by Laline Paull
‘You are the most egotistical fucker I have ever met, Tom, you know that?’
‘You’re very welcome. If I’d gone in there all mealy-mouthed, you’d be dead in the water.’ Their pints came. They clinked.
‘Bastard.’
‘Bastard.’
They drank hard and talked lightly of current affairs, excluding the one with Martine. Tom thanked Sean for the picture. They discussed the latest closure of the Suez Canal, the skinhead revival, and remembered a mutual friend from college, recently killed reporting from Ukraine.
‘We underestimated him,’ Tom agreed. ‘A hero in our midst.’
‘Like you,’ Sean said. ‘You’re a hero.’
Tom drained his pint. ‘Win Midgard, you will be too.’
Sean felt a glow that was more than the beer, and the afternoon sun coming in through the sand-etched windows. Putting the world to rights with Tom, boozing an afternoon away. What a rare pleasure. He was about to tell him that; he might even have been about to tell him how much he’d missed him, after ordering another pair of pints, when the door opened and a beautiful girl walked in.
She was about twenty-five, fresh-faced, casually dressed. Without realising, Sean pulled in his belly and sat up straighter. She looked across and walked over. Her smile was lovely. Perhaps she’d been in one of his clubs, and recognised him. He prepared himself. Tom put his arm round her. They kissed.
‘I’m ready,’ he said.
‘Then hello and goodbye.’ She smiled at Sean, playful and polite.
‘You look so familiar,’ he said to her. ‘Have we met?’
‘I live in Berlin. Do you go there?’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Tom, she’s the image of Ruth.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Is that a good thing?’ The girl looked from face to face. ‘Who is Ruth?
‘Mutual friend,’ Tom said. ‘A brilliant woman.’
The girl’s smile lit her up. ‘Then I don’t mind at all.’
Sean gazed at her until Tom punched him lightly on the shoulder.
‘Let me know how much they hated me.’
Sean smiled automatically and watched them disappear out onto the street, and into their shared afternoon. He found himself alone, quite drunk and acutely bereft.
The lovely German girl was young enough to be Tom’s daughter, if he’d had one. This brought the image of his own sharply to Sean’s mind. Rosie, the angry sad child who could not understand how her father needed to feel like a man more than a husband. How her mother had changed into a woman who saw him as he really was, instead of who he wanted to be. It was Gail who had caused him to fail, with her impossible standards.
Sean knew he was drunk, but maybe that was the best way to tell Rosie how he felt. He wanted to say sorry, for so much. There at the bar he took out his phone. The call went straight through to her voicemail. At least it didn’t ring several times, as often happened, before going dead. That meant she knew it was him, and didn’t want to talk. This time, she was just busy. Then he called Martine, and the same thing happened.
Why did they not pick up? And Tom, the shit, hadn’t even told him he had plans, yet he must have had that arrangement in place all along. As if he might try to muscle in, or something. Sean left his pint unfinished. Only sad old men drank pints on their own in daylight. Tom had done this to him.
A bright burst of laughter seemed aimed at him and he turned. Two girls sat at a corner table, they looked away when he caught their eye – but not before flashing him a quick smile. He did not know what to do with himself; it was that awkward time when the pub was just filling up with the early after-work crowd, the low earners who couldn’t wait to get away. One minute he was enjoying a liberating freedom with Tom, drinking pints in an unfashionable pub at the hour they felt like doing it – and the next he was beached on the shores of other people’s lives – like some loser.
The girls sent arcs of laughter up through the air, they were lassoing him and drawing him over, they wanted to play. He looked in the mirror behind the bar, where he could see them angling their thighs towards him, rearranging their shiny hanks of hair.
Before he left, he spoke to the barman and bought a bottle of champagne to be sent over when he’d gone. Their faces fell as he went out, and he felt a grim satisfaction that he had not fallen for it, drunk as he was. He could have gone over and within a couple of drinks – maybe not even that – adjourned to somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. An hotel. He had learned to always use that weirdness, to demonstrate his adherence to the right set of rules. Inviting people for ‘a kitchen supper’, never ‘dinner’. Repeating ‘how do you do,’ instead of ever answering the question. In English society, nobody cared – that was something he learned too – and they would be horrified if you told them. He did however draw the line at eating soup backwards; that was just madness.
