The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

by Paul Torday

  I took my eyes from the road. There was a large white van, of the kind preferred by low-budget rental companies, parked next to the entrance. As we drew closer I could see two large men in boiler suits. One was at the front door, obviously ringing the bell, while another was peering through a ground-floor window, as if contemplating other means of access to the house. We pulled up in the Audi, and both climbed out. I said to the nearer of the two men, who had turned to face me, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Morning, mate,’ he said. He was unshaven and pasty faced, and looked cross. ‘Glad you turned up at last. Don’t seem to be very good at answering letters, do you?’

  He held up a piece of paper.

  ‘You might want to look at this, Mr Summers.’

  ‘I’m not Mr Summers,’ I told him. An awful realisation was dawning on me: I was beginning to think I knew what this was all about.

  ‘This is a court order, Mr Summers,’ said the man. ‘I’m a bailiff and I’m authorised by the court to . . . what did you just say?’

  ‘I’m not Mr Summers,’ I repeated.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ asked the man. ‘Was you expecting to find him in? Do you know when he’ll be back?’

  ‘I’m not expecting him back at all,’ I said. ‘This is our house, not his.’

  Harriet was looking confused.

  ‘Who is Mr Summers?’ she asked.

  It took a while to sort things out. Endless pieces of paper were produced by the first bailiff, while the second lurked in the background looking as if he might welcome some physical recreation in the form of a punch-up. At last, an explanation emerged. Charlie had used this address in an application form for a credit card. He had then, it seemed, used the card to go straight to his credit limit. The credit card company had received no response to the bills it had sent to this address, and had sold the debt to a credit recovery company.

  Once I knew what had happened, I had to get the first bailiff to speak on the phone to Mr Gilkes, before I could convince him not to decamp with all the furniture from the house in the back of his van. After the call he gave up.

  ‘Here’s something for your trouble anyway,’ I said, giving him a twenty-pound note. It seemed better to part on good terms.

  The bailiffs gone, I unlocked the front door and we went in.

  ‘Now you must tell me what on earth that was about,’ said Harriet. ‘''Who is Charlie Summers? What was he doing here?’ But a further surprise awaited us. In the kitchen, a large cardboard box sat on the table and next to it was a note from Mrs Graham dated the day before saying, ‘This was delivered for you today. I thought it best to leave it here for you to collect.’

  Harriet and I looked at the box. On one face, ‘This Way Up’ was stencilled along with wineglass symbols indicating the fragility of the contents. On another was an elaborate coat of arms in gold and blue hinting at connections with nobility, if not royalty. Above this were the words:

  Chateau kloof

  Vin de Pays de zeeland

  Appellation controlee

  Prix d’or Dusseldorf weinfest 2006

  (runner-up)

  ‘Someone’s sent us a box of wine,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Dutch wine,’ I said, feeling that I might know who the sender was. I opened the top of the box. Inside was a leaflet, made to look like faded parchment, as if it were a fragment of the Magna Carta. On this was written:

  A unique opportunity to invest in one of the few Dutch vineyards producing premier cru quality wine

  Chateau Kloof is, at present, known only to a small number of connoisseurs of fine wines. Although its output comes from only a few hectares, it produces several thousand bottles a year of an intense beetroot-coloured wine, with an unusual and distinctive aroma that has reminded many who have tried it of a great St Emilion.

  In order to make it available to a wider public, it has been decided to offer the future output of the wine to investors. Units can be purchased at £1,000 each, and each unit entitles the investor to . . .

  I didn’t bother to read any more; I felt I had the general idea. I looked down at the bottom of the parchment, which was signed off by Charles Edward Gilbert Summers, Master of Wine. Beneath this was a handwritten scrawl in black felt tip, distinctly out of place with the elegant calligraphy on the rest of the document:

  Dear Eck

  This is my new business - what do you think? The wine’s on me, drink my health and hope we meet again one day.

  Your Friend Charlie S.

  I showed the note to Harriet, and pulled out a bottle to look at it.

