Lawrence Osborne: The Ballad of a Small Player

“Oh, my glorious Teddy organized everything for me before he died,” she would say, forgetting that she had said the very same thing the week before. “But now I seem to have got into a tizzy about it all. He always told me to move my money around and keep it fresh. Do you agree?”

“Your husband was perfectly correct.”

“But there’s no one I trust, you see.” Her eyes shone with a kind of crazy flinty gullibility. “Except you, of course. Perhaps you could take some of my funds out of Rio Tinto and put them somewhere else? I am going to authorize Mr. Ashburton at Lloyd’s to give you access. Now, why don’t you try one of my chutney sandwiches? I make the chutney myself with Mr. Porter’s raisins from Sunte Avenue. Go on.”

She barely recognized me in the later days, when I came by to chat with her and hold her hand and assess the value of her moldering but well-stocked property. She sometimes thought I was her nephew, or the doctor, or who knows who else. While she dozed in her armchair in the front room, I wandered through her mansion and pocketed, for fun, the occasional trinket. She never noticed. And so I began to steal from her very gradually, a hundred pounds here, a hundred pounds there, and when I progressed to higher sums I saw that it made no difference. No one was watching over her affairs but me, and no one had access to her bank account but me. There must have come a point, I reflected as I sat there looking at the Binokel card, when I realized that I could get away if not with murder then with the second best thing.

I must have passed the better part of two years laboring at this secret game. I became, gradually, much richer than anyone around me, and much richer than I myself had ever been before — because I had never been even well off, let alone seriously affluent. Quite the contrary. I came from the loins of a vacuum cleaner salesman. I had never had anything. In fact I had noticed, hitherto, a certain snobbery toward me on the part of the other lawyers at our firm, and certainly a distinct snobbery coming from the partners. They could tell by a sixth sense that I was not one of them. I had not gone to a public school, not even Ardingly, down the road, where most of them had spent their miserable boyhoods loafing around willowed ponds. I had been to the local state schools. To Scrayes Bridge Comprehensive and then Haywards Heath Grammar, where I had picked up my A levels. I was an orphan in the Hindu-style English caste system, a “ghost” indeed. To them I was therefore faintly detestable, comically inferior, and they were a little surprised, I imagine, that I had even made it that far. Nottingham was not a bad university but it didn’t exactly ring any bells; it had no meaning to the boys who had come down from Oxford and King’s. The only thing that confused them was my accent.

As I say, I had studied their accent and reproduced it. As the country as a whole went more and more prole in its accents, I went the other way and I did it on purpose, because of course now I was at war with it all and I wanted to win at parody while siphoning off as much of Mrs. Butterworth’s money as I could. I stashed it away in various accounts and soon I had an account in Hong Kong, which I was able to open with the help of a friend. It proved to be invaluable. Into Hong Kong I poured all my secrets and hopes. It seemed then like the land of freedom and invisibility.

China. A police state would not seem the ideal place for escape. But what if it was a police state that didn’t like our police? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. No one would go looking for me in a place like Macau, because Macau wasn’t Hong Kong; it was one of the most secretive places on earth. I thought about it a great deal as I paced around Haywards Heath at night, that empty and tomblike place in which only the railway line is a source of life after midnight. It could not be any worse, I thought, than the prison I was already living in. Lodging in a private flat with Mrs. Eaglin on Denman’s Lane, riding to work on a bicycle when it wasn’t raining. A company car, otherwise, a Vauxhall Astra perfect for country lanes but terminally undistinguished. The only thing that redeemed this unworthy existence was the idea that I could get away with the Butterworth dosh. It was a strange thought that I was acquiring all the wealth of that long-dead mining executive. Anglo-American Copper and its tributaries, a vile company in all likelihood, and its treasures had ended up in my secret bank account in Hong Kong. Why would it be immoral to gamble that money away? Would that be worse than the way it had been gained? I remembered how guiltless I had felt, the first time I spent a week in Hong Kong on holiday. Within days I knew the Macau casinos back to front.

It seemed to me that unlike the snobbish and closed world from which I came, this place had a violent democracy about it. I compared it to Haywards Heath and I was charmed. I formed the idea of eloping there with my spoils. A foolish idea, no doubt, childish and naïve. But I was sure that sooner or later the directors would smoke me out, as indeed they eventually did. I didn’t want to go back to the unworthy existence, let alone face psychiatric evaluation and possibly prison, and wanted to keep Mrs. Butterworth’s money, which otherwise would have been sent to the International Society for the Humane Treatment of Marine Mammals.

It was a tense wire to be balanced upon, and I was a poor tightrope walker. One afternoon the senior partner of our firm, Mr. Strick, invited me into his office at the top of the building and frostily asked me to take a seat. He was a very old-school character, much like Mr. Butterworth, I imagine, and he believed in the sterling value of “man-to-man” chats.

“Look here, Doyle,” he said, taking off his glasses and inserting one of the grips into the corner of his mouth, “I’ve always thought you were a rather decent chap, even if you do keep yourself to yourself a bit too much. Some of the others were wondering if a chap like you might feel a tad uncomfortable with chaps like them. I said, he’s a funny old chap and that’s all there is to it. What do you say, Doyle? No after-work pints for you?”

“I’m not much of a drinker, sir.”

“Ah, so that’s it, eh, you’re not a chap who likes to drink too much?”

“No, sir.”

How could I forget that office, with its paperweights filled with pieces of Pacific coral and the golf clubs in glass cases? That smell of shag and woodland mud and stale PG Tips?

“Well, look here, old chap, I’ve noticed that you’ve been eating every lunch at Tiffany’s French place across the roundabout. Rather dear for you, isn’t it?”

“I’ve developed a taste for it, sir.”

“Yes, yes. But what I mean is, Doyle, you seem to have a bit of money to knock around. I’m not aware we gave you a raise.”

We laughed, and for the first time I had an inkling of his suspicion, of the close eye that he was keeping on me. “Everything all right with the Butterworth account? You and Mrs. Butterworth seem awfully tight. You are going there every week? It must be a frightful bore.”

“Not at all. We talk about old films.”

“Do you now? She seems like a frisky old bird. I knew her husband, you know. We played golf together at Ardingly. Spiffing chap and all that, but a bit morose for my taste. They say he made a lot of money in precious metals. But I suppose you’d know all about that.”

I said that I did, and that I took great interest in the account.

“Good show,” he concluded, putting his glasses back on. “But, Doyle — we do have to keep an eye on Mrs. Butterworth. She is not quite in her right mind. I wouldn’t want any irregularities to occur.”

At that moment, in Macau, I looked up from the elaborately designed cards and into the eyes of the English seigneurs on their thoroughbreds. I hated nothing more than them. I saw the puffed face of Mrs. Butterworth laid back against an antimacassar. She had been sweet and arrogant in equal measure. A woman who looked down on me when she had had her wits about her. I had taken her hand when I entered the room and spoken to her close to, stooped to the ear. Yes, Mrs. Butterworth; no, Mrs. Butterworth .