The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (28 page)

‘Doesn’t he have, you know … pastimes? Hobbies, recreations?’

‘He’s a fiend for the horses,’ Roger admitted. ‘Studies the form assiduously. Knows the name of every trainer at every stable in the country. But I’m not sure it gives him any
pleasure
. He simply bets to win. It’s all about the money again, you see.’

As it happened, I did meet Crispin Lambert a few weeks later: by which time, various subtle but disquieting shifts had taken place in my relationship with Roger. For one thing, I’d had my first experience of his facility – one might almost call it a relish – for creating embarrassing situations. We had attended a production of
Titus Andronicus
where the entire play was performed in modern dress and set in the offices of a local council building in Stockton-on-Tees. This innovation had been greeted with some approval from the newspaper reviewers, but Roger was noticeably unimpressed. Twenty minutes into the performance he stood up, and declared at the top of his voice: ‘I see that we are being bamboozled, ladies and gentlemen, by talentless oafs. These cretins are dragging our greatest playwright through the mire, and I will not stand for it a moment longer. Anyone who wishes to join me in making a swift exodus to the nearest pub is more than welcome. Come, Harold.’ On this occasion he was wearing – as was often his way – a black, silk-lined cape, which he swirled around himself in the most effective and compelling gesture before stumbling out over the legs of the other audience members in his row, dragging me after him while everyone (including the actors) looked on in outraged astonishment. To me, prone as I was to an attitude of deference and self-effacement whatever the circumstances, this was a frankly mortifying experience. My cheeks flamed under the knowledge that hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed upon us, whereas Roger, I am sure, savoured the moment. He liked nothing more than to be the centre of attention. Afterwards, as we were sitting in the pub, he laughed heartily. ‘Someone had to show those idiots up for what they were,’ he said. ‘Everyone else would just have sat there like a flock of hypnotized sheep.’ Then, observing that I was upset and embarrassed by the whole episode, he began to chide me for my timidity. ‘Harold, you lack spirit,’ he said. ‘You are too cowed by inhibitions, which make you afraid not only to speak your own mind, but even to look inside and find out what’s really in it. Your sort will do anything to preserve the status quo. I’m afraid you will never amount to anything, with that sort of attitude.’

This sentiment was to be expressed several times during our friendship. It next happened after I had made the mistake of showing Roger some of my own poetry, an act of presumption on my part which led to a most painful evening together – the first evening I ever spent with Roger when for a while I really believed that I hated him, and wished him dead. As usual, we were in The Rising Sun, where we had been sitting for more than an hour and a half, while he lectured me on ancient British pagan rituals (the latest field to have attracted his fickle, quicksilver interest) without alluding once to the precious manuscript which I had put into his hands two days earlier in an anonymous A4 manila envelope. Finally, during a brief interlude in his monologue, my patience deserted me, and my curiosity would wait no longer.

‘Have you read them?’ I blurted out.

He hesitated, and swirled the gin around in his glass.

‘Oh yes,’ he said at last. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all right.’

The subsequent pause seemed to go on for ever.

‘Well? What did you think?’

‘I thought … I thought it probably best if I didn’t say anything, on the whole.’

‘I see,’ I said – not seeing at all, but feeling very wounded, all the same. ‘Didn’t you have any criticisms to make?’

‘Oh, Harold, what would be the point?’ Roger sighed heavily. ‘You have no poetry
in
you, that’s the problem. No poetry in your soul. The soul of a poet is a floating, airy thing. You are earthbound. Of the earth.’

He regarded me almost kindly as he said this, and clasped me by the hand. It was an extraordinary moment: our first instance of real physical contact, I believe (after seeing each other for so many weeks!), which sent a pulse of exhilaration through my body, so that I could almost feel the blood tingling through it, as if a circuit had been completed at last. And yet, at the same time, I felt an absolute revulsion: my fury at his rejection, at the sheer contempt in which he clearly held my attempts at verse was so strong that I could not speak, and withdrew my hand sharply after only a second or two had gone by.

‘I’ll get some more drinks,’ he said, rising to his feet. And I was sure I could glimpse an almost daemonic smile in his eye as he looked back over his shoulder at me and carelessly asked: ‘Same again?’

