by Jonathan Coe
Among themselves, his colleagues would puzzle over this curious blind spot. The amount of money involved was negligible, in Stewards’ terms: but it was still the only time in Thomas’s fifteen-odd years of chairmanship that he had persisted in offering uncritical support to a palpably loss-making enterprise. And they never did guess the real reason, which was that he was enraptured with the sharp picture quality and perfect still frames offered by the video disc, which suited his own needs so admirably and took him back to the heady, exhilarating days when he used to hang around the film studios and collect discarded footage of beautiful young actresses in various stages of déshabillé. The freeze frame, for Thomas, was the very raison d’être of video: he was convinced that it would turn Britain into a nation of voyeurs, and sometimes, as he sat spellbound in the dark with the television on, his fly buttons undone and the door to his office securely locked, he would imagine identical scenes being played out in curtained rooms up and down the country, and would feel a strange solidarity with the great mass of ordinary men from whose pitiful lives he normally took such care to insulate himself.
Only once, incidentally, did he forget to lock the office door. It was about seven o’clock in the evening and as luck would have it his secretary, who was also working late, made the mistake of entering without knocking. She was sacked on the spot; but the story still managed to make its way into a few of the City wine bars, and some people maintain that the phrase ‘merchant banker’ was introduced into the currency of rhyming slang at precisely this time.
∗
Thomas loved screens of every description. He loved the lie they sustained: that the world could be given shape by the four sides of a rectangle, and that he, the spectator, was in a position to sit back and watch, untouched and unobserved. In his professional life (not that he had any personal life to speak of) he was at constant pains to screen himself off from the world, which he watched as if it were a silent film from behind the protecting glass of many different screens: the window of a first-class railway carriage, for instance, or of Bob Maxwell’s helicopter (which he was occasionally allowed to borrow), or the smoke-tinted, one-way glass of his private limousine. The computerization of the foreign exchange markets, which alarmed some of the older bankers, seemed to him an entirely logical development. So did the abandonment of the stock exchange floor in 1986. At last, to his delight, there was no longer any need for dealers ever to come into contact with one another, and every transaction was reduced to the flicker of electric pulses on a video screen. He had a camera installed in Stewards’ own foreign trading room, connected to a monitor in his office, and here, staring at a screen which all day showed nothing but row upon row of his traders, themselves staring at screens, he would swell with quasi-sexual sensations of pride and power. It seemed, at such moments, that there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day’s intoxicating speculations. Banking, as he once told a television interviewer, had become the most spiritual of all professions. He would quote his favourite statistic: one thousand billion dollars of trading took place on the world’s financial markets every day. Since every transaction involved a two-way deal, this meant that five hundred billion dollars would be changing hands. Did the interviewer know how much of that money derived from real, tangible trade in goods and services? A fraction: 10 per cent, maybe less. The rest was all commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist. In that case (countered the interviewer) surely the whole system was nothing but a castle built on sand. Perhaps, agreed Thomas, smiling: but what a glorious castle it was …
Watching his foreign exchange dealers as they stared feverishly at their flickering screens, Thomas came as close as he would ever come to feeling paternal love. They were the sons he had never had. This was during the happiest time of his life, the early to mid 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher had transformed the image of the City and turned the currency speculators into national heroes by describing them as ‘wealth creators’, alchemists who could conjure unimaginable fortunes out of thin air. The fact that these fortunes went straight into their own pockets, or those of their employers, was quietly overlooked. The nation, for a brief, heady period, was in awe of them.
Things were very different when Thomas had first come to work for Stewards: the City was still recovering from the ordeal of the Bank Rate Tribunal which, for two weeks in December 1957, had exposed some of its dealings for the first time to public view. Labour MPs and the popular newspapers had been raising scandalized eyebrows over revelations of multi-million-pound deals being passed through on a nod and a wink in the comfort of gentlemen’s clubs, on Saturday morning golf courses and weekend grouse-shooting parties. Although all of the merchant banks involved had been cleared of the charge of acting upon ‘improperly disclosed’ information about the raising of the Bank Rate, a distinct whiff of scandal lingered in the air, and it remained true that hefty amounts of gilt-edged stock had been unloaded on to the market in the days (and hours) before the Chancellor’s announcement. For Thomas, who had become a director of Stewards in the spring of that year, it had been a bruising initiation: Macmillan may have been proclaiming in Bedford that the economy was strong and the country had ‘never had it so good’, but the foreign speculators thought differently, and embarked upon a fierce campaign of selling sterling short, wiping millions of dollars off the gold reserves and forcing an eventual 2 per cent rise in the Bank Rate (up to 7 per cent, its highest for more than a century).
‘It was what you might call a baptism by fire,’ Thomas had explained to his young cousin Mark, who was employed in a junior capacity at the bank in the summer of 1961. ‘We cleaned up, of course, but to be frank I don’t expect to see another sterling crisis like it during my time at Stewards.’
And yet something similar did take place, on September 16th 1992 (Black Wednesday, as it came to be called), when the currency dealers once again managed to raid the country’s gold reserves to the tune of billions of dollars, and this time force a devaluation of sterling into the bargain. Thomas was right in one respect, however: he never did see it happen. He had lost the use of his eyes by then.
