Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (9 page)

'Tell me what it's about. Tell me and I'll see what I can do, if I can do anything. What's happened to Mr. Pérez Nuix, both names are his, are they not?' I couldn't help saying this in the patronizing tone of someone preparing to listen, consider, think it over, be a momentary enigma, keep the other person dangling and then concede or deny or be merely ambiguous. It always makes you feel rather important, knowing that you'll take equal pleasure in saying a 'Yes' and a 'No' and a 'Possibly' ('I'm being so good,' you say to yourself; or 'I'm so hard, so implacable, I wasn't born yesterday and no one's putting anything over on me'; or 'If I don't give a decision right now, I will be the lord of uncertainty'), and so you magnanimously, patiently draw the other person out: 'What is it?' or 'Tell me' or 'Explain what you mean'; or else speak threateningly and urgently: 'Come on, spit it out' or 'You've got two minutes, make the most of them and get straight to the point' (or 'Make it short')—I was giving that young woman all the time in the world that night, the rain outside removed all sense of haste.

'Yes, my mother's maiden name was Waller. He hyphenates his two names,' she said, and she drew the hyphen in the air, 'but I don't. I'm like Conan Doyle.' She smiled, and that, I thought, would be the last smile for quite some time, for as long as it took her to present her case. 'My father's getting on a bit now, he had me quite late, from his second marriage, I've got a half-sister and half-brother somewhere who are much older than me, but I've never had much to do with them. Even though my mother was considerably younger than him, she died six years ago from galloping cancer. He was already retired by then; well, insofar as anyone can retire from doing far too many things, most of them unproductive and vague and never entirely abandoned. He was always a womanizer, and still is within his limitations, but he was quite lost or perhaps disconcerted when my mother died: he even lost interest in other women. Naturally, this didn't last very long, just a few months of playing the part of the suddenly aged widower, but he soon recovered his youth. He'd had a terrible time as a child in Spain, during the War and afterwards, until his father managed to get him out and bring him to England, my grandfather had left in 1939 and couldn't send for him until '45, when the war against Germany ended; my father was fifteen when he arrived and was always torn between the two countries, he'd left some older brothers behind in Barcelona, who, when they had the chance, chose not to change countries. And he didn't have an easy time in London at first either, until he started to make his own way. He married well, both times; not that it was hard for him, he was a charming man and very handsome. It was a great error and injustice, to use his words, that he'd had such a difficult start in life, but he, of course, forgot about the difficulties and soon made up for them. And he'd laugh when he said this. He maintains, and always has, that we come into this world in order to have a good time, and anyone who doesn't see it like that is in the wrong place, that's what he says. He was a very good-humored man, and still is, he's one of those people who avoids sadness and is bored by suffering; even if he has real reason to suffer, he'll shake it off eventually it just seems to him like a stupid waste of time, like a period of involuntary, enforced tedium that interrupts the party and may even ruin it. He was terribly shaken by my mother's death, I could see that, his grief was very real, some days it bordered on despair, he was almost mad with it, shut up at home, which was unheard of for a man who has spent his entire life going to sociable places in search of diversion. However, he was incapable of remaining anchored in sorrow for more than a few months. He can only cope with pain, his own or other people's, as if it were a brief performance in need of encouragement and compliments, and he would have seen wallowing in grief as not making the most of life, as a waste.'

That was the word both Wheeler and my father had used to refer to a very different thing, to the war dead, especially once the fighting's over and it becomes clear that everything has remained more or less the same, more or less as it probably would have been without all the bloodshed. That, with few exceptions, is how we all feel about wars, when we become distanced from them by passing time, and people don't even know about the crucial battles without which they might not have been born. According to young Pérez Nuix's father, time spent on heartbreak and mourning was also a waste. And it occurred to me that perhaps his idea was not so very different from that of my two old men, simply more categorical: not only were deaths a waste, whether in wartime or peacetime, it was just as much a waste to allow ourselves to be saddened or dragged down by them and not recover or be happy again. Like a knee pressing into our chest, like lead upon our soul.

'What was your father's name, I mean, what is his name?' I asked, correcting myself at once. I had been influenced by her temporal oscillations, 'He maintains, and always has,' 'He said, he says,' 'He was, he is,' I imagined that she kept slipping into the wrong tense because her father was old, and she would find it harder and harder to see in him the father of her childhood; it happens to all of us, we take the fathers and mothers of our childhood to be the real, essential and almost only ones, and later, even though we still recognize and respect and support them, we see them slightly as impostors. Perhaps they, in turn, see us like that, in youth and adulthood. (I was absenting myself from my children's childhood, who knows for how much longer; the only advantage, if that banishment were to prove prolonged, would be that, later, we would not see each other as impostors, they would not see me that way, nor I they. More like uncle and nephews, something strange like that.)

'Alberto. Albert. Or Albert.' The second time, she said the name as it would be pronounced in Catalan, with the stress on the second syllable, and the third time as it is in English, with the stress on the first. I deduced from this that she must have ended up pronouncing her father's name in that third way in his adopted country, and that this is what friends and acquaintances would call him, and his second wife when they were at home, and how the child Pérez Nuix would have heard him addressed before she relinquished that pretentious hyphen. 'Why do you ask?'

'Oh, no reason. When someone is talking to me about a person I don't know, I always get a clearer idea of them if I know their first name. Names can be very influential sometimes. For example, it's not insignificant that Tupra is called Bertram.' And with my next words, I took advantage of my temporary position in the control seat, it was an attempt to make her feel insecure, or to instill in her a sense of now unnecessary haste, I was used to the situation now and to her agreeable presence, my living room was infinitely more welcoming with her inside it, and more entertaining. 'I still don't know why you're telling me all this about your father. Not that I don't find it interesting, mind. Plus, of course, I'm interested in you.'

