The Valley (5 page)

‘Could you make it sooner, Max? I could come in tomorrow if you want?’

‘I’m in Marbella,’ he said. ‘Lucy was…well, there are a few things to take care of.’

‘Of course…I’m sorry, I understand.’

‘I will be back on Thursday. I’ve got a free slot around noon if you could come to my office then.’

I calculated the date in my head. It was the 24
^th
: four days before the end of the month and probably too late to get a deal through before the deadline.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said, grasping at straws.

He hesitated, then asked, ‘And John, you haven’t approached George about this, have you?’

‘George?’

‘George Colebrook.’

‘No,’ I spluttered, ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’

There was a long silence before Max spoke again.

‘Okay, John, I’ll see you at noon on Thursday.’

When George Colebrook – or to give him his full name, The Honourable George Colebrook – first turned up at one of Max’s parties at Bristol, I assumed he was just another of the rich public schoolboys that Max tended to invite and then quickly grow bored of. It took over a year for me to realise that there was a deeper bond between them. George’s father was an old friend of the Gores, the true owners of Glen Avon, and consequently George was one of the few students besides me to know that Max’s family, far from being his fellow nobility, were really only the hired help. But if Max was touchy about this, George certainly wasn’t. As Max pointed out, if George had restricted his social circle to people who were as rich and aristocratic as he was, he would have had very few friends.

And there was a lot to like about George besides his lack of snobbery. Small and slightly built with receding dark hair, he was shrewd and witty. He had been bullied at Eton, but at Bristol he blossomed, discovering a talent and passion for acting, and becoming a leading light of the university’s drama society. He was also a superb mimic and whenever he wanted to tease me, he could copy my clipped South African intonation to perfection.

In our last year, when everyone else started scrabbling around for post-graduation jobs, only George and Max seemed to be above the fray, and were often left by themselves as the rest of us filed through an endless succession of careers-inspired events and milk-round interviews. Max’s future as an army officer had been settled before he even arrived at the university, with the contract sealed by the officer cadet’s salary he received each month; whilst George had already secured a place at the Old Vic theatre school in London. For me there was no such escape. Needing a well-paid job if I was to continue the sort of affluent lifestyle I had been leading in Bristol, I had fired off application letters to every financial institution known to the Bristol University Careers Advisory Service, eventually chancing upon a small, sleepy, British Merchant Bank, with a semi-retired Head of Recruitment who preferred talking to undergraduates about rugby rather than banking. A few days after my interview, I received a letter offering me a place on the bank’s graduate training program. In the absence of any other offers, I accepted immediately.

Max was just on his way out of the house to go to a tutorial when I told him the news, but he hurriedly offered me his congratulations, before adding that maybe he, George and I should all live together in London.

‘I thought your regiment was based in Colchester,’ I said.

‘There has been a slight change of plan,’ he replied.

I learnt the full story later that evening whilst I helped Max unload fertiliser bags from his Land Rover into the garage beneath our flat in Bristol. Like all our gardening supplies, the fertiliser had come from the people Max went shooting with. They were mostly gamekeepers, tenant farmers and rural odd-job men, some of whom had worked for Max’s father in Scotland, or at least knew people who had. It was a part of Max’s life that I had little contact with. All I knew was that when we bought anything from these people, the price was much lower than it would have been in any garden centre, we always paid in cash, no receipts were ever issued and Max usually took possession of our goods after dusk.

As we faced each other across a fifty-kilogram fertiliser bag, Max revealed that he was going to work for a Japanese bank.

I was genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t know they even had a graduate recruitment scheme.’

‘They don’t,’ Max said, ‘not in this country anyway. One of my maths tutors knew someone on their derivatives trading desk. We had a few chats, then they suggested we meet, and now they’ve made me an offer.’

‘How much?’

He named a sum that was twice my starting salary.

I whistled. ‘Have you told the army?’

‘I sent them a letter,’ Max said, turning away from me, ‘George helped me draft it.’

The Officer Commissions Board’s initial response was to threaten him with a court martial. But Max stood his ground and the army did not want a scandal. Only once did I see the strain get to Max. It was during the Easter holidays. I was staying with him at the Lodge in Glen Avon, and one morning his father made it very clear that he felt Max should honour his schoolboy promises. But by then it was too late, for Max had effectively purchased his freedom by promising to repay all the money he had taken from the army, plus interest, within three years.

