The Crack In the Teacup

by Michael Gilbert

  “I’ll try,” said Anthony.

  “Good. I’m a great admirer of your father’s. How is he, by the way?”

  “As well as could be expected.”

  “Bad as that, is it? Poor old chap. We formed the first Home Guard platoon in Barhaven, in 1940. I expect he’s told you? He was Platoon Commander and I was Platoon Sergeant. Now then—”

  He pulled out a thick sheaf of typewritten documents, schedules and accounts.

  “I’ve been picking up one or two quite promising little businesses lately—”

  Not really a soft mouth, when you looked at it more closely. A predatory mouth.

  “Hairdressers, sweet shops, newsagents, places like that. When a town grows, they are the sort of people who grow with it. And Barhaven is growing. You don’t need statistics to tell you that. You can see it happening. We’re God’s gift to the Upper Middle Class. The sort of people who find Brighton too raffish and Eastbourne too stuffy. They’re beginning to discover Barhaven. And what’s more, with the south leg of the M2 and the doubling up of the railway to Maidstone, we’re becoming accessible. Not much more than an hour from London either way. When I first came here it was a minor resort. Now it’s on the map. It’s growing, and nothing’s going to stop it. Population’s going up. Thirty per cent more visitors this summer than last. Land values sky-rocketing. Unfortunately, it’s too late to get in on that racket. The Council’s got all the land on one side and a gang of farmers under Gauleiter Sellinge have got a stranglehold on the other. Wasn’t that Sellinge I passed in the corridor, by the way?”

  “That’s right,” said Anthony, wishing he could cure himself of the weakness of blushing.

  “Able chap, in his way. I believe he’s planning to go to town at this enquiry. Did you know about that?”

  “I had heard something about it,” said Anthony.

  “Ah.” The blue, knowledgeable eyes rested on him for a fraction of a second. “Mustn’t waste your time talking about other people’s business. Now. My idea was this. Form a private company. The company holds all my properties, and it holds my ordinary business, too – insurance brokerage. That makes a reasonably steady profit every year. Nothing to get excited about. Four or five thousand. I can give you the exact figures later. The businesses – I’ve picked up five of them so far, and got options on two others – sometimes make a profit, sometimes make a loss. Obviously, if I can set the losses off against the brokerage profits—”

  They descended into the mass of papers, and came up for breath half an hour later when Southern looked at his watch, and said, “Heavens, it’s a quarter to one already. I’ve got to go and have lunch with the Lady Mayoress, to brief her for this afternoon’s session. It’s the report of the Lands Committee and she thinks we’re in for trouble. So do I. We’ll fix another appointment when you’ve digested all those figures and had a think about them.”

  Chapter Five

  Anthony Lunches with his Father

  Anthony went home to lunch.

  He had made a habit of doing this since his father’s second coronary had confined him to the house. He found the old man perched in his high-back chair, with a tray in front of him and the Barhaven Gazette propped up against the water jug. With his hooked nose and ruffled hair, he looked like a little eagle. But he was a little eagle in bondage.

  “Blasted idiot,” he said.

  “Who’s an idiot?”

  “Ambrose. That man’s got so many bees in his bonnet I wonder honey doesn’t drip out of his ears.”

  “What’s he on about now?”

  “Parking.”

  “It’s time someone did something about parking,” said Anthony, sitting down to the hot-pot which, regardless of the weather, was Mrs. Stebbins’ standard Monday offering. “It’s all right in the winter, but from May to September you can’t squeeze a car in anywhere.”

  “And how would you deal with it?” said his father in his cross-examining manner.

  “For a start, it wouldn’t do any harm if we had two or three more big underground garages like the East Pier Garage.”

  Mr. Brydon chuckled.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.” He was back in court, luring an opponent into a trap. “And why does no one build these garages?”

  “No money.”

