The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

Taking an interest in other people had never been high in Sir Gordon’s priorities, but he found himself examining the Earl more closely as he returned with a tray, a bottle, and three Georgian sherry glasses. Sir Gordon was sensitive enough to feel a little embarrassed at being treated by this aristocrat as if he was manna from heaven, but then there came that voice again – ‘I have a sherry that I think will amuse you’ – and the authority returned, Sir Gordon was in his thrall.

‘I thought we’d have luncheon first,’ said the Earl, after they had been amused by the sherry, ‘and then examine the picture.’ He pronounced it ‘pickcha’.

Peregrine had refused to tell Sir Gordon what the purpose of their visit was. ‘I’m sorry, I know how infuriating it is,’ he had said, ‘but I want your reaction to be instinctive and immediate.’ Now it was clear that the Earl wanted him to buy a pickcha for the collection. Peregrine had explained that the estate was in deep trouble and needed to sell its assets. It was situated in an unfashionable part of the country – Bedfordshire – and was in the shadow of Woburn. The eighteenth Earl did not have a talent for showmanship. The house was seventy-ninth in the heritage top hundred. No elephants or giraffes wandered its grounds to delight the masses. No pop stars drowned the screeching of the peacocks.

Lord Flaxborough led them along a damp corridor towards the cavernous dining room. His wife arrived to join them as if she had been hiding in a secret passage. They lunched at a large table with the Earl at one end and Lady Flaxborough at the other, and of course it occurred to Sir Gordon that this was the real version of the parody he had performed with Christina in the private room of the Hoop and Two Colonels only yesterday – could it really have been only yesterday?

Lady Flaxborough was pale and slim and had a face like an overworked angel. She was painfully polite, asking Sir Gordon endless questions about his collection, his charitable foundation, even Climthorpe United. ‘It must be such fun to own a whole football team,’ she said, in a tone that almost but not quite concealed the subtext of ‘What kind of an idiot are you?’

Sir Gordon, determined to begin to turn over a new leaf and talk to people about themselves, was forced to spend the whole luncheon behaving as if he was rehearsing the final run-through of a television programme about his life. Poor Peregrine was silenced too, bypassed utterly.

The luncheon was served rather slowly. In fact, it was thirty-five years late. It consisted of brown Windsor soup, roast lamb in caper sauce, and sponge pudding, and was served by a butler who looked like a gnarled oak and made Farringdon seem a complete imposter.

‘I think you may be rather mystified by the red wine,’ said the Earl, and they were, although Sir Gordon had to be careful not to end up too mystified; he needed to be fresh for the evening.

And then the meal was over and the moment came.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Lady Flaxborough. ‘I will be so grateful to you, Sir Gordon, if you agree to help us dismantle our heritage, but I cannot bear to witness it.’

‘I understand,’ said Sir Gordon in a hoarse voice.

He didn’t know whether protocol demanded that he attempt to kiss Lady Flaxborough on her white cheeks, but in the end he only shook her hand.

The three men climbed the main staircase, in the face of a northerly gale blowing from the bedrooms, and entered the long gallery, which was indeed long, but slightly less long than most of the other long galleries in the stately homes of England. Nobody ever said, ‘When you go to Flaxborough, you must see the quite long gallery.’

They had the quite long gallery to themselves. The house was closed for the winter. The air was icy. Two small radiators were pointlessly hot.

The Earl led them to a rather small painting, a watercolour entitled Storm Approaching the Solway Firth. It was a Turner, dating from 1836. In the presence of its owner, who’d had more than fifty years to admire it, and of Peregrine, who was steeped in the language of art appreciation, Sir Gordon felt incapable of any adequate response. He was out of his comfort zone. Luckily, Peregrine spoke for him.

‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘A minor masterpiece, perhaps, yet a masterpiece. The colours more muted than in some Turners, but we know it’s autumn and we don’t know how we know and that is very clever. We know the storm is coming, we feel the unease, we may suspect that this will be the first storm of winter, yet the picture is almost still, but the stillness is fragile, the stillness is doomed, the boat looks so peaceful, the water is just gently ruffled, yet we know that the boat will soon be tossed and helpless. Magnificent. Will you buy it, Sir Gordon?’

