DAVID NOBBS
The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

For Briget, Mark and Max

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

So it had come to this

The suspicions that would overwhelm him

It was going to be one of those days

‘I really have shocked myself’

Can we be absolutely certain that they can’t lip-read?

We never said a word about Jack

The evening ended, as it had begun, in silence

A great deal nearer than the Solway Firth

Those insidious doubts

Perhaps we have intruded enough

Staring at himself with astonishment

Not such a useless lump of a nun after all

‘Shame’

His night’s work is done

A serious mistake

‘A perfect memento’

That didn’t make Sir Gordon happy at all

It began to rain

A great deal of pain

He was gone

He might yet be able to save his fortune

‘Siobhan,’ said Sir Gordon, ‘you’re a genius.’

Flat, flat, flat

Back into the real world

An opportunity had been lost

He would need a long, hot bath

There was no chance

It’s wasted already

She is even more astonished

‘I do not listen to your calls. Ever.’

And felt an answering squeeze

What hope is there?

I hope we haven’t

Beyond Gravesend

Fred Upson went pale

What the letters SFN actually stood for

He rather liked bees

A thing that they had never done before

‘I can’t afford to get rid of him’

‘Decision time’

A magic moment

He didn’t think that problem would be any easier

Suddenly he was very sober

The Great Fire of Stoke

‘I’m so sorry’

‘For Jack’

A plan was beginning to take shape

He was fibrillating wildly

It has no future either

And went to bed

The message from his wife

‘Grief makes you very hungry’

No respecter of wealth

Scrambled eggs are his favourite

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by David Nobbs

Copyright

About the Publisher

So it had come to this

He woke with a sense of shock. He had no idea who he was. Or where he was. Or who this woman was, sleeping so peacefully beside him.

Oh God. Did he want to know who he was? Would it be an unpleasant surprise?

Later, when he told his doctor, he would estimate that this blankness, this disorientation, this absence of self, probably lasted less than a minute, maybe not even thirty seconds. At the time it seemed like an age.

What he also realized later – and this he didn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell another human being ever – was that he had experienced, in that brief moment, the first intimation of doubt. To most of us, plagued as we are by doubt, this may seem incredible, but men like this man – I feel it would be impolite, in a curious way, to give you his name before he himself has remembered it – manage to live without feeling any doubt at all, do things that would be impossible if they felt even a shred of doubt. Garibaldi, Hitler, Colonel Gaddafi, could they have done what they did if they’d had doubts? Not that I am putting our still unnamed hero in that category.

He felt something that he had not felt in his life for a very long time – real alarm. This was extremely disconcerting. He was always so completely in command of himself, prided himself on not needing an alarm clock because his body did what he told it to do; he was always in control, people thought him a control freak.

Well, that was something. That was a piece of knowledge about himself. He was a control freak. But today he was a control freak out of control. He was breaking into a sweat, he could feel the wetness of panic all over his skin.

Memory came back to him in small bits. Somebody calling him Gordon. He was Gordon somebody. This narrowed it down, but it really didn’t help all that much. Then from nowhere, in the utter darkness of the bedroom, there flashed into his mind a vivid memory of Mr Forbes-Harrison, his maths teacher, calling out, in a grim yard behind a grim school on a grim, grey morning, ‘You, Coppinger, where do you think you’re going?’ to which he had replied, to his own astonishment, as well as Mr Forbes-Harrison’s, ‘To the very top, sir.’

And with that ‘sir’ there came the thought that he hadn’t called anybody ‘sir’ for a very long time. People called him ‘sir’ now. He wasn’t just Gordon Coppinger. He was Sir Gordon Coppinger.

Now complete awareness flooded in, astonishing him. He was a great man and a rich one. He was a financier and an industrialist with a finger in many pies, ‘not all of which are steak and kidney’, as he used to say only too often, to prove that he still had a sense of humour, though many people thought it proved that he hadn’t. He owned the twenty-six-storey Coppinger Tower in Canary Wharf. In his huge and luxurious yacht, the Lady Christina, based in Cannes, he gave holidays every summer to men of power and influence.

He was a patriot and a philanthropist. He had created the Sir Gordon Coppinger Charitable Foundation, which supported many good causes. He owned the Coppinger Collection, which housed many masterpieces. The football team that he owned played at the Coppinger Stadium. It was time to get up.

Or was it? Not quite yet, perhaps. He knew who he was now, but he still wasn’t sure where he was. The darkness in the room was absolute, which suggested that he was at home, in the vast master bedroom, with its thick gold curtains and its thermal blinds. But suggestion wasn’t enough. He needed to know.

The question of where he was had no great importance in itself, beyond the necessity of finding a light switch or risk walking in the blackness straight into a row of wire coat hangers in some hotel bedroom, as had happened to a friend of his. Make that an acquaintance of his. He didn’t do friends. But until he knew where he was he couldn’t be sure of the identity of the woman who was sleeping so quietly beside him.

If it was a woman. But that had all been a very long time ago, and, surely, if it was a man, after all this time, he would have remembered. No, it was a woman. Her gentle breathing was unmistakably female.

Just occasionally, the soft breathing became a faint, whistled, wistful snore, as if she was thinking, Surely my life should be happier than this? No man’s snore could come with so many fancy adjectives attached to it. Male snores were loud, or beery, or catarrhal. Male snores were simple.

Were these slight snores Lady Coppinger’s? He wasn’t sure. Was he in the master bedroom of Rose Cottage, the cottage being ironic, and the rose reflecting Her Ladyship’s greatest interest? Or was he in a hotel? Was this woman Francesca? Or Mandy? Please let him not be in Mandy’s flat. He sniffed. No, he wasn’t in Mandy’s flat. There was a faintly unpleasant smell of stale humanity in the room, but Mandy’s flat smelt of drains – distant drains, but unmistakable.

How could he ever have been so unwise as to go to bed with a woman called Mandy? Few names had more baggage attached to them, few names screamed ‘tabloid press’ as much as Mandy. He had been lucky to get away with it this long. Mandy must go.

He was wide awake now, and shocked by the timidity of his thoughts. Her name was half the point of Mandy. The risk was everything. Was he going soft? He felt for his prick. Yes, he was, but that wasn’t what he’d meant.

He tried to remember the events of the previous evening, but they stubbornly refused to come. Had he made love? He didn’t think so. That suggested, but didn’t prove, that he was with his wife. The fact that he couldn’t remember also seemed to indicate, but again didn’t prove, that he’d endured an ordinary Sunday evening at home.

Yes! They’d been watching the Antiques Roadshow. He’d said, ‘Bloody morons, they’ve had it for thirty-five years and they haven’t even noticed the maker’s name’; she’d told him to shut up in a very unladylike tone; he’d said, ‘I wish he’d break that fucking vase over Fiona Bruce’s head’; she’d said, ‘If you’re going to be unpleasant leave me alone’; and then not half an hour later she’d ticked him off for not wanting to watch Downton Abbey with her. Downton Abbey! He’d explained that life was too short to bother with things that hadn’t happened to people who’d never existed. She’d shouted, like a fishwife – was that fair on fishwives, if such people still existed? – that he was ruining her Sunday evening.

Yes, he was at home.

Lady Coppinger had watched Downton Abbey; he’d trawled the Net looking for references to himself, while slowly sipping a large glass of the sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and wondering from what revolting bottle Jack was seeking oblivion at that very moment, under some bridge or in some dark alley. Then he’d slipped quietly into bed beside Her Ladyship, planted the obligatory kiss on her cheek so softly that it could not possibly arouse her, switched the light off and gone straight into guiltless sleep, while she’d read a bit of some soppily romantic book by some much-loved authoress who in real life had been such a frightful snobbish bitch that she’d have been drummed out of Dudley with disdain.

He was at home with Christina. A cocktail of relief and disappointment swept over him, and suddenly he recalled the date and realized why he had felt that this was an important day. It was 31 October. Halloween. His wife’s birthday.

Yes, he had married a witch.

No, he hadn’t married a witch. That had been their little joke. It wasn’t a joke now. She hadn’t been a witch when he’d met her. She’d been as lovely and as full of promise as the dawn. She hadn’t been a witch when he’d courted her, proposed to her, married her. She had been his innocence. He had turned her into a witch. He had fucked his own innocence.

He didn’t like these thoughts, and he wasn’t used to having thoughts that he didn’t like. It was time to get up.

But he didn’t. His body still didn’t stir.

This was dreadful. Regret could play no part in his life. There wasn’t time for regret. Besides, he had everything he wanted. How can a man have regrets if he has everything he wants? Because he didn’t want to have everything he wanted? That was ridiculous. Because he didn’t actually have everything he wanted? Because it was impossible to have everything you wanted, because what you wanted came attached to what you didn’t want, as in fame and photographers?

Photographers! If he had known what was to come!

And yet – and again this only occurred to him afterwards – that morning he did have at least an inkling of what was to come. He had a presentiment. Perhaps, he would suggest to his doctor later, his blankness had been caused by his having, subconsciously, a presentiment that he was going to have a presentiment. His doctor, who was Scottish, would say that was a bit too fanciful for him. He would say that there must have been a physical cause, the position he had slept in, the supply of blood, maybe even some kind of very minor stroke. He would suggest tests. Sir Gordon would pretend to agree.

At last he began to move, easing himself slowly out of the king-sized bed. He padded carefully across the thick, luscious carpet in the utter blackness. He knew from long experience the exact position of the door. He placed his hand on the handle, turned it ever so slowly.

Lady Coppinger gave a low moan which seemed to Sir Gordon to be a rebuke of cosmic proportions, but she didn’t wake.

He was relieved that his wife was still asleep, that he didn’t have to face her yet.

So it had come to this.

The suspicions that would overwhelm him

He seated himself at the round rosewood (what else?) dining table in the exact centre of the gigantic dining room, whose panelling was as Elizabethan as it could be in a house built in 1932. The table seated twelve, and most mornings, as he breakfasted in solitary splendour, he derived pleasure from the sight of the eleven empty places.

He was smartly dressed in the clothes Lady Coppinger had laid out for him the previous evening. He had no colour sense. She did. You couldn’t breed roses without having a colour sense.

Farringdon emerged from the kitchens and slid gravely towards Sir Gordon like a stately home on legs. He carried a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a pile of newspapers. Sir Gordon, who was still feeling quite deeply disturbed by his lapse of memory, tried to look the essence of calm, and gave a small, studied smile.

‘Good morning, Farringdon,’ he said, and he thought he detected a slight nervous quiver in his voice. Farringdon didn’t appear to notice it, but then Farringdon would not have appeared to notice it if his employer had come in to breakfast naked. In the early days Sir Gordon had been slightly unnerved by Farringdon’s eyes. There never seemed to be any expression in them. It looked, in certain lights, from certain angles, as if he had two glass eyes. Sir Gordon was used to this now. He found it restful.

‘Good morning, sir. Sir has slept well?’ said Farringdon gravely.

‘Sir has slept very well, thank you, Farringdon.’

‘That is good news, sir.’

The politenesses over, Farringdon got straight down to business, listing for Sir Gordon, in the unchanging daily ritual, all the pages of the newspapers that mentioned him: ‘Telegraph page seven, Times business page two, Sun page two—’

‘Opposite the totty!’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Mirror page twenty-seven—’

‘Page twenty-seven! That’s a bit far back.’

‘Indeed, sir, but perhaps the fact that it is a page lead will assuage the disappointment.’

Sir Gordon wasn’t given to idle speculation, but even he did wonder sometimes if Farringdon had once discovered a night-school course on the Language of Butlers.

Farringdon went on to list articles in the newspapers that the team judged to be of relevance to Sir Gordon, mainly from the business sections. Important though their impact on his day’s decisions might be, he would only turn to those after he had finished reading about himself.

Sir Gordon took it entirely for granted that several of his employees had been up since three in the morning, driving the early editions of the papers down to Surrey, where other early risers had hunted through them for stories relevant to himself; while yet more, in London, were at their computers finding and collating references to him on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and, only slightly less important, news bulletins. He thought that his researchers trawled through every page of every paper. He hadn’t heard of Google Alert.

He began the process of opening the newspapers at the pages that Farringdon had listed, and which he had not needed to write down. Sir Gordon was proud of his memory. His eyes swept contemptuously past several headlines that told of the sad state of our world in the autumn of 2011. Air-disaster fears soar as laser louts blind pilots. Thieves desecrate memorials to our war heroes every two days. Nineteen glasses of wine by the age of twelve. The behaviour of the lower orders from whom he had so thoroughly escaped was of no interest to him.

He found the first reference to himself in the business section’s editorial comment:

Rumour has it that the City is bracing itself for a disappointing set of results from SFN Holdings. While this is not particularly significant in itself, SFN being a fairly small player in the global game, any bad news from the Coppinger empire is bound to be …

Farringdon arrived with a pot of tea, a jug of water, and a bowl of Coco Pops. Sir Gordon had a proudly sweet tooth.

‘Thank you, Farringdon. English Builders’ Tea, the best drink in the world.’

Farringdon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Agreement would have figured largely in his job description, had there been one.

‘You can keep your champagne.’

Again Farringdon, who had no champagne to keep, raised his eyebrows in agreement, and moved off, in his slightly bent, tactful way. He was three inches taller than Sir Gordon, and found it sensible not to emphasize the fact.

… destabilizing at this sensitive time. Also, SFN is believed to be close to Sir Gordon Coppinger’s heart, if such an organ can be located, as it is in his native and beloved Dudley.

‘If such an organ can be located!’ Cheeky bugger. Rather flattering, though. Except … wasn’t he loved, despite his wealth, despite his ruthlessness, because he was British, not Russian or Chinese? A British oligarch. A walking assertion that Britons can still become rich. A patriot. And famously possessed of charm. When he wanted it. When he needed it. Which was most of the time. Which could become irksome.

But could it be – no, it wasn’t possible – that the press were beginning to attack him, to test the waters? And why print these comments anyway, if not to destabilize? They must know that SFN Holdings made a loss every year, though he hoped that they didn’t know that making a loss every year was the whole point of SFN Holdings.

By the time Farringdon returned with the crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, Sir Gordon had already located another story about himself. Well, this one was about Lady Coppinger, variously described in the press as fragrant, elegant, enigmatic – what a gift she was to the world of adjectives, and to imagery taken from roses, as in the headline to this particular story.

A PIECE OF CAKE FOR THORNY CHRISTINA

It’s a long road from selling Battenburg cake to breeding the champion climbing rose at the Baden-Baden October Flower Festival, but even that honour couldn’t make Sir Gordon Coppinger’s elegant wife Christina smile for long.

My German friend Gisela informed me yesterday that Christina didn’t win many hearts as she accepted the prestigious Der Meisteroktoberbergsteinerrosigpreis for her George Clooney Perpetua, named after her favourite film star.

She popped in to the famous and elegant German spa town by private …

‘Thank, you, Farringdon.’

… jet, made a brief speech without using a single word of German, and popped out as fast as her long but no longer quite so slim legs could carry her.

Gisela informs me that Christina did not endear herself to her hosts by wearing her Remembrance poppy throughout.

Can it be that the former confectioner’s assistant and beauty queen – she was voted Miss Lemon Drizzle in 1980, Miss Danish Pastry (West Midlands) in 1982 and Miss West Bromwich in 1983 – was anxious to show her husband that she shares his fanatical xenophobia, or was there perhaps a more personal reason for the brevity of her visit?

Did she feel that she needed to get back to find out what Sir Gordon was up to?

Sir Gordon smiled. She would hate that. She would be furious at the slur cast on her famous legs. She would loathe the references to her days as a beauty queen. How the world would mock. Didn’t she have the sense to see that the whole point of their lives was that they had gone up, up, up and so it was great publicity that they had once been down, down, down? Even Miss Lemon Drizzle can dream of leaving the world of cake far behind and breeding world-class roses. Christina could have been a heroine for our times, a walking representative, in her high heels, on her long but no longer quite so slim legs, of the social mobility so loved by prime ministers who had been to Eton.

And, to his great surprise, he felt a distant flicker of sexuality at the reference to those legs. He even felt stimulated by the thought that they were no longer quite so slim. Few men are turned on by perfection. You couldn’t believe what was in the papers but it might be rather exciting to check on the accuracy of the observation. Good God. Was it possible – was it? – that this year his birthday dinner with her would not be an ordeal?

But … this apparently trivial diary entry also worried Sir Gordon just a little as he ate his exquisite, always exquisite, bacon and scrambled eggs. He didn’t like that phrase, ‘what Sir Gordon was up to’.

What he had been up to was Francesca Saltmarsh. He had taken the rare opportunity, while Christina was abroad, of staying the night. They had made love three and a half times. That half haunted him. Was he beginning to grow old?

Could the press possibly have known about Francesca? No. It was just a shot in the dark. No! If the worst they could come up with was a snide suggestion in a little diary piece, he had nothing to worry about. He was invulnerable, as his fellow ‘Sir,’ Jimmy Savile, had been, because the great British public would not allow him to be attacked. They loved him so much, just as much as he in his turn hated them.

