Читать книгу The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger - David Nobbs - Страница 6

He seated himself at the round rosewood (what else?) dining table in the exact centre of the gigantic dining room, whose panelling was as Elizabethan as it could be in a house built in 1932. The table seated twelve, and most mornings, as he breakfasted in solitary splendour, he derived pleasure from the sight of the eleven empty places.

He was smartly dressed in the clothes Lady Coppinger had laid out for him the previous evening. He had no colour sense. She did. You couldn’t breed roses without having a colour sense.

Farringdon emerged from the kitchens and slid gravely towards Sir Gordon like a stately home on legs. He carried a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a pile of newspapers. Sir Gordon, who was still feeling quite deeply disturbed by his lapse of memory, tried to look the essence of calm, and gave a small, studied smile.

‘Good morning, Farringdon,’ he said, and he thought he detected a slight nervous quiver in his voice. Farringdon didn’t appear to notice it, but then Farringdon would not have appeared to notice it if his employer had come in to breakfast naked. In the early days Sir Gordon had been slightly unnerved by Farringdon’s eyes. There never seemed to be any expression in them. It looked, in certain lights, from certain angles, as if he had two glass eyes. Sir Gordon was used to this now. He found it restful.

‘Good morning, sir. Sir has slept well?’ said Farringdon gravely.

‘Sir has slept very well, thank you, Farringdon.’

‘That is good news, sir.’

The politenesses over, Farringdon got straight down to business, listing for Sir Gordon, in the unchanging daily ritual, all the pages of the newspapers that mentioned him: ‘Telegraph page seven, Times business page two, Sun page two—’

‘Opposite the totty!’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Mirror page twenty-seven—’

‘Page twenty-seven! That’s a bit far back.’

‘Indeed, sir, but perhaps the fact that it is a page lead will assuage the disappointment.’

Sir Gordon wasn’t given to idle speculation, but even he did wonder sometimes if Farringdon had once discovered a night-school course on the Language of Butlers.

Farringdon went on to list articles in the newspapers that the team judged to be of relevance to Sir Gordon, mainly from the business sections. Important though their impact on his day’s decisions might be, he would only turn to those after he had finished reading about himself.

Sir Gordon took it entirely for granted that several of his employees had been up since three in the morning, driving the early editions of the papers down to Surrey, where other early risers had hunted through them for stories relevant to himself; while yet more, in London, were at their computers finding and collating references to him on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and, only slightly less important, news bulletins. He thought that his researchers trawled through every page of every paper. He hadn’t heard of Google Alert.

He began the process of opening the newspapers at the pages that Farringdon had listed, and which he had not needed to write down. Sir Gordon was proud of his memory. His eyes swept contemptuously past several headlines that told of the sad state of our world in the autumn of 2011. Air-disaster fears soar as laser louts blind pilots. Thieves desecrate memorials to our war heroes every two days. Nineteen glasses of wine by the age of twelve. The behaviour of the lower orders from whom he had so thoroughly escaped was of no interest to him.

He found the first reference to himself in the business section’s editorial comment:

Rumour has it that the City is bracing itself for a disappointing set of results from SFN Holdings. While this is not particularly significant in itself, SFN being a fairly small player in the global game, any bad news from the Coppinger empire is bound to be …

Farringdon arrived with a pot of tea, a jug of water, and a bowl of Coco Pops. Sir Gordon had a proudly sweet tooth.

‘Thank you, Farringdon. English Builders’ Tea, the best drink in the world.’

Farringdon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Agreement would have figured largely in his job description, had there been one.

‘You can keep your champagne.’

Again Farringdon, who had no champagne to keep, raised his eyebrows in agreement, and moved off, in his slightly bent, tactful way. He was three inches taller than Sir Gordon, and found it sensible not to emphasize the fact.

… destabilizing at this sensitive time. Also, SFN is believed to be close to Sir Gordon Coppinger’s heart, if such an organ can be located, as it is in his native and beloved Dudley.