‘The provenance is utterly secure, I suppose?’ said Sir Gordon, making it only just a question.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said the Earl. He couldn’t look Sir Gordon in the face. ‘Let me put you fully in the picture, Sir Gordon. I have three pictures that have been earmarked for sale, with huge regret. All masterpieces but what else is one to sell if one needs to raise money? This, a Tintoretto, and a Monet. Our great institutions in this time of cuts cannot afford to buy everything, so the pictures will have to go to auction unless … unless a saviour can be found.’

A warm feeling crept over Sir Gordon. Saviour. He was a saviour. In moments like this he almost persuaded himself – perhaps occasionally did persuade himself – that this was why he had done it all, this had always been his purpose, to make money in order to use it more wisely than any government, in order to give something back to the nation he loved and, more important, the nation that loved him. He no longer felt uneasy in this house. He even felt a sense of triumph, and he longed to say, ‘I’ll buy all three.’ Why not? That would show just how successful he had been, and just how generous he was.

But that would have been vulgar, and, however weak his position, there was still something about the Earl that forbad vulgarity in his house. Besides, there came with Sir Gordon’s warm feeling a colder undercurrent, a trickle of sensitivity that marred his pleasure as he witnessed the unease of a man short of old money practically begging to be saved by new money.

Maybe Peregrine Thoresby could read his mind, and had sensed the danger. Certainly he leapt in pretty quickly.

‘Clearly, even if we wanted to, the collection couldn’t consider buying all three,’ he said. ‘There are limits even to our resources, and the publicity it would engender would create an excitement that we just would not be able to accommodate in the context of our other work and the rest of our collection and the inevitably finite resources of our building itself. So, Sir Gordon, I felt – and this is what I would strongly advise – that we should purchase the Turner. If all three go to auction, none of them is likely to remain in Britain. There simply isn’t the money here to rival what there is in other places. Well, if the nation loses the Tintoretto and the Monet, they weren’t ours in the first place. But to lose a Turner – even a relatively small work from someone so British, so quintessentially British, even, dare I say it, quintessentially English – would be a tragedy.’

Sir Gordon knew that the Earl and Peregrine would be capable of talking about the picture for at least an hour without being so vulgar as to actually mention money, so, however much he might regret it, however much it would suggest that his reactions and his motives were less spiritual than everyone else’s, he would have to be the first one to raise the subject.

‘So, what sort of sum are we talking about here?’ he asked.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of talking to the Earl about this, Sir Gordon,’ said Peregrine, ‘and we’ve arrived at a round figure, a very round figure, which we think is fair, in no way excessive, and which acknowledges that this is a relatively small work, and a watercolour, and his watercolours do not historically fetch as much as his oils.’

‘I would be prepared to sell this picture to you,’ said the Earl in his modulated tone, ‘for twenty million pounds.’

‘Fine,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Consider the deal done.’

They shook hands. Sir Gordon was again bathed in the warm glow of the saviour. The Earl was relieved. Peregrine Thoresby was as excited as a child.

Sir Gordon felt happy as Kirkstall drove them speedily back to the Coppinger Tower. He was now the proud owner of Storm Approaching the Solway Firth. He was blissfully unaware that this was just the first of many storms that would approach, and that all the others would come a great deal nearer than the Solway Firth.

Those insidious doubts

The entry in his diary read, ‘6.30. Dorchester. DDT (Kranjčar and Modrić)’. Using the names of real people gave him a tiny frisson of risk. It was unlikely that Her Grimaldiship would recognize Kranjčar and Modrić as Tottenham Hotspur players, but it was just possible, and that element of insecurity added salt to the stew of deception.

‘Well, Helen,’ he said as he reached her desk. ‘I’m off to see the Croatians.’

‘Give my love to the Dorchester.’

‘I will.’

Did other people have conversations as fatuous as that? he wondered. (Wondering again! What was going on with all this wondering? he wondered. And that was wondering again.)

‘May I ask what DDT stands for?’

