No—I’d open it now. Some things you can’t put off. I ripped at the envelope and scanned its contents.
“Bastard money people!” I snarled. I threw the letter down and went back to looking at my veins. It was no consolation the broker had himself lost money in the venture. What mattered to me was that he had, in advising me to buy those shares, helped turn £20,000 into slightly under £2,000. Unless gold recovered pretty sharpish, I was stuffed—no more swanning about as the gentleman-scholar.
But you don’t inject in this frame of mind. I got up again and went back to the mirror. Was the faint slittiness about my eyes more or less pronounced? Hard to say in this light, though it couldn’t be much changed from the day before. I put up a hand and stretched an eye wider open. The larger patch of whiteness only showed up the dark brown of the iris.
I felt I was about to cry. Instead, I stiffened my upper lip and smiled. That certainly increased the slittiness. But, whatever the change in the past day, it had been far more pronounced when I was a boy. I’d been in my second year at Lord Sittingbourne when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. For a week, I’d been the most popular boy in my form. I’d even put on an all-purpose Oriental accent picked up from Saturday morning pictures.
“You are what you are, old boy,” I said to myself. I smiled again. If I wasn’t of the pure Imperial Race, Stanhope had been right about my mother. She’d been a fine-looking woman from the north. In her veins—and now in mine—had run the blood of another imperial race that had swept out of the deserts and imposed its own sway on the inert, trashy peoples of the hotter south. Whatever his endless mockery, I had no fellowship with Pakeshi or any of the other trouble-making babus who fancied themselves as the rightful lords of India. “Courage, and shuffle the cards!” had been my mother’s last words to me. Now, if I’d shuffled badly, I could at least try to look brave.
Yes, I’d lost out on the venture. But I’d been the one to say yes—no one had put a gun to my head and made me sign the transfers. And it had all looked set fair for success. Ever since we’d gone back onto the gold standard, the price of gold had rocketed. We’d gone back on in 1950, then the Germans, then the French and Italians, then any number of riff-raff countries. Within five years, the Ministers were all wittering about changes in the silver ratio. Should there be a new fix of twenty four shillings to the pound? Or should we keep the old numerical ratio, but mint heavier shillings? Who could have expected the Russians to pay off some of their debts by dumping a straight thousand tons of gold on the market? That had killed all talk of the reminting. And it had buggered the South African mines good and proper. One day, the union leaders out there and the mine owners had all been at each other’s throats. A single announcement to the cameras in Moscow, and they’d all fallen sobbing into each other’s arms.
Once again, I smiled. I stretched out on the bed and undid my collar buttons. A week after the bottom had dropped out of gold, I’d sat with Harold Macmillan. He and Churchill had been close in the ‘30s, and, now Eden was back on the lithium salts, there was no better source for opposition to the first Munich Settlement—the failed one, that is, where Hitler had tried to make us look stupid. We’d sat for an hour, going through the diplomatic and financial meltdown that had looked inevitable in March 1939. Scary stuff it had looked too, even if Big Mac was still—though quietly—more bullish about its longer outcome than I now felt. More interesting had been his relief about the gold collapse. If wages hadn’t fallen much, the headlong drop in all other prices had caused havoc in the rental markets. The Government’s official line was that the fall in general prices below their 1914 level should be welcomed. In private, Macmillan was still talking up his old friend Keynes and his schemes for printing everybody rich. He’d been out of office when gold was restored. Now, he was rubbing his hands at the thought of the boost the fall in gold would give to computers and drugs and chemicals and electricals and all the other goodies in the “family silver”. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps, whatever embarrassments I might be facing, it would be good for the country.
I looked over at the Queen and gave her a brief salute. She was on her throne, and the pound was worth a pound. And, failing an actual bankruptcy in my gold company, I remained a player in the game. For the moment, I was stuffed. I needed those royalties. And I’d need to make a few economies. But the game was by no means over.
I jabbed in the needle and winced at the now unfamiliar pain. Just a few days earlier, possessing even an empty syringe would have let the Republican Guards do to me what they’d done to poor Greenspan. Now, I was at home with all the comforts of home. In a moment, I’d feel much better. Much later on, I’d think how to avoid the indignity, some time before Christmas, of a begging letter to my cousins in Sheffield.
CHAPTER SIX
I sat on my bed and pressed the remote control to switch channel. I might as well have switched the set off. It was another documentary.
It was Thursday the 16 March 1939, went the solemn commentary over the usual black and white footage. The Fuhrer had spent twenty two hours in Prague to inspect his latest conquest. During this time, the people of that city had barely been aware of his presence in the Castle. But as the Mercedes accelerated to carry him back to the railway station, one of the armoured cars forming his guard got stuck in the tramlines that lay just beyond the Wenzelsplatz. The Fuhrer’s car swerved to avoid this. On the frozen cobblestones….
And so it went on with leaden predictability. How anyone watching this hadn’t seen it all a hundred times before was a mystery. But it had been made for morning television. There might be a backward schoolboy somewhere in England watching it for the first time. I pulled the blankets back over my knees and took another sip of the hot coffee. We were now being shown the gigantic funeral in Berlin—all Wagner and fluttering banners. Then it was a surprisingly youthful—not to mention still rather slim—Goering giving the eulogy. You’d never think from the tears running down his face that he’d already signed the arrest warrants for everyone else who might get in his way. But now we were back into colour, and there was some Jewboy with a Swastika on his arm smoothly explaining how the Nuremberg Decrees were only ever meant to be a short term defence against the Bolshevik Menace. There was what should have been an entertaining divergence between the spoken German and the subtitles. But I was in no mood for entertainment, and the subtitles were now being distorted by some most provoking interference.
“How much more of this fucking drivel?” I snarled softly as I flicked through the other ten channels. It was all Hitler, Hitler, and more bloody Hitler. And there were still six days to go till the actual anniversary. But I do exaggerate. One of the channels was showing an Enid Blyton cartoon. Another was nearing the end of a Hollywood film from the old days. But there was no Churchill. Had everyone completely forgotten him? “Nothing big after Gallipoli!” that bitch had claimed. “Arid financial stuff!” Did the first restoration of the gold standard count for nothing?
I pressed the wireless button on the remote control and got the Third Programme. It was Carl Orff’s Requiem for the Fuhrer. I ground my teeth at the percussive mournfulness and the hissy interference, and stabbed viciously at the off button. I threw the blankets aside. At least, the heating was fully up. Good old Hotpoint. Even if I couldn’t eat, I’d not freeze. I went into the bathroom for a pee. Then I washed a dead spider down the plughole and ran a very hot bath. I was still stewing there over my second cigarette, when the telephone rang. I reached out with my free hand for the extension receiver.