∗
Thomas’s world had always been apprehended entirely through the eyes: this was why (among other things) he never felt any desire to touch or to be touched by women. All great men have their idiosyncracies, and his, unsurprisingly, was a neurotic preoccupation with the quality of his eyesight. A private medicine cabinet in his office contained a vast array of eyewashes, moisturizers, baths and drops, and for thirty years the only fixed item in his timetable was a weekly visit to his ophthalmologist, at nine-thirty every Monday morning. The doctor in question might have found this arrangement trying had not Thomas’s obsession been earning him a ludicrous amount in consultation fees. There wasn’t a single ailment in the textbook which he did not believe to have contracted at some time or another. He fancied that he had arc eye, cat’s eye, pink eye and cystic eye; gas eye, hare eye, hot eye and lazy eye; ox eye, Klieg eye, reduced eye, schematic eye, scotopic eye, aphacic eye, squinting eye and cross eye. Once, after a fact-finding visit to some hop fields, he became convinced that he had hop eye (acute conjunctivitis found in hop-pickers, caused by irritation from the spinal hairs of the hop plant); after a visit to a shipyard, that he had shipyard eye (epidemic keratoconjunctivitis, an infection spread by contaminated fluids in the busy eye casualty stations found at shipyards); and after a visit to Nairobi, that he had Nairobi eye (a severe ocular lesion caused by the secretions of certain vesicating beetles common in Nairobi). On another occasion, when his mother made the mistake of telling him that his grandfather Matthew Winshaw had suffered from a congenital form of glaucoma, he had cancelled all his banking engagements for three days and booked himself a succession of round-the-clock specialist appointments. In turn he was tested for absolute glaucoma, capsular glau
coma, compensated glaucoma, congestive glaucoma, haemorrhagic glaucoma, inflammatory glaucoma, inverse glaucoma, obverse glaucoma, malignant glaucoma, benign glaucoma, open-angle glaucoma, closed-angle glaucoma, postinflammatory glaucoma, preinflammatory glaucoma, infantile glaucoma and myxomatosis. Thomas Winshaw’s eyes were insured (with Stewards’ own insurance company) for a sum variously rumoured to be between £100,000 and £1 million. There was no organ, in other words, which he valued more highly; and that includes the one towards which his right hand could sometimes scarcely stop itself from wandering – most memorably, perhaps, on the day he entertained a surprised but politely speechless Queen and Prince Charles to sherry in his freshly red-carpeted office.
∗
When the Conservative government announced that they were abolishing free eye tests on the NHS in April 1988, Thomas phoned his brother Henry to tell him that they were making a big mistake: there would be a public outcry. Henry told him that he was overreacting. There would be a whimper of protest from the usual quarters, he said, and then it would all quietly die down.
‘And I was right, wasn’t I?’
‘I should have bowed to your political judgment, as always.’
‘Well, it’s quite simple, really.’ Henry leaned forward and threw another log on the fire. It was a cold, dark afternoon in early October 1989, and they were enjoying tea and muffins in one of the Heartland Club’s private rooms. ‘The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than … a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at a time.’
Thomas nodded and bit eagerly into his muffin.
‘Unemployment, for instance,’ Henry continued. ‘When was the last time you saw a newspaper headline about unemployment? Nobody gives a hoot any more.’
‘I know: and all this is very reassuring, old boy,’ said Thomas, ‘but what I really want is some concrete guarantee …’
‘Of course you do. Of course.’ Henry frowned and focused his mind upon the matter in hand, which was the case of Farzad Bazoft, a British journalist recently imprisoned in Baghdad on charges of espionage. ‘I understand your point entirely. You and Mark want to protect your investments: I can quite sympathize with that.’
‘Well, it isn’t even just Mark. We’ve got plenty of other clients besides Vanguard who are doing very nicely servicing Saddam and his shopping list. We’re all committed up to our necks, frankly.’
‘You don’t have to remind me.’
‘Yes, but look: this sounds to me like a very delicate situation. This man’s a British subject. Surely this new chap at the Foreign Office – Major, or whatever his name is – is going to come under a bit of pressure to get him released.’
Henry raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. ‘How could he possibly do that?’
‘Well, sanctions, of course.’
‘Really,’ said Henry, laughing out loud, ‘I’m amazed that you think we’d even contemplate such a thing. We’ve got a $700 million surplus with Iraq. Confidentially, there’s going to be another four or five hundred where that came from in a month or two. If you think we’re going to jeopardize all of that …’
He tailed off: the sentence didn’t need finishing.
‘Yes, but what about Mark’s little … line of business?’
This time Henry’s laughter was shorter, more private. ‘Put it this way: how on earth can we impose sanctions on something, when we’re not even selling it in the first place. Mm?’
Thomas smiled. ‘Well, I can see you have a point there.’
‘I know Major hasn’t been in the job for long and we’re all a bit worried that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s playing at. But take it from me – he’s a good boy. He does what he’s told.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘And besides, he might be moving again soon.’
‘What, already?’
‘It looks that way. Margaret and Nigel seem to be heading for a final bust-up. We suspect there’ll be a vacancy at Number Eleven pretty soon.’
