The Thief of Time (29 page)

At the same time, I became aware of a romance which had developed between Denton and Annette. She would often return home late from work in a flurry of excitement after he had taken her out to dinner or dancing. She seemed happy and excited by this new relationship and I encouraged it, for I was fond of Denton and he could certainly afford to give her and her son a happy lifestyle if things developed that far.

‘I little expected to be playing matchmaker,' I told her one evening as we sat in my home, a rare evening when Denton was not with us. I was reading the new Hemingway novel, A
Farewell To Arms,
which had just been published, while she sat sewing new buttons on to some of Tommy's shirts. T thought I was just setting you up with a job, not a husband.'

She laughed. ‘I don't know how far it will go,' she admitted, ‘although I am very fond of him. I know he blusters around a lot and tries to make everyone think that he's so in control, but inside he's a lot quieter.'

‘Really,' I said, finding it hard to imagine.

‘It's true. That father of his ...' She shook her head and looked back down at her work. ‘I really shouldn't speak of this,' she said quietly.

‘Whatever you prefer,' I said, ‘but remember you're not involved with his father, just himself

‘He interferes, you see,' she continued, clearly wanting to talk about it anyway. ‘He breathes down poor Denton's neck every minute of the day. You'd think he was still running the place.'

‘He has a lot of money tied up there,' I said, playing devil's advocate. ‘And a lifetime of work too. It's only natural that he would -'

‘Yes, but he asked Denton to take over the firm. When he had his stroke. And it's not as if he doesn't know what he's doing. My God, he's worked in the firm since he was seventeen.'

I nodded. She was probably right; I barely knew Magnus Irving at all, having only met him once or twice and even then he was only a shadow of the man that I knew he must have once been. But shortly afterwards, on Saturday 5 October, a great party was held at the Irving estate and when all the guests were assembled – everyone who was anyone in the New York financial world as well as a great many friends and relations – the engagement between my friend and my niece was announced. I was delighted for them both, for they looked deliriously happy, and congratulated them warmly.

‘Good job my last secretary was murdered, eh?' he said to me, his face falling the moment he uttered the words. ‘My God,' he said, shaking his head. ‘That came out completely wrong. I meant that if it hadn't been for -'

‘It's all right, Denton,' I said suspiciously. ‘I know what you meant. Fate. Chance. All those sorts of things, I expect.'

‘Exactly.' He looked across at Annette who was holding court on the dance floor with a succession of bankers. ‘Just look at her, eh?' he said, shaking his head in disbelief at his own good fortune. ‘I can't believe she said yes. I can't believe my own luck.'

I noticed Magnus Irving dressed in a regulation tuxedo, sitting in his wheelchair at one of the tables, and nodded towards him. ‘Your father,' I said, ‘what does he make of the match? Does he approve?'

Denton bit his lip and looked momentarily angry, but composed himself quickly, not wishing to let anything spoil his evening. ‘He's a bit concerned about the boy,' he said eventually.

‘Tommy?' I said in surprise. ‘Why? What's wrong with him?'

‘Nothing's wrong with him,' he replied quickly. ‘We get along fine. I've been getting to know him quite well recently in point of fact. No, I think that my father feels that, what with Annette having been married before, and having a child – I mean I hope you don't mind me saying this, with you being family of hers and everything, but -'

‘He thinks she's a gold-digger,' I said simply.

‘Well, in a word. He's just concerned that -'

‘Well, it's simply not the case,' I said, stopping him in his tracks, determined to stand up for my niece-in-law's honour. ‘My God, when she first got here she wouldn't even let me -'

‘Matthieu, Matthieu, relax,' said Denton, placing a hand on my shoulder.
‘I
don't think that's the case for even a moment. I love her, you see. And she loves me. I know she does. Everything's fine.'

I nodded and did relax, for I could see by the smile on his face that he was telling the truth. I also knew from my conversations with Annette how strongly she felt towards him. ‘Good,' I said eventually. ‘That's all right then.'

