The Tailor of Panama (7 page)

“Here we are, sir. Our mid-grey alpaca in all its glory. Thank you, Marta,” as she belatedly appeared below him.

Her face averted, Marta grasped her end of the cloth in both hands and marched backwards towards the door, at the same time tilting it for Osnard to inspect. And somehow she caught Pendel's eye, and somehow he caught hers, and there was both question and reproach in her expression. But Osnard was mercifully unaware of this. He was studying the cloth. He had stooped over it, hands behind his back like visiting royalty. He was sniffing it. He pinched an edge, sampling the texture between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. The ponderousness of his movements spurred Pendel to greater efforts, and Marta to greater disapproval.

“Grey not right for us, Mr. Osnard? I see you favour brown yourself! It becomes you very well, if I may say so, brown. There's
not a lot of brown being worn in Panama today, to be frank. Your average Panamanian gentleman seems to consider brown unmanly, I don't know why.” He was already halfway up the ladder again, leaving Marta clutching her end of the cloth, and the grey bolt lying at her feet. “There's a mid-brown up here I could see you in, not too much red. Here we go. I always say it's the too-much-red that spoils a good brown, I don't know if I'm right. What's our preference today, sir?”

Osnard took a very long time to reply. First the grey cloth continued to hold his attention, then Marta did, for she was studying him with a kind of medical distaste. Then he raised his head and stared at Pendel up his ladder. And Pendel might as well have been a trapeze artist stuck in the big top without his pole, and the world beneath him a whole life away, to judge by the cold dispassion that was displayed in Osnard's upturned face.

“Stick with grey, if you don't mind, ol' boy,” he said. “ ‘Grey for town, brown for country.' Isn't that what he used to say?”

“Who?”

“Braithwaite. Hell d'you think?”

Pendel slowly descended the ladder. He seemed about to speak but didn't. He had run out of words: Pendel, for whom words were his safety and comfort. So instead he smiled while Marta brought her end of the cloth to him and he reeled it in, smiling till his smile hurt, and Marta scowling, partly because of Osnard and partly because that was the way her face had set after the doctor had done his terrified best.

4

“Now, sir. Your vital statistics if I
may
.”

Pendel had removed Osnard's jacket for him, observing as he did so a fat brown envelope slotted between the two halves of his wallet. The heat rose from Osnard's heavy body like heat from a wet spaniel. His nipples, shaded by chaste curls, showed clearly through his sweat-soaked shirt. Pendel placed himself behind him and measured back collar to waist. Neither man spoke. Panamanians in Pendel's experience enjoyed being measured. Englishmen did not. It had to do with being touched. From the collar again, he took the full length of the back, careful as ever to avoid contact with the rump. Still neither man spoke. He took the centre back seam, then centre back to elbow, then centre back to cuff. He placed himself at Osnard's side, touched his elbows to raise them, and passed the tape beneath his arms and across his nipples. Sometimes with his bachelor gentlemen he navigated a less sensitive route, but with Osnard he felt no misgivings. From the shop downstairs they heard the bell ring out and the front door slam accusingly.

“That Marta?”

“It was indeed, sir. Going home, no doubt.”

“She got something on you?”

“Certainly not. Whatever made you ask that?”

“Vibe, that's all.”

“Well I'm blessed,” said Pendel, recovering.

“Thought she had something on me, too.”

“Good heavens, sir. What could that possibly be?”

“Don't owe her money. Never screwed her. Your guess as good as mine.”

The fitting room was a wooden cell about the regulation twelve by nine, built at one end of the Sportsman's Corner on the upper floor. A cheval mirror, three wall mirrors and a small gilt chair provided the only furnishings. A heavy green curtain did duty for a door. But the Sportsman's Corner was not a corner at all. It was a long, low timbered attic hideaway with a suggestion of lost childhood about it. Nowhere in the shop had Pendel worked harder to achieve his effect. From brass rails mounted along the wall hung a small army of half-finished suits awaiting the final bugle. Golf shoes, hats and green weatherproofs gleamed from ancient mahogany shelves. Riding boots, whips, spurs, a pair of fine English shotguns, ammunition belts and golf clubs lay about in artful confusion. And in the foreground, in pride of place, loomed a stately hide mounting horse, like a horse in a gymnasium but with a tail and head, on which a sporting gentleman could test the comfort of his breeches, confident that his mount would not disgrace him.