Standing outside, Sean watched the girls receive the champagne. They were suitably over-excited and he drew back as they scanned the pub for him. What a strange thing to have done. It gave him no pleasure, he was just acting out the anxiety of waiting, of being compared and judged after the presentation. He should have just said that to Tom, but he’d been too busy struggling with the feeling of inadequacy because of how brilliant Tom had been. If they’d only had longer, and more to drink, he would have blurted it all out, they could have talked again like they used to – he could have told him about how it had gone wrong with Gail. Tom was kind, he was always kind, he would have known what to say. Instead, he’d gone off with Miss Berlin, who did look like a young Ruth.
Sean slammed into the wall of the pub, drunker than he’d thought. When he and Tom had been drinking together, he’d been happy in a way he had forgotten, relaxing into that feeling of comradeship and solidarity that was peculiar to their friendship. Only now did he realise he’d been looking forward to talking about their Greenland trip again, to indulging in a full-blown nostalgia fest, to drinking more, to calling Martine drunkenly to say he was having dinner – supper – with Tom, that it didn’t fucking matter what happened with the Midgard deal, at least they’d reconnected.
He peered through the pub window. To feel so disappointed was pathetic. Nostalgia was for people whose lives were over. Tom had a date, and those girls in there had been joined by two meaty-looking boyfriends. Sean watched some animated talk about the bottle and the boys jerked their necks and squared their shoulders in ritual male display for the rich sod who’d undercut them.
Aimlessly drunk, emotionally disorderly, he decided to clear his head and walk back to Devon Square through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, in the hope of seeing the cavalry.
But it was too late in the day for the horses, and Sean sat on a bench with a coffee from one of the kiosks, trying to sober up. Vodka he could skilfully calibrate, but pints of beer somehow sidestepped that control and made him too emotional. From deciding as he walked away from the pub that he would park the whole Greenland nostalgia trip, he was now flooding with memories of it. He’d been there on three separate expeditions, the first with Tom, on the Lost Explorers’ Expedition when they were twenty. They had been racing partners on the ten-dog sled, and both had imagined that reading about it was tantamount to expertise. They had made complete fools of themselves and had never had a better time. The next couple of times had been for Kingsmith, investigating some mining tender that came to nothing; he had spent time in the capital Nuuk – but it had still been Greenland, still the Arctic.
The first time was the best, despite their incompetence. Because of it, perhaps. He and Tom sweating and stumbling about in the snow, desperately trying to wrestle ten dogs into their harnesses, the air snapping and flashing with the frenzy of excited barking, the dogs fully aware they had novices to deal with. One by one they got them in, resorting to both of them grabbing one dog and managing at last to work out which leg went through which bit of harness – exhausted before they even set off, but the dogs howling and leaping with the thrill of it, a
s if they’d never done it before either.
It was a shock when his phone rang, in Hyde Park. It was Mogens Hadbold, and he had good news.
One is often asked what is the attraction and what are the joys of Polar exploration. The answer is – Adventure – going where man has never gone before. Achievement – discovering something of value to mankind, such as the whale-fishery of South Georgia; or ramming your way through ice or any difficulties under steam or sail. The wonderful pure beauty of these regions, the healthy invigorating life; and last but not least – comradeship – the comradeship of men. Men who fight alongside you, toil with you, laugh with you, and chaff you. Pals who rack their brains for abuse and epithets to hurl at each other, and who fight for their absent chums. Pals who stand by each other through thick and thin; who share trials, hardships, joys, dangers and food, and are determined, at all hazards, to ‘see it through’ together. For such men you feel a great affection, and the results are teamwork and loyalty of the finest, highest quality, with joy of memory that never fades away.