‘And what about you?' he asked me. ‘When are we going to fix you up with some charming young thing, eh? You've never remarried, have you?' he asked, believing Constance to have been my first wife.

‘Several times,' I said. ‘Marriage and I don't seem to agree.'

‘Well, plenty of time,' he laughed, with the self-congratulatory arrogance of one who has found the love of his life. ‘You're a young man still'

Now it was my turn to laugh.

By the middle of October, I had very few stock options left on the books of CartellCo., and my relationship with Denton had changed from being a business one to a purely friendly one. I still called on him for lunch, enjoying our debates about the economy, the stock market, politics; we began to criticise Herb for never contacting us any more, although I suppose he had a lot more important things on his mind than the injured feelings of a couple of old friends. I liked my association with this happy couple and Tommy, enjoying the idea of playing the benevolent uncle in their lives. On 23 October, however, things started to go awry.

Although the market had closed on the upside for the previous few days, there was a sudden spate of selling on the 23rd that appeared to come out of nowhere. By the following day, Black Thursday, prices had all crashed to their lowest levels and did not appear to show any sign of improving. I was in Wall Street, in the stock exchange itself that afternoon with Denton, and watched as the traders on the floor screamed at each other, trying to make sales, their very hysteria helping the market to fall lower and lower. Denton was beside himself with anguish, unsure of what he could do to help matters, when a most extraordinary incident occurred.

Below us there was a sea of red jackets and young and old men all holding their tickets in the air as they tried to offload anything they could; however, not a single share was being traded. And then from the left-hand side of the exchange a young man – he couldn't have been more than about twenty-five – walked into the centre of the floor and raised his hand aloft. Over the din, which somehow seemed to lessen as his self-assurance grabbed people, he shouted out that he wanted to buy 25,000 shares of US Steel for $205 each. I looked at the board quickly.

‘What's he doing?' asked Denton, his hand clutching the rail in front of himself anxiously so that the knuckles became white with the pressure. ‘US Steel is down to $193.'

I shook my head. I couldn't quite grasp it myself. ‘I'm not sure ...' I began as the young man shouted out his order again to one of the traders who immediately sold the shares to him greedily, with the look of a man who could not believe his luck.

‘He's steadying the market,' I said then, shaking my head in disbelief. ‘The most audacious .. .' I found that I couldn't complete my sentence, so impressed was I by the gesture which within minutes saw more tentative sales taking place on the floor and a slight rise in prices. Within about half an hour they had steadied completely and it appeared as if the panic was over.

‘That was incredible,' said Denton afterwards. ‘I thought we were finished there for a moment.'

I wasn't so sure. I couldn't quite see what was going to happen next but it seemed obvious that the worst was far from over. Over the next few days, the state of the stock market was on the tip of everybody's tongue and Denton himself was under siege from his father with constant questions of what he was doing to help salvage the firm's fortunes. However, as the consequences of Black Thursday began to settle in investors' minds, most people attempted to recover their losses and the dramatic selling began again. On Tuesday 29 October, the day of the Wall Street Crash, more than 16 million shares were dumped in an afternoon of trading. On that one single day, as much money was lost on the New York stock exchange as had been spent in its entirety by the US government on fighting the First World War. It was a disaster.

Annette phoned me from CartellCo. to tell me that Denton was acting crazy. His father had been phoning all day but Denton had refused to take any of the calls, finally locking himself in his office. The firm was bust – I knew that much already. Everything he owned was gone, as was most of his investors' money. I was the fortunate man in a city of terrible tragedies that day. By the time I arrived at his offices and made my way to the top floor, where his own suite was located, Annette was in a terrible state; Denton wouldn't open the door but we could hear him inside, breaking things. I could hear the sound of lamps crashing to the floor as he paced around, the incessant ringing of the phones his accompaniment as he moved.

