What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Well that was my decision, not yours. I didn’t want them all there, gawping at you.’

  ‘Well there you are: it’s quite obvious that you don’t like them yourself, and there must be a rea–’

  There was a discreet knock on the door, and the butler’s gaunt, solemn figure took a few deferential steps into the room.

  ‘Drinks are now being served, sir. In the ante-drawing room.’

  ‘Thank you, Pyles.’ He had turned on his heels and was about to leave when Mortimer detained him. ‘Oh, Pyles?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If you could just look in and check on the children. We left them in the nursery. They were with Nurse Gannet, but you know how she … dozes, sometimes.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ He paused and added, before withdrawing: ‘And may I offer you, sir, on behalf of all the staff, our warmest congratulations, and many happy returns of the day.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

  ‘Our pleasure, sir.’

  He made a silent exit. Mortimer walked over to the window and stood behind his wife, whose gaze remained fixed on the pitiless landscape.

  ‘Well, we’d better be getting downstairs.’

  Rebecca did not move.

  ‘The kids’ll be fine. He’ll keep an eye on them. He’s an absolute brick, really.’

  ‘I hope they don’t break anything. Their games always seem so violent, and then we’d never hear the end of it from Lawrence.’

  ‘It’s Roddy who’s the little devil. He goads Hilary on. She’s a sweet little thing.’

  ‘They’re both as bad as each other.’

  Mortimer began stroking her neck. He could feel her nervousness.

  ‘Darling, you’re shivering.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’ He sat beside her and impulsively she nestled against his shoulder, like a bird seeking refuge. ‘I’m all of a flutter. I can hardly bear to face them.’

  ‘If it’s Tabitha you’re worried about –’

  ‘Not just Tabitha –’

  ‘– then you’ve nothing to be afraid of. She’s changed completely in the last couple of years. She and Lawrence even talked for a little while this afternoon. I honestly think she’s forgotten that whole business about Godfrey: she doesn’t even remember who he was. She’s been writing these nice letters to Lawrence from the – from the home, and he’s said the whole thing’s forgiven and forgotten as far as he’s concerned, so I don’t think there’ll be any trouble from that quarter tonight. The doctors say she’s more or less back to normal.’

  Mortimer heard the hollowness of these words and hated himself for it. Only that afternoon he had seen evidence of his sister’s continued eccentricity, when he had surprised her in the course of a walk around the wildest and most far-flung reaches of the grounds. He had been emerging from the hounds’ graveyard and was about to strike out in the direction of the croquet lawn when he caught what seemed to be a glimpse of Tabitha crouched in one of the densest areas of shrubbery. As he approached, without making a sound for fear of alarming her, he was dismayed to find that she was muttering to herself. His heart sank: it seemed that he had, after all, been too optimistic about her condition, and perhaps too precipitate in suggesting that she should be allowed to attend the family party. Unable to make out anything intelligible from her broken mumbles and whispers, he had coughed politely, whereupon Tabitha gave a little scream of shock, there was a violent rustling from the bushes, and she burst out a few seconds later, nervously brushing the twigs and thorns from her clothing and almost speechless with confusion.

  ‘I – Morty, I had no idea, I – I was just …’

  ‘I didn’t mean to surprise you, Tabs. It’s just —’

  ‘Not at all, I was – I was out for a walk, and I saw – I thought I’d explore … Heavens, what must you think of me? I’m mortified. Morty-fied, in front of Morty …’

  Her voice died, and she coughed: a high, anxious cough. To ward off a heavy silence, Mortimer said:

  ‘Magnificent, isn’t it? This garden. I don’t know how they keep it so well.’ He took a deep breath. ‘That jasmine. Just smell it.’

  Tabitha didn’t reply. Her brother took her by the arm and walked her back towards the terrace.

  He had not mentioned this incident to Rebecca.

  ‘It’s not just Tabitha. It’s this whole house.’ Rebecca turned towards him and for the first time that evening looked deep into his eyes. ‘If we ever came to live here, darling, I should die. I’m sure I would.’ She shuddered. ‘There’s something about this place.’

