The Paper Chase (6 page)

“At this time Johnny Bogue was only twenty-eight, but it was already said that he was making his mark. He got into Parliament at the 1923 election as Labour member for one of the Wandsworth constituencies. It was supposed to be a safe Conservative seat and he won it by a few hundred votes. In Parliament he used constantly to be asking the kind of questions that get into the papers. And at the same time he was on good terms with a lot of the right people in the City.”

Jenks’ voice was dreamy, his expression withdrawn. “This particular evening was the second time Nora and I had been to the Hundreds and Thousands. Soon after we’d got there Johnny came over to Nora and asked her to dance. Afterwards he came back to our table and introduced himself. I disliked him at once. You’ve seen what he looked like, you can imagine that he was full of Cockney conceit. Talked all the time about what he could do, in Parliament and out of it. And by no means a gentleman. On that first evening he waved his hand round, and said: ‘You like this place? It’s mine, I own it.’ Then he ordered champagne and talked about the important people he knew and what the new Labour Government was going to do. It was all for Nora’s benefit, not mine. That first evening he took hardly any notice of me. On Nora he made the kind of impression he intended. He had a way of looking at women – it was disgusting, really, but they seemed to like it. Nora liked it, anyway. She talked about nothing but Johnny Bogue after we got home, how clever he was, the great future he had ahead of him. She refused to believe that anybody as common as Eileen could be his mistress. I asked why not, since he was as common as dirt himself. Nora didn’t like that.”

“Are you still married to – ?”

“Nora’s dead.” Jenks’ brown, anxious eyes seemed to look beyond Applegate. “The way she died… But I’d better go on with the story. A week after we went to the Hundreds and Thousands Bogue rang me up and reminded me that we’d met. ‘You’re the director of Jenks and Company, building contractors, aren’t you?’ he asked. I said that was right. ‘You’ve got an estimate in for a new scheme of public works in North London. We ought to talk about it. Come and have lunch.’

“It was against my inclination, but I had lunch with him. It was in his flat off Buckingham Gate, and he set out to charm me. Up to a point he succeeded, but I was still suspicious of him. There were two telephone calls while we were having coffee. At one of them he gave instructions to buy a hundred thousand shares, at the end of the other he said, ‘That was Jimmy Thomas.’ You remember him, he was in the Cabinet of course. My word, I thought, you must take me for an innocent. Then something happened which convinced me that those telephone conversations were real. Bogue had said somebody was coming in to join us for coffee, and when the time came I recognised him at once. He was the First Commissioner for Works, George Lansbury. I’d seen photographs, and you couldn’t mistake him. He greeted me briskly. ‘So this is the friend of yours who wants to do some building for us, Johnny,’ he began. ‘Now, Mr Jenks, what I want to know is whether you’ve really got the organisation to carry out the work.’ Well, I talked, and he listened to what I had to say, but it was his attitude to Bogue that impressed me. He was almost deferential to Bogue at times, asked his opinion on this point and on that. When he left after half an hour, he said to me that they would see what they could do. ‘There are other people in for this contract,’ he said. ‘But anyone who comes with an introduction from Johnny has a head start.’

“After Lansbury had gone Bogue sank back in his chair and said: ‘We put that over on the old bastard. Now let’s get down to business. What’s it worth to him and to me if you get the contract?’

“Do you know, when it was put like that it took my breath away for a moment. In England we’ve got so used to the idea of official incorruptibility that the idea of a police officer or a judge or a Minister of the Crown being open to bribery seems absolutely shocking. But after all, it’s quite common in other countries, and why shouldn’t it be so here? Bogue reminded me of the scandals about sales of honours a few years earlier. ‘The trouble is, there are too many hypocrites in this country,’ he said. ‘They talk about the sanctity of public life and hold out their hand for a little of the ready at the same time. Now, I’m not a hypocrite. I’m saying straight out, what’s it worth to you as a businessman? And remember, old Windbag has to be taken care of.’

“Put that way, I could see it was a matter of business. Bogue asked for two and a half per cent on the contract, I said we couldn’t afford more than one and a half. We finally settled for two per cent.” Jenks broke off suddenly. “What do you think of the story so far?”

“It’s very interesting.”

“You’re shocked, I believe. You think I should have walked out of Bogue’s flat.”

