The Strode Venturer (3 page)

“The secretary.” He seemed suddenly confused. “If it’s Mr. Whimbrill you want, then I’m sure …”

“No, no,” I said. “I’ll come back on Monday.” And I went out and closed the door, wondering what sort of man George Strode was that his assistant should appear to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Remembering what Billings had said about the portraits in the boardroom I walked past the head of the stairs and opened the first door I came to. A young man sat alone at a big desk, smoking and staring out of the window. I asked him where the boardroom was and he told me in a bored voice that it was the second door on the right. It proved to be no bigger than the office I had just left, but the pictures on the panelling were all portraits. The same face looked down from the position of honour over the big stone fireplace—a head and shoulders this time, the hair
grizzled instead of white, the eyes more vital, the mouth less sour, but still the same heavy, fleshy face, the sense of thrust and power. The pictures I had come to see were on the right and left of this portrait. Underneath were the names Henry Strode and George Strode. The faces had something of the same heaviness, but that was all; they had inherited none of the ebullient vitality, the strength, the personality of their father. And neither of them was the man I had met in the Persian Gulf clad like the nakauda of the dhow on which he was travelling.

I went back to the central portrait, trying to see in it a resemblance to the Strode I knew. But he had been small and wiry, his face thin, almost drawn, and burned black by the sun, the hair black, too, and the ears very pointed so that he had an almost faunlike quality. This had been accentuated when he smiled, which he had done often, causing little lines to run away from the corners of eyes and mouth. My memory of him was blurred by time, but I thought, looking up at that portrait, that the only thing he shared with his father was the same powerful impression of vitality, that and something in the eyes, a sort of zest. Or rather it had been zest in the case of the man I knew—zest for life and a strange excitement; here I thought it looked more like greed.

I was thinking of my father again as I went down the stairs, of what he must have gone through, everything he had worked for smashed by that ruthless man whose face I had now seen for the first time. He had died shortly afterwards. It hadn’t meant anything much to me at the time for I was at Dartmouth busy coping with the problem of fitting myself into a new life. It was only when I got home and saw my mother suddenly turned grey in a matter of months that I felt the impact of it. She had moved to Sheilhaugh, a little farmhouse on the Scottish border that had originally belonged to her family, and was busying herself keeping chickens … “Everything all right, sir?” It was the commissionaire, polite and friendly.

“Yes. Yes, thanks.” And then on the spur of the moment,
not thinking what I planned to do, I asked him where the annual general meeting would be held.

“Right here, sir.” He nodded to the bronze doors on the right of the entrance.

“What time?”

“Noon to-morrow. You’re a shareholder, are you, sir?”

“Yes, I am.” I hesitated. “You’ve been here some time I take it?”

“Over ten years.”

“Then perhaps you could tell me whether there’s another son—a son of the founder who doesn’t work here.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said, “Well, it’s not for me to discuss the family’s affairs, but I believe there was a son by the Old Man’s second marriage. It’s just gossip, you know. I’ve never met him and I don’t think anybody else has. Was he the one you wanted to see?”

“Do you know his name?”

But he shook his head. “No, only that he’s … well, a bit of a rolling stone, if you see what I mean.”

So that was it and the Strode I’d met was probably still wandering around the world. Feeling suddenly tired I went out again into Leadenhall Street, to the throb of buses and heavy lorries pumping diesel fumes into the narrow gut between the grubby buildings. I would like to have gone back to the hotel and had a bath, perhaps a short sleep, but it was a long way and there was at least one other man I knew in the City, a stockbroker in Copthall Court. The last time I had seen him had been at a party in Harwich Town Hall the night before the North Sea Race. I’d been crewing in one of the R.N.S.A. boats; he’d been racing his own yacht. That had been nearly five years ago.

I went down Bishopsgate and then turned left into Threadneedle Street, a gleam of watery sunlight softening the façade of the Bank of England. All about me were buildings that seemed to date from the massive Victorian age of greatness, richly ornate, stolid buildings grimed with dirt, their interiors permanently lit by artificial light. The
people in the streets, mostly men wearing dark suits, some with bowler hats, looked pale and ill, like busy termites coming out of dark holes in the grey slabs of the buildings. And when I came to Throgmorton Street and the Stock Exchange, the City seemed to swallow me, the narrow street closing in above my head. A top-hatted broker passed me, his pallid features a dyspeptic grey, his mouth a tight line. Youths jostled each other as they scurried hatless from place to place. And on every face, it seemed to me, there was a strange lack of human feeling as though the concentration on finance had bitten deep into all their souls. It was an alien world, far more alien to me than a foreign port.

