‘Okay, okay…’
‘You asked me… Daddy what’s the matter?’
Freddie had collapsed onto the chair in his sodden suit. His head was in his hands. Kneeling, Rosina put her arms round him.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘It’s not you, Rosina.’ Freddie stroked her hair.
It was the fact that he had just chucked away another £10,000.
Nineteen
The public humiliation of Sir Gordon Sitwell, followed by his hounding by the press, had nothing to do with Freddie’s dismissal but was an indirect result of it.
Gordon was not a bad man, but like the roses in his garden he was a product of his environment. The virtues of uprightness and moral rectitude which he had inherited, via his father, from his grandfather, had been mulched by the belief obtaining when he joined Sitwell Hunt as a very young man, and which he preached to his employees, that security and safety in banking were more important than a potentially large profit.
Since he had fired Freddie, Gordon had not been himself. Margaret had noticed the difference although he had not discussed the matter with her, and she was unaware of its cause. Gordon was jumpy and nervous. He was more taciturn than usual. When he did speak to her, he was extremely short. He spent more time in the garden, and often went out – without telling her where he was going – at night. Margaret had caught sight of Jane Lomax at the hosiery counter in Harvey Nichols. She had wanted to ask her if she knew if anything untoward was going on at Sitwell Hunt, but as she approached, Jane had turned away, and Margaret could not be sure whether the slight had been deliberate, or whether the vice-chairman’s wife had not noticed her. Whatever was bugging Gordon, Margaret thought, resigning herself to the situation and turning for her customary solace to the romantic fiction which Gordon decried but which was, in her opinion, no worse than the spaghetti westerns to which he was partial, he was keeping to himself.
Gordon did not regret that he had sacked Freddie. He had taken over Sitwell Hunt from his father in the full flower of its reputation and success, and he had no intention of relinquishing it in anything other than the peak of condition. As with his roses, so with his bank, it was a question of vigilance and protection, of tending and of nurturing, and of cutting out the dead wood.
To this end he had been watching his second in command with increasing alarm for some time. There was no doubt that he owed much to Freddie. In the five years that he had been with Sitwell Hunt he had worked extremely hard and had brought a great deal of new business to the bank, which he had served both with honour and integrity.
In view, however, of the recession, the company’s recent losses (in particular the deficit which had resulted from the defection of Bretton Corporation) and Freddie’s apparent recklessness – which may well have been a consequence of the sound judgement on which he prided himself, and which had been vindicated by his successful defence of Corinthian Hotels – Gordon had decided, after careful deliberation, to dispense with the highly paid services of his head of corporate finance and promote his son-in-law (which would please his daughter) who would eventually make a more prudent chairman of the bank.
Having made his decision and acted upon it, he was not the only one at Sitwell Hunt unable to get Freddie out of his mind. The news of the vice-chairman’s enforced departure had caused not only consternation, but a great deal of agitation in the ranks. A few members of Freddie’s erstwhile team, as well as some of the senior executives now fearful for their own jobs, had become decidedly jittery. The worried personnel director had been to see Gordon with the suggestion that he take the matter seriously.
‘It wouldn’t do Sitwell’s reputation any good to be known as hire-and-fire merchants,’ she said. ‘There’s the milk round to consider.’
Gordon knew that she meant the annual trawling of potential Oxbridge candidates in the spring.
‘…We don’t want to get a name for dismissing our people, talented or otherwise, at a moment’s notice.’
‘Point taken,’ Gordon said. ‘What do you suggest?’
‘Basically, I suggest we offer the services of a first-class outplacement firm to Mr Lomax, sir. It might cost you £10,000 but at the end of the day it would be well worth it.’
Gordon was not a man given to spurious friendships. Over the past five years, he had become fonder of his vice-chairman than he thought. The pretext of passing on the personnel director’s idea, rather than allowing her to do it herself, gave him an opportunity to make contact with Freddie.
Freddie’s voice on the phone, not unsurprisingly, was glacial.