‘That'll be Magnus,' said Annette, ripping the line from the wall and silencing it at last. ‘He thinks the whole fucking thing is Denton's fault.' I stared at her in surprise, having never heard her utter such a profanity before, but sure that it was called for at this point. ‘You have to break the door down, Matthieu,' she said and I nodded.

I stepped back and shoved against it but it was solid oak and by the time I felt I was starting to get anywhere I could feel the bruising coming out on my shoulder. Eventually, with one last push and a kick to the lock, it fell through and Annette and I ran inside, to find Denton standing by the open window, his face contorted with madness and disarray, his clothes torn, his eyes on fire.

‘Denton,' screamed Annette, tears rolling down her face as she started to run towards him, but I prevented her by holding on to her arm for I could see him edge ever closer to the window as she approached him. ‘We can fix this,' she said. ‘You don't need to -'

‘Stay away!' he roared, jumping up on the ledge now, and my heart skipped a beat because I knew from the look on his face that all was lost. He took a look outside, licked his lips and in a moment he was gone. Annette screamed and charged to the window, leaning out so far that I feared she might fall herself but we could only barely make out his broken body on the ground below.

In time, the unfortunate Annette recovered from this tragedy although Magnus Irving suffered another stroke when he heard about what had happened to his son and he died shortly afterwards himself. I was lucky still to have my fortune pretty much intact and when I left for Hawaii for a couple of decades that Christmas I settled a decent amount on Annette and Tommy, who declined to join me but instead returned to Milwaukee where they lived out their days.

Annette and I kept in touch but she never married again and after her son's death in Pearl Harbor she moved in with her daughter-in-law and grandson, until they in turn moved back to England where that child also fathered a son, who was to become a well known television soap opera actor and singer. Eventually we lost touch but I received a letter from her neighbour after she died, telling me that it had been quite peaceful after a long illness. She forwarded on to me a letter of gratitude from Annette which she had left in her possession, thanking me for whatever I had done for her in New York in the twenties and also sent a photograph of the three of us, Denton, Annette and I, at the ball which announced their engagement a few months before the Crash. We all looked very happy in it, very optimistic about our futures.

I invited Martin downstairs to my apartment for a drink, feeling that the warm, familiar surroundings of my home would be a better place to break the bad news to him about the cancellation of his show than the relatively sterile atmosphere of the station's offices. I considered his situation and how he would take it; a late middle-aged man, used to the spotlight, accustomed to people hanging on his every word, however ridiculous those words might actually be, suddenly unemployed and left to his own devices. He'd go crazy. And it wasn't the money because we didn't pay him all
that
much and he was already quite comfortable. He'd made enough as a politician to keep him for the rest of his life; he owned his house and had filled it with good paintings and
ohjets d'art
which hadn't come cheap. He had the kind of lifestyle that he liked to ridicule in others but enjoy for himself. I hoped he'd take the news well but, somehow, I doubted it.

I hadn't counted on Polly, his wife, coming downstairs with him and it rather threw out my prepared speech. Polly is Martin's second wife and they've been married for seven years. Needless to say, she's quite a bit younger than him – he's aged sixty-one, she's only thirty-four. His first wife, Angela, whom I have never met, was with him through most of his parliamentary career but they broke up shortly after he became a private citizen again. Not needing to pursue the public necessity for a happy marriage, he divorced her and chased after the next generation, managing to find Polly without very much difficulty, for celebrity inspires attraction. I know little about her background except to note that she has a very good eye for art – she used to work in a gallery in Florence whose construction I helped to finance in the 1870s – and an ear for music in which ladies of her generation are often lacking. She married him for his money, of course, but he's gained something out of it too. He clearly enjoys being seen as the ageing squire of a young, beautiful woman and, assuming that she allows him anywhere near her, I dare say there's still a thing or two that she can teach him.

‘Martin,' I said, opening the door cheerfully, and ‘Polly', I muttered then, my smile freezing slightly as I tried to weigh up how this might affect the meeting. ‘I'm so glad you two could make it.'

