‘Make a wish!’
Make a wish, Freddie. Make a wish. Year after year, urged on by Lilli, Freddie had wished that his father would come back, and later for a bicycle with three-speed gears. Despite the fact that he had shut his eyes tightly as instructed by his mother, and kept his promise not to tell a soul, neither dream had come true. Blowing out the candles, he plunged the knife into the soft icing.
‘Happy birthday, darling!’ Jane said.
‘To the future chairman of Sitwell Hunt International.’ James raised his glass. ‘The smart money’s on you, boy!’
‘Speech!’ Bingo put an arm round Freddie’s shoulders.
Freddie stood up and filled his glass with champagne. ‘I would like to thank you all for coming, and tell you how much I love you, and value your friendship…’
James mimed a maudlin violin to the hummed tune of an Indian love lyric, ‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar’.
‘Do shut up, James,’ Dos said.
Unsteady on his feet, Freddie looked round at the expectant faces of his friends which refused to focus; Piers with his Perrier, Georgina with her pearls, Charles with his catch, Bingo with her bustier, James with his cigar, Dos with her bosom, Robert with his tic, Caroline with her blusher. At the far end of the table his wife’s features danced.
Jane wondered anxiously what he was going to come out with. Freddie caught her eye. They all jumped as, unexpectedly, he hurled his glass into the black marble fireplace.
‘Sod the recession!’
Upstairs in the drawing-room Freddie’s aberration was not referred to. The conversation drifted back to the economy and the collapse of Canary Wharf.
‘Bankrupt property developers have always been the signal for the end of any economic cycle.’ James took a cigar from his pocket. ‘Economic downturns historically follow building booms. Look at William Cobbett and his Great Wen. Look at Belgravia and Bayswater. Look at Kensington Palace Gardens. Look at Notting Hill…’ He concentrated on lighting his cigar. When it was going nicely he pointed it at Freddie who was helping Jane with the coffee. ‘Look at the plans for Regent’s Park. John Nash had a hell of a time when the speculators pulled out during the Napoleonic wars. The richer the development the more spectacular the bankruptcy. Freddie sees it every day, Freddie will tell you. It’s one of the hazards of living in London.’
Freddie did not answer. He handed Georgina her coffee, complimenting her on the Château Suduiraut she had supplied to accompany the birthday cake. Georgina, as he thought she would, launched into a spiel about Botrytis cinerea, commonly known as ‘noble rot’, which guaranteed wine of exceptional quality and which the Sauternes producers prayed for each year.
While she was holding forth, Piers, watched closely by Freddie, followed Jane to the sofa where he sat at her feet and waxed lyrical about the dinner – Alex’s idea of a meal was to grab something on the way home and shove it in the microwave – and told her, for the umpteenth time, how great he thought she was. Alex filled them in on the latest royal gossip, while James, who made no secret of the fact that he fancied women who looked like horses (he thought it was a waste of time introducing Caroline to Robert Gould) pinned her to the wall and asked her euphemistically if she would have lunch with him. Dos treated Charles to stories of sybaritic life on the Côte d’Azure and listened in return to how he was trying to persuade Bingo, who absolutely loathed being pregnant, to give him a child of his own.
At two o’clock, Freddie, who could see that none of them had the slightest intention of moving, put on a CD of I Pagliacci. When it came to ‘La commedia è finita’, he turned off the lights abruptly and sent them all home.
Jane, her hands full of glasses, went down to the kitchen to make sure that Lavender and Tracey had put away all the food. Then, unzipping her dress, removing her shoes, and taking off her earrings as she went, she climbed the two flights of stairs to the bedroom to conduct the usual party post-mortem with Freddie.
She wanted to ask him what Gordon Sitwell had had to say about Corinthian; why he hadn’t rung her during the afternoon; why he had arrived so late; why he had come home drunk, and the reason for his unwarranted behaviour. To her surprise, although it was no more than fifteen minutes since they had said goodbye to the last of the guests, she found that the bedroom was in darkness and that Freddie, his worry beads in his hand, was already asleep.