“Not at all. I might have said that in nineteen twenty-nine. In the hydrogen bomb age commercial morality has no point.”

“You’re very lenient, Charles, to an old sinner. Have another drink.” Whisky splashed into metal again. Applegate looked at his watch. The time was ten past six. “Before I left, Bogue warned me that there was a chance the contract might not come to me, that other pressures might be brought to bear on the Minister. In that case I should pay nothing. During the next fortnight Nora and I saw a good deal of him. We were his guests at the Hundreds and Thousands and at dinner one night, and he came to dinner with us. He made no secret of his admiration for Nora. He would say: ‘This is a wonderful little woman you’ve got, Henry. Be careful I don’t take her away from you,’ but I took it as being all in joke. Then one day I received word that Jenks and Company had been awarded the contract. I telephoned Johnny to thank him. He took it coolly. ‘What else did you expect?’ A day or two afterwards I paid him twelve hundred pounds in pound notes.” He sipped whisky.

“Corruption in high places.”

“There was no corruption.”

“You mean it wasn’t corrupt for Lansbury to give you the contract?”

“I mean what I say. There was no corruption. We got the contract because ours was the lowest tender, Lansbury had nothing to do with it. Bogue had nothing to do with it. I paid him the twelve hundred pounds for nothing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Years afterwards Johnny told me the way it was worked. He found out that my firm was on a short list of four for this contract. Beyond that he had absolutely no influence. Lansbury – the man I thought was Lansbury – was an out of work actor hired for the day and coached in what to say. Johnny used half a dozen of them at different times. All Johnny risked was the actor’s pay and a meal or two. He stood to gain twelve hundred pounds. Oh, Johnny was clever. Don’t you agree he was clever?”

“Very.”

“And after that, you see, I trusted Johnny. He’d shown his influence and I believed what he said. He was fascinating, you know, he could talk. And his smile was so boyish. Rather like yours.” Jenks’ long body wriggled, a white handkerchief wiped imaginary rheum from his little eye.

“After the affair of the contract I thought we should cultivate Johnny. I said so to Nora, and she agreed with me. I haven’t told you about Nora, have I? She was ambitious, very. Always urging me to expand the business, take a house in town, give large parties, that sort of thing. After we got to know Johnny she wanted those things more and more. A nice house in Surbiton, a fur coat, anything she wanted in the way of clothes, you’d think that would satisfy a woman, wouldn’t you? But Nora always wanted more than I could give her. More – I don’t know if that’s the right word. Something different, anyway.

“She always had a kind of contempt for me, Nora, and the better we knew Johnny the more she seemed to feel it. He used to take her out to lunch, the theatre, introduce her to important people, or at least she thought they were important. And she often went to the Hundreds and Thousands. What was going on between them I never asked. After all, Nora was my wife and Johnny was my friend. Wasn’t I entitled to expect them to behave honourably? Yet people don’t always behave honourably, do they, Charles? And I sometimes ask myself what were my own motives. The human mind is a dark forest. Would you like another little drink?”

“Thank you.” The ritual was again enacted. Hunched now on the bed, his long legs drawn up like those of a jack-knife-diving swimmer, Jenks revived the past.

“The next scheme of Bogue’s I was involved in came about through a slip he made when he’d been drinking. I wouldn’t say he ever got drunk, but after a few glasses of champagne – he never drank anything but champagne – his tongue loosened and he’d talk about the people he knew, the New Radical Party he was going to form, the money he’d made and so on. One night when we were all at the Hundreds and Thousands in a party – somehow there was always a party when Johnny was in the club – he told a story about the way he’d used a piece of information to make a lot of money on some shares. I said that he sailed too close to the wind and that it was a good thing to look before you leap. One day, I said, he would land right in the ditch. Johnny didn’t like that, he never could bear being criticised, and for the rest of the evening he called me Henry Caution. ‘You’re lucky to have a husband like Henry Caution, Nora,’ he said. ‘You may never be rich, but you’ll never be poor either. Put Henry on a raft in the middle of the ocean and he wouldn’t get his feet wet. Every quarter when he gets his bank statement Henry goes to the manager and asks to see the money. Henry Caution’s the original man who wouldn’t buy a pound note for sixpence when it was offered to him. He wouldn’t waste his money like that, not Henry.’

