With the crepes suzette I asked after Dissdale and Bettina and heard that Dissdale had been to New York on a business trip and that Bettina had been acting a small part in a British movie, which Dissdale hadn’t known whether to be pleased about or not. ‘Too many gorgeous young studs around,’ Calder said, smiling. ‘Dissdale gets worried anyway, and he was away for ten days.’
I pondered briefly about Calder’s own seemingly nonexistent sex-life: but he’d never seen me with a girl either, and certainly there was no hint in him of the homosexual.
Over coffee, running out of subjects, I asked about his yard in general, and how was the right-hand-man Jason in particular.
Calder shrugged. ‘He’s left. They come and go, you know. No loyalty these days.’
‘And you don’t fear... well, that he’d take your knowledge with him?’
He looked amused. ‘He didn’t know much. I mean, I’d hand out a pill and tell Jason which horse to give it to. That sort of thing.’
We finished amiably enough with a glass of brandy for each and a cigar for him, and I tried not to wince over the bill.
‘A very pleasant evening,’ Calder said. ‘You must come out to lunch again one day.’
‘I’d like to.’
We sat for a final few minutes opposite each other in a pause of mutual appraisaclass="underline" two people utterly different but bonded by one-tenth of a second on a pavement in Ascot. Saved and saver, inextricably interested each in the other; a continuing curiosity which would never quite lose touch. I smiled at him slowly and got a smile in return, but all surface, no depth, a mirror exactly of my own feelings.
In the office things were slowly changing. John had boasted too often of his sexual conquests and complained too often about my directorship, and Gordon’s almost-equal had tired of such waste of time. I’d heard from Val Fisher in a perhaps edited version that at a small and special seniors meeting (held in my absence and without my knowledge) Gordon’s almost-equal had said he would like to boot John vigorously over St Paul’s. His opinion was respected. I heard from Alec one day merely that the mosquito which had stung me for so long had been squashed, and on going along the passage to investigate had found John’s desk empty and his bull-like presence but a quiver in the past.
‘He’s gone to sell air-conditioning to Eskimos,’ Alec said, and Gordon’s almost-equal, smiling affably, corrected it more probably to a partnership with some brokers on the Stock Exchange.
Alec himself seemed restless, as if his own job no longer held him enthralled.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he said once. ‘You’ve the gift. You’ve the sight. I can’t tell a gold mine from a pomegranate at five paces, and it’s taken me all these years to know it.’
‘But you’re a conjuror,’ I said. ‘You can rattle up outside money faster than anyone.’
‘Gift of the old gab, you mean.’ He looked uncharacteristically gloomy. ‘Syrup with a chisel in it.’ He waved his hand towards the desks of our new older colleagues, who had both gone out to lunch. ‘I’ll end up like them, still here, still smooth-talking, part of the furniture, coming up to sixty.’ His voice held disbelief that such an age could be achieved. ‘That isn’t life, is it? That’s not all?’
I said that I supposed it might be.
‘Yes, but for you it’s exciting,’ he said. ‘I mean, you love it. Your eyes gleam. You get your kicks right here in this room. But I’ll never be made a director, let’s face it, and I have this grotty feeling that time’s slipping away, and soon it will be too late to start anything else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like being an actor. Or a doctor. Or an acrobat.’
‘It’s been too late for that since you were six.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lousy, isn’t it?’ He put his heart and soul ten minutes later, however, into tracking down a source of a hundred thousand for several years and lending it to a businessman at a profitable rate, knitting together such loan packages all afternoon with diligence and success.
I hoped he would stay. He was the yeast of the office: my bubbles in the dough. As for myself, I had grown accustomed to being on the board and had slowly found I’d reached a new level of confidence. Gordon seemed to treat me unreservedly as an equal, though it was not until he had been doing it for some time that I looked back and realized.
Gordon’s hitherto uniformly black hair had grown a streak or two of grey. His right hand now trembled also, and his handwriting had grown smaller through his efforts to control his fingers. I watched his valiant struggles to appear normal and respected his privacy by never making even a visual comment: it had become second nature to look anywhere but directly at his hands. In the brain department he remained energetic, but physically over all he was slowing down.
I had only seen Judith once since Christmas, and that had been in the office at a retirement party given for the head of Corporate Finance, a golden-handshake affair to which all managers’ wives had been invited.
‘How are you?’ she said amid the throng, holding a glass of wine and an unidentifiable canapé and smelling of violets.
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Fine.’
She was wearing blue, with diamonds in her ears. I looked at her with absolute and unhappy love and saw the strain it put into her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She shook her head and swallowed. ‘I thought... it might be different... here in the bank.’
‘No.’
She looked down at the canapé, which was squashy and yellow. ‘If I don’t eat this damned thing soon it’ll drop down my dress.’
I took it out of her fingers and deposited it in an ashtray. ‘Invest in a salami cornet. They stay rock-hard for hours.’
‘What’s Tim telling you to invest in?’ demanded Henry Shipton, turning to us a beaming face.
‘Salami,’ Judith said.
‘Typical. He lent money to a seaweed processor last week. Judith, my darling, let me freshen your glass.’
He took the glass away to the bottles and left us again looking at each other with a hundred ears around.
‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘When it’s warmer, could I take you and Gordon, and Pen if she’d like it, out somewhere one Sunday? Somewhere not ordinary. All day.’
She took longer than normal politeness to answer, and I understood all the unspoken things, but finally, as Henry could be seen returning, she said, ‘Yes. We’d all like it. I’d like it... very much.’
‘Here you are,’ Henry said. ‘Tim, you go and fight for your own refill, and leave me to talk to this gorgeous girl.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and swept her off, and although I was vividly aware all evening of her presence, we had no more moments alone.
From day to day when she wasn’t around I didn’t precisely suffer: her absence was more of a faint background ache. When I saw Gordon daily in the office I felt no constant envy, nor hated him, nor even thought much of where he slept. I liked him for the good clever man he was, and our office relationship continued unruffled and secure. Loving Judith was both pleasure and pain, delight and deprivation, wishes withdrawn, dreams denied. It might have been easier and more sensible to have met and fallen heavily for some young glamorous unattached stranger, but the one thing love never did have was logic.
‘Easter,’ I said to Gordon one day in the office. ‘Are you and Judith going away?’
‘We had plans — they fell through.’
‘Did Judith mention that I’d like to take you both somewhere — and Pen Warner — as a thank you for Christmas?’
‘Yes, I believe she did.’
‘Easter Monday, then?’
He seemed pleased at the idea and reported the next day that Judith had asked Pen, and everyone was poised. ‘Pen’s bringing her kite,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s a day trip to Manchester.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tell her it won’t be raining.’