The Midden (2 page)

'But Uncle Fergus says he always looked at '

'He was so short-sighted he couldn't see clearly that far. What he could do was work out
square roots and some things called prime numbers at the drop of a hat. Nearest thing to a human
calculator in existence.'

In spite of this Timothy Bright followed his uncle's example to the extent of attending a
great many race meetings at which he gave bookies a considerable amount of money and learnt
nothing at all. All the same, he did go into banking, and on his twenty-first birthday became a
Name at Lloyd's.

Bletchley tried to tell him what a Name was. 'The thing is,' he said awkwardly, 'the thing is
you don't have to put any money up. All your capital stays in investments or property or whatever
you like. I suppose some people leave it in Building Societies. And every year Lloyd's pay you
premiums. It's as simple as that.'

'Premiums?' said Timothy. 'You mean like insurance premiums?'

'Precisely,' said Bletchley, delighted that the boy had caught on so quickly. 'Just like
insurance on the car. Instead of the company getting the premiums, Lloyd's distributes them among
the Names.

It's a wonderfully fair system. Don't know what we'd have done without it. In fact Brights
have been Names since Names were invented as far as I know. Hundreds of years probably. Been an
absolute Godsend to us.'

On this somewhat lopsidedly optimistic note the interview ended. Timothy Bright was a
Name.

A few years later Timothy had made something of a name for himself. Coming to the City at the
beginning of the eighties his opinion that the world was his oyster fitted in exactly with the
views of those then in power. From his position in the investment branch of the Bimburg Bank he
was soon able to play a surprisingly important role in restructuring the stock market. Long
before insider trading became such a well-publicized practice, a few of the shadier and, in the
opinion of some, shrewder stockbrokers had used Timothy as an intermediary in the certain
knowledge that they could talk through him without his having the faintest understanding of the
issues involved. It was this enviable reputation for involuntary discretion which, more than
anything else, led to his consistent rise up the investment banking ladder. When Timothy Bright
was urged to push shares he pushed them, and when told to talk them down he did that too. And of
course the Bright family benefited from his popularity, in particular Uncle Fergus, who regularly
caught the night train from Aberdeen simply to take his nephew out to lunch and quiz him about
the week's business. From these unnoticed interrogations Fergus Bright returned to Drumstruthie a
richer and more knowledgeable old man. Of course it required all his skills as an interpreter or
even a code-breaker to sift the genuine information from the useless bits with which Timothy had
been programmed, but the effort was clearly worth the trouble. Uncle Fergus was able to buy
cheaply shares that would shortly rise to quite astonishing heights while selling those that
would presently fall.

It was largely thanks to Uncle Fergus's interventions in the market that Timothy was
eventually promoted from Bimburg's investment branch to the Names Recruitment Bureau at Lloyd's.
This wasn't its official title and its existence was strenuously denied, but its work consisted
almost entirely of spreading the word to the millions of newly 'enriched' Thatcherite home owners
that becoming a Name at Lloyd's had the advantage of being socially most acceptable and, at the
same time, inevitably rewarding. As house prices shot up and the Prime Minister spoke of
Britain's new economic success, Timothy Bright did what he was told and recruited new Names to
help pay for the anticipated losses on asbestosis, pollution claims, and a host of other
disasters. Life was joyful. He moved in a world of self-congratulation and socially accredited
greed. In his clubs and at weekend house parties, at political conferences and intimate dinner
parties, Timothy Bright could be relied upon to say that prosperity had finally come to post-war
Britain and that the Prime Minister had saved the nation from itself. In return for this idolatry
he was favoured with fresh confidences about privatization plans and those companies that could
expect government contracts. The flow of supposedly confidential information grew so steadily
that Fergus was persuaded to take a room permanently in an hotel rather than spend so much time
travelling backwards and forwards from Scotland. He was especially delighted to have news in
advance of the coal miners' strike, and made provision for the outcome by investing in Nottingham
Trucks Ltd and their spare parts subsidiaries.

'A fine man and a Scotsman, MacGregor,' he said when Timothy told him who was to be appointed
to the Coal Board to inflame Scargill.