The following summer, for the first time in two years, I did not go up to Glen Avon for a part of the holidays. Before I had even finished my exams, Max had left Bristol, joining his Japanese bank’s derivatives trading team in New York for a three month induction. In contrast, the merchant bank that had hired me made it very clear that it virtually closed down until September. With time on my hands, I flew out to Australia to stay with my mother and Pete, and catch up with my sister who I had not seen for three years, and who had suddenly morphed into a teenager.

There was a postcard waiting for me at my mother’s house. It was from Max and had the address and telephone number of a three bedroom terraced house in Battersea that he and George had rented for a reduced price because of its rising damp.

It was George who let me into the house, and I soon discovered that Max only notionally lived with us. The bank was his real home, until another bank, this time an American one, poached him and the rest of his derivatives trading team, doubling all their salaries and giving Max a sign-on bonus that allowed him to repay the army the money he owed it two years ahead of schedule. From then on Max spent more time in New York than in London. He flew back once a month, normally arriving jetlagged on a Saturday morning. If it was winter, he would immediately set off to shoot pheasants with a smart syndicate he had joined, where everyone else was at least ten years older than him. In summer, he would go sailing off the South Coast in a yacht he leased with two other bankers. If we were lucky, George and I would see him briefly on Sunday nights before he flew back to America.

I lived a far more humdrum existence. Although officially working in the same industry as Max, my job no more resembled his than the dark Victorian office building in which I was based, with framed pre-war bond certificates lining its endless corridors, resembled his Manhattan skyscraper. After being rotated around all the various departments of the merchant bank, I had been assigned to the equities research department, a semi-academic backwater, which was in many ways the perfect place inside a bank for someone who had never really wanted to be a banker. There I wrote reports that labelled shares as ‘Strong Buys’, ‘Buys’ or merely ‘Holds’ – we were forbidden to write ‘Sell’, in case it damaged the interests of our Corporate Finance team. I probably earned a fifth of what Max did, but to someone whose mother had worked as a shop assistant in Durham, and whose only previous job had been as gardener, it seemed reasonable. My only disappointment was that rather than being attached to the Mining research team – which would have left open some connection to the life my father had led – I was seconded to the Media desk, simply because they were a man short.

Two days a week I was allowed to go home early. I was supposed to study for my Financial Analyst exams but usually I would sit and chat to George, who would return at about the same time from drama school. George often seemed more interested in my job than I was. Although acting was his passion, there was a definite entrepreneurial streak running through his character, and he was forever asking whether I had heard any hot stock market rumours. On the few occasions when I did, he immediately telephoned his family’s stockbroker, whilst I sat squirming on the sofa, praying that we were not breaking any insider trading laws. George was never worried. ‘A man’s got to eat,’ he’d say. I once joked that he was an aristocratic Arthur Daly – referring to the genial conman in the TV series Minder – and he took that as a compliment.

In return I learnt about George’s life, which seemed to be a mix of acting lessons and unsuccessful auditions. Casting agents rarely needed a short, skinny, balding, twenty-something with a cut-glass accent. He played an aristocratic heroin addict in a play that never quite made it to the West End, and he once appeared in a TV movie as an extra in a Concentration Camp scene, but that was it. Eventually, at a loose end, he rang up his family’s stockbroker not to buy a share but to ask if his firm might have a temporary job for him. The firm didn’t, but they were smart enough to realise that quickly inventing one might guarantee his family account for another generation. So George became a stockbroker, advising private clients with similar backgrounds to his own, on where to invest their family wealth. Soon afterwards he moved out of the house to a one bedroom flat in South Kensington which he bought with money from a family trust, saying that only a fool rents when he could buy instead.

A few months afterwards Max too announced he was leaving. As he spent so little time inside the house, the only surprise was where he was moving to. I had guessed it would be to a penthouse in Belgravia, but he laughed and told me he was going to live on the estate he had just purchased.

‘You mean in Scotland?’ I said, trying to make sense of it all.

‘No, Docklands.’

