Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  What had caught his eye in his search through the few privately owned insurance companies was the Threadneedle’s licence to transact long-term insurance, the life insurance that had made David Todd rich. The company was right for a takeover, but old ladies were traditionally conservative and Matt’s lawyer’s approaches by telephone had been flatly refused. They would not even discuss the matter. Their sentimental ownership of the company was worth more to them than a larger income.

  The morning of the party Lucky had arranged left Matt searching for the key to unlocking the sister and the widows. Matt walked from Baker Street to Hyde Park on a beautiful day in August, preoccupied and not even looking at the pretty girls. Some wealthy Londoners were horse riding but the smell of fresh horse manure did not make him think of Sunny Tupper. He had been told his fortune by one of the old ladies who owned Threadneedle, and even the lure of visiting his ancestral home would not make him go up to Scotland to visit the other, unless there was no alternative. It had to be the lady with the young boy.

  Progressing along this line of reasoning, he determined to leave the booze alone at the party and drive down to Surrey in the morning. This time he would make an appointment and, with his mind made up, he strode back to the flat and put through a call to the number given by his solicitor. He had been relieved to find the lady did not have a double-barrelled name.

  “Missus Holland?”

  “No. Do you want to speak to her?… Ma, there’s a man on the phone.” Matt only had to wait a moment.

  “Missus Holland. This is Matthew Gray. I made a mistake in asking my solicitor to talk to you about the Threadneedle Insurance Company, and I hoped I could call tomorrow and discuss my proposition further.”

  “Where are you from, Mister?…”

  “Gray. G-R-A-Y. From Africa, Missus Holland.’

  “Wow!” He heard the voice that had answered the phone. “Have you seen a lion in the wild?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Gray. That is my son. I picked up the extension.”

  “I last saw a lion in about May,” Matt answered the boy.

  “I was in the Congo. That’s in central Africa. We were right in the jungle.” He had sensed the boy’s interest in lions could be turned to advantage.

  “Come down early,” said the boy, almost overcome with excitement. “Wow! Lions! I never met a man who had met a lion in the wild! Wow, wait till I tell my friend.”

  “Shall we say eleven o’clock?” suggested Mrs Holland. Matt could feel that she was smiling. “Maybe you would like to stay for lunch and give my boy a geography lesson? Ask at the shops in the village. Godalming is not very large. My husband’s family have lived here since the seventeenth century.”

  “Thank you. And my name is Matthew. Matt. I’ll look forward to meeting you and the boy.”

  Archie had found a caterer who had trained at the Dorchester Hotel, and the food laid out in the dining room was as good as anything in London. The fork supper had recently reached England from America, along with manhattans and daiquiris. There were no Maharajah Chotapegs. Matthew stayed in his room working, keeping close track of the progress of his shares and money. The purchase of Security Holdings shares had slowed, as institutions sensed there was a predator in the market. The ordinary shares had risen by six per cent, and Matt decided to withdraw his buy order on the Monday and sell half his shares to confuse the market. He would buy the shares back at a lower price. The idea of selling a parcel short intrigued him for a long moment of speculation. He would wait until Tuesday. Matt wondered if David Todd had started an investigation into the new buyers of his shares.

  Matt was sure his godfather would find only a smokescreen. That week, there had been a small item in the social column of the Daily Telegraph, announcing the arrival of David’s grandson at Oxford University, on a Rhodes Scholarship from Bishops School in the Cape. The boy had to be good, and the idea of stiff competition increased Matt’s enjoyment. There had to be more than money in business. There had to be fun. David Todd had been right, and Matt smiled to himself as the noise level rose from the large reception room with its small wooden dance floor at the one end. The fun was to be found back in business for Matthew Gray.