  “For a profitable venture like that? You could borrow all the money you needed from the bank.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because the Borough Council, and in particular, the Borough Engineer and Surveyor, Macintyre, won’t let them. Whenever a project’s put up to Macintyre he vetoes it. Structurally unsound, danger from infiltration of sea water, unsafe, insanitary.”

  “I’m not a surveyor,” said Anthony, “but it sounds pretty good nonsense to me.”

  “It sounds nonsense to Mr. Ambrose,” said his father. “But he always spoils a good case by going too far. He’s now suggesting that an enquiry ought to be held to find out who really owns the East Pier Garage.”

  “Does he suggest an answer?”

  “He’s not quite such a fool as that. There’s a law of libel. But the implication is pretty clear, I think.”

  Anthony had been reading the article whilst his father was talking. Ambrose wrote well and forcibly. His talent was wasted in Barhaven. He would probably end up in Fleet Street. And he would certainly be unhappy there.

  “Anything new at the office?”

  “I had rather a busy morning, actually.” He told his father about the police court proceedings.

  “Silly young asses. They’d only got themselves to thank,” said his father. “All the same, I’m glad to see us back in court. We lost a lot of that work when they made Mentmore Clerk to the Justices. A mistake to have a partner in a local firm doubling up that job. Bound to lead to discrimination.”

  Anthony grinned to himself. He was well aware that his father had angled for the job himself. Nor was he being insincere, now. He was exercising the prerogative of old age, of forgetting inconvenient facts.

  He said, “Business is looking up all round. We had two new clients this morning.”

  “Good,” said the old man. “That’s very good.”

  He had started the practice from nothing when he came back from France in 1918. He had lived in it, and for it. It had been work and play, wife and family. In 1937, on doctor’s orders, he had taken his first real holiday – a six weeks’ cruise, down the west coast of Africa and across to South America. He had met Anthony’s mother at dinner on the first night out, made up his mind to marry her at Freetown, proposed to her at Lagos and been finally accepted at Capetown.

  Mr. Brydon, like most front-line soldiers, was an admirer of Earl Haig. Had not Haig met his future wife at a house-party on Friday, played golf with her on Saturday, and proposed on the ninth green? And when friends expressed their surprise at the speed of his wooing had he not said that “he had made his mind up on many more important matters more quickly than that?”

  Mr. Brydon approved the sentiment. Marriage was something you went in for when more important business allowed. When he learned of Anthony’s birth, he did sums on his fingers and said, “We’ll have him through his Finals by 1960.” When his wife died he mourned her genuinely and briefly. It had been an episode; satisfactory in itself, and doubly satisfactory because it had produced a junior partner for the firm of Brydon & Pincott.

  To Anthony his mother was hardly even a memory.

  “Who were these new clients?”

  “There was Chris Sellinge.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “Shorter & Sellinge.”

  “Oh, those house agents. Yes.”

  “They don’t call themselves house agents. They call themselves Surveyors, Auctioneers and Valuers.”

  Mr. Brydon snorted. He was not fond of house agents. They made difficulties over deposits, and charged more, in his view, for five minutes’ work in selling a house than the solicitor did for two months’ work transferring it to a purchaser.

/>   “What did he want?”

  Anthony explained, and his father listened in silence. At the end he said, “I suppose you’ll have to take it on.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “You can’t pick and choose. It’s legitimate work. If you don’t do it, someone else will.”

  “In this case, I’d rather someone else did.”

  “Why?”

  “Whoever wins, it’s going to antagonise about half the top people in Barhaven. The Council’s split. By no means down the middle, I agree. The Sellinge gang are in a minority. But don’t forget, the Council elections are coming on. Five retiring members, four of whom happen to be anti-Sellinge. And if one or two of them don’t get back, it might be quite a different picture.”

  “That’s politics. It’s nothing to do with lawyers.”

  “I wish you were right,” said Anthony. “But I’m afraid you aren’t.”