‘Delighted to,' he replied, stepping inside and shooting his head in every direction quickly in order to see whether there was anyone else present or anything new which he could examine. He has a habit of picking up my belongings and giving them the once over, and then informing me either how he has a better one himself or how he could have got me the same thing for only half the price. It's one of his less endearing traits.

I led them both to the living room and offered them drinks. Martin took a whisky as ever but Polly absurdly asked for a mint julep.

‘A what?' I asked in surprise for I had never intended upon this becoming a cocktail party or a scene out of
The Great Gatsby.

‘A mint julep,' she repeated. ‘It's bourbon, mint leaves, caster -'

‘I know what's in it,' I replied quickly. ‘I'm just surprised to hear you ask for one, that's all.' It occurred to me that I hadn't had a mint julep since the twenties. ‘And I doubt if I have any mint, to be honest with you.'

‘Have you got bourbon?'

‘Of course.'

‘I'll have a glass of that then. Straight.' From a cocktail to a straight shot; odd. I went into the kitchen and fixed the drinks. When I returned, Martin was standing in the corner with a wrought iron candleholder in his hands; it was inverted and he was examining it carefully, holding the three candles in place carefully even as small shavings of hardened wax drizzled effortlessly on to the carpet. I put the tray down noisily, hoping he would replace it as well.

‘Where did you get this then?' he asked me, returning it right side up but scratching at the iron to see whether anything would come off. ‘I've got one just like it but the colour comes off when you scratch at it.'

‘Then you shouldn't scratch at it,' I said with a slight smile, sitting down as Polly twisted around in her seat to observe her husband more closely. ‘It's like the old story of the man who goes to the doctor and says it hurts when I do this with my arm.' I watched as he put it back on the side table and came over to join us, and remembered that the candleholder had been a wedding present from my sometime mother-in-law Margerita Fleming, whose psychotic daughter Evangeline I had been foolish enough to marry some time in the early nineteenth century. It was one of my few mementoes from that miserable Swiss marriage, which had ended with Evangeline throwing herself from the roof of the sanatorium to which she had been confined. I had placed her there myself, of course, after she had tried to kill me – foolish girl -believing me to be in league with Napoleon, of all people, with whom I never had any dealings whatsoever. After her death, I rid myself of most of our joint possessions, not wishing to remember that sour, psychotic dervish, but held on to the candlestick for it was a particularly fine piece and one which always brought comment from visitors.

‘It was a wedding present', I replied when he asked me again where I had come across it, ‘from my former mother-in-law, may she rest in peace.' They both nodded in sorrow, looking at the ground for a moment out of respect to both the dead parties, even though they'd been gone for almost two hundred years. They presumably thought that it was my most recent wife to whom I was referring. It was like a moment of silence in their joint memories and I made sure to interrupt it for they deserved no such marks of respect. ‘It seems like ages since we've all got together,' I said cheerfully, recalling our many entertaining dinners upstairs. ‘And who knows how long it's been since I've invited you down here.'

‘Are you still seeing Tara Morrison?' asked Polly, leaning forward and something made me glance at her hands to see whether she was holding a dictaphone or not.

‘Oh no,' I said, laughing. ‘We haven't been together in quite some time now. I'm afraid that really wasn't destined to be.'

‘What a shame,' she replied; I suspected that she was something of a fan of the ‘Tara Says:' column. I imagined she followed Tara's rules for living with something close to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She had barely been able to keep her eyes off the celebrity the last time we had dined with them and had cornered her afterwards, looking for marital advice from a woman who had never held down a steady relationship in her life. ‘I thought you seemed like the perfect couple,' she added generously.