  Adjusting his evening dress, something that rested well on his broad shoulders, accentuating his height, he opened the door to his bedroom and walked down the plush carpet to survey the talent. He was impressed with what he saw. There was not one woman in the room whom he would rate below eight points out of ten on his scale of talent or looking at them over the age of twenty-five. Every one of them was well groomed and expensively dressed causing him to make a mental note to ask his co-hosts what the ladies did for a living. Professional ladies were off the visiting list of Archie and his friends, and listening to the different accents of the girls, Matt was still unable to place the speaker in the right social class, but he was sure of only one thing: the girls were not all from the middle and upper classes. That accent he had worked out through the art dealer, the solicitor, the QC and his distant relative in Scotland. Not all their daddies were rich.

  As the next idea came to him, he laughed out loud, covered the gesture with a wave to Archie’s current girlfriend who was not a day over nineteen and joined the party. Keeping to the promise he had made to himself, he filled his empty brandy glass with Canada Dry ginger ale at the makeshift bar. There he saw the black girl talking intimately with Lucky Kuchinski and agreed with Archie that she would rate a nine, if not a ten.

  She was perfect, the big lips of the wide mouth making the sexiest ‘come on’ he could see at the party. The girl had put on a rich orange lipstick over-painted with white. The result even kept the men’s eyes away from the deep cleavage made by her large breasts. She was wearing crimson coloured velvet hot pants, and her legs went on forever. Matt had a flashback of the beach at Port St Johns and it was the nostalgia and sudden homesickness, homesickness for his real home that made him go across to talk to the girl. Instinctively, he knew she came from Africa, direct from Africa and not via America or the West Indies. Lucky introduced him as his best friend.

  The three friends had a golden-rule. They never poached each other’s girlfriends. Pity. But a rule was a rule, and Lucky’s friendship was worth more than any woman. Matt left them alone and went off to see what else he could find. By midnight, sober and knowing a lot more about many of the girls’ source of income – sponsors, usually married – he took himself off to bed and locked the door. He lay awake in the dark for ten minutes, the party noise muted by the thick walls, playing his idea through his mind. He was smiling when he fell asleep, and dreamed of Port St Johns and a tall black girl with a large inviting mouth. He slept for eight hours, woke as fresh as a morning in the mountains, dressed for the country after a long soak in the bath, and walked through the lounge, not looking too carefully. There was at least one body behind the sofa snoring gently. The flat was a mess. Matthew felt it wonderful to walk out on a Sunday morning without a trace of a hangover.

  The house was hidden among firs and elms and, even before he drove up to the front door, it was obvious that the Hollands had seen better days. The lawns were unkempt and dandelions grew profusely in what once had been a tennis court, the back netting sagging in disrepair from rusted poles. The net posts still stood, but the net had long since gone.

  Geoffrey Holland had died six years earlier, leaving the Threadneedle Insurance Company as his main asset. The consequences of the ill-advised foray into Australia were apparent in the long grass and peeling paint. The unearned income tax at nine and six in the pound had also taken its toll, along with death duty and the prohibitive property taxes of the Wilson Labour government. The front door to the house opened before Matt was out of his Jaguar XJ6.

  “Are you the man who saw a live wild lion?”

  “That’s me. And who are you?”

  “Jonathan Holland. I’m going to boarding school next year. My father went to Charterhouse and so did grandpa. Where did you go to school?”
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  “I didn’t, Jonathan. There wasn’t any money.”

  “Mummy said there isn’t any money but I’m still going to Charterhouse. How big was the lion?”

  “I brought a photograph.”

  “Why are you so tall?”

  Matt laughed, and followed the young Holland into the house that had belonged to his family since the early eighteenth century. Matt had done his research. Waiting in the drawing room for Jonathan’s mother, Matt speculated how long the house would stay in the family, with the boy twenty years away from making real money, even if the opportunity for making it still existed. The boy himself, sharp as a nail, kept up the questions while studying the photograph of the lion Matt had taken in the Congo with the last two exposures in his film.

