Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Matthew walked in on the act with Luke’s new address in his pocket. Luke had progressed from drumming to singing in English and Xhosa, and was doing his best recollection of a war dance when an equally tall man in the audience howled back at him in Xhosa. The man, pushing his way through the crowd, mounted the small stage on the bandstand and fell into perfect step. The crowd clapped and the two giants, one black and one white, leaped and cavorted, Matthew stripping to his jeans in the smoky heat. Their excitement at seeing each other mounted in the dance as they vied for the tallest leap. With the simultaneous crash of four feet on the floor, the music stopped.

  “Give a welcome to my brother,” shouted Luke, and the noise was heard in the street, up the deep well from the basement. “You’re an elusive bugger to track down,” said Matthew. “You were out. Someone gave me the name of the club. Two sets of regalia and we’ll make a sensation.”

  The castle at Loch Lothianmore opened to the public in May, on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11 am to 4 pm. The earl of Lothianmore was running out of money and socialist England smiled at his indignity. The retribution of wealth was taking effect.

  After three more months of listening to Oliver Gore, Matthew had foregone the opportunity of a grouse shoot (which presumably did not take place on Wednesdays or Saturdays) in favour of joining the tourist bus from Stirling. Matthew and Luke, who were now sharing a flat together, had changed trains three times before arriving at the little Scottish city and before showing their tour tickets to the bus conductor. Three Americans had asked Luke “You from America?” as they rightly assumed that a black immigrant to Britain did not ride on tour buses in Scotland.

  When the bus turned through the trees and showed them the ancient pile of stones, Matthew felt a queer shiver and touched the snuff box in his pocket. He had said nothing to Luke, as many families had tales of glory in their past that were nothing more than good stories to add a little spice to wearisome lives. The bus stopped briefly at the castle gatehouse, which needed immediate repairs, before continuing down a long drive. Rhododendrons lined the route and behind them the once lush lawns had been turned into fields and were now cropped short by a flock of sheep. They continued through an avenue of tall fir trees and up to the side door of the ancient castle where the passengers began to disembark. When he stepped down and walked into the building, Matthew felt so peculiar that Luke asked him if he was feeling all right.

  “I feel dizzy… Luke, I feel I’ve been here before.” And as he walked further into the castle. “I know this place.”

  After ten more minutes of déjà vu, Matthew asked the tour guide if the earl and countess were in residence. “They never talk to visitors. Our family is very private.”

  “Your family?” asked Matthew. “Are you related to the earl?”

  “I am a cousin.”

  “Then maybe you could take this to the earl,” and Matthew pulled the snuff box from his pocket, “and say that Matthew Gray from South Africa would be grateful for a brief moment with his lordship.”

  “Where’d you get this, laddie?”

  “From my mother, and her mother before that.”

  “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  “Her married name was Metcalf. I was never told her maiden name.”

  “When the others take their tea, I’ll take you to Lord Lothianmore’s private quarters.” The man put the snuff box in his pocket and continued to lecture the tour group, repeating his twice-weekly story by rote.

  Later, as the tourists lined up for their tea in an old summer house, the guide advised Matthew to wait by the door. He then returned to the castle, to return about five minutes later. He gestured to Matthew to follow him, and then led him round the back of the castle and in through a small entrance. Matthew followed him obediently along a cold, gloomy corridor.

  The guide stopped outside a door, knocked, and opened it when bidden from within. He announced, “Mister Matthew Gray, my Lord,” and stepped back to allow Matthew to enter. Matthew did so, finding himself in what seemed like a different world from the gloomy day outside. Although by no means ornate, the room was brightly lit and a little warmer, thanks to an electric heater, than all the cold halls of history. It was like a lounge except for a desk on the left, behind which sat a smallish, balding man not ten years older than Matthew. He was holding the snuff box.

  He greeted Matthew briefly, but did not offer him a seat. “Mister Gray, can you tell me, please, how you came to be in possession of this snuff box?” he requested. Matthew told him the story in a few words.

  “Do you have your mother’s birth certificate?” The earl was clearly a little suspicious, although the state of his property made it evident that he was not in a position to enrich any charlatans who might claim blood relationship.

  “Of course.”

  “She was an artist. Where is she now?”

  “Dead. She did not have money for penicillin.”

  “Your father?”

  “Died at Tobruk.”

  "Your grandmother died here five years ago. She was destitute. Why did your family not help?”

  Matthew began to laugh and held out his hand for the snuff box. “I’ll keep this as a curiosity,” he said. “She walked out on my mother. A family disagreement. She was unable to accept my mother’s desire for a different lifestyle, or her marriage to my father. So she practically disowned her. I am the only relative. I earn twelve pounds a week and share a flat in Shepherds Bush with a black man, my only friend, who is taking his tea with the rest of your tourists. I was curious to know if the story was true.”

  “Are you looking for help?”

  The hackles rose on Matthew’s back. “One day, Lord Lothianmore, judging by the upkeep of this place you will more likely be asking me for help.” Matthew took out his wallet and a pen, wrote his name and the Johannesburg phone number of Security Life c/o David Todd on a plain card and gave it to the earl. “Phone me when you have to sell this place.”