  ‘Why on earth should we come to live here? What a silly thing to say.’

  ‘Who else is going to take it over when Lawrence is gone? He’s got no sons to leave it to; and you’re his only brother, now.’

  Mortimer gave an irritable laugh; it was clear he wanted the subject dropped. ‘I very much doubt if I shall outlive Lawrence. He’s got a good many more years in him yet.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right,’ said Rebecca, after a while. She took a long, last look at the moors, then gathered up her pearls from the dresser and fastened them carefully. Outside the dogs were howling for their supper.

  ∗

  Poised in the doorway leading from the Great Hall, her own small hand folded tightly in Mortimer’s, Rebecca found herself confronted by a roomful of Winshaws. There were no more than a dozen of them, but to her it seemed like a vast, numberless throng, whose braying and mewling voices merged into a single unintelligible clamour. Within seconds she and her husband had been pounced upon, separated, absorbed into the crowd, patted and touched and kissed, welcomed and congratulated, plied with drink, their news solicited, their health inquired after. Rebecca could not distinguish half of the faces; she didn’t even know who she was talking to, some of the time, and her recollection of each conversation would forever afterwards be hazy and unfocused.

  For our part, meanwhile, we should seize the opportunity offered by this gathering to become more closely acquainted with four particular members of the family.

  ∗

  Here, for one, is Thomas Winshaw: thirty-seven, unmarried, and still having to justify himself to his mother Olivia, in whose eyes all his glittering success in the financial world counts for nothing beside his continued failure to start a family of his own. Now she listens tight-lipped as he tries to put a favourable gloss on a new development in his career which clearly strikes her as more frivolous than most.

  ‘Mother, you can get an extremely high return from investing in films these days. You’ve only got to be involved with one really big hit, you see, and you’re sitting on an absolute fortune. Enough to compensate for a dozen failures.’

  ‘If you were just in it for the money you’d have my blessing, you know you would,’ says Olivia. Her Yorkshire accent is thicker than her brothers’ and sister’s, but her mouth has the same downward, humourless turn. ‘The Lord knows, you’ve shown yourself clever enough where that’s concerned. But Henry’s told me what your real motives are, so don’t try to deny it. Actresses. That’s what you’re after. You like being able to tell them you can get them a job in the pictures.’

  ‘You do talk nonsense sometimes, Mother. You should listen to yourself.’

  ‘I just don’t want any member of this family making a fool of himself, that’s all. They’re no better than whores, most of those women, and you’ll only end up catching something nasty.’

  But Thomas, who feels for his mother no more or less than he feels for most people – namely, such contempt that he seldom considers them worth arguing with – merely smiles. Something about her last remark seems to amuse him, and his eyes take on a cold glaze of private reminiscence. He is thinking, in fact, that his mother is quite wide of the mark: for his interest in young actresses, strong as it is, does not extend to physical contact. His real interest is in watching, not touching, and so for Thomas the principal benefit of his new-found role in the film industry lies in the excuse it gives h
im to visit the studios whenever he wants. Thus he is able to turn up during the filming of scenes which, on the screen, will simply offer innocent titillation, but which in the actual making provide perfect opportunities for the serious voyeur. Bedroom scenes; bathroom scenes; sunbathing scenes; scenes involving missing bikini tops and vanishing soap suds and falling towels. He has friends, spies, minions among the cast and camera crew to alert him in advance whenever such a scene is about to be shot. He has even persuaded editors to give him access to discarded footage, sequences which turned out to be too revealing for inclusion in the final cut. (For Thomas has started out by investing in comedies, modestly budgeted, reliably popular entertainments starring the likes of Sid James, Kenneth Connor, Jimmy Edwards and Wilfrid Hyde-White.) From these, he likes to clip his favourite images and turn them into slides which he will project on to the wall of his office in Cheapside late at night, long after his employees have gone home. So much cleaner, so much more personal, so much less risky than the tedious business of inviting actresses back to his house, making them absurd promises, all that fumbling and coercion. Thomas is annoyed with Henry, then, not so much for giving away secrets to his mother, as for implying that his own motives could be quite so commonplace and demeaning.

