"Innes, Hammond - The Strode Venturer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Innes Hammond)

'Do you know his name?'

But he shook his head. 'No, only that he's . . . well, a bit of a rolling stone, if you see what I mean.'

So that was it and the Strode I'd met was probably still wandering around the world. Feeling suddenly tired I went out again into Leadenhall Street, to the throb of buses and heavy lorries pumping diesel fumes into the narrow gut between the grubby buildings. I would like to have gone back to the hotel and had a bath, perhaps a short sleep, but it was a long way and there was at least one other man I knew in the City, a stockbroker in Copthall Court. The last time I had seen him had been at a party in Harwich Town Hall the night before the North Sea Race. I'd been crewing in one of the R.N.A.S. boats; he'd been racing his own yacht. That was nearly five years ago.

I went down Bishopsgate and then turned left into Threadneedle Street, a gleam of watery sunlight softening the facade of the Bank of England. All about me were buildings that seemed to date from the massive Victorian age of greatness, richly ornate, stolid buildings grimed with dirt, their interiors permanently lit by artificial light. The people in the streets, mostly men wearing dark suits, some with bowler hats, looked pale and ill, like busy termites coming out of dark holes in the grey slabs of the buildings. And when I came to Throgmorton Street and the Stock Exchange, the City seemed to swallow me, the narrow street closing in above my head. A top-hatted broker passed me, his pallid features a dyspeptic grey, his mouth a tight line. Youths jostled each other as they scurried hatless from place to place. And on every face, it seemed to me, there was a strange lack of human feeling as though the concentration on finance had bitten deep into all their souls. It was an alien world, far more alien to me than a foreign port.

Copthall Court was through an archway opposite the Stock Exchange and in a building half-way down it I found the firm I wanted listed among about a hundred others on a great board opposite the lift. Their offices were on the sixth floor, a group of poky little cubby-holes looking out on to the blank wall of the neighbouring building. To my surprise George Latham seemed as bronzed and as fit as when I had last seen him. What is more he recognised me at once. 'Come in, dear boy. Come in.' He took me into his office which he shared with two of his partners and an Exchange Telegraph tape machine that tickered away erratically. 'Excuse the mess.' There was barely room to move in the litter of desks and papers. 'Only got back the other day. Been in the Caribbean and now I'm trying to catch up.' He was a big bull of a man, broad-shouldered, with a massive square-jawed head. 'Well now, what can I do for you? No good asking me what to buy. I don't know. Market should have gone to hell with the collapse of the Common Market talks. But it hasn't, God knows why.'

'I want your advice about some Strode Orient shares I hold.'

At that he raised his eyes heavenwards and heaved a sigh. 'For God's sake, man. What price did you pay?' And when I told him I'd inherited them from my mother who'd been given them in 1940 he seemed relieved. 'I thought for a moment you'd been caught when they were run up to over five shillings a couple of months or so back. A take-over rumour, but nothing came of it. Strode & Company blocked it. They own about forty-five per cent, of the shares.' He reached for The Financial Times and checked down the list of quotations. 'They're now about two bob nominal. Just a moment. I'll get the Ex Tel card.' He went to a filing cabinet and came back with a card that gave all the details of the company. 'Yes, I remember now. Some slick outfit thought they'd make a killing. The company owns seventeen vessels standing in the balance sheet at just over a million. The scrap value alone must be all of that and even in the present depressed state of shipping there'd be a market for the five newer vessels. Say a million and a half for them and half a million for the rest. That's two million plus half a million cash. The capital is four and a half million in one pound shares which means that at five bob a share, which was what these boys were offering, they would have had the whole boiling for little more than a million.'

'They offered me ten shillings a share,' I said.

'And you didn't take it?'

I told him the whole story then, producing from my pocket the company's photostat copy of the letter of acceptance my mother had signed. He read it through and then shook his head. 'I can't advise you on this and I doubt whether your solicitors could either. You'd need to take counsel's opinion to find out whether it really was binding on you as the present owner of the shares. How many do you hold?'

