by Paul Torday
*
‘I never used to think it was worthwhile getting involved with girls,’ I told Harriet later, as we caught the last of the afternoon sunshine. It was getting quite cold, but the peace and beauty of the afternoon light had drawn us outside.
‘Why was that?’ asked Harriet.
‘It was all the talking one had to get through before going to bed. A quick bonk and a large gin and tonic used to be my motto. Unfortunately as one gets older the bonking gets quicker and the drinks - whisky, nowadays, I’m afraid - get larger. That’s been my system until now. I admit that it hasn’t often worked.’
‘Don’t feel you have to talk to me if you don’t want to,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m quite used to silence. Anyway, I’m not in the least fooled by you. You present yourself as a simple soldier, but you’re not at all simple. I think you are a rather complicated person.’
‘But I like talking to you, Harriet,’ I told her. ‘That’s the point. I’m here because I need to be with you. And when I go back tomorrow night, which I must, I don’t quite know how I will manage without you.’
Harriet stopped smiling.
‘You know I can’t promise you anything. I’m very happy you came out here - but I don’t quite know what it all means. Let’s not rush things.’
I frowned.
‘But when I go back, to a job I don’t much enjoy, I’ll spend the whole time wishing you were with me. Won’t you ever think about coming back to England?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean, Eck. You’re trying to rush me into decisions I don’t feel I have to take just now. When I came out here I was so distraught because of Bob’s death, I could hardly get from the beginning of the day to the end of it. For a long time it was like a wound that wouldn’t heal. But I’ve got over Bob’s death now and I know he’d have been the last person to want me to throw away my life. All the same, I’ve found a sort of peacefulness that I enjoy. I know it’s selfish, but I’ve got a life here now. I don’t want to give it up without being more certain about what would happen next.’
Harriet paused for a moment, and then changed the subject in rather a determined way.
‘Anyway, why don’t you enjoy your job? I thought you’d become hugely successful in the City?’
‘I’m just a glorified salesman,’ I said, ‘and half the time I don’t understand what I am selling. It’s beginning to bother me.’
For a while we talked about Bilbo and my job.
Then Harriet said, ‘It’s getting too cold to sit out here any longer.’
The sky was darkening and red and purple streaks crept up from the horizon. Lights had come on in the farms dotted about the plain below.
‘I’m going to take you out to dinner tonight,’ I said to Harriet as we went inside. ‘Tell me where we should go.’
Later that evening, over dinner in a small cafe in the centre of Fayence, Harriet asked me why I had left the army.
‘You could have gone on, couldn’t you? You can’t have been more than thirty when you left.’
‘I could have gone on, but then something happened that made me sick of the whole thing.’
‘What?’ asked Harriet.
‘I don’t really want to tell you about it,’ I replied.
‘Oh, I think you have to tell me now you’ve said that,’ said Harriet. ‘No secrets if you want to stay friends with me.’
So I found myself telling her - something I had told no other person except Bilbo since leaving the army - what had happened seven years previously at dawn in the valley above Gholam Khot.
*
On Sunday afternoon, I said goodbye to Harriet. She stood at the door of her small white house as I kissed her.
‘When will I see you again, Harriet?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It was a lovely surprise to see you. Let’s just take it as it comes. Don’t ask for any more promises right now.’
I felt an ache as I left her. I don’t know what she was feeling. She turned away quickly as I drove off. She may have been hiding tears or she may have been keen to catch up on the ironing. I knew that Harriet felt affection for me. She had taken me into her bed twice now, if not yet to her heart. One day Harriet would, I had no doubt, learn to live a normal life in a normal way, stop being a recluse, marry, have children, and join a book club. A girl like that deserved a happy life. The question was: with whom would she spend it? I wished I could be sure that it would be me.
I tried to stop thinking about her on the plane back to London. Instead I read the Sunday papers from cover to cover, without really taking much in. One small article caught my attention, however:
Bright Star Mortgage Inc. filed for Chapter n today, in another sign of stress in the sub-prime mortgage sector in the US. Analyst Dave Stratton at Capital Trust noted that sub-prime lending was not typical of the UK mortgage market and events in the United States were unlikely to impact on the UK debt markets.
