Meltdown (20 page)

‘That is very true,’ Rupert conceded, ‘and I bow to no man in my appreciation of those skills. But when it came to the practical side of life I don’t think I have ever encountered such a cack-handed arse as Robbo, and were he here, he’d tell you so himself.’

There was a pause. The fact that Robbo was
not
there and never would be again was such a very recent and shocking development that it sounded strange to hear it referred to so bluntly. Even Rupert, a notoriously hard case and clearly determined to treat the gathering as a roast, had a tiny catch in his voice as he proceeded.

‘You may or may not know this,’ he went on, ‘but Robbo’s official position within his and Lizzie’s firm was “business manager”. He supposedly handled the investment, property and pension aspects of the family business. What a bloody joke!’ Rupert shouted with mock outrage. ‘As far as Robbo was concerned, business management meant sticking your cash in the bank and hoping for the bloody best! Can you imagine what it was like for a bloke like me having Robbo as a mate? It was torture! Absolute bloody torture, I tell you. As far as I’m concerned, making money out of money is a religion! A sacred duty! And here was this old arse sitting on shedloads of the stuff and doing absolutely nothing with it. Just eating curry, getting pissed and occasionally buying new fluffy dice for his ancient wreck of a car! No investment strategy. No tax avoidance. No offshore havens. This man
insulted my faith
!’

There was laughter, many cheers and much comical groaning at Rupert’s speech. He delivered it well and made an effective point. It was certainly true that there could scarcely have been two more financially opposite personalities than the business manager of Lizzie Food and the celebrated CEO of the Royal Lancashire Bank, and it was rather touching that they should have been such old and firm friends.

Next, Jimmy got up to raise a glass.

Jimmy had probably been closest to Robbo of all the gang, but then Rupert, Henry and David also saw Robbo as their best friend. He was that kind of man. Jimmy knew that he must keep things fun. There would be time for solemnity later, but tonight required jollity and good-natured finger-pointing. That was unquestionably what Robbo would have wanted. Nonetheless, even on this deliberately raucous occasion Jimmy was determined to do Robbo justice. He himself was still struggling to deal with the fact that while grieving for his dead friend, he was also about to go deeply into that dead friend’s debt. Robbo and Lizzie’s loan would save Jimmy and his family from financial disaster and Jimmy wished with all his heart that he did not have the added complications of guilt and gratitude intruding on his grief. As he rose to his feet he struggled to put those thoughts from his mind and focus solely on celebrating the memory of the friend he loved.

‘Let’s be very clear about this.’ Jimmy banged the table with one hand and held his slopping glass aloft in the other. ‘Robbo was not remotely financially useless! In fact, Rupert, he had the only bloody decent economic strategy among us! And do you know what that strategy was, mate? To sit back and enjoy his bloody life, that’s what! Fag Ash Rob knew what to
do
with money all right. He spent it on stuff he liked and ignored it the rest of the time. Brilliant! Inspired! A lesson for the whole bloody nation! In the truest sense of the word Robbo was a financial genius.’

This sentiment was greeted with huge cheers and much refilling of glasses. Jimmy was half drunk but he spoke with genuine passion, the passion of a man who had made the mistake of ignoring Robbo’s example. A man who, instead of simply enjoying his good fortune and using it to enrich his life and increase the sum of his own happiness and that of those around him, had listened to siren voices (particularly Rupert’s) and seen his money as merely a stepping stone to more money. He had tried to use money to buy more money and in so doing had lost the lot.

‘Yes, Rupert!’ Jimmy went on. ‘Like you say, Robbo used his cash solely to eat, drink and be merry. Those were the things that mattered to him. He loved his food, his car, his booze, his mates, his wife and children. In that ascending order! That was what he cared about and you could stuff your
wealth management portfolios
up your arse!’

There was further huge cheering at this and much stamping of feet.

‘Bravo! Well said!’ David called out good-naturedly. ‘Although I think you’d find he liked his booze more than his mates, or at least he preferred its company.’

‘More than Rupert’s anyway,’ Henry shouted.

