The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  There was a short queue to pay at the toll booth and when his turn came he had only a ten-pound note. He held it out to the sullen attendant. She pointed to a large sign: Exact Change Only.

  ‘I don’t have any. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I need the right change.’

  Steven searched his pockets to show willing, although he knew they were empty. This is all I’ve got. I know it must be a bind for you . . . I didn’t know the bridge was open yet.’

  ‘You don’t have anything smaller?’

  ‘No . . . if I had it, I’d give it to you.’ He let her realise that he was controlling a justified impatience but that she had the power to force him to keep it under control.

  She looked at him flatly. ‘You’re supposed to have the right change.’

  ‘I haven’t been through here before. Next time I’ll have the right money.’

  She looked at him without responding. He handed her the ten-pound note and the barrier lifted. As she turned to the next driver, her face showed neither triumph nor irritation.

  He drove to the Suffolk coast with the windows down, enjoying the warm wind on his face, taking a couple of hours to reach a small place near Diss where he rented a hut next to the beach. Once in the hut, he locked the body in a steel padlocked chest. He hired a boat in Harwich where he also bought six 15-kilo weights. Four hours later, he was back at the beach and loading the body into the boat. Cloud had dimmed the sun so that the grey stones of the beach merged with the grey sea and the grey sky. The only colour in the deserted landscape was the dark blue of his tracksuit and the bright electric orange of the bag.

  Ten miles out, in deep water, with the weights tied to the body, he rolled it over the side. Its fall was visible for half a second as the black of the body-bag merged with the blackness of the undersea. He watched for a moment, feeling the gentle swell of the sea as it shifted the boat. He plunged his face into the water for ten or fifteen seconds, and pulling himself back, he wiped the freezing water from his face, smoothing it over his dark hair. He sailed into Harwich as the light failed and he was back in his flat by eleven p.m.

  The weariness of pursuing a life where the opportunities for failure were endless left Steven alternating between boredom and terror. It was such hard work being the way he was. He could rely on nothing. Mistakes and successes often masqueraded as one another. With Maria, poor judgement had saved his life, thoughtfulness and insight almost lost it. Careful planning and patience had allowed their relationship to settle into a deadly friendship. But his storming out of the shop in anger had forced her in the most dramatic way to reconsider what she felt about him. He should have killed her weeks ago but he was confused both by the failure as well as the success. Unplanned victory was itself a kind of defeat because it was vital not only to succeed but also to know exactly why. Where you might unconsciously charm you might also unwittingly offend. In letting her live long enough for her reservations to crystallise, what would have been pure enough to keep him safe for years had been adulterated to the point where it had poisoned him. All he had now was breathing space, and little enough of that. It had not been indecisiveness alone that had delayed her killing but a certain gratitude that she had returned, and a desire on his part to take it easy for a bit. This, thought Steven, had been his unforgivable mistake: the thing that distinguishes man from the animals is that animals don’t take holidays. Nature doesn’t believe in breaks, in time off. There’s paying attention or there’s death. Down in the jungle it’s work, work, work.

  He realised this because he learnt quickly. But you could never learn quickly enough, for there were so many complicated ways in which to make mistakes. This complication was not matched by the brutally straightforward consequences of getting it wrong. There was starvation in every compliment, in every kiss bestowed and touch reserved; what you did and what you did not do. It all mattered, all of it, all of the time.

  He flicked through a copy of Vogue he had bought at the newsagent’s the day before. For a long time women’s magazines had been a puzzle to him. All of them – whether for the young or the middle-aged, cheap or pricey – seemed identical in their triviality: no politics, no economics, no sociology, no history, no analysis. Everything was reduced to the golden rule of four: food, relationships, disease and looking good. He liked and admired, and was often amazed by, the richness of the women he had known, and so the repetitive similarity of these magazines did not reflect his experience of women in any significant way. Until one day he twigged.

