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 glaucoma, 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 earthshe 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.’