  The old man shifted uncomfortably in his chair. It irked him that he couldn’t get down to the office and grasp the complexities of matters like this one. Anthony was a clever boy. Cleverer than he had ever been himself. But had he got the tough, inner core which you needed if you were to come out top in the competitive world of a solicitor’s practice?

  “There’s another snag,” said Anthony. “My second new client this morning was your old friend Raymond Southern.”

  “Has he deserted Mentmores?”

  “For the moment.”

  “That’s very good. I’ve always wanted Raymond as a client.”

  “I’ve not had much to do with him before this morning.”

  Mr. Brydon chuckled.

  “Raymond’s a crook,” he said. “But an honest crook. If you follow me. In a business deal he’ll fight with every weapon in his hand, but he won’t bear you any ill-will afterwards, even if you win. That’s how he plays bridge, too. He’ll open on nothing, double to scare you, bluff you out of game. But if you call his bluff and he goes down a couple of thousand points, he simply smiles like a crocodile.”

  “There’s nothing illegal in what he wants us to do.”

  He explained the details to his father, who was only half-listening. He was thinking of his old companion-in-arms of Home Guard days, of nights spent on the cliff-top, of confidences shared.

  “He’s the sort of man the socialists hate. He’s too hard for them. And too successful. And, in a way, too kind. He gives to charity, but he gives it on his own terms. If he works hard and makes money he doesn’t see why a lot of parlour pinks should take three-quarters of it away and sprinkle it round among people who are too lazy to earn it for themselves. What are you laughing at?”

  “I wasn’t laughing,” said Anthony. “I was just thinking what a pity it was you couldn’t stand for the Borough Council at this election.”

  What he was really thinking was that there was no gap like the gap between twenty-five and sixty-five.

  Chapter Six

  “Take One”

  “I have the honour,” said Lincoln-Bright, “to present to the Council the report of the Lands Development Committee. As you will be aware—”

  “A point of order, Madam Chairman.”

  “Yes, Mr. Viney?”

  “I know that I am speaking for one or two others besides myself when I say that I question whether a matter of this importance should have been referred to a committee at all.”

  “You were here when that was agreed,” said Jack Crawford.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if the member for the Marine East Ward observed the proprieties of debate and addressed his remarks to the Chair?”

  “Hear hear,” said Chris Sellinge.

  Crawford, his brick-red face turning several shades darker, presented his back to Sellinge and addressed the Mayoress with elaborate formality.

  “I merely wished to point out, Madam Chairman, that since the member for North Ward was present when this committee was appointed, it seems to me to be a bit late in the day to object to the committee presenting its report.”

  “My point has been misunderstood,” said Mike Viney. He was a tiny figure, with a hunch-back, and a mop of grey hair. “When this committee was appointed, more than two years ago, the situation was very different from what it is now. The eastern extension of the Marine Parade was only a project. It is now nearly completed—”

  “No thanks to you,” said Crawford, loud enough for the speaker to hear, but not loud enough to constitute an official observation.

  “—moreover we had not then had the reports of the Drainage Sub-Committee or the Roads Sub-Committee, both of which, I think it would not be unfair to say, leaned toward western rather than eastern development—”

  “Madam Chairman—”

  “If I might be allowed—”

  “I have not yet concluded my remarks—” The Mayoress rotated her head slowly, her myopic gaze lighting on each speaker in turn. Finally the interruptions cancelled each other out, and a moment of silence ensued.

  “It really does seem,” she said, “that there are differences of opinion about this. Perhaps we ought to discuss the whole matter before we listen to the report “

  “A debate of the whole Council—”

  “On a point of order—”

  “I don’t think Madam Chairman—”

  “If you all talk at once,” said Raymond Southern, his high voice riding easily over the clamour, “we’re going to be here all day, and get nowhere. So far as I know, the member for North Ward still has the floor. I think, Madam Chairman, he should be allowed to conclude his observations, and that you should then call on the next speaker—and so on. We may then preserve what have already been referred to this afternoon as the proprieties of debate.”

