Various Flavors of Coffee (43 page)

“I cannot pay you,” I said quietly.

He smiled thinly. “Then you had better stay with us until you can.”

On my way
out I encountered Jenks again. I had the feeling he had been waiting for me.

“Well?” he said.

“He seems to want me on the staff again.” “I’m glad to hear that,Wallis.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “The old man—I sometimes think he has gone a little odd, you know. Perhaps together we might be able to . . . well, to calm him.”

[
sixty-nine
]

he curious thing was that Pinker actually seemed to
have no real use for me. Occasionally he would seek me out and deliver a lecture about the evils of price-fixing or the iniquities of the Exchange. Sometimes he would have Jenks bring me cuttings extolling the success of the Brazilian scheme—a “model for a prosperous future; one that will surely be followed closely by those endeavoring to bring stability to sugar, rubber, palm oil, and every other world market,” as one writer put it: in the margin

Pinker had scrawled a single word—
FOOLS
.

Once, when he had delivered himself of a particularly biting critique of his opponents, he glanced at me and said,“Make a note of it, Robert.You will never remember it precisely unless you do.”

“But I am unlikely to have any need to remember it.”

“Write it all down,” he insisted.“That way, when you come to tell the story, you will not have to guess—you will have the proof.” “The story?” I said, my mind still on which pocket I had left my pen in.Then I realized what he meant, and why he wanted me

around.

• • •

“He means
me to be his biographer,” I said to Jenks when we were alone.

He nodded. “He thinks he is making history. He always has. Emily used to record his utterances. Since she married he has had no one else to do it.”

“Speaking of Emily, do you ever hear from her?” I asked, casually.

He stared at me, and some of the old antagonism returned to his voice.“Why would I?” he said coldly.“She is married now, she has her own concerns. She does not need to mix with the likes of you and me.”

After that I
did what was required of me, and kept a record of my employer’s observations in my notebook—the same notebook in which I had once recorded my own poetic jottings.

I did pick up some snippets of Pinker family news. Ada had stayed in Oxford and married a don; Philomena had “come out,” as the phrase had it, going to society parties and mixing with a crowd of artistic types in Bloomsbury. There was no longer any reason for them to come to their father’s offices.As for Emily, since her marriage she was effectively barred from taking part in the business.

“Her job now is to be a wife, and a politician’s wife at that,” Pinker said testily, the only time I mentioned it. “Doubtless she will soon have her own family to concern herself with.And in the meantime, we have a business to run.”

He ran that business in ways that were increasingly unconventional. For example, quite without warning a dock strike crippled movements of coffee in and out of the Port of London. This was

not in itself unusual—there were often strikes in those days—but what was curious was that there were strikes at exactly the same time in Antwerp and New York.

The price of coffee to the ordinary shopkeeper rose accordingly. But on the Exchange it was a different story. Coffee was be-ing kept in ships that were waiting to unload: the Thames, the Hudson and the Scheldt backed up like faulty conveyor belts. Nobody could buy any more until the dispute was resolved, and the price dipped sharply—until the Brazilian government stepped in and supported it.

For those who had stored coffee outside the Port of London, of course, there was no difficulty: they could sell at a handsome profit. I remembered that endless line of porters marching out of Pinker’s warehouse, and marveled at the extent of his planning.

He made
a fortune that week—but it gave him no satisfaction. Victory, not money, was what he craved.

“That was a skirmish, Robert. We have probed their strength.

The real battle is to come.”

He began to instruct Jenks and myself in the workings of the Exchange. If Emily had taught me to cup, and Hector to farm, then it was Samuel Pinker who taught me about the mysterious alchemy by which wealth is created in the City.

“We sold half a million sacks of coffee this month, and made a profit of two shillings on every one. Now then.What if we’d had ten million bags under contract?”

“There is not so much coffee in the supply chain,” Jenks said, baffled.