‘Of course, Helen. You have every right to know.’

Their eyes met. A stab of desire caught him off guard. He was always vulnerable at the start of one of his naughty evenings.

Did she sense his sexuality? He thought she did. He thought he could see it in her eyes. He’d have to be careful. He ought to leave. A quickie with Helen was definitely not in the plan.

‘It’s the Dubrovnik Development Trust.’

‘And what’s that all about?’

‘Developing Dubrovnik.’

‘I’m sorry I asked.’

He lowered his voice.

‘This is very hush-hush, Helen, but I can trust you.’

Her square face softened. She really did believe he was going to the Dorchester to meet two Croatian businessmen. What an opportunity.

‘We’re planning to build a shopping mall inside the walled city. I’m helping to fund it – for a substantial return, of course.’

‘Inside the walled city. You can’t. It’d ruin it. Where inside the walled city?’

‘Near the harbour, at the end of that big long tiled main street.’

‘But that’s the best bit. You can’t do this. I love Dubrovnik.’

He knew that.

‘It’s ravishing.’

And once I ravished you. No!

‘Why? Why, Sir Gordon?’

‘To keep the cruise ships away. They have up to five huge ships a day, pouring people in – in their ghastly shorts with their hideous white veined legs and their paunches and their tattoos, filling the bars and the shops and the restaurants, making life for the natives utterly intolerable. They have to make it ugly to survive.’

God, it was just believable.

He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and noticed that she had the faint beginnings of a moustache. That really turned him on. He hurried away from the danger.

As he strode through the open-plan office, a few people were still at their desks. It was five to six.

‘Well done,’ he called out. ‘Your diligence has not gone unnoticed.’

Kirkstall drove him to the Dorchester, dropped him off and went to park. As soon as his chauffeur was safely out of the way, Sir Gordon went outside and hailed a taxi. In the taxi he thought about the evening ahead. He was never at his best in taxis. Rich though he was, and even though he had just offered to buy a painting for £20 million, he hated the way the meter clicked up, up, up. He tried to ignore it, but found his eyes drawn back to it. ‘That’s one pound, twenty just for waiting at these lights,’ he would say. Christina had once pointed out that he resented spending on taxis but paid a fortune to gardeners. ‘They don’t have meters on their foreheads,’ he had said.

So now, in the taxi, it was natural that his thoughts should veer towards the negative.

Barely thirty-six hours had passed since that disturbing awakening, when he’d decided that he must end it with Mandy. But then he’d thought of that as a sign that he was going soft.

Should he end it? Were people becoming alerted to his sexploits, as the tabloids would no doubt call them? Insidious doubts began to assail him. Was he still invulnerable? Would his sexual appetite destroy him? Shouldn’t he concentrate on his great work, his collection, his charitable foundation, his football team? Men with missions should be single-minded. What would his staff in those great organizations and his workers in his factories and all the people in the Coppinger Tower think if they knew that their esteemed leader stared at the meters of taxis in horror? What would they think if their charismatic hero was splattered across the tabloids as a sex addict?

Oh God, was he a sex addict? He hoped not. It didn’t sound good when he read about other people who were sex addicts. They had to have treatment, for goodness’ sake. How intolerably embarrassing that would be.

If only, with his appetite, his virility, his needs, his strength, he could resume sexual relations with Christina. It really was rather extraordinary that he couldn’t.

He would have to grasp that nettle.

No, he must give Mandy up. She had served her purpose.

As he climbed the stairs to the second floor of her block of flats in Hackney – there was no lift – he noticed again that there was no smell of drains. The smell occurred only inside the flat, yet it was so faint that it seemed to be drifting in from outside. A conundrum! A conundrum that might perhaps have been easily solved if only Germophile had … but he must stop thinking about Germophile.

There she was, beaming plumply, sexy and generous, far too aroused for him to even contemplate disappointing her. He would let her down gently later. He owed her that much.

There was a smell of something else, dominating even the distant drains. It was the faintly sweet, temptingly disgusting aroma of cooking lamb. She had made one of her shepherd’s pies.