Jimmy took a swig of beer and surveyed the gathering with a boyish twinkle in his eye, that twinkle once so familiar to his friends but so often absent in the preceding months.

‘Now I’m not saying Robbo didn’t do his bit for Lizzie’s business,’ Jimmy went on. ‘Never let it be said that our old mate didn’t occasionally finish his beer, put down the crossword and make an effort. Some of you will, I’m sure, recall his famous plan to open a male waxing salon!’

Jimmy was on even more solidly popular ground here than he had been with his previous comments. It was well known among Robbo’s friends that every now and then some residual store of latent energy had roused him to attempt a contribution to the family lifestyle empire. His efforts had been the cause of much hilarity over the years.

‘You may remember,’ Jimmy continued as the crowd settled back to enjoy what they knew would be a good story well told, ‘that he decided to call it Back, Sack and Crack. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, it did to Rob when it came to him in the taproom of the Dog and Duck! Lizzie had just begun making hair products and Robbo was reading an article in the
Evening Standard
’s Friday magazine about male grooming. You may recall that this was at the time when David Beckham had been photographed wearing a dress! You remember that?’

There were cheers and nods at this.

‘He called it a sarong but we knew it was a bloody dress. He’s English, for God’s sake! Anyway, the thrust of the article Robbo was reading was that heterosexual blokes who had previously been noted for their homophobia all suddenly wanted to look gay! So, armed with this brilliant bit of in-depth research and despite the fact that Robbo himself usually wore an old cricket jumper and never trimmed his bloody nose hair, he rented a shop and went on Morning TV, courtesy of Lizzie’s celebrity, and made a complete arse of himself talking about metrosexuals! Do you remember?’

The answering cries told Jimmy that Robbo’s friends did indeed remember.

‘Pink is the new brown!’ David shouted.

‘That’s right!’ Jimmy called back. ‘That’s what he said, wasn’t it.
Pink is the new brown!
Like Rob had ever given two seconds’ thought to what colour his clothes were. I can see him now –’ Jimmy began to crease up with laughter at the memory – ‘that mad old arse sat on the Morning TV couch, his arms folded across his fat belly, his gut showing through the gaps between the buttons of his shirt, more hair growing out of his
ears
than most blokes have on their chests, actually trying to flog a male grooming business! I mean, for God’s sake, you had to love the bastard!’

And they did love him. People cheered and toasts were proposed as Jimmy described how the salon had lasted a week before Robbo mooched back to the pub and picked up his crossword.

People cheered once more, cheering in a kind of hilarious sadness over the loss of a much-loved friend.

Henry got up to regale the gathering with Robbo’s political philosophy.

‘He said the problem with Parliament was that, unlike everything else under New Labour, it didn’t have a sell-by date,’ he explained good-naturedly. ‘His view was that there must surely come a point at which all the required laws had been made, when we should all simply pack up and go home. He felt that this point had been reached somewhere in the late nineteenth century and that after that it was all bollocks.’

With the speeches over, the curry arrived and people sat and drank and got more pissed. Jimmy found himself discreetly rolling half a nan into a missile, but then he remembered that Robbo was not there to throw it at. How could he be? It was his wake. What was the point of making a nan bomb with no Robbo in your sights? The other guys had always been secondary targets. Robbo had been his prey, just as he had been Robbo’s.

Then he received a text from Monica. She had decided not to attend the evening, saying, ‘It will be very boysey. I’d go if Lizzie was going.’ When he heard the beeps, Jimmy assumed that there was some crisis with the children. That Lillie had lost her favourite Baa Baa perhaps.

But it wasn’t about the children.

‘
Come home
,’ it said. ‘
Lizzie’s here
.’

What an honour

Rupert might have been to a very minor private school and he might have only pretended to be posh at university, a pretension for which he had always been roundly ridiculed by Henry and the other lefties in the Student Union refectory. But years later he was to get the last laugh on his friend Henry and all those silly, parentally supported pinkos whom he despised. Because finally, after a dozen years of asset-stripping and exploiting venerable financial institutions, Rupert actually
became
posh. Or at least what passed for posh in the dog days of the Blair government. Which meant being rich enough and vain enough to pay for it.