Ten
Opening her eyes at eight o’clock to an eerie and unaccustomed silence, Jane realised that not only was there no opera music to assault her ears but that Freddie was still in bed. She tried to remember the last time he had not woken at six and put on his jogging gear.
‘Freddie.’ Jane put a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s eight o’clock. Time to get up. You’ve overslept.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Is anything the matter? Are you ill?’
Freddie did not believe in illness. When the children were young and had produced nebulous complaints to keep them home from school, he had packed them off, overruling Jane who was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. When Rosina was 11 she had woken with a stomach ache, swearing melodramatically that ‘men with swords’ and ‘great balls of fire’ were attacking her entrails. After a battle of wills, Freddie had hauled her out of bed, stood by while she dressed, and delivered her personally into the hands of her teacher. Three hours later, to Freddie’s eternal shame, Rosina was in hospital with a ruptured appendix. Jane was already out of bed and struggling into her dressing gown.
‘I’d better wake Rosina.’
When Jane had left the room, Freddie opened his eyes. He could not move his right hand. Thinking at first that he was in the grip of some paralysis, he realised that instead of leaving his worry beads on the table by the bed as usual, he had fallen asleep clutching them. Painfully, like the sensation which slowly returned to his numbed fingers, the memories of the previous day returned to him.
Denise, the compliance director, had stood patiently by the door of his office as he packed up his personal possessions and handed over his security pass. Sacked employees had been known to appropriate files in the hope of seducing influential clients away from the bank, and the official surveillance was par for the course. There was nothing personal about it. Considering that Susan was part of his management team and had been in his confidence for so many years, Freddie was not surprised when the personnel department sent for her.
She returned, five minutes later, white-faced.
‘You too?’
Susan nodded and blew her nose. Unable to speak, she had searched for an old briefcase into which Freddie could put the miscellaneous contents of his drawers – some of it long lost to memory – the oakum of his existence of the past five years. All she had managed to come up with was a couple of Waitrose carrier bags into which he had put his photograph of Jane, his leather desk set, his personal stationery, Rosina’s psychedelic pyramid, his birthday cards and presents, while Susan, struggling to hold back the tears, had consigned the flowers she had bought that morning from a barrow, to the waste-paper basket, and packed her pressed-powder compact and her muesli bars and her Fisherman’s Friends into empty A4 boxes.
As he unhooked his pictures from the wall, unplugged his desk lamp, rescued his blue-and-orange golf umbrella (which he had brought to the office when Leonard was off sick and it had been raining), Freddie thought that it was as if someone had died. As if Gordon Sitwell had killed him.
Bidding goodbye to the stunned Susan, promising to keep in touch, ignominiously carrying his supermarket carriers, watched with curiosity by Travers, his second in command, he had said goodbye to no one. In no mood to exchange pleasantries with Leonard, he had taken the lift to the underground garage where he had got into the Mercedes and driven up the ramp into the almost deserted street. Too profoundly shocked to notice where he was going, and with no recollection of how he had got there, two hours later he had found himself in Brighton. Turning left at the pier and parking the car by
the green railings of the promenade, he had scrunched his way in his city shoes onto the deserted beach where, oblivious to time passing, he sat on the stones, throwing pebbles into the sea. Too numbed, for the moment, to confront the raw wound of his dismissal, he considered his financial situation and, as the stones ricocheted over the dingy waves to sink inexorably into the spume-flecked ocean, made a mental list of his assets.
He had borrowed £600,000 to buy the £850,000 house in Chester Terrace. A few months ago, Porchester Bank – where he maintained a personal overdraft in excess of £100,000 (secured by a second mortgage) – worried by the downturn in the economy, had carried out an informal valuation on his home. Far from his investment having doubled, as five years ago it had been pretty safe to predict, the Nash house was found to be worth no more than the £600,000 which was still outstanding on the first mortgage. Presuming that he was able to find a buyer for it in the almost stagnant market, the proceeds of any sale would be immediately swallowed up by the finance company which had serviced his mortgage. The house was not an asset but a liability and ‘negative equity’ – owning a house worth less than it cost – no longer just a bad dream. Five years ago, he was not the only one not to have foreseen the recession, not the only one to have totally misread the signs.
