by Paul Torday
‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘I knocked the driver down. Put him on his arse. But then he wasn’t fit to drive. I don’t think he was anyway. There was a fuss. The old people were upset. When we eventually got everyone back I was sacked; rather unfairly, I thought.’
‘And then you moved on to dog food?’
‘Well, there were quite a few other things in between. I’ve had an interesting life, Eck, although at times things have been difficult for me: very difficult.’
There was a silence. I had a feeling I had learned enough about Charlie’s career. He seemed to long for my approval, and the approval of the world in general, yet each action he took removed him further from the possibility of ever being accepted, of ever having a proper job - no doubt by now he was quite incapable of anything so mundane - and of ever achieving the respectability and wealth he so desperately wanted.
What is it about people like Charlie? I know now that he was a good man, or a man capable of goodness, which is perhaps not the same thing. From what outer margins of the world he came I do not know; but he remained stranded there, and nothing anyone could do would ever change that.
We both sat wrapped in our thoughts: Charlie, no doubt, reflecting on the mutability of Fate; I, on the room upstairs with the yellow bedspread, thinking of how Harriet had lain down upon it and said, I’m what you want - and now you can have me.’’
I looked at my watch. It was almost eight o’clock. By now I’d drunk too much whisky and water to consider driving. The best plan would be to stay in the spare bedroom tonight and leave first thing in the morning - perhaps earlier than that - and drive back to my flat in London. Then I could change and get into the office at a reasonable hour. Charlie had a disruptive effect on people’s lives, I decided, even when it was not intended. There was something about him: he got under your skin. He was the last man in the world I would have chosen to spend an evening with and yet here I was, listening to him talk. I realised I had started to feel sorry for him. It had gone beyond the passing guilty impulse that had made me offer him the shelter of Aunt Dorothy’s house.
‘People are so ungrateful,’ said Charlie suddenly. ‘You do your best for them and, when things don’t quite work out, they don’t even try to understand. They never say, “Oh, bad luck Charlie, let’s write it off to experience and start again.” No; they just shout at me for money. I don’t have any money. I’ve never had any money. I don’t understand how you get money if you don’t have it in the first place. I mean, I know how to obtain credit. The means might not always be strictly kosher, but you can always get credit, and once you have a little, you can stretch it. But what I’ve found,’ said Charlie, ‘is that it’s like an elastic band. After you’ve stretched it a bit, and a bit farther, something snaps, and then you’re in trouble.’
I poured us both another drink.
‘I mean you, for example,’ said Charlie, as he accepted the top-up, ‘you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth.’
‘No I wasn’t,’ I protested.
‘Yes you were, Eck. You may not think so. You may not have thought it was silver, but silver it was, compared to the way I started out in life. I’ve always been on thin ice, Eck. That’s where you have to walk when you don’t have any money of your own, when your mother has pushed off and your father is half crazy, and you haven’t got any qualifications. God knows, I’ve tried hard enough to make ends meet.’
‘Life’s tough,’ I said. Then I thought Charlie might think I was being flippant at his expense.
He took the comment as if it were intended seriously, though, and replied, ‘Isn’t it? I wish I’d done what you did, Eck. Joined the army and served with the Special Forces. Now that would have been a life to be proud of; that would have been something to tell my children. Not that I’m likely to have any. Telling children and grandchildren stories about your time in dog food or pensioners’ coach tours doesn’t quite match up to serving behind enemy lines, risking your life every minute of the day. If you could tell them, of course: national security and all that. I do understand you’ve got to be careful what you say.’
‘I work in the City now,’ 1 told Eck, ‘and I was never in the Special Forces, as you call them. I’ve been out of the army for a long while.’
‘Oh, I know you’ve got to say that,’ said Charlie. ‘Mum’s the word. You can trust me to keep a secret. I just want to say I really admire people like you, people who do their bit for
I lie country and keep quiet about it. What about another whisky?’