No, his concerns were exaggerated. A second cup of good old British tea, and the world would be fine again.

But as he turned to the third article about himself, his world felt not quite so fine.

Climthorpe United’s challenge for promotion to the Premiership faltered when they were held to a goalless draw by lowly Barnsley at the Coppinger Stadium in yesterday’s late kick-off.

The Gordoners missed a hatful of chances, the best of which fell to taciturn Bulgarian striker Raduslav Bogoff. The fans in the Abattoir Stand have started to boo him every time he touches the ball, and the same message comes from the increasing number of placards being paraded around the ground. Their message wouldn’t be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, but it gets its point across clearly and simply: “Bogoff, Bogoff.”

Manager Vernon Thickness continues to defend the moody target man from the Black Sea resort of Varna. “He gives us different options, which the punters can’t always appreciate,” he explained in his post-match press conference. “He’s creating the chances, and the goals will come.”

Does Thickness really believe this, or is he no more than a mouthpiece for owner Sir Gordon Coppinger’s ideas? And why does Sir Gordon persist with the surly Slav, when it is his express intention eventually to turn Climthorpe into the only all-British side in the Championship, and, whatever his motives may be, we have to applaud that intention.

Sir Gordon has stated that the clumsy seasider gives the team a dimension of subtlety which brings out the best in his British teammates. “I am British through and through and have got rid of no fewer than eight foreign players since I bought the club,” Sir Gordon explained recently, “but I haven’t yet found a British striker who gives me exactly what Raduslav offers.”

The eponymous owner was not present in the Sir Gordon Coppinger Stand yesterday to see his Eastern European protégé miss yet more chances. Nor was Bogoff’s lovely wife, the svelte Svetoslava.

Could it be that her presence in Britain, and her absence from the match, has something to do with Sir Gordon’s continued faith in her hapless hubby?

Sir Gordon loved to read about other great men, and he knew that all truly great men had to be vigilant in their examination of themselves for traces of incipient paranoia. He was honest enough to wonder if there was a touch of the disease in his suspicion that there might be a connection between this story and the diary piece about Christina. Had the press decided to go on the offensive against him, albeit slowly and carefully, putting their toes into the ocean with little hints? Well, they were hopelessly on the wrong tack with Svetoslava. Apart from everything else, he didn’t know when he had seen a less svelte Slav.

But even this very gentle rumour and tittle-tattle made him feel uneasy, and he wasn’t used to feeling uneasy. He’d have liked a third cup of good old British tea, but it was out of the question. Great men can’t be seen clambering out of their Rolls-Royces for a quick pee at the side of the Kingston By-Pass, or taking a bottle with them just in case. To be seen by Kirkstall performing awkward manoeuvres into a bottle on the back seat, it was unthinkable. The urination of great men – and indeed of great women – must be hidden from the world.

Through the huge picture windows of the dining room he could now see that an unlovely dawn was creeping shyly in over the lush Surrey countryside. Dawns didn’t break, they arrived mysteriously. As a boy he had sometimes stood by the window in the dark in that little house in Dudley, stopwatch in hand, waiting to record the exact second when it began to get light, in order to enter it into ‘Coppinger’s Almanac’, his life’s work. He had always failed, and the failure had made him furious. He never failed now, and he was rarely furious. Fury used up energy that needed to be stored for more important use.

He was pleased that it was such an unappetizing grey morning. What was the point of being driven to work by a chauffeur in a luxurious Rolls-Royce if the hoi polloi in their ghastly clothes were standing at their bus stops in warm sunshine? He hoped it would chuck it down this evening, so that all the trick-or-treaters would get soaked.

He turned, reluctantly, to the financial pages.

Insecurity grows. House prices fall. CBI wants tax breaks to help young unemployed.

What? Tax breaks? Help for the young unemployed? He almost choked on his last sip of tea.

China: Don’t count on us to help you.

Bastards. Who was ever naive enough to think they would? He’d boycotted Chinese restaurants for five years now. That had shown them.

In a sudden surge of temper he flung the papers to the floor.

He clambered slightly stiffly out of his chair. That wouldn’t do. He was only fifty-six, and fifty-six was the new forty-three.

He picked the papers up, smoothed them down, and put them in a neat pile.

Thank goodness nobody had witnessed his brief rage. He never lost his temper. He was always cool and collected. Nobody ever saw him ruffled.

He would have been astonished if he’d known that this would be one of the reasons for the suspicions that would overwhelm him.

It was going to be one of those days

It was a day like any other, and yet it was a day like none other. Everything was as it usually was, yet nothing was as it usually was.

Every moment of every day in the life of Sir Gordon Coppinger (fifty-six), control freak, of Rose Cottage, Borthwick End, near Borthwick Magna, in the county of Surrey, was calculated, planned, and conducted with calm authority. On this grey Halloween morning, however, a ghost of anxiety sat on his shoulder, drove with him into that strange place known as Canary Wharf – half smart city, half urban village – accompanied him as Kirkstall steered smoothly past trim tower blocks whose names on their summits proclaimed the point of the place: Barclays, HSBC, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, Coppinger.

The anxiety walked with him up the steps and through the wide glass doors into the great foyer of the slim, sleek, Coppinger Tower, affectionately known, because of its ribbed structure, and the delicate frond-like curves at its top, as the Stick of Celery. The Coppinger Tower stood a little off the centre of Canary Wharf, but commanded a splendid view over a long bend of London’s river. At its top gleamed that single, powerful word, in gold letters: ‘Coppinger’.

On this grey Halloween morning he took with him, past all the huge rubber plants, only the appearance of calm authority. He was more shaken by the manner of his awakening than he would ever admit. It was as if for those moments of blankness he had been outside his body, and it was as if he still hadn’t quite slipped fully back in, didn’t quite fit neatly yet. And he was aware, too, that he was, almost subconsciously, nervous about the evening. He was dreading the birthday dinner with his wife. The hope that he might enjoy it this year had withered in the cruel light of dawn.

‘Good morning, Alice, how was your weekend? Did you and Tom do anything interesting?’

Alice Penfold, neatly groomed, intelligent, modern, confident receptionist, had slender legs and shapely knees that banished instantly any depression caused by the traffic on the Kingston By-Pass. Sir Gordon wished that she didn’t have a stud in the middle of her chin and a ring through the left nostril of her sweet flared nose, but they had the advantage of giving out a strong signal that this skyscraper was not a stuffy place. She blushed, as if she really believed that the great man was interested in her puny doings. That was the extraordinary effect Sir Gordon had on people. He asked about the wretched Tom at least once a week, but he had no interest in the man, who was a keen cyclist and birdwatcher, the twerp. He could just imagine Tom, with his heavy binoculars, his orange Lycra and his spots, stopping to pee behind some sodden hedge in Sussex. Strange. That was the second time that morning that he had thought about peeing at the side of the road.

‘We went to Brighton for the day, Sir Gordon. It was lovely.’

Brighton! Lovely! Dear God. And yet … he recalled a trip he had made, all those years ago, all the way to Llandudno, with Cindy on the back of his motorbike, and he felt, for Alice, a pang of envy, soon stifled with a slight, involuntary shake of the head – imagine it, a movement of the body that was unplanned, what was going on?

‘Good for you.’

What a stupid comment, but Alice seemed pleased.

As he walked towards the busy lifts, Sir Gordon saw the cheery bulk of Siobhan McEnery entering the building, and he slowed down to speak with her. She greeted him with a smile as wide as the Shannon. There was a warmth about Siobhan McEnery that reached even into Sir Gordon’s heart, and he wondered briefly what it would be like to take her to his secret seduction suite on the twenty-second floor. But then he wondered about this with most women.

‘Good morning, Sir Gordon.’

‘Good morning, Siobhan. Everything sorted for Saturday?’

Siobhan McEnery’s unofficial title was Head of Fun. Her official title was Head of Corporate Entertainment. Sir Gordon stretched this to include making all the preparations for his great biennial Bonfire Night bash.

‘Everything sorted, Sir Gordon. Oh, Liam and I are so looking forward to it.’

‘And how’s wee Ryan?’ Sir Gordon asked as they entered the lift. The database that was his mind saved the names of all his employees’ offspring.

Siobhan flushed with pleasure at this evidence of her employer’s interest in her family. She little knew that he couldn’t have cared less about wee Ryan.

‘The wee mite’s not so good this morning, Sir Gordon, but nothing to worry about.’

‘I hope not.’

Siobhan got out at the fourth floor. As the doors closed behind her Sir Gordon gave a little shake of the head at the thought of sex with her. He realized that the only other occupant of the lift, a courier, had seen that shake, and this shocked him slightly. It had been the visual equivalent of talking to oneself. He was beginning to grow old.

The glass lift, built on the outside of the Stick of Celery, took him swiftly, smoothly, silently up to the nineteenth floor. He smiled at the courier as if the unkempt oaf was his equal. As the lift rose it opened up a view of wharves and water stretching to the towers of the City of London itself, but he had no eyes for that. He had eyes only to turn in upon himself. He was remembering that he had always peed a lot, as a child, when he’d been nervous. He didn’t remember that he’d ever been nervous since he was a child. But he wanted to pee now. Odd how peeing was dominating his thoughts that morning.

He walked from the lift to his office past the massed ranks of his employees. He had asked for the floor to be designed that way. He liked to see them all hard at work making him richer in their awful open-plan working space. In the ante-office to his own, enclosed office sat his secretary, Helen Grimaldi, these days more grim than aldi. She gave him her smile which suggested that she still remembered that Tuesday, and flicked her eyes towards a young man seated on the white settee. Sir Gordon recalled that he had three meetings this morning. He thought of them as if he could see them written in his diary: ‘8.30 Martin Fortescue, 9.30 Fred Upson, 10.30 GI.’

Martin Fortescue was the twenty-one-year-old son of a man he didn’t like who had asked him to see the boy as a favour. He’d arranged for him to come in at eight-thirty, to test his punctuality. He was disappointed to see that the long streak of piss (oh no, another urine reference) was there already. His little lecture on the importance of punctuality would remain unspoken yet again. What was wrong with people, all turning up on time in these hard days?

The boy rose from his seat in the outer office, rose … and rose … and rose. Much too tall. And the innocence, the keenness. Sir Gordon suddenly felt as if he was seventy-seven.

‘See you in a moment.’

‘No problem, sir.’

Sir Gordon’s office was enormous, as were his rosewood (what else?) desk and his sleek swivelling chair. There were four hard chairs and four soft chairs for visitors. Whether he seated you on a hard chair or a soft chair had huge significance. Half the wall opposite the door consisted of a vast curved picture window. On the rest of the wall there were just five pictures: a portrait each of Lady Coppinger looking arrogant, his elderly father Clarrie looking wise, his banker brother Hugo showing all the warmth of a cheque book, his artist son Luke looking artistic, and his daughter Joanna looking as though she had never had a man and wouldn’t know what to do with him if she ever did.

There was no picture of Jack.

He kept the boy waiting for eleven minutes, just long enough to make him feel anxious, which would show he was the wrong type, not hard enough – or irritated, which would show that he was a different kind of wrong type, bit above himself. But the lad, to do him credit, seemed utterly unfazed. That’s what Winchester and Cambridge did for you, gave you confidence, damn and blast it. That’s what you had to find for yourself if you’d been to a secondary modern in Dudley.

He indicated the hard chair that he had placed in isolation at the other side of the desk.

‘Did they offer you a drink? Tea? Coffee?’

‘Yes, thank you. No, I’m fine, sir. I’m all right.’

Excuse me, but that’s what we’re here to find out.

‘Winchester, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Like it?’

‘I think it was great. I felt privileged.’

You are.

A barge hooted urgently on the sullen river. Sir Gordon never found time to stand at his great picture window and look at the boats. All he saw when he looked at the window were the window cleaners’ bills.

‘Good school motto, Winchester. “Manners maketh man.”’ Most stupid bloody motto in the history of mottoes. Manners concealeth man. ‘We certainly set great store by manners here.’

‘I can see that, sir.’

You can see nothing.

‘So why do you want to work in the City?’

‘It would be stupid to pretend that I didn’t like the idea of making a lot of money, sir, but I honestly do think it would be the right career path for me.’

‘It doesn’t worry you that you might be setting out on this … “career path” … at a time when it may be turning into a rather rocky road?’

‘I hardly think working for you could ever be described as being on a rocky road, sir.’

Too smooth for his own good. Could be quite clever, though, could fancy making a name for himself. Keep him well away from Gordon Investments.

‘I’m going to offer you a job, Martin, but … you’re going to have to prove yourself.’

‘I would expect nothing else, sir.’

‘Good. Good. If you accept it, you’ll have to move to Stoke.’

That’ll teach you for being six foot five.

‘Stoke?’

‘On-Trent.’

‘Oh yes, sir, I know of it. The Potteries.’

‘Exactly. Arnold Bennett country.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not with you.’

‘Arnold Bennett was a famous man from that region.’

‘Oh, really. What did he … what was he famous for, sir, exactly?’

‘He invented a very well-known omelette.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘Full of smoked fish.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘I know.’

Sir Gordon swivelled idly from side to side in his large executive chair, as if he was weighing up what to say next, though he knew perfectly well what he was going to say next.

‘I daresay you dream of getting rich overnight, but I want to test your mettle in manufacturing, Martin.’

‘Manufacturing, sir?’

‘Yes. I have factories that actually make things. I’m not just a money man, you know.’

‘Oh, I know, sir.’

The first lie. Oh well.

‘Have you heard of Porter’s Potteries Pies?’

‘I can’t say that I have, sir.’

Avoided a second lie. Well done. Not a bad lad, sadly.

‘Well, I have a finger in many pies, and they happen to be one of them.’

Didn’t even smile. No sense of humour? That could be a problem, working for Porter’s Potteries Pies.

‘Porter’s – they’re the Wedgwood of the pie.’

‘Ah.’

‘Cut your teeth on them, and the world could be your oyster.’

‘Thank you, sir. Do you … um …’ A roguish look spread over Martin Fortescue’s face. ‘Do you ever put oysters in your pies? I know people used to.’

‘Arnold Bennett, probably. No, we never have. Maybe you could explore the possibility.’

‘Thank you, sir. I certainly will.’

Sir Gordon sent Martin on his way and immediately telephoned his father. Martin’s father, not his own. No point in telephoning his own father. Not compos mentis. No longer wise. Very sad. Terrible, actually.

‘Julian?’ He was relishing this moment. He only wished he could see Julian Fortescue’s self-satisfied face when he told him he was sending his precious son to a pie factory in the Potteries. ‘I’ve seen your son, Julian, and I’m offering him a job. In my pie factory. In Stoke.’

‘Stoke?’

‘On-Trent.’

‘I know where Stoke is, Gordon. Oh, Gordon, pies, that’s marvellous, that’ll take the smile off his face. And Stoke. All the way to Stoke. We were wondering how the hell we could ever persuade him to leave home. I can’t thank you enough for this, Gordon.’

It was going to be one of those days.

‘I really have shocked myself’

His second meeting was with Fred Upson, MD of SFN Holdings.

Fred was one of those people who irritated you by their passivity, and then irritated you even more by their passive acceptance of your right to irritate them. He was one of life’s natural victims, and Sir Gordon, like most other people, couldn’t resist a little bit of ritual humiliation.

He had to be careful, however, very careful. Fred knew where the body was buried, the body in this case being SFN Holdings. He would be committing professional suicide if he alienated Fred. Fred might perhaps suspect that he was being humiliated at these Monday meetings, but he must never be allowed to know it for certain. The relationship was on a knife-edge, but then the edges of knives were Sir Gordon’s favourite territory.

He also had to pay Fred extremely well.

He moved the hard chair to an obscure corner of the room, and brought forward one of the soft chairs.

His meetings with Fred were always scheduled for nine-thirty, just early enough to make it impractical for him to get to Euston from Dudley that morning, and so forcing him to spend a night in the London that he loathed so much.

Fred was on time, of course, exactly on time, on the dot, as always. How irritating was that?

Sir Gordon indicated the soft chair.

‘Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘Had coffee at the hotel, thank you. Vile. Put me off the stuff for weeks.’

‘Something stronger, then?’

‘Oh no. No, no. No thanks. Bit early for me.’

Fred had a drink problem. Offering him something stronger was just perfect – right on the edge of the knife.

‘So, hotel not good?’

‘Disgusting.’

‘I thought we’d got you a new one, F.U.’

The edge of that knife again. Fred could hardly complain, they were his initials, but he must have resented it. He didn’t show it at all, though, which of course made Sir Gordon want to say it all the more.

‘You did, Sir Gordon. I’ve now tried the Ibis, the Travelodge, the Travel Inn, the Kwality Inn, the Premier Inn, the Outside Inn, the Innside Out, the Orvis …

‘I think that’s a shirt.’

