Armadillo by William Boyd

Ivan says to me: ‘I ’ ve an interesting basinet with letten fleurons and with, astonishingly, the original aventail – though of course the vervelles are missing, ’ and I know exactly – exactly – what he means. To own an armour, a suit entire, is an impossible fantasy (though I once bought a vambrace and couter of a child ’ s armour, and a shaffron from a German horse armour) so I settled instead for armour of the head, on helms and helmets, developing a particular taste for visorless helmets, the sallets and kettle hats, basinets, casques, spangenhelms and morions, burgonets, barbutes and – another dream, this – the frog-mouthed and the great helms.
    The Book of Transfiguration
    Stella shifted beside him, her knee touching his thigh, making it hot almost immediately, so he slid another couple of inches away from her. She was asleep, soundly, deeply, a small snore gently emanating from time to time. He squinted at the luminous figures on his watch dial. Ten to four: the endless dark centre of the night, that period of time when it is too early to get up, too late to read or work. Perhaps he should make a cup of tea? It was at moments like these that Alan had told him consciously to note and analyse what was going on in his mind, systematically, one by one. So what was going on in there?… The sex had been good enough, sufficiently prolonged to send Mrs Stella Bull off to sleep almost immediately, Lorimer reflected. He had been intensely irritated by the visit to his family but that always applied, and, equally true, seeing his father like that always unsettled him, but that was hardly out of the ordinary… He enumerated other subject headings. Health: fair. Emotional? Nothing, as it should be. Work? Mr Dupree’s death – very bad. Hogg, Helvoir-Jayne – all a bit uncertain, unresolved, there. Hogg seemed more than usually on edge and that communicated itself to everyone. And now the Dupree business… Solvency? There would be no bonus now on the Dupree case even if Hogg had been prepared to share it with him; Hogg wouldn’t let him deal with the estate – that was normal practice, it would go through now, unadjusted. The house in Silvertown had swallowed up almost all his capital, but there would be more work along shortly. So what was it? What was there in that macédoine of niggles and worries, shames, resentments and preoccupations that left him alert and tireless at four in the morning? Standard anxiety-insomnia, Alan would say too much going on.
    He slipped out of bed and stood naked in the bedroom dark wondering whether to half-dress or not. He pulled on Stella’s towelling dressing gown – the sleeves ended in mid-forearm and his knees were showing but it would do as precautionary decency. Stella’s daughter Barbuda was still away at school so the coast was clear, in theory. Barbuda had walked into the kitchen late one night, sleepy and pyjamaed as he had searched the fridge, naked, looking urgently for something savoury to eat. It was not an encounter he wanted to repeat and it was fair to say that things had never been quite the same between them since then, in fact he thought Barbuda’s previous indifference had turned, after that chance meeting, to a peculiar form of hate.
    Waiting for the kettle to boil, he tried not to think of that night nor of what degree of tumescence he had or had not displayed. He stared out at a corner of the brightly lit scaffolding yard visible through the kitchen window. A tight row of flat-bed lorries, the enormous shelves of planks and pipes, the skips filled with clamps and extenders… He remembered his first visit here, on business, one of his early ‘adjusts’. Stella walking him coldly round the yard, £175,000 worth of material stolen. Everything had been painted the Bull Scaffolding colours, ‘cerise and ultramarine’, she had assured him. She had been away on a Caribbean holiday. The security guard had been pounced on, bound up and had watched