Gradually I extracted the details. He had resigned from his job, but on sufficiently good terms to have received some funding from his ex-employer, which had allowed him to create his own property company and buy a building site near Canary Wharf that was being converted into a luxury apartment block.

‘Where will you sleep?’ I asked.

‘There’s a prefab office. I can kip in there. Builders always work faster when the owner’s around.’

‘And where will you wash – The Thames?’

‘It’s too polluted,’ he said. ‘There’s a YMCA less than a mile away.’

I looked at him. ‘Didn’t you enjoy derivatives trading?’

‘I did it for over two years.’

‘You made a lot of money.’

‘I made a lot more for other people.’

I barely saw Max for the next year. Several times when we were due to meet up, he cancelled at short notice, snowed under by work. Everything that could go wrong with his development went wrong. First the ground was contaminated; then a change in building regulations meant he had to alter his designs; house prices fell and interest rates rose. Finally the bank panicked and pulled the rug out from under him. His property company went into liquidation and Max quickly followed it into personal bankruptcy. He lost everything and slipped out of the country, signing up to become a crew member on a large ocean-going yacht. It had taken him less than four years since leaving university to win and lose a fortune.

I was one of the last people to see him before he left. I came back from work and he was waiting for me. By his feet he had a green canvas holdall and beside it was the same faded blue trunk that he had kept in his room at Bristol, and which he had been trying to haul up the stairs the first time I had met him.

‘Could you keep this for me?’ he said. ‘It’s got all my possessions in. Or at least everything the receiver doesn’t know about. There’s nothing particularly valuable, just sentimental stuff.’

I looked at it and noticed it had a sturdy combination lock.

‘It’s set to my birthday – 0804,’ Max said. ‘You’re quite welcome to open it if you ever want to. And if I drown at sea, everything inside it is yours.’

The trunk was too big for my room so together we lugged it down the stairs to the small damp cellar. We placed it on top of some old paint pots, where it would be safe from flooding.

I offered Max dinner but he picked up his canvas holdall and said he had to take the train to Southampton. He would not even accept a lift to Clapham Junction, saying he wanted to stretch his legs. As he walked off down the street, he turned around to wave goodbye, and I saw he was grinning from ear to ear.

He said he would stay in touch, but apart from one postcard sent from the Bahamas six months later, describing the local marlin fishing, he never did. Whenever I went down to the cellar to read the electricity meter, and saw his blue trunk, I would wonder where he was. And when I met George for lunch in the City – who to his own surprise, if not mine, had since become a rather successful stockbroker – we would speculate on when Max would come back and what he would do.

George was certain Max would eventually return to the City. But I was not. Max had always told me that he thought that comebacks were a mistake, and there was something inherently restless about his character. He had effortlessly changed from an army officer into a derivatives trader and then a property developer, and I could easily imagine him becoming a gamekeeper, or joining the navy, or running a sheep station in Patagonia. The only thing that would have surprised me was if he stayed in the same place doing the same job for several years.

One day, I decided to call Max’s father to hear if he had any news. I had not stayed at the Lodge in Glen Avon since I had left Bristol, but I still had the telephone number, so I rang it from work the next morning. When there was no answer, I obtained the phone number of the estate office at Glen Avon from Directory Enquiries and rang that. The woman who answered told me that Max’s father had left the estate over two years ago.

I gave up after that. The fact that Max had never even told me that his family had moved from Glen Avon seemed to prove how much we had outgrown each other. And I had other things on my mind. The sleepy British merchant bank where I worked had been taken over by a much more ambitious German bank and in the resulting turmoil, I struggled to hang on to my job, And just when that was settling down, I went on a skiing holiday, and met a slim girl with long chestnut brown hair, almond-shaped green eyes and a cute, slightly turned-up, nose. Her name was Karen.

We were the only two novice skiers. It snowed everyday, providing the others with the white powder they needed for their adrenalin thrills, and driving the two of us into mountain cafés, where we sipped vin chaud and talked for hours. I came back from the holiday utterly besotted, and a few weeks afterwards I moved into her flat in Stockwell. She worked as a doctor at St Bart’s hospital on the edge of the City and most days we could take the Tube into work together, holding hands amid the throng of commuters. In the evenings, I would rush back, keen to minimise the time we spent apart.