Growing Pains Page 2

  And then, as quickly and with as little apparent reason as it had come, the bad patch was over and life resumed the slightly uneven tenor of its way. They began being nice to each other again, at first uneasily and hesitantly, then with growing and finally soaring confidence that all was well again. They began to use little endearments between themselves, at first slightly self-consciously, as if faintly embarrassed, like newly-acquainted actors in the early rehearsals of a play, but very soon as unconsciously and unaffectedly as before; they resumed sleeping together, and soon after that they restarted sexual relations, which had ceased almost instantly with the beginning of their quarrel. In a fortnight it was as if there had never been any awkward moment, or any disagreement between them. By a common, unspoken but clearly understood instinct, they agreed to keep away from any topic of conversation that might unduly remind them of the rift; and in a few weeks it was forgotten.

  One thing Graham had mentioned, which they had both almost forgotten in the ensuing unpleasantness, was that his old friend had told him, in a rare interval of lucidity, that he had left him most of his estate. When the tiff was over and they were back on the old, easy footing once more, they discussed it briefly, but neither of them thought much about it. “Will it be very much?” Stephen had asked.

  “No idea,” Graham had replied casually. “He’s got that whacking great flat in St John’s Wood, and he must have a bit of cash to be able to afford the London Clinic just now. But as far as I know he’s not a wealthy man. I shouldn’t start choosing the yacht yet awhile.”

  “I’m not,” Stephen had said, grinning. “There’s only one thing I want out of life at the moment, and Reggie’s money couldn’t buy that.” He stood up and moved his hips lasciviously. Graham had stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then caught on, and they had gone quietly but happily upstairs. The interlude of coldness between them, inexplicable though it had been, had in one sense been valuable, in that it had made them realise just how blissful their relationship had been, by and large, until then; so when normality was resumed they were both duly grateful and appreciative. It was not destined to last; but neither of them could know that, and they took their happiness while it was there to be taken.

  * * *

  “Come on, then, Graham,” urged Stephen that evening at home. “Let’s tot it up. Let’s see how much you’ve got. Christ, you’re a millionaire, aren’t you?”

  “Several times over, by the looks of this,” said Graham, still unable to absorb the full import of Westwood’s solicitors’ tortured legal English. Now that they had the black and white of the solicitors’ letter before them to testify to their precipitate and utterly unexpected entry into the ranks of the rich, they found it temporarily paralysing. They passed the letter back and forth between them, reading and re-reading the series of clauses and trying to see real, tangible things behind them.

  “Hey! You’ve got a pub!” had been Stephen’s first words when he scanned the letter the first time. For no particular reason that he could analyse, the idea of Graham owning a pub on the Sussex coast struck him as absurd, impossible, almost surreal. Sitting on the floor at Graham’s feet, he goggled at the paragraph of the letter until it ceased to have any meaning, and the letters swam before him. Then he leaned back against Graham’s legs and roared with laughter, which he could not have explained in any way whatsoever. Graham, oddly enough, had been reflecting on old Reggie Westwood owning a pub, and finding it as improbable as Stephen found the idea of Graham owning the same place, and joined him in the laugh. Then they had gone more carefully through the long series of clauses, discovering that in addition to a substantial fortune in various kinds of stocks, bonds, shares and cash, and the pub in Sussex, Graham was now the proprietor of a small chain of fish and chip shops in the north of England, and a director of a travel agent’s in Maida Vale, a chain of nine petrol stations and tyre-fitting depots in the Midlands, a company making electric and gas furnaces and crematoria, and nine other companies across the country.

  “Well, come on, then,” urged Stephen. “What’re you going to do with it all?”

  Graham laughed. “Not so fast, boy,” he said sternly, and the reversion to schoolmaster was so convincing that Stephen stopped his prattling in mid-flow for a moment, until he remembered, and glared accusingly at Graham.

