A Week in December (47 page)

'Where's that?'

'On the way to Ipswich,' said Nasim.

'Oh, I see,' said Mark Loader.

'Are you a politician, too?' said Nasim. 'Like Lance?'

'God, no.'

Since Loader offered no more, Nasim continued. 'So what is it you do?'

'I'm a mathematician.' The way he pronounced it made it sound like 'methemetician'. He seemed very pleased by his calling.

Nasim smiled. 'I used to love maths at school. It was my favourite subject. Where do you teach?'

'I don't
teach
.' Loader looked as though he'd been accused of a minor but disgusting offence. 'I run a fund.'

'What are you raising money for?'

Loader's face creased with impatience, then relaxed, as though he had decided to give the wetback one more chance. 'To be precise,' he said, 'I run a fund of funds.'

'A fund of ...?'

'I've been very lucky.' Loader took a passing canape and focussed briefly on Nasim. 'I worked for an old mate in a hedge fund for some years. I did the heavy lifting. The analysis. Then we had an offer we couldn't really refuse from one of the American banks. So we sold it. Johnny's still a consultant. So I sort of retired.' Mark Loader took a sip of his drink. 'But I was only thirty-six. And after a couple of years, I got rather bored. You know. Had the Georgian rectory, swimming pool, blah blah.'

'So what did you do?' said Nasim.

'Well, me and a couple of mates started a fund. Or to be precise, a fund of funds. You know, some people think hedge funds lose their touch after a short while. Style drift. So you want to keep moving. Even the best hedgie can't really cover all the bases. So it's quite usual to have money in a fund of several different funds. It's an obvious way of maximising your profit. Keeping fresh.'

'I see,' said Nasim.

'It's just a little thing,' said Loader. 'Very few investors. But it keeps me out of mischief. I do a couple of days a week on it. I've been awfully lucky.'

Gabriel was standing next to them. He introduced himself.

'Oh dear,' he said, when Nasim told him who she was. 'Sophie told me I was not to talk to you because I'm sitting next to you at dinner.'

Nasim smiled. 'Perhaps you should talk to Mr Loader, then. He was telling me that he runs a fund of funds.'

'Really?' said Gabriel. 'What's that?'

'I'm just going to have a word with our host,' said Loader. 'Excuse me.'

'It's a way of keeping fresh,' said Nasim. 'Of avoiding style drift. Do you have money in a fund of funds?'

'I keep all my wealth there,' said Gabriel. 'Mad not to. But I'm thinking of moving it to a fund of funds of funds.'

Loader lingered for a moment as Sophie Topping joined them. 'You can laugh as much as you like,' Loader said. 'But if you were in work between 1986 and 2006 and you failed to bank fifty million, then your children are going to wonder whether you bothered to get out of bed. There's never been a time like it and there never will be again. Even al-Qaeda couldn't derail it. Look over there. That's Jamie "Dobbo" McPherson. He was at school with me. Left with two exam passes, and one of those was in woodwork. Even Dobbo made it in the end. God knows, we thought he'd never manage it. But finally, finally, he flogged his share in Cafe Bravo, then made a pile in commercial property. Christ, he even made money backing
films
for heaven's sake! He's made north of a hundred million. And if
you
haven't, your children and grand-children are going to want to know why.'

'Is it too late now?' said Gabriel.

But Loader had gone. Gabriel put his empty glass back on a tray and, taking a fresh one with him, slid from the room and went downstairs to look for a way outside. He needed air. He was also very hungry, and the raw fish had not sat well on his empty stomach. At the back of the house, he pushed open a door on to what appeared to be a study. There was a wall full of photographs of Lance Topping, taken over many years, shaking hands with famous people. Here was Lance with a fierce economist, once tipped as party leader, now teaching in the University of the Third Age; Lance with the then party leader, latterly delusional in a care home; Lance with a former Chancellor who'd lost his seat and turned to writing detective stories. Among them all, Lance was now the only serving MP.

Gabriel felt that he had wandered into a world he didn't understand. People like Mark Loader and, in his different way, Lance Topping were playing by different rules. And somehow money had become the only thing that mattered. When had this happened? When had educated people stopped looking down on money and its acquisition? When had the civilised man stopped viewing money as a means to various enjoyable ends and started to view it as the end itself? When had respectable people given themselves over full-time to counting zeroes? And, when this defining moment came, why had nobody bloody well told him?