They kissed hungrily, hurried to the bedroom, tottered on to the bed, clawed at each other’s clothes – they couldn’t get them off fast enough. He raised her rate of interest, he made his deposit, it was urgent, it was a meeting of needs, it was a contract, it was the execution of an agreement, it was over.

It had always struck him as pathetic that she tried to lay an attractive table in her cramped kitchen-diner. There was a single, rather tatty rose in a cheap vase. There was a flickering candle which would deposit wax over the Formica that wasn’t even retro. She had placed the mats for the veg without a vestige of spatial awareness. The salt and pepper pots were dumped inelegantly in just the wrong place. It was a disaster, but she had tried. It made a vivid contrast to luncheon at Flaxborough Hall, where elegance hung in the air like a memory.

She would have to go.

He couldn’t tell her just now, or, if he did, he would have to leave before the meal. He wasn’t that cruel, to leave her with two portions of shepherd’s pie to eat through her tears. Besides, the portions had not been generous at luncheon, and a man is always hungry when he has just agreed to pay £20 million for a picture.

But would she shed tears? Did she care a jot for him?

She poured him a glass of wine. In the first few months he had always taken a bottle, hugely expensive, wasted on her. She had said that she was perfectly able to buy good wine, she was his girlfriend, not a paid mistress. He knew that sometimes she paid as much as £9.50 for the wine they drank.

He took a sip and actually enjoyed the roughness that her palate could not detect. Sometimes the wines that he bought were so smooth that all the tension had been bred out of them. Yes, he could enjoy this. And as the top of the shepherd’s pie began to crisp up the smell grew far more appealing, and he realized that he was very hungry indeed, even hungry enough to eat lamb for the second time that day.

‘I hope this is going to be all right,’ she said. ‘It’s only shepherd’s pie.’

‘It’ll be just lovely. I’ve told, you, Mandy, I don’t particularly like sophisticated food.’ He realized that this hadn’t sounded like the essence of tact, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Good old British simplicity, that’s me. Besides, how can I criticize? I’ve never cooked anything in my life.’

Her large pale blue eyes grew even larger in astonishment.

‘What, never? Not even boiled an egg?’

‘Never. Not even boiled an egg. I have things done for me, Mandy. I have everything done for me. I haven’t cut my toenails myself for a quarter of a century.’

‘I can’t imagine your life.’

She wouldn’t be able to imagine the Earl of Flaxborough’s either.

‘I can’t imagine yours.’

She served the shepherd’s pie with cabbage and carrots.

He ate hungrily.

‘Sex makes me hungry,’ he said.

She blushed just a little. Her body was so uninhibited, but she went all coy when she talked about sex. She changed the subject hurriedly.

‘I’m trying out a new girl this week. She’s better with hair than with people.’

He didn’t want to talk. He was actually relishing the food. The cabbage and the carrots were a little undercooked to his taste, but the pie itself was succulent, nicely seasoned, simple but unadorned, a success.

Sometimes when she talked about her salon he thought of other things, but today he actually found himself listening and wondering about this other world, so far removed from his, and even further removed from the Earl of Flaxborough’s. How many worlds there were.

‘That’s the thing with hairdressing. You get people who’re good with hair and useless with people and you get people who’re good with people and useless with hair.’

He smiled. They shared a problem – the inadequacy of underlings.

‘If you get somebody who’s good with hair and people it’s like gold, and then they emigrate to Dubai, and they never come back. There must be millions of hairdressers in Dubai. I don’t know how you do it, finding people for eleven manufacturing companies plus your financial empire and your property portfolio and all your ancillary activities.’

He had once used the phrase ‘my property portfolio and my ancillary activities’ to her, to explain the cancellation of that month’s visit, and she was one of those dangerous people who remember every single thing that is said to them.

‘This is very nice, Mandy.’

He really meant it and she knew that he meant it and she blushed slightly again and he felt the first tingle of returning desire. Maybe … maybe he wouldn’t tell her till after their second helping.

‘Would you like a second helping?’

Her timing was immaculate, and completely innocent.

‘Thank you. I would. Very much.’

Over his second helping he found himself making a request. He, making a request to her!