  ‘You shouldn’t take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,’ he now says, with a chilly smile. ‘After all, he is a politician.’

  ∗

  And here is Henry, Thomas’s younger brother, already recognized as one of the most ambitious Labour MPs of his generation. Their relationship goes beyond the ordinary ties of blood and extends to a number of common business interests, for Henry has a seat on the board of several companies generously supported by Thomas’s bank. Should anyone have the temerity to suggest a conflict of loyalty between these activities and the socialist ideals which he professes so loudly in the House of Commons, Henry has a variety of well-rehearsed answers. He is used to dealing with naïve questions, which is why he is able to laugh airily as his young cousin Mark shoots him a teasing glance and says:

  ‘So, I take it you’ll be travelling back to London first thing tomorrow morning, in time for the demonstration? We all know that you Labour bods are in cahoots with CND.’

  ‘Some of my colleagues will undoubtedly be attending. You won’t find me there. There are no votes in the nuclear issue, for one thing. Most of the people in this country recognize the unilateralists for what they are: a bunch of cranks.’ He pauses to allow one of the under-footmen to refill their glasses of champagne. ‘Do you know the best bit of news I’ve heard all month?’

  ‘Bertrand Russell getting seven days in the slammer?’

  ‘That did bring a smile to my face, I must say. But I was thinking more about Khrushchev. I suppose you’ve heard that he’s started testing H-bombs again, out in the Arctic or somewhere?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Ask Thomas what that did to shares in the munitions companies a couple of days later. Through the roof, they went. Through the bloody roof. We made a few hundred grand overnight. I’m telling you, earlier this year, with Gagarin coming over and everyone talking about a bit of a thaw, things were beginning to look a bit shaky. I didn’t like the look of it at all. Thank God it turned out to be a flash in the pan. First the Wall goes up, and now the Russkies start letting off fireworks again. Looks like we’re back in business.’ He drains his glass and pats his cousin affectionately. ‘Of course, I can talk to you like this, because you’re family.’

  ∗

  Mark Winshaw digests this information in silence. Perhaps because he never knew his own father, Godfrey, he has always regarded his cousins as paternal figures and looked to them for guidance. (His mother has attempted to offer him guidance too, of course, has tried to inculcate her own values and codes of conduct, but he has, from an early age, made a point of ignoring her.) He has already learned a great deal from Thomas and Henry, about how to make money, and how the divisions and conflicts between lesser, weaker-minded men can be exploited for personal gain. He will be going up to Oxford in a few weeks’ time, and has just spent the summer working in a minor administrative capacity at the office of Thomas’s bank in Cheapside.

  ‘It was so kind of you to give him that job,’ Mildred now says to Thomas. ‘I do hope he wasn’t a nuisance or anything.’

  Mark’s expression is one of undiluted hatred, but his glance goes unnoticed, and he says nothing.

  ‘Not at all,’ Thomas answers. ‘He was very useful to have around. In fact he made quite an impression on my colleagues. Quite an impression.’

  ‘Really? In what way?’

  Thomas proceeds to tell the story of a discussion which took place between senior members of the bank over lunch in the City one Friday afternoon: a lunch to which Mark had been invited. The conversation had turned to the recent resignation of one of the partners over the role taken by the bank in the Kuwait crisis. Thomas feels called upon to explain the details of this crisis to Mildred, assuming that, as a woman, she won’t know anything about it. He therefore tells her how Kuwait was declared an independent Sheikdom in June, and how, only one week later, Brigadier-General Kassem had announced his intention of absorbing it into his own country, claiming that according to historical precedent it had always been an ‘integral part of Iraq’. He reminds her that Kuwait had appealed to the British government for military support, which had been promised by both the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, and the Lord Privy Seal, Edward Heath; and that, since the first week of July, more than six thousand British troops had been moved to Kuwait from Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, the United Kingdom and Germany, establishing a sixty-mile defence line only five miles from the border in readiness for an Iraqi attack.