‘Yes?’
In the background Gordon could hear the dramatic strains of the opera in which the chief of police gets stabbed with a fruit knife.
‘I thought I’d just give you a ring, Freddie,’ Gordon said, ‘to find out how you are getting on…’
‘I’m getting on perfectly well.’
‘And the family?’
‘Everybody’s fine.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve found anything yet?’ Gordon anticipated the silence which followed. ‘I have been thinking…’ he said, as if the notion were his own. ‘I have decided that it would be only fair if we sponsored you for a top outplacement consultancy. At the bank’s expense, of course.’
‘Not interested.’
‘They would work with you. At your level, you would have your own office with full secretarial facilities. They would put you in touch with headhunters until such time as –’
‘Not interested,’ Freddie said.
‘If you take my advice –’
‘I’ve had enough of your advice.’
‘I was only trying to help…’
‘I don’t need your help, Gordon. I can look out for myself.’
‘You’re making a big mistake. Think about it. Get in touch with personnel.’
It was no coincidence that after his rebuff from Freddie, Gordon had instructed his driver to take him to Park Lane and drop him off at the Hilton Hotel for what he liked to think of as his ‘happy hour’. Since his run-in with the police, he had forsaken the crepuscular world that abutted King’s Cross station, for the more salubrious streets of Shepherd Market, to which he had of late been returning with increasing frequency.
A product of Eton, to which he had been bundled off at the age of eight, and Oxford, where he had managed only a Second, Gordon accepted that sexually he was repressed. He was astonished at the current outspokenness of the cinema, some of the more lurid scenes on late night TV, and the descriptions and permutations of the sexual act about which he read in the gold-embossed airport books he guiltily consigned to hotel waste-paper baskets, which left nothing whatsoever to the imagination. His father, a remote and authoritative figure with a belief in corporal punishment, had been totally uncommunicative as far as either the facts of life or relationships were concerned. His mother had been far too busy socialising to pay any attention to Gordon. His resentment towards her for the fact that all she could manage on occasions when it simply could not be avoided, was the most perfunctory and transient kiss, was expressed in his boyish cruelty to animals – tormenting frogs and cutting up live worms – coupled with a tendency both at home and at school, to show off. Gordon had first become conscious of what he realised only years later was sexual intercourse between his parents, at the age of 4. Woken by some night terror, he had approached the open door of the master bedroom and been stopped in his tracks by sights and sounds which both fascinated and repelled him, and which he was quite unable to understand. At first he had been terrified and prayed that his mother and father would stop whatever it was that they were doing to each other, then he had crept back up the stairs to his own room and lain awake all night feeling left out and resentful. When he was older, on the rare occasions when his mother came into the bathroom to supervise his ablutions, she would greet Gordon’s protests at the intrusion, and his hasty efforts to conceal his private parts beneath his flan
nel, with the dismissive comment that he had ‘nothing to look at’. Sometimes, when his mother was getting dressed, he would peek through the crack of the door hoping to catch her without any clothes on. On one occasion she had surprised him, and had turned him over to his father who had given him a sound thrashing.
Gordon had been 20 years old before he had slept – he could not bring himself to utter the current neologism – with a girl, the first one he had managed to lay his hands on since leaving school. The encounter, although aided by her father’s Glenfiddich, had been singularly inept. After this initiation there had been one or two similarly empirical skirmishes before his unsatisfactory marriage to Margaret had led to his seeking alternative solace.
There had been a great deal of media fuss and pother recently about the pestering of prostitutes (both male and female), as well as a clamp-down by the police on kerb crawling. Gordon justified his predilection for intercourse with the women who plied their trade in the streets behind the Hilton Hotel, by the fact that he was merely talking to them. He could not see what harm there was in that.