  “To tell you the frozen truth,” Graham said after some musing, “I haven’t got the slightest idea what I’m going to do with it all. I mean, good God, I’ve never expected to have anything like this much… never dreamed of being as rich as this, in my wildest day-dreams.” He relapsed into silence.

  “One thing I can tell you I’m not going to do,” he said at length. Stephen looked up at him attentively.

  “I’m not going to work any longer,” said Graham decisively. “That’s absolutely flat. I’ve read about these twats in the papers that win three-quarters of a million on the pools, and say ‘I’ll be back with my broom on Monday’. Well, I’m not gonna be back with my broom after this. No way.”

  “Be unfair anyway, wouldn’t it?” commented Stephen. “I mean, keeping someone out of a job who actually needed one.”

  Graham stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Christ, you’re good for me,” he said softly. “I can always trust you to see the thing from an unusual angle. You’re going to keep me young years beyond my rightful span, d’you know that?”

  That was something else that was not destined to be fulfilled, but once again, they could not know it at that moment.

  The following morning Graham went in to Strasbourg to discuss the future with his old friend and Cambridge crony who had given him his job when Graham was in some trouble. He took him to the best restaurant in Strasbourg, bought him a gourmet lunch and told him without much detail of his good fortune. His friend was almost more emphatic than Graham himself that he should give up the daily toil; but they agreed that Graham would remain in place for a while, until his friend had succeeded in finding the right applicant to take over from him, to preserve continuity for the students. Graham accepted this compromise gladly, delighted to be able to offer something by way of compensation. He told Stephen of the decision that evening, and Stephen agreed without demur that it was no more than Graham’s friend was entitled to. Stephen, for his part, had come to a similar amicable arrangement with the aubergiste on his own initiative.

  * * *

  In all it took them another two months before they were completely free of all encumbrances. Graham flew to London twice more, to discuss details of his inheritance with Reggie’s solicitors, some very sharp operators in Chancery Lane. He shed all his directorships, mostly in return for handsome cash settlements, and sold the fish and chip chain for a small fortune to a consortium of the owners of individual shops. He sat and listened to a whole series of lengthy and detailed speeches from the sharp operators on the best ways of avoiding the maximum possible sums in taxes, duties and other imposts on his money, of which he understood one word in ten, and perhaps one sentence in a thousand. When he gathered that the fount of advice on avoidance had finally flowed to its conclusion he thanked his advisors profusely, candidly admitted the extent of his understanding, and asked if he might perhaps entrust the entire management of his unexpected fortune to the sharp operators. That being precisely the result which the sharp operators had been expecting and hoping for, they congratulated him politely on his impeccable business acumen, recommended that he allow the same firm of accountants to remain in charge as had supervised the making of the original fortune for Reggie

  Westwood, and, when Graham agreed without demur, congratulated him once again, offered him a glass of very dry and splendid sherry, and bowed him out of the office with great courtesy but not a grain of servility.

  At some point in the proceedings, almost as an afterthought, one of the sharp operators asked if he had made a will. When Graham had said he hadn’t there were Jeeves-like coughs and it was politely intimated to him that only a breech-born half-wit wou
ld be so insensate and incorrigible as to leave the office in possession of such a fortune and intestate. And so it came to pass that, almost without thinking about it, or even really being fully conscious of what he was doing, so fast did the sharp operators lead him through the seemingly impenetrable morass of legalese, formality and red tape associated with becoming suddenly and unexpectedly rich, Graham quickly, efficiently and almost casually made a will, in which he left everything he possessed to Stephen Francis Hill, currently of 4, Rue de la République, Saint-Hippolyte, Haut-Rhin, in the Alsace region of the republic of France.

  2

  Stephen swallowed the last dissolving morsel of his Café de Paris entrecôte and leaned back in his chair with a deep sigh of repletion. It turned into a burp, quite a loud one, and he pulled a sheepish face as he glanced guiltily round. Then he grinned. Graham smiled affectionately at him across the table.

