by WALL, ALAN
‘He’d be round within the hour. I’m not expecting you to do the hiring and firing. You’re not a natural manager, are you? I’m not really sure what you are. You should probably have got your First and become a don instead of just staying in bed with a headache. Anyway, I can re-dress you but I can’t reinvent you completely, not at this stage in the game. So you’re my spy, Sean. That’s what you can do for me. Congratulations on your new appointment. Now let’s go downstairs and have a walk around.’
We stepped briskly from one room to the next, from restaurants to bars, Dan making brief introductions as we went. His yellow-clad minions all nodded to me respectfully and smiled. Inside the main entrance stood a woman in a brilliant green trouser suit, her hennaed hair twisted into twiglets, and gilded at the end with tiny scraps of foil. Both Dan and I stared at her for a moment in silence before he spoke.
‘Yes, Cinderella, you will go to the ball.’ Her male companion, a little shorter than she was, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and a jacket that looked two sizes too large, heard this and turned, with an expression as menacing as he could manage, towards Dan. Evidently defending the good lady’s honour.
‘What did you just say?’ Dan smiled at him confidentially, man to man. He lowered his voice.
‘Perhaps you could inform your wife, for future occasions you understand, that in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea it is still a criminal offence to impersonate a Christmas tree. The management will, however, see fit to overlook the matter on this occasion.’ Then we were off once more on our tour of inspection.
‘It won’t be the same when you’re gone, will it, Dan?’
‘What won’t?’
‘Words of welcome in the atrium. Must pull them in, I should think.’
‘It certainly hasn’t been keeping them away. There’s no need to fawn on humanity, Sean. They don’t really like it anyway. If I learnt one thing from Shakespeare myself, it was that even the kings hold courtiers in contempt. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern couldn’t stand the sight of themselves, as I remember, which is presumably why fate had split them into two, as some sort of amoeboid punishment. Then they couldn’t see anything but the mirror image of what they most loathed.’ We walked in and out of rooms. The king and his newly appointed intelligencer.
‘Don’t get too autobiographical, Sean,’ he said to me as we were walking upstairs. ‘After all, nobody knows whether you have any experience in this business or not. They don’t know about your hidden years at the BBC and you don’t have to tell them, do you? All they know is you’re my man. And that’s all they need to know. Keep a certain distance, all right? And if you want to unzip a banana, do it discreetly.’ The curious protocol of early Dan, the fruiterer. After our drinks we went outside into the courtyard.
‘Give me the details on your driving licence and I’ll put you on the insurance policy. You might as well have the Porsche while I’m away.’
‘I can’t drive, Dan.’ He turned to look at me, then started shaking his head.
‘Everyone can drive, Sean. Even my fucking mother can drive. Not that she does, but she can.’
‘Well, I can’t.’
‘The life of the mind, eh? Get it cleaned once a week, then. I can’t stand seeing performance cars collecting dust. The place is usually open to between three and four in the morning. Most of the funny business would happen after midnight, if my experience is anything to go by. That’s when folks in the city loosen up. And that’s more or less when you get up, from what Dominique tells me.’
‘A bit earlier.’
‘But you’re a night owl.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stay awake then. Now, money. Come back up with me to the flat.’ So up we went once more. On the way Dan shouted at one of the young men in yellow suits, ‘Get this mess cleared up, David. And quick.’ Then we were back in the apartment. Inside the drawer of a desk was a large black metal box. Dan took a key from his pocket and opened it. There were a lot of notes, both large and small denominations.
‘Once a week the man whose name is on that card is going to come here and give you some cash. Count it. Then put it in that box. Take what you need out of the box. You’ve already got board and lodging round here, so you shouldn’t need more than five hundred a week. And there’ll always be more than that there.’
‘Where does it come from, Dan?’ He looked at me for a moment as though the years between Mark Scully and the present had never occurred. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Right. This is a cash business and a little bit of the cash comes here, that’s all. We don’t bother notifying the VAT man or the Inland Revenue.’
‘A sort of slush fund?’
‘There you are, Sean, you’re getting the idea already. If you’d come in with me all those years ago, instead of joining the BBC, you’d probably even have a driving licence by now. So, that’s our little pile to keep you in the manner to which, I’m sure, you’ll very soon become accustomed. Don’t advertise it and don’t lose that key. And on the sheet of paper in the bottom of the tin you write down the amount Freddy brings in each week so I can check it all out when I get back.’
I said what was on my mind. ‘Is this completely legal?’
Dan sighed and laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘One thing always amazes me about you intellectuals: you spend the whole of your life studying information, but you still never get to the facts. And the fact of having money is always a bigger fact than where it comes from. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s precisely legal or not, does it? As long as only a few of us ever know. We can keep a secret, can’t we, old friends like us? After all, you’re not going to be much use to me as a spy otherwise. I already pay more than enough tax to keep Yorkshire in social services for the next half-century. I’m not stealing anything; I had to work for it all, you know.’