Pendel was racking his brains for a topic. In the fitting room it was his habit to chatter incessantly as a means of dispelling intimacy, but for some reason his customary material eluded him. He resorted to reminiscences of My Early Struggle.

“Oh my, did we have to get up early in those days! The freezing dark mornings in Whitechapel, the dew on the cobble—I can feel the cold now. Different today, of course. Hardly a young one going into the trade, I'm told. Not in the East End. Not real tailoring. Too hard for them, I expect. Quite right.”

He was taking the cape measurement, across the back again but this time with Osnard's arms hanging straight down and the tape going round the outside of them. It was not a measurement he would normally have taken, but Osnard was not a normal customer.

“East End to West End,” Osnard remarked. “Quite a shift.”

“It was indeed, sir, and I never had cause to rue the day.”

They were face-to-face and very close. But whereas Osnard's tight brown eyes seemed to pursue Pendel from every angle, Pendel's were fixed on the sweat-puckered waistband of the gabardine trousers. He placed the tape round Osnard's girth and tugged at it.

“What's the damage?” Osnard asked.

“Let's say a modest thirty-six plus, sir.”

“Plus what?”

“Plus lunch, put it that way, sir,” said Pendel, and won a much needed laugh.

“Ever pine for the old country at all?” Osnard enquired, while Pendel discreetly recorded thirty-eight in his notebook.

“Not really, sir. No, I don't think so. Not so's you'd notice. No,” he replied, slipping the notebook into his hip pocket.

“Bet you hanker for the Row now and then.”

“Ah well, the
Row,
” Pendel agreed heartily, succumbing to a wistful vision of himself safely consigned to an earlier century, measuring for tailcoats and breeches. “Yes, the Row's a different thing again, isn't it? If we had more of Savile Row as it used to be and less of some of the other things we've got today, England would be a lot better off. A happier country altogether we'd be, if you'll pardon me.”

But if Pendel thought that by mouthing platitudes he could divert the thrust of Osnard's inquisition, he was wasting his breath.

“Tell us about it.”

“About what, sir?”

“Old Braithwaite took you on as an apprentice, right?”

“Right.”

“Aspiring young Pendel sat on his doorstep day after day. Every morning when the old boy clocked in, there you were. ‘Good morning, Mr. Braithwaite, sir, how are we today? My name's Harry Pendel and I'm your new apprentice.' Love it. Love that sort o'
chutzpah.
”

“I'm very glad to hear that,” Pendel replied uncertainly as he tried to shake off the experience of having his own anecdote retold to him in one of its many versions.

“So you wear him down and you become his favourite apprentice, just like in the fairy tale,” Osnard went on. He didn't say which fairy tale, and Pendel didn't ask him. “And one day—how many years is it?—old Braithwaite turns round to you and says, ‘All right, Pendel. Tired o' having you as an apprentice. From now on, you're crown prince.' Or words to that effect. Give us the scene. Mustard for it.”

A frown of ferocious concentration settled over Pendel's normally untroubled brow. Placing himself at Osnard's left flank, he looped the tape round his rump, coaxed it to the amplest point, and again jotted in his notebook. He stooped for the outside leg measurement, straightened and, like a failing swimmer, sank again until his head was at the height of Osnard's right knee.

“And we dress, sir—?” he murmured, feeling Osnard's gaze burning the nape of his neck. “Most of my gentlemen seem to favour left these days. I don't
think
it's political.”

This was his standard joke, calculated to raise a laugh even with the most sedate of his customers. Not with Osnard apparently.

“Never know where the bloody thing is. Bobs about like a wind sock,” he replied dismissively. “Morning, was it? Evening? What time o' day did 'e pay you the royal visit?”

“Evening,” Pendel muttered after an age. And like an admission of defeat: “A Friday like today.”

Assuming left but taking no chances, he conveyed the brass end of his tape into the right side of Osnard's fly, studiously avoiding contact with whatever lay within. Then with his left hand he drew the tape downward as far as the upper sole of Osnard's shoe, which was of the heavy, officer-off-duty type and much repaired. And having subtracted an inch and written down his finding, he bravely stood his full height, only to discover the dark round eyes so tightly upon him that he had the illusion of having walked into the enemy's guns.

“Winter or summer?” Osnard asked.