The fact that the Porchester Bank was now uncovered had prompted the manager, Derek Abbott, to write to Freddie at fortnightly intervals suggesting, politely but firmly, that he not only reduce his overdraft, but refrain from writing any more large cheques. Secure in his position at Sitwell Hunt with its substantial salary, supplemented by performance-related bonuses, and with his future chairmanship of the bank on Gordon Sitwell’s retirement in two years’ time very much in mind, Freddie had ignored the bank manager’s letters.
After paying tax at 40 per cent on a portion of his package from Sitwell Hunt, the amount with which he would be left would leave him with insufficient funds even to repay the bank. The situation was extremely serious. His one ray of hope was Universal Concrete with which he hoped to bail himself out.
He was wondering just how he was going to tell Jane what had happened, and getting quite good at the stones, when a slack-bellied, grey-haired woman, wearing a black bathing suit and white swimming cap, making her cautious way alongside the nearby breakwater, reminded him of how as a terrified schoolboy, he had broken the news to Lilli of the loss of his brand new raincoat, which had cost her a week’s tuition fees. On his return from an educational day trip to Calais, the outburst with which he had greeted his mother, before she could open her mouth to say a word, had become firmly embedded in the family archive.
‘We had breakfast on the boat eggs and beans and sausages and went up on deck and the wind came up gale force eight and the sea got rough and everyone was sick spew spew nothing but spew even the teachers and when we got to Calais we walked round the town the old city and the harbour was destroyed in the war then we went on a coach to Boulogne to see where Julius Caesar set out with 800 boats to conquer the English and Bonaparte tried to invade England with flat-bottomed boats only Nelson saved the day and we had lunch but nobody ate it and I bought you an ashtray with Calais on it I know you don’t smoke but it was all I could find and we played cricket on the beach and I lost my raincoat and then we had to get the coach again and nearly missed the boat because we couldn’t find Oliver and Mr Holmes was doing his pieces he got on the wrong coach but it wasn’t his fault it was the same colour although we had to remember the number…’
It was not until the following morning, when he was about to leave for school, that the loss of the raincoat, bought, he remembered, humiliatingly long in the length and in the sleeves for economy’s sake, had sunk in. He could hardly employ the same tactics with Jane.
The woman had left her white towel and her flip-flops by the water’s edge and was proceeding with infinite slowness towards the horizon in a measured breaststoke. Freddie toyed with the idea of following the swimmer out to sea. Only he would not come back. His discarded clothes would be found by the police. Jane could collect on his life insurance. She would be well-provided for. She could get married again – Piers Warburton had made no secret of his passion for her – there was nothing to worry about on that score.
A pang of hunger reminded him that he had had nothing to eat since breakfast. Stiff from sitting on the damp stones, he returned to the car. In the boot he found the liquor canteen, which Leonard kept topped up for clients, and took a swig from the brandy. Taking the flask with him, he got into the driver’s seat and, to the drums and the trumpets of The Damnation of Faust, made his way back to London. Conjuring up the disappearance of the cross, the dangling skeletons, the hideous and bestial phantasmagoria of Faust’s descent to hell, he considered his own damnation. He did not need Gordon to remind him of the current job losses in the financial sector. Restructuring and rationalisation were terms he had himself used when weeding out junior staff. Convinced of his invincibility, he had had no reason to believe that they would ever be applied to him.