  “David Todd? The insurance man?”

  “He is my godfather. All three of his sons died the same week as my father outside Tobruk.”

  The following July, un-tempted by the brief warmth of the English summer and repaying Price Forbes for his boat trip, Matthew caught the aeroplane back to South Africa. His search for living relatives had ended with his interview with the earl of Lothianmore.

  The interviews went on for two weeks. Matthew was fully qualified with, in addition, six months’ London experience. He had worked in the insurance industry for ten years and was looking for a managerial job. The representative of a Hong Kong company, head-hunting in South Africa, interviewed him twice and offered him the job of managing their chief agency with a staff of seven, six of them Chinese.

  The romantic image of the East caught his imagination but, before ending up in a general office number five in a bank of desks even if he was sitting at the top, Matthew went home and wrote down carefully the way in which he would run the Hong Kong office for Swire and Maclean. He would train his staff to be account executives, each with a personal assistant (PA). These would handle all classes of insurance business for the client. They would each, including the PA secretaries, have their own offices. Claims for up to five hundred pounds would be settled by the AEs (account executives) in the client’s office by cheque, and would then be recovered from the insurance company through application of the claim for system.

  He estimated that he could run a highly efficient chief agency for nine per cent of premium, five per cent below Price Forbes who received a broker’s twenty-two per cent average commission against a chief agency’s forty per cent, as the chief agency would act as both underwriter and broker.

  He received by telegram, to Archie Fletcher-Wood’s cottage, where he was staying temporarily, an immediate withdrawal of the job offer. Swire and Maclean did not wish to be told how to run their business.

  Archie now married and area manager for his American drugs company, read Matthew’s thesis on
how to run an insurance agency and, when the rejection came from Hong Kong, showed a copy of the report to his managing director. The American read it carefully and told Archie that, in his opinion, if the concept were implemented properly, Matthew would make a fortune and that, if the appointment of his insurance broker had not been dictated by Fort Worth, he would have been interested in eliminating his own insurance frustrations by handing them all over to Matthew. He told Archie to advise his friend to branch out on his own and not waste his talent on an employer.

  Archie spoke to Matthew that night. “Take the best salary on offer for a year,” he advised. “Save your money, build-up a prospective list of potential clients and go out on your own. If you have to, find a broker, or sell life insurance while you are building up your short-term account. Security Life will give you an agency.”

  At the end of August, six weeks after Matthew’s return to South Africa, Gray Associates was formed, and incorporated as a private, limited-liability company at the end of the year. In his pursuit of business, Matthew forgot about castles in Scotland and Luke in London. He worked fourteen hours every weekday, keeping Saturdays and Sundays for himself. With annual life commission paid in advance, his cash-flow was positive in six weeks, and he was able to move out of Lucky’s flat, to where he had gone from Archie’s marital home in Rivonia. Matthew rented a flat in Sandown and settled into his new life. Once again he had found his happiness, this time in the freedom and excitement of owning his own business.

  Poppy Tupper was the product of an East End of London mother with a sense of humour and a father who worked in the docks but should have been given the opportunity for a better education. Poppy’s mother had had her christened Poppet, and the overworked priest had not joined the first name to the second and come up with the mother’s sick sense of humour. Someone had in fact popped it up her at the age of fourteen and Poppy had found it much to her liking.

  Taking her brains from her father and the other lifelong-to-be habit from her mother, she had written 0-level examinations at the grammar school when she was fifteen years old, a mature girl with big breasts and the body of a go-go dancer. To the surprise of everyone outside school, Poppy passed all ten subjects, none of which were of any commercial use. She should have taken A-levels and gone to university, but her mother’s side of her genes dictated otherwise. Poppy had a thirst for men and wore clothes that drew them like a magnet.

  Finding no further adventure in the boys at school, Poppy looked at life’s alternatives, and gave up a promising academic career to pursue a more hedonistic lifestyle. There was a lot of fun in being sixteen and a body that swivelled every male head, a face full of laughter, and brains to keep the predators from ruining her life.

  She took a job in the accounts department of Security Life’s head office in London and received her first tentative introduction to Africa. Being quicker on the uptake than most, she quickly mastered her trivial job and centred her attention on the good life after work. Poppy was able to do her work accurately after four hours’ sleep, day after day after day. She shared a small fiat with two other girls, never ate at home and spent most nights playing away.

  It was lack of private accommodation that threw her into the arms of older men who were rich enough to afford their own apartments. Poppy became quite upset when people suggested that she was digging for gold. The matter was much more simple. She liked her sex in comfort, and one climax was merely enough to leave her thoroughly frustrated and unable to sleep. Someone gave it to her in the broom cupboard in the office and she vowed never to try that one again. After two years of clubs, restaurants, theatres and music halls, Poppy was bored and looking for a new adventure when she learnt about the South African-assisted passage that was encouraging whites to emigrate.