“Summer.” Pendel's voice was running out of power. He took a brave breath and started again. “Not many of us young ones fancied working Friday evenings in the summertime. I suppose I was the exception, which was one of the things about me that commended me to Mr. Braithwaite's attention.”

“Year?”

“Well, yes, my goodness, the year.” Rallying, he shook his head and tried to smile. “Oh dear me. A whole generation ago. Still, you can't sweep back the tide, can you? King Canute tried it, and look where he ended up,” he added, not at all sure where Canute did end up, if anywhere.

All the same, he was feeling the artistry coming back to him, what Uncle Benny called his fluence.

“He was standing in the doorway,” he resumed, striking a lyrical note. “I must have been absorbed in a pair of trousers I'd been entrusted with, which is what happens to me when I'm cutting, because it gave me a start. I looked up and there he was, watching me, not saying anything. He was a big man. People forget that about him. The big bald head, big eyebrows—he was imposing. A force. A fact of life—”

“You've forgotten his moustache,” Osnard objected.

“Moustache?”

“Bloody great big bushy job, soup all over it. Must've shaved it off by the time they took that picture of him downstairs. Frightened the daylights out o' me. Only five at the time.”

“There was no moustache in my day, Mr. Osnard.”

“Course there was. I can see it as if it was yesterday.”

But either stubbornness or instinct told Pendel to give no ground.

“I think your memory is playing tricks on you there, Mr. Osnard. You're remembering a different gentleman and awarding his moustache to Arthur Braithwaite.”

“Bravo,” said Osnard softly.

But Pendel refused to believe that he had heard this, or that Osnard had tipped him the shadow of a wink. He ploughed on:

“ ‘Pendel,' he says to me, ‘I want you to be my son. As soon as you've got the Queen's English, I propose to call you Harry, promote you to the front of shop and appoint you my heir and partner—' ”

“You said it took him nine years.”

“What did?”

“To call you Harry.”

“I started as an apprentice, didn't I?”

“My mistake. On you go.”

“ ‘—and that's all I've got to say to you, so now get back to your trousers and sign yourself into night school for the elocution.' ”

He had stopped. Dried up. His throat was sore, his eyes hurt, and there was a singing in his ears. But somewhere in him there was also a sense of accomplishment. I did it. My leg was broken, I had a temperature of a hundred and five, but the show went on.

“Fabulous,” Osnard breathed.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Most beautiful bullshit I've ever listened to in my life, and you socked it to me like a hero.”

Pendel was hearing Osnard from a long way off, among a lot of other voices. The Sisters of Charity at his North London orphanage telling him Jesus would be angry with him. The laughter of his children in the four-track. Ramón's voice telling him that a London merchant bank had been enquiring about his status and offering inducements for the information. Louisa's voice telling him that one good man was all it took. After that he heard the rushhour traffic heading out of town and dreamed of being stuck in it and free.

“Thing is, old boy, I know who you are, you see.” But Pendel saw nothing at all, not even Osnard's black gaze boring into him. He had put up a screen in his mind, and Osnard was on the other side of it. “Put more accurately, I know who you aren't. No cause for panic or alarm. I love it. Every bit of it. Wouldn't be without it for the world.”

“I'm not anybody,” Pendel heard himself whisper from his side of the screen and, after that, the sound of the fitting room curtain being swept aside.

And he saw with deliberately fogged eyes that Osnard was peering through the opening, making a precautionary survey of the Sportsman's Corner. He heard Osnard speaking again, but so close to his ear that the murmur made it buzz.

“You're 906017 Pendel, convict and ex–juvenile delinquent, six years for arson, two and a half served. Taught himself his tailoring in the slammer. Left the country three days after he had paid his debt to society, staked by his paternal Uncle Benjamin, now deceased. Married to Louisa, daughter of Zonian roughneck and Bible-punching schoolteacher, who dogsbodies five days a week for the great and good Ernie Delgado over at the Panama Canal Commission. Two kids: Mark eight, Hannah ten. Insolvent, courtesy o' the rice farm. Pendel & Braithwaite a load o' bollocks. No such firm existed in Savile Row. There was never a liquidation because there was nothing to liquidate. Arthur Braithwaite one of the great characters o' fiction. Adore a con. What life's about. Don't give me that swivel-eyed look. I'm bonus. Answer to your prayers. You hearing me?”