Copthall Court was through an archway opposite the Stock Exchange and in a building half-way down it I found the firm I wanted listed among about a hundred others on a great board opposite the lift. Their offices were on the sixth floor, a group of poky little cubby-holes looking out on to the blank wall of the neighbouring building. To my surprise George Latham seemed as bronzed and as fit as when I had last seen him. What is more he recognized me at once. “Come in, dear boy. Come in.” He took me into his office which he shared with two of his partners and an Exchange Telegraph tape machine that tickered away erratically. “Excuse the mess.” There was barely room to move in the litter of desks and papers. “Only got back the other day. Been in the Caribbean and now I’m trying to catch up.” He was a big bull of a man, broad-shouldered, with a massive square-jawed head. “Well now, what can I do for you? No good asking me what to buy. I don’t know. Market should have gone to hell with the collapse of the Common Market talks. But it hasn’t, God knows why.”

“I want your advice about some Strode Orient shares I hold.”

At that he raised his eyes heavenwards and heaved a sigh. “For God’s sake, man. What price did you pay?” And when I told him I’d inherited them from my mother who’d been given them in 1940 he seemed relieved. “I thought for a moment you’d been caught when they were run up to
over five shillings a couple of months or so back. A takeover rumour, but nothing came of it. Strode & Company blocked it. They own about forty-five per cent of the shares.” He reached for
The Financial Times
and checked down the list of quotations. “They’re now about two bob nominal. Just a moment. I’ll get the Ex Tel card.” He went to a filing cabinet and came back with a card that gave all the details of the company. “Yes, I remember now. Some slick outfit thought they’d make a killing. The company owns seventeen vessels standing in the balance sheet at just over a million. The scrap value alone must be all of that and even in the present depressed state of shipping there’d be a market for the five newer vessels. Say a million and a half for them and half a million for the rest. That’s two million plus half a million cash. The capital is four and a half million in one pound shares which means that at five bob a share, which was what these boys were offering, they would have had the whole boiling for little more than a million.”

“They offered me ten shillings a share,” I said.

“And you didn’t take it?”

I told him the whole story then, producing from my pocket the company’s photostat copy of the letter of acceptance my mother had signed. He read it through and then shook his head. “I can’t advise you on this and I doubt whether your solicitors could either. You’d need to take counsel’s opinion to find out whether it really was binding on you as the present owner of the shares. How many do you hold?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“Well, I can tell you this: you put twenty thousand on the market as it is at present and you wouldn’t get anywhere near two bob. Probably you wouldn’t get an offer. Still, it might be worth spending fifty quid for an opinion—just in case the boys who were after the company become active again. You never know. They may find a way of getting control. Let’s see what the market thinks.” He reached for the telephone and in two minutes had the answer. “Well now, this is interesting. Apparently they’ve switched their
campaign from Strode Orient to the parent outfit, Strode & Company. The jobbers say they can’t hope to get control through the market. As with Strode Orient, the public holds less than fifty per cent of the capital, but they’ve pushed the shares up from around eight shillings to nine shillings and sixpence in the past month so it looks as though some of the family may have sold out. Not that it helps you.” He sat back in his chair, swivelling it round to face me. “Pity your mother couldn’t have sold her shares when old Henry Strode was alive. I remember when I first started in as a stockbroker after the war Strode Orient were virtually a blue chip and stood at over four pounds, which meant that at that time her holding was worth all of eighty thousand.” He smiled. “But that’s the Stock Exchange for you. If you know when to buy and when to sell …” He gave a little shrug. “Maybe I live too close to it. I’m in and out of the market and I make a bit here and there, but as you see, I’m still working for my living.”

I wasn’t really listening to him. I was thinking of what had happened to the Strode shipping empire since Henry Strode had died and what it meant to me. Eighty thousand! And now, even if I could find a way round the agreement, those shares were worth less than my gratuity. “Any point in going to the meeting to-morrow?” I asked.