  They had decided to spend a little of Graham’s sudden and rather overwhelming wealth on a leisurely tour round Europe, and had come to rest, after a very short first leg, in Geneva, a city Graham loved deeply and Stephen had never seen. They had been on the mini-train and all the numerous different cruises on Lake Leman. “You could play cricket on some of those lawns,” Stephen had remarked at one point as they passed a vast pink and cream mansion inhabited by a recently deposed psychopathic third-world despot. Graham had nodded, and both had unconsciously given the majestic sweep of manicured grass a lightning assessment, for dimensions, flatness and obstacles. Then they had realised simultaneously what they were doing; two heads had come up in the same moment, and they had stared sadly at each other for a long moment. There had been a tacit but unbreachable understanding between them ever since Stephen’s arrival in Saint-Hippolyte that cricket should not be mentioned. The sense of loss it brought was altogether too painful. “Sorry,” Stephen had muttered, and they had turned back to look at the next palace along the lakeside in a glum silence.

  They had cheered up very quickly, though, aided by the benign and relaxed atmosphere of the city, and had gone for a drive later, dining sumptuously at a small but magnificent gourmet restaurant in the mountains overlooking the city. The following day they were going to a concert of orchestral music, the first Stephen had attended. “Time you acquired some culture, then, you little prole,” Graham had said when Stephen confessed the fact. Meanwhile, they had decided to take the day in between easy, wandering round window-shopping and buying little presents for people, enjoying the sensation of not having to wonder whether they could afford them. Finally Stephen had felt hungry, and Graham had introduced him to the delights of the Café de Paris and its entrecôte steaks.

  “This is the life, isn’t it?” Stephen said luxuriantly as his coupe colonel arrived.

  “Hmph!” grunted Graham, eying the huge confection. “We’ll be as fat as a pair of prize saddlebacks if we don’t start getting a bit of exercise,” he went on, glancing round the packed restaurant and surreptitiously undoing the waistband of his trousers. Stephen muttered “Good idea” and followed suit, and both minds turned simultaneously to the one thing they were both missing poignantly.

  Graham sat deep in thought for some time, and Stephen, sensitive as always to his beloved friend’s humours, devoted himself to polishing off his dessert in a considerate silence.

  “You say ‘This is the life’,” Graham said at last, gazing reflectively into the middle distance, “and very agreeable it is, I grant you. But if you’re missing things… well, what I’m really asking, I suppose, is, would you like to go back?” Stephen gazed at him for a moment across the little round table, his coffee cup arrested halfway to his lips. “I… well… I hadn’t…” he stammered, before falling silent once more. “I hadn’t really thought about that,” he eventually said, thinking about it now. “I mean, I’ve been enjoying it over here. Very much. Especially since — you know, since we could do things in style, sort of.” He sat thinking about it some more.

  “But in any case,” he resumed, “surely we’d be running the same risks as before if we were to go back now, wouldn’t we? I mean, I’m still not twenty-one, so we could still get into trouble with the law, couldn’t we?” He sat watching Graham anxiously, the tranquil contentment that had settled over him since they had started their jaunt blown to shreds by Graham’s unexpected question.

  “Ah,” said Graham, looking shrewdly at him. “Now, that’s rather where things are a bit different now. Different from how they were before — before our bit of trouble, that is.

  “There’s one big difference between then and now.” He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a fat wad of Swiss banknotes. “That’s the difference,” he said quietly, slipping the money back. “And it makes more difference than anything else in the world could make, believe you me.” Stephen looked questions at him.

  “You said just now ‘This is the life’,” Graham said. “Yesterday, you remember, we were both saying how bloody marvellous it was to be able to pop into any old shop, whichever we felt like popping into, and buying exactly what we felt like buying, without having to count the cost? Same thing the day before, when we went to that flash restaurant up in the mountains, remember?” Stephen nodded.