‘Tell me more about the new girl. The one who’s not good with people.’

‘Why?’

‘I like hearing you talk.’

Forget Hackney. It was Blush City, Arizona.

‘She talks too much. I think they’ve told her in training that’s what you do. Hairdressers can be overtrained.’

‘Like footballers.’

‘I was sorry you lost on Saturday. I always look for the scores.’

‘Yes. Unfortunate. Go on. In what way does she talk too much?’

‘Asks questions. I mean, the sort of women I get, they nod off or read magazines. They don’t want her saying, “Are you doing anything exciting this weekend?” Because most of them aren’t, and if they were they wouldn’t tell her, would they?’

She chatted away and he didn’t have to say much in reply and actually to his surprise he found it not unbearably boring to hear about this other world. There was apple crumble; he praised it and asked her if she’d made it herself and she said it was from Waitrose. They finished the bottle and he assured her three times that it was nice and she said, ‘I won’t wash up,’ which was the nearest she would ever get to ‘How about another fuck?’

This was one of his best evenings with her and he was amazed to find how much more he was enjoying it than his visit to Flaxborough Hall. He felt a twinge of pity for the eighteenth Earl, who would never hear anything about Hair Hunters of Hackney. The meal had been much better than usual, really quite edible, and she had worked hard over it, and it would have seemed heartless to have said, after that, ‘Mandy, this can’t go on, you know.’ So he didn’t.

This time he relished her unfashionable fleshiness, her large untrendy breasts, her full cheeks, her generous lips, the pleasure in her pale blue eyes. She once, in a rare moment of post-coital candour, had told him that his power turned her on, that it was exciting not to have been entered by her friend, the traffic warden, but by a man who had eleven manufacturing outlets in England alone. (Not to mention his property portfolio and his ancillary activities, though she hadn’t mentioned those on that occasion.)

This second coming was so gentle, so relaxed, so slow, so synchronized, so lovely. You really could almost have believed that there was real emotion in it. You could almost have believed that he felt real affection for her. You could almost have believed – oh, he hoped not – that she felt some kind of love for him.

He didn’t want to go home. He really did not want to go home. But he would, he almost always did, and when he didn’t he almost always regretted it.

As he took his shower, washing all traces of sexuality off him (not that Christina would come near enough to him to notice, but this was one risk that wasn’t worth taking), he felt really quite sad that he was destroying all the evidence. It seemed … tactless. Ungracious. And using her hot water too.

This was the moment when, if he was to tell her at all, he would have to tell her.

She mouthed her farewell kiss at him, careful not to undo the good work performed by the shower.

As he walked down the stairs he found himself wondering how a hairdresser could have such awful hair. But he actually found that quite endearing, and, as he stepped into the taxi that would take him to the Dorchester – in order for him to look as if he was coming out of the meeting he hadn’t been to, so that Kirkstall could drive him to darkest Surrey and suspect nothing, although actually he suspected that Kirkstall suspected everything – he was really extremely glad that he hadn’t given way to those insidious doubts.

Perhaps we have intruded enough

The dusk is pulled across the London sky like a merciful shroud drawn over a dead body. The short day is over. The long night is beginning. Nights are very long on the London streets, in winter.

For one of the men on the streets this Saturday evening, however, the night is perhaps not going to seem as long as usual. He has found a marvellous position, not exactly the best seat in the house, but the best space on the pavement. He has found a little corner, below pavement level, where warm air is being pushed out from the extractor fan of a posh London restaurant. He does not know the name of the restaurant. He does not know the name of any restaurant. He has not been in a restaurant for more than twenty-five years.

Before he settles down for the night he takes a swig from his bottle. The rawness of the alcohol warms him. He runs on alcohol. He starts each day with alcohol. It is the only thing that can cure his hangover. Maybe tonight, though, he will sleep right through, and need no alcohol. He certainly hopes that he will sleep until the restaurant’s kitchen closes.

He puts the bottle down beside him, where it will be handy if he needs it during the night. He wraps his old stained rags around him and lowers himself carefully on to the ground. He will be relatively cosy, tonight, in his own sunken grotto.