‘Oh, sorry. Anyway, it’s one that begins with an O, and ends in tears. They’re all awful.’

‘Well, if you refuse to go beyond Euston Road, what can you expect?’

‘Speaking about the hotel, I gave Helen a list of my expenses. They have rather piled up. If they could be … er … processed …’ Fred Upson didn’t quite have the courage to use the verb ‘paid’. ‘… I’d be very grateful. Not that I … but … you know.’

‘Absolutely. Helen will be processing them even now, if I know Helen.’ Sir Gordon was almost tempted, just to see Fred Upson’s face, to add, ‘And I do know Helen. In the biblical sense.’ But he resisted it. Mustn’t give employees ammunition.

‘Right. The most important matter is dealt with.’ Sir Gordon smiled at Fred Upson, to show that this was, and at the same time wasn’t, a joke. Fred Upson’s expenses were a legend in the Stick of Celery. ‘Everyone in my employ is the best at something,’ Sir Gordon had once said. ‘And in Fred Upson’s case it’s expenses.’

‘So! To business! How are things at good old SFN?’

‘You know how they are, Sir Gordon. They never change.’

‘True.’

‘I read that article about our results being disappointing. Strange that SFN should be mentioned at all, but rather reassuring.’

‘I wondered if they meant you were going to declare a profit.’

‘Oh my God, no.’

‘Actually, Fred …’

The phone rang. It was part of the ritual.

‘Sorry about this.’

That was part of the ritual too. Sir Gordon wasn’t at all sorry. In fact, he had instructed Helen to send through as many phone calls as possible during Fred Upson’s visits. It was his little joke, for his own amusement only. Power can be boring, and absolute power can be absolutely boring. Fred might suspect that she was doing this, but he couldn’t know it.

Helen didn’t always do Sir Gordon’s bidding. In fact, she was becoming less and less compliant. He couldn’t sack her, unfortunately, or she would rearrange the vowels and issue a complaint. One unwise Tuesday he’d had sex with her for seven minutes and he’d regretted it for eleven years. But she did what he asked with regard to Fred Upson. She too found pleasure in annoying him. Mother Teresa herself would have found the temptation hard to resist.

‘Coppinger,’ he announced briskly into the phone.

‘Me too.’

‘Oh, hello Hugo.’ He mouthed, ‘My brother. Won’t be long,’ to Fred. ‘How are you, Hugo?’

Hugo went straight to the point. Phones weren’t made for small talk.

‘Can you do lunch? The Intrepid Snail, one o’clock. A.A. Gill slated it, so it can’t be bad.’

‘Well, yes, but … any reason? Not that it matters.’

‘No reason, except … well, two things, only one of which I would dream of mentioning on the phone.’

‘Do you think your phone may be being hacked?’

‘They wouldn’t dare. No, I think your phone may be being hacked.’

‘So what’s the reason you can mention?’

‘Jack. We must do something about him.’

‘Ah. The Intrepid Snail, one o’clock, right.’ He put the phone down and smiled insincerely at Fred Upson.

‘Sorry about that, F.U. Where were we?’

‘Your tone changed and became serious and you said, “Actually, Fred …”’

‘Ah, yes. Yes. Actually, Fred …’

The phone rang again.

‘Oh good heavens, so sorry about this.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Coppinger.’

‘It’s me, Dad.’

‘Luke!’ He mouthed, ‘My son. Won’t be long,’ to Fred.

Fred gave him an ‘I understand. It doesn’t matter. He’s family. I’m not. I’m just an employee’ look which irritated Sir Gordon so much that he felt tempted to have a really long chat, except that no good could come out of a long chat with Luke. These thoughts had the suitable accompaniment of at least three vehicles rushing through the windy streets around Canary Wharf with sirens blaring.

‘Is it a bad time?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘That’s a miracle.’

‘So, how can I help?’

‘I don’t know if you can.’

Sir Gordon looked across to Fred Upson, sitting there so patiently, seemingly content to be ritually humiliated, and suddenly all irritation left him. He felt a stab of sympathy for the man. This wasn’t good, he wasn’t at home with sympathy the way he was with irritation, but he found himself wondering about Fred’s home life, was he married, could he be married, what sort of woman could possibly … and then he realized that he hadn’t heard a word of what his son was saying. This was awful. Get a grip, Gordon.

‘So what would you advise, Dad?’

‘Luke, I have a big problem here …’ He shook his head several times, trying to tell Fred that the problem was nothing to do with him, or that the problem was a fiction. ‘… and I’m afraid I … I didn’t fully catch what you said.’

‘Well, how much did you catch?’

‘Luke, it might be better just to tell the whole story again.’

‘Are you all right, Dad? This isn’t like you.’

‘I know. I don’t seem to be terribly like me today.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. Get on with it.’

Sir Gordon felt that he was in danger of raising his voice, of losing his rag, and he never did that in the office. Well, never anywhere, but particularly not in the office.

‘OK,’ continued Luke. ‘Look, you know my painting of the Garden of Eden?’

‘Not specifically.’

‘Well, I showed it to you last time you visited us, and you asked if it was Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.’

‘Oh, that one. Yes, vaguely. Sorry.’

‘Well, you may not like it, but Carmarthen Art Gallery think it’s pretty wonderful. Or was.’

‘What? “Was”?’

‘It’s been vandalized.’

‘What?’

‘Horrid words daubed all over it.’

Another siren. You’d have thought the world must be ending somewhere, but it was just another routine London day.

‘What horrid words?’

‘Well … sorry, Dad … “Fuck off”.’

‘“Fuck off”?’ Sir Gordon smiled apologetically at Fred.

‘Yes. And … “Ffycia bant”.’

‘“Ffycia bant”?’

‘Yes. That’s Welsh.’

‘Welsh for what?’

‘Welsh for “Fuck off”.’

‘I see. So somebody’s told you to fuck off in two languages.’ Good for them. Almost worth learning another language just for that. ‘I think that’s carrying nationalistic sensitivity a bit far.’ He smiled apologetically at Fred once again. ‘Not very friendly to you.’

‘Not just to me, Dad.’

‘What?’

‘There’s something else. That’s why I’m ringing you. It says something else.’

‘What?’

‘“Like father, like son”.’

‘In two languages?’

‘In two languages. Somebody out there doesn’t like us, Dad.’

‘It seems like it. Oh dear. What do you want me to do, Luke?’

‘I don’t think you can do anything. But the press know. I thought I ought to warn you.’

‘OK, right. Thanks.’

He couldn’t just ring off. He had to say something, show – that surprise word again, that stranger from the unused pages of the dictionary of his mind – sympathy.

‘And Luke?’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘I may not understand your pictures. I may not like them. Probably I’m wrong, since they fetch such amazing prices, but … I’m sorry. Really. That’s an awful thing to happen to an artist.’

‘Well, thanks, Dad, I … thanks.’

Thank God we’re on the phone, thought Sir Gordon. If we’d been together we might have hugged.

‘Sorry about that, F.U.,’ he told Fred after he had rung off, ‘but it was important. My son’s picture of the Garden of Eden has been vandalized.’

Fred shifted uneasily in his easy chair. He wasn’t interested in Luke’s troubles, but he clearly felt that he had to ask something.

‘Was it blasphemous?’

‘I didn’t understand it well enough to be able to say. I suppose it could be some religious nutter. Plenty of them about. But part of the message read, “Like father, like son”. I assumed that was us.’

‘Could have been God the Father and Jesus the Son. They’re pretty well known too.’

Sir Gordon looked at Fred Upson in astonishment.

‘Sorry,’ said Fred.

‘No. No. I rather … fair point. Rather good, Fred. I …’

I almost liked you there, for a moment. Couldn’t say that.

‘So what was it you were going to say to me when the phone went?’

‘Obviously we still need to declare big losses, Fred.’

A smile played with the edges of Sir Gordon’s mouth as he recalled the day he appointed Fred. ‘So you are asking me to be MD of a loss leader?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘So you consider me the ideal man to run a firm that is a loss leader?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I see.’

The smile died.

‘But in the present climate, Fred,’ said Sir Gordon, suddenly very solemn, ‘we may not be able to afford to continue to actually make big losses. The office is costing too much to run. Declare more losses, make fewer. I want a report on potential savings on my desk one month from today. One month from today, F.U. Things could be going to get serious. We’re going to have to up our game.’

Their eyes met again, and each held his gaze.

‘You’ve shocked me,’ said Fred Upson.

‘I’ve shocked myself,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘I really have shocked myself.’

Can we be absolutely certain that they can’t lip-read?

That anxiety, throbbing in his gut like the engines of a slow-moving ship, sharpened slightly. ‘10.30 GI.’

He pulled forward three easy chairs for the managers of GI.

Within minutes Keith Gostelow, Dan Perkins, and Adam Eaglestone were stretching their legs in their chairs. The heartland of Sir Gordon’s empire was not a bastion of equal rights for women.

If a member of the public was introduced to Keith Gostelow, Dan Perkins, and Adam Eaglestone as the triumvirate who ran a major investment company, that member of the public would not be impressed. But no members of the public did meet them. That was not the nature of Gordon Investments.

‘Any problems, gentlemen?’

Keith Gostelow and Adam Eaglestone exchanged a very swift, uneasy glance, a glance which excluded Dan Perkins. Sir Gordon’s sharp eyes missed none of this, and he didn’t like the glance. It suggested that there were problems – or, at least, that there was a problem.

‘Keith?’

It was an acknowledgement from Sir Gordon that he had seen and understood the glance.

‘Um …’ began Keith Gostelow – floppy, anarchic hair; bad complexion. ‘Maybe it’s just me, but … and I’m not saying it’s a serious matter, don’t get me wrong, but … um … I have noticed … I mean, not widely, and not equally over the whole country, and perhaps more in long-term investments, but also in … in the long term … in short-term investments … a bit … but as I say, not widely, but enough to make me take notice … investment is … in some areas … in some fields … um … not great.’

‘Poor?’

‘Exactly.’ Keith smiled, then the smile dissolved into slight panic. ‘Well, I mean, no, not exactly poor, no.’

‘But not great?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Adam? Your take on this?’

Adam Eaglestone – balding, short, shiny suit – was more fluent.

‘Uptake is sluggish. I would say that this is entirely unsurprising in view of economic sentiment at this moment in time. However, I would offer this cautious addendum. Should the economic situation weaken still further – and I see no reason to be optimistic about this – I do think that a problem might arise, and should be guarded against, if it can be done without weakening confidence, because to weaken confidence might be to precipitate the crisis whose possibility was the cause of confidence weakening in the first place.’

‘Thank you, Adam. Dan?’

‘We’re in the shit.’

Sir Gordon paused. The words of Dan Perkins – all muscle, face like granite – seemed to echo round the vast office. The clouds drifting slowly past the great picture window were just slightly coloured as if the sun was attempting to break through, giving them an unattractive muddy complexion which reminded Sir Gordon of the unpleasant waste matter in which, in Dan Perkins’s pithy opinion, they were.

‘So,’ said Sir Gordon. He let the word hang there. It hung well, so he repeated it. ‘So … if Dan’s view is right, and if what you two were saying reflects that view – and I am of course absolutely shocked to hear this, but I respect you or I wouldn’t have appointed you …’ The sentence wasn’t going well. Every man finds himself occasionally in the middle of a sentence which isn’t going well. The average man struggles to its muddled end. A great man abandons it. Sir Gordon abandoned it and returned to the word which, since it had served him well twice already, might be expected to be effective again. ‘So …’ he said, and once more he let the word hang there.

‘Do you think we should reduce the return by, say, for instance … um …’ began Keith Gostelow.

Suddenly two men appeared at the window, one of them massive, with a broken nose, the other short, wiry and grim-faced. Sir Gordon’s heart almost stopped. Ice coursed through his veins. He couldn’t breathe. The tall man raised his gun. So this was it. Pie Producer Patriot Gunned Down in Canary Wharf Horror. He’d known that he had enemies, of course, but …

Then he realized that the gun was a mop. He raised his arm in greeting. The large window cleaner waved back, and then the two were obscured by a torrent of water.

‘… or I mean maybe we should … um … I don’t know … well, I mean, I really don’t mean that I don’t know …’

‘Quiet,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Careless talk costs lives.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That was a poster my dad kept. From the war.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Better not say too much in front of the window cleaners.’

Another look passed between Keith Gostelow and Adam Eaglestone. Again, it bypassed Dan Perkins. Sir Gordon hoped that none of his three investment executives had noticed his brief panic. If rumours that his nerve was going got about … and was it going? Oh God. Was it? Was that what the waking-up incident had been about? As a result of all this, he found himself speaking in a sharp manner that shone light on his momentary weakness.

‘You think I’m paranoid, Adam, Keith?’

‘Um …’ said Keith.

‘Of course not,’ said Adam. ‘And I’m as security conscious as anyone, but … do you really think a window cleaner could hear what we’re saying through double glazing?’

‘It wouldn’t matter if he heard what you and Keith were saying, anyway,’ said Dan. ‘I’ve never heard two people say so much about so little.’

‘Dan, please,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Let’s not get personal. Let’s not lose our nerve.’

His eyes met Dan’s. He held the look. Dan broke away first.

‘I’m security conscious, yes,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Very much so. Maybe exaggeratedly so. No, of course I don’t think they can hear what we say through what is actually triple glazing. And of course I’m not paranoid. However …’ He paused. ‘You three are the only other people in the world who know the truth about Gordon Investments. There are people who would pay highly for that truth. Keeping it secret is vital to our survival. Vital. They may be bona fide window cleaners. They may not. But, even if they are, can we be absolutely certain that they can’t lip-read?’

We never said a word about Jack

There were only two people in the world, one man and one woman, whom Sir Gordon Coppinger regarded as his equals. He had felt it about the man from the moment he first read about him. Garibaldi was his hero, his mentor, his example. He had felt it about the woman from the moment she laid her sword upon his shoulder. But there was also one person in the world whom he regarded as his superior. His brother Hugo – his elder brother Hugo. How important is that word ‘elder’. How irreversible is the luck of birth.

Sir Gordon belonged in Canary Wharf, that upstart city outside the City. Hugo belonged in the City. Huge swathes of British history seemed to accompany him as he walked arrogantly towards the Intrepid Snail. Even the fact that he had been knighted seemed to Sir Gordon, in Hugo’s presence, to be a handicap. He was a man who had needed to be knighted. Hugo walked with the air of a man who has already been knighted by existence itself.

The Intrepid Snail was situated on the ground floor of what had once been a bank. The walls were dark and their panelling was centuries older than that in the dining room of Rose Cottage. In its sombre recesses there had been placed sculptures of snails in varying degrees of intrepidity. The restaurant itself, however, perhaps in a forlorn attempt to persuade the masses to enter with equal intrepidity, consisted of rows of scrubbed pine tables, and looked like an upmarket works canteen.

At one o’clock on this mild, windy Halloween day the masses had not been persuaded to enter. There were only two customers, middle-aged men in dark suits seated at a window table. They were leaning forward so that their heads almost touched and talking in such low whispers that they must either be indulging in deadly and important gossip or declaring a late flowering of homosexual love. The former seemed the more likely.

‘More gastropod than gastropub,’ commented Hugo Coppinger as his eyes took in the room in one brief glance. His well-cut suit bore not a trace of its cost. Its elegance was perfectly restrained. You would have sworn, if you hadn’t known him, that there was a woman in his life who had chosen his shirt and his silk tie.

‘It should be all right,’ he said with doubt in his voice. ‘It was slated by Giles Coren.’

‘I thought it was A.A. Gill.’

‘Him as well. It was slated by everyone. What do these food writers know?’

The contempt which he poured into the words ‘food writers’ was pure Hugo, thought Sir Gordon. He didn’t know anyone who did contempt better than his banker brother. In the contempt stakes even Sir Gordon was an also-ran. And all this from a man born to humble stock in Dudley.

A waiter approached with the air of a man who has been disturbed in the middle of a nap.

‘Have you booked?’ he enquired in a contorted accent that neither of them could identify.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Hugo, ‘but perhaps you can squeeze us in.’

Either the waiter had no sense of humour or he was deaf or he didn’t speak English or he had heard that remark five hundred times before. He led them, as they had known he would, towards the window table next to the whispering duo. Sir Gordon strode as erectly as he possibly could, striving for the extra inch that would place him on a level with his brother. Hugo let his shoulders sag just slightly, in order to hide that fateful inch. The ruse worked perfectly. Both men looked exactly five foot eight and a half inches tall.

‘Please!’ said Hugo. ‘We don’t want to sit near these people. We have matters of the utmost secrecy to discuss, and so, no doubt, do they. This is the City of London in crisis, man.’

‘You not want sit in window. Lovely view.’

‘It’s a disgusting view. I don’t want to see it. I want to go right over there, far from what our mother, mistakenly but nevertheless accurately, always called the maddening crowd.’