Bright Star Mortgage: the name rang a bell. The Styx fund had just bought a chunk of its stock, and in an internal email Bilbo had trumpeted ‘another successful trade in oversold financial sector stocks that will come good for our investors’. Maybe not this one, I thought.
The next few weeks were increasingly difficult for me. Christmas came and went with no sign to mark it other than a dull little office party. I went north and took off for a few days in the Yorkshire dales. January passed, and then February. Ever since my visit to Harriet in France I had been consumed by restlessness. The simple part of that, the part I also understood, was a desire to be with her. But I also understood very clearly that she did not want to commit herself just yet. Harriet had made one big commitment in her life so far, and that had been destroyed when Bob Matthews had been shot in Iraq - or possibly in Iran, the gossips said, a place where British soldiers should not have been. The death of the man Harriet had been expecting to marry was compounded by the murky, even sinister, circumstances surrounding the event. I had fallen for a girl who had become frightened of commitment: getting her to come towards me felt, at times, as if I were trying to talk a jumper off a ledge. It was a task that needed tact, sensitivity and patience: none of them qualities I possessed to any great degree.
We talked occasionally on the phone, but the conversations led nowhere. Harriet was always friendly, even affectionate, and seemed to like me calling her. But at the same time she sounded remote, as if she were speaking to me from another planet.
At work, too, the sense of restlessness assailed me. I did my day job, and I had two more meetings with Aseeb at Bilbo’s request. I was becoming used to acting as Bilbo’s go-between, but still found it very odd.
‘Why don’t you meet him?’ I asked Bilbo each time he asked me to collect or dispatch yet another memory stick, or more likely the same one.
‘Aseeb trusts you,’ Bilbo told me. ‘With these people, it’s a relationship thing. He has faith in you because you were a soldier. He likes the fact that you don’t talk too much, I’m sure. I will meet Aseeb one day soon, but at the moment we’re at a stage in the negotiations where I might risk giving away some of our position if I were to sit down at the same table as him. The moment he sees me in the flesh, he’ll know I’m ready to sign a deal, and he’ll use that to squeeze more from me. A few extra points on the equity, no doubt.’
Aseeb and I no longer dined together; instead we had the briefest of meetings over cups of coffee. He seemed to be in London intermittently, and then only for fleeting visits. He had stopped staying at the Berkeley or, at least, I never met him there any more. The most recent meeting had been in a coffee bar at Heathrow, where the memory stick was handed back to me with the words, ‘Mr Eck, tell Mr Bilbo this has gone on long enough. We will deal on the terms we have stated in the files I have given you. No other terms. Not one word different. Please make Mr Bilbo understand that we have no more time for discussions.’
I relayed this message, which did not seem to bring Bilbo any great sense of satisfaction.
Nor was I. I was beginning to feel like a travelling salesman who suddenly realises that he is peddling snake oil. I felt guilt now, rather than any sense of achievement, when I chatted up friends and acquaintances, trying to sign them up for a ride on Bilbo’s magic roundabout. Some of them had begun to ask questions I couldn’t answer, about the jitters we read about in the financial press, about the relative safety of our investments.
‘Seems to me I’d be better off in property,’ said Freddie Meadowes. ‘Shares can go up or down, and even you hedge fund types can’t beat the market all of the time. Property just goes up. It’s the one reliable place to put your money.’
Freddie and I were fishing together on the Tweed near Kelso. It was late March but there was an unseasonable warmth in the sun, as if summer had arrived early. No doubt the following week it would be snowing. It was a good beat, and very expensive, exactly the sort of place our investors liked to be taken to. The river flowed around wide stately bends, over a gravel bottom on which it was easy to wade. Behind us were low wooded hills; on the other bank, fields of winter wheat. Every year Mountwilliam Partners took a few days’ fishing early in the season to entertain its present, and future, customers who liked the sport. As I was the only person at Mountwilliam Partners - apart, possibly, from Bilbo - who could tell the difference between a golf club and a fishing rod I was usually in charge of this expedition.