‘Where are you going, Dan?’
‘To America. By boat. My new partner’s boat. Always fancied sailing the Atlantic.’
‘What are you going to do there?’
‘I’m going to buy, well, we’re going to buy, a company called Arborfield.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Deals in timber. Lots and lots of timber. North American at the beginning and now South American too. One of the world’s most popular commodities. We really can’t do without it.’ He tapped my head gently. ‘We’ll be needing some to do the repairs on you up there one of these days. Always a good idea to buy a big pile of what people can’t do without, Sean. And I don’t even intend to sell this place to do it.’
‘Is that because it’s cheap?’
‘No, it’s going to be extremely expensive. But the Americans are smarter than we are about how convincing money can be when you just let it get on and do its own talking. It seems to make more and more of itself as it goes along. The line of zeros gets longer and longer. High-yield bonds, my friend, are going to change the way we run the world. You’ll see.
‘Come to St Katherine’s Dock next Saturday. We’re having a little party on the boat before we set sail in the early hours. Who’d have thought it? My dear old friend Sean Tallow on the payroll at last.’
* * *
That Saturday night I took the tube to London Bridge. I walked around the harbour until I found the Zeta, the forty-five-foot ketch where Dan was holding his party. A little crew was standing on the deck with drinks in their hands, talking and laughing. All the navigation lights were on, giving the boat the twinkling air of a window display. Dan was at the prow, clutching one of the stays. He beckoned me on board and told me to help myself to a drink from the buffet table in the cabin. Then he introduced me to some elegant men and women, and finally to his partner, Gerry, an American with golden hair and a heavy tan, who looked about fifty. And he looked rich. His skin and his teeth and his hair all spoke eloquently of the virtues of money. Sunshine, vitamins and money.
‘You’re the guy holding the fort for Dan here while he makes some on the other sid
e of the Atlantic.’
I nodded. ‘I’m his spy.’
‘All good businessmen need one.’
‘And what do you do, Gerry, when you’re not captaining boats?’
‘I’m an arbitrageur,’ he said. Then with a wry smile: ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘The only thing I know is that it involves large amounts of money.’
‘That’ll probably do.’
Later that night I headed back to Chelsea and my new apartment at the top of the Pavilion, and Dan headed west across the ocean to the New World. I thought of his last words to me: ‘And call in on Sally from time to time. She gets lonely, too, you know.’
5
In Zimbabwe people are buried with straws coming out of their mouths. When the first maggots emerge into the air, then the spirit is known to be escaping at last. So maggots aren’t always bad news. The early alchemists were fascinated by how the lion, that golden king of the sun, could be transformed in days into a seething lake of gentles. This gave them hope regarding the transmutation of metals. They did not concern themselves with such things as flies and eggs, only with the ultimate universality of matter and how different forms could be imposed upon it, depending on the disposition of the planets and the commanding spirit.
I believe in the universality of matter too – always have; believe that if you could follow the stars back to their noisy births, or trace with minute enough attention and exactitude all the myriad subatomic particle dances, the shifting microscopic spiderweb that constitutes the universe, you would find stuff of a unitary splendour, thriving in a nest of time. In the matter of the text of life, I am not a disintegrator: atomism is merely a phase humanity had to go through, a pupa from which it is at last emerging.
So I would have to say that ultimately Daniel Pagett and I were shaped out of the same material. Only the form differed. Now, of course, his earthly form has been lifted from him. His matter is free once more to transmute into anything. Or anyone. And his spirit is as free as Puck to girdle the globe. Remember, Sean, he had said to me as he drove me along the Embankment in that Porsche before leaving for America, if we could travel at the same speed as money, we’d be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Money’s the same as a shark; it can only stay alive by keeping moving. As he said this, I remembered being back with my grandfather in Blackpool three decades before. As we had entered the aquarium under the Tower, I had looked up at him and asked, ‘Are there any sharks here, Grandad?’
‘Only those buggers who just took our money at the door, lad.’
Daniel had made it plain once again, over those last few days we were together, that he was disappointed in me; sad that I had simply resigned myself to the world of thought, though he probably overestimated the amount of it there really was at the BBC at any one time. He reckoned thought was the husk left over when the real thinking ended. And the history of thinking was the history of money, according to him. If you had a comprehensive chronicle of every monetary transaction in the world since the beginning of time, then you would know pretty much what everyone had ever wanted or disliked, what they had loved and hated, what they had been prepared to go to war about and on what terms they had finally made peace; even what poetry had been worth reading. Coins changed hands, sooner or later, wherever anything of significance occurred. Where money was, according to Dan, was where the real action took place, and that was where the important thinking was always done, the thinking that kept you alive. I was trying to come up with exceptions to this rule of his, which married thinking and money quite so monogamously, and I mentioned Bletchley Park, briefly remembering a newspaper article I had recently read. At this Dan had grown excited. Bletchley Park, he reminded me, as we cornered hard through a roundabout, was not in the middle of the country so much as in the middle of the war. That was its true location. Otherwise, it could never have attracted so much money. The brains arrived along with the investment. Universities, he said with some vehemence, housed the residue of talk, after history was already settled: the edges and grass verges where you went when nothing much else was moving down the highway. Greensward in an age of tarmac. Did he really say that? I can’t think why I’d have made it up. And did he only say such things because he had never managed to get to Oxford? Could there still have been an edge of bitterness from all those years before, when millstone-grit mansions and Indigo from Paris had replaced the last stage of his education? I didn’t know, but there was certainly poison in his bite from time to time: ‘Tell me the last university that made anything happen, Sean. Whenever anyone wants to make things happen they leave the university, don’t they? They have to go somewhere else to really do anything. Whether it’s Downing Street or Silicon Valley.’
