The Midden

'I must say I find his emphasis on sin disturbing,' Bletchley told his wife when he had read the letter several times.

'What do you think they are going to do on Exmoor?' Ernestine asked. 'It gets so terribly cold there at Easter.'

'I prefer not to think,' said Bletchley, and left the room before she required him to discuss the nature of Timothy's fantasies. He shut himself away in the downstairs lavatory and tried to exorcise the memory of his own adolescent lusts by studying photographs of a collection of mole traps in The Field. He'd have liked to use one on the Reverend Benedict de Cheyne.

But Mrs Bright raised the topic again at dinner that night. 'Of course I blame Old Og,' she said as they sat down to scrambled eggs.

Bletchley's fork paused. 'Old Og? What on earth has Old Og got to do with it?'

'Timothy has been exposed to...well, Old Og's baleful influence,' said Ernestine.

'Baleful influence? Nonsense,' said Bletchley. 'Old Og's all right. Outdoor sports and so on.'

'You may call them that,' she went on. 'In my opinion they are something else. To allow a sensitive and delicate boy like Timothy to be exposed to...well, Old Og.' She stopped and looked down at her plate.

'Exposed? You keep using that expression. If you're telling me Old Og exposed himself to...' Bletchley shouted. 'By God, I'll thrash the blighter...I'll '

'Oh, do shut up,' Ernestine said. 'You're making an absolute fool of yourself. You're not capable of thrashing him. No, that dreadful creature exposed Timothy to two terrible temptations.' She paused again. Bletchley was about to rise from his chair. 'One was that awful animal with blood on its snout killing a pet rabbit '

'He had to,' Bletchley interrupted. 'There weren't any wild rabbits about and he had to train it on something. And anyway it was not an awful animal. It was Old Og's young ferret, Posy.'

'All ferrets are awful,' said Mrs Bright. 'And as if that were not enough to turn the child's mind, Og had to take him to some frightful girl in the village and expose him to...'

'Expose him?' Bletchley said. 'He didn't do anything of the sort with me. He exposed her. Ripe as...Now, what's wrong?'

'You are a vile, disgusting, and hopelessly impotent man. I can't think why I bothered to marry you.' And Ernestine Bright left the table and went up to her room.

'I can,' Bletchley told the portrait of his grandfather, Benjamin. 'For money.'

But in due course the Chaplain's forecast proved correct. Timothy Bright came off Exmoor with all dreams of a religious life quite gone. He had a different attitude to the Reverend Benedict, too. Instead he followed the usual course for boys of his sort and failed his A-Levels.

'Bang goes your chance of Cambridge, my boy,' his Uncle Fergus told him when the results arrived Timothy was up at Drumstruthie for the summer 'There's nothing for it now. You'll have to go into banking. I've known an awful lot of fools who've done remarkably well in banking. It apparently doesn't require any real thought. I remember your Great-Uncle Harold was put into banking and you couldn't wish for a bigger fool. Dear fellow, as I remember him, but definitely short of the necessary neurons for anything else. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'd say in the modern jargon that he was so mentally challenged it took him twenty minutes to do up his tie. But a fine fellow for all that, and naturally the family rallied round to train him for his new profession. I seem to think it was your grandmother's Uncle Charlie who found the way. He owed a bookie at Newmarket rather a large sum and in the normal way would have avoided the fellow for a bit. Instead he got the family to put up the necessary cash and Charlie did a deal with the bookmaker. He agreed to pay up in full immediately provided the bookie took Great-Uncle Harold on and showed him the ropes. Bookie thought Harold was an idiot and accepted, and when he'd graduated Harold went on as a banker in the City. Did damned well too. Ended up as Chairman of the Royal Western, with a gong. They said he had a knack of knowing what a chap was thinking just by looking at his hands. Extraordinary gift for a fellow with no brains to speak of. I daresay you'll do very well in banking and the family could do with some financial help just now.'

Inspired by the example of his great-uncle, Timothy Bright had tried to persuade his father to put up the money to apprentice him to a Newmarket bookie, only to meet with an adamant refusal to waste money.

'You've been listening to Uncle Fergus's tommyrot,' Bletchley told him. 'Uncle Harold wasn't such an idiot as all that, and what Fergus forgets is that he was a mathematical genius. That's what accounted for his success. Nothing to do with watching clients' hands. From what Fergus says anyone would think he was some sort of tic-tac man.'

'But Uncle Fergus says he always looked at '

'He was so short-sighted he couldn't see clearly that far. What he could do was work out square roots and some things called prime numbers at the drop of a hat. Nearest thing to a human calculator in existence.'

In spite of this Timothy Bright followed his uncle's example to the extent of attending a great many race meetings at which he gave bookies a considerable amount of money and learnt nothing at all. All the same, he did go into banking, and on his twenty-first birthday became a Name at Lloyd's.

Bletchley tried to tell him what a Name was. 'The thing is,' he said awkwardly, 'the thing is you don't have to put any money up. All your capital stays in investments or property or whatever you like. I suppose some people leave it in Building Societies. And every year Lloyd's pay you premiums. It's as simple as that.'

'Premiums?' said Timothy. 'You mean like insurance premiums?'

'Precisely,' said Bletchley, delighted that the boy had caught on so quickly. 'Just like insurance on the car. Instead of the company getting the premiums, Lloyd's distributes them among the Names.

It's a wonderfully fair system. Don't know what we'd have done without it. In fact Brights have been Names since Names were invented as far as I know. Hundreds of years probably. Been an absolute Godsend to us.'

On this somewhat lopsidedly optimistic note the interview ended. Timothy Bright was a Name.

A few years later Timothy had made something of a name for himself. Coming to the City at the beginning of the eighties his opinion that the world was his oyster fitted in exactly with the views of those then in power. From his position in the investment branch of the Bimburg Bank he was soon able to play a surprisingly important role in restructuring the stock market. Long before insider trading became such a well-publicized practice, a few of the shadier and, in the opinion of some, shrewder stockbrokers had used Timothy as an intermediary in the certain knowledge that they could talk through him without his having the faintest understanding of the issues involved. It was this enviable reputation for involuntary discretion which, more than anything else, led to his consistent rise up the investment banking ladder. When Timothy Bright was urged to push shares he pushed them, and when told to talk them down he did that too. And of course the Bright family benefited from his popularity, in particular Uncle Fergus, who regularly caught the night train from Aberdeen simply to take his nephew out to lunch and quiz him about the week's business. From these unnoticed interrogations Fergus Bright returned to Drumstruthie a richer and more knowledgeable old man. Of course it required all his skills as an interpreter or even a code-breaker to sift the genuine information from the useless bits with which Timothy had been programmed, but the effort was clearly worth the trouble. Uncle Fergus was able to buy cheaply shares that would shortly rise to quite astonishing heights while selling those that would presently fall.