Next to the desk was a glass door that gave on to a small balcony. Gabriel undid the security locks at top and bottom and let himself out. He lit a cigarette, sucked in the smoke and swilled down some cold champagne. He saw a man sitting on a low raised brick wall at the end of the garden, all alone.

Without thinking, Gabriel took out his mobile phone and wrote a text message to Jenni. 'Stuck at party. Tossers. Meet tmw? Still important aspects of case 2 discuss ... G x'.

Having pressed 'Send', he felt dizzy. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed nicotine - there was hardly anywhere you could smoke these days and he didn't allow himself cigarettes at home. Or maybe it was just that the whole world had tilted and he was out of kilter with it, doomed to feel forever seasick. Was Jenni the answer? At least she seemed real. She seemed grounded, earthed. He smiled: almost all the ways in which he thought of her seemed to evoke trains or electricity. But something about that girl filled him with a sense of urgency - with a desire to live that he hadn't known before.

He could hear a steady, fulsome braying from upstairs. 'There was a sound of revelry by night ...' he thought.

Byron. 'The Eve of Waterloo'. The words brought back with almost painful clarity the feel of a book,
Poetry Worth Remembering
, the yellow cloth on his eleven-year-old fingers, the schoolroom on a hot afternoon and his striving to force the words into his memory.

'Sir. Excuse me.'

The caterer was in the study staring out at Gabriel on the small balcony with the look of a sympathetic police officer about to run in an old lag, but who, almost regretful that the long pursuit is over, has decided to give him a few more minutes at large.

'Dinner is served, sir.'

Gabriel ground out his cigarette. The man was waiting, and watching him.

'It's OK, Super.' Gabriel could imagine him speaking into his lapel. 'Chummy's not going to give us any trouble this time.'

He came quietly. Out in the hall, he saw women picking their way carefully downstairs in high heels and going across into the brightly lit dining room.

'If anyone needs the toilet,' called out Sophie, 'it's down at the end of the hall.'

There was a tailback on the stairs as the guests went down to dinner, and John Veals found himself standing next to a tall, debonair man in a chocolate-coloured corduroy suit with a purple tie.

'Hello,' he said, holding out his hand. 'Patrick Warrender.'

'John Veals.'

'I saw you just having a word with one of my star reviewers in there. Ralph Tranter.'

'Yes,' said Veals. He paused. 'Vindictive little cunt, isn't he?'

Patrick coughed. 'That's rather a quick summing-up.'

'It's what I do,' said Veals. 'Sum things up. And I see you don't deny it.'

'Well it's fair to say that Ralph may have a slight problem with the ... er, the contemporary,' said Patrick.

'Christ, you can say that again,' said Veals. 'If he was a chocolate drop he'd fucking eat himself. Even in my business ...'

But Veals didn't complete the sentence, as Patrick had slipped through a gap on the stair below and made his escape.

The cleared rooms opened on to one another through an arch, where once there had been a wall. A long table ran under it, swathed in floor-length white linen with clusters of candles and bowls of cut flowers at intervals. Sophie's voice scraped against the hubbub as she ordered her dilatory guests to their places. A second, much less sympathetic caterer hovered by her elbow; this man was not so much deserving plod as supercilious schools inspector, who watched more in sorrow than in anger as the headmistress struggled with her charges.

The shrill insincerity of the conversation was acting like a drug. No one wanted to sit down for fear it showed that they were not entranced by what was being bellowed at them. Almost all the guests had overcome strong competition in their fields of work, proving keener, greedier or more obdurate, so none would yield in the game of conspicuous gaiety.

Gabriel pulled back the hired banqueting chair for Nasim (it reminded him with a brief stab of the one he'd sat on when he first met Catalina), and introduced himself to the woman on his left, Clare Darnley, who'd been the one confronting Simon Porterfield about his new TV package.

'You gave him a good going-over, I thought,' said Gabriel. 'You should be in my job. You'd be good with witnesses.'

Clare didn't seem amused. 'But do you ever watch this stuff? It's absolutely appalling. Posh people think it's chic to say they like it. You sound like a snob if you say what you really think.'