‘If such an organ can be located!’ Cheeky bugger. Rather flattering, though. Except … wasn’t he loved, despite his wealth, despite his ruthlessness, because he was British, not Russian or Chinese? A British oligarch. A walking assertion that Britons can still become rich. A patriot. And famously possessed of charm. When he wanted it. When he needed it. Which was most of the time. Which could become irksome.

But could it be – no, it wasn’t possible – that the press were beginning to attack him, to test the waters? And why print these comments anyway, if not to destabilize? They must know that SFN Holdings made a loss every year, though he hoped that they didn’t know that making a loss every year was the whole point of SFN Holdings.

By the time Farringdon returned with the crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, Sir Gordon had already located another story about himself. Well, this one was about Lady Coppinger, variously described in the press as fragrant, elegant, enigmatic – what a gift she was to the world of adjectives, and to imagery taken from roses, as in the headline to this particular story.

A PIECE OF CAKE FOR THORNY CHRISTINA

It’s a long road from selling Battenburg cake to breeding the champion climbing rose at the Baden-Baden October Flower Festival, but even that honour couldn’t make Sir Gordon Coppinger’s elegant wife Christina smile for long.

My German friend Gisela informed me yesterday that Christina didn’t win many hearts as she accepted the prestigious Der Meisteroktoberbergsteinerrosigpreis for her George Clooney Perpetua, named after her favourite film star.

She popped in to the famous and elegant German spa town by private …

‘Thank, you, Farringdon.’

… jet, made a brief speech without using a single word of German, and popped out as fast as her long but no longer quite so slim legs could carry her.

Gisela informs me that Christina did not endear herself to her hosts by wearing her Remembrance poppy throughout.

Can it be that the former confectioner’s assistant and beauty queen – she was voted Miss Lemon Drizzle in 1980, Miss Danish Pastry (West Midlands) in 1982 and Miss West Bromwich in 1983 – was anxious to show her husband that she shares his fanatical xenophobia, or was there perhaps a more personal reason for the brevity of her visit?

Did she feel that she needed to get back to find out what Sir Gordon was up to?

Sir Gordon smiled. She would hate that. She would be furious at the slur cast on her famous legs. She would loathe the references to her days as a beauty queen. How the world would mock. Didn’t she have the sense to see that the whole point of their lives was that they had gone up, up, up and so it was great publicity that they had once been down, down, down? Even Miss Lemon Drizzle can dream of leaving the world of cake far behind and breeding world-class roses. Christina could have been a heroine for our times, a walking representative, in her high heels, on her long but no longer quite so slim legs, of the social mobility so loved by prime ministers who had been to Eton.

And, to his great surprise, he felt a distant flicker of sexuality at the reference to those legs. He even felt stimulated by the thought that they were no longer quite so slim. Few men are turned on by perfection. You couldn’t believe what was in the papers but it might be rather exciting to check on the accuracy of the observation. Good God. Was it possible – was it? – that this year his birthday dinner with her would not be an ordeal?

But … this apparently trivial diary entry also worried Sir Gordon just a little as he ate his exquisite, always exquisite, bacon and scrambled eggs. He didn’t like that phrase, ‘what Sir Gordon was up to’.

What he had been up to was Francesca Saltmarsh. He had taken the rare opportunity, while Christina was abroad, of staying the night. They had made love three and a half times. That half haunted him. Was he beginning to grow old?

Could the press possibly have known about Francesca? No. It was just a shot in the dark. No! If the worst they could come up with was a snide suggestion in a little diary piece, he had nothing to worry about. He was invulnerable, as his fellow ‘Sir,’ Jimmy Savile, had been, because the great British public would not allow him to be attacked. They loved him so much, just as much as he in his turn hated them.

No, his concerns were exaggerated. A second cup of good old British tea, and the world would be fine again.

But as he turned to the third article about himself, his world felt not quite so fine.

Climthorpe United’s challenge for promotion to the Premiership faltered when they were held to a goalless draw by lowly Barnsley at the Coppinger Stadium in yesterday’s late kick-off.