Under Sail in the Frozen North: The Log of the 1926 British Arctic Expedition (1927)
Frank Arthur Worsley
10
From his park bench, Sean sent emails to Kingsmith, Radiance and Tom. He phoned Martine and said he would be over soon, then he called Gail, to say he wouldn’t. He told her the news and first she congratulated him then asked for a divorce. She knew that Martine was part of the consortium and not one of his silly little girls, and she understood that now his relationship with her would become paramount. Gail wanted the dignity of immediate separation. She told him her lawyer’s name and hung up. Sean was both relieved and shocked that she was so prepared.
When he arrived at Martine’s apartment she had a spare key and a bottle of chilled Krug waiting. This was the moment they had imagined, and though he enjoyed seeing her blaze with their triumph, he felt oddly detached. Perhaps he just no longer liked champagne. Perhaps this was a sign of success; when vintage Krug became a fizzy drink. Not a noble pint in a fuggy all-comers pub, with a mate who kept you level.
Martine slid down onto her knees in front of him and smiled, in the way he understood. He closed his eyes. The effort was over, success was his. The strain of living a lie with Gail was also gone. And Tom had come in and done exactly what Sean had brought him in to do: make him the winner. But he did not feel happy. After a while Martine looked up, concerned. He wound her hair in his hands and nodded, his eyes still closed. She resumed, and he focused on her skill. He tried harder to respond, thinking of the two girls in the pub, of recent porn – an appetite no woman would ever wean him from, even if she knew about it, which Martine did not. Still nothing. Gently he lifted her back up to him. He held her.
‘Why am I not happy?’
‘You got what you wanted. Now you feel empty.’
He nodded. It was true, and her insight made him feel tender. He stroked her hair, in silent consolation for their first erotic non-event. Later they watched television together, also for the first time.
‘A decent man’s content with profit,’ Kingsmith used to say to him, in the early days. ‘Only fools want more – and fools are tools but never partners.’ And Sean, or Sean boy as Kingsmith called him, had laughed and watched the money rolling in, and worked seven days a week if necessary, as it often was, learning his mentor’s particular ways, travelling with him, growing familiar with the Russian dolls of his financial habits, and Kingsmith’s migratory routes: the Caymans to Panama, Monaco to Jersey, to Zurich – to thin air. Very often a scrap of a percentage point of profit fell under the table to Sean, sometimes as a cash bonus, but more often as a last-minute allocation of some IPO, some hitherto obscure company Kingsmith had carefully cultivated up to its stock market debut, usually but not always connected with mining, one of his major interests. Sean proved himself an excellent steward of his financial good fortune, using part of his profit to grow his property portfolio, and always reinvesting in something else Kingsmith recommended.
Both knew Sean would never be in the same league, but he was a quick study and had become personally wealthy beyond the dreams of his twelve-year-old, or even twenty-year-old self. Wealthy enough to acknowledge that money was not enough. What he’d always dreamed of was his name on the map. Literally. Like Barentsz or Bering or – well, OK, not like Cecil Rhodes – but to be a man of daring and discovery and honour, whose explorations could name mountains and seas.
Now, after the Pedersen deal, that secret glory-seeking part of him rejoiced like never before. He, Sean Cawson, had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and at this most critical moment in its history, owned a tiny piece of the Arctic. The ice was receding and the TransPolar sea route was busier every day, moving global markets from supermarket checkouts to construction contracts as the price of goods went down. Untold mineral wealth was newly unprotected and within reach. There was something magical in the air; it was a new golden age of trade and opportunity, and he was a very modern buccaneer, in it for influence, not plunder. He was known for bringing people together, and now he was about to do this in the Arctic, the new business arena where trade and logistics rubbed up against the environment. Surely that was worthy of some sort of recognition?
Midgard was his biggest coup, but somewhere deep inside he had always known he would succeed. Several months ago, and in the face of the heavy odds against him winning the bid, he had placed a large retainer on the services of his chosen Norwegian architect, in order to capitalise on the narrow time window for the work. The morning after the Pedersen decision, and after Martine had left for work, he made that call from her apartment, and the sound of jubilation in the Oslo office buoyed him in happiness all the way across Kensington Gardens.
