‘It’s what we call leverage,’ Mr Lambert explained.
My head was still swimming. ‘But surely this means you will be out of pocket yourself?’
Mr Lambert smiled. ‘You leave me to worry about that.’
‘Believe me,’ said Roger, ‘he wouldn’t be doing it if he stood to lose any money on the deal. I’m sure he’s thought it through.’
‘Precisely,’ said Crispin. ‘The fact is that I already have another each-way bet on this race, with a different bookmaker. So really, you understand, I have nothing to lose by this arrangement, and might even gain by it. In fact, everybody gains by it.’
‘So come on, Harold – what do you say? We stand to make ninepounds. That would make a good start to our European fund.’
‘True.’
‘Well then, stump up the money, there’s a good chap.’
I wasn’t too happy about being the sole contributor – this had not, as I understood it, been part of the arrangement, but it seemed that Roger only had five shillings with him at the time. I handed Mr Lambert a crisp green one pound note – not by any means an inconsiderable sum, for me, in those days. In return, he scribbled some words on a sheet of paper torn from his pocket book, signed the document, and passed it over to my friend.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Now it’s all strictly legal. Let’s settle up on Monday morning, and hope for a satisfactory outcome all round.’
With that he drained his glass and took his leave, waving a cheery goodbye from the door of the pub as he did so.
Roger smiled and clapped me on the back. ‘Well, today was our lucky day,’ he said. ‘Another round?’
‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said, frowning into the remains of my beer. ‘There has to be a catch. And anyway, nine pounds isn’t going to get us to Naples and back.’
‘True,’ said Roger, ‘very true. But we’ve made a good start. And besides, I’ve thought of something else. I’ll go up and see my sister at the weekend.’
‘How will that help?’ I asked.
‘She’s filthy rich, that’s how. Married the boss of a big chemical engineering firm a couple of years ago. I shall pop up there on Saturday afternoon, play the part of the devoted younger brother to the hilt, stay the night, and ask her for a little loan in the morning.’
‘A loan?’
‘Or an advance – that’s how I shall put it. An advance on the fabulous book I shall write about the archaeological sites of Northern and Southern Europe. I shall invite her to invest in the brilliance of her brother. How does that sound? These people like to talk of investments.’
Roger’s enthusiasm was infectious sometimes, there was no denying that. ‘It sounds just fine,’ I said, and by way of celebration he stood me a whisky chaser with my next pint of beer.
When I saw Roger at Hill’s Restaurant on Monday lunchtime, he brought good news and bad. Red Runner had come in first, which meant that we could exercise our option on Crispin’s betting slip, and collect the winnings – thirty pounds on his five-pound stake, less the twenty pounds we owed him, and the one pound for the option: all of which left us nine pounds in profit. Very satisfactory. Less satisfactory, on the other hand, was the outcome of Roger’s approaches to his sister.
‘Let this be a warning to you, Harold,’ he said gravely, ‘that women are not to be trusted, or relied upon. In fact, one should not even take the slightest notice of the selfish, small-minded creatures. Harriet showed not the least interest in our expedition, or in the book which I told her might come out of it. Her horizons are simply too … limited to take in the importance of what we’re proposing to do. She focuses entirely on her own tiny, trivial, domestic concerns.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, this baby she is going to have, of course. It was all she could talk about.’
‘Ah. Well, I can see how that might seem –’
‘She’s always been like this, you know, Harriet. I’d forgotten what she was like. I’d forgotten how much I hated her.’
‘When is the baby due?’ I asked, rather shocked by his language.
‘Oh, in a few months. I wasn’t going to flatter her sense of self-importance by asking her questions like that. Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’
We left the tiled gloom of the restaurant behind us and spent the rest of our lunch hour in the pleasant green space of Finsbury Circus, a short walk away. It was now early in March, and just about warm enough to sit outside reading a book in the weak sunshine. I had with me a copy of The Hawk in the Rain, the first collection of Ted Hughes, then a little-known poet. Roger was reading his well-thumbed edition of Witchcraft Today, by Gerald Gardner. This sensational volume had been published about five years earlier, and had attracted considerable attention, especially in the popular Sunday newspapers which liked to titillate their readers with the notion that modern witches’ covens existed the length and breadth of suburban England, where sex orgies and acts of naked devil-worship regularly took place behind respectable closed doors. Roger dismissed these reports as lurid fantasies and insisted, on the contrary, that Mr Gardner’s book was one of the most important publications of recent times: he maintained that it had uncovered a vital, authentic spiritual heritage which stretched far back into the pre-Roman era, and provided a valuable counter-tradition to the repressive authoritarianism of the Christian Church. Mr Gardner’s name for this alternative religion was ‘Wicca’, and its main characteristic was that it involved the worship of two Gods, or rather a God and a Goddess, represented respectively by the Sun and the Moon. Not being much inclined towards religious belief of any sort, I tended not to listen too closely when Roger was expounding on this theme, although I do remember what he said to me that afternoon in Finsbury Circus. ‘You should pay attention to this, Harold, if you’re serious about wanting to write. The Goddess is where all poetic inspiration comes from. Read Robert Graves if you don’t believe me. You’d better keep on the right side of her. Unfortunately …’ (he put the book down and lay back on the grass, his head resting on folded hands) ‘she absolutely disapproves of homosexuality, and has terrible punishments in store for those who practise it. Bad news for the likes of us.’
I said nothing, but a shiver of protest went through me when I heard this remark, which was thrown out casually, as if merely the statement of an obvious truth. I knew that Roger sometimes took pleasure in being foolishly provocative. It was also that afternoon, I remember, that he first mentioned his intention to place a malediction on his sister.
Meanwhile, Roger did not neglect the more material side of our affairs. Over the next few weeks, he came to a series of further financial arrangements with Crispin Lambert and his numerous bookmakers, each one more ambitious and more elaborate than the last. I heard talk of each-way bets, four-folds and accumulators. Then we were on to any-to-come bets, fivespots, pontoons and sequential multiples. Each one of these bets was recorded on a betting slip: Crispin would calculate what this slip might be worth if the race had the desired outcome, and would then sell us an option to buy the slip off him when the result was announced. Somehow – I presumed because Roger and Crispin were accurate in their calculations, and in their study of the horses’ form – we seemed to make a profit every time, and everybody came out of it a winner. Soon we became bolder, and the agreements we signed no longer gave us the option of purchasing Crispin’s betting slips when the race was over, but imposed on us the obligation to do so. We chose to do this because the terms he offered us were more favourable, even though the risk involved (on our side) was much greater. Steadily, however, our travelling fund grew larger and larger. Roger became increasingly excited about the prospect of giving up our jobs and embarking on this voyage, until he could barely talk about anything else: it became his absolute obsession. The cultural pleasures on offer in London seemed to have palled, as far as he was concerned, and we rarely went to concerts or the theatre together any more. Instead, if we were not poring over maps of Pompeii and drawings of ancient German burial mounds, he preferred to stay indoors and study his growing library of volumes on witchcraft and paganism. And somehow, subtly, indefinably, although our trip was still talked about very much as a shared endeavour, I felt the closeness between us beginning to slip away, was more and more conscious that I had somehow disappointed him, failed to meet his expectations, and this realization upset me deeply.