  ‘Who is Charlie Summers?’ she asked again.

  ‘Let’s go round and agree what has to be sold, and then we’ll open a bottle of Charlie’s wine and I’ll tell you about him.’

  We did our tour of the house, pausing only for the briefest of moments outside the bedroom with the yellow bedspread. Harriet looked inside it as if she were seeing it for the first time in her life. There was nothing worth keeping. In any case, there was no room for more furniture at Pike’s Garth Hall, nor in my London flat.

  After half an hour we had achieved what we came for. We sat at the kitchen table and agreed to go with the valuer’s recommendations on price, then I rang the estate agent on my mobile and told them to put the house on the market. The sooner it was sold now, the better. The unwanted contents could go off to auction or to the scrapyard and that would be the end of it.

  ‘Let’s try this Chateau Whatsit,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps there’s a corkscrew somewhere.’

  ‘You stayed here with Charlie Summers? How did that happen?’

  ‘If you want to know about him, Harriet,’ I told her, ‘I have to begin at the beginning.’

  I found one of those combination tin-opener, bottle opener and corkscrew gadgets that are designed to perform several different tasks, each in an unsatisfactory way. Then I began to tell Harriet how Henry, Charlie and I had all met in a restaurant the night after she had been to dinner with us, in the South of France. At this point the story was interrupted as I struggled to extract the cork from the bottle. It was plastic, and came out reluctantly. I poured two glasses of wine as I told Harriet about Charlie singing Panis Angelicus as the sun sank over the hills of the Var.

  ‘That’s an interesting colour,’ said Harriet, looking at her glass of wine. It was: a red richer than rubies; the liquid looked more like a Bloody Mary gone wrong than the Queen of Clarets, as it was described in Charlie’s marketing literature.

  ‘Let’s allow it to breathe for a while,’ I said cautiously.

  I sniffed the glass: it did not smell of much, except for a faint vegetable aroma, familiar but difficult to place. I continued with Charlie’s story, piecing together events as best as 1 could from what Henry and Charlie had told me at different times, going on to Charlie’s arrival at Stanton St Mary, and describing the Yoruza saga. We had just come to the place in Charlie’s story relating to Mrs Bently when, feeling a little parched from so much talking, I decided to sip the wine.

  I have never before sprayed the contents of a glass over a table and I hope I never will again. It can’t be an attractive sight.

  ‘Christ,’ I spluttered.

  ‘I’ll get you some water,’ said Harriet. She found a clean glass, went to the sink and ran the tap for a few moments, then brought back the water for me to drink. I gargled and spat into the sink for a few moments, then drank two more glasses of water to try to take away the taste of Charlie’s wine.

  ‘Don’t touch your glass,’ I warned Harriet, between gargles.

  ‘I think I’ve got the message,’ she replied. When I turned around to face her, she was laughing. ‘Your face,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d had a camera.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted anything like it,’ I said, ‘never.’

  We abandoned the idea of further wine tasting. I told Harriet that I would leave the case as a house-warming present for whoever bought The Laurels. There was nothing more for us to do there.

 
; ‘Now what?’ I asked Harriet.

  ‘Could you drop me off at my mother’s house?’ she said. ‘She’s not been very well again. I’m going to stay with her for a couple of days.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Back to France - it’s my busiest time of year. I’ve got more clients than ever.’

  I stood for a moment, thinking about this clear statement that I had no place in her future plans.

  ‘Harriet,’ I said, ‘you know perfectly well how I feel about you.’

  Her face screwed up immediately, as if she had toothache.

  ‘You have to listen to me for a moment. I deserve that much,’ I told her, ‘and then I’ll take you to your mother’s.’

  Her expression changed to contrition.

  ‘Of course Eck, only—’

  ‘Only you don’t like me talking about it. I know that by now. But I’m giving up my job in London.’

  There was a decision, right there, that I had not known I was going to make before I spoke. ‘I’m going to move back North and try to scrape a living at home. God knows what I will do. But I can’t go on selling dodgy investments to people any longer. It seemed like the answer at the time. Now I know it’s not. I want you to come and live with me at Pike’s Garth Hall.’