  They had reached the flying boats to find the pilots over on the island. While they were loading the paintings, a pride of lions, the cubs almost fully grown, had chased them off, shattering the myth that cats did not swim. From the cabin of the Beechcraft Baron, with the window open, Matt had photographed the male before they lifted off from the river. The mane was almost black and the eyes a cold, calculating yellow. Looking back, Matt had seen the lion watching the seaplanes without even bothering to get up.

  Man came and went in the Congo, but the lion was still the king of the jungle.

  Mrs Holland had come into the room without Matt noticing and, when he looked up from the photograph, he knew what she was thinking. She had the sad look of a single parent seeing her son excited in the company of a man.

  “I didn’t see my father after the age of seven,” Matt said, standing up. “He went to war and never came back.” And for Matt, the pain was as great at that moment as it had been when his own mother had explained that his father was never coming home, never again walking down the long sand of Second Beach. Never fishing. Never being there to answer any of his questions… No one said anything for a moment, not even the twelve year old boy.

  “Maybe one should start by talking about Jonathan, and then see how my ideas for the Threadneedle fit into the picture.” In his moment of pain, Matt knew exactly how to gain control of the long-term licence and keep the short-term company alive and well for Jonathan to take over when he had gone through school and an insurance apprenticeship under Matt’s guidance. He would enjoy doing for the boy what had not been done for him.

  “Jonathan, go out into the garden. Mister Gray wishes to talk business.”

  “Can you take me to see a wild lion?”

  “If you mother agrees to my suggestions,” Matt smiled.

  Matt stayed for the most comfortable Sunday lunch he could ever remember and, by the time he left to drive back to London, Mrs Holland had agreed to go up to Scotland at Matt’s expense. Matthew himself would see the Lloyd’s broker who would then be asked to convince his mother to sell fifty-one per cent of her shares. Matt would need a Lloyd’s broker when he took over Security Holdings, buying back his own company in the process. Putting Jonathan Holland through school was a small extra price to pay for the licence. Matthew Gray was back in business.

  Six weeks later, on a Wednesday morning at half past eleven, Matt was sitting in the lounge of their flat with his long legs stretched out in front of him. Archie was playing patience, and cheating. Outside, the October rain was coming down in a steady drizzle. Lucky was pacing the shaggy white carpet having been cooped up in the flat for three days. Matt had been waiting a week to bring up the subject he wanted to discuss with them. He was smiling.

  “Never thought I could be rich and bored,” said Lucky.

  “Sit down, Kuchinski,” ordered Archie.

  “The red queen,” said Lucky, stopping to look over his shoulder at the game.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lucky continued to pace.

  “Last week I bought us an insurance company,” Matt began casually.

  “Us?”

  “With some of your trust money.”

  “We can’t party forever. Boring.”

  “So what has that got to do with an insurance company?”

  “We’re going to run it together. The three of us. Life and pensions. And it’s going to be fun.”

  “How can insurance ever be fun?” asked Archie, stacking his cards.

  “First, I am going to put you two through an intensive training course. Life insurance is far simpler than fire and accident. The success of a life company is in the selling and the investment premiums. I want you two to help me with the selling by training a sales force that will outperform our conservative competitors.”

  “Matt, you can’t be serious,” protested Archie.

  “Between us, we have a list of two hundred and twelve single, very attractive and mostly intelligent young girls between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. I’ve checked out the backgrounds of forty-three of them. Only six have regular jobs with monthly salaries. The rest live off the party set, mostly older, rich men who find our friends better company than their wives. Only when they come into our set do they meet single men, which is why we never have problems with good looking girls when we want to throw a party. In another age, the girls would be mistresses in the classic sense with a town house down the end of a pretty mews and a visitor twice a week. All the girls I checked want a good time while they are young, but none of them wish to sell their bodies for cash. What I propose to do, with your help, will give them a far greater freedom of choice. We will give them financial independence. The ‘I don’t need you in a fit’ money that will enable them to look after themselves.”

