the beaten track of world affairs would be a suitably obscure place to conduct their criminal dealings. They had not reckoned with me. I had been reporting an illegal meat-trading business that authenticated carcasses not fit for human consumption but which were fed back into the food chain. The trail led me to New Zealand and the resulting story made my reputation. I was promoted to be one of the paper’s leading investigative journalists. It was a dangerous profession. Organised crime does not like inquisitive people and it is prepared to be utterly ruthless, especially where governments are weak and are not prepared to oppose it. So, in my mid-thirties, single and hungry for adventure, I found myself fulfilling a role that I found exciting but distinctly risky.

My current assignment had turned out to be even more dangerous than I would usually have expected. Somehow I had found myself in a relationship with the remarkably beautiful wife of the magnate who ran the company I was investigating. Myrex, so far as I could discover, was a commercial complex that operated in several countries and seemed to concentrate on exploiting and developing old Soviet assets in satellite states deserted by that once dominant centralised power. My enquiries had unearthed so far some curiously dubious operations in the Baltic States. To be conducting an affair with the wife of the company’s proprietor and chairman was not altogether wise but I thought it could have its advantages. Anyway, it was her initiative that had started our liaison; she was impossible to resist.

At the end of one of the side aisles, a black-tied pianist played Mozart on a Bechstein. I sat at a table a little distance from him and listened to the rapturous music that shifted me from the worries of my predicament. A young waiter emerged from the recesses and asked if I would like anything. His request was on the edge of ambiguity: it might have been a sexual overture. Others might have caught the fly: ‘A Scotch and soda, please.  Perhaps you could bring one to my room a little later, too.’ ‘About 10.30, sir?’ ‘That will do well. I look very much forward.’ So a tryst is made between a wearied traveller and a good-looking young chap from a local village with little money and his way to make in the world, who has nothing to sell except, as it were, his soul to the Devil.

I ordered a Dry Martini, assured that in this American Spanish institution, the bar would know how to mix it. Outside of Manhattan or away from Massachusetts Avenue in DC, I have learned to be wary of ordering the classic cocktail. Once in Oxford, at what was reputedly an international hotel, in answer to my Dry Martini order I had received a wine glass of Martini Seco. When I explained that the drink should have gin in it, I was served another glass with a measure of Gilbey’s and charged for two separate drinks.

This youth’s Dry Martini was first-class, two-thirds gin to one of vermouth, a twist of lemon, chilled in the shaker. If his personal service was as good as this and he had not already contracted Aids, then he would surely do well.

I sat sipping the Martini, musing on what the boy was thinking, and daydreaming in the balming influence of Mozart’s music.

So, while lost in thought waiting for Roxanne, Belmont showed up. It was a surprise. I had not expected to see him. He drifted in, shabbily chic, in what had once been a well-cut coat but now well-worn, threadbare at the cuffs and sagging slightly under the left armpit, not that he would have been carrying his gun then. He reminded me of the recent chairman of the Publishers’ Association whom I had once met in literary London: he habitually wore a shoulder holster but carried in it his mobile telephone. To begin with, those who knew him and his past experience as a Special Forces senior officer would freeze as he shifted his jacket to one side and reached for his phone. Belmont’s role for years had been that of the British representative to the equivalent of the Chamber of Trade in Seville; but in the news world we knew that he doubled working for the intelligence service, something that he always denied.

Belmont, aquiline, fair-haired, physically elegant even if his clothes were not, sauntered towards my table and subsided into one of the cane chairs. He flicked the lick of blonde hair across his forehead, and with a mere hint of gesture signalled the boy to him. He ordered the same restorative tincture as mine.

‘It’s great to see you, B,’ I said. ‘Even better to see you’re still alive. What’s news?’

He no more than brushed the conical-shaped glass with his lips. ‘No news here; but have you heard what’s happened in London?’ I replied that I was out of touch: I had not talked to anyone at home since yesterday.

‘I caught Willy as he was leaving the office,’ he said. ‘London is in turmoil. Pall Mall and Waterloo Place are pretty well devastated. It was a car bomb apparently; went off at about three. There was gridlock. The Duke of York’s statue is pockmarked by shrapnel.’

‘Who was responsible? Was it Al-Qaeda? Does anyone know? Have you been on to HQ yet?’

He ignored my last remark. ‘Why are you asking so many questions? Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s better; after all you’ve got the contacts. Willy will talk to you. He’s guarded with me. Give him a ring. He must know what the word is on the Albert Embankment.’

Willy worked at MI6 headquarters and talked in a sort of code, a cipher language, which those of us who knew him well were, for the most part, able to interpret. Always mindful of the Official Secrets Act, he delivered his hints, his nods and his winks with a quiet discretion. I had known him up at Oxford where he had read History and with a methodical, calculated, cold-blooded efficiency gained himself a First. That was the sort of guy he was. When he put his mind to something, then look out. He ruthlessly put into the shade the star history student of our year who thought he had the flair and intelligence; but up against Willy, he became slightly demoralised and at the end flunked to a good Second. Willy was recruited while he was a short-service commissioned officer in the Army to the Security Services and served in the field to great effect in Germany and later on in Moscow. He then became home based. He enjoyed the paperwork of policy-making and the measure of control that he had over younger colleagues on active service. He occasionally interviewed new hopefuls. His one key question to them was always a poniard thrust, ‘Are you prepared to kill someone when the necessity arises?’