  Harriet raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I know it’s not the South of France. But I’m sure you could get a job in our part of the world. Between us we could scrape a living, and be very happy. I’d be happy, at any rate.’

  Harriet listened to this speech intently, but said nothing in reply. There was an awkward silence, which I felt compelled to break.

  ‘It’s not a proposal of marriage,’ I said, ‘at least, not yet. We could live together in sin if you prefer it, for a while. But I do want to marry you.’

  ‘Eck,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You wouldn’t even have to change your name if we got married,’ I blundered on. ‘Have you thought how convenient and economical it is that we both share the same surname already? Think of the expense most married couples have to go to, changing their writing paper and the initials on their handkerchiefs?’

  ‘Eck, you’re babbling,’ said Harriet. She took both my hands and kissed me briefly, as if to command my silence.

  ‘Is that a “yes”?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. If there were to be anyone in my life again, it would be you. That’s the most I can tell you.’

  ‘Will you think about what I’ve said? Will you come and live with me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. At last I felt some sympathy for what she might be feeling. My irritation faded and was replaced by compassion. I took her right hand in mine and pressed it. I understood her: this girl really could not make up her mind. She would be a nightmare to go shopping with.

  ‘I don’t know,’ repeated Harriet. She sounded in pain as she spoke.

  In every relationship there comes a moment when someone asks a question that perhaps should not have been asked: about sex, or money, or commitment. Sometimes that question becomes the rock on which the relationship founders. I wondered whether that was what I had just done: asked Harriet a question that she didn’t want to answer, a question that might force a reply I didn’t want to hear.

  Fourteen

  Maybe it wasn’t Armageddon. Only the historians will be able to say when things become really bad. But that autumn, we knew that the world was about to change: and not for the better.

  A stream of financial crises made the front-page news here and in Europe, and in the United States. But it wasn’t the front-page headlines which scared those of us who worked in the markets. It was the gossip between the traders, the rumours of potential defaults, including some of the biggest names in the banking and insurance world, the unwillingness to do deals, the closing down of credit lines. Cash was becoming scarce; credit scarcer.

  In the midst of all this speculation, which seemed almost feverish in its intensity, Bilbo gave a dinner at his house in Kensington Gate for associates of the firm. I had returned to work but it was still a surprise to me that I had been included. I realised it would be unsettling for everyone else if I had been omitted from the guest list as I was still officially employed by Mountwilliam Partners. I had not yet given my notice in, as I was waiting for the right moment; or, as I admitted to myself in more candid moments, was still trying to summon up the nerve. Bilbo would lose his temper if I sacked him, so to speak, before he sacked me.

  Most of the crowd from the Bloomsbury office were there:

  Doug Williams, Alan McNisbet, and several others. Twenty-four of us, including Bilbo and his wife, sat down to dinner that night. I was placed somewhere in the middle, not deserving a place of honour close to Bilbo or his wife.

  The dining room was a splendid scene. Silver pheasants, wild boar and other fauna decorated the table. There were five crystal glasses in front of each place setting and innumerable knives and forks, all silver and engraved with Bilbo’s crest with the heraldic cat licking its heraldic paws. A gold plate had been set at each place setting as we sat down, and was whisked away by a waiter after we had had only a moment to admire it. It was replaced by plates from a service of Sevres porcelain.

  ‘We bought these plates at Christie’s,’ I heard Vanessa Mountwilliam say. ‘I’ve been dying for an opportunity to use them. Don’t you think they’re attractive?’

  Billy O’Brien, a mathematics graduate from Cambridge to whom the remark was addressed, said, ‘Yes. That daffodil design is charming.’

  He had graduated only five years ago and, until recently, had furnished his flat entirely from Ikea.

  ‘They are fleur-de-lis, as it happens,’ said Vanessa coldly, turning to her other neighbour.