I shrugged. ‘I don't know,' I said and it amazed me how my mind was suddenly drifting on to Tara now with an emotion akin to regret. It occurred to me how often I thought of her, how much she had both delighted and infuriated me in equal measures, and how pleased I was by the prospect of winning her back to our television station. I shivered quickly. ‘We both lead very busy lives,' I said, ‘especially Tara. She has so many commitments that it was difficult to find time together. And she spends so much of her time trying to think up her next opinion; it can't be easy for her. Also, there was the age difference.'

‘Oh, nonsense,' said Polly furiously, and I quickly realised my
faux pas
as I looked at the mismatched couple before me. ‘Age has nothing to do with it. And it's not like you were
that
much older than her. She has to be in her mid-thirties if she's a day. And I bet you weren't even around during the war.'

I opened my mouth and thought about it. ‘I was born in ‘forty-three,' I said honestly.

‘Well, then. What's that after all? Fifty-six?'

‘Fifty-six,' confirmed her husband, nodding his head like a human calculator.

‘Well, then,' she repeated, unwilling to let this one pass without hammering her objections into the ground. ‘You see? That's not so much of a difference.' I shrugged and decided to change the subject. I could see that Martin was feeling uncomfortable with it as it stood, age being a subject which has always bothered him. He confided in me once how from the age of about nineteen he had gone into a state of depression every time he saw another year pass him by. Birthdays destroy him; he looks back now, of course, from the age of sixty-one at occasions ten, twenty, thirty years before and realises just how young he was then but it doesn't show him that it's all relative. He should imagine how it feels to be looking forward to entering a fourth century; then he really would feel old.

Perhaps one of the things which made the age question most difficult for Martin was the business of Polly's fidelity to him. Over a late night of drinks a few months earlier, he had mentioned to me that he thought Polly was having an affair with a runner from his own television show. The lad in question – and I sought him out a few days later – was no more than about nineteen years old, and he was tall and handsome, with an air of smug arrogance which apparently charmed those with whom he worked. Martin wanted me to fire Daniel, for that was his name, but I had refused and it had tested our friendship for a little while. I felt that I could not fire him if he was doing a good job, and from what I heard from his supervisor he was doing an excellent job, particularly when the allegations against him were completely without evidence or proof. I subsequently learned from a source at the station that Polly and Daniel, while not actually having an affair, had enjoyed an ‘incident' but I never brought the subject up with Martin again, who seemed keen to pretend that it had never happened. Either way, I could tell that youth – Youth by its very nature – irritated the hell out of him.

‘I wanted to talk about the show,' I began, after all this small talk had been got out of the way, ‘where you see it developing. Where you see the format going from here.' I heard the words come out of my mouth and found them startling as I had prepared a perfectly adequate opener and instead said something which implied that I saw his programme as a going concern.

‘About time too,' said Martin, always keen to discuss his career. ‘I don't know about you, Matthieu, but I think we've done about all we can with the show the way it stands. I have to be perfectly honest with you on that.'

‘You do?' I asked surprised.

‘Absolutely I do,' he replied firmly. ‘It's something I had intended talking to you about in fact. Polly and I have been discussing it for quite some time, if you want to know the truth, and we've come up with what I think is a pretty good idea. A real way forward. I hope it makes sense to you,' he added with the air of a man who was actually saying that he hoped I would
understand
how much sense it made.

He's going to retire, I thought joyfully. He's going to retire!

‘We need to move into prime time,' he said eventually with a smile, holding his hands palm out and away from his face, as if he could suddenly see his name up in lights. ‘We put the show into prime time and make it an hour long. A panel of guests every week. A studio audience.' He leaned forward as if he was about to put the cherry on top of the icing on the cake. ‘I could roam around with a microphone!' he said joyfully. ‘Think of it. It'll be huge.'

I nodded. ‘Right,' I said. ‘That's certainly one idea.'

‘Matthieu,' said Polly in a soft voice and for some reason I could tell that if I agreed to this absurd idea, she would be putting herself forward for the position of producer. I can recognise a job pitch when I see one. ‘The format we've been working with ... it's had its day. Anyone can see that.'