‘Problem?’ asked Gordon’s almost-equal. ‘Can I help?’
‘Do you know if Gordon meant to go any further with this?’ I asked. ‘Did he say?’
Gordon’s colleague looked the prospectus over and shook his head. ‘Who’s along there with you today?’
‘Only Alec. I asked him. He doesn’t know.’
‘Where’s John?’
‘On holiday. And Rupert is away because of his wife.’
The colleague nodded. Rupert’s wife was imminently dying: cruel at twenty-six.
‘I’d take it around,’ he said. ‘See if Gordon’s put out feelers in Research, Overseas, anywhere. Form a view yourself. Then if you think it’s worth pursuing you can take it to Val and Henry.’ Val was head of Banking and Henry was Henry Shipton. I saw that to be Gordon was a big step up indeed, and was unsure whether to be glad or sorry that the elevation would be temporary.
I spent all afternoon drifting round with the prospectus and in the process learned less about Brazil than about the tizzy over the report in What’s Going On... Soul-searching appeared to be fashionable. Long faces enquired anxiously, ‘Could one possibly... without knowing... have mentioned a takeover to an interested party?’ And the short answer to that, it seemed to me, was No, one couldn’t. Secrecy was everywhere second nature to bankers.
If the article in the paper were true there had to be three people involved; the seller, the buyer and the informant; and certainly neither the buyer nor the informant could have acted in ignorance or by chance. Greed and malice moved like worms in the dark. If one were infested by them, one knew.
Gordon seemed to have asked no one about Brazil, and for me it was make-up-your-mind time. It would have been helpful to know what the other merchant banks thought, the sixteen British accepting houses like Schroders, Hambro’s, Morgan Grenfell, Kleinwort Benson, Hill Samuel, Warburg’s, Robert Fleming, Singer and Friedlander... all permitted, like Paul Ekaterin’s, to assume that the Bank of England would come to their aid in a crisis.
Gordon’s opposite numbers in those banks would all be pursing mouths over the same prospectus, committing millions to a fruitful enterprise, pouring millions down the drain, deciding not to risk it either way.
Which?
One could hardly directly ask, and finding out via the grapevine took a little time.
I carried the prospectus finally to Val Fisher, head of Banking, who usually sat at one of the desks facing Henry Shipton, two floors up.
‘Well, Tim, what’s your own view?’ he said. A short man, very smooth, very charming, with nerves like toughened ice.
‘Gordon had reservations, obviously,’ I said. ‘I don’t know enough, and no one else here seems to. I suppose we could either make a preliminary answer of cautious interest and then find out a bit more, or just trust to Gordon’s instinct.’
He smiled faintly. ‘Which?’
Ah, which?
‘Trust to Gordon’s instinct, I think,’ I said.
‘Right.’
He nodded and I went away and wrote a polite letter to the Brazil people expressing regret. And I wouldn’t know for six or seven years, probably, whether that decision was right or wrong.
The gambles were all long term. You cast your bread on the waters and hoped it would float back in the future with butter and jam.
Mildew... too bad.
June
Gordon telephoned three weeks later sounding thoroughly fit and well. I glanced across to where his desk stood mute and tidy, with all the paper action now transferred to my own.
‘Judith and I wanted to thank you...’ he was saying.
‘Really no need,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Wasting time. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, we’ve been offered a half-share in a box at Ascot next Thursday. We thought it might be fun... We’ve six places. Would you like to come? As our guest, of course. As a thank-you.’
‘I’d love it,’ I said. ‘But...’
‘No buts,’ he interrupted. ‘If you’d like to, Henry will fix it. He’s coming himself. He agreed you’d earned a day off, so all you have to do is decide.’
‘Then I’d like to, very much.’
‘Good. If you haven’t a morning coat, don’t worry. We’re not in the Royal Enclosure.’
‘If you’re wearing one... I inherited my father’s.’
‘Ah. Good. Yes, then. One o’clock Thursday, for lunch. I’ll send the entrance tickets to you in the office. Both Judith and I are very pleased you can come. We’re very grateful. Very.’ He sounded suddenly half-embarrassed, and disconnected with a click.
I wondered how much he remembered about the white faces, but with Alec and Rupert and John all in earshot it had been impossible to ask. Maybe at the races he would tell me. Maybe not.
Going racing wasn’t something I did very often nowadays, although as a child I’d spent countless afternoons waiting around the Tote queues while my mother in pleasurable agony backed her dozens of hunches and bankers and third strings and savers and lost money by the ton.
‘I’ve won!’ she would announce radiantly to all about her, waving an indisputably winning ticket: and the bunch of losses on the same race would be thrust into a pocket and later thrown away.
My father at the same time would be standing drinks in the bar, an amiable open-fisted lush with more good nature than sense. They would take me home at the end of the day giggling happily together in a hired chauffeur-driven Rolls, and until I was quite old I never questioned but that this contented affluence was built on rock.
I had been their only child and they’d given me a very good childhood to the extent that when I thought of holidays it was of yachts on warm seas or Christmas in the Alps. The villain of those days was my uncle who descended on us occasionally to utter Dire Warnings about the need for his brother (my father) to find a job.
My father however couldn’t shape up to ‘money-grubbing’ and in any case had no real ability in any direction; and with no habit of working he had quietly scorned people who had. He never tired of his life of aimless ease, and if he earned no one’s respect, few detested him either. A weak, friendly, unintelligent man. Not bad as a father. Not good at much else.
He dropped dead of a heart attack when I was nineteen and it was then that the point of the Dire Warnings became apparent. He and mother had lived on the capital inherited from grandfather, and there wasn’t a great deal left. Enough just to see me through college; enough, with care, to bring mother a small income for life.
Not enough to finance her manner of betting, which she wouldn’t or couldn’t give up. A lot more of the Dire Warnings went unheeded, and finally, while I was trying to stem a hopeless tide by working (of all things) for a bookmaker, the bailiffs knocked on the door.
In twenty-five years, it seemed, my mother had gambled away the best part of half a million pounds; all gone on horses, fast and slow. It might well have sickened me altogether against racing, but in a curious way it hadn’t. I remembered how much she and father had enjoyed themselves: and who was to say that it was a fortune ill spent?
‘Good news?’ Alec said, eyeing my no doubt ambivalent expression.
‘Gordon’s feeling better.’
‘Hm,’ he said judiciously, ‘So he should be. Three weeks off for ‘flu’...’ He grinned. ‘Stretching it a bit.’