Golden Boy
Contents
Title Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
About the Author
BY THE SAME AUTHOR ALSO ON EBOOK BY ARCADIA BOOKS
Copyright
One
Certain moments. Hiroshima. The assassination of President Kennedy. The first fuzzy footfall of the first man on the moon. The photoflash of recollection. By its brief light we remember what we were doing, at the time, in the hours before. Putting the kettle on. Making love. Precedent memories quantify significant events. Cataclysm is blunted by quotidian trivia. I was listening to the Goldberg Variations/following the safety instructions/spraying the roses/walking down Whitehall… The icons that surround the event eclipse the event itself.
Which was why Freddie Lomax would always recall his fortieth birthday and the circumstances which preceded it. They were perpetuated on the internal cassette of things past. He played it on the VCR of his memory, fast-forwarding and rewinding it. It was accompanied by digital sound.
Days such as these begin like any other. Nothing untoward. Freddie’s did. Jogging round the Outer Circle. His morning routine was important. Not only for the exercise but the structuring of his day. It was not possible to plan and work simultaneously. Strategy must be separated from execution. To save time, minimise effort, it must be dealt with in advance.
Circumventing the park each morning gave him the opportunity to define targets and establish deadlines. Freed him for immediate action once he got to work. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Worry beads in one hand, telephone in the other. A well-built man. Six foot three. Riviera tan. Soon to be topped up at Porto Ercole. Last year it was Sardinia. He didn’t believe in owning second homes; or boats. The economics were wrong. Freddie had his head screwed on.
Friends had villas, James and Dos – wife number two. Wife number one, who had stuck with James when he was struggling to build up his construction business, had been put out to grass with what she could squeeze out of him. ‘Dos’. James had had the epithet perpetuated in 18-carat gold. Dos wore it round her neck, skinny-dipping, with her silicone breasts, in the kidney-shaped pool. You punched a keypad outside the iron gates to enter. The code changed every day. A butler served bullshots. Dos was renowned for them. By their bullshots shall ye know them. Lunch at the villa went on all afternoon. Sometimes they ate at the African Queen. The whole shooting match. At a long outdoor table, over deep bowls of moules marinières, overlooking the harbour. No matter where he sat amongst the noisy gathering, Freddie Lomax was its epicentre. Conversation was aimed in his direction, faces drawn into the magnetic field of his charm. He turned heads. Drawing the eyes of passing girls as bronzed as himself. Freddie gambled with skin cancer as he did at the tables. Never risking much. Getting out when he was ahead. He was at his peak. Dressed to complement his physique. Had his suits made, dark blue or grey, by Douggie Hayward in Mount Street. Didn’t begrudge the arm and the leg. The suits were his calling card. Gave his clients confidence. Hermès tie. Silk handkerchief. A right nerd, Rosina said. Secretly she was proud of him.
He dropped her off at school on occasion, Queen’s College in Harley Street, before going on to the bank. Rosina wore a bundle of rags, in decorative leather or denim. From Camden market. Freddie footed the bills for them. At fifteen, the chrysalis of puppy fat falling away, Rosina was turning into Jane as she had been when he’d first met her. Sometimes, catching sight of his daughter, Jane’s freckles, her bright red hair, it startled him. Rosina was into heavy metal. Read Rock Power, and Kerrang!, when she should have been doing her homework, moshed to the thrashes of Impetigo and Recipients of Death ‘singing against oppression’, and had to be forcibly restrained from tattooing her arms and joining the slam pit (everyone else’s parents let them) at the Hammersmith Odeon on Saturday nights.