Even Bletchley Bright, normally an exceedingly cautious man where any of his son's financial
advice was concerned, was tempted to invest though not in anything connected with coal or along
the tortuous lines laid out so carefully by Fergus. He took his son's advice literally, and lost
nearly everything in Canadian gold.

'That's the last time I listen to that blithering idiot son of yours,' he told Ernestine. 'The
little moron definitely said gold was going to make a terrific come-back. Said he had it from
some blighter in the Bank of England. And now look where it is. No wonder the country's in a
stew.'

'Now, now, dear,' said Mrs Bright, 'Timothy is doing brilliantly and everyone thinks so.
There's no need to spoil things for him. After all, we're only young once.'

'Thank God,' said Bletchley and went off to commune with Old Og, who thought the world was in
a dreadful mess too.

'Bain't seem to be no sense in it,' Og told him. 'Had a fellow from the Ministry round said us
had to gas all badgers. I told him we got no badgers but he don't hear like. "Got to gas 'em cos
they got TB," he says. I tells him straight. "I don't know about that," I says, "and we still
haven't got no badgers. You'm come to the wrong place for badgers unless you want to gas Master's
shaving brush, that being the only bit of badger round here."'

Bletchley found comfort in the old man's words. They took him back to a world that had never
existed in which summers were perpetually sunny and it snowed every Christmas.

In many respects Timothy Bright's world was as unreal as his father's memories. He too went
through the eighties believing what the PR men told him and, while politicians and businessmen
lived in the hope that their optimistic words would produce the prosperity they proclaimed was
already there, Timothy Bright really believed it was. With the sublime ignorance that finds no
excuse in law, he thrived in the praise of criminals and timeservers like Maxwell and his
acolytes and took the view that a prison sentence was no bar to social advancement. In Timothy's
world no one resigned or was punished for negligence or worse. The Great Hen squawked
self-congratulations over the City, and Maxwell silenced his mildest critics with the harshest of
libel writs and made Her Majesty's Judges accessories to his terrible crimes. And Timothy
thrived. He was a merry idiot and everyone loved him.

And just as suddenly he was a bloody swine and no fool after all.

As with everything else in his life it took Timothy some time to realize that anything was
wrong. He went about what he called his work in the same way as before and frequented the same
clubs and wine bars to discuss the same topics and tell clients what shares to buy or sell, but
slowly it did begin to dawn on him that something was different. People seemed to drop out of his
society without any warning and a number of friends he had advised to become Names began to
remind him of his advice.

'But I hadn't the foggiest that things were going to turn nasty then,' he explained only to be
called a damned liar.

'You knew as far back as '82 that the American courts were going to award asbestosis victims
huge sums '

'All right, I knew,' Timothy admitted. 'But I didn't know what asbestosis was then. I mean it
could have been the measles or something mild like that.'

'But you knew about the huge awards that were coming. And what about pollution? You were there
at the meeting when the whole dirty scheme for recruiting new Names to help pay was first mooted.
And don't bloody well say you weren't. We know you were. You went there with Coletrimmer.'

'Well, yes I did,' said Timothy unwisely. 'I remember the meeting but I had no idea the sums
were going to be so large. Anyway, I didn't fix for you to go into that Syndicate.'

'Didn't you? Then how come you managed to stay out of it so well?'

'I was only doing what Coletrimmer advised,' said Timothy.

'Oh, sure. That's a likely story. Coletrimmer's up the spout himself and you're sitting
pretty. Why don't you follow his example and sod off to South America some place?'

In this new and harsh world Timothy found himself increasingly isolated. His clubs had become
the focal points of an unpopularity he could not face and, while he still saw a few old
girlfriends from the heady days of affluence, his own financial position deteriorated so
drastically that he was unable to entertain them in the same style and they drifted away.
'Timothy Bright's such an awful tick,' he heard a girl he had been fond of say as he stood in a
crowded train. 'He was naff enough before. But now. Ugh.'

