The Marketmaker

13

‘I’ve left the School of Russian Studies.’

A piece of overdone pork hovered on my fork. I shoved it in my mouth and chewed. And chewed. My mother was not a good cook.

‘Really, dear?’ she said, raising her eyebrows.

‘Good God! When was this?’ thundered my father.

‘About a month ago.’

The obvious question for most families would have been ‘Why didn’t you tell us sooner?’ But not in our family. I had long since stopped discussing anything important with them, and they had stopped expecting it.

We were sitting in the small square dining room in the flint cottage that my parents had bought in Norfolk after my father had retired. Even though it was the end of April, it was cold. When the wind came from the north or east, it was always cold; there wasn’t much between the cottage and the North Pole. Both my mother and I were wearing thick jerseys, and my father an old sports jacket.

I had inserted this remark into a pause in the conversation. Although it wasn’t really a conversation, more a monologue as my father droned through his staple topics: Europe, old friends from the City, Lady Thatcher (always with the ‘Lady’), and cricket. The subjects hadn’t changed much since my youth, although he had substituted Europe for the unions as his principal object of hatred. He would eat and talk at the same time, his large florid face bulging as he chewed. These conversations required no participation at all from my mother and me. I sometimes wondered whether they occurred when there was just the two of them. I concluded something much more depressing. Days, months, years of meals eaten in silence.

‘So, what are you going to do?’ my father demanded.

This was the bit I wasn’t looking forward to. I chewed some more, and finally managed to swallow the lump of pork, and felt it force its painful way down my throat.

‘I’m going to work for a company called Dekker Ward,’ I said.

‘Dekker Ward! Not the stockbroker?’ My father put down his fork, and broke into a huge grin. ‘Well done, my boy! Well done!’ And then, much to my embarrassment, he leaned over and shook my hand. ‘Know them well. Old Lord Kerton was a pal of mine. Must be near retirement age by now. They specialized in plantations, I think. Now there was plenty of money to be made there if you could get the timing right. Oh, yes. Plenty of money.’

‘I think the old Lord Kerton died, Father.’ He liked to be called Father. ‘It’s his son, Andrew, who’s chairman now.’

My father tucked into his burnt pig with renewed gusto. I had made his day. ‘Don’t remember a son. Probably still at school when I knew him. Sorry to hear about old Gerald, though.’ He took a gulp of the tap water in the glass in front of him. ‘Well, old man! Whatever made you finally do it?’

‘Money, Father. I needed the money.’

‘Well, you should make plenty of that. The City’s rolling in it, these days. A smart young man like you will make a fortune. Let me get a bottle of wine. We need to celebrate.’

My mother had been watching me all this time, wearing a slight frown. ‘Why?’ she mouthed.

‘I’m skint,’ I mouthed back. She nodded. She understood that. When we had lived in Surrey, we had lurched from having plenty of money to having very little. For a while I had thought it was my fault. I had gone to a local grammar school that had become independent. I had enjoyed it. The teachers were excellent, the rugby team won more often than it lost, I made some good, like-minded friends, and it got me into Oxford. But somehow I was made to feel guilty that I was there. It was to do with the fees. The termly demands for payment were met by frowns and barbed comments from my father. I was never quite sure why: he was a stockbroker, like many of the other boys’ fathers, fees should not have been a problem. I’m pretty sure now that my father’s distress was a result of inept stock-market speculation, but at the time he left me in no doubt that the family’s money worries were down to me.

He returned with a bottle of Argentine red. Very appropriate. He prattled on, talking a lot about the old colonial stocks in which Dekker Ward used to ply their trade.

After several minutes I decided to correct him mildly. ‘Actually, Father, they concentrate a lot on Latin America now. And they’re thinking of doing business in Russia. That’s why they want me.’

‘Oh, I see. Jolly good.’

My father talked on, about the deals he’d done, the people he knew, and he trotted out some aphorisms such as ‘Sell in May and go away,’ and ‘Never trust a man whose tie is lighter than the colour of his shirt.’ I studied the surface of the dining table, where the imprint of my school homework could still just be picked out. ‘Oct 197’ and ‘= 5X + 3’ were the most prominent marks.

After coffee, I asked my mother if I could look at her latest paintings. She smiled and led me to her studio. We left my father behind with the washing-up.

The studio was a large room that took up half the length of the cottage. It had big windows that provided plenty of natural light. But to walk in there was like walking into a hurricane.

Five years ago her pictures had been open landscapes of the Norfolk shoreline, in an impressionist style. Since then they had become steadily darker, wilder, swirls of cloud enveloping lonely figures on beaches that never ended. Individually they were highly unsettling. When surrounded by dozens of them at once the effect was downright frightening. The nearest thing I had felt to it was walking through the Edvard Munch exhibition at the National Gallery several years before.

My mother’s painting worried me. It was probably brilliant, but it had taken over her life.

‘Have you tried any more galleries, Mum?’ I asked.

‘I’ve told you, dear, none of the galleries round here will touch them.’

‘How about London?’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. They wouldn’t be interested in this.’

I wasn’t so sure. I suspected that someone somewhere would jump at her work. But these pictures were for herself, not other people.

We were looking at a particularly haunting painting of the blackened shell of a wreck being slowly sucked down into the sand flats off Brancaster beach.

‘I’m sorry you’re giving up Russian literature, Nick,’ she said.

‘I’m not. I’ll still read. And, once I’ve made some money, I’m sure I’ll go back to it in some form.’

‘Hmm. Just promise me one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t marry a banker.’

I couldn’t answer. The sadness of it wrenched my gut. I glanced at her profile. She had a broad, intelligent face, beneath thick hair only now beginning to go grey. She was still attractive, and was striking in the wedding photograph that had been in the sitting room for as long as I could remember. They must have been in love when they married, although I could only remember sniping in my childhood that changed to major rows in adolescence. Then, since I had left home, this had lapsed into silence.

My father gave me a lift to King’s Lynn station. Just as I was getting out of the car at the station entrance, he called after me, ‘Oh, Nick?’

‘Yes?’

‘If you hear any good tips, don’t forget to let your old man know, eh?’

He winked.

I smiled quickly and slammed the car door shut. It was with a huge sense of relief that I felt the train lurch away from the platform.

As the fens dashed past the grimy train windows, I thought of the City as my father saw it. Lunch, drink, talk, helping out old pals, getting on to a good thing. It was a long way from the efficient activity of the Dekker machine, high up in its gleaming tower, whisking billions round the world. But there were some shared assumptions. In both the deal was all. You helped out your friends and screwed your enemies to get the best deal. And then you felt clever about it.

A heavy shower scurried across the fen, and hit the train in a tantrum, splattering the window with angry raindrops. I slumped back into my seat, and didn’t feel very clever at all.