  Most men led simple, if aggravating, lives consisting of money and the work they did to get it. Women, on the other hand, were on the go from dawn till dusk, just as they had always been: gathering, watching, preparing, teaching, fetching, carrying, mending, arranging, delivering, putting things back. Now they were free to live lives of money and work as well. The High Priestesses of liberation had given them something else to do, and only the inventive generosity of men – Mr Hoover, Mr Zanussi – had prevented them from grinding to an exhausted halt. Women liked to read women’s magazines for the same reason that he enjoyed them: in a life where there were always other things to think about, always another task you had to do, it was nice to switch off for a bit.

  And no wonder, he thought, that women’s magazines were full of recipes: mothers rewarded and withdrew through food; anorexics punished; seducers and plain women fed their way into the hearts of others; grandparents sweetened their daughter’s toddlers and in doing so turned their daughters sour. Every bottle has its message, every meal its manifesto. Here were the missing economics, the absent politics, the disappearing sociology. Many bitter Christmas dinners with many different families had taught Steven that you could even eat history. Since he survived on something that could not be touched, what had seemed implausible to him at first was suddenly obvious: abstractions can be boiled or baked or fried.

  At some point in the fairly recent past, he had realised that he was harbouring an ideal. He had read in Vanity Fair about a family refurbishing an ancient, run-down, large ancestral home. They had discovered while rebuilding that it had two bedrooms they hadn’t known about. He considered himself to be exactly like a house – finite, known, needing to be adapted to changing circumstance by sharp tools – but this story captured his imagination and unsettled what had become a fixed way of viewing himself. Some time later he’d listened to a woman at the next table in the café in Liberty’s who was troubled by a recurring dream in which she discovered that her house contained large rooms she’d never seen before. He was particularly struck by her recollection of opening an airing cupboard door and finding, instead of the dark accumulation of out-of-fashion clothes or the warm smell of hot cotton, a spacious room: light, well proportioned and with a view. He was possessed by a certainty that there was a way out, that if he could find the right woman and persuade her to love him perfectly, then when he killed her it would stop.

  In the days that followed, his body reacted erratically to his near-failure with Maria – nausea, blurred vision, an occasional attack of the shakes – but all in all he was reassured. He would manage for a year or so, he guessed, maybe more. The headaches and the stiffness were more pronounced, particularly if he could not doze for an hour during the day, but whether he slept or not, at four o’clock came the sudden dip, the sense that he had been disconnected and allowed to drain away. His fear, great at first, receded to a nagging presence at the back of his mind.

  After three weeks he called the police and reported Maria missing, then went shopping for clothes. He spent nearly two hours with one of the assistants in the Paul Smith shop in Covent Garden. The man’s initial enthusiasm waned as Steven chose and replaced, matched one set of clothes with another then rejected everything he had chosen. His attitude changed again as Steven arrived at a collection of suits, jackets, ties and trousers which suggested a taste which was original but restrained. He wrote a cheque for just under two thousand pounds and walked round the corner to Windles. He gave the hair
dresser a photograph cut out of a magazine of a man in his forties, a businessman, with a neat but uninspiring haircut, and asked her to do his hair in the same style.

  When he returned to his flat there was a letter for him. This is Not a Circular, the envelope announced. He opened it. The Nationwide building society was pleased to declare a half per cent fall in the interest repayments on his mortgage.

  The Dark Figure

  There is no such thing as an individual man or woman. There is only society.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  From time to time the head gatekeeper at the Bank of England turns away members of the public who waggishly ask him to show them the cash machine, or ask where they need to go to get a loan. He treats them as he has always done, with tolerance and courtesy. He gently points them to a commercial bank, Lloyds on Poultry, perhaps, or the National Westminster on Bishopsgate. If he curses them he does so under his breath and the curse is a mild one, as you would expect of a man with such fine silver hair, a red waistcoat, pink tails and a top hat.