'Twenty thousand.'

'Well, I can tell you this: you put twenty thousand on the market as it is at present and you wouldn't get anywhere near two bob. Probably you wouldn't get an offer. Still, it might be worth spending fifty quid for an opinion -just in case the boys who were after the company become active again. You never know. They may find a way of getting control. Let's see what the market thinks.' He reached for the telephone and in two minutes had the answer. 'Well now, this is interesting. Apparently they've switched their campaign from Strode Orient to the parent outfit, Strode & Company. The jobbers say they can't hope to get control through the market. As with Strode Orient, the public holds less than fifty per cent, of the capital, but they've pushed the shares up from around eight shillings to nine shillings and sixpence in the past month so it looks as though some of the family may have sold out. Not that it helps you.' He sat back in his chair, swivelling it round to face me. 'Pity your mother couldn't have sold her shares when old Henry Strode was alive. I remember when I first started in as a stockbroker after the war Strode Orient were virtually a blue chip and stood at over four pounds, which meant that at that time her holding was worth all of eighty thousand.' He smiled. 'But that's the Stock Exchange for you. If you know when to buy and when to sell . . .' He gave a little shrug. 'Maybe I live too close to it. I'm in and out of the market and I make a bit here and there, but as you see, I'm still working for my living.

I wasn't really listening to him. I was thinking of what had happened to the Strode shipping empire since Henry Strode had died and what it meant to me. Eighty thousand! And now, even if I could find a way round the agreement, those shares were worth less than my gratuity. 'Any point in going to the meeting to-morrow?' I asked.

'The meeting? Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. The market is expecting the chairman to face some awkward questions. Could be some fireworks, in fact. Apparently one of the big institutions purchased a large block of Strode Orient shares when they were marked down on the death of the old chairman and they've been stuck with them ever since.' The phone rang and when he'd answered it he punched the Ex Tel card across to me. 'Henry Strode died in 1955 and the price of the shares in that year ranged from a low of forty-two shillings to a high of fifty-eight and six. Even around the low they must have paid more than twenty times the present price. That's not a very good record for an institution.' He got to his feet. 'I've got to go and deal for a client now. But I should go to the meeting if you've nothing better to do.' And he added as he held the door open for me, 'Practically all our shipping companies are the same; they've been too bloody slow to move with the times. They've stuck to the small general-purpose tramp and let the Swedes and the Norwegians with their big specialised bulk carriers grab the much more lucrative long-term charter business. But the Strode Orient Line has been about the slowest of the lot. If you go to the meeting you'll see the sort of management you've got.

'The trouble with meetings,' he went on as we waited for the lift, 'is that the chairman doesn't have to answer any questions put to him by shareholders. It's only when shareholders get together with sufficient voting strength to push the old directors out and get their own men in that the fur really begins to fly. Directors love their salaries, you know. Or perhaps, I should say in these days of high taxation that, like politicians, they love the power and advantages of their positions - the chauffeur-driven car, the big office, expense accounts, the ability to make and break people, to order others about. Those they cling to like limpets.' He laughed as we went out into the street. "So would I. And so would you if you had the chance. It's the only way to live well in a country where the State dominates. The Russians discovered it long ago, and when all's said and done the power of the State is now so great that the gap between our brand of capitalism and Russia's brand of Communism is closing all the time.' We had reached Throgmorton Street and he paused. 'Do I gather you've left the Navy?'

'In the process of leaving,' I said.

'Well, get yourself with one of the big institutions, or better still with a small one that's growing.' He glanced round, seeming to savour the bustle of the street. 'Whatever they say about the City, it's still a huge dynamo with its tentacles reaching out to every corner of the globe. If you've the right contacts . . .' He smiled and left it at that. 'Well, sorry I couldn't be of more help to you.' A quick pat on the arm and he was gone, moving quickly across the street and up the steps into the Stock Exchange.

