The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  He regarded me almost kindly as he said this, and clasped me by the hand. It was an extraordinary moment: our first instance of real physical contact, I believe (after seeing each other for so many weeks!), which sent a pulse of exhilaration through my body, so that I could almost feel the blood tingling through it, as if a circuit had been completed at last. And yet, at the same time, I felt an absolute revulsion: my fury at his rejection, at the sheer contempt in which he clearly held my attempts at verse was so strong that I could not speak, and withdrew my hand sharply after only a second or two had gone by.

  ‘I’ll get some more drinks,’ he said, rising to his feet. And I was sure I could glimpse an almost daemonic smile in his eye as he looked back over his shoulder at me and carelessly asked: ‘Same again?’

  I was in thrall to Roger. However cruel he was to me, I could not escape him. I had made very few other friends in London, and besides, his personality was so much stronger than mine, I accepted even his severest criticisms of me and believed them to be well founded. We continued with our schemes of pleasure and self-improvement. But he did not take me by the hand again, for quite a while.

  A recurrent feature of our conversations was our plan to take a long trip together, at some unspecified time, through France and Germany and thence down to Italy, to visit Florence, Rome and Naples, and to view the splendours of the ancient world. Like all of Roger’s schemes, it was grandiose. He would not contemplate a quick journey there and back by rail. There were many places he wanted to see on the way down; and he even began to talk about returning along the Italian and French rivieras, with a possible detour to Spain. The whole excursion, he said, if carried out properly, would take a number of months, and would cost several hundred pounds. And so the main obstacle standing in the way of this scheme was entirely predictable, and seemingly intractable: a serious lack of funds.

  The germ of a solution presented itself, however, early one evening in March as we were making our way towards the bar of the Mermaid Theatre, where we were intending to have a drink and perhaps see the performance afterwards. As we strolled together down Carter Lane, we passed a tall City gent in his pin-striped suit and bowler hat walking in the other direction. Roger stopped in his tracks and looked after him as he ambled by.

  ‘That’s Crispin,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a word. I’ll introduce you to him.’

  ‘Will he be pleased to see us?’ I asked, somewhat nervously.

  ‘Horrified, I should think. That’ll be half the fun.’

  Crispin had disappeared through the door of a pub which also, I noticed, went by the name of The Rising Sun, despite being less than a mile from our regular haunt in Cloth Fair. We found him standing at the bar, bent in deep thought over the pages of the Sporting Life.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Lambert,’ said Roger, in a deferential tone I had never heard him use before.

  ‘Roger!’ He looked up, thoroughly startled. ‘Good gracious. I didn’t know that this was one of your watering holes.’

  ‘One of many, Mr Lambert, one of many. Allow me to introduce my friend, Harold Sim.’

  ‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ he said, extending a lukewarm handshake. He hesitated, waiting for us to move away. But we stayed where we were. ‘Well …’ he said, after an awkward silence, ‘I suppose you gentlemen will be wanting a drink?’

  Once we’d had a few drinks together, Crispin Lambert turned out to be amiable enough: not that I took a very active role in the conversation. He and Roger soon fell to discussing their work on the Stock Exchange floor, and I found myself lost in a thicket of financial jargon of which I had not the least understanding. My mind drifted off and I began thinking of other things. Some lines of a sonnet occurred to me and I began writing them down in my notebook. I took no further notice of my companions, in fact, until several minutes later, when I realized that Roger was addressing me directly.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that sounds an interesting proposition. What do you say, Harold – shall we pool our resources and give it a try?’

  I knew that they had been discussing, among other things, the prospects of a particular horse running in the 3.30 at Newmarket that Saturday, so I assumed at first that Roger was suggesting a bet. But it turned out that it was rather more complicated than that.

  ‘Mr Lambert has already placed his bet,’ he explained, holding up a crumpled piece of paper with a bookmaker’s scrawl upon it. ‘This is the betting slip, and what he is proposing, is that he sells us the right to buy it from him in the future. What he wants to sell us, in effect, is an option on the bet.’

