Various Flavors of Coffee (50 page)

I noticed,
though, that there was a darker tone to the Castle advertisements these days. As well as the smiling, pliable women of the early posters, a new type of wife was increasingly being featured—the rebellious female who got her just desserts. Women who had failed to give their husbands Castle were shown being scolded, spanked, or in one case having the offending liquid poured over her head, by husbands who demanded complete obedience in coffee as in everything else. A new slogan
—A Man’s Home Is His Castle!—
accompanied texts such as
You have a right to good coffee: your wife has a duty to serve it. Don’t be the victim of womanly penny-pinching!
There was even one which showed a woman holding a placard—clearly a suffragette about to abandon her husband to go on a march—with the caption
Who’s in charge? Men, as-sert yourselves! If she’s not serving Castle Coffee, it certainly isn’t you!

There was no doubt that battle lines were being drawn.

[
seventy-eight
]

Bitterness—this taste is considered desirable up to a certain level.

—international coffee organisation,

The Sensory Evaluation of Coffee

*

he build-up to the annual Brazilian crop reports had
begun. Wild rumors swept the Exchange—that the figures would be disastrous, that the figures would be astounding, that frost or disease or politics or war was going to affect the harvest.At one point there was a sudden panic that the President of Brazil had suffered a heart attack: the price rose two cents a bag, forcing the Brazilians to intervene, before the rumors were proved to be un-

founded.

Pinker watched all this with amusement. “They are chafing, Robert.The traders know the situation is unfeasible; they are sim-ply waiting to be told which way to run. It is all grist to the mill.” “Some of my journalist friends have been asking if the market

will turn.”

“Have they indeed?” Pinker considered. “Tell them . . . tell

them you believe it will fall, but that you cannot reveal why just yet. And Robert . . . you might like to explain to them how to take a short position in the Exchange.”

“But if I do that, aren’t we encouraging them to invest for themselves? What happens if we are wrong?”

“We will not be wrong. And besides, it will do no harm for them to have some personal interest in this.”

He spent increasing amounts of time closeted with his bankers, but now he was having meetings with a different type of person as well—young men with sharply cut check suits and loud, confident voices.

“Speculators,” Jenks said with a sniff. “I recognized one of them—Turner, he is one of the coming men in the City, they say. I believe he trades in currencies.”

“What does it mean?”

Jenks shrugged.“The old man will tell us when he wants to.” Pinker was also poring over weather reports and other arcana.

One day I found a Moore’s
Almanack
on his desk: the margins were full of strange scribblings and notations in what could have been algebra, but might just as easily have been astrological signs.

“There is
to be another march,” Emily told me.“This one will be the biggest yet—all the suffrage societies are coming together to organize it.They are calling for a million people, to fill the streets all the way from Hyde Park to Westminster.”

“And I suppose you intend to go, despite your condition.” “Of course.”

“They will not notice if one person is not there.”

“If everyone said that, we wouldn’t have a Cause at all. Robert, there are women who will make incredible sacrifices to be at that march—servants who risk losing their jobs, wives who risk a beating.The least I can do is walk alongside them.”

“Let me take your place.” “What!”

“I mean it. If you agree to stay safely at home, I will go instead. And if you insist on going, I will not. So the numbers will be exactly the same.”

“Do you really not see,” she said, “why it would not be the same thing at all?”

I shrugged.“Not really.”

“We are not simply tokens, to be counted. We are voices
— people—
who must be heard.” She stared at me helplessly.“Robert, we cannot go on like this.”

“What do you mean?”

She said quietly, “Ever since you came back from Africa you have been different.”

“I have grown up.”

“Perhaps. But you have also grown cynical and bitter. What happened to the happy-go-lucky show-off my father met in the Café Royal?”

“He fell in love,” I answered. “Twice. And both times he failed to see that he was making a bloody fool of himself.”

She caught her breath. “Perhaps my husband is right. Perhaps you and I should stop seeing so much of each other. It can’t be easy for you.”

“I can’t give you up,” I said brusquely.“I’m free of the other one but I can’t be free of you. I hate it but I can’t stop it.”

“If I really make you so unhappy, then you should go.” Something about her voice had thickened. I looked at her: the corner of her eye was glistening.“It must be the baby,” she gulped. “It is making me tearful.”

Seeing her crying, I could not quarrel with her. But neither could I go on as we were. She was right: the situation was becoming impossible.

• • •

At Narrow Street
I found the porters unloading sacks from the warehouse.“What’s going on?” I asked Jenks.

“It seems we are selling our stocks,” he said drily. “What—all of them? Why?”

“I have not been privileged to be given that information.

Perhaps he’ll tell you more.”

“Ah, Robert!” Pinker called, spotting me.“Come along, we are off to Plymouth. Just you and I—the train leaves in an hour.”

“Very well. But why Plymouth?”

“We are meeting a friend. Don’t worry, all will become clear in due course.”

We sat in
first class and watched the countryside go by. Pinker was strangely quiet; there were fewer impromptu lectures these days, but I had noticed, too, that he was more relaxed when he was in motion, as if the furious headlong impetus of the train somehow soothed his own restless need for activity.

It was remarkable, I reflected, how little his appearance had changed. He must have been almost sixty by now, but I never heard him talk of retirement. If anything, he simply seemed to feel a greater sense of urgency.

I pulled out a book.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Freud. Interesting enough, although it is almost impossible to tell what he is driving at sometimes.”

“What is his subject?”

“Dreams, mostly.” And then something made me add mali-ciously,“Although in this chapter, fathers and daughters.”

He smiled slightly.“I am surprised he can cover it all in a chapter.”

• • •

“I am watching
the sheep, Robert,” he said a little later, looking out of the window. “It is a curious thing: when the train passes them they panic, but they always run in the same direction, the direction the train is headed, even though it would be more logical to run the opposite way. They are running from where the train
was,
you see, not where it is going; they cannot take its motion into account.”