“The meeting? Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. The market is expecting the chairman to face some awkward questions. Could be some fireworks, in fact. Apparently one of the big institutions purchased a large block of Strode Orient shares when they were marked down on the death of the old chairman and they’ve been stuck with them ever since.” The phone rang and when he’d answered it he pushed the Ex Tel card across to me. “Henry Strode died in 1955 and the price of the shares in that year ranged from a low of forty-two shillings to a high of fifty-eight and six. Even around the low they must have paid more than twenty times the present price. That’s not a very good record for an institution.” He got to his feet. “I’ve got to go and deal for a client now. But I should go to the meeting if you’ve nothing better
to do.” And he added as he held the door open for me, “Practically all our shipping companies are the same; they’ve been too bloody slow to move with the times. They’ve stuck to the small general-purpose tramp and let the Swedes and the Norwegians with their big specialised bulk carriers grab the much more lucrative long-term charter business. But the Strode Orient Line has been about the slowest of the lot. If you go to the meeting you’ll see the sort of management you’ve got.

“The trouble with meetings,” he went on as we waited for the lift, “is that the chairman doesn’t have to answer any questions put to him by shareholders. It’s only when shareholders get together with sufficient voting strength to push the old directors out and get their own men in that the fur really begins to fly. Directors love their salaries, you know. Or perhaps I should say in these days of high taxation that, like politicians, they love the power and advantages of their position—the chauffeur-driven car, the big office, expense accounts, the ability to make and break people, to order others about. Those they cling to like limpets.” He laughed as we went out into the street. “So would I. And so would you if you had the chance. It’s the only way to live well in a country where the State dominates. The Russians discovered it long ago, and when all’s said and done the power of the State is now so great that the gap between our brand of capitalism and Russia’s brand of Communism is closing all the time.” We had reached Throgmorton Street and he paused. “Do I gather you’ve left the Navy?”

“In the process of leaving,” I said.

“Well, get yourself with one of the big institutions, or better still with a small one that’s growing.” He glanced round, seeming to savour the bustle of the street. “Whatever they say about the City, it’s still a huge dynamo with its tentacles reaching out to every corner of the globe. If you’ve the right contacts …” He smiled and left it at that. “Well, sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you.” A quick pat on the arm and he was gone, moving quickly across the street and up the steps into the Stock Exchange.

The sun had broken through now and patches of blue sky showed between the buildings. I walked to the Bank and on down Queen Victoria Street. Here I was in an area of new office blocks and the sense of power and wealth that surrounded me was very strong. I felt suddenly alone and without purpose in a world that had its own built-in dynamic drive. I had always heard it said that a human being could feel lonelier in London than in any city in the world and now it was beginning to be true for me. It was natural, I suppose, that at that moment my thoughts should have turned to Barbara, now some eight thousand miles away. I wondered if she realized how she’d driven me to this and how much she was a part of the loneliness I felt.

When a marriage goes wrong it’s difficult not to blame the other partner. You see their faults so clearly. You never see your own. How much was I to blame? Again, I didn’t know. She’d been barely twenty when I’d rushed her into marriage in 1949. I hadn’t stopped to consider how glamorous Ceylon must have seemed to a young and very vital girl straight from the austerity of post-war Britain. We were in love and it was so marvellous that that was all that had seemed to matter. It was only later that I began to realize that the vitality that had attracted me to her in the first place was not just physical, but an expression of a furious energy that conditioned her whole mental approach to life so that she grabbed at it with both hands like a child unable to resist forbidden fruit. She wanted the stars as well as the moon. The excitement and novelty of having children had satisfied her for a time, but after that … God knows what she had been up to in the long periods when I was away at sea. I hadn’t dared inquire too closely. The satisfaction of sexual appetite can be a useful palliative to some women when ambition is thwarted and abundant natural energy frustrated. It wasn’t altogether her fault, but I couldn’t help thinking with envy of some of my fellow officers. The strength they drew from a happy marriage was something I had never had. And now in a last desperate effort to deal with the problem I had abandoned a career for which I had
been trained all my life. I was feeling very bitter as I walked towards Blackfriars, drawn inevitably towards the river, the one link in this city with the world I knew and loved. I’d see the children. That was something, at any rate. John was at prep school near Hailsham and Mary at a convent school in the same county. Hostages to the future and in a sense my only sheet anchor. Now that I was away from Barbara she didn’t seem to matter so much. But these two did and I felt I couldn’t fail them.