He was not exactly drunk. The brandy was still half full. Or half empty. It depended which way you looked at it. He was doing a steady 70 m.p.h. in the middle lane of the M23 when an audacious red Ferrari overtook him. Leonard kept the Mercedes in good nick. He tinkered with the engine for hours at a time, improving its performance. Freddie took another gulp from the flask, put his foot down, and pulled out into the fast lane. Catching up with the Ferrari he flashed his lights at the driver who took no notice. Freddie flashed again, this time switching the headlights to full beam. The brake lights of the Ferrari flickered for an instant although the car did not reduce speed. It was an old trick. Freddie did not fall for it. Taking a calculated risk, he overtook the Ferrari on the nearside, cutting in ahead of it and assuming the lead. With a glance at Freddie, the driver, who wore leather gloves, accelerated, forcing Freddie to do likewise. At 110 m.p.h., keeping an eye on his rear-view mirror, Freddie drained the last of the brandy. A sense of euphoria overtook him. It was as good a way to go as any. The Ferrari had no intention of letting him get away with it. It came up uncomfortably close behind him. Freddie refused to yield. Taking a leaf out of his book, the driver in leather gloves overtook on the inside and drew level with him. Neck and neck at 120, 130, 140 m.p.h.… Freddie forgot about his dismissal, about Sitwell Hunt. He accelerated hard. The Mercedes swayed. The Ferrari hooted. Freddie returned the compliment. The sequence of events became blurred. The two drivers kept up the pressure, now overtaking, now steering dangerously close. Imagining it was the Grand Prix, a circuit at Le Mans, Freddie amended and revised his tactics until, to his disappointment, the Ferrari peeled off abruptly at the last junction with what he thought was the indolent wave of a gloved hand.
Reducing speed as he approached the end of the motorway, Freddie consigned Faust to the flames. He slid a new cassette into the slot and as the overture to The Marriage of Figaro – assisted by the brandy – restored his faith in the untrammelled joy of existence, he removed his tie, beat time to the admonition of the basses which was echoed by the violins, and headed for home and his birthday party.
Eleven
Freddie’s failure to rouse the household with his morning choice of opera had made Rosina late for her rehearsal. When she dashed into the bedroom to say goodbye and ask him for fifty pounds to buy some spandex Gaultier leggings after school, he was still in bed. He was still there when Jane appeared with the present from James and Dos, a life-sized teddy bear, sporting a bow tie and a badge declaring ‘I am 40’, which she stood in the corner. Freddie was not amused.
Thinking that he must be suffering from the after effects of the party – although she had never seen Freddie with a hangover – Jane asked him whether he would like some coffee, and whether, since it was now, incredibly, getting on for 9.30, he would like her to call Susan at the bank. Drawing a negative on both counts, she shrugged and went downstairs.
When she had gone, Freddie returned to the small print of the previous
day which, although he had feigned sleep, had kept him awake, like a recurring mantra, into the small hours. His unsuspecting ‘La donna è mobile’ and his conversation with Conrad Verger, the colours of Rosina’s pyramid on his desk, Wichmann with his promise of a new and important deal, the brief meeting with Gordon and its unexpected denouement. He attempted to imbue the events with meaning but none of it was real.
The same detachment, the ability to disassociate himself from painful feelings, had marked the summer’s day when he was 6, when in graphic slow motion his father had collapsed within a few yards of his eyes. Although Hugh Lomax had lain spreadeagled on the freshly mown lawn, peculiarly still, the cricket ball still clutched in his hand as if he was about to bowl, Freddie had refused to believe, even after the doctor had arrived and confirmed that he was dead, that he would not get up again. He could not accept that his father would not correct his grip, would not tap the stumps into the ground with the bat, would not fling his arms excitedly into the air, twirling round on his toes, with his excited and triumphant cry of ‘Howzat!’, the exultant sound of which he could still hear clearly in his head. Thirty-four years had been insufficient to suspend disbelief. Sometimes, even now, when he saw fathers and sons together in the street, by some trick of the imagination he managed to disregard the passage of time and convince himself that his father was still alive, not an old man, but exactly as he remembered him. By the same process of denial, he blotted out the sequence of events in Gordon’s office and managed to convince himself that any moment now he would get out of bed, take a shower, send for Leonard, and make his way as usual to the bank. The futility of attempting to think otherwise was making him ill.
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