  It’s true, there are a few current accounts. The Chancellor of the Exchequer may have one, also the Lord Mayor of London, even a few companies, but only if they’ve had money deposited since before the Indian Mutiny. Some employees keep their money in a chequing account, although until recently the Bank refused to allow them overdrafts: debt of any kind was declared imprudent. The decision to allow individuals at the Bank to borrow had been the most important event in British banking history because it marked the point at which money changed its attitude. It changed from being hard to being flexible, from being a constant worry to being a plastic friend.

  ‘Fuck.’

  It is three minutes past nine and money in the Bank of England has fallen short. Two hundred million pounds cannot be accounted for. The man who is cursing is no more than irritated and only he can hear the language which had he been overheard using when he first came to the Bank would have got him fired. Pencil and rubber in hand he scans the number-laden paper in front of him: vast columns of unimaginable sums made up of innumerable giros paid to unemployed welders, redundant middle-managers, single mums; the price of an MRI scanner here; the final payment for a submarine there. A call to the Treasury has failed to find the missing millions and the manager is doing his sums again, rubbing out and filling in. He will not use a calculator or a computer, not out fuddy-duddiness or an unwillingness to learn new tricks, but because he knows technology is thoughtless and liable to make mistakes, and if he is going to get it wrong, the mistakes which have emerged from the tips of his fingers are easier to find. He speaks to these figures and they talk back to him.

  Elsewhere it’s clear that the markets must be calmed. A discount house is offering to buy bills one thirty-second of one per cent over the prevailing interest rate. Charley Varadi considers the meaning of this twitch. Knowing that at one p.m. figures will be released to reveal that inflation has risen slightly above expectations, he considers the ways in which the market can be stroked. He talks to the dealing room: ‘Stress that the numbers last month were lower than they expected. Encourage them to look at the figures together. Tell them we’re taking a long view.’ There is laughter at this, Bank laughter, gentle, knowing and private.

  The head of Foreign Exchange knocks on his office door and enters. In the old days, say three years ago, they might have had a conversation about the wisdom of intervening in the markets, buying pounds to bolster the price of sterling. But the days when the Foreign Exchange dealing room could fight off raids on sterling and defend a fixed exchange rate have gone for ever. ‘Intervening in the foreign exchange markets these days’, Charley was fond of saying, ‘is like walking into the middle of the M1 and trying to stop the traffic by raising a disapproving eyebrow.’

  Now the Bank is only able to advise and warn. It’s not that no one is listening, but that there is no longer anyone out there to hear. There is only money, volatile, on the move, following the flow of itself: here, there, everywhere. Charley Varadi would sigh. ‘You know, I used to think that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President of the United States . . . but now I want to come back as the bond market. Then I could intimidate everybody.’

  The phone on his desk rings.

  ‘Mr Varadi, your visitors are here. Shall I bring them up?’

  ‘No. I’ll come down.’

  The secretary is surprised and looks more carefully at the man and woman in front of her. They do not look important enough to bring down the deputy governor of the Bank of England. But to Charley Varadi, Sally Brett and her new director are very important – more important in their way than the increasingly ungovernable flow of money of which everyone believes the Bank is custodian. That can no longer be controlled.

  ‘Sally, how are you?’ Varadi took her hand and gave her a peck on the cheek. Winnicott saw at once that they had known each other for a long time.

  ‘Charley, this is George Winnicott, our new director.’

  ‘How are you? I was talking to Tim Fowler the other day.’

  Winnicott looked surprised.

  ‘He speaks highly of you. Says it’ll take you six months and you’ll know the City better than any of us.’

  ‘He’s very kind but I know enough already to know he’s wrong.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like the Cook’s tour before we go up, Mr Winnicott?’

  ‘Yes. Very much.’

  As he moved them past doors made of Cuban mahogany as solid as the sheets of Derby stone that faced the walls, Varadi turned to Sally Brett.

  ‘And how is the Icarus of the Fraud Secretariat?’ he said, teasing.