  Now that everyone was sitting down, I could do a proper tally of who was there. None of the more junior staff had been asked. What intrigued me more was that there were no unfamiliar faces.

  ‘Where are Bilbo’s partners?’ I asked Doug Williams. ‘I thought we might see one or two of them here tonight.’

  Doug Williams had been employed by Bilbo longer than I had. I thought he might have been introduced to them.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone apart from Bilbo, Eck. But if there are such people they’ll be rushing around trying to cover their positions, instead of sitting here. That’s what we should be doing. Weren’t you in the office this afternoon?’

  I was thinking about Aseeb and wondering whether the deal had been done. Then I realised what Doug had just said.

  ‘No, I wasn’t in. What do you mean? What happened this afternoon?’

  ‘Bilbo took calls today from two prime brokers and half a dozen repo officers from the various banks we deal with.’

  Prime brokers were the people who lent us our funds on margin, on the basis of which we were able to take those huge leveraged positions in the market. The repo officers worked for the credit departments and it was their job, if necessary, to ask for the money back.

  ‘What did they want?’ I asked.

  ‘What did they want? repeated Doug, looking at me as if I were mentally deficient. ‘They want their money back.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  If what Doug said was true, Mountwilliam Partners was in for a bumpy ride. We might have to close positions when we did not want to, and that could mean taking some big losses. Doug shuffled slightly in his seat to allow a waiter to fill his glass with champagne, and I did the same.

  ‘I know because I’ve heard the rumours in the market. There’s a lot of talk flying around, not just about us. People are saying some of our subordinated debt trades have tanked. Bilbo bet the firm big time on the US housing market.’

  ‘He might be right in the long run,’ I suggested.

  ‘Sure, he might be right in the long run. But you know what they say: we might all be dead in the long run, including Bilbo. At the moment, it doesn’t look like he made a very clever bet.’

  ‘What on earth’s going to happen?’

&n
bsp; Subordinated debt, sub-prime, was what the Styx II fund was invested in; and so of course was Henry Newark’s money.

  ‘I just heard the headlines. You’ll have to ask Alan McNisbet. That’s his desk.’

  I glanced across at Alan. He looked pale and strained.

  We were interrupted by Bilbo rising to his feet at the far end of the table.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, tapping a wineglass with a silver knife to command our attention. There was immediate silence. Bilbo was wearing his green velvet smoking jacket, and tartan - presumably the Mountwilliam tartan - trews. His large, pale face glistened in the light from the enormous chandelier that hung overhead.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bilbo corrected himself. ‘I propose a toast. To the continued success and prosperity of Mountwilliam Partners. Ladies and gentlemen: to ourselves.’

  We all stood and sipped from our glasses.

  ‘The champagne is Bollinger 15)96, by the way,’ said Bilbo, and sat down with a satisfied smile on his lips. The buzz of conversation resumed. Waiters came round with plates of potted shrimp and lobster tails.

  ‘Bilbo’s doing all right,’ I said to Doug.

  He smiled without mirth. ‘If I wasn’t worried before,’ he replied, ‘I am now. This feels like dinner in the Berlin bunker, with the Red Army about five minutes up the road.’

  I laughed. I would miss Doug when I left. He would be the only one, though.

  ‘Well, let’s tuck in while the going’s good,’ I said.

  The dinner was everything you would expect from Bilbo. Five more courses came and went: sorbet; fillet of beef and sauce Bearnaise; pudding; a savoury; cheese. With these came wines to match: white, then red burgundies of fabulous vintages; Sauternes. While Doug was talking to his other neighbour, I attempted conversation with the man on my left, whose name I did not know, but who had joined us as a trader in mining stocks. I asked him how things were going on his desk.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and buried his nose in what he was eating. I tried again, once or twice, and managed with some effort to extract three or four more syllables from him. After that I gave up and concentrated on enjoying the food and wine. I had a feeling this was going to be the last dinner I would be treated to by Bilbo. If so, it was a very good one. We were all feeling quite full when Bilbo rose to his feet again.