Thump-thump. Elbows in. Freddie’s shirts came from Turnbull and Asser. White only. He had his shoes made at Lobb’s. The size of a man’s feet was said to be directly related to that of his penis. Freddie had large feet. Charlie, at Michaeljohn, styled his fair hair – now sometimes assisted by a vegetable rinse. He had had golden curls as a baby. His mother never tired of telling him. Passers-by had stopped to admire her son as she pushed him in his pram. He watched his weight. Mineral water at lunch. No pudding. He kept in trim. Weight training at a gym in the City. Golf at weekends. Tennis in the park. Squash twice a week with James. At the Bath and Racquets. Followed by a swim. At Cambridge he had been on the water-polo team. He had shoulders like a navvy. Thump-thump. His vest stuck to his back. Water trickled down the inside of his thighs. Thump-thump. In his Nike Air. Releasing the endorphins. Every thump a pain.
Regent’s Park had once been pasture land, Marylebone Park Fields: the gravel pit field, the pound field for stray cattle, sheep and horses, the bell field, the butcher’s field, the field where copal varnish was manufactured. It had been used by royalty for game hunting. Ulster Terrace: Ionic columns. York Terrace, spanning York Gate. Mr Nash in Graeco-Italian mode. Sixty-one houses designed to give the appearance of a single building. North to Cornwall Terrace. Decimus Burton, into Corinthian. Burton had wanted to elide the two terraces, Cornwell and Clarence, which had the finest views of the lake, leaving no access to the park from Upper Baker Street.
Mrs Siddons, whose house was at the top of the street, had complained to the Prince Regent about the proposed obstruction to her view. The result of the actress’ petition was Clarence Gate, an entrance to the park which, as the morning progressed, would throttle itself with commuter traffic, extracted from the dreaming suburbs and heading for the West End. The half-moon of Sussex Place (Nash again) now home to the London Business School.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Hanover Terrace. A grey squirrel darted impudently across his path. Hanover Gate. Hanover Lodge. The golden dome of the Mosque behind its picket fence, mobbed by the faithful on Fridays when it was flanked by the psychedelic stalls of Arab street vendors. Thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. A posse of bull-headed runners from the army barracks in Albany Street. Ionic Villa, Veneto Villa – a Petit Trianon in Regent’s Park – receiving the finishing touches to their grotesque exteriors. Nine million pounds apiece. The rape of the park by the Crown. The iron bridge over the canal, escape route from St John’s Wood, once itself steeped in history and rife with illicit love nests, home now to arrivistes with disabled badges, double-parked in the High Street, waging an ongoing battle with the traffic wardens.
The shuttered entrance to the Zoo. Entrèe/Eingang. Its appalling penguin pool, brutalistic elephant house and archaic buildings recently threatened with closure, now besieged by rescue plans for walk-through aquaria and rainforest terraces, and the subject of
fierce controversy. Freddie had refused to sign the petition on behalf of the families who trailed recalcitrant children clutching Zeppelin balloons round the lions and the tigers. He could not accept that it was right to immure wild animals in minimalist cages, and was reluctant to put his name to the creation of what amounted to a theme park on his own doorstep.
The Zoological Society, beneath its clock and weather vane. Gloucester Gate. Any second now the milkman should be approaching, his electric float rattling with bottles of semi-skimmed milk and cartons of orange juice for the sleeping doorsteps. He was. Everything satisfactorily to time. The roundsman did not glance in his direction. He had once tried to cheat Freddie. Unaware that Freddie could multiply the number of days by the number of pints with the speed and precision of a microchip. Now the account from the dairy accounted for no more, and no less, than had been delivered.
Gloucester Terrace. Freddie wiped the sweat from his neck, savouring the punishment he inflicted on his body, as he headed into the straight with a sideways glance at the Danish Church in St Katharine’s Precinct with its echoes of Cambridge and weddings on Saturdays.
