by Dick Francis
If the article in the paper were true there had to be three people involved; the seller, the buyer and the informant; and certainly neither the buyer nor the informant could have acted in ignorance or by chance. Greed and malice moved like worms in the dark. If one were infested by them, one knew.
Gordon seemed to have asked no one about Brazil, and for me it was make-up-your-mind time. It would have been helpful to know what the other merchant banks thought, the sixteen British accepting houses like Schroders, Hambro’s, Morgan Grenfell, Kleinwort Benson, Hill Samuel, Warburg’s, Robert Fleming, Singer and Friedlander… all permitted, like Paul Ekaterin’s, to assume that the Bank of England would come to their aid in a crisis.
Gordon’s opposite numbers in those banks would all be pursing mouths over the same prospectus, committing millions to a fruitful enterprise, pouring millions down the drain, deciding not to risk it either way.
Which?
One could hardly directly ask, and finding out via the grapevine took a little time.
I carried the prospectus finally to Val Fisher, head of Banking, who usually sat at one of the desks facing Henry Shipton, two floors up.
‘Well, Tim, what’s your own view?’ he said. A short man, very smooth, very charming, with nerves like toughened ice.
‘Gordon had reservations, obviously,’ I said. ‘I don’t know enough, and no one else here seems to. I suppose we could either make a preliminary answer of cautious interest and then find out a bit more, or just trust to Gordon’s instinct.’
He smiled faintly. ‘Which?’
Ah, which?
‘Trust to Gordon’s instinct, I think,’ I said.
‘Right.’
He nodded and I went away and wrote a polite letter to the Brazil people expressing regret. And I wouldn’t know for six or seven years, probably, whether that decision was right or wrong.
The gambles were all long term. You cast your bread on the waters and hoped it would float back in the future with butter and jam.
Mildew… too bad.
JUNE
Gordon telephoned three weeks later sounding thoroughly fit and well. I glanced across to where his desk stood mute and tidy, with all the paper action now transferred to my own.
‘Judith and I wanted to thank you…’ he was saying.
‘Really no need,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Wasting time. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, we’ve been offered a half-share in a box at Ascot next Thursday. We thought it might be fun… We’ve six places. Would you like to come? As our guest, of course. As a thank-you.’
‘I’d love it,’ I said. ‘But…’
‘No buts,’ he interrupted. ‘If you’d like to, Henry will fix it. He’s coming himself. He agreed you’d earned a day off, so all you have to do is decide.’
‘Then I’d like to, very much.’
‘Good. If you haven’t a morning coat, don’t worry. We’re not in the Royal Enclosure.’
‘If you’re wearing one… I inherited my father’s.’
‘Ah. Good. Yes, then. One o’clock Thursday, for lunch. I’ll send the entrance tickets to you in the office. Both Judith and I are very pleased you can come. We’re very grateful. Very.’ He sounded suddenly half-embarrassed, and disconnected with a click.
I wondered how much he remembered about the white faces, but with Alec and Rupert and John all in earshot it had been impossible to ask. Maybe at the races he would tell me. Maybe not.
Going racing wasn’t something I did very often nowadays, although as a child I’d spent countless afternoons waiting around the Tote queues while my mother in pleasurable agony backed her dozens of hunches and bankers and third strings and savers and lost money by the ton.
‘I’ve won!’ she would announce radiantly to all about her, waving an indisputably winning ticket: and the bunch of losses on the same race would be thrust into a pocket and later thrown away.
My father at the same time would be standing drinks in the bar, an amiable open-fisted lush with more good nature than sense. They would take me home at the end of the day giggling happily together in a hired chauffeur-driven Rolls, and until I was quite old I never questioned but that this contented affluence was built on rock.
I had been their only child and they’d given me a very good childhood to the extent that when I thought of holidays it was of yachts on warm seas or Christmas in the Alps. The villain of those days was my uncle who descended on us occasionally to utter Dire Warnings about the need for his brother (my father) to find a job.