  ‘An option?’

  ‘Yes. You see, he’s really being very decent about it. He’s placed five pounds on a horse called Red Runner to win, at odds of 6-1. Now you and I can’t afford that kind of stake, obviously. But what he’s suggesting is that, if we pay him one pound now, that gives us the right to buy the betting slip from him for twenty pounds – after the race has been run.’

  ‘Twenty pounds? But we don’t have twenty pounds.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to borrow it. You see, at that point, we can’t lose. We only have to buy the slip off him if the horse has won – by which time, it will be worth thirty pounds. So even if we buy it for twenty, plus the original pound we’ve paid for the option, then we’ve made nine pounds profit. And the only thing we’re risking is our original one pound.’

  ‘I still don’t get it. Why don’t we just place a bet ourselves?’

  ‘Because this way we stand to make more money. If we just bet one pound at 6-1, we’d only make five pounds profit. This way we make almost twice as much.’

  ‘It’s what we call leverage,’ Mr Lambert explained.

  My head was still swimming. ‘But surely this means you will be out of pocket yourself?’

  Mr Lambert smiled. ‘You leave me to worry about that.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Roger, ‘he wouldn’t be doing it if he stood to lose any money on the deal. I’m sure he’s thought it through.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Crispin. ‘The fact is that I already have another each-way bet on this race, with a different bookmaker. So really, you understand, I have nothing to lose by this arrangement, and might even gain by it. In fact, everybody gains by it.’

  ‘So come on, Harold – what do you say? We stand to make ninepounds. That would make a good start to our European fund.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Well then, stump up the money, there’s a good chap.’

  I wasn’t too happy about being the sole contributor – this had not, as I understood it, been part of the arrangement, but it seemed that Roger only had five shillings with him at the time. I handed Mr Lambert a crisp green one pound note – not by any means an inconsiderable sum, for me, in those days. In return, he scribbled some words on a sheet of paper torn from his pocket book, signed the document, and passed it over to my friend.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Now it’s all strictly legal. Let’s settle up on Monday morning, and hope for a satisfactory outcome all round.’

  With that he drained his glass and took his leave, waving a cheery goodbye from the door of the pub as he did so.

  Roger smiled and clapped me on the back. ‘Well, today was our lucky day,’ he said. ‘Another round?’

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said, frowning into the remains of my beer. ‘There has to be a catch. And anyway, nine pounds isn’t going to get us to Naples and back.’

  ‘True,’ said Roger, ‘very true. But we’ve made a good start. And besides, I’ve thought of something else. I’ll go up and see my sister at the weekend.’

  ‘How will that help?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s filthy rich, that’s how. Married the boss of a big chemical engineering firm a couple of years ago. I shall pop up there on Saturday afternoon, play the part of the devoted younger brother to the hilt, stay the night, and ask her for a little loan in the morning.’

  ‘A loan?’

  ‘Or an advance – that�
�s how I shall put it. An advance on the fabulous book I shall write about the archaeological sites of Northern and Southern Europe. I shall invite her to invest in the brilliance of her brother. How does that sound? These people like to talk of investments.’

  Roger’s enthusiasm was infectious sometimes, there was no denying that. ‘It sounds just fine,’ I said, and by way of celebration he stood me a whisky chaser with my next pint of beer.

  When I saw Roger at Hill’s Restaurant on Monday lunchtime, he brought good news and bad. Red Runner had come in first, which meant that we could exercise our option on Crispin’s betting slip, and collect the winnings – thirty pounds on his five-pound stake, less the twenty pounds we owed him, and the one pound for the option: all of which left us nine pounds in profit. Very satisfactory. Less satisfactory, on the other hand, was the outcome of Roger’s approaches to his sister.