They gave him his knighthood for ‘services to banking’, although he really got it for smarming around the Prime Minister and bunging half a million to the party at one of their gala dinners.

‘For God’s sake don’t tell Dad,’ he had told the excited soon-to-be Lady Bennett. ‘
Me
putting money into the Labour Party. He’ll run me over with one of his trucks.’

Rupert’s dad had been a committed Tory all his life, the sort of self-made small businessman for whom Mrs Thatcher was a goddess and unions the spawn of Satan.

‘Silly old dinosaur,’ the soon-to-be Lady Bennett replied. ‘Doesn’t he realize Labour are more Tory these days than the real thing?’

‘Labour
are
the real bloody thing, darling,’ Rupert replied.

‘Except on banning bloody foxhunting,’ Amanda moaned. Her father had been Master of the Hunt and she herself a fine country sportswoman.

‘No, you’re wrong there too,’ Rupert said. ‘All the townie Tories support the ban these days. Just like they support gay bloody marriage and calling everybody an institutionalized racist because they say Bombay instead of Mumbai. It’s the strangest thing really, the Labour Party have taken on all the Conservative economic policies and the Tories have taken on all Labour’s social policies. We’re basically a single party state. It doesn’t matter who gets in, it’s still low taxes and don’t offend the gays and ethnics.’

Rupert leaned over and kissed his wife. They were on their way to Buckingham Palace in the back of Rupert’s Rolls-Royce, or more accurately the Royal Lancashire Bank’s Rolls-Royce which Rupert habitually treated as his own, together with the driver that came with it. Amanda kissed him back. As far as she was aware, there was no gorgeous PA currently ‘working late’ at the office and within an hour or so she would officially be Lady Bennett. A girl could put up with a lot of miniskirted personal assistants for that.

As they drove through the gates of the palace, past the curious tourists and the soldiers in their splendid uniforms, Rupert put his hand on Amanda’s pencil-thin thigh and let his fingers brush gently beneath the hem of her tiny dress. Briefly Amanda squeezed her thighs together to capture his hand. Amanda’s inner thighs did not normally meet when she put her legs together but Rupert’s hand filled the gap nicely. They giggled. Winning was
so
sexy.

Rupert took his place in the queue of the great and the good and when his name was called he made his way up the carpet to kneel before the Queen. Her Majesty appeared to be performing this tedious and familiar duty with her usual stoical commitment. As always, her face gave away nothing of what she was thinking. If she was reflecting on the changing nature of the shoulders upon which she was required by her first minister to lay her sword, no one would ever know. If the disappearance of the explorers, inventors, military heroes and time-serving civil servants whom she used to knight perplexed her, she didn’t show it. If their replacement by political party donors, actors who’d made it in the States and on this occasion, just behind Rupert, a wrinkly rock star who had posed briefly as antiestablishment in 1964 and spent the following forty years in a jet-setting exercise to avoid British tax surprised her, of that she also gave no hint.

After the brief ceremony, the newly ennobled Sir Rupert left Buckingham Palace. Outside the gates, he paused for a moment with Lady Bennett to smile indulgently at the gaggle of photographers awaiting the emergence of the wrinkly rock star and habitual tax exile.

Turning on his phone again – he had been sternly instructed by a palace equerry to desist from sending emails in the honours queue – Rupert saw that among the many messages he’d received was one from the deputy chief fundraiser of the Labour Party.

‘
Congratulations
,’ the message read, ‘
a thoroughly deserved honour. What next for the boy wonder we are all asking ourselves!! If you PEER into the future LORD knows what you’ll see. Lunch??
’

When he and Amanda were back in the bank’s Roller, Rupert showed her the text.

‘How do you fancy being married to a peer of the realm?’ he said with a beaming smile.

‘Darling, I would
love
it,’ Amanda replied, leaning forward and whispering into his ear, ‘although I do think it’s unfair that the wife of a
lord
is still only called
Lady,
just the same as the wife of a knight.’

‘Maybe I can get them to change that,’ Rupert said. ‘I find they’ll consider fucking around with pretty much anything, even the rules of etiquette, if the price is right.’