He and Jane had been married for seventeen years. They had stayed together while their contemporaries, in the throes of complex divorces or embittered battles over children or messes of contested pottage, played a marital version of musical chairs to the phrenetic music of the times. That the stability of their marriage was largely due to Jane, Freddie had little doubt. They had met in Cambridge. James, who changed his girlfriends as frequently as his socks, had brought her to the pub. Jane, on holiday from the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, was his latest acquisition. They were sitting at a corner table over glasses of lager. Jane was wearing a magenta dress, a panama hat encircled with yellow ribbons pulled down over the freckles. She held a miniature wire-haired terrier on her lap and was absent-mindedly stroking its balls. The moment he saw her, Freddie made up his mind to marry her. He had no qualms about seducing her from James.
James’ arm was round Jane’s shoulders in a proprietorial way. Freddie brought his beer over and sat down beside them. Jane did not change her position on the window seat, did not remove James’ hand from her waist where it had wandered, yet imperceptibly she distanced herself from him and moved towards Freddie as unequivocally as if she were crossing the street. They spent the night in his room. Tristan was three weeks old, and Jane and Freddie had been married for six months, before James, accepting the peace offering of being godfather to their son, forgave him.
Cumberland Terrace, its blue pediment topped with genteel ceramic figures representing the arts and sciences, was the grandest of all the terraces. As he thumped his way past its decorative arches, Freddie admitted thoughts of home and anticipated the hot needles of the shower with which he would soon reward himself.
Since his mother had taken him, first to feed the ducks, and later to play in Regent’s Park as a small boy, he had been mesmerised by the blank stares of the stately façades of the terraces. It was where he would live when he grew up. As he kicked his ball in the long grass and picked daisies for her first bouquet, he had enquired if the buildings were palaces and if the Queen lived there. You have to be very rich, his mother had said, taking him later to Buckingham Palace where he had counted the windows. So he had decided to be rich; and to marry his mother who was making a chain out of the yellow-centred daisies. And make her his queen. When his father, a much-loved physician, had died from a subarachnoid haemorrhage while he was playing cricket with the 6-year-old Freddie in the garden, Freddie was convinced that he had killed him. He kept a photograph of his father beneath his pillow while he slept, and wrote letters to heaven begging him to come back. He tried hard to remember him, but had few recollections at his disposal, and after a while there was only an aching void.
Freddie’s childhood had been filled with music. Its manifestation in Freddie was his passion for opera. His mother had been a professional pianist. His father, who played the violin, had belonged to an amateur string quartet, although Freddie could not remember it. He did not play an instrument. His mother, with little time to spare, had not been able to interest him in one. Her only son, born at the very end of her reproductive life, was destined to be a man who glittered as he walked. Brought up, single-handed, to be a credit to her, Freddie had conformed to her spurious vision of himself. Widely tipped to be the next chairman of his bank, he had not let her down.
Chester Terrace, with its colonnades and columns rivalling the Tuileries, was Burton’s final undertaking in the park. Turning into it Freddie experienced a frisson of delight, the daily suspension of disbelief that this rus in urbe was where he lived. He had worked hard for his success. Driven by his aspirations and performing best under pressure, possessed of reserves of energy normally associated with hyperactive children and resolved at all times to excel, his work was his life. He was never happier than when he was immersed in it. A scholarship to Trinity, where he had read economics, had followed his graduation summa cum laude from grammar school, after which, impatiently dismissing the year off taken by many of his contemporaries, he had gone straight into commerce to master banking from the grass roots. As he gradually distanced himself physically from his mother, who was reluctant to let him go, he changed from being a happy schoolboy, to an outgoing student and now, with his extraordinary zest for life, was a poplar and gregarious man, who made a point of keeping his many friendships in constant repair. Tough, but not insensitive, Freddie’s name in the City was synonymous with contentious takeover bids. He was an acknowledged trailblazer, an awesome adversary, a skilled negotiator who never missed an opportunity to make serious money for his clients or to further the interests of the bank. He had been brought up to believe that good manners and self-discipline were the key to personal happiness, and he looked for the same high standards from others that he demanded from himself. A reprimand from Freddie had been known to leave the entrails of his subordinates hanging from the ceiling.