  ‘Let this be a warning to you, Harold,’ he said gravely, ‘that women are not to be trusted, or relied upon. In fact, one should not even take the slightest notice of the selfish, small-minded creatures. Harriet showed not the least interest in our expedition, or in the book which I told her might come out of it. Her horizons are simply too … limited to take in the importance of what we’re proposing to do. She focuses entirely on her own tiny, trivial, domestic concerns.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, this baby she is going to have, of course. It was all she could talk about.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I can see how that might seem –’

  ‘She’s always been like this, you know, Harriet. I’d forgotten what she was like. I’d forgotten how much I hated her.’

  ‘When is the baby due?’ I asked, rather shocked by his language.

  ‘Oh, in a few months. I wasn’t going to flatter her sense of self-importance by asking her questions like that. Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’

  We left the tiled gloom of the restaurant behind us and spent the rest of our lunch hour in the pleasant green space of Finsbury Circus, a short walk away. It was now early in March, and just about warm enough to sit outside reading a book in the weak sunshine. I had with me a copy of The Hawk in the Rain, the first collection of Ted Hughes, then a little-known poet. Roger was reading his well-thumbed edition of Witchcraft Today, by Gerald Gardner. This sensational volume had been published about five years earlier, and had attracted considerable attention, especially in the popular Sunday newspapers which liked to titillate their readers with the notion that modern witches’ covens existed the length and breadth of suburban England, where sex orgies and acts of naked devil-worship regularly took place behind respectable closed doors. Roger dismissed these reports as lurid fantasies and insisted, on the contrary, that Mr Gardner’s book was one of the most important publications of recent times: he maintained that it had uncovered a vital, authentic spiritual heritage which stretched far back into the pre-Roman era, and provided a valuable counter-tradition to the repressive authoritarianism of the Christian Church. Mr Gardner’s name for this alternative religion was ‘Wicca’, and its main characteristic was that it involved the worship of two Gods, or rather a God and a Goddess, represented respectively by the Sun and the Moon. Not being much inclined towards religious belief of any sort, I tended not to listen too closely when Roger was expounding on this theme, although I do remember what he said to me that afternoon in Finsbury Circus. ‘You should pay attention to this, Harold, if you’re serious about wanting to write. The Goddess is where all poetic inspiration comes from. Read Robert Graves if you don’t believe me. You’d better keep on the right side of her. Unfortunately …’ (he put the book down and lay back on the grass, his head resting on folded hands) ‘she absolutely disapproves of homosexuality, and has terrible punishments in store for those who practise it. Bad news for the likes of us.’

  I said nothing, but a shiver of protest went through me when I heard this remark, which was thrown out casually, as if merely the statement of an obvious truth. I knew that Roger sometimes took pleasure in being foolishly provocative. It was also that afternoon, I remember, that he first mentioned his intention to place a malediction on his sister.

  Meanwhile, Roger did not neglect the more material side of our affairs. Over the next few weeks, he came to a series of further financial arrangements with Crispin Lambert and his numerous bookmakers, each one more ambitious and more elaborate than the last. I heard talk of each-way bets, four-folds and accumulators. Then we were on to any-to-come bets, fivespots, pontoons and sequential multiples. Each one of these bets was recorded on a betting slip: Crispin would calculate what this slip might be worth if the race had the desired outcome, and would then sell us an option to buy the slip off him when the result was announced. Somehow – I presumed because Roger and Crispin were accurate in their calculations, and in their study of the horses’ form – we seemed to make a profit every time, and everybody came out of it a winner. Soon we became bolder, and the agreements we signed no longer gave us the option of purchasing Crispin’s betting slips when the race was over, but imposed on us the obligation to do so. We chose to do this because the terms he offered us were more favourable, even though the risk involved (on our side) was much greater. Steadily, however, our travelling fund grew larger and larger. Roger became increasingly excited about the prospect of giving up our jobs and embarking on this voyage, until he could barely talk about anything else: it became his absolute obsession. The cultural pleasures on offer in London seemed to have palled, as far as he was concerned, and we rarely went to concerts or the theatre together any more. Instead, if we were not poring over maps of Pompeii and drawings of ancient German burial mounds, he preferred to stay indoors and study his growing library of volumes on witchcraft and paganism. And somehow, subtly, indefinably, although our trip was still talked about very much as a shared endeavour, I felt the closeness between us beginning to slip away, was more and more conscious that I had somehow disappointed him, failed to meet his expectations, and this realization upset me deeply.