  “Hear hear,” said General Crispen.

  “I am obliged,” said Mike Viney, who had not sat down through the whole of this. “I had, in fact, nearly finished what I wanted to say. We have none of us any objection to hearing the report of the Lands Development Committee who have, I am sure, done their work in a most thorough and conscientious way. As long as we all bear in mind that their conclusions are not binding on the Council, and that conditions have changed so radically since they were appointed that their terms of reference may well now be out of date.”

  He sat down, and no one seemed quite clear what to do next, until Southern whispered in Mrs. Lord’s ear, and the Lady Mayoress first said, “What?” and then, after further whispering, “I now call on the member for Victoria Park to present the report of the committee.”

  Lincoln-Bright again rose to his feet.

  “As you will be aware,” he said, “this committee – which consists of myself, as Chairman, the senior member for the Liberties, Mr. Andrews, and the junior member for Connaught Ward, Mrs. Coverdale, who was, unfortunately, unable to be here today – was charged with a general survey of the development plans of this Council—”

  “We’re a mixed bag,” Chris Sellinge had once said to Anthony.

  Around the long, horseshoe-shaped Council table, itself reputedly five hundred years old, sat the elected representatives of the people of the Ancient Borough of Barhaven: Charlie Andrews and Willie Law from the “Liberties”, the rich farmlands which had been the delta of the River Barr before it had been diverted, and which now formed a private green belt round the inland side of the town; Ian Lawrie, Tom Allerton and Mike Viney, the North Ward representatives, a solid Radical block who spoke for the station area and the slums which lay behind it; Miss Planche who (with the absent Mrs. Coverdale) represented the Connaught Ward, and who would vote Progressive as long as her bête noire, Miss Cable, supported the Independents; Raymond Southern and Lincoln-Bright for Victoria Park; Chris Sellinge and Miss Cable, for Marine West; Jack Crawford and the redoubtable Miss Barnes, J.P., for Marine East where the big hotels stood; General Crispen, the retired Sapper, who stood alone for Splash Point; George Gulland, an almost inarticulate fisherman, whose family had represented Dollington for centuries; and, in the cen
tre, at the head of the horseshoe, looking as apprehensive as a mother who realises that her family has finally grown beyond parental control, Mrs. Lucy Lord, Mistress of the Tolls, inheritrix of Dollington Park, and three times Mayoress of Barhaven.

  “—And we came, therefore, to the unanimous conclusion that the scheme prepared for us by our consultant surveyors, Messrs. Grey Dorfer & Co., involving a lay-out of the eastern area from the fringe of the present development, in three successive phases, up to the line of Splash Point and the old river outlet, was the optimum scheme, both in its planning and its economic aspects.”

  As he sat down three people tried to get to their feet together. Chris Sellinge, who had the advantage of sitting immediately opposite the Mayoress, caught her eye.

  “I am not going to repeat what has been said by Mr. Viney—”

  “I should hope not.”

  “—And if the member for Marine East would refrain from making puerile interruptions we could get on with our business a bit faster.”

  Jack Crawford glared at the speaker, and scribbled a note which he pushed across to Raymond Southern. The Vice-Chairman glanced at it, folded it, and put it into his pocket without looking at the sender. His face was tranquil.

  “I would like, instead, to elaborate on the suggestions he has made. There seems to me to be a danger here that we ought to guard against. If the report we have just heard is put to the vote of this Council it will quite clearly be passed. It recommends what I should describe, briefly, as the eastern scheme. And this has always been the scheme favoured by the Independent Party on this Council—”

  “Mr. Sellinge,” said Southern. “I don’t want to interrupt you, or usurp your right to free speech. We’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing this morning. But could I clear up this point before we go further? If the majority on the Council finds itself in favour of the report of this committee, why shouldn’t the fact be recorded?”

  “For two reasons, Mr. Vice-Chairman. The first is that any formal decision could prejudice a matter that is already sub judice.”