The Triple Goddess (7 page)

Not surprisingly, this last revelation caused many of her mother’s friends to blanch and excuse themselves. On one occasion a dowager duchess, whose attendance at a soirée had been prompted by her hoping to secure a donation from Veronica Stace’s husband’s for her fund at Hoare’s Bank in aid of disenfranchised nobility, had fainted; after the sal volatile in the duchess’s handbag proved ineffective in restoring her to her senses, the quarter bottle of brandy also retrieved therefrom had done the trick.

As she neared her teens, in deference to the suggestion of her mother, who was by no means unamused by her performances but nervous at the possible damage to her husband Charles’s reputation, Arbella agreed to leave out the worst of the gore, and to restore colour to chalky faces and life to little fingers frozen over teacups with the much more appealing, to her audiences’ minds, details of the rials, angels, angelets, testoons, and gold sovereigns that had been produced in the Tower’s Royal Mint.

But all that was long ago, and Arbella the young woman showed no trace of the child who had been so eager to share her enthusiasms with others. Now her favourite time was late at night, when she returned home after another tedious dinner party of bad food and worse conversation; and attempts to paw her by drunken would-be boyfriends, when saying goodbye on a doorstep after she refused to go on to Annabel’s and insisted on taking a taxi home alone: importunate young men who on occasion woke up in the morning with an eye blackened by Arbella.

On going up to her room on the top floor, she would not switch on the lights or draw the curtains, but throw up the sash of her window and look to see if there was a moon. If there was and she, the moon, was new—her identification with Artemis, or Cynthia because she was born on Mount Cynthus, Hecate, Phoebe, and Selene made her unarguably feminine—Arbella returned her vestal smile of approval at how her protegée had dismissed her suitors; and when she was full, she admired her royal poise and beauty as she crossed the ballroom of the sky under the gaze of the courtier stars.

When the moon was not there to keep her company, the melancholy that Arbella felt at her absence imbued the glow of the red tail-lights of cars and buses as they headed in either direction to Victoria Station or Sloane Square.

If one must first be lost before one might find the way, thought Arbella as she nursed her megrim, she would rather remain lost. In order to be privy to the secrets of another world one had to relinquish the present.

*

When we went to the Ball

You were clearly the best,

You looked like a goddess

And eclipsed all the rest.

Your dress was a wow,

And the hair round your ears

Encompassed such beauty

I felt close to tears.

Your eyes had a sparkle,

Your teeth looked divine,

And your skin was the pinkest—

It wasn’t the wine;

Your perfume was gorgeous,

Your mouth was just right;

I ordered a double

And kept you in sight.

Your fingers and nails

Were so shapely and long,

And the way that you stood

Was a poem or song,

Your nose and your lips

Each inspired a new verse,

And your ankles and shoes,

And necklace and purse;

Not forgetting the curves

And the portions unseen

That hinted at bliss,

If you know what I mean.

The ensemble was perfect,

Your demeanour was fine;

But I knew in my heart

You would never be mine,

For when I got close

And looked into your eyes,

Those pools of reflection

Where the truth always lies,

I saw there...saw nothing,

Zero, nada at all.

So I ordered another,

And we danced at the Ball.

Chapter Five

The Caller’s chair was elevated on the Rostrum, or Podium, where sat the waiter-on-duty, enjoying his brief status as the potentate of the Room. In addition to his primary duty, there was one function that he performed extremely infrequently: ringing the Lutine bell that hung in the canopy over his head.

When information was received that a ship was overdue or “missing, fate unknown”, the bell would be rung once, to bring trading to a halt so that the announcement could be made. A hush fell on the room and the news was broadcast over the Tannoy, in order that all interested underwriters might hear about it simultaneously, and no one would be at a disadvantage should he wish to lay off his liability, for a price, against the possibility of a total loss.

Otherwise the bell was rung only on important occasions: the death of the monarch, or when some ceremony was to be performed; and in modern times, to let everyone know that the bomb squad was on its way to the building. When there was a Yellow Alert, which meant intelligence had been received that there might be an explosive device in the Room courtesy of the Irish Republican Army, electrical metal shutters came down over the huge windows.

Though underwriters would grumble at the interruption, no one quit his seat, and discussions were resumed as if nothing had happened. For people so versed in paper peril they were unconcerned for their own safety when it became up close and personal.

In the happy event that the missing vessel reappeared and reached its destination safely, or it was announced that the Queen had given birth, or the bomb did not go off, the bell would be rung twice, for good news.

While catastrophic non-marine losses, like earthquake temblors, had no need of advertisement because one, or got a telephone call at the office (there were no phones at the boxes), or read about it in the Evening Argus, or saw it later on television or in the morning newspaper, details of lesser and partial losses of damage and delays to shipping were torn off a telex machine, and posted on the notice board on the other side of the marine floor.

Protocol regarding the calling of names from the rostrum was that each was prefaced by that of the founder of the individual’s company. Thus, since Chandler Brothers had been started by one George Chandler, the penniless son of a shoemaker who had set up as a ship broker in the eighteenth century, Arbella Stace would be hailed as “George Chandler, Stace.”