Hugo plonked himself down at a table as far as possible from the other couple. The waiter, offended by having the table chosen by the customer, stomped off.

On each table there was a single artificial red rose, standing in a glass vase shaped like a snail.

The waiter emerged from the kitchens with food for the other table and the look of a man who was rushed off his feet. It must have been several minutes before he approached the two brothers. He handed them menus, and gave the wine list to Hugo, which irritated Sir Gordon.

‘Unusually quiet, is it?’ he asked.

‘No, sir. Always like this, Monday. Tuesday too. Wednesday, Thursday, a little more busy. Friday, you never know. Friday is unpredict.’

‘You do like chatting to people, don’t you?’ commented Hugo with just a trace of waspishness as the waiter ambled off. ‘The famous charm, overcoming even the reticence of a waiter who hates customers.’

‘I use it,’ admitted Sir Gordon. ‘I work it.’ He paused. ‘I think I despise it, actually.’

He took the wine list off Hugo.

‘My turn, I think.’

‘I invited you.’

‘Irrelevant. We take turns.’

‘Fine. I accept graciously.’

Sir Gordon had wondered if the menu would feature nothing but snails, but he needn’t have worried. It didn’t appeal particularly to these two men who could eat out anywhere at any time and were used to the best, but at least it wasn’t over-reliant on the eponymous molluscs, although the chef’s signature dish was snail bouillabaisse.

‘Snail bouillabaisse. What the hell is that all about?’ said Hugo. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. This French restaurant is not French. No Frenchman would insult their marvellous bouillabaisse in that way.’

Barely ten minutes passed before the waiter strolled back to take their orders. All the time Sir Gordon was wondering if Hugo really had suggested lunch because he had something important to say. He hoped not. He sensed that, if he did have anything to say, it would not be pleasant.

‘Have what you fancy, Hugo,’ he said unnecessarily.

‘I won’t have a starter,’ said his brother. ‘I’m eating tonight.’

He didn’t enlarge on this information. He was a very secretive man.

‘Me too. Dinner with my wife.’

‘Ah! The domestic bliss that has escaped me. Or have I escaped it?’

Sir Gordon ordered a bottle of Margaux that was almost as old as the waiter and cost £210.

‘Wait!’ commanded Hugo as the waiter started to move off. He lowered his voice, even though every word was clearly audible to the waiter. ‘Do you really want to spend that much?’ He lowered his voice even more, but was still audible. ‘The food isn’t going to be worth it. And you don’t need to impress me.’

‘I hope you aren’t hinting that I can’t afford it?’ said Sir Gordon.

‘Of course not, Gordon. It’s just … not necessary.’

‘It is to me. I like fine wine.’

‘Well, all right, then. Good. I’ll enjoy it. Thank you.’

The waiter returned surprisingly quickly, opened the bottle with exaggerated reverence, and poured a small amount into Hugo’s glass with ill-concealed hostility. Hugo handed the glass to Sir Gordon without comment. Sir Gordon rolled the wine round the glass, sniffed it, and nodded. He couldn’t help feeling, in Hugo’s presence, that he didn’t quite know what he was nodding at, that he wouldn’t even know if it was corked.

When the waiter had gone they clinked glasses in their usual manner.

‘To “Our Escape from Dudley”,’ said Hugo.

‘“Our Escape from Dudley”,’ echoed Sir Gordon.

‘I haven’t said this before,’ said Hugo, ‘but, you know, it’s a bit of a miracle, you and I, from a secondary modern in Dudley, both so eminent in our different fields. I should think ninety per cent of the people I deal with in my work went to public school, and half of them to Eton. We owe a lot to our parents.’

‘Well, of course. I hope I always acknowledge that.’

‘Stop looking for evil subtexts in what I’m saying, Gordon.’

‘Sorry. Bad habit.’

‘No, but there they were, two good people, intelligent people, but … not special. Here we are – let’s not beat about the bush – thoroughly special.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Dad was clever. Mum wasn’t clever exactly, but she had common sense in spades, and she had spunk. The last thing I want to do is be rude to Dad but he did lack spunk. But the combination of brains and spunk, in you and me, it just gelled. It’s not perfect, I could definitely do with a bit more spunk and you could probably do with a bit more brains, but it isn’t bad. Is it?’

‘I never said it was.’

‘You’re looking for subtexts again.’

The wine was delicious and as they sipped and chatted Sir Gordon almost forgot his concern over whether there was a secret agenda for the meeting. He couldn’t recall quite such a relaxed conversation with his brother as the reminiscences of old Dudley flowed. But all good things come to an end, and eventually their food arrived.

They ate for a few minutes in silent disbelief. Eventually Hugo plucked up the courage to speak.

‘How’s your veal?’

‘It tastes like face flannel that has been marinated in Montenegrin traffic warden’s phlegm.’

‘So A.A. Gill was right.’

They both left half their food, and the waiter took their plates away with no comment and no surprise. They scorned the pleasure of looking at the dessert menu, and shuddered at the thought of coffee.

‘We’ll just enjoy the rest of the wine.’

‘Very good, gentlemen.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Pity nothing else was.’

His brother raised his eyebrows in surprise. The waiter made no comment and showed no reaction.

Hugo leant forward and dread entered Sir Gordon’s heart.

‘I suggested lunch for a reason, Gordon. I keep my ear to the ground. I’m picking up … rumours. Only rumours. And please don’t believe that I believe them. There’s usually no smoke without a fire, but no cliché is true all the time. Rumours about Gordon Investments. Rumours that … all is not well.’

‘When you say “all is not well” do you mean … we’re running into financial trouble?’

‘Not exactly. Gordon, you can talk to me. We’re family. I’m here for you. We haven’t always been close, not as close as we should, we haven’t always got on as well as we should, but … damn it, man, I’m not good at being affectionate …’ He paused, then lowered his voice still further, though now they were the only two people in the room. The other customers had left and the waiter was probably having forty winks after his exertions. ‘People are suggesting – hinting – that the set-up of Gordon Investments is not altogether straight.’

‘Not honest?’

‘Yes. So people are saying.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘Gordon, I’ve studied the figures, and … I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they don’t add up. The returns you’re giving people are … possible but perhaps not probable. Either you and your team are very good … very very good, or … well, I don’t need to spell it out, I don’t actually think I could spell it out. So really, I’m asking you, Gordon, I suppose, for reassurance.’

Suddenly Sir Gordon knew how desperately lonely he was. His mother was dead. His father was lost in the mists of senility. Circumstance prevented his getting any filial feeling from his son. His daughter was cowed by life. And his wife – oh, how he dreaded this evening – his wife would be merciless if the truth emerged. It was a moment of revelation that dwarfed everything else that had happened on this difficult day. It even seemed to explain to him the nature and cause of his disturbing awakening that morning … was it really only eight and a half hours ago? It had been psychic, a portent. Suddenly he longed to be close to his dear elder brother whom he had never really appreciated. Suddenly he longed to confess. Suddenly he realized just how heavy his burden had become, that burden that he had never even acknowledged to himself, that burden that had grown and grown while he had slept his guiltless sleeps.

Hugo, help me. Hugo, I’ve been the most frightful fool. Hugo, you do love me, don’t you?

There were so many sentences that he found impossible to utter.

‘Hugo, I’m telling you, I’m telling you honestly …’

The waiter, skilled at interruption like so many of his kind, came over with their bill, showing a surprising turn of speed.

Sir Gordon entered his card details.

‘If I add a tip, does it get to you?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Good. Good. The question was purely hypothetical, of course.’

‘I’m sorry, sir?’

‘You will be. I’m not giving you a tip. You don’t deserve it.’

‘We closing in two minutes, sir.’

‘Excellent news. The outside world is so much more appealing.’

Sir Gordon noticed that Hugo had noticed that he had abandoned his habitual charm. He really must abandon it more. The gratification you could feel from being rude was brief, briefer even than the gratification of sex, but it was enjoyable both in anticipation and reflection. And he did particularly dislike waiters. He would smile at the memory of his remark as he ascended towards his office that afternoon. Besides, what was the point of being powerful if you were always polite? Where was the fun? No, he had used his charm too much.

Sir Gordon abandoned these thoughts reluctantly, and turned back to his interrupted speech.

‘Hugo, I’m telling you honestly, yes, I know the figures are difficult to believe, but I have very skilled men working for me, I have a marvellous organization honed over the years, I’d be a fool if I claimed that we can continue in this climate to give investors the returns they’ve become used to, but there’s not a shred of irregularity in what we do, and not even a particle of doubt in my mind that with my reputation, my record, my popularity, we will easily do enough business to keep our heads well above water and with no need of any form of illegality whatsoever.’

‘Well, I’m very pleased to hear that,’ said Hugo.

‘I wish my mother was alive so I could say those words directly to her in your presence. Then you’d believe me.’

‘I do believe you, Gordon.’

‘I wish my father was compos mentis so we could go together and—’

‘Gordon, I believe you.’

‘Rumour doesn’t help in difficult times. Can you scotch those rumours, Hugo?’

The waiter reappeared, jangling keys in one of the least subtle hints in history.

‘We’ll have to go. Gordon, I’m not a public figure like you but I have immense influence behind the scenes. I will do all I can to kill this creeping, insidious doubt. I just had to hear your denial of wrongdoing from your own lips. We had to share it as brothers. I’ve heard it. I believe it. End of story. Thank you for the wine, if not the lunch.’

They passed through the door without meeting the waiter’s eyes. They heard the lock click angrily behind them.

And in the street – there in the City of London – the Coppinger brothers did something neither of them would have believed, when they got up that morning, that they would ever do.

They hugged.

Hugo walked away. He didn’t look back. He never looked back.

And Sir Gordon thought, Good Lord. We never said a word about Jack.

The evening ended, as it had begun, in silence

We’ve all seen them, those married couples in pubs and restaurants, sitting there in silence, not a word to say to each other. It’s easy to mock, feel a touch of contempt even, forget that maybe they no longer need to talk, know what the other is thinking without any necessity for words. It’s easy to forget that they know so much about each other that it’s almost impossible for them to think of any questions to ask each other. ‘What sort of music do you like?’ would be a devastating admission of lack of interest after twenty-nine years.

And Sir Gordon and Lady Coppinger had been married now for twenty-nine years. It felt like forty-nine. Their silence was not companionable, not shared. Their silence was prickly, and loud with all the things that were not being said. Their silence was deafening.

They were sitting at opposite ends of the oval table in the private room on the first floor of the Hoop and Two Colonels. It was a gastropub in these days when pubs in the country can no longer survive without being gastropubs. Sir Gordon liked it because it served largely good, plain, solid English food. Lady Coppinger disliked it for the same reason. If she ate there too often her legs would become even less slim than once they had been. There was nothing unusual about the place except its name. It was the only pub in the world called the Hoop and Two Colonels. Neither Sir Gordon nor Lady Coppinger was remotely interested in why it was so named. There was no money in knowing.

It cost Sir Gordon quite a sum to book the private room just for the two of them. The restaurant was full of atmosphere, crazy with beams, crammed with dressers laden with old plates. The private room was spare and pale and almost corporate. But it was difficult for them to eat in public. You never knew who’d be watching, finger on the button, ready to Tweet. ‘Saw Sir Gordon and Lady Coppinger at dinner. Hardly spoke. Devoted? I don’t think so.’ Or to phone. ‘You know who those are? Just popping out, sweetest, to phone the papers. Might be a photo opportunity, might bung me a few quid, might be able to get that trellising fixed.’ People! Bastards!

The private room could seat twenty, so by sitting at the ends they formed a little parody of the aristocracy at home. This evening that just irritated Sir Gordon. This evening he actually wanted to talk. But he couldn’t. He felt as if he was visiting a sick relative in hospital. Time dragged. Opening gambits died on his lips. After the ritual insincere ‘Happy birthday, darling’, the raising of his gin glass and her champagne flute – he hated flutes, he hated champagne – and her insincere ‘Thank you, Gordon’, she couldn’t even bring herself to say ‘darling’ there was an aching silence while they waited to order.

If one is telling of a meeting in which nothing was said, what can one do but relate what was not said? Prominent in this category, from Sir Gordon, was ‘What sort of a day have you had?’, closely followed by ‘Anybody phoned?’, ‘Any further disasters reported from the care home?’, ‘Has Luke forgotten it’s your birthday again?’, ‘Was Joanna’s card as uninspired as ever?’, and, coming up strongly on the outside, ‘Bought any more shoes today?’

From his wife there was no such profligacy. One silence strangled all others in their infancy. ‘Have you seen Mandy today?’

They gave their orders. Lady Coppinger’s ‘I’ll have the coquilles St Jacques and the pork stroganoff’ was a simple statement of defiance against the patriotism on which her husband traded. Sir Gordon’s ‘I’ll have the hare terrine and the Lancashire hotpot’ was spoken with the slight uneasiness that comes with the knowledge that every word one utters in public may be dissected for hidden meaning. The chef might phone the business section of a paper, whose gossip columnist might write, ‘May we expect news of an investment in the north-west from the Sir Gordon Coppinger Group? Certainly on Monday evening at his wife’s birthday dinner Sir Gordon chose not only Lancashire hotpot, but also hare terrine with Cumberland sauce. Straws in the wind? Maybe. But the north-west is one of the few parts of Britain in which Sir Gordon has no business interests.’ And the hare terrine. Woe betide him if he ever came out against hunting. The waiter might remember that hare terrine and accuse him of hypocrisy on Facebook. Bastards, waiters.

Sadly, people do not always realize how difficult and stressful the lives of the famous are.

Once again, too, Sir Gordon had to order a bottle of wine that cost in excess of £200. If he didn’t, his wife might wonder about the state of his finances. She might also discover – oh, perish the thought – that he had spent more on a bottle for his brother Hugo than he had on her.

Once the waiter had gone, Sir Gordon began to wish that he could end the silence, that they could talk, laugh, joke as once they had done. Christina was much more comfortable with the silence than he was. The silence put him at a disadvantage. And he was struck again by that sense of utter loneliness. This was awful. This was weak. He might be many things, but he was never weak. He must speak.

But to speak would be weak. He mustn’t speak.

But he couldn’t bear the silence any longer. He spoke.

His question was hardly worth all the agony that had preceded it.

‘Do anything for lunch?’

The question shrivelled in her gaze.

‘Of course not.’

‘Why “Of course not”?’

‘Gordon, I can’t eat twice in one day.’

She’d read the article about her appearance in Baden-Baden! She’d seen the comment about her legs!

The wine arrived and saved him further humiliation for a moment. He spent more than a minute swirling it round his mighty glass and sniffing it.

When the waiter had gone, the silence was absolute. She crossed her no longer quite so slim legs and the rasping of tights on tights was deafening. It was awful to feel no desire in these circumstances. He was a man of prodigious virility. Surely he could summon up at least a smidgen of desire?

The need to speak conquered him again. Inevitably, the subject was roses. Roses were her life. She had won no fewer than thirty-seven prizes for her roses, in various parts of the world, and her two slim volumes, Rose Breeding For Beginners and The Bush Pruner’s Companion, had winged their way to all her friends and most of her enemies.

Occasionally, when he caught her at work on her roses, he saw a trace of the enthusiastic, uncomplicated woman she had once seemed to be. Her face lost its wariness, its hauteur. It was still a beautiful face but it had slowly grown harder, thinner, more angular. He sometimes wondered if she had actually forgotten, over the years, that she had once been Miss Lemon Drizzle 1980.

He recalled her telling him, when they were courting, how thrilled she had been with the corner of his allotment her father had given her, how excited she had been when she first made carrot cake with her own carrots, how she had loved her very first rose bush. He had seen her slowly turn this new interest from a hobby to a business, from fun to finance, from colour to competition, from pleasure to prizes, from roses to rosettes. He had seen her stride through the Chelsea Flower Show like the goddess she now seemed to believe she was, as if she had bred not only roses but her own self as a lady of breeding. And he knew now that much of the responsibility for her transformation had been his. It was little wonder that his remark came out all wrong.

‘Thought up any new roses today?’

Even to him it sounded sarcastic. It was a huge mistake.

‘I do not think up roses. I breed them.’

She relapsed into silence, and the fact that he deserved it didn’t make it any easier to bear.

‘I do wish you had something to say, Christina,’ he said. ‘It is your birthday, after all.’

He noticed a flicker of astonishment in her dark brown eyes, and a brief glimmer of triumph. He had shown his weakness. She had reduced him to pleading, and to making a ridiculous non sequitur about her birthday.

The return of the waiter was quite a shock to Sir Gordon. The silence in the room had been so absolute that it would not have surprised him to have discovered that the rest of the pub had disappeared, that they were suspended in space.

‘Which of you’s the terrine?’ the waiter asked.

This ineptitude cheered Sir Gordon considerably. It was what he expected from the public. It was what he expected from waiters.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Must be difficult to remember when there are so many of us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

When the waiter had gone, Sir Gordon found himself wondering if there was a name for a person who hated waiters. A waiterophobe?