“Yes. But suppose our bags are hypothetical.What then?” “Then we would have made twenty times the profit,” I said. “Exactly.” Pinker nodded. “And all from adding a few zeros to

our position. So. We want those ten million bags. Where shall we find them?”

Jenks threw up his hands.“It is a riddle—a nonsense.The coffee does not exist, and nothing we can say will make it otherwise.”

“But it will exist in the future,” Pinker insisted. “What if we could bring it back here to the present, where it will be more use?”

Jenks made a noise that suggested he thought the conversation had become ridiculous.

I said slowly,“If someone had a contract to supply that coffee at a later date . . .”

“Yes?” Pinker said eagerly.“Go on, Robert.”

“And if you could buy that contract—well, its value would go up or down depending on whether the current price meant it was likely to represent a profit or a dud.”

“Exactly,” Pinker said with satisfaction.

“But how does that help anyone?” Jenks demanded.

“It would mean, for example, that a grower could take out insurance against a future fall in prices,” I said.“He could buy a contract which assumed they would fall, and make a small profit to offset the greater loss from his crops.”

“Yes,” Pinker said.“But there is more to it than that, Robert— much more.Think of it as a time-bargain—a contract in four dimensions. A man might create such a contract who had never grown a bag of coffee in his life—he could always buy the goods in to fulfill the contract if need be, but there would never be any need: he could simply replace one contract with another when the time came. He would be growing . . .” He paused, searching for the word.

“He would be growing capital rather than coffee,” I said.

“But what does this have to do with us?” Jenks said plaintively. “We have a coffee—Castle Coffee. People drink it. People choose

it over our competitors’ product.We have a duty to ensure that it continues to be there, on the shelves, and not merely in some hypothetical sense.”

“Yes,” Pinker said, with a sigh. “We have a coffee. And you are right, Simon—we must not be unduly distracted by the time-bargain. No matter how fascinating its possibilities.”

Jenks believed
our employer had gone a little mad. Certainly, Pinker had some strange notions. On one occasion he bounded into the office Jenks and I now shared and announced that we were to look into controlling the weather.

“I beg your pardon?” Jenks said, nonplussed.

“Specifically, frosts. Frosts in Brazil kill millions of coffee plants, but they are apparently unpredictable.What if there is a pattern? A cycle, even? What if—oh, a dry summer in Australia, say, or a ty-phoon in Jamaica—what if that could make a frost more likely in the highlands of Brazil?”

“I have never heard of such a thing.”

“Look into it, though, will you? I have a sense about these things.”

And so we contacted various meteorological societies, and a succession of strange men with even stranger devices traipsed through Narrow Street. One man brought along a contraption in which a dozen live leeches were attached to tiny bells by wires: when the atmospheric conditions were inauspicious—a circumstance to which leeches, he assured us, were particularly sensitive— the leeches would contract, thus tugging their bell-ropes. Another claimed that weather was determined by the conjunction of the planets, like a horoscope; another, that summer rainfall over the Pacific was a certain predictor of winter frosts in Brazil. Pinker listened to all of them with the same rapt attention. But then—

“Proof ! I want proof !” he would mutter and, restlessly, search for the next charlatan to come and gull us.

S
OMETIMES
he referred to stocks and shares, and other more eso-teric forms of contract, as
financial instruments.
It was an apt description: he was like nothing so much as a musician, or a conductor, beckoning great symphonies of cash flow into existence with a perfectly timed wave of his hand.

Jenks could not hear these invisible melodies. I think he saw himself as the practical one, the diligent servant who ensured that his eccentric master always had a clean shirt to wear and socks on his feet. It was Jenks who dealt with the advertising agency now, Jenks who negotiated terms with Sainsbury and Lipton. In that commonsense world—a world in which women bought coffee because you told them it would make them better wives, and store owners bought coffee because you offered them a better profit— he was completely at home. It was the more philosophical, no-tional world of the Exchange which flummoxed him.

Pinker said to me one day, “You have a feel for finance, Robert.”

“That seems unlikely, given that I have never managed to stay out of debt for more than a day or two in my life.”