We stayed in a comfortable hotel with its own golf course, and if we got as far as the river there was a ghillie, if we needed him, to point out where the fish would have been if l he river hadn’t been so low. There were long, alcoholic lunches on the riverbank, when the fishing became hopeless, followed by long, alcoholic evenings at the bar. On this particular day, two of our party were on the golf course; Freddie and I had decided to give the river a try, and had dispensed with the ghillie’s services for the day. I didn’t want anyone hanging around while I tried to talk Freddie into taking an interest in our Styx fund.
Freddie Meadowes had been on my target list for a while, and I had been pleased when he accepted the invitation to come fishing. Freddie didn’t much care for fishing, or shooting, or racing or anything else that I knew of, for that matter; but he liked the idea of being asked to the best places, and this was one of them. Freddie was much richer than Flenry. He had inherited a quinta in Portugal from an aunt, a brewery in Staffordshire from his father, and a large house with a farm attached in Oxfordshire from his mother. That was just for starters: Freddie had hopes of further inheritance from at least three more aunts who had yet to drop off the perch. Meanwhile, he had popped the brewery for a few million, and there were signs that the money was burning a hole in his pocket. I thought I might have a chance of persuading him to invest in one of our funds.
Freddie had waded a yard or two into the river while I stood on the bank. Now he executed a particularly dangerous cast; the line flew back and sideways and I felt the fly embed itself in my cap.
‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind, Freddie,’ I said. We recovered my cap, which had flown into the river on the end of Freddie’s line, and disentangled the fly. Freddie decided to come and sit on the bank with me. It was obvious even to the most optimistic fisherman that there was about as much chance of catching a fish that day as of winning the lottery. The spring sun had got out and beat steadily down on us, and the river seemed to be getting even lower as we watched it.
‘I’m thinking of making a few buy-to-let investments,’ said Freddie. ‘That’s the place to be.’
I reached behind me into the drinks cooler and extracted a bottle of white wine and a couple of glasses. It was only eleven o’clock, but Freddie would say good moftiing to any alcoholic drink almost as soon as the Rice Krispies in his cereal bowl had stopped crackling. I poured us both a glass and handed one to Freddie.
‘We might know of a better bet, if it’s property you’re after,’ I said. ‘Have you heard of sub-prime?’
‘Haven’t I read about that in the papers somewhere?’ asked Freddie. At the time, it would have been difficult to avoid the subject if you ever opened the newspapers, for they had finally woken up to the growing debt crisis in the United States. Freddie’s attention span was, however, limited at the best of times.
‘You may well have done,’ I said. ‘The subject has been in the news a bit.’
I explained Bilbo’s theory about buying up distressed subprime debt and waiting for the market to turn.
‘I like the sound of that,’ said Freddie. ‘I mean, people are always going to want houses, aren’t they?’
‘That’s right, Freddie,’ I agreed.
‘I mean, they aren’t making land any more, are they?’
‘Absolutely, Freddie, they aren’t.’
‘Quite a clever wheeze of your chaps - you buy up mortgages at half-price and wait for the market to turn, is that it?’
‘Got it in one,’ I told him.
Freddie looked at the river, considering.
‘I might put fifty large ones into this little scheme of yours, lick. Perhaps even more.’
‘We normally start at a million, Freddie,’ I told him.
‘Oh, well, that’s OK too,’ said Freddie quickly, not wanting to appear mean or short of cash, ‘Much better to have one or two biggish investments than lots of little jobs you can’t keep your eye on.’
‘You’re quite right, Freddie.’
‘Do you think there’s any more vino in that bottle?’