My father however couldn’t shape up to ‘money-grubbing’ and in any case had no real ability in any direction; and with no habit of working he had quietly scorned people who had. He never tired of his life of aimless ease, and if he earned no one’s respect, few detested him either. A weak, friendly, unintelligent man. Not bad as a father. Not good at much else.
He dropped dead of a heart attack when I was nineteen and it was then that the point of the Dire Warnings became apparent. He and mother had lived on the capital inherited from grandfather, and there wasn’t a great deal left. Enough just to see me through college; enough, with care, to bring mother a small income for life.
Not enough to finance her manner of betting, which she wouldn’t or couldn’t give up. A lot more of the Dire Warnings went unheeded, and finally, while I was trying to stem a hopeless tide by working (of all things) for a bookmaker, the bailiffs knocked on the door.
In twenty-five years, it seemed, my mother had gambled away the best part of half a million pounds; all gone on horses, fast and slow. It might well have sickened me altogether against racing, but in a curious way it hadn’t. I remembered how much she and father had enjoyed themselves: and who was to say that it was a fortune ill spent?
‘Good news?’ Alec said, eyeing my no doubt ambivalent expression.
‘Gordon’s feeling better.’
‘Hm,’ he said judiciously, ‘So he should be. Three weeks off for ‘flu’…’ He grinned. ‘Stretching it a bit.’
I made a non-committal grunt.
‘Be glad, shall we, when he comes back?’
I glanced at his amused, quizzical face and saw that he knew as well as I did that when Gordon reappeared to repossess his kingdom, I wouldn’t be glad at all. Doing Gordon’s job, after the first breath-shortening initial plunge, had injected me with great feelings of vigour and good health; had found me running up stairs and singing in the bath and showing all the symptoms of a love affair; and like many a love affair it couldn’t survive the return of the husband. I wondered how long I’d have to wait for such a chance again, and whether next time I’d feel as high.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed,’ Alec said, the eyes electric blue behind the gold-rimmed specs.
‘Noticed what?’ Rupert asked, raising his head above papers he’d been staring blindly at for ninety minutes.
Back from his pretty wife’s death and burial poor Rupert still wore a glazed otherwhere look and tended too late to catch up with passing conversations. In the two days since his return he had written no letters, made no telephone calls, reached no decisions. Out of compassion one had had to give him time, and Alec and I continued to do his work surreptitiously without him realising.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Rupert nodded vaguely and looked down again, an automaton in his living grief. I’d never loved anyone, I thought, as painfully as that. I think I hoped that I never would.
John, freshly returned also, but from his holidays, glowed with a still-red sunburn and had difficulty in fitting the full lurid details of his sexual adventures into Rupert’s brief absences to the washroom. Neither Alec nor I ever believed John’s sagas, but at least Alec found them funny, which I didn’t. There was an element lurking there of a hatred of women, as if every boasted possession (real of not) was a statement of spite. He didn’t actually use the word possession. He said ‘made’ and ‘screwed’ and ‘had it off with the little cow’. I didn’t like him much and
he thought me a prig: we were polite in the office and never went together to lunch. And it was he alone of all of us who actively looked forward to Gordon’s return, he who couldn’t disguise his dismay that it was I who was filling the empty shoes instead of himself.
‘Of course, if I’d been here…’ he said at least once a day; and Alec reported that John had been heard telling Gordon’s almost-equal along the passage that now he, John, was back, Gordon’s work should be transferred from me to him.
‘Did you hear him?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Sure. And he was told in no uncertain terms that it was the Old Man himself who gave you the green light, and there was nothing John could do about it. Proper miffed was our Lothario. Says it’s all because you are who you are, and all that.’
‘Sod him.’
‘Rather you than me.’ He laughed gently into his blotter and picked up the telephone to find backers for a sewage and water purification plant in Norfolk.