“I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about finance—a completely different matter. And I suspect it is precisely your attitude to debt which is the reason. Simon cannot shake off the idea that borrowing is a bad thing—that money owed must be earned, and creditors paid off. But in this new world of hypothetical coffee and time-bargains, one can buy and sell debts and contracts just as profitably as one can sell beans.” He stared at me, drumming his fingers on the table, and once again I was struck by the nervous energy which animated him these days.“You see it, Robert, don’t

you? We are no longer just traders in sacks and beans. We are traders in
obligations.
And just as an emperor might call on ancient loyalties to raise an army, so we too can make these obligations work for us—to shape the market. Imagine it, Robert! Imagine what we might do with such a force at our command!”

[
seventy
]

The same coffee, served at the same time, will exhibit slightly different aromatic characteristics to different people. Similarly, the same coffees will show slightly different characteristics when served to the same person at different times.

—
lingle,
The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook

*

y now both the articles and the invitations had almost

dried up, just as Hunt had predicted. But there was an At Home in Pimlico which I went to, more to fill myself up with canapés and wine than because I wanted to tell yet again the story of Teruda.

And there she was.

She had her back to me, but I knew her instantly. When she turned away from the person she was talking to, and I saw her in profile, I saw that she had changed. She looked a little more care-worn, and her hair was not so bright. Styles had changed while I was away: it was the women now, not the men, who were the peacocks. But the expensive lace blouse she wore looked as if it should belong to someone else.

She was not one of the group who hung on my words, but her husband was, and he called her over—like a fool.“May I introduce my wife?” he said. “Emily has a particular interest in Africa, Mr. Wallis.”

Her handshake was brief, her expression impassive.

“Indeed,” I said, “Miss Pinker and I are old acquaintances. We both worked for her father.”

At that the man flushed.“She is not Miss Pinker now.” “Of course. My apologies, Mrs.—?”

“Brewer,” she said.“Mrs.Arthur Brewer.”

“And she was never actually employed by her father, I should make that plain,” Brewer said nervously, looking around to see who might be listening. “Before her marriage she used to lend a hand with his papers and so on, but these days being my wife gives her plenty to do.”

“Indeed,” I said,“there is nothing wrong with employment.” She raised her eyebrows at that, just a little. “Do you have employment, Mr.Wallis?”

“Not as much as I should have.”

“You are once again a
boulevardier
?” she said, with a hint of her old asperity.

“I meant, not enough to fill my time.Your father keeps me on his staff, but I have little to do there.”

“Oh, but you are a writer,” Brewer said. “I read several of your pieces on Africa—they were most evocative; one could almost smell the dust—” And he was off, chattering away, while my eyes remained locked on his wife.

Yes, she had changed.There was less bloom on her cheeks now and more sharpness to her face. Her eyes had a slightly bruised quality, as if she were not getting enough sleep. But there was also a belligerence in her gaze that had not been there before.

Brewer was still rattling on. Clearly he had no idea that she and I had once been engaged. I wondered at that.Why had she not told

him? But perhaps, I thought, any woman would want to keep the way I had behaved to her a secret.

It was hopeless. I could not speak with her there, and besides, people were starting to stare—her husband might not have known of our previous connection, but there were some in that room who did, and out of the corner of my eye I saw one or two women already whispering behind their hands. I said to Brewer,“Sir, I agree with everything you have said so far, and since that leads me to believe that I must certainly agree with everything else you have to say, there seems little point in prolonging our conversation.” I nod-ded at his wife.“Mrs. Brewer. It was good to see you again.”

I moved to the other side of the room. Behind me I heard Brewer say “Well!” in a hurt tone. I did not care that I had offended him: I cared only whether his wife would come after me.

She did not, directly—could not, with so many eyes on us. I was prepared for that. I circumnavigated the room, talking briefly to this person, then that . . . allowing myself to be swept, as if by accident, into quiet corners, discreet nooks.