*
Later that night, I lay on the bedspread in the spare bedroom trying to sleep. I had thrown a blanket over me, and was comfortable enough, but I kept remembering the last time I had been in that room, and imagining I could still capture the faint scent of Harriet. I tried to change the track of my droughts by recalling fragments of my earlier conversations with Charlie.
At one point in the evening, Charlie and I had wandered into Aunt Dorothy’s drawing room. There, on a bureau, were some old photographs and what I had failed to spot before: a picture of Harriet, standing next to Bob Matthews and looking radiant.
‘What a pretty girl,’ said Charlie, picking up the photo and looking at it closely. I resisted the urge to snatch it from his hands.
‘She’s my cousin,’ I said as neutrally as I could.
‘Sounds like you have a soft spot for her,’ said Charlie, winking at me. He put the photograph back down on the bureau and stared at it some more.
‘I’d have a soft spot for a girl who looked like that,’ he added. ‘Is that her intended?’
‘He was killed a couple of years ago in Iraq,’ I replied.
‘I’d have a crack at her, then,’ said Charlie, ‘cousin or no cousin. You ought to have a go, Eck.’
I had tried to get him off the subject by wandering back to Dorothy’s sitting room.
‘The trouble with my life,’ said Charlie, following me, ‘is that all the girls I really fancy don’t want to know a bloke like me.’ He sat down and hummed another fragment of a sentimental song by George Formby. When Charlie sang, no matter how banal or obscure the words of the song, he managed to invest in them a haunting quality that was all his own.
‘Trouble is,’ Charlie repeated, ‘the certain little lady never has come by, in my case. Not unless you count Mrs Bently. But that would never have worked. The daughter would have been at me until I slung my hook.’
I noticed how Charlie’s way of speaking seemed to loosen up the more he drank.
‘I mean . . .’ said Charlie. He took a gulp from his glass.
‘I thought you said you were fond of her?’ I commented.
‘She was a real lady, Mrs Bendy,’ he said. ‘I’ll say that. I haven’t known many of those. She was very good to me.’ Suddenly, and to my intense surprise and embarrassment, he had burst into tears. After a moment he recovered, and blew his nose loudly into his handkerchief.
‘She’ll be wondering about me,’ said Charlie. ‘She’ll be worrying about where I’ve got to and what I’m doing. She will, you know. She cares for me. It was just too complicated for me to stay: too many debts and no money. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?’
Later, when I had yawned and said I was off to bed, Charlie had stopped me.
‘Before you go, I want to show you something.’
He had gone out into the hallway and rummaged around in his canvas bag. After a moment he came back with a very old leather document case. From it he took out a muchfingered and worn set of papers. Some of them were typewritten, appended to what seemed to be an immense family tree, drawn with great precision by someone who was no slouch at penmanship. Charlie handed it to me.
‘Have a look at that.’
It was difficult to concentrate by that stage of the evening, hut after a few moments I managed to grasp what I was looking at.
‘Who is Ned Summers?’ I asked.
‘My father,’ replied Charlie.
&
nbsp; ‘So you’re related to the Royal Family?’ I asked.
‘That’s what it says there,’ agreed Charlie. ‘Wrong side of the blanket at one stage but that’s what my father believed. I’ve never told anyone about this: not even Mrs Bently . . . Sylvia, I mean. I suppose I wanted her to respect me for who I am, not because of any grand connections I might have.’
‘You’re a relation of this Grand Duke Ernst, the brother of Prince Albert and the brother-in-law of Queen Victoria. Is that it?’
‘Not the Grand Duke as such: a member of his family. It comes to the same thing, though.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Come on,’ said Charlie, ‘I know what you’re thinking. There’s no “congratulations” about it. It hasn’t done me any good, has it? I mean, no one’s ever rung up from Buckingham Palace to ask if I’m a bit short, or whether a couple of grand would be of any use, have they?’
‘Haven’t they?’ I said stupidly.