He also wondered how it was that he was starting to wonder about things. It wasn’t like him. There was no percentage in wondering.

He took a large mouthful of hare terrine, liberally spread with Cumberland sauce. At that moment, with cruel timing, Christina spoke.

‘So, let’s talk,’ she said. ‘What have you done today?’

Oh Lord. She had bowled a googly. He chewed his terrine at unnecessary length and pondered all the things he couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her about meeting Fred Upson. She hated the man. His obsession with his expenses drove her into apoplexy. He couldn’t mention Luke’s paintings. In his eyes the fact that the boy had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize was a stain upon the whole family. He could tell her nothing about GI. To talk about his lunch with Hugo would be most unwise. And as for his afternoon … well!

The swallowing of the terrine could be delayed no longer.

‘I gave a job to the Fortescue boy. Terribly public school. Bathed in naivety and enthusiasm. I’ve sent him to Porter’s Potteries Pies.’

‘Excellent.’ She almost smiled. ‘I hate that Fortescue man.’

He thought, but did not say, ‘You didn’t need to tell me that. It’d be easier just to tell me when you don’t hate somebody.’

‘And?’

‘What do you mean – “And”?’

‘And what else have you done? I hardly think that took all morning.’

He took another mouthful of the delicious terrine, and again chewed for as long as he dared.

‘Oh, you know,’ he said at last. ‘Meetings and things.’

‘You’ve become very secretive lately, Gordon. Particularly in the last seventeen years. So, nothing to report. The little lady wouldn’t understand all those dreadful economics.’

‘Well, since the world’s economists don’t seem to, you probably wouldn’t.’

‘Lunch?’

‘What?’

‘Did you have lunch?’

‘No.’

‘No lunch? Gordon! What’s happening to you? You’ll waste away.’

‘Well, I mean, I had a quick sandwich. In the office.’

‘Fetched for you by the grim Grimaldi?’

‘Yes, as it happens.’

‘What sort of sandwich was it?’

Suddenly there was too much talking – far too much.

‘What is this – the Spanish Inquisition?’

‘I’m interested. You always say you hate sandwiches, and now I learn you had them today and naturally I’m fascinated to know what kind of sandwich was so delicious that you overcame your habitual repugnance.’

‘Tuna and cucumber.’

‘Tuna and cucumber! Gordon, that is so Pret A Manger. That is so Network Rail. That is so Welcome Break. You cannot expect me to believe it.’

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe it.’

‘Because Hugo told me you lunched with him.’

‘Oh, was that today? Oh God, yes. Yes, it was. The tuna sandwich must have been Friday.’

Oh God. If my millions of admirers could see me squirming like this.

Christina smiled. It struck him how her smile had also changed over the years, hardened into a reaction not to the world but to her own thoughts about the world. It had become as spiky as some of her roses. Yet it still had a faint, disturbing echo of what it had once been.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘I was thinking, what if your millions of admirers could see you squirming like this?’

‘Have you finished?’

They hadn’t heard the waiter come in.

‘I see not a speck of food left on our plates. I think we may safely deduce that we have finished,’ said Sir Gordon, clothing his sarcasm in a smooth smile.

‘Thank you, sir.’

The waiter slid noiselessly out on shoes that must have been oiled with WD40, or perhaps with ‘S’ssh! The Ultimate in Squeak Removal’, made in Sir Gordon’s factory on the outskirts of Droitwich and destined, he hoped and believed, to consign WD40 to the pages of history. Or was he being over-ambitious again, as he had been with Germophile? Germophile! He didn’t even want to think about that episode.

In his effort not to think about Germophile, something Christina had said suddenly struck him.

‘You’ve spoken to Hugo then?’

‘I wondered how long it would take for that fact to sink in. Yes. He phoned, asked if he could bring anything for Saturday. I told him there was no need to bring anything except himself. I told him he was gift enough. The poor sap lapped it up.’

‘Hugo isn’t a poor sap, darling.’ He regretted that ‘darling’. ‘Poor saps don’t have houses in Eaton Square, Cap Ferrat, Venice, Rhode Island, and Bermuda.’

‘He’s a poor sap emotionally.’

‘He’s a banker.’

The opportunity for rhyming slang cannot have escaped either of them, but they said nothing.

‘Who’s the hotpot?’ interrupted the waiter like a gunshot.

It had to be an act.

When the waiter had gone, Sir Gordon took a mouthful and discovered that the hotpot was a very hot hotpot indeed. He gasped, tried moving the meat around in his mouth so as not to burn any bit of skin too much. Few wives could have wasted such a moment.

‘And your afternoon?’

While he dealt with his explosive mouthful, Sir Gordon thought desperately about his desperate afternoon. What could he tell her? Jack wasn’t mentioned in the house, which was hardly surprising in view of the gift that he had left her all those years ago, the gift that she had once, briefly, welcomed. (I could explain this now, but I choose to string you along. These are not generous times.)

Besides, how could he admit to his wife that he had felt unable, after his lunch with Hugo, to face the Coppinger Tower? He could never confess such weakness to her. And how could he admit that his heart seemed to have opened up, and that he’d felt an overwhelming need to see his younger brother, who had not quite enough of the family brains, not quite enough of the family spunk, not quite enough of the combination of brains and spunk that had been given to Sir Gordon and to Hugo by the brutality of chance. How could he admit to Lady Coppinger that he had hunted for Jack with the intention of trying to help him, even though Jack had rejected all help for ever?

And hadn’t found him, not in Soho, not under the arches of Charing Cross, not in Waterloo, not under any of the bridges of London. And how the wind had blown.

‘I just went back to the office actually. Caught up on some paperwork. Didn’t see anybody.’

‘Except the grim Grimaldi, presumably.’

Did she know?

‘Except the grim Grimaldi, yes. She brought me her grim coffee, and a grim rock cake from the grim canteen.’

He felt a slight twinge of shame at his disloyalty in calling the canteen grim. The canteen and the adjoining restaurant on the eighth floor were fine. The only reason he didn’t use them was because his presence inhibited everyone else from saying anything meaningful to each other. The strength of his ears was legendary.

Talk faded, fluttered feebly, died. Sir Gordon grieved, searched for answering grief in his wife’s dark eyes, and found none.

‘Have you finished?’

‘Once again the total absence of any even minute morsels of food remaining on any of our plates or in any of the dishes would suggest that we are seriously deluded if we believe that we haven’t finished.’

‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’

If only he had managed to see Jack.

Could Jack have died?

How would they find out if Jack had died?

He became aware that Christina had been speaking.

‘Sorry, I missed that. I was thinking,’ he said.

‘Gordon! How brave. Taking up a new activity at your age.’

He was so tired of her sarcasm – though not, curiously, of his own.

‘So, have I missed anything interesting?’

‘God, no. I just asked what you were doing tomorrow. I know my questions aren’t very imaginative but I am trying because you said you wanted me to talk. ’

‘So you’re trying new things as well. The obedient wife. Very nice.’

For a moment he thought he’d got away with it. He really didn’t want to talk about tomorrow. Two events dominated tomorrow’s agenda, and he didn’t want to talk to her about either of them. But then she repeated the question.

‘So what are you doing tomorrow?’

Tomorrow … lunching with the Earl of Flaxborough, who lives, not surprisingly, at Flaxborough Hall, which is, also not surprisingly, just outside Flaxborough, and in which ‘a proposition of some interest will be put to you’, according to the Curator of the Coppinger Collection, Peregrine Thoresby. What a feast of sarcasm about his glamorous life and his neglect of her that would inspire if he told her. And in the evening … well …!

‘Tomorrow? Nothing much. Can’t remember.’

‘Oh, come on, Gordon. You always remember. You don’t even need a diary.’

‘No, honestly, tomorrow, routine bits and bobs, that’s all. Tuesday’s never very stimulating. Oh, and I won’t be back for dinner. I have a meeting.’

‘With Mandy?’

‘Who’s the tiramisu?’

He was grateful for the interruption; he had never been so grateful to a waiter, but he didn’t show it.

‘Has it not dawned on you yet that I choose the British dishes, because I am British and proud of it, and my wife deliberately, in order to annoy me, chooses the most foreign dishes she can find on the menu?’

‘So you are the Eton Mess, sir?’

‘Oh, well deduced, Mr Einstein.’

Oh God, now those dark eyes were gleaming. In his eagerness to show the waiter how much he hated him he had revealed to Christina how deeply she had got under his skin. What a disaster, what an Eton mess.

‘You’re avoiding my question. Are you seeing the marvellous Mandy tomorrow night?’

‘I wasn’t avoiding your question. The waiter interrupted, with the genius of his ilk. I didn’t get a chance to reply.’

‘You’re avoiding it now. Are you seeing Mandy?’

‘What is this obsession with Mandy?’

‘That’s what I ask myself. Are you seeing her tomorrow night?’

Why was he so reluctant to lie? Was he losing his nerve? Did he think she would be able to tell that he was lying?

‘No, I am not seeing Mandy tomorrow night. I’m seeing two Croatian businessmen. Croatia’s an up-and-coming country. I need to get in there.’

After that, they ate their delicious desserts in silence.

Suddenly the door burst open and a woman in her early thirties, wearing a witch’s hat and a very short dress, lurched into the room, saw them, and shrieked with laughter.

‘Oops, sorry, I thought it was the Ladies,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Sir Gordon unnecessarily.

‘Oh gawd, I’m bursting,’ said the drunk young woman.

‘Too much information,’ said Sir Gordon.

‘Do you know where the Ladies is?’ the drunk young woman asked Christina.

‘I have no idea,’ said Christina frostily.

‘Blimey, you’re on your pud and you haven’t been yet. You must have a strong bladder. I’ve got a very weak bladder. I go all the time. Pee, pee, pee, that’s me.’

Oh, Christina, your face. Your fury. Your scorn. The lower orders, how common, how vulgar. Your denial of your birth, your childhood, your mum and dad, your moments of glory as Miss Lemon Drizzle. Oh, Christina.

He conveniently forgot, in his scorn of her scorn, that he also despised the lower orders. But, curiously, this evening he did not despise this intruder. Oh, silly drunk young woman in your witch’s hat, he thought, I will help you find the Ladies.

And he did. Without difficulty. With charm.

And that disturbed him. Maybe he had only done it to irritate Christina, and he often went through rituals that he despised and hid his scorn in charm, but he found that he did not despise this young woman who might have very good reasons to get drunk. He found the incident rather endearing. He thought the young woman was fun.

That was worrying.

He returned, looked at his wife’s icy face.

‘It’s odd. Today has been strangely dominated by urine. At breakfast I thought of the horror of needing to pee on the Kingston By-Pass. In the office, I imagined our receptionist’s boyfriend peeing in a sodden Sussex hedge. In the lift I realized I needed to pee and then I found myself describing young Martin Fortescue as a long streak of piss – though only to myself admittedly – and then in the afternoon I found myself in agony, while I was searching for Jack, and I did something I’ve never done, I took an enormous risk, not a paparazzo in sight, but still a risk, I peed under Blackfriars Bridge. And now this poor girl with her weak bladder, what a day.’

Of course he said none of that. The evening ended, as it had begun, in silence.

A great deal nearer than the Solway Firth

Sir Gordon felt slightly uneasy on his visit to Flaxborough Hall. This was the real deal. Rose Cottage truly was only a cottage after all.

He felt uneasy from the moment Kirkstall nosed the Rolls-Royce up the long drive towards the beautiful Jacobean frontage, through parkland laid out by Perspicacity Smith centuries ago.

There were signs, it was true, of slight but disturbing decay. Some of the bushes needed pruning. Branches that had been ripped off trees by the recent gales still lay on the ground. The mellow red-brick walls were in need of pointing. A gutter here and there hung loosely. Drainpipes were rusty.

The eighteenth Earl of Flaxborough stood at the top of the steps to welcome them, almost as if Sir Gordon and Peregrine Thoresby were royalty. Here too there were signs of slight but disturbing decay. He looked frail. He seemed to have become slightly too small for his clothes. He was beginning to droop, as if his long legs could no longer bear the weight of his even longer body. He had stretched his thin hair bravely over his scalp, to little avail.

‘I am so delighted to welcome you to Flaxborough,’ he said, in a melodious voice steeped in history.

There was a slight stiffness to his walk as he led them through the great hall into a large drawing room. The chairs in which they sat felt as if dust sheets had only just been removed from them. A chill hung over the house. Damp clung to the walls like a nervous child. It would have been tactless to look at the plaster too closely.

‘The bells aren’t working,’ said the Earl apologetically. ‘Excuse me while I round up some sherry.’

Perhaps the Earl’s stiffness was just a result of the damp, but when he had gone Peregrine commented, ‘He walks as if he has the burden of history in his bones.’ Peregrine had a great mass of curly black hair which made him look much younger than his forty-eight years. His voice was almost as posh as the Earl’s, but thinner and more strident. ‘Did you notice that little habit he has of glancing behind him? Is it fanciful to imagine that he is seeing seventeen Earls of Flaxborough marching behind him, watching what sort of a fist he is making of managing his inheritance?’

Taking an interest in other people had never been high in Sir Gordon’s priorities, but he found himself examining the Earl more closely as he returned with a tray, a bottle, and three Georgian sherry glasses. Sir Gordon was sensitive enough to feel a little embarrassed at being treated by this aristocrat as if he was manna from heaven, but then there came that voice again – ‘I have a sherry that I think will amuse you’ – and the authority returned, Sir Gordon was in his thrall.

‘I thought we’d have luncheon first,’ said the Earl, after they had been amused by the sherry, ‘and then examine the picture.’ He pronounced it ‘pickcha’.

Peregrine had refused to tell Sir Gordon what the purpose of their visit was. ‘I’m sorry, I know how infuriating it is,’ he had said, ‘but I want your reaction to be instinctive and immediate.’ Now it was clear that the Earl wanted him to buy a pickcha for the collection. Peregrine had explained that the estate was in deep trouble and needed to sell its assets. It was situated in an unfashionable part of the country – Bedfordshire – and was in the shadow of Woburn. The eighteenth Earl did not have a talent for showmanship. The house was seventy-ninth in the heritage top hundred. No elephants or giraffes wandered its grounds to delight the masses. No pop stars drowned the screeching of the peacocks.

Lord Flaxborough led them along a damp corridor towards the cavernous dining room. His wife arrived to join them as if she had been hiding in a secret passage. They lunched at a large table with the Earl at one end and Lady Flaxborough at the other, and of course it occurred to Sir Gordon that this was the real version of the parody he had performed with Christina in the private room of the Hoop and Two Colonels only yesterday – could it really have been only yesterday?

Lady Flaxborough was pale and slim and had a face like an overworked angel. She was painfully polite, asking Sir Gordon endless questions about his collection, his charitable foundation, even Climthorpe United. ‘It must be such fun to own a whole football team,’ she said, in a tone that almost but not quite concealed the subtext of ‘What kind of an idiot are you?’

Sir Gordon, determined to begin to turn over a new leaf and talk to people about themselves, was forced to spend the whole luncheon behaving as if he was rehearsing the final run-through of a television programme about his life. Poor Peregrine was silenced too, bypassed utterly.

The luncheon was served rather slowly. In fact, it was thirty-five years late. It consisted of brown Windsor soup, roast lamb in caper sauce, and sponge pudding, and was served by a butler who looked like a gnarled oak and made Farringdon seem a complete imposter.

‘I think you may be rather mystified by the red wine,’ said the Earl, and they were, although Sir Gordon had to be careful not to end up too mystified; he needed to be fresh for the evening.

And then the meal was over and the moment came.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Lady Flaxborough. ‘I will be so grateful to you, Sir Gordon, if you agree to help us dismantle our heritage, but I cannot bear to witness it.’

‘I understand,’ said Sir Gordon in a hoarse voice.

He didn’t know whether protocol demanded that he attempt to kiss Lady Flaxborough on her white cheeks, but in the end he only shook her hand.

The three men climbed the main staircase, in the face of a northerly gale blowing from the bedrooms, and entered the long gallery, which was indeed long, but slightly less long than most of the other long galleries in the stately homes of England. Nobody ever said, ‘When you go to Flaxborough, you must see the quite long gallery.’

They had the quite long gallery to themselves. The house was closed for the winter. The air was icy. Two small radiators were pointlessly hot.

The Earl led them to a rather small painting, a watercolour entitled Storm Approaching the Solway Firth. It was a Turner, dating from 1836. In the presence of its owner, who’d had more than fifty years to admire it, and of Peregrine, who was steeped in the language of art appreciation, Sir Gordon felt incapable of any adequate response. He was out of his comfort zone. Luckily, Peregrine spoke for him.

‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘A minor masterpiece, perhaps, yet a masterpiece. The colours more muted than in some Turners, but we know it’s autumn and we don’t know how we know and that is very clever. We know the storm is coming, we feel the unease, we may suspect that this will be the first storm of winter, yet the picture is almost still, but the stillness is fragile, the stillness is doomed, the boat looks so peaceful, the water is just gently ruffled, yet we know that the boat will soon be tossed and helpless. Magnificent. Will you buy it, Sir Gordon?’

‘The provenance is utterly secure, I suppose?’ said Sir Gordon, making it only just a question.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said the Earl. He couldn’t look Sir Gordon in the face. ‘Let me put you fully in the picture, Sir Gordon. I have three pictures that have been earmarked for sale, with huge regret. All masterpieces but what else is one to sell if one needs to raise money? This, a Tintoretto, and a Monet. Our great institutions in this time of cuts cannot afford to buy everything, so the pictures will have to go to auction unless … unless a saviour can be found.’

A warm feeling crept over Sir Gordon. Saviour. He was a saviour. In moments like this he almost persuaded himself – perhaps occasionally did persuade himself – that this was why he had done it all, this had always been his purpose, to make money in order to use it more wisely than any government, in order to give something back to the nation he loved and, more important, the nation that loved him. He no longer felt uneasy in this house. He even felt a sense of triumph, and he longed to say, ‘I’ll buy all three.’ Why not? That would show just how successful he had been, and just how generous he was.

But that would have been vulgar, and, however weak his position, there was still something about the Earl that forbad vulgarity in his house. Besides, there came with Sir Gordon’s warm feeling a colder undercurrent, a trickle of sensitivity that marred his pleasure as he witnessed the unease of a man short of old money practically begging to be saved by new money.

Maybe Peregrine Thoresby could read his mind, and had sensed the danger. Certainly he leapt in pretty quickly.

‘Clearly, even if we wanted to, the collection couldn’t consider buying all three,’ he said. ‘There are limits even to our resources, and the publicity it would engender would create an excitement that we just would not be able to accommodate in the context of our other work and the rest of our collection and the inevitably finite resources of our building itself. So, Sir Gordon, I felt – and this is what I would strongly advise – that we should purchase the Turner. If all three go to auction, none of them is likely to remain in Britain. There simply isn’t the money here to rival what there is in other places. Well, if the nation loses the Tintoretto and the Monet, they weren’t ours in the first place. But to lose a Turner – even a relatively small work from someone so British, so quintessentially British, even, dare I say it, quintessentially English – would be a tragedy.’

Sir Gordon knew that the Earl and Peregrine would be capable of talking about the picture for at least an hour without being so vulgar as to actually mention money, so, however much he might regret it, however much it would suggest that his reactions and his motives were less spiritual than everyone else’s, he would have to be the first one to raise the subject.

‘So, what sort of sum are we talking about here?’ he asked.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of talking to the Earl about this, Sir Gordon,’ said Peregrine, ‘and we’ve arrived at a round figure, a very round figure, which we think is fair, in no way excessive, and which acknowledges that this is a relatively small work, and a watercolour, and his watercolours do not historically fetch as much as his oils.’

‘I would be prepared to sell this picture to you,’ said the Earl in his modulated tone, ‘for twenty million pounds.’

‘Fine,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Consider the deal done.’

They shook hands. Sir Gordon was again bathed in the warm glow of the saviour. The Earl was relieved. Peregrine Thoresby was as excited as a child.

Sir Gordon felt happy as Kirkstall drove them speedily back to the Coppinger Tower. He was now the proud owner of Storm Approaching the Solway Firth. He was blissfully unaware that this was just the first of many storms that would approach, and that all the others would come a great deal nearer than the Solway Firth.

Those insidious doubts

The entry in his diary read, ‘6.30. Dorchester. DDT (Kranjčar and Modrić)’. Using the names of real people gave him a tiny frisson of risk. It was unlikely that Her Grimaldiship would recognize Kranjčar and Modrić as Tottenham Hotspur players, but it was just possible, and that element of insecurity added salt to the stew of deception.

‘Well, Helen,’ he said as he reached her desk. ‘I’m off to see the Croatians.’

‘Give my love to the Dorchester.’

‘I will.’

Did other people have conversations as fatuous as that? he wondered. (Wondering again! What was going on with all this wondering? he wondered. And that was wondering again.)

‘May I ask what DDT stands for?’

‘Of course, Helen. You have every right to know.’

Their eyes met. A stab of desire caught him off guard. He was always vulnerable at the start of one of his naughty evenings.

Did she sense his sexuality? He thought she did. He thought he could see it in her eyes. He’d have to be careful. He ought to leave. A quickie with Helen was definitely not in the plan.

‘It’s the Dubrovnik Development Trust.’

‘And what’s that all about?’

‘Developing Dubrovnik.’

‘I’m sorry I asked.’

He lowered his voice.

‘This is very hush-hush, Helen, but I can trust you.’

Her square face softened. She really did believe he was going to the Dorchester to meet two Croatian businessmen. What an opportunity.

‘We’re planning to build a shopping mall inside the walled city. I’m helping to fund it – for a substantial return, of course.’

‘Inside the walled city. You can’t. It’d ruin it. Where inside the walled city?’

‘Near the harbour, at the end of that big long tiled main street.’

‘But that’s the best bit. You can’t do this. I love Dubrovnik.’

He knew that.

‘It’s ravishing.’

And once I ravished you. No!

‘Why? Why, Sir Gordon?’

‘To keep the cruise ships away. They have up to five huge ships a day, pouring people in – in their ghastly shorts with their hideous white veined legs and their paunches and their tattoos, filling the bars and the shops and the restaurants, making life for the natives utterly intolerable. They have to make it ugly to survive.’

God, it was just believable.

He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and noticed that she had the faint beginnings of a moustache. That really turned him on. He hurried away from the danger.

As he strode through the open-plan office, a few people were still at their desks. It was five to six.

‘Well done,’ he called out. ‘Your diligence has not gone unnoticed.’

Kirkstall drove him to the Dorchester, dropped him off and went to park. As soon as his chauffeur was safely out of the way, Sir Gordon went outside and hailed a taxi. In the taxi he thought about the evening ahead. He was never at his best in taxis. Rich though he was, and even though he had just offered to buy a painting for £20 million, he hated the way the meter clicked up, up, up. He tried to ignore it, but found his eyes drawn back to it. ‘That’s one pound, twenty just for waiting at these lights,’ he would say. Christina had once pointed out that he resented spending on taxis but paid a fortune to gardeners. ‘They don’t have meters on their foreheads,’ he had said.

So now, in the taxi, it was natural that his thoughts should veer towards the negative.

Barely thirty-six hours had passed since that disturbing awakening, when he’d decided that he must end it with Mandy. But then he’d thought of that as a sign that he was going soft.

Should he end it? Were people becoming alerted to his sexploits, as the tabloids would no doubt call them? Insidious doubts began to assail him. Was he still invulnerable? Would his sexual appetite destroy him? Shouldn’t he concentrate on his great work, his collection, his charitable foundation, his football team? Men with missions should be single-minded. What would his staff in those great organizations and his workers in his factories and all the people in the Coppinger Tower think if they knew that their esteemed leader stared at the meters of taxis in horror? What would they think if their charismatic hero was splattered across the tabloids as a sex addict?

Oh God, was he a sex addict? He hoped not. It didn’t sound good when he read about other people who were sex addicts. They had to have treatment, for goodness’ sake. How intolerably embarrassing that would be.

If only, with his appetite, his virility, his needs, his strength, he could resume sexual relations with Christina. It really was rather extraordinary that he couldn’t.

He would have to grasp that nettle.

No, he must give Mandy up. She had served her purpose.

As he climbed the stairs to the second floor of her block of flats in Hackney – there was no lift – he noticed again that there was no smell of drains. The smell occurred only inside the flat, yet it was so faint that it seemed to be drifting in from outside. A conundrum! A conundrum that might perhaps have been easily solved if only Germophile had … but he must stop thinking about Germophile.

There she was, beaming plumply, sexy and generous, far too aroused for him to even contemplate disappointing her. He would let her down gently later. He owed her that much.

There was a smell of something else, dominating even the distant drains. It was the faintly sweet, temptingly disgusting aroma of cooking lamb. She had made one of her shepherd’s pies.

They kissed hungrily, hurried to the bedroom, tottered on to the bed, clawed at each other’s clothes – they couldn’t get them off fast enough. He raised her rate of interest, he made his deposit, it was urgent, it was a meeting of needs, it was a contract, it was the execution of an agreement, it was over.

It had always struck him as pathetic that she tried to lay an attractive table in her cramped kitchen-diner. There was a single, rather tatty rose in a cheap vase. There was a flickering candle which would deposit wax over the Formica that wasn’t even retro. She had placed the mats for the veg without a vestige of spatial awareness. The salt and pepper pots were dumped inelegantly in just the wrong place. It was a disaster, but she had tried. It made a vivid contrast to luncheon at Flaxborough Hall, where elegance hung in the air like a memory.

She would have to go.

He couldn’t tell her just now, or, if he did, he would have to leave before the meal. He wasn’t that cruel, to leave her with two portions of shepherd’s pie to eat through her tears. Besides, the portions had not been generous at luncheon, and a man is always hungry when he has just agreed to pay £20 million for a picture.

But would she shed tears? Did she care a jot for him?

She poured him a glass of wine. In the first few months he had always taken a bottle, hugely expensive, wasted on her. She had said that she was perfectly able to buy good wine, she was his girlfriend, not a paid mistress. He knew that sometimes she paid as much as £9.50 for the wine they drank.

He took a sip and actually enjoyed the roughness that her palate could not detect. Sometimes the wines that he bought were so smooth that all the tension had been bred out of them. Yes, he could enjoy this. And as the top of the shepherd’s pie began to crisp up the smell grew far more appealing, and he realized that he was very hungry indeed, even hungry enough to eat lamb for the second time that day.

‘I hope this is going to be all right,’ she said. ‘It’s only shepherd’s pie.’

‘It’ll be just lovely. I’ve told, you, Mandy, I don’t particularly like sophisticated food.’ He realized that this hadn’t sounded like the essence of tact, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Good old British simplicity, that’s me. Besides, how can I criticize? I’ve never cooked anything in my life.’

Her large pale blue eyes grew even larger in astonishment.

‘What, never? Not even boiled an egg?’

‘Never. Not even boiled an egg. I have things done for me, Mandy. I have everything done for me. I haven’t cut my toenails myself for a quarter of a century.’

‘I can’t imagine your life.’

She wouldn’t be able to imagine the Earl of Flaxborough’s either.

‘I can’t imagine yours.’

She served the shepherd’s pie with cabbage and carrots.

He ate hungrily.

‘Sex makes me hungry,’ he said.

She blushed just a little. Her body was so uninhibited, but she went all coy when she talked about sex. She changed the subject hurriedly.

‘I’m trying out a new girl this week. She’s better with hair than with people.’

He didn’t want to talk. He was actually relishing the food. The cabbage and the carrots were a little undercooked to his taste, but the pie itself was succulent, nicely seasoned, simple but unadorned, a success.

Sometimes when she talked about her salon he thought of other things, but today he actually found himself listening and wondering about this other world, so far removed from his, and even further removed from the Earl of Flaxborough’s. How many worlds there were.

‘That’s the thing with hairdressing. You get people who’re good with hair and useless with people and you get people who’re good with people and useless with hair.’

He smiled. They shared a problem – the inadequacy of underlings.

‘If you get somebody who’s good with hair and people it’s like gold, and then they emigrate to Dubai, and they never come back. There must be millions of hairdressers in Dubai. I don’t know how you do it, finding people for eleven manufacturing companies plus your financial empire and your property portfolio and all your ancillary activities.’

He had once used the phrase ‘my property portfolio and my ancillary activities’ to her, to explain the cancellation of that month’s visit, and she was one of those dangerous people who remember every single thing that is said to them.

‘This is very nice, Mandy.’

He really meant it and she knew that he meant it and she blushed slightly again and he felt the first tingle of returning desire. Maybe … maybe he wouldn’t tell her till after their second helping.

‘Would you like a second helping?’

Her timing was immaculate, and completely innocent.

‘Thank you. I would. Very much.’

Over his second helping he found himself making a request. He, making a request to her!

‘Tell me more about the new girl. The one who’s not good with people.’

‘Why?’

‘I like hearing you talk.’

Forget Hackney. It was Blush City, Arizona.

‘She talks too much. I think they’ve told her in training that’s what you do. Hairdressers can be overtrained.’

‘Like footballers.’

‘I was sorry you lost on Saturday. I always look for the scores.’

‘Yes. Unfortunate. Go on. In what way does she talk too much?’

‘Asks questions. I mean, the sort of women I get, they nod off or read magazines. They don’t want her saying, “Are you doing anything exciting this weekend?” Because most of them aren’t, and if they were they wouldn’t tell her, would they?’

She chatted away and he didn’t have to say much in reply and actually to his surprise he found it not unbearably boring to hear about this other world. There was apple crumble; he praised it and asked her if she’d made it herself and she said it was from Waitrose. They finished the bottle and he assured her three times that it was nice and she said, ‘I won’t wash up,’ which was the nearest she would ever get to ‘How about another fuck?’

This was one of his best evenings with her and he was amazed to find how much more he was enjoying it than his visit to Flaxborough Hall. He felt a twinge of pity for the eighteenth Earl, who would never hear anything about Hair Hunters of Hackney. The meal had been much better than usual, really quite edible, and she had worked hard over it, and it would have seemed heartless to have said, after that, ‘Mandy, this can’t go on, you know.’ So he didn’t.

This time he relished her unfashionable fleshiness, her large untrendy breasts, her full cheeks, her generous lips, the pleasure in her pale blue eyes. She once, in a rare moment of post-coital candour, had told him that his power turned her on, that it was exciting not to have been entered by her friend, the traffic warden, but by a man who had eleven manufacturing outlets in England alone. (Not to mention his property portfolio and his ancillary activities, though she hadn’t mentioned those on that occasion.)

This second coming was so gentle, so relaxed, so slow, so synchronized, so lovely. You really could almost have believed that there was real emotion in it. You could almost have believed that he felt real affection for her. You could almost have believed – oh, he hoped not – that she felt some kind of love for him.

He didn’t want to go home. He really did not want to go home. But he would, he almost always did, and when he didn’t he almost always regretted it.

As he took his shower, washing all traces of sexuality off him (not that Christina would come near enough to him to notice, but this was one risk that wasn’t worth taking), he felt really quite sad that he was destroying all the evidence. It seemed … tactless. Ungracious. And using her hot water too.

This was the moment when, if he was to tell her at all, he would have to tell her.

She mouthed her farewell kiss at him, careful not to undo the good work performed by the shower.

As he walked down the stairs he found himself wondering how a hairdresser could have such awful hair. But he actually found that quite endearing, and, as he stepped into the taxi that would take him to the Dorchester – in order for him to look as if he was coming out of the meeting he hadn’t been to, so that Kirkstall could drive him to darkest Surrey and suspect nothing, although actually he suspected that Kirkstall suspected everything – he was really extremely glad that he hadn’t given way to those insidious doubts.

Perhaps we have intruded enough

The dusk is pulled across the London sky like a merciful shroud drawn over a dead body. The short day is over. The long night is beginning. Nights are very long on the London streets, in winter.

For one of the men on the streets this Saturday evening, however, the night is perhaps not going to seem as long as usual. He has found a marvellous position, not exactly the best seat in the house, but the best space on the pavement. He has found a little corner, below pavement level, where warm air is being pushed out from the extractor fan of a posh London restaurant. He does not know the name of the restaurant. He does not know the name of any restaurant. He has not been in a restaurant for more than twenty-five years.

Before he settles down for the night he takes a swig from his bottle. The rawness of the alcohol warms him. He runs on alcohol. He starts each day with alcohol. It is the only thing that can cure his hangover. Maybe tonight, though, he will sleep right through, and need no alcohol. He certainly hopes that he will sleep until the restaurant’s kitchen closes.

He puts the bottle down beside him, where it will be handy if he needs it during the night. He wraps his old stained rags around him and lowers himself carefully on to the ground. He will be relatively cosy, tonight, in his own sunken grotto.

Just as sleep is about to envelop him, there are two loud bangs from somewhere nearby. He is irritated rather than alarmed. He knows what they are. They are not the signal to start a revolution. They are not the first shots in a gangland battle. They are fireworks. Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night. He knows this because he knows that November the fifth is Bonfire Night, and he knows that it is November the fifth because he always knows the date. There are often pages of newspapers bouncing in the wind along London’s dirty streets, and although he may look half drunk and extremely filthy, he still has a good brain, and he has very little to feed it, so he grabs what scraps he can.

Now sleep will not come. He thinks back to all those Bonfire Nights in Dudley, watching the municipal fireworks display with his brothers, gasping with shared astonishment, which was about the only thing they shared. They weren’t allowed to have fireworks themselves. There were a lot of things they weren’t allowed to have. They weren’t allowed to go to the swimming pool in case they contracted polio. He enjoyed the Saturday-morning film shows but his two brothers had grown out of such things, if indeed they had ever been into them. His elder brother almost certainly hadn’t. He had no sense of fun. There hadn’t been any point in playing games with him. He had no talent for games.

