Fog Heart Read Free

eleven months he’d spent driving the Bombsite Boys around Britain in the van, a different venue every night, dance halls, raucous pubs and grungy rock bars from Glasgow to Portsmouth. Rotten food, empty sex, endless drink, constant bitching, ego wars, troublesome cops and stroppy club owners who invariably refused to pay in full the agreed amount. Crewe, Derby, Slough, Blackburn, Cheadle, Poole, Brighton, Wolverhampton, Cardiff and too many others – oh, yes, Oliver could still remember every wretched stop on that hideous, never-ending tour.
    Best year of his life, really.
    He called Carrie, but she was out of the office. Lunchtime in New York, and so to be expected.
    Oliver took off his shoes, sat in the large leather armchair and watched the lines of traffic down on the High Street. Should he get another Scotch? Nick had an excellent selection of single malts. Later. He shut his eyes and slept for exactly forty-five minutes, an old trick he had mastered on the road trip.
    He took a hot shower, dressed and then tried Carrie again. Now it appeared that she would be out of the office on business for the rest of the afternoon. No matter. He should try to get on better terms with the receptionists there, but they stayed for only a month or two and then left. Hopeless.
    Tomorrow he had a late-morning flight to Munich, to keep the vastly talented and desperately insecure Marthe Frenssen in line. They had so much to accomplish before someone else discovered the amazing things she could do with raw flax and linen weaves.
    So this was his night on the town. Oliver had a vindaloo at a nearly empty Indian place on Abingdon Road, and then took a cab to Piccadilly. The Esquire was a bit drearier than it had seemed on his last visit. He downed a short and left.
    Things were much livelier at the Miranda, on Kingly Street. The doorman recognized him, or at least pretended he did. Inside, downstairs, the late-night crowd was beginning to gather. Here was the old London Oliver knew and, in a way, almost adored. There was something vaguely seedy about it, and yet it had a kind of low glamour. The décor was out of date by a couple of decades but the place was so dark and smoky you didn’t notice. The food was hardly memorable, but the floor-show made up for it.
    The women were young, pretty and well shaped, and when they weren’t busy dancing they mingled without being pushy. They came from places like Southampton and Reading and Peterborough. They wanted to enjoy the fast life in London, have torrid affairs with exciting young men on the make, make some money, catch a break, and, eventually, when they grew tired of it all, land a reasonably reliable gent who had a job in the City and a deposit on a lovely mock-Tudor in one of the better parts of Surrey. If he owned the house and already had a wife installed, that was acceptable too, as long as he could afford to dislodge the incumbent and not lose everything in the process. Hardly any of these women had the bad luck of falling in love to the tune of a net financial loss.
    The men were mid-range business types, entrepreneurs, hearty marketeers treating their out-of-town customers, has-beens with a modicum of buoyancy left, villains with their docile flunkeys and dangerous apprentices, and a few deep-pocketed old geezers in for some genteel slap and tickle. It was a crowd that could be merry and loud or strangely tense, but was seldom merely dull.
    Oliver fancied himself somewhat apart from the others. They were regulars, and he was an outsider who dropped in from time to time. The club was part of their normal routine, whereas for him it was an occasional rest-stop. He chatted with some of the women, but he didn’t buy them a drink from the gilt-edged suckers’ menu. He usually ended up discussing markets and trade with one or two businessmen, and he often got a useful indication of how the trends were going before it appeared as an official fact in the FT indexes.