When he was not in the car, Gordon’s happy hour invariably followed the same pattern. First the reconnaissance. Stalking the pavements, his head down, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, he would quantify, as if entering them in some mental ledger, the goods on offer. One was too squat, another was too tall, this one was too scrawny, that one was too fat, one was too up front, one too supercilious, one appeared spaced out, her companion too predatory. Gordon had been cruising the streets for a great many years before he realised that what he was seeking was a remote and patrician-faced brunette, a carbon copy of his mother. Having tracked her down, he was willing to pay generously for her time while he explained, in graphic terms, what he would like to do to her. The prostitutes would regard him with contempt – the more contempt the better – while he catalogued his furtive desires which ranged from watching their performance in the lavatory, to mutual masturbation, and the most profound and prolonged penetration with both his tongue and his penis of every bodily orifice. The catalogue of his innermost fantasies tended towards the sadistic – as they had towards his frogs and his worms – and he frequently dreamed of disfiguring the women and, in his darker moments, of dismembering them, with his father’s hunting knife, into a hundred bloody pieces. His fascination with blood had started when as a small, uncomprehending boy, he had accidentally stumbled upon his mother’s soiled sanitary protection in the bathroom. It had persisted until the present day when, mesmerised by the bauble oozing slowly from his finger when punctured by a thorn from his roses, he was reluctant to take out his handkerchief and wipe away the fascinating drop of scarlet dew.
On the evening of his abortive conversation with Freddie which left him with a feeling of rejection which echoed those of his childhood, Gordon had dismissed his driver in front of the Hilton and walked briskly through the crowded lobby, out of the back of the hotel, and into the shadowed streets. Tonight he was in search of total absolution. He needed to expiate his sins in the sackcloth and ashes of a comprehensive shrift. Had he not been thinking about Freddie, he might have paid more attention to the police constable with his two-way radio who was lingering in a doorway.
Stopping for a moment, Gordon exchanged a few words with a girl in a scarlet jumper, but despite the tawny breasts, their nipples, like small thumbs, visible through the open lace-stitch, he was repelled by her pitted skin and moved on. An elegant hooker with bare legs, in high heels and a satin suit with diamanté buttons fastened over her naked chest, who would not have looked amiss at a Buckingham Palace garden party, met his eyes but alarmed him with her poise. Turning into Hereford Street, he rejected a fluffy blonde who did not look old enough to be on the game, before spotting an elegant brunette with upswept hair and dangling earrings. It was the dangling earrings which did for him. They recalled his mother’s diamond drop earrings, which had seemed to the young Gordon to twinkle above her bare shoulders, in the luminous portrait above the library chimney piece of the Sitwell home in Scotland. The brunette, identifying a wealthy punter, moved in her slit skirt across the pavement towards him.
‘Want the business, dear?’
Gordon noticed that her mouth was painted with a gouache of orange gloss and that on closer acquaintance she did not look the slightest bit like his mother. He was, none the less, about to explain to her that the only service he required was fifteen minutes of her undivided attention for which he was willing to pay the appropriate fee, when he realised that they were not alone.
‘Excuse me, sir. May I ask what you are doing?’
Gordon looked at the police constable. He was considerably older than the one who had cautioned him at King’s Cross.
‘I have been keeping you under observation for the last five minutes, sir, and I have seen you approach several ladies…’
‘Of course you have.’ Gordon was used to dealing with subordinates. ‘I am looking for an all-night chemist. I was asking this young lady for directions.’
‘Do you live round here, sir?’
‘If I did, officer, I would know where the chemists’ shops were located. I live in Stanmore. I was on my way home.’
‘From…?’
‘From the City.’
‘May I suggest, sir, that Hereford Street is hardly “on the way home” from the City.’
‘I’m quite aware of that, officer. My wife is ill…’ he was sorry to bring Margaret into it, ‘and I’ve had an extremely busy day. Now if you’ll excuse me…’
‘Just one moment if you please, sir.’ The constable, who would not have made more than messenger in Gordon’s bank, reached for his notebook.
‘I should be extremely careful if I were you,’ Gordon warned him. ‘I think you should know that you are talking to the chairman of a bank and a close friend of the Lord Mayor of the City of London.’