  Then, one day in the middle of the week, he came to me with a proposal which caused me some alarm.

  ‘I was with Crispin most of last night,’ he said, ‘in The Rising Sun. He really is a very decent fellow, I think. He really wants to help us raise the money for this trip. Anyway, last night, we worked out a way we could do it – all in one fell swoop. By Saturday evening, the money could be ours. We could hand in our notice next week and be on the train to Dover within a fortnight. What do you say?’

  Naturally, I said that it all sounded wonderful. But I was less enthusiastic when he told me what he had in mind.

  The proposal, in fact, was for one single, gigantic bet – or rather, a phenomenally complex spread of bets – to be placed with five bookmakers on Saturday’s races. I cannot remember the details now (not surprisingly, since I could never really understand them then), but among the different terms being floated were ‘single stakes about’, ‘round robin’, ‘vice versa’, ‘the flag’, and ‘full-cover multiples’. As before, it was Crispin who had chosen the horses, calculated the odds, placed the bets, and had bundled the whole package up into one financial instrument – the usual signed piece of paper, taken from his pocket book – which he was now offering to sell to us for …

  ‘… for how much?’ I said to Roger, incredulous.

  ‘I know it sounds a lot – but the winnings will be five times that, Harold. Five times!’

  ‘But that’s the whole of our fund. Everything we’ve saved up so far. All the sacrifices we’ve made to put that money together … Supposing we lose it all?’

  ‘We can’t lose it all. That’s the beauty of it. If we were just to place that money in a single bet, like most punters would do, then of course we’d be taking a huge risk. But the system Crispin and I have worked out is much cleverer than that. It’s flawless – look.’ He handed me a sheet of foolscap paper, on which were written a series of calculations and mathematical formulae far too complicated for me (or any other averagely int
elligent being) to comprehend.

  ‘But if this system worked,’ I objected, ‘everyone would be doing it.’

  ‘If they had the brains to work it out, yes.’

  ‘What are you saying? That you’ve found a way of making money out of nothing? Out of air?’

  Roger smiled a proud, secretive smile as he took the paper back. ‘I’ve told you this before,’ he said. ‘You, Harold, are earthbound. You need to develop a more spiritual outlook. Don’t become one of those lesser mortals who inhabits the material world. The world where people spend their lives making things and then buying and selling and using and consuming them. The world of objects. That’s for the hoi polloi, not the likes of you and me. We’re above all that. We’re alchemists.’

  It was when Roger began to talk like this, I’m ashamed to say, that I found him most irresistible – even when I knew that I was being controlled and manipulated. It was with a sinking heart, all the same, that I agreed to hand over all of our savings (and rather more) to Crispin in return for his promise that he would sell us, in a few days’ time, the betting slips which both he and Roger assured me would be worth a fortune by then. A sinking heart, and a hollow, nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Will you telephone me on Saturday?’ I asked. ‘To let me know the outcome – not that it’s in any doubt, of course.’

  ‘Telephone you? Why on earth would I do that? You’ll be with me, surely.’

  ‘I was planning to visit my parents,’ I explained. ‘It is the Easter weekend, after all.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,’ he said, with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘Haven’t you learned anything from me in the last few months? Must you always run for cover to the safety of those silly bourgeois, Christian values that your family drummed into you from an early age? These Christian festivals are just a sham – a pale shadow of the real thing. You’re coming with me this weekend to discover what Easter is really about.’

  ‘Coming with you? Where?’