The middle brother, now, he had been different. He had been rather good at games, at make-believe, but he had never had the time. He had never had the time for anything, really, except for making money. He used to go to the baker’s, buy cakes, take them home, and cut them into pieces – rather small pieces to be honest – and sell them by the slice. He preferred that to any game, which was a pity.

Does the man in the privileged position beside the warm-air outlet welcome these reminiscences, or are they an irritation which prevents him from sinking into the unconsciousness he craves, if indeed he does crave it? How does he feel about his lifestyle? Is he happy? Is he sad? Is he resigned? Is he bitter?

What goes on inside his head is actually the only privacy he has left in his life. Perhaps we have intruded enough.

Staring at himself with astonishment

This was the bit that he liked best – the moment before anybody arrived. He stood in the middle of the enormous drawing room, rich in plump settees and elegant standard lamps, two of them in the art deco style – who said he was a philistine? On the walls hung a Cézanne, two Pissarros and a Stanley Spencer – again, who said he was a philistine? Log fires crackled gently at both ends of the great room. They were known as the west fire and the east fire. Some people described this as affectation, but Lady Coppinger said that it was necessary in order to give definite and simple instructions to the servants.

He walked slowly through the ground floor of his ‘cottage’, and every prospect pleased him.

The rosewood (what else?) dining table, the long rustic table in the far kitchen and the trestle tables erected for the occasion in the conservatories were all beautifully laid with plates of rare beef, pink lamb, pork with liberal crackling, smoked duck, venison sausages, five moist whole salmon that had once been wild, six stuffed trout that hadn’t been too pleased either – the old jokes were the best in Sir Gordon Coppinger’s book. It was all so quintessentially British, to use Peregrine Thoresby’s favourite word. Not a salami or a snail in sight. Good old Siobhan.

In the vast entrance hall with its anachronistic Doric pillars, the two lovely Pembroke tables were bedecked with all the rich promise of alcoholic excess. On the table to the left were bottles of champagne and long antique flutes. On the table to the right bottles of red wine stood opened and breathing and were surrounded by glasses of a size to cheer the most sombre of hearts. All the wine was British. It pained Sir Gordon not to be able to serve great French wine, but his reputation as a patriot was paramount.

The serving staff stood at their posts, young enough, smart enough, alert enough and attractive enough to pass muster even to this stern critic. Good old Siobhan.

Oh, it was wonderful. The food elegant and untouched, the bottles full, the glasses gleaming, the carpets spotless, and Lady Coppinger safely in her dressing room deciding which shade of lipstick to favour and which necklace to wear.

He climbed the stairs with the energy of a young man, and made a final security check round the eight bedrooms, the three dressing rooms and the eight bathrooms, six of which were en suite. Everything was as it should be. He’d known that it would be but he was glad of the excuse to look round and admire his cottage without seeming smug about it.

He switched off the lights on the landing that would have seemed long enough and wide enough to be called a gallery if he hadn’t been to Flaxborough Hall so recently, and peered out of one of the windows into the impenetrable dark. The rain hadn’t amounted to much, the bonfire would burn well. In a couple of hours this dark sky would be alive with bright colours and sensational patterns.

He could just see, through the gently swaying trees, the lights in Top Field, where a marquee had been set up to serve beer and wine and pork pies and sausages (not venison) to the good people of Borthwick End, Borthwick Magna and Borthwick Juxta Poynton. How generous I am, he thought, to allow them to marvel at the sensational waste of money which is at the heart of this evening at this critical economic moment in our island’s story.

Yes, this was the bit he liked best. Soon they would be here, headlights frightening the owls in the trees that lined the drive, tyres churning up the grass in the Front Meadow and the Back Meadow, exclamations of astonishment as if they’d never seen tables laid with food before, the wild salmon and the unhappy trout skeletonized before his eyes, and the chatter, the roar of the trite remarks of 250 people, what did they find to talk about? The showy coats piled on the beds in the guest bedrooms, the crumbs and wine stains on the carpet, the soiled bowls in the many lavatories, it would be downhill from now on.

He braced himself against the invasion. He consulted the database in his head. He must be prepared.

People invited included his elder brother Hugo; his doctor Hamish Ferguson and Mrs Ferguson; his centre forward Raduslav Bogoff and his not so svelte wife Svetoslava Bogoff; his creative left-side midfielder Danny Templeton and Mrs Templeton; his goalkeeper Carl Willis and Mrs Willis; Keith Gostelow, Dan Perkins, and Adam Eaglestone from GI (Keith Gostelow and Adam Eaglestone accompanied by their better halves, Dan Perkins accompanied by his worse half); his daughter Joanna, accompanied by nobody; Siobhan and Liam McEnery; Field Marshal Sir Colin Grimsby-Watershed (retired) and Lady Grimsby-Watershed (retired); Admiral Lord Feltham of Banbury (retired) and Lady Feltham; Gloria Whatmough, Head of Charitable Giving, and her friend June Wellington; Peregrine Thoresby, Curator of the Coppinger Collection and his partner David Emsley; and, last but least, his son Luke and his latest girlfriend, Emma Slate.

People not invited included his younger brother Jack; his deceased mother Margaret; Fred Upson; Martin Fortescue; Helen Grimaldi; Kirkstall; Alice Penfold with her stud and ring; Fiona Bruce; A.A. Gill; Giles Coren; the Mayor of Dudley; Mandy of Hair Hunters of Hackney; Francesca Saltmarsh of the Perseus Gallery with the sweetest little bedroom upstairs; and Jenny Boothroyd, Sandy Lane, Isla Swanley, Kerry Oldstead, Gill Goldthorpe, and Ellie Streeter, all of whom he had taken to his secret seduction suite on the twenty-second floor during the last six months.

The phone rang, loud and shocking in this last moment of silence.

A few moments later, Farringdon called out to him.

‘A Mr Liam McEnery on the telephone for you, sir.’

‘Thank you, Farringdon.’

He approached the phone as if it was an unexploded bomb.

‘Coppinger.’

‘I’m so sorry to bother you when you must be so busy, Sir Gordon.’

Yes, so get on with it.

‘I’m afraid we aren’t going to be able to come, sir.’

No Siobhan! What do I do if things go wrong? How selfish is this, to let me down at this late hour?

‘It’s the wee mite, sir.’

Oh, bloody Ryan. Might have guessed it. Children! Bastards!

‘I’m afraid he’s not well, sir.’

‘Oh dear. Nothing serious, I hope, Liam.’

‘I’m afraid it may be, sir. We’ve had to rush him to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

This really is very inconvenient, though. Why are kids always so inconvenient? And who will orchestrate the evening now?

‘Please give Siobhan my very best wishes, and tell her not to worry at all about the party, I’m sure her planning is absolutely foolproof.’

‘Thank you, sir. She’ll appreciate that.’

First arrivals. Suddenly Lady Coppinger sailed out from the harbour of her bedroom, exuding welcome, dripping with real pearls and false charms.

‘Hello! Oh, you look gorgeous.’

‘Well, so do you.’

‘And that new rose you bred last year. Divine. What was it called again?’

‘The Crimson Rambler.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘Thank you.’

They were off. It had begun. Siobhan was forgotten.

Who the hell are this couple? Quick, access the database of the brain, search. Ah, yes. Stanley Welton, the big cheese at Stilton (ha, ha) and Mrs Welton. ‘How are Olivia and Toby?’ ‘Oh, how clever of you to remember.’ We’re off, we’re at the races, who needs Siobhan? I can do this.

Chat, chat, chat. Sip, sip, sip.

The chosen footballers of Climthorpe United were among the first to arrive, awkward in their suits, none more awkward than Raduslav Bogoff. They had a Derby match against Charlton next day, and to invite so many of them tonight had been to indulge that love of risk that is an essential ingredient of the make-up of all great men.

‘Good luck against Charlton tomorrow, Raduslav,’ said Sir Gordon, ‘and don’t rush it in front of goal.’

‘Oh no, Sir Gordon. Tomorrow I am cool. Tomorrow I am ice.’

‘Excellent. And Raduslav? Don’t drink too much tonight.’

‘Oh no, I not, sir. I am Bulgarian. I no have this culture of booze.’

‘Great stuff. Good man.’

The manager, Vernon Thickness, and his absurdly blonde wife Claudia walked in on either side of the little gaggle of footballers as if they were two sheepdogs directing them towards the pen.

‘Hello, Vernon. Hello, Claudia. Going to stuff Charlton tomorrow, are we, Vernon?’ asked Sir Gordon.

‘Absolutely. Close down their wingers and they’ve no Plan B.’ Vernon Thickness narrowed his eyes, which was difficult as they were narrow already. ‘And don’t worry about them drinking too much tonight. I’ll be watching like a hawk.’ He did his hawk impression. ‘Anyone who drinks too much tonight is out. O U T. Out.’

Your spelling’s improved, thought Sir Gordon. Let’s hope your tactical awareness has too. But he didn’t say this. There were some things even Sir Gordon didn’t say.

They were pouring in now, and there was such a business of handing over coats and getting drinks that he had the unpleasant feeling of being surplus to requirements in his own entrance hall. He decided that it was better to return to the drawing room, which was filling up already.

Lady Coppinger approached him, gave him a sweet kiss on the cheek and said, ‘Darling, you look gorgeous tonight.’ She turned to the people who were drifting in the wake of her perfume. ‘I’m so proud of my man.’

Sir Gordon almost showed his shock before he realized that this was a public performance, overdone in order to hurt him. And, briefly, it did hurt him. A shaft of pain went through him as he recalled the times when such things might have been said and meant.

The drink flowing. The noise rising. The locals in Top Field getting frisky already. The chauffeurs in the Back Meadow and the Front Meadow running their engines to keep warm. Cost of fuel immaterial, they don’t have to pay. Global warming, global schwarming.

‘More bubbly?’ ‘Please.’ ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Who cares about the Greeks anyway? They can whistle for those marbles.’ ‘No wonder they want them, they’ve completely lost theirs.’ ‘Very good! Quite right! Bastards!’ ‘Nobody pays tax in the whole of Southern Europe, they’ll go to the wall and take us with them. Bastards.’

There was a sheikh in the room. He hadn’t invited a sheikh. Hadn’t got anything in particular against sheikhs, take them or leave them really, that was his attitude to sheikhs, but what was he doing here? Have to ask Siobhan. Oh, damn, couldn’t. Better ask the fellow himself. How do you address them? Excuse me, Your Sheikhship, and I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but who exactly invited you?

He started to part the crowds, feeling slightly like Moses, to get to the sheikh, but then he saw his dad, standing by the door looking utterly and totally lost. What was he doing here? Who’d invited him? He made his way over to Christina, who was holding court.

‘Sorry to break in, sweetest –’ God, that was difficult to say – ‘but did you invite Dad?’

‘Yes, all the happy family together, Gordon, on this very public occasion.’

‘Bit risky, isn’t it?’

‘He’ll be fine.’

Women! That was women all over. Make a gesture, create havoc. Better say nothing, though.

He hurried over towards his dad, feeling, though he was too anxious to realize it, a genuine shaft of emotion for the first time in the evening.

His father’s cheeks were shrunken and his eyes were hiding in panic at the backs of their sockets.

‘Dad!’

Say ‘Dad’ at regular intervals, and he just might put off that moment he dreaded, the moment when he had to face for the first time the fact that his father didn’t know who he was.

‘How are you, Dad?’

‘I’ve lived too long.’

Quite right.

‘No! Never!’

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re at my house.’

‘But it’s huge.’

‘I’m very rich, Dad.’

‘Are you? Good Lord. I never was. Was I?’

‘No, Dad, you weren’t, but you did all right.’

‘Did I? Oh, good. Where’s Margaret?’

Margaret’s dead, Dad. No point. Wouldn’t remember, why hurt him?

‘Probably checking her make-up.’

‘That’ll be it. Who’s that boy over there who’s in love with his hair and isn’t in love with that woman who looks as if she doesn’t wash?’

Good God. So few corners of the brain left active, and still such perception.

‘That’s your grandson, Dad. Luke.’

‘Ah! Thought I recognized him. You must introduce me some time.’

He found a seat for his dad and looked round for someone to go and talk to him. His eyes lit upon a nun. A nun! What was she doing here? He hadn’t invited a nun. What did Siobhan think she was doing inviting a sheikh and a nun? He must talk to Siobhan. Oh, blast. He couldn’t. Perhaps he could ring the hospital. No. Insensitive. A picture flashed across his mind, anxious parents at a bedside. A wee mite struggling to breathe. Oxygen.

He managed to reach the nun. No time to ask her why she was here.

‘Excuse me. I don’t know you, but obviously as a nun you have compassion.’

Strangely attractive. He’d never had a nun. No! Gordon, get a grip.

‘My dad … that’s him in that chair … he’s eighty-six … he’s got dementia … he’s frightened … will you talk to him, calm him down? … Please.’

‘Of course. Don’t worry.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem.’

He was disappointed to find that even nuns said ‘No problem’.

He tried to make his way over to Luke, but his path was blocked by Hugo, immaculate to excess and as supercilious as a cat.

‘Posh do, Gordon.’

‘Well, you know.’

‘Yes. Keeping up appearances.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Stop looking for hidden meanings. Anyway, I can see I’ll have to pull my socks up next year.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Hugo. You top me every time. Last year was fantastic.’

‘It was good, wasn’t it? Still, this looks lovely. Where’s Christina?’

‘Oh, here, there, everywhere. Being charming.’

‘Not being charming, Gordon. She is charming.’

‘You don’t live with her.’

Hugo gave the very faintest twitch.

‘True. Very true.’

Sir Gordon edged closer to Luke. A quick look showed his father chatting happily with the nun. Maybe Siobhan had known what she was doing inviting her.

At last he was with Luke. They shook hands. The formality seemed odd, but a kiss was out of the question.

‘Dad, this is Emma Slate.’

The worst yet.

‘Delighted to meet you, Emma.’

‘Really? Luke said you’d hate me.’

‘Well, give me a chance. I haven’t had time yet.’

Uneasy laughter. Good.

‘I may as well tell, you, Sir Gordon –’ there was a look of defiance on her face, plus an element of fear that if she wasn’t careful she might look attractive to men she despised – ‘that I came here under duress.’

‘Not the quickest way. I recommend coming through Esher and Epsom. Any more vandalism, Luke?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a pessimist, Luke, why should there be any more?’

‘I just have a feeling, Dad.’

‘Luke gets these feelings, Sir Gordon.’

‘Oh, does he? I wouldn’t know, Emma. I don’t know him as well as you.’

‘Dad!’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Whose fault is that?’

‘Oh look, Luke, not today.’

‘OK. Right. No, I think I must have – or we must have because you were mentioned as well – offended the Welsh in some way.’

‘Well, that isn’t difficult. So, Emma, are there a Mr and Mrs Slate?’

‘No, I was produced by artificial insemination.’

‘Emma!’

‘I’m sorry, Luke, but I just hate telling people. It’s such a conversation stopper. No, there isn’t a Mr Slate or a Mrs Slate. Both my parents are dead, Sir Gordon. They drowned in Tenerife.’

Emma was right. It was a conversation stopper.

Now, as the buzz grew louder, the crowd thicker, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, two people, the sight of whom demanded instant attention – his daughter Joanna, and a Greek Orthodox priest. It was no contest. He approached the priest with determination in his step.

‘Excuse me … I don’t know you … I’m … I’m Sir Gordon. Your host.’

‘Lovely party.’

‘Thank you. I … um … I have no wish to be in any way offensive, and I … I have no idea of how one is supposed to address a Greek Orthodox priest.’

‘A Greek Orthodox archbishop.’

‘Oh my goodness. Then perhaps I ought to call you “Your Beatitude”.’

‘That will do splendidly.’

‘Good. I have to ask you, Your Beatitude, who invited you?’

‘You did.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, not personally, but the invitation was from you.’

‘You received an invitation?’

‘I received an invitation and both as a Greek citizen and as a senior representative of Our Lord here on earth I find your attitude to me somewhat offensive.’

‘I have to say that I am not thrilled by your attitude, Your Beatitude.’

‘I will show you the invitation but I do so under protest.’

‘There’s really no need. I accept your word.’

‘I insist.’

‘Very well.’

The invitation looked exactly like the design that Siobhan and he had devised, and the words too were as they had agreed. If it was a forgery, it was a good one. He would need to phone Siobhan.

But could he? The image returned, Ryan’s breathing now faint, Liam holding Siobhan’s hand, a doctor and two nurses staring at the graph of the wee mite’s heart; it was terrible, compassion flooded into Sir Gordon, and he had no defence against it, having hardly felt any for as long as he could remember.

