The Midden Read online

  It was largely thanks to Uncle Fergus’s interventions in the market that Timothy was eventually promoted from Bimburg’s investment branch to the Names Recruitment Bureau at Lloyd’s. This wasn’t its official title and its existence was strenuously denied, but its work consisted almost entirely of spreading the word to the millions of newly ‘enriched’ Thatcherite home owners that becoming a Name at Lloyd’s had the advantage of being socially most acceptable and, at the same time, inevitably rewarding. As house prices shot up and the Prime Minister spoke of Britain’s new economic success, Timothy Bright did what he was told and recruited new Names to help pay for the anticipated losses on asbestosis, pollution claims, and a host of other disasters. Life was joyful. He moved in a world of self-congratulation and socially accredited greed. In his clubs and at weekend house parties, at political conferences and intimate dinner parties, Timothy Bright could be relied upon to say that prosperity had finally come to post-war Britain and that the Prime Minister had saved the nation from itself. In return for this idolatry he was favoured with fresh confidences about privatization plans and those companies that could expect government contracts. The flow of supposedly confidential information grew so steadily that Fergus was persuaded to take a room permanently in an hotel rather than spend so much time travelling backwards and forwards from Scotland. He was especially delighted to have news in advance of the coal miners’ strike, and made provision for the outcome by investing in Nottingham Trucks Ltd and their spare parts subsidiaries.

  ‘A fine man and a Scotsman, MacGregor,’ he said when Timothy told him who was to be appointed to the Coal Board to inflame Scargill.

  Even Bletchley Bright, normally an exceedingly cautious man where any of his son’s financial advice was concerned, was tempted to invest – though not in anything connected with coal or along the tortuous lines laid out so carefully by Fergus. He took his son’s advice literally, and lost nearly everything in Canadian gold.

  ‘That’s the last time I listen to that blithering idiot son of yours,’ he told Ernestine. ‘The little moron definitely said gold was going to make a terrific come-back. Said he had it from some blighter in the Bank of England. And now look where it is. No wonder the country’s in a stew.’

  ‘Now, now, dear,’ said Mrs Bright, ‘Timothy is doing brilliantly and everyone thinks so. There’s no need to spoil things for him. After all, we’re only young once.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Bletchley and went off to commune with Old Og, who thought the world was in a dreadful mess too.

  ‘Bain’t seem to be no sense in it,’ Og told him. ‘Had a fellow from the Ministry round said us had to gas all badgers. I told him we got no badgers but he don’t hear like. “Got to gas ’em cos they got TB,” he says. I tells him straight. “I don’t know about that,” I says, “and we still haven’t got no badgers. You’m come to the wrong place for badgers unless you want to gas Master’s shaving brush, that being the only bit of badger round here.”’

  Bletchley found comfort in the old man’s words. They took him back to a world that had never existed in which summers were perpetually sunny and it snowed every Christmas.

  *

  In many respects Timothy Bright’s world was as unreal as his father’s memories. He too went through the eighties believing what the PR men told him and, while politicians and businessmen lived in the hope that their optimistic words would produce the prosperity they proclaimed was already there, Timothy Bright really believed it was. With the sublime ignorance that finds no excuse in law, he thrived in the praise of criminals and timeservers like Maxwell and his acolytes and took the view that a prison sentence was no bar to social advancement. In Timothy’s world no one resigned or was punished for negligence or worse. The Great Hen squawked self-congratulations over the City, and Maxwell silenced his mildest critics with the harshest of libel writs and made Her Majesty’s Judges accessories to his terrible crimes. And Timothy thrived. He was a merry idiot and everyone loved him.

  And just as suddenly he was a bloody swine and no fool after all.

  2

  As with everything else in his life it took Timothy some time to realize that anything was wrong. He went about what he called his work in the same way as before and frequented the same clubs and wine bars to discuss the same topics and tell clients what shares to buy or sell, but slowly it did begin to dawn on him that something was different. People seemed to drop out of his society without any warning and a number of friends he had advised to become Names began to remind him of his advice.

  ‘But I hadn’t the foggiest that things were going to turn nasty then,’ he explained only to be called a damned liar.

