‘It’s subtly chosen to impress thrusting entrepreneurs, David. You are impressed?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Actually, it’s a bloody nightmare,’ he said, running his hand through his thinning hair. ‘I much preferred pinstriped suit, blue shirt and a blue tie. This way my wife laughs at me every morning. She says blue and green don’t go together. Is that true?’
‘Couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid. It’s not the kind of thing we have to worry about on our side of the fence.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t.’ He examined the menu. ‘Shall we get a bottle of wine? I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’
‘Sure.’
Henry ordered an expensive Montrachet to go with our fish.
‘OK, Henry, what’s going on?’ I asked.
Henry laughed. ‘I’m being proactive. I want you to humour me.’
‘Proactive?’
‘Yes. We had a big strategy conference at Gleneagles a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the Internet. As you can’t help but have noticed, things are hotting up. In the States websites are going public at astronomical valuations. The VCs over there are making bucket loads of dosh. It’s going to happen here and we don’t want to be left behind.’
‘Of course not.’
‘As we see it we have two choices. We can either give the next twenty-five-year-old management consultant who comes through the door with a plan to sell bagels on-line a couple of million quid, or we can work out the sectors that look interesting, find the promising firms that operate in those spaces and see if they want our money. Make sure we get to them before someone else does. I thought you were a good place to start.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I certainly am.’
‘So you’re going to give us money just like that?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Henry. ‘We’ll beg you to let us consider your business, string you along and then turn you down. We are venture capitalists after all.’
‘Henry?’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘You aren’t doing a very good job of marketing me.’
‘Aren’t I?’ He had a sly smile on his face. Henry was no fool. He knew he was hooking me with candour where bullshit would fail.
‘What about the management issues?’ I asked.
‘The rules are changing. You’ve started up. The site looks great. And you’ve got Tony Jourdan on board. Now he has made money before. Also, I know you: you’re a safe pair of hands.’
I winced. It might be true, but I didn’t want to be known as ‘a safe pair of hands’ any more. I wanted to be a successful, imaginative moneymaker. Give it time and I’d show Henry.
‘By the way,’ he said. ‘I never realized that Guy was Jourdan’s son.’
‘Sorry. We discussed telling you earlier, but Guy was dead against the idea. He wanted to raise money as his own man.’
‘Admirable, I’m sure.’ Henry sipped his wine appreciatively. ‘So. How’s Ninetyminutes getting on?’
I told him. I incorporated all Guy’s ideas for an accelerated roll-out into Europe and an early start on merchandising. I told him the visitor numbers and extrapolated them wildly.
‘Golly, David,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve never seen you that excited about anything before.’
I smiled. ‘Really?’ I thought about it. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘To do all that we need ten million pounds now, and maybe another twenty in six months.’
‘So Orchestra does this round and then we float the company in the spring?’
‘That will work. We should have a great story by then.’
‘Sounds good. Will you give us an exclusive to look at the deal?’
I couldn’t help laughing. Here was a venture capitalist asking me for the business.
‘Hey, that’s not fair!’ Henry protested.
‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to discuss it with Guy.’
‘You’ll let me know?’
‘I’ll let you know, Henry.’
Guy went for it. The following Monday, Henry arrived in our offices with his associate, Clare Douglas, a small, slim, no-nonsense Scottish woman with wispy blonde hair and enquiring grey eyes. They crawled all over us, asking everyone about everything. I was impressed by Henry’s thoroughness, but Clare was particularly well prepared. She must have spent the weekend scouring the web for everything she could find on football. She was a tenacious interrogator, picking up on any hesitation or waffle from any of us and pinning us down until she had the details right.
Henry asked Guy, myself, Ingrid, Gaz and Owen for references, several each. We were all happy to oblige, apart from Guy. I overheard his conversation on the subject with Henry. He refused, saying that since his previous career was acting there was no one who would have anything relevant to say about him. Henry didn’t back down: in fact he became more persistent. In the end Guy got away with giving him the phone numbers of his agents in London and Hollywood. Henry left him alone, but he didn’t look satisfied.
Neither was I.
After Henry had gone, leaving Clare to her interrogation of Sanjay, I voiced my fears to Guy. ‘Henry thinks you’re hiding something.’
Guy nodded.
‘Are you?’
Guy looked me in the eye. ‘Fancy a walk?’
We strolled out into the small street, bathed in the gentle sunlight of an Indian summer, and made our way north towards Clerkenwell Green.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘I had a bad time in LA,’ Guy said.
‘So I can imagine.’
‘No, it was worse than London. I totally lost it. Not just drink. Drugs. Lots of them. Very little work. I became low, very low. Clinical depression, they called it. I went to see a shrink.’
‘What did he say?’
‘She had lots to say. I have issues, Davo. Issues with my father. Issues with my mother. Issues with Dominique. She almost wet herself when I told her what had happened in France. To hear her talk about it, I’m lucky I’m not a psychopath.’
‘I can’t imagine you depressed,’ I said.
‘Can’t you?’ Guy replied quickly, his eyes searching mine.
He was asking me to think about it, so I did. Guy the charmer, Guy with the capability to make everyone around him smile, Guy the centre of attention, the natural leader. But I did remember those moments of inexplicable melancholy at school, when he brooded over the failure of a particular girl to fall for him, or just brooded over nothing at all. I had dismissed them at the time as just silly. Guy had the perfect life, everybody knew that.
But perhaps he didn’t.
‘One day I woke up fully clothed on the floor of some guy’s apartment in Westwood feeling like shit. Worse than shit. It took me twenty minutes to realize it was Monday morning and another ten to figure out I was supposed to be at an audition for a part in a TV pilot. It could have been my big break. There was no way I was going to make it.
‘The guy whose apartment it was came in. He was only a few years older than me, but he looked closer to forty. “What’s up, John,” he said. He didn’t even know my name! I’d gone there on Saturday night. Sunday had just disappeared.
‘I had an appointment to see the therapist that afternoon. She wanted me to talk about my mother and my feelings about her. Which I did. My brain felt like mush.
‘Then she began talking. About how I was angry with my father, how my mother hadn’t met my expectations, I don’t know, some psychobabble. I was sitting there, and suddenly my brain cleared. She was talking bullshit. It was all bullshit. I was the one who had got myself on to that floor. I was the one who was screwing up my life. And I was the one who could stop it.’