“Well, they are only sheep,” I said, not sure what his point was. “We are all sheep—except those who decide not to be,” I

thought I heard him mutter to the glass.

I must have
dozed off. When I opened my eyes I found that he was looking at me.

“Each time we buy and sell on the Exchange, we make a profit,” he said softly, as if he were merely continuing some conversation I had missed the beginning of.“But there is more to it than that. Each time the Brazilians are forced to intervene and buy up more coffee, they have to put more into storage, which costs them money. And so every profit we make puts more pressure on them. The last thing they want now is a good harvest—they cannot af-ford to store the surplus from the years they already have. A frost might have saved them, but there have been no frosts.” He shook his head. “I cannot believe it is an accident. I really cannot. But what does one call it? What is the word?”

I nodded, but he said no more, and I soon went back to sleep.

At Buckley,
a small country station near Plymouth, a car was waiting.The doors bore a small monogram, a heraldic
H.
I tried to recall where I had seen it before.Then it came to me—it was the

same device I had seen on the
fazenda
in Brazil. “That’s Howell’s monogram,” I said, surprised.

Pinker nodded. “We are going to his English home. We both felt it would be more discreet than meeting in London.”

Howell’s English home
was an Elizabethan manor house. Sheep grazed on either side of the long drive; through gaps in the parkland one got glimpses of the distant sea. Gardeners were busy clipping hedges, and a gamekeeper with a terrier in his coat pocket and a gun under his arm touched his cap as we swept past.

“A fine estate,” Pinker commented.“Sir William has done well for himself.”

“Have you ever thought of getting somewhere like this?” I did not need to ask if he could afford it now.

“It is not to my taste.Ah! There is our host, come out to greet us.”

They closeted
themselves together in a drawing room for half an hour before I was called in. The space between them was strewn with papers; legal documents, they looked like.

“Come in, Robert, come and join us. Sir William has brought us a gift.” Pinker held out a large envelope.“Take a look.”

I slid out the pages and scanned them. It made no sense to me at first—a list of foreign names with figures next to them, and a se-ries of subtotals at the bottom.

“Those are this year’s crop figures from the fifty largest estates in Brazil,” Sir William said.

“How on earth did you get them?”

He smiled.“That is a question best not asked.And certainly best not answered.”

I looked at the figures again. “But this comes to more than Brazil’s entire annual output.”

“Fifty million bags,” Pinker agreed. “Whereas the Brazilian government declares only thirty million.”

“What happened to the rest? Has it been destroyed?”

Sir William shook his head.“It is an accounting trick; or rather, a series of tricks.They have built in false figures for wastage, down-graded certain estates, created losses that do not exist—anything, in short, to make it look as if they produce less coffee than they actually do.”

I did not have to ask why they should want to do that. “If the Exchange knew about this . . .”

“Exactly,” Pinker said.“Robert, I think you should have a lunch or two with your journalist friends. It must be carefully timed— we need the news to start coming out next week. Not all at once, mind. We want to start a panic, and investors always panic more when they know they are ignorant of the real facts.”

“Are these figures accurate?”

Howell shrugged. “Enough for our purposes—they will bear reasonable scrutiny.”

“You must say only, Robert, that there is to be a great scandal,” Pinker continued.“Then, when a statement is made in the House of Commons next Wednesday—”

“How do you know a statement will be made then?” “Because I know who will be making it, and why. But that is

only the start of it.There will be a Trade and Industry investigation announced, and the monopolies committee will call for sanctions against Brazil—”

My mind was racing. “Trade and Industry—that’s Arthur Brewer’s ministry, isn’t it? And he is the chairman of that committee.”

Pinker’s eyes twinkled.“What is the use of having a son-in-law in the government if one cannot provide him with information on matters of national interest? But even then we will not release the

figures—not all of them: you must feed different parts of the document to different newspapers, so that no one quite has the whole picture.They will all be guessing, speculating, and the speculation will feed on itself—”

“The markets will stampede.”

“The markets will realize the truth: that they have been too trusting.The Brazilians release their own figures on Thursday. And those figures, we may depend on it, will be another fiction—a gross underestimate.The difference is, this time people will be able to see it.” He crossed his legs and leaned back in his seat. “This is the moment, Robert,” he said softly.“I have waited seven years for this.”

He was perfectly calm; they both were. I knew then that everything he had done—the speculating, the mastering of the new financial instruments, the approach to Howell, even the seeding of my contacts in the newspapers—all had been carefully directed to this end.What I, and the markets, had taken for changes of direction had in fact been only the most terrible, implacable patience.

I turned to Sir William.“If the market crashes, it will ruin you.” “I used to think so,” he said quietly. “Like every other damn fool producer in the world, I used to think we needed to support the price of coffee. But it is not so. It is the others—the less efficient producers—who will go to the wall first.When it is all over, and the price settles, my plantations will still make a profit—a small amount per acre, perhaps, but healthy when taken across the operation as a whole.” He nodded at Pinker.“It was your employer

who did the sums.”

“That was what he sent you,” I said.“That was what was in the letter. Sums.”

“Why should Sir William’s efforts support farmers less successful than himself ?” Pinker demanded.

Howell nodded. “Life will be much easier when only the big

fazendas
are left. We can do business with each other: the leeches who sit in São Paulo and suck our blood can fend for themselves for a change.”

“The future is a smaller number of bigger companies,” Pinker added.“I am certain of it.”

I said brusquely, “But what about those smaller producers? What about the smallest ones of all? For twenty years they have been encouraged to plant coffee—to root up crops they can eat, and live off, in favor of a crop they can only sell. There must be millions of them, all across the world.What will happen to them?”