A far cry from Savile Row
Andrew Barrow
THE TAILOR OF PANAMA by John Le Carte Hodder, £16.99, pp. 410 Tailoring is a subject close to my heart. I love its terminology and old-fashioned practitioners, its bolts of cloth and subtle snobberies. My first bespoke suitings came from Billings & Edmonds, school outfit- ters. Later, I moved to Donaldson & Williams, formerly of Savile Row. In recent years I have branched out a bit and ordered a pair of trousers from Russ Abbott's tailor, Mr Eddie, and had two suits run up by John Pearse, a more con- temporary figure but as gifted a cutter and fluent a talker as any of the Old School.
The tailoring firm under scrutiny in this novel is called Pendel & Braithwaite and is located just off the Via Espana in present- day Panama City. Mr Braithwaite, we soon discover, never existed nor, as is claimed on the door, was the firm ever in Savile Row. Mr Pendel, our increasingly heroic hero, is an East End boy who learnt his trade while serving a sentence for arson in a British jail. At the start of the story, all seems to be well. The business is a success and Harry Pendel is a dazzling performer in and out of the cutting room. Listen to him extolling the virtues of a particular material to a new customer called Mr Osnard:
Alpaca cloth is in my fairly informed judg- ment the finest lightweight in the world bar none. Ever was and ever shall be, if you'll pardon me. You can have all your mohair- and-worsted mixes in the world, I don't care. Alpaca is dyed in the thread, hence your vari- ety of colour, hence your richness. Alpaca is pure, it's resilient, it breathes. Your most sensitive skin is not bothered by it.
Unfortunately, this Mr Osnard is no ordinary customer but an Old Etonian villain on a secret mission. By the end of his 77-minute visit, he has bribed and blackmailed Mr Pendel into spying for `Merrie England'. The tailor's carefully fabricated world soon begins to collapse around him.
The book concentrates chiefly on the tortured or tortuous relationship between the tailor and his unsavoury client and is illuminating about the wickedness at both ends of the East End/Eton spectrum. Andy Osnard is 'a customer from hell', 'a slimy English crook' and 'rotten through and through'. Harry Pendel is a much more endearing figure but no follower of the Guild of Tailors' code of conduct. He has an almost unique capacity for telling what he himself describes as 'highly ornamented porky-pies' and his well-cut pockets are soon bursting with unearned dollars. As one of Osnard's bosses back home puts it, `These East End fellows end up stabbing you in the back.' Yes, but both protagonists seem to get the last laugh. Osnard is last seen on the ski slopes of Davos with a soci- ety beauty twice his age, while Pendel walks off to join his new good Panamanian neighbours, having at last acquired a dis- dain for suits and other forms of fabrica- tion, which makes one's own preoccupation with these matters rather worrying, to put it mildly.
The other characters in this novel are equally imposing. An enormous drunken figure in a Pendel & Braithwaite magenta smoking jacket lurches into the book on page 75 and eventually becomes the story's only fatal victim. A lesser casualty is Pendel's wife, who reaches with increasing regularity for the vodka bottle on the top shelf in the bathroom. Back in London, there's an antiquated spy-master called Scottie Luxmore, who talks about 'the counting houses of Threadneedle Street' and a mighty media baron called Ben Hatry, who gives the new invasion of Pana- ma his approval over lunch at the Con- naught, double damask napkin to hand. Life in these cool corridors of power is cleverly contrasted with sweaty third-world Panama where your underpants nip you in the crutch - or is it crotch? The author has the confidence to use both spellings.
This highly provocative and, dare one say, exquisitely tailored narrative is sped on its way by snatches of slang, odd uses of the vernacular, lively syntax, well-chosen italics and what can only be described as literary short-cuts: in a roadside restaurant, Osnard simply orders two glasses of aircraft fuel. The book also contains mono- logues or reveries of spell-binding perfec- tion. Here is Scottie Luxmore on the telephone to his senior colleague, Tug Kirby:
Tell me, Tug, am I correct in my belief that the Planners & Appliers are having them- selves a little get-together next Thursday at a certain person's house? - I am? Well, well. My spies are not always so accurate, hem, hem. Tug, will you do me the honour of lunching you that day, the better to prepare you for the ordeal, ha, ha? And if friend Geoff were able to join us, may I take it you would not he averse? My shout, now, Tug, I insist. Listen, where would be congenial to us, I am wondering? Somewhere a wee bit apart from the mainstream, I was thinking. Let us avoid the more obvious watering holes. I have in mind a small Italian restau- rant just off the Embankment there - do you have a pencil handy, Tug?
This level of observation and characteri- sation gives the book its strength, humour and profundity. The author tenderly probes the background of each of his characters. The British Ambassador's unhappy relationship with his wife - 'I loathe her. She loathes me. Our children loathe us both' - is both funny and poignant.
Some readers will particularly enjoy the acknowledgments. Here, John Le Cane pays tribute to the various London tailors who have helped him with his research. These include Doug Hayward of Mount Street, W 1. This tiny, throwaway, almost invisible yet highly evocative flourish has the stamp of genius.
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