The Talisman (26 page)

Harriet snuggled into his shoulder, said that she was glad it wasn’t some woman. Edward coiled a strand of her hair round his finger, rolled it and let it drop into a ringlet on her shoulder . . . She caught his hand, kissed it, and he kissed the top of her head, very, very gently . . . He shook himself back to sanity. ‘We should go, Harry – come on, it’s stopped raining.’ Standing up, he lifted her to her feet. She was too close, his hands involuntarily tightened around her – he knew he should push her away, but he couldn’t. She looked up into his face. There was a calmness in her, an adultness that took his breath away. Gently, she pulled his head down to hers and kissed his lips. The sweetness, the innocence of the kiss, her lips so soft – no tongue searching, thrusting down his throat – it was a childish kiss, no hands swarmed over his body, or clutched at his trousers to feel him. She was simply there, so warm and so pure that it made him gasp. ‘We’d better go, come on, get your boots on.’

She began to tie her hair back, and got into a mess so he had to do it for her. As he tied the ribbon, he lifted her thick hair and kissed the nape of her neck, then tapped her tight little bum and told her to get a move on . . . He walked out, hampered by his erection and knowing he had to get away from her before he ripped her skin-tight jodhpurs off.

At seven-thirty, Edward was freezing to death in the bathroom, in a cold bath. The dinner gong, obviously repaired, boomed out, and he hurried to his room to dress. Harriet hurtled into his bedroom in a dreadful pea-green dress. The hooks and eyes were undone at the back, she had only one shoe on and her hair was like a wild hedgerow. ‘Will you do me up, Allard’s not in his room? I hate this dress, it looks dreadful, doesn’t it? Mother says I have to wear one for Uncle and Auntie.’

The dinner gong chimed again. Edward adjusted his immaculate, perfectly tied bow tie and, silently congratulating the late Clarence on his taste and style, hurried down the stairs.

Mrs Simpson was talking loudly to her husband as Edward entered the sitting room.

‘A real stallion hound, darling, is frightfully rare nowadays.’

Sitting astride her chair as though it were a horse, Mrs Simpson gave Edward a cursory smile and kept talking. The Judge rose to his feet as his wife went on at great length about what, in her opinion, a good hound should look like. He poured a sherry and handed it to Edward.

‘Straight, beautiful neck and shoulders, depth of girth, bone and feet. Must have that essential muscle, refinement of skin, back quarters like a horse. Frightfully important that it’s quick of hearing. Get a deaf dawg . . .’

‘Thought you were describing me for a minute there, Edna.’

BB and his wife, with their son trailing slightly behind, made a grand entrance, and were introduced to Edward. His wife, tiny and demure, fluttered in a chiffon dress that seemed to trail myriad floating panels like scarves. The room reeked of Chanel No. 5, and her shrill, nervous laugh mingled with the clinking of her many bracelets.

BB accepted a whisky from the Judge. He was a lot older than his wife, and wore an immaculate grey suit and stiff white collar, with a blue foulard tie in an old-fashioned dimple knot and a large diamond pin. His complexion was florid, his white hair, though balding, thick at the sides of his red cheeks, and his small round eyes were like flints. He shook Edward’s hand in a grip like iron, and stood nearly as tall as Edward, his wide shoulders tapering to his once-slim waist showing that, although he was too heavy, he had at one time been a very fit, athletic man. He raised his glass high, including everyone in the room in a toast to the family.

His son paled beside him, although he had his father’s colouring and was exceptionally handsome, the similarity ended there. Richard Van der Burge was slim and dandyish, and Edward reckoned him to be around the same age as himself, although far more sophisticated.

Richard laughed up at Harriet who loomed over him as he sat on the sofa, and observed that she was growing faster than he was. Then he got to his feet and gave her a kiss. She pushed him away and wiped her cheek, telling him he was a ponce. The butler nervously approached Mrs Simpson and whispered to her, asking if he should announce dinner. Edward took stock of the guests. They were, it was exceedingly obvious, ‘money’.

Allard swept in, his cheeks flushed with the evening air and slightly out of breath. He apologized to everyone for his lateness and linked arms with his mother. They all drifted into the dining room.

The table was beautifully laid, and a rotund cook peered through a hatch that led into the kitchen. She was handing the dishes to a young local girl who had come in to help out, and to old Fred. Fred, obviously a ‘man of all trades’, was acting butler. Edward couldn’t help but notice that he was even less adept at this than he was at driving. Edward was placed next to BB with Harriet opposite. While the others at the table discussed family outings and previous dinners together, Edward became fascinated with BB.