‘Did you know,’ he said conversationally, busy dialling a number, ‘that there are so few sewage farms in West Berlin that they pay the East Berliners to get rid of the extra?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ I didn’t especially want to know, either, but as usual Alec was full of useless information and possessed by the urge to pass it on.
‘The East Berliners take the money and dump the stuff out in the open fields. Untreated, mind you.’
‘Do shut up,’ I said.
‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘And smelled it. Absolutely disgusting.’
‘It was probably fertilizer,’ I said, ‘and what were you doing in East Berlin?’
‘Calling on Nefertiti.’
‘She of the one eye?’
‘My God, yes, isn’t it a shock? Oh… hello…’ He got through to his prospective money-source and for far too long and with a certain relish explained the need for extra facilities to reverse the swamp of effluent which had been killing off the Broads. ‘No risk involved, of course, with a water authority.’ He listened. ‘I’ll put you in, then, shall I? Right.’ He scribbled busily and in due course disconnected. ‘Dead easy, this one. Ecology and all that. Good emotional stuff.’
I shuffled together a bunch of papers of my own that were very far from dead easy and went up to see Val Fisher, who happened to be almost alone in the big office. Henry Shipton, it seemed, was out on one of his frequent walkabouts through the other departments.
‘It’s a cartoonist,’ I said. ‘Can I consult?’
‘Pull up a chair.’ Val nodded and waved hospitably, and I sat beside him, spread out the papers, and explained about the wholly level-headed artist I had spent three hours with two weeks earlier.
‘He’s been turned down by his own local bank, and so far by three other firms like ourselves.’ I said. ‘He’s got no realisable assets, no security. He rents a flat and is buying a car on HP. If we financed him, it would be out of faith.’
‘Background?’ he asked. ‘Covenant?’
‘Pretty solid. Son of a Sales Manager. Respected at art school as an original talent: I talked to the Principal. His bank manager gave him a clean bill but said that his head office wouldn’t grant what he’s asking. For the past two years he’s worked for a studio making animated commercials. They say he’s good at the job; understands it thoroughly. They know he wants to go it alone, they think he’s capable and they don’t want to lose him.’
‘How old?’
‘Twenty-four.’
Val gave me an ‘Oh ho ho’ look, knowing, as I did, that it was the cartoonist’s age above all which had invited negative responses from the other banks.
‘What’s he asking?’ Val said, but he too looked as if he were already deciding against.
‘A studio, properly equipped. Funds to employ ten copying artists, with the expectation that it will be a year before any films are completed and can expect to make money. Funds for promotion. Funds for himself to live on. These sheets set out the probable figures.’
Val made a face over the pages, momentarily re-arranging the small neat features, slanting the tidy dark moustache, raising the arched eyebrows towards the black cap of hair.
‘Why haven’t you already turned him down?’ he asked finally.
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Look at his drawings.’ I opened another file and spread out the riotously coloured progression of pages which established two characters and told a funny story. I watched Val’s sophisticated world-weary face as he leafed through them: saw the awakening interest, heard the laugh.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘Hmph.’ He leaned back in his chair and gave me an assessing stare. ‘You’re not saying you think we should take him on?’
‘It’s an unsecured risk, of course. But yes, I am. With a string or two, of course, like a cost accountant to keep tabs on things and a first option to finance future expansion.’
‘Hm.’ He pondered for several minutes, looking again at the drawings which still seemed funny to me even after a fortnight’s close acquaintance. ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s too like aiming at the moon with a bow and arrow.’
‘They might watch those films one day on space shuttles,’ I said mildly, and he gave me a fast amused glance while he squared up the drawings and returned them to their folder.
‘Leave these all here, then, will you?’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Henry over lunch.’ And I guessed in a swift uncomfortable moment of insight that what they would discuss would be not primarily the cartoonist but the reliability or otherwise of my judgement. If they thought me a fool I’d be back behind John in the promotion queue in no time.
At four-thirty, however, when my inter-office telephone rang, it was Val at the other end.