My bottom line with Willy was that he was immensely useful for my investigative work. He would give me invaluable hints about people and enterprises. I reckoned that he felt I might be useful to him because of my newspaper work and confidential sources. Thus we had an unexpressed understanding of intelligence cooperation. So far it had all worked well.

I did not respond to Belmont’s Albert Embankment remark. He changed the subject and asked about Roxanne. He had met her once or twice at parties, not in my company, and once with me in an obscure restaurant where Roxanne and I had gone to avoid being seen. It was there that Belmont had shown up. He, too, had been trying to keep out of sight for reasons not the same as ours.

The trouble was that Roxanne was the wife of this prominent businessman, the president of the city’s leading commercial forum. I had met her first when I was invited to give a lunchtime address on the British Press’s attitudes to Spain and the European Community. I had been seated between the president and his wife. After my talk, when I had sat down, Roxanne had rested her hand on my knee and congratulated me on what I had said. There was no mistaking the warmth of that touch. I knew at once that she was making a move, and I responded. She was gorgeously attractive, slim, dark-haired, shapely: she was elegantly made up and scented unmistakably with Chanel Number 5. I had placed my hand on top of hers and pressed gently. She stretched her fingers, shifted her position and stroked softly upwards, caressing the inside of my thigh. Her intention was clear: she had decided. The final decision was up to me, and I could not resist. It is extremely flattering to receive such an immediate approach from an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.

The president was oblivious to what was going on between us. He was bound up with the elderly wife of a business colleague seated on his left. Roxanne and I spoke in undertones: should we meet later? Was I busy? Where would be a good place? I mentioned a small bar by the railway station.

‘It’s out of the way, quite private. We’re not likely to be noticed, and if we are we can say we met by chance.’

Roxanne was eager. We arranged to meet at half past six. For an hour we talked. She told me that she had been struck by my presence as soon as I had arrived next to her at lunch. She had felt an immediate
frisson
that she was still experiencing. It was not that she did not like her husband, she did, but the flame had died. It surged and flared in my company. All this, of course, was entirely physical: we had hardly explored each other’s intellects.

‘We must be careful,’ I said. ‘We don’t know each other. We don’t know if we can talk to each other.’

Roxanne dismissed my anxiety. She knew instinctively that we were at one both physically and mentally. She would hear nothing of caution along those lines. She did advise it so far as her husband was concerned. He was an influential, powerful man who did not like to be crossed and who was conventional in his attitude towards his family. If honour was impugned, he would stop at nothing to wreak revenge. The manners of the great Sevillian commercial families were not dissimilar to those of the great Italian mafia dynasties. Roxanne was the English wife of a Spaniard of note. It was necessary for everyone’s safety that we were discreet. He was eminently dangerous. Provoke the viper and it would bite. In the end, after he had discovered our liaison, it did not matter. So long as we kept ourselves out of the public eye and did nothing embarrassingly outrageous, her husband raised no objections. It turned out that he followed his own interests, his own sexual liaisons, which involved a succession of not only delightful young women but also young men. He seemed quite content that I entertained his wife. Had he grown bored with her? I do not know. I do know that he was engaged in that fruitless quest of always looking for something different, something new.

I told Belmont that Roxanne was well, indeed, that she was flourishing. Since we first had met and Roxanne had suffered the epiphany that I found difficult to believe was caused by my presence, she had lightened in spirit. There was a joy in her looks, an eagerness in her mood: her happiness was infectious and affected those she was with. Why should I have this effect on someone? I could not understand it. I was just an ordinary newspaperman, in a sense a hack journalist, quiet, dull, out of the way. The sort of work I did, the assignments I was given, would have destroyed James Bond by their boredom. I have always wondered who did Bond’s paperwork.

‘Roxanne should be here soon. I’m waiting for her. If you hang on a while, you’ll meet her,’ I said.

‘You’re a lucky bastard,’ he said. ‘How did you pick her up?’

I wondered if it would be ungallant to point out that it was the other way round and decided that it would not matter: Roxanne would be totally unconcerned. So I said to Belmont, ‘I didn’t. She picked me up, in a manner of speaking. Though I agree, I’m a lucky bastard.’

‘Why doesn’t that sort of thing happen to me?’ Belmont complained.

I looked at him. He was handsome enough, and his down-at-heel air had a captivating charm of its own peculiar kind. The problem was that he radiated unhappiness, an uncertainty, which I could see disturbed people. Was it Dr Johnson who said that you have a duty to be cheerful? Belmont had not heard that apophthegm. Too often he was in the grips of a desperate gloom that could not help affect those he was with. Women, attracted at first by the unconventional untidiness of the man and his shabby good looks, were soon put off. There was no joy, no lyricism in his soul.

He drained his Martini and went before Roxanne arrived. He was going to leave five euros but I told him to forget it: he could buy mine next time round. That was never to be. As always, I regret intensely not having said goodbye to him properly. I liked him. Despite his melancholic cast, he was a good friend to me, reliable, hospitable and kind. I miss him terribly now.