  ‘You knew as far back as ’82 that the American courts were going to award asbestosis victims huge sums –’

  ‘All right, I knew,’ Timothy admitted. ‘But I didn’t know what asbestosis was then. I mean it could have been the measles or something mild like that.’

  ‘But you knew about the huge awards that were coming. And what about pollution? You were there at the meeting when the whole dirty scheme for recruiting new Names to help pay was first mooted. And don’t bloody well say you weren’t. We know you were. You went there with Coletrimmer.’

  ‘Well, yes I did,’ said Timothy unwisely. ‘I remember the meeting but I had no idea the sums were going to be so large. Anyway, I didn’t fix for you to go into that Syndicate.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Then how come you managed to stay out of it so well?’

  ‘I was only doing what Coletrimmer advised,’ said Timothy.

  ‘Oh, sure. That’s a likely story. Coletrimmer’s up the spout himself and you’re sitting pretty. Why don’t you follow his example and sod off to South America some place?’

  In this new and harsh world Timothy found himself increasingly isolated. His clubs had become the focal points of an unpopularity he could not face and, while he still saw a few old girlfriends from the heady days of affluence, his own financial position deteriorated so drastically that he was unable to entertain them in the same style and they drifted away. ‘Timothy Bright’s such an awful tick,’ he heard a girl he had been fond of say as he stood in a crowded train. ‘He was naff enough before. But now. Ugh.’

  To make matters worse still, Uncle Fergus gave up coming to London and let it be known he didn’t want ‘that moron Timothy’ anywhere near Drumstruthie. Timothy took this particularly hard. For once he had offered his uncle some good advice and had warned him there was likely to be war in Kuwait. It had been entirely due to Fergus’s habit of finding the kernel of truth behind the arrant nonsense that Timothy usually talked that he had decided no war was likely and had invested heavily in Iraqi Oils. Fergus’s losses had been very considerable and the old man had never forgiven his nephew. As a result Timothy had nobody at all sensible to turn to when his own financial problems developed. And they developed with alarming rapidity. The house he had bought in Holland Park at the top of the property boom had required an enormous mortgage. As the recession developed and his work tailed off, he found himself unable to keep up his mortgage payments. And, as if that were not enough, he found himself involved in the Lloyd’s scandal and owing hundreds of thousands of pounds. In a few months Timothy Bright’s world collapsed about him.

  *

  It was at this point that he recalled his ambition to make a fortune and the method his Great-Uncle Harold had used. Timothy turned to horse-racing and gambling. Having lost nearly everything on the horses he borrowed heavily and, using an infallible system he had read about, bet everything on the roulette wheel at the Markinkus Club. The roulette wheel ignored the system and when Timothy finally pushed back his chair and stood up there was little he could do except accompany two very thickset men to the office for what they termed ‘a quiet word with the Boss’. It was rather more than a quiet word. By the time Timothy Bright left the casino twenty minutes later he was in no doubt what his future would be if he did not pay his debts within the month.

  ‘An
d that’s generous, laddie,’ said Mr Markinkus, who was clearly in an expansive mood. ‘See you don’t miss the deadline. Yeah, the deadline. Get it?’

  Timothy had got it, and in the dawn light filtering slowly over London he tried to think where to turn for help. It was at this dark moment that he found the inspiration that was to change his life so radically. He remembered his Great-Aunt Ermyne who had gone to her demented death repeating the never-to-be-forgotten words ‘You must always look on the Bright side’ over and over again. Timothy had only been eleven at the time but the words, repeated like a mantra as Auntie Ermyne was wheeled down the corridor at Loosemore for the last time, had made a deep impression on him. He had asked Uncle Vernon, Ermyne’s husband, who seemed to be in a talkatively good mood, what they meant. After the old man had muttered something about a few years of freedom and happiness, he had taken Timothy by the hand and had shown him the family portraits in the Long Gallery.