'But you're not afraid to?'

'God, no,' said Clare. 'Someone has to tell the truth. This kind of television is the vicious exploitation of stupid ignorant people by cruel rich shits. It's a disgrace to our society.'

Gabriel bit his lip. 'You should write a newspaper column.'

'That's the second job you've offered me. Do you work for an employment agency in your spare time?'

'No, I do the crossword and read poetry. But I'm beginning to think that not enough clues have been devised and not enough lines of verse written to fill the deserts of vast eternity that make up my spare time.'

'Marvell,' said Clare.

'Yes.'

'Why've you got so much spare time?'

'Because I have so few cases.'

'And why do--'

'I don't know. I'm not fashionable. My chambers are not fashionable. No one apart from the head of chambers has much work. And one other person, a commercial silk.'

'It can't be just that.'

'No, I think you're right. I think there's something deeper. I think that solicitors sensed my lack of enthusiasm. But that's changing. I think I've turned the corner. I've already got four cases booked in next year. I have a case coming up in the Court of Appeal in January and I think it's going to change everything.'

'And did you vote for Lance in the by-election?' said Clare.

'No. I don't live in his constituency.'

'Neither does Lance.'

'Anyway, I don't know what he believes in,' said Gabriel. 'I always think of him as someone who could be in any party. He probably chose the wrong club to join at university. The flip of a coin. I think he just wants to be in power. He wants to run things.'

'Well, perhaps his day will come. He's certainly trying his socks off with Mrs Wilbraham.'

'I hope it comes soon. For his sake.'

'White wine or red, sir?' The schools inspector was leaning over his shoulder, his eye taking in the half-eaten salad, the messily torn slice of walnut bread.

'Red, please,' said Gabriel. He thought it was time he spoke to the woman on his left, Nasim al-Rashid. The subject moved naturally from why she had no wine glass to the question of religion.

'Are you very devout?' said Gabriel.

Nasim smiled. 'Not really. My family wasn't at all religious. I was just an ordinary Yorkshire girl. Knocker - my husband - his family's very religious. So is he. And my son, too. He used to sing and recite in the mosque, until he discovered politics. Now I think he's coming back to Islam.'

'Are you happy about that?'

'Of course.'

Nasim didn't look happy, though. Gabriel watched her knitted brow, her big brown cloudy eyes. She was a fine-looking woman, he thought, though somehow she seemed sad - marginalised, perhaps, as though she felt her life was one of watching others, not participating.

'Anyway,' he said. 'The Koran's a funny book, isn't it? I mean, not farcical, but odd.'

'Funny peculiar, you mean,' said Nasim.

'Yes. It's so unstructured.'

'He wrote it down as it was revealed to him.'

'I know. By the Angel Gabriel. But my namesake didn't have much narrative discipline. It kind of just comes at you, doesn't it? There's so weirdly little story. Just assertion.'

'More red wine, sir? The next course is lamb.'

'Yes. Still red, thank you.'

Gabriel felt his school being marked down as 'problematic' by the inspector, who allowed him a bare half-glass more of Lance Topping's burgundy.

Gabriel turned back to Clare, but she was dealing with a man on her right; Nasim's attention was switched to her left, so Gabriel was given a few minutes' respite. His hearing was unusually acute, and even in the noisy dining room he could tune briefly in and out of many conversations.

Magnus Darke was leaning across to Richard Wilbraham. 'So what sort of limit might you set on immigration?'

Wilbraham smiled uneasily. 'I assume that Chatham House rules apply tonight?'

Darke shrugged and looked pained, as though his honour had been doubted. 'Just a rough figure.'

Sophie Topping: 'Don't be naughty, Magnus.'

Wilbraham: 'Well, you have to understand that seventy-five per cent of births in London last year were to mothers who were not themselves born in this country.'

Indira Porterfield: 'Speaking as someone also not born in--'

Spike Borowski: 'You want beautiful football, you cannot make team from all English players.'

Olya: 'Yes, Tadeusz is paying much taxes.'

Roger: 'Yes, I'd love some more. Lance, where d'you get this burgundy?'

No one was prepared to listen; and a look of quiet relief came over Richard Wilbraham's face as the clamour of received ideas made it impossible for Darke to pursue his questioning.