Thomas tucked this information away at the back of his mind for future reference. It had considerable implications, which he would need to contemplate and examine at his leisure.
‘Do you think they’ll hang him?’ he asked suddenly.
Henry shrugged. ‘Well, he was a rotten chancellor, it has to be said, but that would be a bit drastic.’
‘No, no, not Lawson. I mean this journo character. Bazoft.’
‘Oh, him. I dare say they will, yes. That’s what happens if you’re silly enough to get caught snooping around Saddam’s arms factories, I suppose.’
‘Making trouble.’
‘Exactly.’ Henry stared into space for a moment. ‘I must say, there are one or two snoopers over here that I wouldn’t mind seeing strung up on Ludgate Hill, if it came to that.’
‘Nosey parkers.’
‘Precisely.’ Briefly a frown crossed his face, comprised half of malevolence and half recollection. ‘I wonder whatever happened to that scruffy little writer that Mad Tabs set on us a few years back?’
‘Him! Good God, that fellow got up my nose. What on earth she was thinking of …’ He shook his head. ‘Well, anyway: she’s just a poor witless old fool …’
‘You spoke to that chap, then, did you?’
‘Invited him up to the office. Gave him lunch. The works. All I got in return was a lot of impertinent questions.’
‘Such as?’
‘He had a bee in his bonnet about Westland,’ said Thomas. ‘Wanted to know why Stewards had been so keen to support the American bid when there was a European one on the table.’
‘What, and he supposed you were snuggling up to Margaret in the hope of a knighthood or something, did he?’
‘Even more devious than that, I’m afraid. Although, now you come to mention it, I seem to remember there was something promised …’
Henry shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I haven’t forgotten, Thomas, really. I’m seeing her tomorrow. I’ll bring it up again.’
‘Anyway, he’d got this absurd theory that Sikorsky had tied up some huge arms deal with the Saudis, and the only reason we all wanted to climb into bed with them was to get ourselves a slice of the cake.’
‘Preposterous.’
‘Outrageous.’
‘And so what did you say to that?’
‘I sent him packing,’ said Thomas, ‘with a few choice words once directed at myself, on one very memorable occasion, by the late, great and much lamented Sid James.’
‘Oh?’
‘I said – and here I quote from memory – “Do us all a favour, laughing boy: piss off out of it and don’t come back.” ’
And then the room echoed as Thomas attempted his own version of the comedian’s smoky, inimitable laugh.
∗
It had happened in the late spring of 1961. Thomas arrived at Twickenham Studios at about lunchtime and made his way to the restaurant, where he spied three vaguely familiar faces at a corner table. One of them was Dennis Price, still best known for his leading role in Kind Hearts and Coronets twelve years earlier; another was the wizened, eccentric Esma Cannon, who reminded Thomas irresistibly of his mad Aunt Tabitha, still confined to a high-security asylum somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire moors; and the third, unmistakably, was Sid James, one of the stars of the film currently in production – a loose comic remake of an old Boris Karloff feature, The Ghoul, under the new title What a Carve Up!
Thomas fetched himself a tray of corned beef hash and jam pudding, and went over to join them.
‘Mind if I sit here?’ he said.
‘It’s a free country, mate,’ said Sid James, indifferently.
Thomas had been int
roduced to all three actors a few weeks ago, but he could see that they didn’t recognize him, and their conversation, which had been lively, dried up when he sat beside them.
‘We have met, I believe,’ he said, after taking his first mouthful.
Sid grunted. Dennis Price said, ‘Of course,’ and then asked, ‘Are you working at the moment?’
‘Well, erm – yes,’ said Thomas, surprised.
‘What are you in?’
‘Well, I don’t know how you’d describe it really: I suppose I’m in stocks and shares.’
‘Stocks and Shares, eh?’ said Sid. ‘That’s a new one on me. Something the Boultings are cooking up, is it? Taking the lid off the City: Ian Carmichael as the innocent young bank clerk, Terry-Thomas as his conniving boss. Sounds good. Should be very droll.’
‘Not exactly: I think there might be a small misunder–’
‘Hang about, I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’ Sid had now been studying his face for a few moments. ‘Didn’t you play the vicar in Two-Way Stretch?’
‘No, silly, that was Walter Hudd,’ said Dennis, before Thomas had had the chance to deny it. ‘Surely, though, you were the policeman in Dentist in the Chair?’
‘No, no, no,’ said Esma. ‘That was Stuart Saunders. Darling Stuart. But didn’t I see you in Watch Your Stern?’
‘Come off it – I was in that one,’ said Sid. ‘You think I wouldn’t remember? No, I’ve got it: Follow That Horse. You were one of the spies.’
‘Or was it Inn for Trouble?’
‘Or Life is a Circus?’
‘Or School for Scoundrels?’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ said Thomas, raising his hand. ‘But you’re all quite wide of the mark. I’m no thespian, I’m afraid. When I said I was in stocks and shares, I meant it literally. I work in the City. I’m a banker.’
‘Oh.’
There was a longish silence, broken at last by Esma, who said cheerfully: ‘How fascinating.’