‘I have not shaved myself in over twenty years. I was in New York, and I realized that it was non-productive and time-consuming. In the time it would take to shave, I could have been reading, say, a company report, and no doubt made a decision that could possibly bring in a million dollars, maybe more. So I detailed a unique tonsorial network between myself, my chauffeur and my barbers. The barbers were briefed to be standing by to attend to me instantly, and they got a good tip for being ready and waiting.’ His shaggy eyebrows and piercing blue eyes roamed the table, demanding attention. He spoke in a strange, guttural manner, clipping the ends of his words. The family, obviously having heard most of his stories before, continued their chatter. Richard paid no attention to his father, but Harriet was avidly interested in her uncle and asked questions Edward was too shy to ask.

‘Did you make millions, Uncle BB? In America? I thought you were in mining? You’ve got mines in America too, I suppose.’

BB roared with laughter while he picked at the dreadful dinner on the plate before him. Edward gathered that the Van der Burges were in gold- and diamond-mining in South Africa, and that BB must have made a fortune in the early twenties over there and opened up some kind of banking operation in America. He fascinated Edward as he patiently described the mysteries of the Stock Exchange to Harriet. ‘You got different types of markets, Harriet, we give them names. First we got the “bull” market, that’s the one in which the majority of share prices have been, and continue to be, rising. Then you got what we call the “split up” – that’s when the value of a company’s stock goes very high. Market dealings are made easier if the value of the stock is reduced, and the number of shares correspondingly increase as the “split up” happens, understand?’ BB continued to talk, holding forth with gestures so expansive that his wife carefully removed his cut-glass wine and water tumblers from his reach. ‘A man known as a “bear” is a person who believes prices will fall, and the “bull” is a man who expects them to rise.’

Both her elbows on the table, Harriet’s eyes twinkled as she asked BB which of the two he considered himself.

‘You tell me, Harriet, eh? Which one do you think I am, Harriet, lovey?’

BB gave the butler a small nod of his head to clear, and by that small movement placed himself as the head of the table – not that the Judge seemed to notice, he was too busy pouring himself another glass of wine. He was arguing with his wife about the vegetables, telling her they should be lightly boiled and not stewed to a pulp. Mrs Simpson haughtily repeated his suggestions through the hatch to the cook. At the same time Harriet spoke even louder to BB, ‘Does that mean you are rich then? I mean, diamonds are worth a lot of money, Ma’s got a diamond ring and that’s worth thousands, isn’t it Ma? Not as big as Auntie Sylvia’s, though. Did you sell them in America? Is that what you did over there, Uncle?’

Harriet was reprimanded for asking impertinent questions, and it gave Edward the opportunity to talk to BB. Buster appeared at this moment, at least, they could smell him and he had to be removed. He was dragged unceremoniously out of the doors, and the Judge remarked that if the dog was fed the same stewed veg as he was, no wonder he farted.

BB quietly explained to Edward what they meant in the City by ‘selling short’. He smiled and murmured that he was, if anything, a bear, and selling short was a favourite device of a bear. This was done if you believed that a stock was going down. A bear would sell, but the stock he sold was not necessarily his own – or not as yet, because he knew he was able to borrow it from a broker for a time, for a fee. ‘Then, Edward, I deliver the borrowed shares to my buyer, collect the payment and wait for the price to fall. Once it goes down, I buy the same shares at a lower price – you with me? – and give them to the broker to replace the shares I initially purchased . . . my profit is the difference between the price at which I sold the borrowed shares to the buyer and the price I paid to replace them. Now, you can get yourself in a right bad situation if the prices unexpectedly go up instead of down. In 1930, rules governing the short-selling system were imposed, aimed at the likes of me so that there could be no possibility of the system actually causing prices to fall.’

Bored by her uncle’s conversation, Harriet concentrated on stuffing herself with trifle. Edward asked BB if the Wall Street Crash had affected him. The big man put his napkin down and turned to Edward, although he threw his voice to the whole table. He thumped the table, making the pudding spoons jump, and said he had got out in time. ‘I wish I could say the same for many of my friends – good friends that were bled dry, men who had to face creditors and so gambled on the markets that had already crumbled beneath them.’ He swept the dining table with a theatrical gesture, forcing everyone to listen as he described the fate of many of his colleagues in New York. Mrs Simpson raised her eyes heavenward, having heard this story, like everyone else, many times before.

‘There were men appealing for time, many became foolish, taking risks they would never have attempted before the crash . . . One close associate who shall remain nameless, but a true, dear friend of mine and my dear wife’s, tried to recoup his losses, based on the old Roman maxim,
caveat emptor
– buyer beware!’