The officer was unimpressed with this pulling of rank. It was his bread and butter.
‘Could I have your name and full address, please, sir?’
‘I refuse to give you either,’ Gordon said. ‘There is, as far as I am aware, no pass law in this country.’
‘Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to report you, sir.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Gordon said. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life.’
‘If you refuse to co-operate, sir,’ the police constable raised his two-way radio to his lips, ‘I have no option but to ask you to come with me to the police station. I am arresting you…’
‘For what offence?’
‘Persistent soliciting…’
‘You must be out of your mind!’
‘…Under Section Two of the Sexual Offences Act.’
Twenty
Freddie had taken over the dining-room. He used it as an office while he read every advertisement he could lay hands on, wrote countless life-and-death letters, spent hours making fruitless telephone calls and following up abortive leads in situations, amongst others, where he had found out that heads of corporate finance had either been made redundant or had died. Looking for work he had discovered – which included continuing his lunch arrangements with his City pals – was a full-time job.
Piers Warburton, with Freddie’s interests very much at heart, was doing his best to help. He had tipped Freddie off both about a director of corporate finance vacancy – which had turned out to be a board position for applicants between 45 and 50 years of age – and an opening at Lloyds which had proved to be for a deputy to a head of department considerably Freddie’s junior for which he did not bother to apply. There had still been no word from Wichmann. Freddie had called Frankfurt repeatedly. Herr Wichmann was in a meeting. Herr Wichmann was with a client. Herr Wichmann was out of town.
According to the City editors, the mean time taken by executives to find a job was anything up to six months. But it was not the City editors who were being forced into bankruptcy, not the City editors who were being cut back. At the
end of two weeks of unremitting networking which he found exceedingly distasteful, Freddie was not only still in square one as far as his career prospects were concerned, but in the grip of an unfamiliar rage. Sometimes he felt as if his anger, which was triggered by the least provocation, would throttle him. Accustomed to being in charge, not only of others but of himself, he made an heroic effort to overcome it, but his emotions refused to be subordinated. Listening to the sound of his own voice as he attempted to restore what could not be restored, to reconstruct what could not be reconstructed, as if it were a question of will, he took out his pain on his loved ones and afterwards was consumed with self-hatred.
Rosina, who had other things on her mind, was unperturbed by what she considered were her father’s unjust and unprovoked attacks on her. His run-ins with Jane were more distressing. Jane had been furious that he had not only borrowed her car without telling her, making her late for her appointment with the dentist, but had added insult to injury by leaving it outside Lilli’s flat, and Freddie was annoyed that because of Jane’s committee meetings he could not call his home his own.
‘I do not want all those women in my house.’
‘It’s the functions committee, darling, and the Ball’s next month.’
‘Well, you’ll have to hold the meetings elsewhere.’
‘Freddie! You are not at the bank…’
The problem was not only one of committee meetings. Each time Jane left the house, Freddie asked her where she was going, how long she would be. Sometimes she had no idea, and cheerfully told him so. Used to working to an agenda, to having his day divided into predetermined and clearcut instalments, Freddie did not understand. He expected to be provided with a resumé of her movements. If she was late home he grew fearful that something untoward had happened to her, and asked her to be more precise. If she complained about his vigilance, he said that it was because he loved her, because he worried about her. She told him that paternalism was the worst form of tyranny. He had no idea what she was talking about. Sometimes, during the day, he would ask Jane what she was doing, when she replied that she wasn’t doing anything – meaning nothing in particular – he said she must be doing something. He told her what he was doing: ‘I’m just going to the postbox’; ‘I’m just going to look at the teletext’; ‘I’m just going to listen to Turandot’; ‘I’m just going to watch the news’. He asked her if she had seen things: his briefcase, his calculator, his memo-recorder, his diary. Sometimes, when he was on the telephone, he would ask her to write down a number for him. He was used to a personal assistant.
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