  “Well, that’s one… one facet of having money. It buys you things. Great. But there’s another aspect of it, that’s even more important, and even nicer for the lucky person,” Graham went on. “It was spelt out to me once by a chap I knew. Only really rich man I ever knew, really — ’cept Reggie, of course, and he didn’t count, because I didn’t know he was rich. Not really rich. But this other bloke told me why he was glad he’d got money, and hoped the day would never come when he hadn’t got it. Can you guess what he said?”

  “No,” said Stephen simply.

  “No, well, there’s no reason why you should, of course. Well, what he said was ‘I like having this kind of money, not because of what it can buy me — that’s very nice, but there’s very little it gets me that I couldn’t cheerfully do without. What this is, for me’ — and he pulled out a wad about five times the size of that lot I just showed you — ‘is Fuck-you money.’ He explained to me, and I understood. But I understand better now, Stevie. Do you see what he meant?”

  Stephen sat there, thinking about it. “Well,” he began, “I think I do, but…”

  “What he meant, Steve, was that when you’ve got this sort of money behind you” — he gestured at his trouser pocket — “real money, there’s nothing anybody can do to you that can hurt you. Because you can always go one better. Whatever they do to you, you can always buy something bigger, or better, or you can buy someone to put right whatever they’ve damaged or fucked up. Money can buy you practically anything, not to mention anybody. So if someone looks as if they want to do you some kind of disfavour, why you haul out your wad, and you say ‘Fuck you, pal’, and you buy whatever sort of antidote or prophylactic you need to spike their guns. That’s what he meant, and I’m beginning to see just how right he was. Do you see what I mean, though? The relevance of what I’ve been saying to what we were talking about?”

  Stephen pondered the matter for some time, sipping his coffee absently. “You mean, I suppose,” he said slowly, “that if we were to go back to England, and anybody started getting nasty about you having me with you, you could use your money to get rid of them. I don’t mean get rid of them,” he added hastily. “I mean, get rid of the threat they posed, or whatever.”

  “That’s it,” said Graham calmly.

  “But surely, even having a lot of money can’t make any difference to the law,” objected Stephen. “I mean, you can’t bribe judges and things, can you? I know the odd policeman takes bribes, but you could never take the risk of offering one, could you, in case the policeman you picked happened to be an honest one. You’d be even further in the sh…”

  “Not the point, Steve,” said Graham. “The point about having money is that you never get to the position where you have to start taking risks like offering bribes
. The point is that anyone who ever thought there wasn’t one law for the rich and another for everybody else was deluding himself. We’re the rich now. So we stop at the kind of hotels where the police only go if they’re invited, and call people ‘sir’ if they do. We’ve now got enough money to take two rooms, even though we only want one. But we’ve got enough also to pay our hotel staff, who might say something, well enough that they bloody well won’t. No chambermaid or room service waiter’s going to jeopardise the kind of tips we’ll be giving, just to see the law about under-age sex with you enforced.”

  Stephen grinned at him brightly. “Fuck-you money,” he mused. “Mm, yeah. Got a nice ring to it, as well, hasn’t it? So you can stick your finger up at anybody who looks like getting in our way and say ‘Fuck you, pal’, and there’s nothing they can do about it?”

  “That’s it, exactly. So, what with that and the fact that the British legal system is open to all, like the Ritz Hotel — we’ll be in the Ritz Hotel, of course — if you want to go back to England, well, we can. It’s as simple as that, really.”

  Once more Stephen sat for a long time in thought. The waitress came, and Graham smiled winningly at her, gestured at the boy and made gear-wheel motions beside his own temple, and ordered further coffees for them. She smiled, charmed, and went off.

  “It’s very sweet of you to offer,” Stephen said very slowly at length. “But it’s not the cricket season yet, is it? What is it, the…” He consulted his watch. “Eighteenth of Feb. There’s two months to go till the season starts. I’d like to carry on this trip round, if you’re willing,” he said after more reflection. “Then maybe we could go back and find a club a bit later on, when the season’s under way.”