  ‘These are the Bright side of the family,’ he had explained in tones that suggested ancestor worship. ‘Now when things look darkest, as they generally do, I’m told, just before the dawn, it is to the Bright side that we always look. Here, for instance, is Croker Bright shortly before he was captured by the French. His forte was piracy on the high seas and after that the usual silk and brandy smuggling. He was particularly feared by the Spanish. Died in 1678. We owe a great deal to him and to his son, Stanhope, here. Stanhope Bright was a fine fellow. You can see that. He was a slave trader and became the founding father of the Bristol Brights. Very rich man indeed. His cousin over here is Blakeney Bright, also known as Mangle Bright, not, as people would have us believe, for any good agricultural reasons but for the invention of a particularly devastating form of high-speed beam engine. I forget what it was supposed to do but I do know it was only used in coal mines where very high casualty rates were perfectly acceptable.’

  Old Uncle Vernon had moved on down the Gallery extolling the virtues of Bright ancestors while Timothy had learnt how one Bright after another had made a fortune against quite amazing odds of character and circumstance. Even after the abolition of slavery, for instance, the Rev. Otto Bright, of the Bright Missionary Station on Zanzibar, had done a remarkable fund-raising job for the Church by supplying well-favoured young men from Central Africa to discriminating sheikhs on the Arabian peninsula while his sister, Ursula, had pursued her own feminine tendencies by persuading a number of young women from Houndsditch to join what she called ‘secular nunneries’ in the less amenable ports of South America. Even as late as the 1920s several American Brights who were the direct descendants of Croker Bright had collaborated with the bootlegger and gangster Joseph Kennedy in rum-running during Prohibition. Uncle Vernon remembered some of them.

  ‘Fine fellows who followed the family traditions,’ he said and quoted another old family maxim. ‘“Where there is a demand, supply it: where there isn’t, create one.” That is an old saying that dates back to Enoch Bright, a contemporary of Adam Smith and the truer Tory. The saying is at the very heart of modern economic practice and Croker is a good example.’

  Now, standing in the grey dawn off the Edgware Road, Timothy recalled his uncle’s words and looked on the Bright side. It wasn’t at all easy but he did it. He still had his job of a sort at Bimburg’s Bank; he had a flat in a friend’s name in Notting Hill Gate and a new motorbike, a Suzuki 1100, in place of his old Porsche, which he kept in a lock-up garage; but above all he had the Bright family connections. These were his most important assets and he meant to make use of them. With their present help and the example of past Brights to inspire him he would find a way out of his temporary difficulties and Mr Markinkus’s threats and make his fortune. With renewed optimism he hurried back to his flat and spent much of the day asleep.

  Over the weekend he racked his brains for a way forward. Perhaps, if he went home and asked Daddy to lend him some money . . . No, he’d done that too often and the last time Daddy had threatened to have him certified as a financial lunatic if he ever mentioned the word ‘borrow’ again in his presence. And Mummy didn’t have any money to lend. Perhaps if he wrote to Uncle Fergus and told him . . . But no, Uncle Fergus had a ‘thing’ about gambling and had once preached an awful sermon at his strange Presbyterian Church about ‘Gambling Hells’ which he seemed to think of quite literally. There was absolutely no member of the family he could ask for help in his predicament. ‘You’d think someone would be willing to supply the money considering the demand I have for it,’ he thought bitterly. And then on the Tuesday just when he was almost past thinking and was at his lowest ebb, he received a telephone call at work. It was from a Mr Brian Smith who suggested that Timothy drop by for a drink at El Baco Wine Bar in Pologne Street on his way home that night. ‘Say 6.30,’ said Mr Smith, and rang off.

  Timothy Bright considered the invitation and decided he had nothing to lose by accepting it. Besides, there had been something about Mr Smith’s tone of voice that had suggested he would be well advised not to reject it. At 6.25 he entered the wine bar and had hardly ordered a Red Biddy when the barman told him that Mr Smith was through the back and waiting for him. Without wondering how the barman had known who he was, Timothy took his drink through the door.

  ‘Ah, Mr Bright, my name is Smith but you can call me Brian,’ said a man who didn’t look or sound like any Mr Smith, or Brian for that matter. Timothy had never set eyes on him before. ‘Good of you to come.’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Timothy, trying to be formal.

