It was maybe two or three in the morning by then and my eyes hurt. McGee had suggested a ten-minute break, so I had located an unlocked office at the end of the corridor in which to take the call. I closed the door and slid down its length to the floor, grateful for the respite of the darkness. There were twelve men drinking around that table. I wanted bitterly to make it thirteen.
‘It’s hard,’ I told M. Deauville, struggling to control my voice.
‘I know.’
I gazed at the workers scattered throughout the floors of the building opposite. So many of them although it was the middle of the night, their faces gaunt in the glare of the computer terminals at which they stared so intently that they barely registered the cleaning staff working around their sedentary forms, servicing them like drones in a beehive. Tocka tocka they pattered into their keyboards, for all of us were wired into a universal network, monitoring each other’s activities across the globe. ‘I know,’ M. Deauville repeated. ‘I know it’s hard.’ He sounded more alert than when we had spoken at lunchtime. It must have been a new day in his part of the world. Son of the morning.
‘Regarding the Pudong site,’ I said, wrenching my faculties back to business matters, ‘we are presently waiting to hear whether our bid has been accepted.’
Tocka tocka: the ivory ball skipping along the spinning roulette wheel. It settled in a pocket of black.
‘Bona fortuna, Tristram,’ M. Deauville said and rung off. Only then did I register that our brief conversation had been conducted in Latin. Bona fortuna. M. Deauville had given me his blessing. And that, looking back on things, was the turning point.
*
The earth rotated and returned the sun to us, bringing with it a startling revelation. The men were padding around the boardroom in an exhausted delirium by then, the mark of the plague still staining their lips. Calls had been made across the world. Contracts were being drawn up in various international financial institutions. Things had started to happen. We had already flipped one of the hotels in London and shifted a shopping mall in Dubai, extracting value of over €100 million from those two transactions alone, every cent of which we moved like a stack of poker chips onto the Pudong site, stationing our army at the mouth of this most strategic of ports.
And then what? Then we waited. Close of business in Shanghai wasn’t for another half hour yet. A call had been promised. The phone was set out in state by McGee’s right hand. We could do no more.
It had been such a busy night that we did not know what to do with this idleness. We kept an ear out for the phone, trying not to. We kept an eye on the row of clocks, trying not to. Dublin, Dubai, Shanghai; not London, New York, Tokyo as of old. The axis of world power had shifted. I lifted a slat in the blinds to squint out at the shimmering river. It was another beautiful day and everyone had a headache.
Hickey and I had by that point thrown all our projected profits from the Claremont site, combined with an additional €128 million in loan notes issued by Castle Holdings, into the centre of the boardroom table, forming one of those columns in the cluster of poker chips that had been placed on the square marked ‘Shanghai’ and I was praying for us to win, I was pleading for us to win. Every fibre of my being was focused on that outcome. Bona fortuna. That’s when I experienced the startling revelation: that maybe McGee was right. Maybe wealth could be created out of debt and fortunes amassed overnight. Hickey sat with his hairy forearms on the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, his tie tossed over his shoulder in a manner he possibly considered debonair and sweat stains as big as dinner plates under his armpits. If this worked, he would become an extremely wealthy man. Wealthy enough to buy the Castle and Environs out from under my father several times over, to buy any castle he wanted. A millennium-old order would be overturned in a matter of months.
And if it didn’t work?
The telephone rang. Silence in the boardroom, twelve grown men pretending they weren’t there while the thirteenth listened carefully. ‘Thank you, Mr Guo,’ said McGee. He replaced the receiver in its cradle and held it there like the throttle lever of a jet engine, forcing his will down the line all the way to Shanghai.
‘Gentlemen,’ he finally addressed us, ‘I have kept you very late. Go home to your wives and apologise on my behalf. Tell them that while they slept you earned tens of millions each overnight.’
Hickey got to his feet and I got to mine. Everyone gravitated towards the head of the table, towards McGee. Laughter again only altogether different in quality. This was the shrill, unguarded laughter of disbelief.
~ ~ ~
‘So you signed a contract to purchase the north County Dublin farm that morning?’
~ ~ ~
Yes. First we signed the contracts, then we went to see what we had bought.
Hickey dropped me home to get some rest before setting back out again. I slept until the afternoon then stumbled outside into blazing sunshine, unsteady on my legs, as if I had been bedridden for many years, for all of my life in fact, but was now for the first time bearing my own weight, a man on whom a miracle had been performed. Bona fortuna, Tristram. My luck had turned. M. Deauville hadn’t called since the deal, but then, he didn’t need to. For once, I wasn’t dying for a drink. I raised my face to the sun and my eyelids glowed pink. Maybe the dark days were over.
I wandered up the avenue past Father’s ski lodge of an hotel to the wild rhododendron gardens. May is their month. I have missed their famous display on more occasions than I have caught it because that is the kind of man I am, or was; the kind who let himself lose out on the best part of things.
I found her there, or she found me. Edel. Hickey’s wife.
‘Oh,’ she said, because that’s how all our early conversations began — with an expression of surprise. ‘I came down to see the rhododendrons. They’re at their best at this time of the year.’
‘Is that a fact?’ I said in mock amazement, for I was feeling playful and capricious and expansive all of a sudden, traits I had never experienced while sober. I felt drunk, in fact, now that I think of it. Drunk as a lord.
She lowered her head. ‘You already knew that.’
‘Yes, I already knew that.’
We were walking then, deeper into the gardens. She was leading and I was following. I don’t know how we arrived at this arrangement, just that we did and that I was very happy. Edel was wearing a white sundress. Her blonde hair was tied in a high ponytail and her bare shoulders—
Forgive me. One moment.
*
Thank you, Fergus. You will appreciate that I find the subject difficult. I was the king of the castle and she was my difficult subject. The heat was almost tropical at the base of the bluff; we might have been wandering through a jungle in Borneo. The blossoms were staggered up the jagged incline in hues of red, pink, purple, peach and white until the bank gave way to sheer rock face, and the rock face to blue sky.
The path grew lush and overgrown. Edel kept her head down as she picked her way along it, and those shoulders looked so delicate that I ached to protect them from all the badness in this world, though she seemed untroubled by it. ‘I’ll have to get these paths cut back,’ I blustered in an effort to assert my authority, and she threw me this look over those shoulders before disappearing behind a screen of leaves, leaving me wondering whether it could possibly have meant what I hoped it did. Such a difficult, difficult subject.