'Don't worry, I haven't really been beating about the bush, or not entirely, I'm getting to the point now,' she replied, slightly embarrassed. My words had had an effect, sometimes it's very easy to make someone feel nervous, even people who are not the nervous type. She was one such person, as were Tupra, Mulryan and Rendel. And presumably I was as well, given that they'd made me a member of the group, although I didn't believe that to be a virtue I possessed, not at least that I was aware of, I often feel like a real bundle of nerves. Of course it might be that we were all pretending or that we simply kept our cool at work, but were less successful at doing so outside. 'Anyway, since my mother died, my father has spent the last six years more out of control than ever, more desperate for activity and company. And after a certain age, however sociable and charming you might be, getting both those things can cost money, and without my mother there to keep a check on him, he's been spending it hand over fist.'

'You mean he let her manage his affairs?'

'Not exactly. It's just that the money was largely hers, she was the one with the income, from her family, and all more or less in order and assured. Not that she was rich, she didn't own a fortune or anything, but she had enough not to suffer any financial difficulties and to spend a life, or even a life and a half, in comfort. His earnings were sporadic. He would plunge optimistically into various risky businesses, film and television production, publishing houses, fashionable bars, would-be auction houses that never got off the ground. One or two went well and brought him large profits for a year or two, but they were never very stable. Others went disastrously wrong, or else he was cheated and lost everything he'd invested. Either way, he never changed his lifestyle, or went without his usual entertainments and celebrations. My mother did try to curb his excesses and ensure that he didn't squander so much money that it constituted a danger to her finances. But that ended six years ago. And about a month ago now, I found out that he's incurred enormous gambling debts. He's always loved the races and betting on his beloved horses; but now he bets on anything, whatever it might be—and he's widened the field to the Internet where the possibilities are endless; he frequents gambling dens and casinos, places where there's never any shortage of overexcited people, which for as long as I can remember is what has always attracted him, and so those places have become his principal way of keeping the party going, given that for him, the world is one long party; and to go to those places, he doesn't have to charm anyone or wait to be invited, which is a great advantage for a man getting on in years. Then he took to disappearing from home for long periods, and I'd hear nothing from him until it occurred to him to call me up one night from Bath or Brighton or Paris or Barcelona or from here in London, where he'd taken it into his head to book into a hotel, in the city where he has his own house, and a very nice house too, simply in order to feel more a part of the hustle and bustle, to wander through the foyer and strike up conversations in the various reception rooms, usually with absurd American tourists, who are always the keenest to chat with the natives. I also learned that, up until only a few months ago and for decades now, he'd been renting a little suite in a family-run hotel, the Basil Street Hotel, which isn't luxurious and a bit old-fashioned, but, still, imagine the expense, and imagine what he must have used it for, and hospitality is the thing that always costs most. At least that debt has been paid, the people at the hotel were very understanding and I came to an agreement with them. That isn't the case with the gambling debts, of course, which have got completely out of hand, as tends to happen to innocent aficionados, especially those who like to ingratiate themselves with their new acquaintances, and my father loves to keep refreshing his circle of friends.' Young Pérez Nuix paused for breath (albeit unostentatiously), she uncrossed and crossed her legs, inverting their position (the one beneath on top, and the one on top beneath, I thought I heard the run advance still further, I was keeping my eye on it), and she pushed her glass towards me an inch, propelling it forward by its base. I would have preferred her not to drink so much, although she seemed to hold her drink well. I pretended not to notice, I would wait until she insisted, or until she pushed it a little closer. 'Fortunately, the debts aren't too widely spread, which is something. So he doesn't entirely lack sense, and he borrowed money from a bank, well, from a banker friend, on a semi-personal basis, the banker was really a friend of my mother's and only my father's friend by proximity and association. However, this gentleman, Mr. Vickers, brought in a front man, in order, I understand, not to involve his bank in any way: he's a man with very varied business dealings, he's into lotteries and betting and a thousand other things, including acting as an occasional moneylender. The sums always came from the banker in this case, but the front man was charged with delivering the money and recovering it, along, shall we say, with the bank's interest. And if he can't recover the money, then he'll have to answer to Vickers and pay him the money out of his own pocket, now are you beginning to get some idea of the mess my father is in?'

'I'm not sure; they'd report him, wouldn't they? Or how does it work? Can't you come to some arrangement with this man Vickers, if he was a friend of your mother's?'

'No, that isn't how it works at all, you don't understand,' said Pérez Nuix, and in those last few words there was, for the first time, a hint of desperation. 'The money is originally his, but to all practical effects it's as if it wasn't. It's as if he had given the order: "Lend this gentleman up to this amount and have him return it to you with this much interest and by this deadline, and if he doesn't return it, bring me the money anyway." Officially, he doesn't even touch it, when it comes to handing it over or to recovering it. It's not up to him to worry about the transactions, these are the responsibility of the front man from start to finish, and the banker exercises no control over them whatsoever; and that is precisely how he wants it; consequently, he refuses to intervene, nor would he wish to. He doesn't even want to know if the money he receives on a certain date comes from the debtor or not; he will receive it from the person who received it from him in the first place, which is how it should be. That's all. The rest is not his responsibility. And so my father doesn't have a problem with Vickers, but with this other man, and he's not the sort to go to the police to make some pointless formal complaint. It isn't like it was in Dickens' day when people went to prison for the most paltry debts. What would he gain by that anyway, putting a seventy-five-year-old man behind bars? Assuming that were a possibility.'

'Wouldn't they first impound your father's goods or something?' 'Forget about all those slow, legal routes, Jaime, this man would never resort to anything like that in order to settle an outstanding bill, and I assume that's why Vickers and other people use him, so that no one has to waste time and so that everything turns out as planned.'