Richard Van der Burge looked at his mother and yawned, but his father held forth and fixed his son with such an icy stare that the boy pursed his lips and looked down at his plate instead. BB continued, ‘In 1933 the Securities Act effectively made it mandatory in all stock dealings for the seller to beware. It was a tough new legislation, and I was lucky to get out without undue losses. Men were up to their necks in lawsuits, all resulting from disputed market dealings and loans. Bankruptcy is a terrible thing, and a friend of mine who fell foul of the hungry vultures wrote on a notepad over and over again, “My life is worthless, worthless, worthless, I am a failure.” Then he shot himself in a New York cocktail bar. That man’s life had been a veritable victory, rising from nowhere, nothing, to dominate the banking world for ten years.’

BB was finally silenced by Allard waving his spoon in the air and loftily asking if anyone knew what Beau Brummel’s last words were?

‘As they carried the dying Brummel from his impoverished room in Paris, he was heard to say, “I owe no one.”’

When dinner was over, Mrs Simpson stood up, saying she, Sylvia and Harriet would take coffee in the library. Allard and Richard sprang up and both rushed to the doors, giggling. The Judge only lasted until he had drained his brandy glass, then departed to his bedroom, complaining of wind. Edward was thankful they had left him alone with BB, and began to question him in a roundabout, flattering way. BB was a sharp man. He smiled, poured himself a glass of port and held it to the light, murmuring that he hoped it would not be of the same poor quality as the rest of the meal. ‘I am a self-made man, Edward lad, and I am proud of it, proud. I began in South Africa, I went over there with one hundred pounds in my pocket, and eight years later I was a multi-millionaire. Ever heard of the great Kimberley mine, son? Look at this, see, this was the first diamond I mined with my own hands, look at the colours, beautiful, isn’t it?’ He held his tie-pin up to the light, then placed it in Edward’s hand. Edward held it and turned it over, then returned it to BB’s big, open palm.

‘The gold pin was made from my first gold nugget. I struck it rich, my boy; my quarry returned five thousand ounces of gold from thirteen tons of ore, my shares rose from one pound to one hundred and fifty. Those were the days, these hands raking the ground hour after hour, but my God, when you strike, there’s no better feeling on this earth – better than sex, lemme tell you. No woman on earth can give you a climax like the one you get when you strike it rich. I’ve seen a gold nugget the size of that decanter, weighing in at twelve pounds – the Peacock nugget – Jesus God, my friend, I seen men weeping just looking . . . and I was there, right at the beginning. Gold, it can’t clothe a man like wool, can’t even arm them like iron, warm them like coal, feed them like corn, but – and pay close attention to this, lad – gold can buy all the others, and that’s what it’s all about.’

It was two hours later when Edward and BB joined the rest of the party, BB having consumed an entire decanter of port. His face was flushed and his small eyes glinted, and he strolled into the lounge with his arm around his new friend’s shoulders. The others were playing charades, and BB shattered the relaxed, informal atmosphere as he strode into the centre of the room and declared that he wished his own son had the intellect of his new-found friend. ‘There’s a job waiting for this lad when he gets out of university, and you’re all my witnesses. This lad is going places, I know, I can tell, which is more than I can say for everyone else gathered here. Finance is what rules the world, and I say there would be no war on right now – no bastard Germans herding Jews into the concentration camps – there wouldn’t be a war if there had been no Wall Street Crash.’

Embarrassed by his father, as everyone else also appeared to be by now, Richard tried to hand him a cup of coffee, but BB stood in the centre of the room, legs apart. ‘You young people don’t understand finances. Take the Messerschmidt – now then, when the crash came, where was Willy Messerschmidt, tell me that? I’ll tell you – in Germany, waiting to see if the Eastern Aircraft Corporation at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had crashed, and when he discovered it was in trouble his hopes of building a secret air force to prepare Germany for another war were dashed, but had they? No! The bastard facing financial ruin was kept going by Hitler himself. It was Hitler who knew the man was a genius, and financed him, and, by Christ, look what havoc those planes are creating. There would be no war – no war – if the Wall Street Crash hadn’t happened. It caused Germany’s growing economic crisis to escalate, just as it improved Hitler’s chance of gaining office. The Reich was tied to the American economy more closely and – not many people know this – massive loans from Wall Street helped finance the German reparation payments and the post-war reconstruction projects. That’s how that man got into power, the Wall Street Crash should never have been allowed to happen . . .’ BB swayed, still standing in the centre of the room.