  ‘The thing is,’ says Thomas, ‘that this junior partner fellow, Pemberton-Oakes, couldn’t stomach the fact that we were still lending enormous sums of money to the Iraqis to help them keep their army going. He said that they were the enemy, and we were more or less at war with them, so we shouldn’t be giving them any help at all. He said it was Kuwait we should be dealing with as a matter of principle – I think that was the word he used – even though their borrowing requirements were pretty negligible and the bank wouldn’t get much out of it in the long run. Well, there we all were, with people chipping in on both sides, putting the alternative points of view, when somebody had the bright idea of asking young Mark what he thought.’

  ‘And what did he think?’ asks Mildred, with a resigned note to her voice.

  Thomas chuckles. ‘He said it was perfectly obvious, as far as he could see. He said we should be lending money to both sides, of course, and if war broke out we should lend them even more, so they could be kept at it for as long as possible, using up more and more equipment and losing more and more men and getting more and more heavily in our debt. You should have seen their faces! Well, it was probably what they’d all been thinking, you see, but he was the only one who had the nerve to come right out with it.’ He turns to Mark, whose face has remained, throughout this conversation, a perfect blank. ‘You’ll go a long way in the banking business, Mark, old boy. A long way.’

  Mark smiles. ‘Oh, I don’t think banking is for me, to be honest. I intend to be more in the thick of things. But thanks for giving me the opportunity, all the same. I certainly learned a thing or two.’

  He turns and crosses the room, conscious that his mother’s eyes have never left him.

  ∗

  Mortimer now approaches Dorothy Winshaw, the stolid, ruddy-faced daughter of Lawrence and Beatrice, who is standing alone in a corner of the room, her lips set in their usual petulant, ferocious pout.

  ‘Well, well,’ says Mortimer, straining to inject a note of cheerfulness into his voice. ‘And how’s my favourite niece?’ (Dorothy is, by the way, his only niece, so his use of this epithet is a touch disingenuous.) ‘Not long now before the happy event. A bit of excitement in the air, I dare say?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ says Dorothy, sounding anything but exci
ted. Mortimer’s reference is to the fact that she will shortly, at the age of twenty-five, be married off to George Brunwin, one of the county’s most successful and well-liked farmers.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ says Mortimer. ‘Surely you must be feeling a little … well …’

  ‘I feel exactly what you would expect in any woman,’ Dorothy cuts in, ‘who knows that she is about to marry one of the biggest fools in the world.’

  Mortimer looks around to see whether her fiancé, who has also been invited to the party, might have heard this remark. Dorothy doesn’t seem to care.

  ‘What on earth can you mean?’

  ‘I mean that if he doesn’t grow up, soon, and join the rest of us in the twentieth century, he and I aren’t going to have a penny between us in five years’ time.’

  ‘But Brunwin’s is one of the best-run farms for miles around. That’s common knowledge.’

  Dorothy snorts. ‘Just because he went to agricultural college twenty years ago, that doesn’t mean that George has a clue what’s going on in the modern world. He doesn’t even know what a conversion rate is, for God’s sake.’

  ‘A conversion rate?’

  ‘The ratio,’ Dorothy explains patiently, as if to a dim-witted farmhand, ‘of how much food you put in to an animal, compared to what you get out of it in the end, by way of meat. Really, all you have to do is read a few issues of Farming Express, and it all becomes perfectly clear. You’ve heard of Henry Saglio, I suppose?’

  ‘Politician, isn’t he?’

  ‘Henry Saglio is an American chicken farmer who’s been promising great things for the British housewife. He’s managed to breed a new strain of broiler which grows to three and a half pounds in nine weeks, with a feed conversion rate of 2.3. He uses the most up-to-date and intensive methods.’ Dorothy is growing animated; more animated than Mortimer has ever seen her in his life. Her eyes are aglow. ‘And here’s George, the bloody simpleton, still letting his chickens scratch around in the open air as if they were household pets. Not to mention his veal calves, which are allowed to sleep on straw and get more exercise than his blasted dogs do, probably. And he wonders why he doesn’t get good white meat out of them!’