The Gordoners missed a hatful of chances, the best of which fell to taciturn Bulgarian striker Raduslav Bogoff. The fans in the Abattoir Stand have started to boo him every time he touches the ball, and the same message comes from the increasing number of placards being paraded around the ground. Their message wouldn’t be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, but it gets its point across clearly and simply: “Bogoff, Bogoff.”

Manager Vernon Thickness continues to defend the moody target man from the Black Sea resort of Varna. “He gives us different options, which the punters can’t always appreciate,” he explained in his post-match press conference. “He’s creating the chances, and the goals will come.”

Does Thickness really believe this, or is he no more than a mouthpiece for owner Sir Gordon Coppinger’s ideas? And why does Sir Gordon persist with the surly Slav, when it is his express intention eventually to turn Climthorpe into the only all-British side in the Championship, and, whatever his motives may be, we have to applaud that intention.

Sir Gordon has stated that the clumsy seasider gives the team a dimension of subtlety which brings out the best in his British teammates. “I am British through and through and have got rid of no fewer than eight foreign players since I bought the club,” Sir Gordon explained recently, “but I haven’t yet found a British striker who gives me exactly what Raduslav offers.”

The eponymous owner was not present in the Sir Gordon Coppinger Stand yesterday to see his Eastern European protégé miss yet more chances. Nor was Bogoff’s lovely wife, the svelte Svetoslava.

Could it be that her presence in Britain, and her absence from the match, has something to do with Sir Gordon’s continued faith in her hapless hubby?

Sir Gordon loved to read about other great men, and he knew that all truly great men had to be vigilant in their examination of themselves for traces of incipient paranoia. He was honest enough to wonder if there was a touch of the disease in his suspicion that there might be a connection between this story and the diary piece about Christina. Had the press decided to go on the offensive against him, albeit slowly and carefully, putting their toes into the ocean with little hints? Well, they were hopelessly on the wrong tack with Svetoslava. Apart from everything else, he didn’t know when he had seen a less svelte Slav.

But even this very gentle rumour and tittle-tattle made him feel uneasy, and he wasn’t used to feeling uneasy. He’d have liked a third cup of good old British tea, but it was out of the question. Great men can’t be seen clambering out of their Rolls-Royces for a quick pee at the side of the Kingston By-Pass, or taking a bottle with them just in case. To be seen by Kirkstall performing awkward manoeuvres into a bottle on the back seat, it was unthinkable. The urination of great men – and indeed of great women – must be hidden from the world.

Through the huge picture windows of the dining room he could now see that an unlovely dawn was creeping shyly in over the lush Surrey countryside. Dawns didn’t break, they arrived mysteriously. As a boy he had sometimes stood by the window in the dark in that little house in Dudley, stopwatch in hand, waiting to record the exact second when it began to get light, in order to enter it into ‘Coppinger’s Almanac’, his life’s work. He had always failed, and the failure had made him furious. He never failed now, and he was rarely furious. Fury used up energy that needed to be stored for more important use.

He was pleased that it was such an unappetizing grey morning. What was the point of being driven to work by a chauffeur in a luxurious Rolls-Royce if the hoi polloi in their ghastly clothes were standing at their bus stops in warm sunshine? He hoped it would chuck it down this evening, so that all the trick-or-treaters would get soaked.

He turned, reluctantly, to the financial pages.

Insecurity grows. House prices fall. CBI wants tax breaks to help young unemployed.

What? Tax breaks? Help for the young unemployed? He almost choked on his last sip of tea.

China: Don’t count on us to help you.

Bastards. Who was ever naive enough to think they would? He’d boycotted Chinese restaurants for five years now. That had shown them.

In a sudden surge of temper he flung the papers to the floor.

He clambered slightly stiffly out of his chair. That wouldn’t do. He was only fifty-six, and fifty-six was the new forty-three.

He picked the papers up, smoothed them down, and put them in a neat pile.

Thank goodness nobody had witnessed his brief rage. He never lost his temper. He was always cool and collected. Nobody ever saw him ruffled.

He would have been astonished if he’d known that this would be one of the reasons for the suspicions that would overwhelm him.