David Nobbs - The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

For Briget, Mark and Max

Table of Contents

Title Page DAVID NOBBS The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

Dedication For Briget, Mark and Max

So it had come to this

The suspicions that would overwhelm him

It was going to be one of those days

‘I really have shocked myself’

Can we be absolutely certain that they can’t lip-read?

We never said a word about Jack

The evening ended, as it had begun, in silence

A great deal nearer than the Solway Firth

Those insidious doubts

Perhaps we have intruded enough

Staring at himself with astonishment

Not such a useless lump of a nun after all

‘Shame’

His night’s work is done

A serious mistake

‘A perfect memento’

That didn’t make Sir Gordon happy at all

It began to rain

A great deal of pain

He was gone

He might yet be able to save his fortune

‘Siobhan,’ said Sir Gordon, ‘you’re a genius.’

Flat, flat, flat

Back into the real world

An opportunity had been lost

He would need a long, hot bath

There was no chance

It’s wasted already

She is even more astonished

‘I do not listen to your calls. Ever.’

And felt an answering squeeze

What hope is there?

I hope we haven’t

Beyond Gravesend

Fred Upson went pale

What the letters SFN actually stood for

He rather liked bees

A thing that they had never done before

‘I can’t afford to get rid of him’

‘Decision time’

A magic moment

He didn’t think that problem would be any easier

Suddenly he was very sober

The Great Fire of Stoke

‘I’m so sorry’

‘For Jack’

A plan was beginning to take shape

He was fibrillating wildly

It has no future either

And went to bed

The message from his wife

‘Grief makes you very hungry’

No respecter of wealth

Scrambled eggs are his favourite

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by David Nobbs

Copyright

About the Publisher

He woke with a sense of shock. He had no idea who he was. Or where he was. Or who this woman was, sleeping so peacefully beside him.

Oh God. Did he want to know who he was? Would it be an unpleasant surprise?

Later, when he told his doctor, he would estimate that this blankness, this disorientation, this absence of self, probably lasted less than a minute, maybe not even thirty seconds. At the time it seemed like an age.

What he also realized later – and this he didn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell his doctor, couldn’t tell another human being ever – was that he had experienced, in that brief moment, the first intimation of doubt. To most of us, plagued as we are by doubt, this may seem incredible, but men like this man – I feel it would be impolite, in a curious way, to give you his name before he himself has remembered it – manage to live without feeling any doubt at all, do things that would be impossible if they felt even a shred of doubt. Garibaldi, Hitler, Colonel Gaddafi, could they have done what they did if they’d had doubts? Not that I am putting our still unnamed hero in that category.

He felt something that he had not felt in his life for a very long time – real alarm. This was extremely disconcerting. He was always so completely in command of himself, prided himself on not needing an alarm clock because his body did what he told it to do; he was always in control, people thought him a control freak.

Well, that was something. That was a piece of knowledge about himself. He was a control freak. But today he was a control freak out of control. He was breaking into a sweat, he could feel the wetness of panic all over his skin.

Memory came back to him in small bits. Somebody calling him Gordon. He was Gordon somebody. This narrowed it down, but it really didn’t help all that much. Then from nowhere, in the utter darkness of the bedroom, there flashed into his mind a vivid memory of Mr Forbes-Harrison, his maths teacher, calling out, in a grim yard behind a grim school on a grim, grey morning, ‘You, Coppinger, where do you think you’re going?’ to which he had replied, to his own astonishment, as well as Mr Forbes-Harrison’s, ‘To the very top, sir.’

And with that ‘sir’ there came the thought that he hadn’t called anybody ‘sir’ for a very long time. People called him ‘sir’ now. He wasn’t just Gordon Coppinger. He was Sir Gordon Coppinger.

Now complete awareness flooded in, astonishing him. He was a great man and a rich one. He was a financier and an industrialist with a finger in many pies, ‘not all of which are steak and kidney’, as he used to say only too often, to prove that he still had a sense of humour, though many people thought it proved that he hadn’t. He owned the twenty-six-storey Coppinger Tower in Canary Wharf. In his huge and luxurious yacht, the Lady Christina , based in Cannes, he gave holidays every summer to men of power and influence.

He was a patriot and a philanthropist. He had created the Sir Gordon Coppinger Charitable Foundation, which supported many good causes. He owned the Coppinger Collection, which housed many masterpieces. The football team that he owned played at the Coppinger Stadium. It was time to get up.

Or was it? Not quite yet, perhaps. He knew who he was now, but he still wasn’t sure where he was. The darkness in the room was absolute, which suggested that he was at home, in the vast master bedroom, with its thick gold curtains and its thermal blinds. But suggestion wasn’t enough. He needed to know.

The question of where he was had no great importance in itself, beyond the necessity of finding a light switch or risk walking in the blackness straight into a row of wire coat hangers in some hotel bedroom, as had happened to a friend of his. Make that an acquaintance of his. He didn’t do friends. But until he knew where he was he couldn’t be sure of the identity of the woman who was sleeping so quietly beside him.

If it was a woman. But that had all been a very long time ago, and, surely, if it was a man, after all this time, he would have remembered. No, it was a woman. Her gentle breathing was unmistakably female.

Just occasionally, the soft breathing became a faint, whistled, wistful snore, as if she was thinking, Surely my life should be happier than this? No man’s snore could come with so many fancy adjectives attached to it. Male snores were loud, or beery, or catarrhal. Male snores were simple.

Were these slight snores Lady Coppinger’s? He wasn’t sure. Was he in the master bedroom of Rose Cottage, the cottage being ironic, and the rose reflecting Her Ladyship’s greatest interest? Or was he in a hotel? Was this woman Francesca? Or Mandy? Please let him not be in Mandy’s flat. He sniffed. No, he wasn’t in Mandy’s flat. There was a faintly unpleasant smell of stale humanity in the room, but Mandy’s flat smelt of drains – distant drains, but unmistakable.

How could he ever have been so unwise as to go to bed with a woman called Mandy? Few names had more baggage attached to them, few names screamed ‘tabloid press’ as much as Mandy. He had been lucky to get away with it this long. Mandy must go.

He was wide awake now, and shocked by the timidity of his thoughts. Her name was half the point of Mandy. The risk was everything. Was he going soft? He felt for his prick. Yes, he was, but that wasn’t what he’d meant.