I was in thrall to Roger. However cruel he was to me, I could not escape him. I had made very few other friends in London, and besides, his personality was so much stronger than mine, I accepted even his severest criticisms of me and believed them to be well founded. We continued with our schemes of pleasure and self-improvement. But he did not take me by the hand again, for quite a while.

A recurrent feature of our conversations was our plan to take a long trip together, at some unspecified time, through France and Germany and thence down to Italy, to visit Florence, Rome and Naples, and to view the splendours of the ancient world. Like all of Roger’s schemes, it was grandiose. He would not contemplate a quick journey there and back by rail. There were many places he wanted to see on the way down; and he even began to talk about returning along the Italian and French rivieras, with a possible detour to Spain. The whole excursion, he said, if carried out properly, would take a number of months, and would cost several hundred pounds. And so the main obstacle standing in the way of this scheme was entirely predictable, and seemingly intractable: a serious lack of funds.

The germ of a solution presented itself, however, early one evening in March as we were making our way towards the bar of the Mermaid Theatre, where we were intending to have a drink and perhaps see the performance afterwards. As we strolled together down Carter Lane, we passed a tall City gent in his pin-striped suit and bowler hat walking in the other direction. Roger stopped in his tracks and looked after him as he ambled by.

‘That’s Crispin,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a word. I’ll introduce you to him.’

‘Will he be pleased to see us?’ I asked, somewhat nervously.

‘Horrified, I should think. That’ll be half the fun.’

Crispin had disappeared through the door of a pub which also, I noticed, went by the name of The Rising Sun, despite being less than a mile from our regular haunt in Cloth Fair. We found him standing at the bar, bent in deep thought over the pages of the
Sporting Life
.

‘Good evening, Mr Lambert,’ said Roger, in a deferential tone I had never heard him use before.

‘Roger!’ He looked up, thoroughly startled. ‘Good gracious. I didn’t know that this was one of your watering holes.’

‘One of many, Mr Lambert, one of many. Allow me to introduce my friend, Harold Sim.’

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ he said, extending a lukewarm handshake. He hesitated, waiting for us to move away. But we stayed where we were. ‘Well …’ he said, after an awkward silence, ‘I suppose you gentlemen will be wanting a drink?’

Once we’d had a few drinks together, Crispin Lambert turned out to be amiable enough: not that I took a very active role in the conversation. He and Roger soon fell to discussing their work on the Stock Exchange floor, and I found myself lost in a thicket of financial jargon of which I had not the least understanding. My mind drifted off and I began thinking of other things. Some lines of a sonnet occurred to me and I began writing them down in my notebook. I took no further notice of my companions, in fact, until several minutes later, when I realized that Roger was addressing me directly.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that sounds an interesting proposition. What do you say, Harold – shall we pool our resources and give it a try?’

I knew that they had been discussing, among other things, the prospects of a particular horse running in the 3.30 at Newmarket that Saturday, so I assumed at first that Roger was suggesting a bet. But it turned out that it was rather more complicated than that.

‘Mr Lambert has already placed his bet,’ he explained, holding up a crumpled piece of paper with a bookmaker’s scrawl upon it. ‘This is the betting slip, and what he is proposing, is that he sells
us
the right to buy it from him in the future. What he wants to sell us, in effect, is an option on the bet.’

‘An option?’

‘Yes. You see, he’s really being very decent about it. He’s placed five pounds on a horse called Red Runner to win, at odds of 6-1. Now you and I can’t afford that kind of stake, obviously. But what he’s suggesting is that, if we pay him one pound now, that gives us the right to buy the betting slip from him for twenty pounds –
after
the race has been run.’

‘Twenty pounds? But we don’t have twenty pounds.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to borrow it. You see, at that point, we can’t lose. We only have to buy the slip off him if the horse has won – by which time, it will be worth thirty pounds. So even if we buy it for twenty, plus the original pound we’ve paid for the option, then we’ve made nine pounds profit. And the only thing we’re risking is our original one pound.’

‘I still don’t get it. Why don’t we just place a bet ourselves?’

‘Because this way we stand to make more money. If we just bet one pound at 6-1, we’d only make five pounds profit. This way we make almost twice as much.’

‘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.’