Freddie’s goal, to have his own bank before he reached the age of 50, represented his deep-seated need to be in control. He coped with failure badly, was not good at forgiving himself and was incapable of forgiving others. He was hardest on those close to him, and the one closest to him was himself.
After their marriage, he and Jane had set up home in a rented, one-bedroomed flat in Earls Court where they waited for Tristan to be born. When Rosina was on the way, he had put down the first payment on a terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush and his move to a more senior position in a second bank, led to a Norman Shaw semi-detached in Bedford Park. A larger Norman Shaw, this time detached, coincided with his joining Sitwell Hunt International as head of the corporate finance division. His swift promotion to vice-chairman was the catalyst for their final move, to the house in Chester Terrace. Freddie had bought it in the days of the property boom upon which it had seemed that the sun would never set. By mortgaging himself to the hilt, he had realised the first of his boyhood dreams.
Outside his house, its stucco exterior painted every fourth year at the behest of the Crown, George, the postman, lopsided with the weight of his sack, was sorting letters. Running on the spot, to reduce his blood pressure slowly, Freddie waited impatiently for his mail.
‘Everything okay?’
George had recently undergone coronary bypass surgery. Walking was the exercise of choice. He would always be grateful to Freddie, who never failed to stop for a morning chat, for insisting that he have a checkup for the pains in his chest which he had put down to indigestion.
‘Mustn’t grumble…’ George handed Freddie a bundle secured with an elastic band. ‘Not with nearly three million out of work.’ He swung his bag over his shoulder. ‘As long as the old ticker holds up. If I go under, the chances of getting another job… I’d never get past question two on the form. Question one’s your name. Question two’s your date of birth. If you’re over forty they don’t want to know. It’s the kids I worry about. The kids, the mortgage,
the insurance, the gas, the electric, the poll tax, the water, the TV licence… Everything going up every week. My wife goes shopping with a calculator. Trouble is there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. To tell you the truth, Mr Lomax, and you know more about it in your line than me, I think they’ve bricked the ruddy tunnel up.’
Opening his front door, Freddie stopped in the narrow hall with its parquet floor and giltwood mirror, and checked his pulse rate. Picking up the newspapers from the mat, he took the mahogany balustraded stairs two at a time.
In the bedroom, Jane was still asleep. She lay on her back with the sheets round her waist. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the words ‘Happy Birthday’ emblazoned in scarlet across her breasts. Smiling to himself, Freddie put the mail down on the bed. As he bent to kiss her, she twined unconscious arms tightly round his neck for a moment then promptly turned over and went back to sleep. Glancing briefly at the bedside clock, he crept into his dressing-room and closed the door gently behind him.
Two
While his vice-chairman and head of corporate finance prepared to meet the day, Gordon Sitwell, chairman of Sitwell Hunt International – a bank founded by his grandfather to finance trade in the British Empire, America, China, and Japan – who had been knighted by Margaret Thatcher before her fall, for services to business achievement (also known as substantial donations to the party), was breakfasting in the kitchen of his mansion in Priory Drive, Stanmore, with his wife, Margaret.
‘Don’t forget we’re going to Freddie and Jane’s tonight.’ Margaret, whose candlewick dressing gown was drawn tightly over the cushion of her bosom, addressed the expanse of Financial Times behind which her husband might be thought to be hiding. The fact that there was no reply, that he had completely forgotten that it was Freddie’s birthday and that they were expected at Chester Terrace for dinner, did not faze her.
‘I’ll look for something on my way to the hairdresser’s. Men are always so difficult. Particularly men like Freddie…’ Margaret pushed the marmalade jar across the wooden table into the outstretched hand which appeared from behind the newspaper. ‘…Men who have everything.’ Margaret held her bone china teacup in both hands. ‘A book – but then I don’t know what Freddie reads – a tie perhaps, a photograph frame for the office…’
Golden Boy Page 1