*
Freddie was interested, but in these nervous times it was becoming more difficult to get people to commit: the really bright investors were staying out of the market, or buying very old-fashioned things like gilts. The easy-money boys were beginning to run for cover. Only Freddie and a few like him hadn’t yet noticed what was going on. Once I might have I found one or two new investors for our funds each month; now people with Freddie’s wealth and impetuous nature were increasingly hard to unearth. Bilbo called me into his office one day, and asked me why I thought he should continue to pay my salary.
‘People are very edgy at the moment, Bilbo,’ I told him. ‘They’re sitting on their hands.’
‘Then your job is to calm them down,’ he replied. ‘Get them to put their hands in their pockets instead. We need to book at least ten million pounds of private-client funds every quarter to keep the momentum going. This quarter you’ve billed only two million. I’m not joking, Eck. At that rate you’re not covering your overhead. You’re not even paying for the share of rent taken up by your desk.’
‘But there are stories in the press. What about Bright Star? They’ve gone bust. Everyone knows we were in there. The press got hold of it.’
‘Not from me,’ said Bilbo. ‘And we invested through nominee accounts, so how did the press find out? Someone’s leaking, or spreading rumours about us. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?’
As he spoke, Bilbo got up from behind his desk*He could look quite intimidating if he wanted to. Today he wanted to, and in a foolish moment I wondered whether he was thinking of striking me to the ground as punishment for my failure to meet sales targets. But all he did was walk across the room and straighten a crooked picture.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I hired you because I thought you might be hungry for money, and be keen to have something to occupy yourself with. Now, all you seem to do is reel off excuses. I hope you haven’t been talking to anyone about our work here?’
‘Of course not, Bilbo, only when you pay me to.’
‘Well, someone is talking about us in the market,’ said Bilbo. ‘If I find out who it is I’ll make life very uncomfortable for them; very uncomfortable.’
The interview was over, and I went downstairs in a troubled state of mind. There was a general paranoia beginning to develop at Mountwilliam Partners. It wasn’t only us. Other people we talked to were becoming jumpy. Rumours spre
ad in the marketplace: banks running out of capital, and not just in America; big corporations having difficulty refinancing. I knew how bad things were when I rang Freddie a week or so after we came back from the Tweed, to persuade him to come and meet Bilbo in the office. That usually clinched it, but Freddie didn’t want to know.
‘Frightfully kind of you to take me fishing, Eck,’ he said, when I rang. ‘Sorry about the bread-and-butter letter not arriving yet - I’m a bit slow to put pen to paper sometimes.’ ‘No need to write, Freddie,’ I said. ‘The pleasure was all mine. Have you thought any more about investing in our Styx fund?’
Then Freddie dropped his bombshell.
‘I met a chap in the bar at my club the other night who said he’d heard another fellow say he’d heard a story that your outfit was about to go tits up.’
‘Freddie, that’s absolute nonsense,’ I said. ‘You know that. I’m ringing you from the office now. We’re all still here. I Everything’s fine. They’re even still paying me.’
But Freddie wouldn’t be persuaded.
‘All the same, I’d rather not just at the moment, Eck. The I act is, I was thinking of buying a smallish sort of yacht, and if I put a million in with you boys it would seriously cramp my style. I’d end up having to make do with a rowing boat.’ We both laughed, but not heartily. Freddie wasn’t going to change his mind.
*
After that phone call, I lost my appetite for ringing people. I just didn’t know that I wanted to do any more networking at that precise moment. I decided to leave the office, although it was only three in the afternoon, and go for a walk. Outside, the early spring sunshine was strong. The brightness of the day made me think with longing of my home in Teesdale.
I went and bought a cup of coffee at the cafe down the road. A moment after I rose to my feet, a man in a wax jacket and corduroys paid his bill, stood up and began to saunter down the street behind me. There you are, I told myself: paranoia. It’s catching. The other night there had been a blue Ford Transit van outside my flat, with a dim light on somewhere in the back, and I had almost convinced myself there was a surveillance team inside it. It was gone the next morning. Now there was this perfectly innocent man walking down the street behind me. I turned once or twice to check that he was still there, and he was; on the third occasion I saw that he had hailed a cab. Maybe I was just nervous because I disliked my job so much.