‘My dad was obsessed with the whole thing,’ said Charlie. ‘Obsessed isn’t a strong enough word. Ever since I was a boy he was always off to public libraries and county archives, even trips to the British Library. He spent all his spare time and money doing research. Imagine being brought up by a dad like that. “Can we go and play football in the park, Dad?” I’d ask. “Not today, Charles, I’m tying up some loose ends with regards to our ancestor the grand Duke Ernst.” It was the Saxe-Coburgs he thought were the link, through their pastry cook’s wife.’
‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s true?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s put it all down there in black and white. Some of it must be right. Otherwise he spent about forty years living in a fantasy world, didn’t he? My mum thought so. She left him when I was about twelve. So there you are: 1 was brought up by a man who thought he was the great-great-great-grandson of the wife of the pastry cook of a German duke and the bastard descendant of the same family as the kings and queens of England.’
The thought of Charlie’s royal descent finished me off. ‘Charlie,’ I said suddenly, ‘I’m going to bed.’
Charlie ignored this.
‘It was awful,’ he said. ‘Everyone at school knew about my dad’s hobby. He managed to persuade the teachers to invite him to give a lecture to the History Society about it. I couldn’t stop him. Nothing I said made any difference. He thought everyone was bound to be as interested in our royal connections as he was: even an audience of fourteen-year-old boys from one of the roughest housing estates in the country. He told them that we were descended from a “pastry cook”. I was a little lad in those days. They called me “Biscuit Boy” at school after that. And that was the nicest nickname I was given. My father didn’t mind, or he didn’t notice. He had a job then, working for the council, in the accounting department. He was always daydreaming. They sacked him, in the end. I don’t know if it was for daydreaming as such, but one way or the other they managed to get rid of him. By the time I was sixteen we didn’t even have a home.’
I didn’t know what to say and simply shrugged. ‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘I’ll be gone in the morning. You’ll be
line here for the rest of the week. I’d better come back next weekend and then we’ll make a plan. I’ll leave my mobile number on the kitchen table before I go, in case you need to speak to me.’
‘Thank you for everything, Eck, you’ve been a real pal,’ said Charlie, as I turned to go. Then I stopped: curiosity made me ask one more question.
‘Is your father still alive?’
‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘He died when I was still quite young. The Royal Family, or the people that work for them, wouldn’t acknowledge him. He wrote lots of letters, and they stopped replying after a while. He wasn’t after money, just recognition. It broke his heart. Family connections meant a lot to him, you see.’
Eleven
The next morning dawn never seemed to break and rain spattered the windscreen from time to time as I drove back to London. I felt light headed and apprehensive. Charlie had that effect on people, of dislocating them from their own reality. My mind was cluttered with disjointed thoughts: Harriet somewhere in the South of France, thinking, or not thinking, about me; Henry signing a two-million-pound loan package; Charlie and Mrs Bendy; Charlie presenting himself as a remote member of the House of Windsor. Why had I taken pity on him? For pity is what I had felt, pity and guilt, when I saw him trudging along the side of the road. But why should I feel pity for Charlie, still less guilt? He lacked the basic competence to be called a con man. He was a pedlar of his own half-baked dreams, and yet people fell for them, even though they knew he was fantasising - one might as well say lying. I had fallen for Charlie’s line of talk too. There he was, living in Aunt Dorothy’s house. God knows what he might do there unsupervised. I began to feel more and more nervous with every mile I put between us, almost to the point that I wanted to do a U-turn and return to Cirencester to evict him.
All the same, I was not immune to Charlie’s charm. His absolute poverty, his total unsuitability for survival in this world, so that he almost seemed an evolutionary anomaly, were carried by a quality one could almost describe as courage. He refused to recognise that he was beaten; that he had been beaten from the day he was born. Perhaps if life had turned out differently, he could have been an artist of some sort, a good, even a great, singer. But that was not how the cards were dealt. And it was not the hand he drew.