  ‘Pretty damn well,’ said Mr Smith, indicating a chair on the other side of the desk. ‘I hear you don’t do so good, no?’

  ‘Nobody’s doing very well in this depression . . .’ Timothy began, before deciding Mr Smith wasn’t talking in general terms. He also appeared to be cleaning his nails with a cut-throat razor. Mr Smith smiled – or something. To Timothy it was definitely not a proper smile.

  ‘Good, so we understand one another,’ said Mr Smith, and apparently cut an errant fly in half in mid-air. ‘You want some money and I got some you can have. How does that sound to you?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Timothy, still overwhelmed by the fate of the fly, ‘I . . . er . . . I suppose . . . that’s very good of you.’

  ‘Not good. Business,’ said Mr Smith, now glancing in a hand mirror to assist him in using the razor to defoliate a nostril. ‘Want to hear more?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Timothy said hesitantly, wishing he wouldn’t flourish the razor quite so casually.

  ‘Good, then I tell you,’ continued Mr Smith. ‘You gotta motorbike, big Suzuki eleven hundred, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Timothy said.

  ‘You gotta uncle?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got quite a few.’

  ‘Sure, you gotta lots. You gotta one who’s Judge. Judge Sir Benderby bloody Bright?’ interrupted Mr Smith. ‘Right?’

  ‘Oh yes, Uncle Benderby,’ said Timothy, and swallowed drily. Uncle Benderby terrified him.

  ‘Your Uncle Benderby done some friends of mine some big favours. Like fifteen years,’ Mr Smith went on. ‘You know that? Fuck.’

  Timothy didn’t know it but he could see that Mr Smith had just nicked his nose. The situation was most unpleasant. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he muttered. ‘He’s not very popular in the family either.’

  Mr Smith dabbed the end of his nose with a blue silk handkerchief and hurled the razor expertly at the desk where it bisected a cigar. He got up and went into the toilet for some paper. ‘Got a yacht called the Lex Britannicus?’ he said while dabbing his nose with the paper.

  ‘Yes,’ said Timothy, mesmerized by the performance.

  ‘And your Uncle Benderby sails it out to a place near Barcelona for the winter and brings it back to Fowey for the summer. Then out again in September. Right?’

  ‘Quite right. Absolutely,’ said Timothy. ‘It’s an awfully rough time to sail. With the equinoctial gales, you know. But Uncle Benderby says it’s the only time to be a real sailor.’
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  ‘He’d know, wouldn’t he?’ said Mr Smith with a nasty smile. The red-stained paper on his nose didn’t improve his appearance. ‘Well, you and Uncle Benderby ought to get together. Soon. Like you ride your flash bike down there with a present for him.’

  ‘A present for Uncle Ben –?’

  ‘That’s right. A present. What you do is this . . .’

  For the next ten minutes Timothy Bright listened to his instructions. They were very clear and to Timothy’s way of thinking didn’t add up to anything in the least attractive. ‘You want me to catch the ferry from Plymouth to Santander with my bike and drive to Llafranc and meet someone who will have a package for me and I’m to put it in the sail locker on Uncle Benderby’s yacht without him knowing? Is that right?’ he asked.

  ‘Sort of. Except you’ll be taking something with you maybe so you earn your money both ways. That way we know you’ve done the job proper.’

  ‘But this sounds very dubious to me, I must say,’ Timothy protested, only to be cut short.

  Mr Smith reached into a drawer in his desk and brought out an envelope. ‘Take a look at piggy-chops,’ he said and pulled out a colour photograph and slid it across the desk.

  Timothy Bright looked down and saw something that might once have been a pig.

  Mr Smith let him savour the sight. ‘Right, you want to end up like piggy-chops there all you have to do is not do what I say. Right?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Timothy, who definitely didn’t want to end up looking like that indescribable pig. ‘I mean, yes, of course. Right.’

  Mr Smith put the photo back in the envelope and picked up the razor again. ‘You will get the ferry from Plymouth on the twentieth. That’ll give you time to arrange leave from the bank. You’re owed some. Like three weeks, and you’re taking it.’