He took his mind off it by wondering what it would be like to have sex with a nun, in her cell, right next to the Mother Superior’s. It didn’t work very well.

And then he realized that he had the perfect antidote to compassion right there standing in front of the east fire. His daughter Joanna.

It was the sagging of the shoulders that did it, he decided. The whole body might look better if she stood up straight. Even the clothes, which looked as if they’d been bought in a charity shop the day it closed down, might look better if she stood up straight. And the hair. He’d a good mind to send her a voucher for six free visits to Hair Hunters of Hackney.

Oh, Joanna, the day you were born … our hopes.

‘So, darling, how are you?’

‘Oh, you know, Dad. So-so.’

Never ill. Never well.

‘Well, it’s the time of year.’

Gordon, you can do better than that.

‘Yes, I hate this time of year.’

You hate every time of year. Too hot. Too cold. Too wet. Too dry. Too average.

‘Looking forward to Christmas?’

Oh, come on, Gordon, sparkle. It’s Guy Fawkes Night.

‘Not really, Dad. I don’t much like Christmas actually.’

Not even positive enough to hate it.

‘And it all starts ridiculously early these days.’

I entirely agree, in fact I’d go further, it’s ludicrous, it’s greedy, it’s self-destructive, but can’t we try to be positive tonight? It is a party. Abandon Christmas. Change the subject.

‘How’s the job?’

‘Oh, you know.’

‘Well, you could have worked for me.’

‘Oh, Dad, don’t. You know I don’t want favours. You know I want to make my own way in the world.’

But you haven’t.

‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I haven’t made much of a way, but it’s my way.’

And you can’t sing like Frank Sinatra either.

Suddenly, the banging of a gong broke through the rising chatter. More bangs, cries of ‘Shh’, and silence fell in the great triple-glazed, triple-gabled house specially designed for a soap magnate who needed two swimming pools and so amusingly called his mansion a cottage, ha, ha.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ intoned Farringdon. ‘Your host, Sir Gordon Coppinger, wishes to say a few words. If you would make your way, as many of you as can squeeze in, to the drawing room.’

Sir Gordon hurried through to get to the front while he still could. Farringdon passed the microphone over to him. He tried not to look at the throng. He didn’t want to see the sheikh, the nun or the archbishop. They sounded like a bad joke, but in fact their presence alarmed him. He didn’t want to see his frightened dad, his listless daughter, his inept son, his insincere wife. He wanted to forget his unhappy life. What?? Unhappy?? No!!

He’d paused too long. He must begin. But to have had these thoughts at this very moment … how could he cope?

Of course he could cope. He was a great man, wasn’t he?

Wasn’t he?

He coped.

‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ he began. ‘Ladies and gentlemen … I’m not going to make a speech. Too many people make too many speeches. I’m going to say just a few words. As you may know, my brother Hugo and I host a Guy Fawkes party in alternate years, and this year it’s my turn, so … welcome. Welcome, each and every one of you. Guy Fawkes Night. We celebrate a failure. How very British. Well, I don’t much like failure. In fact, I think I can say that I’m a stranger to it. So, my simple message is this. Don’t talk Britain down. Don’t even contemplate failure. Cut the word “crisis” from your vocabulary. Let’s start tonight. Let’s make this night a huge success. Ladies and gentlemen, you will find tables laden with food in the dining room, in both the conservatories, and in the far kitchen. Don’t rush, there’s plenty for everybody. Enjoy.’

The minute he had finished speaking he felt as if his words had been utterly hollow. He stood there in his crowded home, and felt utterly alone.

People began to queue for food. Many rushed. Others didn’t rush because they were genuinely too polite. Some didn’t rush because they didn’t want to be seen to rush. A few didn’t rush because they were cool. Luke didn’t rush because he had to be seen to be cool. Christina didn’t rush because she was the hostess. Joanna didn’t rush because she didn’t much like food. His dad didn’t rush because the nun had abandoned him and he was utterly confused.

Sir Gordon walked up the side staircase, unseen, upstaged by hunger. His purpose was to telephone Siobhan from the phone in the master bedroom. He had to know whether she had invited the sheikh, the archbishop and the nun. If she hadn’t, why were they there? Was there a plot to kill him? On Guy Fawkes Night? He wasn’t a wimp, but he was frightened. Of course he was frightened. Very few people want to die.

And yet … didn’t he court danger? Didn’t he need it to spice up his unvarying diet of success? Yes, but danger was one thing, death another. He wasn’t ready to die.

Danger. He longed for a sudden little bit of it. Perhaps he was a danger addict, not a sex addict. Perhaps he was a danger addict and a sex addict.

And here was the perfect way of having danger and sex.

He would make love to the nun in the bed he shared with his wife in the middle of his Bonfire Night party.

Gordon, this is madness. You are not a rapist. You are not an evil man. How will you persuade a nun into your bed?

With your famous charm.

But, Gordon, you are beginning to wonder about your charm.

It was a mad moment. It was over. The desire for sex and danger left him, the tide receded and he was a whale stranded on a beach.

He picked up the phone. Siobhan’s mobile was switched off. It would be, you weren’t allowed to have them switched on in the wards.

He hesitated. Even he, so used to having his own way, thought twice about ringing a children’s hospital at a quarter to nine on Guy Fawkes Night.

He must find out.

He dialled.

‘Hello. My name is Sir Gordon Coppinger.’

‘The Sir Gordon Coppinger?’

‘That’s right. I want to speak to a lady called Siobhan McEnery. Her baby son Ryan is seriously ill in the hospital.’

‘Is it important, Sir Gordon?’

‘It’s important or I wouldn’t be ringing at this time but no, it isn’t a matter of life and death and I will understand if she can’t speak to me or doesn’t feel able to.’

‘I’ll do my best, Sir Gordon.’

‘Thank you. I really appreciate that.’

He waited, waited, waited. His heart was racing.

‘Hello.’

Siobhan. He almost fainted.

‘Siobhan, it’s Sir Gordon here. I have to know. How’s Ryan? How’s the wee mite?’

‘Oh, Sir Gordon, thank you so much for asking. He’s very ill but he’s holding his own.’

‘Oh, thank you, Siobhan. Thank you. I’m so relieved. Get back to him, Siobhan.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He put the phone down and walked slowly away. He caught sight of himself in a long mirror. He stared with astonishment at the sight of himself staring at himself with astonishment.

Not such a useless lump of a nun after all

He walked slowly down the stairs, out of silence into bedlam.

Almost without knowing that he was doing it, he took a plate and piled it with food. Almost without knowing how he had got there, he found himself back in the immense drawing room.

‘Dad! Over here.’

Almost without making a decision he obeyed Luke and made his way over to the corner of the room, where there was a spare seat. Nobody, it seemed, had been that eager to sit with Luke and Emma, who had created a little artistic enclave by sitting with Peregrine Thoresby and his partner David Emsley.

‘I love your Pissarros,’ said Peregrine Thoresby, who was at his most effete and wouldn’t be everybody’s cup of mint tea in this gathering.

Sir Gordon finished his mouthful of smoked duck before replying. He needed the time. He was having trouble getting back into the social whirl after his experience upstairs.

‘Well, I put on my walls only what I like,’ he said at length.

‘And that includes nothing by Luke?’ asked David Emsley, who was big and solid and had played in the scrum for Rosslyn Park before coming out of the closet.

‘Difficult one. I really don’t want to be offensive,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘I only put on my walls paintings that I both admire and believe will enhance my house. If you think that makes me philistine, I am. I can admire Francis Bacon. I don’t want him in my house. The same goes for Hieronymus Bosch and, I’m afraid, Luke Coppinger. It isn’t a question of merit. It’s a question of … domesticity. In choosing a picture I use some of the same criteria as I use in choosing a settee. Does it enhance the room? Fact of life, I’m afraid. You disapprove, Emma. I see it in your face.’

‘Emma disapproves of everything,’ said Luke proudly.

‘I do not,’ said Emma. ‘How ridiculous. I disapprove of this party, yes. I’m sorry, but I do. Such waste, when billions are dying of starvation, and when it’s just been announced that company directors voted themselves average increases of forty-nine per cent last year, and here you are wasting money on fireworks of all things, which are no use to anybody and frighten all the animals, and please don’t point out that I myself have been eating your food and drinking your drink because it’s all been laid out and will only be thrown away if I don’t.’

There was silence. Luke seemed abashed. Even Emma seemed abashed. Sir Gordon felt very tired, too weak to face a challenge.

‘You deny that you disapprove of everything, Emma,’ said Peregrine Thoresby. ‘So tell us. What do you approve of?’

‘I approve of disapproval,’ said Emma, ‘because the world deserves it. I approve of alcohol, because it makes me feel good. I approve of cricket, because it’s going to get Luke out of my hair for hours every weekend in summer if we’re still together. I approve of bees, because they’re clever and lovely and I like honey. I approve of rabbits, obviously.’ Her most recent painting was a massive canvas of rabbit droppings. She looked at Peregrine and David. ‘Oh, and I approve of homosexuality.’

‘Thank goodness for that, eh, David?’ said Peregrine.

‘She’s just saying it to be polite,’ said David, and at the word ‘polite’ Emma snorted.

‘Sir Gordon, you’re a bit of an enigma, you know,’ said Peregrine.

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Sir Gordon, but he said it without his usual conviction. He felt uneasy in this conversation.

‘You can be so forward-looking with the collection at times, but you’re regarded as a rather reactionary soul. We’ve never discussed this and I think we get on well, I hope we get on well. What’s your attitude to gays?’

Sir Gordon wanted to tell them of his happy relationship with Dennis Hargreaves in Dudley all those years ago, but he couldn’t think of a way of putting it that wouldn’t sound a bit like boasting in this context, as if he was telling them that he wasn’t narrow, he wasn’t prudish, he too was a man of the world, a man of broad tastes. So he didn’t. Instead he repeated something he had said at a seriously stuffy dinner party in Leatherhead.

‘I have no objection to male homosexuality,’ he said. ‘I get on very well with homosexuals actually, but I loathe lesbianism.’

Throughout the house the conversation was buzzing merrily, people were beginning to go for desserts, soon it would be fireworks time, but in this corner there was a stunned silence. Luke broke it at last.

‘That’s ridiculous, Dad.’

‘I don’t want to be rude,’ lied Emma, ‘but it’s ludicrous. How can you possibly justify it?’

‘Two male homosexuals are two rivals out of the way,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Two lesbians mean two lost opportunities. Simple self-interest.’

There was another, only slightly less stunned silence.

‘Every decision in the world is made out of self-interest.’

‘Oh bollocks,’ said Emma, and she stormed off, to the extent to which it was possible to storm off in such a crowded room.

‘Oh, Dad,’ said Luke, and he set off after her.

‘They’re young,’ said David Emsley. ‘The truth still hurts them.’

The truth. Was it the truth? Sir Gordon wasn’t sure any more. It didn’t explain his phone call to Siobhan.

And then, shortly before ten o’clock, the guests trooped out into a night that wasn’t quite wet and wasn’t quite dry, that wasn’t quite cold and wasn’t quite mild, and they stood in their overcoats and their massed ranks right at the bottom of the garden.

Behind them, the house shone with light, a fantasy of gables and even a small turret, built in brick, rambling, almost mirroring a medieval house that had grown over the centuries, though this had grown in two days on the drawing board of a fast and not too punctilious architect.

Just beyond the fence, at the top of Top Field, the mountainous bonfire burst into life. The flames lit up the faces of the locals, beyond the bonfire.

Now the fireworks began. The Surrey sky was alive with double and triple rockets, meteors, comets, whistling tails, crackling willows, canopies of glittering starburst, noise and glitter and bursting greens and blues and reds. His guests ooohed. The locals aaahed. The guests aaahed. The locals ooohed. All was noise and light.

Dogs whimpered and hid. Cats hissed. Bewildered finches woke and fled. Nervous horses neighed and pranced and fell. Rabbits hared to their burrows. Sticklebacks in the streams felt the vibrations. Sir Gordon caught sight of the Greek Orthodox archbishop looking endearingly boyish and excited, and wondered again whether there was a plot to kill him or kidnap him tonight, under cover of all this excitement.

But most of the time his eyes were gazing into the sky, marvelling at the barrage of rockets, the titanium salutes, the wildly whistling missiles that burst into confusions of colours. Nobody noticed a frail old man slip through a gate with an agility beyond his years, but then he was nineteen again, he was in the Eighth Army, he was inspired by Monty, he was inspired by Rommel, who was that rarity, an enemy worth fighting. Nobody noticed him ride out the hail of bullets, dodge the wickedly whistling shells, and speed – well, totter, but it seemed like speed to him – towards the conflagration.

‘There are men in there,’ he cried, but his voice was frail, and nobody heard his cry. ‘There are men dying in there.’ But the noise was loud, and nobody heard his voice. But then he tripped, and the fall caught somebody’s eye, and voices were raised, Sir Gordon and others heard the cries, Sir Gordon saw his father, slender and tottering in the glare of the flames, getting to his feet again, shouting desperately but oh so feebly, stumbling towards the flames, but oh so slowly, men were catching him, Sir Gordon was running but he was too late, too late, his father fell again, arms reached out for him, a log spat viciously, sparks flew, his father’s straggly hair was on fire, his father screamed, then he saw his father pulled away out of the reach of the fire, there was a bag over his head, somebody was pressing the bag down so that the fire couldn’t breathe, but his father couldn’t breathe, Sir Gordon couldn’t breathe, a great pain shot through him, he was having a heart attack, he was dying, he was lying and dying beside his dead father.

But Sir Gordon didn’t die and neither, amazingly, did his father. They made them tough in Dudley, and besides, don’t forget, Clarrie was nineteen again.

The bonfire burned on, the fireworks continued to explode, many people hadn’t even noticed the kerfuffle beside the fire. Somebody found Dr Ferguson, who examined the old man with great tenderness. There beside the fire he was in the warmest place around. Dr Ferguson suggested that they let him recover a little from his shock before they moved him. And then, during the spectacular climax to the magnificent display, when almost all eyes were on the heavens, they moved Sir Gordon’s frail, shocked father carefully, and carried him with infinite care back to the protection of the warm, wonderful house. Dr Ferguson said that to move him to hospital, a twenty-mile trip in an ambulance, to transport him to a bed when there was a bed here safe from MRSA, would be senseless. He himself would stay beside him, tend him, treat him, dress the burn on his scalp, comfort him.

‘Well,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to his spouse of twenty-nine years, ‘do you think inviting him was sensible now?’

‘It might have been a good, brave way for him to go,’ said Lady Coppinger, the former Miss Danish Pastry (West Midlands).

Sir Gordon sighed. It was a sigh steeped in realism. She would always have the last word.

Some people knew what had happened and sent their condolences, but far more of the revellers had no idea that anything untoward had happened, such had been the splendour of the display.

There was mulled wine to round the evening off, and then, gradually, the guests began to leave.

‘Next year will have to be pretty special,’ said Hugo Coppinger to his brother.

‘To next year,’ said Admiral Lord Feltham of Banbury (retired). ‘If we’re invited, of course.’

‘Time for us to retire, my dear,’ said Field Marshal Sir Colin Grimsby-Watershed (retired) to Lady Grimsby-Watershed (retired).

‘Did you enjoy the fireworks?’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to his daughter Joanna.

‘I don’t much like fireworks actually,’ said Joanna Coppinger to her father.

‘Well,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to Emma Slate, whose Rabbit Droppings Near Hornchurch was said by one critic to have lent a completely new and translucent complexion to the meaning of art. ‘There have been many panicking cats and dogs, ponds and marshes full of frightened frogs and terrified toads, well over a hundred expensive cars pumping carbon monoxide into the air, lights blazing in every room of a house of hugely unnecessary proportions, vast amounts of fine foods likely to be thrown away, most of which were produced by rearing and keeping animals in very dubious conditions indeed, and one dreadfully startled old man. Have you enjoyed it?’

‘Oh, Sir Gordon, I have. I have,’ wailed Emma Slate. ‘Does that make me a bad person?’

‘No,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger. ‘It makes you human.’

Their eyes met. She wasn’t his type at all. His father had been right. She wasn’t very clean. And there had to be something a bit insalubrious in the mind of a woman who could create a picture of rabbit droppings. But sexual attraction didn’t run along smooth lines. There weren’t any rules. And he did wonder if there was just a chance that he could steal her off Luke. That would be fun.

‘You’re pissed,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to Vernon Thickness. ‘If we don’t win tomorrow you’re on your bike, sunshine.’

‘We will hammer Charlton Unthletic tororrow. We will larecate them utterly. One–nil. I promise you that,’ said Vernon Thickness to Sir Gordon Coppinger.

‘A message for you, sir,’ said Farringdon to Sir Gordon Coppinger. ‘A lady rang and left a message. A Siobhan McEnery. I believe her husband had rung earlier.’

Sir Gordon’s heart almost stopped yet again.

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