He was walking towards Selfridges, to kill a bit of time before meeting Joe Kingsmith for lunch. As yet he did not know the venue or the hour – but that was typical. Sean hadn’t even known he was in London but found the email when he woke, saying he’d be at the Wallace Collection just behind Selfridges, and then they could grab a bite. He liked to look at the old weapons collection, Sean remembered. It was the older man’s indulgence to himself, and usually meant things were going well. He lived in hope of owning something connected with the Roman general Crassus; Sean always meant to look him up, so he could talk knowledgeably about him – but he had never got round to it.
The sky was an empty blue and it was so hot for February that although the trees were bare the joggers were dressed for summer. Sean walked across the park, repressing a feeling of irritation at how his mentor, affectionately though he felt towards him, still seemed to think of him as the callow and grateful undergraduate, willing to dance attendance on his whims. That was a lifetime ago – but Kingsmith didn’t seem to age the way other people did.
Sean passed the top of the Serpentine, watching a pair of swans gliding down to land on the water. If Kingsmith still treated him like a kid, then that was the price of access to his capital. One hundred and fifty million dollars in this case, which, along with Tom’s participation, had got him Midgard Lodge. Once he’d referred to him as ‘the old man’ and people had thought Kingsmith was his actual father. He had not corrected them; he felt much more Kingsmith’s son than his own unknown father’s. And though wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of him, because Kingsmith was awkward around emotion, in Sean’s heart he was sure the old man had some paternal affection for him too. So Kingsmith had good credit. Sean would kill some time in the Watch Room at Selfridges, and wait for his call.
This was a place long soothing to Sean’s spirit, and he had visited it many times before he could afford the things he wanted. It was always the same, the dawdling wealthy shoppers, sparkling vitrines and his own enhanced reflection in the tall apricot-lit mirrors.
He should commemorate his journey from staring at the painting of the icebergs on the care-home staff landing, to standing here, the legal owner of a piece of the Arctic, with – of course – a watch. A new tim
e in his life, something that fitted his new role of merchant prince and environmental champion. A watch of subtlety, with a rugged outdoor quality, its high value only apparent to the cognoscenti. Nothing vulgar. Sean had no idea which that would be. It amused him that as he went from case to case, the glittering dials, exotic straps and satin-draped plinths jostling for his attention, he gathered sales assistants like iron filings to a magnet. There was a new display case since he had last come in, ‘The Hall of Fame’ case. And in it, a platinum Rolex Cosmograph Daytona gleamed at him, with its ice-blue dial the colour of a glacier. He tried it on and looked at his reflection. He didn’t want to take it off so he bought it and slipped his Patek Philippe into his pocket. Collecting beautiful watches went with his idea of himself.
Perhaps he should buy a watch for Martine too. No more philandering. Marriage to Gail had not worked, but he still wanted a mate – not to be like Kingsmith, who for all his wealth and rosters of willing beauties around the world, seemed to lack the centre of gravity that a relationship gave. He had no children, no regular partner, but a different gorgeous woman was always available, wherever he was. Once Sean had thought this highly desirable, but now it seemed increasingly sad, though that was one emotion he’d never seen Kingsmith display.
Sean browsed the women’s watches. He also wanted to buy something for Rosie, but the idea of calling her and saying where he was, and her being vile to him on this day of triumph – this was not the time to do that. What about Radiance Young then? This was also her triumph. She had brought China to the table and he wanted to show his appreciation – but she was so eccentric. Who knew what sort of inappropriate behaviour a gift from him might trigger? She kept her Facebook page frequently updated and either referred to herself as ‘Bi-Polar Babe’ due to her extraordinary feats of endurance at both Poles, or, ‘Simple Girl Looking For Love’. Sean had yet to meet another thirty-four-year-old single Chinese woman with hundreds of millions of dollars at her disposal. Or a chain of specifically Chinese-friendly hotels in hitherto untapped markets (most of Europe), a portfolio of interests in several African countries, and her own shipping line, a wharf in the port of Dalian included. Radiance was bumptious, exuberant in her appetites, driven, tactless and generous: but simple she was not.