In any case, I could not turn back. I had to show up for the morning strategy meeting at the office. I had a text message on my phone from Bilbo, saying he was back from New York. All the partners and most of the associates would be there. I was an ‘associate’; my business card said ‘Director - Client Relations’, but back at the office I was just one grade higher than the tea lady would have been, if we’d had a tea lady.
As I approached London the sky grew blacker. It infected my mood. The last few hours with Charlie had unsettled me to the point where, not for the first time, I wondered what on earth I was doing working for Mountwilliam Partners. If Charlie was selling downmarket dreams, was I not simply peddling the same at the upper end of the market? Was I going to spend the next twenty years commuting between a decrepit farmhouse in the Pennine Dales, which I could not afford to do up, and a grim little flat in West Hampstead? No doubt one day, as my salary and bonuses increased, I would be able to afford a grim little flat off Sloane Street instead of West Hampstead. I might even be able to do up the farmhouse and convert it into a mansion. But to what purpose? It would be wasted on just me. And what miracle was required to bring Harriet back to England? Wouldn’t a real human being have abandoned his job and gone to France in pursuit of her?
*
‘The US mortgage market is going through some stress at the moment,’ said Bilbo. We were sitting in the one conference room in the building, a cramped space into which the dozen or so people attending the briefing could barely fit. Bilbo sat at the head of the table, a porcelain cup beside him in which fresh coffee steamed. The rest of us clutched disposable plastic cups of a hot liquid dispensed by the vending machine, and perched wherever we could find a space. Attendance at Bilbo’s briefings after his trips was always a three-line whip.
‘The thinking over there is that there might be as much as twenty billion dollars of write-downs that US banks will have to take as a hit to their balance sheets.’
‘Will it happen over here in Europe?’ asked Doug Williams, one of the senior traders.
‘We don’t believe so, no,’ said Bilbo. ‘We are viewing this purely as an American problem at the moment. It is a financial problem, but more of a blip than a crisis. The US economy remains strong. Our own economy is in tremendous shape. There is a temporary weakness in some US bank shares, particularly those that have been active in the mortgage market, but we think this may be a buying opportunity for our new Styx II fund.’
A flash of lightning flickered across the window and there
was a huge crash of thunder outside. Someone giggled nervously.
‘However,’ said Bilbo, ‘we must be mindful of the fact that lack of confidence among the US banks can spill over into the credit markets, to the extent that it might affect funds like our own for a short period. As a precaution we are talking to representatives of a large sovereign wealth fund who might be future investors in the firm.’
I wasn’t aware that Aseeb represented any particular country, but if Bilbo chose to present him in this favourable way, it was not my job to contradict him.
‘This information is highly confidential at the moment,’ Bilbo continued. ‘I don’t want to start a guessing game about which sovereign fund it might be. Any speculation or leaking of this matter would be something I and my partners would have to take very seriously indeed.’
Bilbo looked around the room. His expression made it clear that indiscretion of any sort would be a hanging matter.
‘This particular fund sees an investment in Mountwilliam Partners as a way of buying a ringside seat. They are willing to inject significant liquidity - I mean hundreds of millions of dollars - into our balance sheet, to enable us to take advantage of future buying opportunities in bank debt. They benefit from our expertise and we benefit from their cash flow, which I might add is very strong.’
There was a mutter of comment at this news. Bilbo held up his hand.
‘To sum up, then: the house view is that we are buyers of distressed US bank debt at the moment and will continue to he so until further notice. The global economy is robust and we expect US banks and mortgage lenders to make a sharp recovery. This is a period in the markets when aggressive, confident trading is required. 1 will want to discuss details of our current strategy with each of you over the next few days.’ The meeting broke up. As I left the room, Bilbo signalled to me that 1 was to wait behind. As soon as we were alone, he said: ‘Not a word to anyone about our conversations with Aseeb, Eck. This is a very sensitive transaction.’