“‘Oh, my God, Johnny,’ Nora said. ‘Is he really such a bore? I’m afraid he is.’ They’d got into the habit of talking about me in that way in front of me, as if I wasn’t there.

“‘Henry Caution’s the original man who locked up his wife in a chastity belt while he was away and then gave the key to his best friend,’ Johnny said. ‘When he came back he said he hoped his friend had looked after it carefully and the friend said yes, he’d even put a drop of oil on because the key squeaked so much in the lock. And Henry thanked his friend for being so thoughtful.’ Everyone laughed at that, including Nora. ‘Never mind, Henry, you stick to Surbiton. Don’t walk too near the riverbank, you might fall in.’

“I kept my temper. ‘When you’re in the river, Johnny, I’ll stand by with a rope to pull you out.’ I thought that was rather a good reply, but Nora said: ‘God, Henry, you
are
stuffy. Johnny could have cut you in on something worth while, but –’

“‘Shut up, Nora,’ Johnny said. She was quiet at once. She was never quiet like that when I said something to her. Not that I often did say anything. On the way home that evening, though, we had a terrible argument. I accused her of disloyalty. She shrieked at me about the thousands Johnny made every year, and said there was money ready to fall in my lap if I would take it. The trouble was I was too lily-livered to look at anything off the beaten track, although this thing was really right in my line. I asked her what kind of thing it was. She said she didn’t know, but it was something in the building line. Johnny had mentioned it to her, but he said it would be no good approaching me, this was not my line of country.

“I might have left it at that, I don’t know. But the next time I saw Johnny he was perfectly charming to me – and he had all the charm in the world when he wanted to use it. He said he’d had too much to drink, and that he was sorry. I asked him to tell me about the deal Nora had mentioned. At first he simply refused. ‘This is not your kind of thing, Henry, and I don’t want to get you into it.’ It was half an hour before I got anything out of him, and then he wouldn’t mention names.

“The scheme was very simple. A friend of his, A, had a paper mill for sale. It was worth perhaps ten thousand pounds, but a chartered accountant Johnny knew was prepared to value it at about fifty thousand. The mill was in need of certain improvements and alterations. The idea was that a building contractor, B, should buy the mill for fifty thousand. He would make these improvements, which would cost no more than a thousand or two. The mill would then be sold to another friend of Johnny’s, C, who was looking for a paper mill on behalf of his firm, for round about a hundred thousand. A, B, C and Johnny would split the profit, some eighty-five thousand pounds, between them.

“Johnny told me this scheme in the cockiest, most impudent way in the world. When he’d finished I said, ‘But that’s dishonest.’ He pretended to be surprised. ‘Is that what you call it? You don’t mind fiddling to get a contract and paying a bit of commission, but when it comes to big money you’re frightened. Honest, dishonest, what’s the difference? Who’s going to suffer by this except the shareholders of C who’ll pay through the nose for a paper mill. What the hell, they’ll hardly notice eighty-odd thousand less off their profit. But I wasn’t wrong, was I? You’ll never get your feet wet.’ At that I was stung into saying that he hadn’t really told me anything. How could I say anything at all without knowing the names of the firms? He said he’d be a fool to tell me any names without knowing that I was prepared to come in on the deal. We talked round that for half an hour and then Johnny said he’d trust me. A was a man named Martin, who owned the Wrixford Paper Mill in Hertfordshire. I’d never heard of him. B could be me if I liked. But the vital name was C, the final purchaser. He was Sir Robert Rigby, the managing director of a big combine named Flitzens, which owned dozens of stationers’ shops and libraries throughout the country. I suppose I should have felt incredulity when I heard his name, but my experience with the other business had hardened me against that.”

The glance Jenks gave Applegate now was almost coy. “It really was not honest. You’ll say I shouldn’t have considered it. But I wanted to please Nora. And Johnny could be very – fascinating. And then it seemed to me he was quite right, nobody would suffer except the shareholders. In any case, I thought there could be no harm in having a look at the place. So Johnny and I went down to Wrixford and did just that. When I first caught sight of it I was surprised by the size of the place and its air of prosperity, then I realised I’d mistaken it for another factory, the Wrixford Printing and Binding Works. The Paper Mills were tucked away round a corner from the Printing and Binding Works, and they were nearly derelict. Ten thousand pounds seemed to me a high estimate of their value. To turn them into a profitable concern would have cost a good many more thousands than we were proposing to spend.