‘Come up and collect your papers,’ he said. ‘Henry says this decision is to be yours alone. So sink or swim, Tim, it’s up to you.’
One’s first exposure to the Royal Ascot meeting was, according to one’s basic outlook, either a matter of surprised delight or of puritanical disapproval. Either the spirits lifted to the sight of emerald grass, massed flowers, bright dresses, fluffy hats and men elegant in grey formality, or one despised the expenditure, the frivolity, the shame of champagne and strawberries while some in the world starved.
I belonged, without doubt, to the hedonists, both by upbringing and inclination. The Royal meeting at Ascot was, as it happened, the one racing event from which my parents had perennially excluded me, children in any case being barred from the Royal Enclosure for three of the four days, and mother more interested on this occasion in socialising than betting. School, she had said firmly every year, must come first: though on other days it hadn’t, necessarily. So it was with an extra sense of pleasure that I walked through the gates in my father’s resurrected finery and made my way through the smiling throng to the appointed, high-up box.
‘Welcome to the charade,’ Gordon said cheerfully, handing me a bubbling glass, and ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Judith exclaimed, humming with excitement in yellow silk.
‘It’s great,’ I said, and meant it; and Gordon, looking sunburned and healthy, introduced me to the owner of the box.
‘Dissdale, this is Tim Ekaterin. Works in the bank. Tim – Dissdale Smith.’
We shook hands. His was plump and warm, like his body, like his face. ‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘Got a drink? Good. Met my wife? No? Bettina, darling, say hello to Tim.’ He put an arm round the thin waist of a girl less than half his age whose clinging white black-dotted dress was cut low and bare at neck and armholes. There was also a wide black hat, beautiful skin and a sweet and practised smile.
‘Hello, Tim,’ she said. ‘So glad you could come.’ Her voice, I thought, was like the rest of her: manufactured, processed, not natural top drawer but a long way from gutter.
The box itself was approximately five yards by three, most of the space being filled by a dining table laid with twelve places for lunch. The far end wall was of windows looking out over the green course, with a glass door opening to steps go
ing down to the viewing balcony. The walls of the box were covered as if in a house with pale blue hessian, and a soft blue carpet, pink flowers and pictures lent an air of opulence far greater than the actual expense. Most of the walls of the boxes into which I’d peered on the way along to this one were of builders’ universal margarine colour, and I wondered fleetingly whether it was Dissdale or Bettina who had the prettying mind.
Henry Shipton and his wife were standing in the doorway to the balcony, alternately facing out and in, like a couple of Januses. Henry across the room lifted his glass to me in a gesture of acknowledgement, and Lorna as ever looked as if faults were being found.
Lorna Shipton, tall, over-assured, and dressed that frilly day in repressive tailored grey, was a woman from whom disdain flowed outward like a tide, a woman who seemed not to know that words could wound and saw no reason not to air each ungenerous thought. I had met her about the same number of times as I’d met Judith Michaels and mostly upon the same occasions, and if I smothered love for the one it was irritation I had to hide for the other. It was, I suppose, inevitable, that of the two it was Lorna Shipton I was placed next to at lunch.
More guests arrived behind me, Dissdale and Bettina greeting them with whoops and kisses and making the sort of indistinct introductions that one instantly forgets. Dissdale decided there would be less crush if everyone sat down and so took his place at the top of the table with Gordon, his back to the windows, at the foot. When each had arranged their guests around them there were two empty places, one next to Gordon, one up Dissdale’s end.
Gordon had Lorna Shipton on his right, with me beside her: the space on his left, then Henry, then Judith. The girl on my right spent most of her time leaning forward to speak to her host Dissdale, so that although I grew to know quite well the blue chiffon back of her shoulder, I never actually learned her name.
Laughter, chatter, the study of race cards, the refilling of glasses: Judith with yellow silk roses on her hat and Lorna telling me that my morning coat looked a size too small.