To make matters worse still, Uncle Fergus gave up coming to London and let it be known he
didn't want 'that moron Timothy' anywhere near Drumstruthie. Timothy took this particularly hard.
For once he had offered his uncle some good advice and had warned him there was likely to be war
in Kuwait. It had been entirely due to Fergus's habit of finding the kernel of truth behind the
arrant nonsense that Timothy usually talked that he had decided no war was likely and had
invested heavily in Iraqi Oils. Fergus's losses had been very considerable and the old man had
never forgiven his nephew. As a result Timothy had nobody at all sensible to turn to when his own
financial problems developed. And they developed with alarming rapidity. The house he had bought
in Holland Park at the top of the property boom had required an enormous mortgage. As the
recession developed and his work tailed off, he found himself unable to keep up his mortgage
payments. And, as if that were not enough, he found himself involved in the Lloyd's scandal and
owing hundreds of thousands of pounds. In a few months Timothy Bright's world collapsed about
him.

It was at this point that he recalled his ambition to make a fortune and the method his
Great-Uncle Harold had used. Timothy turned to horse-racing and gambling. Having lost nearly
everything on the horses he borrowed heavily and, using an infallible system he had read about,
bet everything on the roulette wheel at the Markinkus Club. The roulette wheel ignored the system
and when Timothy finally pushed back his chair and stood up there was little he could do except
accompany two very thickset men to the office for what they termed 'a quiet word with the Boss'.
It was rather more than a quiet word. By the time Timothy Bright left the casino twenty minutes
later he was in no doubt what his future would be if he did not pay his debts within the
month.

'And that's generous, laddie,' said Mr Markinkus, who was clearly in an expansive mood. 'See
you don't miss the deadline. Yeah, the deadline. Get it?'

Timothy had got it, and in the dawn light filtering slowly over London he tried to think where
to turn for help. It was at this dark moment that he found the inspiration that was to change his
life so radically. He remembered his Great-Aunt Ermyne who had gone to her demented death
repeating the never-to-be-forgotten words 'You must always look on the Bright side' over and over
again. Timothy had only been eleven at the time but the words, repeated like a mantra as Auntie
Ermyne was wheeled down the corridor at Loosemore for the last time, had made a deep impression
on him. He had asked Uncle Vernon, Ermyne's husband, who seemed to be in a talkatively good mood,
what they meant. After the old man had muttered something about a few years of freedom and
happiness, he had taken Timothy by the hand and had shown him the family portraits in the Long
Gallery.

'These are the Bright side of the family,' he had explained in tones that suggested ancestor
worship. 'Now when things look darkest, as they generally do, I'm told, just before the dawn, it
is to the Bright side that we always look. Here, for instance, is Croker Bright shortly before he
was captured by the French. His forte was piracy on the high seas and after that the usual silk
and brandy smuggling. He was particularly feared by the Spanish. Died in 1678. We owe a great
deal to him and to his son, Stanhope, here. Stanhope Bright was a fine fellow. You can see that.
He was a slave trader and became the founding father of the Bristol Brights. Very rich man
indeed. His cousin over here is Blakeney Bright, also known as Mangle Bright, not, as people
would have us believe, for any good agricultural reasons but for the invention of a particularly
devastating form of high-speed beam engine. I forget what it was supposed to do but I do know it
was only used in coal mines where very high casualty rates were perfectly acceptable.'

Old Uncle Vernon had moved on down the Gallery extolling the virtues of Bright ancestors while
Timothy had learnt how one Bright after another had made a fortune against quite amazing odds of
character and circumstance. Even after the abolition of slavery, for instance, the Rev. Otto
Bright, of the Bright Missionary Station on Zanzibar, had done a remarkable fund-raising job for
the Church by supplying well-favoured young men from Central Africa to discriminating sheikhs on
the Arabian peninsula while his sister, Ursula, had pursued her own feminine tendencies by
persuading a number of young women from Houndsditch to join what she called 'secular nunneries'
in the less amenable ports of South America. Even as late as the 1920s several American Brights
who were the direct descendants of Croker Bright had collaborated with the bootlegger and
gangster Joseph Kennedy in rum-running during Prohibition. Uncle Vernon remembered some of
them.