The Sun had broken through now and patches of blue sky showed between the buildings. I walked to the Bank and on down Queen Victoria Street. Here I was in an area of new office blocks and the sense of power and wealth that surrounded me was very strong. I felt suddenly alone and without purpose in a world that had its own built-in dynamic drive. I had always heard it said that a human being could feel lonelier in London than in any city in the world and now it was beginning to be true for me. It was natural, I suppose, that at that moment my thought should have turned to Barbara, now some eight thousand miles away. I wondered if she realised how she'd driven me to this and how much she was a part of the loneliness I felt.

When a marriage goes wrong it's difficult not to blame the other partner. You see their faults so clearly. You never see your own. How much was I to blame? Again, I didn't know. She'd been barely twenty when I'd rushed her into marriage in 1949. I hadn't stopped to consider how glamourous Ceylon must have seemed to a young and very vital girl straight from the austerity of post-war Britain. We were in love and it was so marvellous that that was all that had seemed to matter. It was only later that I began to realise that the vitality that had attracted me to her in the first place was not just physical, but an expression of a furious energy that conditioned her whole mental approach to life so that she grabbed at it with both hands like a child unable to resist forbidden fruit. She wanted the stars as well as the moon. The excitement and novelty of having children had satisfied her for a time, but after that . . . God knows what she had been up to in the long periods when I was away at sea. I hadn't dared inquire too closely. The satisfaction of sexual appetite can be a useful palliative to women when ambition is thwarted and abundant natural energy frustrated. It wasn't altogether her fault, but I couldn't help thinking with envy of some of my fellow officers. The strength they drew from a happy marriage was something I had never had. And now in a last desperate effort to deal with the problem I had abandoned a career for which I had been trained all my life. I was feeling very bitter as I walked towards Blackfriars, drawn inevitably towards the river, the one link in this city with the world I knew and loved. I'd see the children. That was something, at any rate, John was at prep school near Hailsham and Mary at a convent school in the same county. Hostages to the future and in sense my only sheet anchor. Now that I was away from Barbara she didn't seem to matter so much. But these two did and I felt I couldn't fail them.

I was passing The Times building then and the sight of it reminded me that I had met one of their correspondents at the time of the Oman war. But when I went in and inquired for him I was told that he was in South Rhodesia. I had never been in a newspaper office before and seeing the copies of the day's paper spread about and people looking through them I realised that here was a world whose function was to record the news, to record it permanently in print. 'How far do your records go back?' I asked.

'You want to look something up?' the man at the desk asked. 'We've all the back issues. If you'd care to give me the date, sir?'

'I can give you the year. It was 1931.'

'And the subject?'

'Strode & Company's acquisition of the Bailey Oriental Line and anything you have on the death of Sir Reginald Bailey. That was 21st December, 1931. There might be an obituary.'

He nodded and reached for the phone. It was all much easier than I had expected and in less than quarter of an hour I was seated at a table with several bound volumes of The Times stacked beside me and a list of references. What precisely it was that made me want to rake over the past I don't quite know, but once started, I sat there reading on and on, fascinated by the picture conjured up by those faded columns of print. It was all there - the cut-throat competition for freight as world trade slumped, the news that two of the largest shareholders in Bailey Oriental, one of them my father's own brother, had sold out to Henry Strode, and then the long-drawn-out struggle for control with my father pledging his credit to the limit and beyond in a wild and reckless attempt to buy back control in the open market. Mostly the story was confined to the financial pages so that much of it was written in terms that were difficult to follow, but I understood enough of it to read between the lines and realise what my father must have gone through. Only in the final stages did it spread over into the general news pages. This was when Strode began to unload and the market in Bailey Oriental collapsed overnight. He had timed it so that he caught my father over-extended, with short-term loans falling due and a large block of shares he couldn't pay for. The result was bankruptcy. Three months later, in the issue of 23rd December, I found the obituary. He'd died at Sea, in one of his own ships. He was given ten lines, that was all; ten lines written in such a way that I was reminded of the letter from Strode I had found amongst my mother's things. Both the obituary and that letter implied something that was never stated.