another?”
“No. You shouldn’t, either. Will you resign?”
“Must do.” He shook his head from side to side. “Thirty years. Come on,
have another.”
“No,” Arny said firmly. “You should go home.”
He stood up and took Evan’s elbow.
“All right.”
The two men walked out of the wine bar and into the street. The sun was
high and hot. Lunch-hour lines were beginning to form at cafes and
sandwich shops. A couple of pretty secretaries walked by eating
ice-cream cones.
Arny said: “Lovely weather, for the time of year.”
“Beautiful,” Evan said lugubriously.
Arny stepped off the curb and hailed a taxi. The black cab swerved
across and pulled up with a squeal.
Evan said: “Where are you going?”
“Not me. You.” Arny opened the door and said to the driver: “Waterloo
Station.”
Evan stumbled in and sat down on the backseat.
“Go home before you get too drunk to walk,” Arny said. He shut the door.
Evan opened the window. “Thanks,” he said.
“Home’s the best place.”
Evan nodded. “I wish I knew what I’m going to tell My family.”
Arny watched the cab disappear, then walked toward his office, thinking
about his friend. Evan was finished as a banker. A reputation for
honesty was made slowly and lost quickly in the City.
Evan would lose his as surely as if he had tried to pick the pocket of
the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He might get a decent pension out’ of
it, but he would never get another job.
Arny was secure, if hard up: quite the opposite of Evan’s plight He
earned a respectable salary, but he had borrowed money to build an
extension to his lounge, and he was having difficulty with the payments.
He could see a way to earn out of Evan’s misfortune. It felt disloyal.
However, he reasoned, Evan could suffer no more.
He went into a phone booth and dialed a number.
The pips went and he thumbed in a coin. “Evening Post?”
“Which department?”
“City Editor.”
There was a pause, then a new voice said: “City desk.”
“Mervyn?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Arnold Matthews.”
“Hello, Arny. What goes on?”
Arny took a deep breath. “The Cotton Bank of Jamaica is in trouble.”
DOREEN, the wife of Deaf Willie, sat stiffly upright in the front of
Jacko’s car, clutching a handbag in her lap. Her face was pale, and her
lips were twisted into a strange expression compounded of fury and
dread. She was a large-boned woman, very tall with broad hips, and
tending to plumpness because of Willie’s liking for chips. She was also
poorly dressed, and this was because of Willie’s liking for brown ale.
She stared straight ahead, and spoke to Jacko out of the side of her
mouth.
“Who’ve took him up the hospital, then?”
“I don’t know, Doreen,” Jacko lied. “Perhaps it was a job, and they
didn’t want to let on who, you know. All I know is, I get a phone call,
Deaf Willie’s up the hospital, tell his missus, bang.” He made a
slamming-the-phone-down gesture.
“Liar,” Doreen said evenly.
Jacko fell silent.
In the back of the car, Willie’s son, Billy, stared vacantly out of the
window. With his long, awkward body he was cramped in the small space.
Normally he enjoyed traveling in cars, but today his mother was very
tense, and he knew something bad had happened. Just what it was, he was
not sure: things were confusing. Ma seemed to be cross with Jacko, but
Jacko was a friend. Jacko had said that Dad was up the hospital, but not
that he was ill; and indeed, how could he be? For he had been well when
he left the house early this morning.
The hospital was a large brick building, faintly Gothic, which had once
been the residence of the Mayor of Southwark. Several flat-roofed
extensions had been built in the grounds, and tarmacadamed car parks had
obliterated the rest of the lawns.
Jacko stopped near the entrance to Casualty.
No one spoke as they got out of the car and went across to the door.
They passed an ambulance man with a pipe in his mouth, leaning against
an antismoking poster on the side of his vehicle.