Myself, I simply sank ever deeper in thought as I sat on the leather seat beside him, trying to work out what I was doing there anyway. But I knew really. I wasn’t about to start sinning against time, not at this late stage. I was being provided with the wherewithal for my studies to continue, for the Sphinx’s life-threatening riddle finally to be answered. It was one more of life’s gifts; they simply came in different wrappings. And now here I was in his penthouse apartment. Tomorrow I would put on the suit he had bought me, and the shirt and tie, go downstairs with an authoritative air and wander about mysteriously, giving the impression that I was in some way important.
Which was precisely what I did.
* * *
I don’t know if anyone has ever pointed out that different clothes change the way you walk. As I’ve said before, I seldom buy new clothes, but dressed as neatly as I now found myself after my refurbishment, I found that my gait became more brisk as I stepped from restaurant to bar, from bar to restaurant. I lost my apologetic air as I sat down at one of the tables to order my meal, courtesy of the house. Instead I looked at my watch and then askance at whoever was meant to be serving me, if I judged its arrival to be too tardy, even by minutes. I grew to recognise the regulars, even learning some of their names. One of them I already knew, rendering Dan’s introduction superfluous when he showed me round that first evening.
‘Come over here and meet the thinnest man you’ll ever see,’ he had said, indicating the back of a tall drinker standing at the cocktail bar. ‘He’s a civil servant during the day. Comes here in the evenings to get both the civil and the servant bit out of his system. He lives in a lovely little flat round the corner on Markham Square. Always looking to pick a quarrel, which he usually does very successfully. If he were twenty years younger I’d probably have to bat him. Can be very entertaining, though, if you’re in the mood.
‘Why’s he so thin? Has he got a disease?’
‘No, he’s a cerebrotonic ectomorph.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he told me. Not enough spare flesh on him to feed a mosquito.’ And then, as Dan tapped him on the shoulder, Charlie Leggatt turned to face me. The goatee beard had gone; the spectacles were now square instead of round. Otherwise he hadn’t changed much.
In drink, which was where he invariably already was by the time he arrived at the Pavilion, Charles Leggatt would these days sink swiftly to bright-eyed venom, and when I came down this particular evening to find him at the bar, he had evidently dipped beneath the surface of his civil service persona a good hour or so before. Now he was sharking about at periscope depth, moving in stealthily on any buoyant targets in his range. He was addressing a young man, who was still staring at his copy of the Financial Times.
‘When I began my career in the civil service, the City was thought on the whole to be a place of probity. If you could swallow the basic premise of the capitalist enterprise, then that was thought to be the most reasonable contraption for keeping it going. There was the occasional scandal, to be sure, but one looked to most of its personnel as men of honour. Now if I were to learn someone works in the City, I’d be disinclined to leave him alone in the room with my budgerigar, let alone my daughter.’
‘You don’t have a daughte
r, Charles,’ the man said, without looking up from his paper. ‘And you don’t have a budgerigar either. Your presence is inimical to most forms of organic life. You told me, remember? Now, if I buy you a drink will you go and pick on someone else for a while?’ Charlie spotted me as I approached.
‘Ah, Sean. The prospect of some civilised company. Makes a bit of a change round here these days.’ So we sat down at one of the tables with our drinks.
‘To think that those years at Oxford should have finally landed us both here, with you as a functionary of Mr Pagett, no less.’
‘And you as a civil servant, Charlie. I shouldn’t think anyone would have predicted that future for you.’
‘No. A fellow must look to his pension though.’
‘Are you still a revolutionary, out of interest? You shaved off your Trotsky beard, I see. Did your dialectics go with it?’
‘I reckon I’ve worked out where we went wrong back there,’ he said meditatively. ‘I reckon I’ve cracked it. We had to get to one side or the other of the endless and voracious maw of capitalism, but we went the wrong way. I mean, if profits are all that life is about, then it has no horizon, does it? And where there’s no horizon, there’s no light. And we are obliged at least to try and see. We can’t live in the dark all the time, can we, Sean?’
‘I do my best.’ I was touched that Charlie was still searching for the mystic cipher, the riddle at the heart of the system. He seemed to be brooding now about his old beliefs.