  Poppy sailed from Southampton on the Braemar Castle. She was eighteen years old, more sexy than ever and the sea voyage turned her on uncontrollably. Lifeboats, shower rooms, day cabins, anywhere was good enough, officers, crew or passengers. For Poppy, the two week voyage to Cape Town was a non-stop party. At eighteen Poppy knew exactly which men to avoid, and everyone was happy.

  Matthew Gray believed in employing his own staff personally, and in the years ahead would never employ a personnel manager or an employment agency to do what he considered the vital ingredient in this business. His slogan, snatched from David Todd, was in every advertisement for staff. Two days after her train arrived in Johannesburg, one caught Poppy’s attention. It read:

  If business isn’t fun, forget it’ Gray Associates are again expanding and require accounts staff in their insurance brokerage business.

  Gray Associates were then going into their third year of operation.

  “How many 0-levels?”

  “Ten.”

  “Subjects?” She reeled them off and showed him a leg. Very tall men turned her on.

  “Can you type?”

  “No”

  “Go into accounts but learn to type, and then you can be my secretary. Dictaphone. No shorthand. I want a PA/secretary to think for me.”

  “Why me?”

  “I can teach an intelligent girl insurance but I can’t always teach an insurance girl intelligence. Good-looking girls in a brokerage business attract customers, insurance customers. The average age of my male staff is twenty-three. Will you join us?”

  “What a pleasure.”

  “There is a set of Gray rules on the wall over there.”

  Poppy rose and read the twenty-one rules of the company. “I don’t like rule seven,” she said.

  “Nobody does.” (Rule 7 stated that members of staff were not permitted to date each other.)

  “What happens if we do?”

  “Both parties get fired.”

  “Why?”

  “Internal politics are the cancer which takes the fun out of business. All my staff are unmarried. We’d never get any work done.”

  Poppy began to laugh: “I think I’m going to enjoy myself.”

  A week after becoming Matthew’s PA/secretary and having taken six weeks to learn how to type at a rate of one hundred words a minute, she was asked to close the door. This was only shut for private conversations, Matthew being open to his staff all day. The mini-skirt was starting out on a glorious career, and Poppy had taken to wearing the shortest she could find in the shops. There was a constant panty-flash that had been driving Matthew crazy.

  “We have two alternatives,” he told her, “Either you stop flashing it or you resign now or we go out to dinner tonight.”

  Poppy waited for the laugh which never came. They looked at each other for a full five seconds. He was serious.

  Poppy broke the silence. “There’s a third alternative. You introduce me to your men friends and I’ll introduce you to my girl friends. You do have some men friends, Mister Gray?”

  Matthew began to smile.

  “It could be good for business,” she said, sweetly. She was reading his mind, but he was not thinking of clients so much as Lucky and Archie. Archie had thrown up the area manager’s job along with his wife and become a trader with an import-export house.

  “We’ll have to do something about your name. I can’t introduce you as Poppy Tupper to my friends. No one would believe it.”

  “Some of my friends call me Sunny.”

  “That’ll do. You promise to stop flashing.”

  “You’ll just have to train yourself to stop looking. Or maybe Penny will take your mind off the problem.”

  “Who’s Penny?” Matthew wanted to know.

  “My best friend. We share a flat. How about that dinner tonight? Only we’ll make it for four.”

  “Do you prefer an Englishman who trades in commodities, or a Pole who jumps in and out of his car without opening the door? It’s a convertible.”

  “I’ll try the Pole. For starters… Is he cute?”

  “A dimple like Kirk Douglas’ and an accent that is pure sex.”

  “You’ve talked me into it.”

&
nbsp; Price Forbes had shown Matthew his first insurance summary, compiled piece by piece in each department, intelligible to men literate in insurance language but meaning no more to the client than the policy itself, a comprehensive legal document designed to stand up in court.

  Over the previous eighteen months, he had sat down with the policy documents of every insurance company licensed to do business in South Africa, including Lloyd’s of London, and translated the jargon into understandable English which would enable him to tell his clients what they were and what they were not insured against. The key definition of an insurable gross profit had been worded to enable a chartered accountant to differentiate between his own gross profit and that which he would wish to be paid out if his factory were to burn to the ground and his turnover be reduced to nothing.

  Matthew restored communication between client and insurer, and it was not uncommon for his AEs to be told by a new client that it was the first time the client understood insurance. Matthew’s reports in pursuit of new business used the same new language. New business was controlled not by the number of new clients wishing to do business with Gray Associates, but by the lack of trainable staff, people to whom Matthew could teach all classes of insurance and turn into competent account executives. Much of his after-hours work was training and motivating, teaching his people to do the job the way he knew was right.

  One of his better known conditions of insurance was written in capital letters on every motor policy summary. Drunk drivers were NOT insured, a fact that worried Matthew himself! In South Africa there were no public houses just round the corner and cars were used on all social occasions. Matthew’s first short-term client had been a company in the recording industry, making radio commercials and radio programmes. There was no television in South Africa in 1957. The managing director was an old friend of Archie Fletcher-Wood. The premium was modest but handled personally by Matthew as that six hundred pound commission in the first year had been vital to him.