  Lucky had stopped pacing and Archie had put the cards back on the table. Both of them were looking steadily at Matt.

  “Oh, you clever shit,” said Archie, slapping his knee. “You think it will work?”

  “What?” said Lucky for whom the proverbial penny had yet to drop.

  “He is going to use all those lovely ladies to sell his policies, and you and I, Kuchinski, are going to be their bosses.”

  Matt watched them think it through before he continued. “The lapse ratio will be remarkably low as a married man never wants his wife to know about other women. The girls will be trading their charms for more than a temporary flat in the West End and a charge account at Harrods. The good ones will even become rich in their own right, and you two will be doing what you do best. Chatting up the ladies.”

  “And I was thinking of going back to Africa,” said Lucky, in awe.

  At the end of December 1966, just before Christmas, Matthew bought fifty-one per cent of the Threadneedle Insurance Company, which in turn sold the licence to operate life insurance to a new company in which it would hold a minority twenty per cent share, Matthew’s Jersey trust owning all but five per cent of the balance. The company was called Lion Life, Matt dealing the owner of the well-known Lion Building Society a five per cent shareholding for not contesting the name and allowing the new company to use a similarly rounded logo to that which had been seen for years at every tube station in the London Underground. Matt had learnt the value of sponsorship and familiarity in Gray Associates.

  The Threadneedle general manager had had little interference for twenty years and his only interest was in keeping his job. The debacle in Australia had not been of his making and he had made it clear after the event that A C Entwistle would never have insured a taxi, let alone an Australian taxi. The company, for lack of the shareholders’ knowledge and time in running it, had fallen by default into the manager’s hands, a manager without a shareholding.

  He was fifty-seven years old, bald, fat and pompous and, when Matt phoned for an appointment, his intention being to explain the new situation in person, he ran straight into trouble. The man had a secretary who had shrivelled up on the job protecting her boss. When she refused to give Matthew an appointment without being told his business, he hoped he had not forgotten his short term insurance in the eighteen months that had elapsed since selling his company to Security Life.

  For half an hour,
he pondered the idea of leaving Entwistle where he was, under strict financial control, doing neither harm nor good, while Matt himself concentrated on Lion Life in different premises. Then the devil in him took over and on went his coat.

  An hour later, he was standing at what barely qualified as a reception desk. Matt wanted to laugh. It only needed high stools and quills for the place to have been straight out of Dickens. It was no wonder that the company had not increased its dividends in thirty years. There were three rows of desks occupied by old men in dark suits, bald-headed or grey, with an elderly woman at each end sitting in front of typewriters that had been bought before the Second World War. The smell of old dust and antiquated central heating mingled with the cluster of wet raincoats hanging on umbrella stands inside the door.

  An old lady with dyed hair turned genteel orange in patches with bright red lipstick and caked powder on an old face, asked him his business. Appalled at the reality of what he had bought and the magnitude of the task ahead, he was unable to speak. His eyes swept over the ancient tomb, resting on the glass cage that housed the general manager. When his horrified gaze returned to the old lady, she gave him a wink. Her old eyes were sparkling with merriment. Matt, taller than anyone in the room by a foot and younger by twenty years, must have looked as incongruous to them as they did to him. He began to smile and then chuckle.

  “Do you have an appointment?” They were sharing a good joke and Matt felt better. The staff may be old, he thought, but this one had a sense of humour.

  “That’s the problem. Mister Entwistle’s secretary wouldn’t give me one.”

  “He’s not busy.” She said it in a way that told him Mister Entwistle was not often very busy. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Tell him Missis Holland sent me.”

  “How is Missis Holland? And Jonathan?” She was on her way to the glass cage. It was obviously a family business and, unless he wished to replace the staff and pay a large sum in severance pay, he had better tread softly. The company had at least managed to stay in business, which seemed a miracle in itself.