  ‘I take it you mean Daedalus, Charley. Icarus was the one who flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea.’ She turned to the puzzled Winnicott. ‘Charley is being droll about Michael McCarthy. In his spare time, Michael is a free-fall parachutist.’

  ‘Really?’ Winnicott realised that his surprise had come out as graceless disbelief, but before he could correct the impression, Varadi interrupted.

  ‘Come now. He’s not just a bit of a daredevil, we’re talking about the Champion of Europe no less. Isn’t that right, Sally? He’s quite a hero at the Bank, Mr Winnicott. Whenever people accuse us City regulators of being dreary we all bring up Michael. That soon shuts them up.’ Varadi looked at Sally Brett as if he were a small boy about to pull a pigtail. ‘Never thought of having a go yourself, then, Sally?’

  She looked at him witheringly and he thought better of continuing. Winnicott was keen to know more about this surprising side to his deputy but he, too, could see that Sally was not in the mood. Varadi stopped beside a mosaic of the two-faced god, Janus.

  ‘Rumour has it that one of the privately wealthy Bank men paid the artist to give it the face of Lord Cunliffe, reputedly one of the nastiest men ever to have been Governor.’ He looked over at Brett to see if she was ready to be placated. ‘You remember old George Routon who came in just after the First World War? He wasn’t exactly renowned for expressing a strong opinion on anything.’ Brett smiled – a private joke. ‘He described Cunliffe as a real pig.’

  His bluntness took Winnicott aback.

  ‘Do you still print money here, Mr Varadi?’ Winnicott knew that all the notes were printed in Debden because one of the IRA cells he had interrogated had been casing it as a target, but he had been trooping along silently, like the new boy at school and he thought that asking a question would stop him feeling like a dope.

  ‘We did until 1921 when we moved it just down the road into a building in Old Street.’ He laughed, a high-pitched, pleasant sound, almost a giggle. ‘It was the old lunatic asylum.’

  ‘Mind you, at times it doesn’t seem quite so amusing,’ said Brett indignantly. ‘Look at all the fuss in the papers this morning because our former Chancellor had the temerity to suggest that as the economy keeps growing ordinary people should be careful not to overstretch themselves when they borrow large sums of money.
Hysterical outrage at a rather straightforward notion, I would’ve thought.’

  ‘Yes, but he wasn’t just urging good sense on a profligate electorate, was he? I think there was just a touch of his trying to avoid responsibility for all the people who got up to their gizzards in negative equity as a result of his policies. He encouraged people to borrow as much as they liked without thinking about the consequences. People haven’t learnt how personal economics is becoming. Once you’re in debt, you’re part of the international banking system whether you like it or not. The U.S. Federal Reserve decides on Monday, your higher mortgage lands on your breakfast table on Friday . . . and if your household budget deficit is critical, you’re out on the streets by March.’ He grinned, aware that he was on a hobby horse. ‘I’ll just show you one of the wells we still use to draw our water.’ They moved towards a small door hidden at the end of the corridor. ‘You know,’ continued Varadi, ‘when my father started work on the railways in the 1920s it was impossible for a working man to obtain a loan. By the middle of the 1980s it was barely possible for him to refuse one. Happy days.’ He smiled, mockingly, to himself. Opening the low door, he gestured Winnicott through.

  ‘Mind your head as you . . .’

  There was a loud crack as Winnicott’s head hit the lintel of the doorway and he fell unconscious to the floor.

  When Winnicott opened his eyes he was flat on his back. The room was enormous. In fact it was not really a room at all but a circular space the size of the Albert Hall, with a domed roof and a skylight at its apex. He sat up, wincing at the sharp pain in his head. On one side of the hall there were about twenty people lying vertically on couches similar to those in his chiropractor’s treatment rooms. The couches were arranged around a long table on which there were a number of lamps. They were dim, and merely defined the area without giving enough light to see clearly what lay beyond. The people on the couches looked up at the ceiling, eyes fixed, uninterested in where they were or in anyone around them. Just behind Winnicott someone coughed. He turned, startled.