Hear it though she might, Arbella never answered her calls because there were too many of them and they were rarely genuine. When daring young brokers who were dying for a glimpse of her, or were trying to summon her on a bet, did it too often she would be driven to return to the office. Sometimes the caller on duty at the rostrum, who was himself not immune to her charms, assisted in these diversions by varying his voice, or speaking in a honeyed and alluring tone to convey that he was in on the joke.

Entertaining variations were provided by the Senior Waiter, a Puckish individual called Mr Archibald. Mr Archibald might stretch her name out like a piece of chewing gum, or bite it off peremptorily, or insert a dramatic pause between the words. He had in his repertoire an abrupt, “George Chandler STACE!!!”; a sibilant, “George Chandler...Ssstaacce!”; “George Chandler, Shtaiishh”, with the last inebriated syllable followed by silence and a hiccup; “George Chandler: Sta-a-a-ce”, spoken so deeply that it reverberated like the thirty-two-foot bourdon pipe of an organ; and “Chandler—
Staaiss!!
”, sung in a Pavarottian tenor.

Also notable were his muezzin cry of “Aa-ell-
a
aa
ah
h
h
...”; and that uttered with a Pagliacci crack in the voice and a sob: “Ah!
Bella
!”

After coffee in the Captains’ Room, which she was rarely permitted to drink alone, Arbella would waft from box to box on the marine floor. She took her job seriously, but as the cynosure of the market it was tiresome to have to run the gamut of siren calls from underwriters, who dispensed with their customary good manners to compete for her attention, and tried to tempt her with cut rates, big lines, lunches, candlelit dinners in romantic restaurants, and offers to divorce their wives and marry her.

It was easy to tell if Arbella was on the Floor, and where, because of the buzz and posse of young ensorcelled admirers who followed her around, eager to watch and listen as she went through the rote of her broking presentations, share her aura, and benefit from the unaccustomed philanthropy of post-Arbella underwriters who had yet to come off the high of having her as a postulant, though it only be for a line on a risk, so close to them.

Mesmerized by her gazelle-like beauty, the grumpiest underwriter was transformed by the briefest encounter with her.

Whether Arbella was aware or not of the fascination she inspired was impossible to tell by those who observed her; but despite her polite smile it was clear to all, from her otherwise sphinx-like expression, that she neither was nor would be anyone’s minx. Fixated nonetheless the mariners were all wistful I-chabods, the glory of whose romantic aspirations departed with her.

Though most marine underwriters had never embarked on anything more saline and adventurous than a cross-Channel ferry, or sailed in a lagoon, they all believed that the Cerebos of the sea was in their blood. Though they may not have set foot on ship or boat or dinghy, or if they had, only for as long as it took to feel queasy and hop ashore before cast-off, or had done no more than float a model yacht on the lake in the park as children, they were attuned to the music of the main, and experienced its rolling motion—not just after lunch—and were inspired by the desire described by Masefield in his poem
Sea Fever
, to [go] “down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky...where the wind’s like a whetted knife”.

At heart they were like the little boy whose father takes him down to the docks and wharves for the first time, to smell the tar in the rigging of ships sliding at anchor, and spices from the Indies and Orient. Like the Sea Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows
, they saw the chests and bales being unloaded at the quayside, and sailors with gold rings in their ears descending gangways with unsteady feet and far-off eyes; with him they heard the keening gulls and saw the other rats running along the hawsers, and the ship’s cat curled on a barrel with his tail twitching, still dreaming of abroad.

From boy to man: now each was a healer from marine risk, a ship’s doctor.

Lloyd’s of London in the modern era, though still very conscious of its seafaring origins, was predominantly a market for protection against Acts of God: earthquake, windstorm, fire, tornado, volcanic eruption, flood, tsunami. It was there for farmers whose crops had been ruined by drought, and blight; and for the owners, and former owners, of jewellery, stamp and coin collections, vintage cars, and Stradivarius violins.

It insured churches, prize bulls, and carrier pigeons. It was also a market for every kind of legal liability, and the pioneer of professional indemnity coverage for lawyers, accountants, hospitals, doctors; for the surgeon who removed the wrong leg, or who botched repairing the finger of a concert pianist who had got too close to the blade of his lawnmower, and for the malpractising priest.

In the worst of all possible scenarios, when the triangulated lines of the actuarial charts of probability converged in a delta wing of impossibility, the last Lloyd’s underwriter left sitting ramrod straight at his box would stare at the unlimited policy he had bound himself for when Apocalypse was succeeded by Armageddon, shrug, toddle upstairs to his office and sign every claim cheque with a steady hand. Then, after telling his deputy that he had to take care of a few things, he would pawn his cuff-links and watch to keep the bailiffs from bothering his family for a few days.

Having invited his biggest Names down to his country house for the weekend, he would ply them with sherry and as much Chateau Margaux as they could hold at dinner. Early next morning he would kiss his sleeping wife and children, slide his last negotiable instruments under the bedroom doors of his guests, take one of the matched Purdeys from the gun room into the spinney, and blow his brains out.