Golden Boy

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

This is one of Rosemary Friedman's best-loved novels. High-flyer Freddie Lomax is vice-chairman of a city bank. Popular and sociable, others are drawn to the magnetic field of his charm. Utterly without warning he is given two hours to clear his desk and finds himself joining the ranks of the middle-aged unemployed. His confidence that a new job will appear proves unfounded and with his self-esteem in tatters he takes his frustrations out on his wife. After reaching rock bottom and attempting to take his own life, Freddie befriends Becky, an abused adolescent patient in the psychiatric clinic to which he is referred, and through helping her finds his own salvation and saves his marriage.

Release date: June 30, 2006

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 189

Sample

Certain moments. Hiroshima. The assassination of President Kennedy. The first fuzzy footfall of the first man on the moon. The photoflash of recollection. By its brief light we remember what we were doing, at the time, in the hours before. Putting the kettle on. Making love. Precedent memories quantify significant events. Cataclysm is blunted by quotidian trivia. I was listening to the Goldberg Variations/following the safety instructions/spraying the roses/walking down Whitehall… The icons that surround the event eclipse the event itself.

Which was why Freddie Lomax would always recall his fortieth birthday and the circumstances which preceded it. They were perpetuated on the internal cassette of things past. He played it on the VCR of his memory, fast-forwarding and rewinding it. It was accompanied by digital sound.


Days such as these begin like any other. Nothing untoward. Freddie’s did. Jogging round the Outer Circle. His morning routine was important. Not only for the exercise but the structuring of his day. It was not possible to plan and work simultaneously. Strategy must be separated from execution. To save time, minimise effort, it must be dealt with in advance.

Circumventing the park each morning gave him the opportunity to define targets and establish deadlines. Freed him for immediate action once he got to work. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Worry beads in one hand, telephone in the other. A well-built man. Six foot three. Riviera tan. Soon to be topped up at Porto Ercole. Last year it was Sardinia. He didn’t believe in owning second homes; or boats. The economics were wrong. Freddie had his head screwed on.


Friends had villas, James and Dos – wife number two. Wife number one, who had stuck with James when he was struggling to build up his construction business, had been put out to grass with what she could squeeze out of him. ‘Dos’. James had had the epithet perpetuated in 18-carat gold. Dos wore it round her neck, skinny-dipping, with her silicone breasts, in the kidney-shaped pool. You punched a keypad outside the iron gates to enter. The code changed every day. A butler served bullshots. Dos was renowned for them. By their bullshots shall ye know them. Lunch at the villa went on all afternoon. Sometimes they ate at the African Queen. The whole shooting match. At a long outdoor table, over deep bowls of moules marinières, overlooking the harbour. No matter where he sat amongst the noisy gathering, Freddie Lomax was its epicentre. Conversation was aimed in his direction, faces drawn into the magnetic field of his charm. He turned heads. Drawing the eyes of passing girls as bronzed as himself. Freddie gambled with skin cancer as he did at the tables. Never risking much. Getting out when he was ahead. He was at his peak. Dressed to complement his physique. Had his suits made, dark blue or grey, by Douggie Hayward in Mount Street. Didn’t begrudge the arm and the leg. The suits were his calling card. Gave his clients confidence. Hermès tie. Silk handkerchief. A right nerd, Rosina said. Secretly she was proud of him.


He dropped her off at school on occasion, Queen’s College in Harley Street, before going on to the bank. Rosina wore a bundle of rags, in decorative leather or denim. From Camden market. Freddie footed the bills for them. At fifteen, the chrysalis of puppy fat falling away, Rosina was turning into Jane as she had been when he’d first met her. Sometimes, catching sight of his daughter, Jane’s freckles, her bright red hair, it startled him. Rosina was into heavy metal. Read Rock Power, and Kerrang!, when she should have been doing her homework, moshed to the thrashes of Impetigo and Recipients of Death ‘singing against oppression’, and had to be forcibly restrained from tattooing her arms and joining the slam pit (everyone else’s parents let them) at the Hammersmith Odeon on Saturday nights.

Thump-thump. Elbows in. Freddie’s shirts came from Turnbull and Asser. White only. He had his shoes made at Lobb’s. The size of a man’s feet was said to be directly related to that of his penis. Freddie had large feet. Charlie, at Michaeljohn, styled his fair hair – now sometimes assisted by a vegetable rinse. He had had golden curls as a baby. His mother never tired of telling him. Passers-by had stopped to admire her son as she pushed him in his pram. He watched his weight. Mineral water at lunch. No pudding. He kept in trim. Weight training at a gym in the City. Golf at weekends. Tennis in the park. Squash twice a week with James. At the Bath and Racquets. Followed by a swim. At Cambridge he had been on the water-polo team. He had shoulders like a navvy. Thump-thump. His vest stuck to his back. Water trickled down the inside of his thighs. Thump-thump. In his Nike Air. Releasing the endorphins. Every thump a pain.

Regent’s Park had once been pasture land, Marylebone Park Fields: the gravel pit field, the pound field for stray cattle, sheep and horses, the bell field, the butcher’s field, the field where copal varnish was manufactured. It had been used by royalty for game hunting. Ulster Terrace: Ionic columns. York Terrace, spanning York Gate. Mr Nash in Graeco-Italian mode. Sixty-one houses designed to give the appearance of a single building. North to Cornwall Terrace. Decimus Burton, into Corinthian. Burton had wanted to elide the two terraces, Cornwell and Clarence, which had the finest views of the lake, leaving no access to the park from Upper Baker Street.


Mrs Siddons, whose house was at the top of the street, had complained to the Prince Regent about the proposed obstruction to her view. The result of the actress’ petition was Clarence Gate, an entrance to the park which, as the morning progressed, would throttle itself with commuter traffic, extracted from the dreaming suburbs and heading for the West End. The half-moon of Sussex Place (Nash again) now home to the London Business School.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Hanover Terrace. A grey squirrel darted impudently across his path. Hanover Gate. Hanover Lodge. The golden dome of the Mosque behind its picket fence, mobbed by the faithful on Fridays when it was flanked by the psychedelic stalls of Arab street vendors. Thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. A posse of bull-headed runners from the army barracks in Albany Street. Ionic Villa, Veneto Villa – a Petit Trianon in Regent’s Park – receiving the finishing touches to their grotesque exteriors. Nine million pounds apiece. The rape of the park by the Crown. The iron bridge over the canal, escape route from St John’s Wood, once itself steeped in history and rife with illicit love nests, home now to arrivistes with disabled badges, double-parked in the High Street, waging an ongoing battle with the traffic wardens.


The shuttered entrance to the Zoo. Entrèe/Eingang. Its appalling penguin pool, brutalistic elephant house and archaic buildings recently threatened with closure, now besieged by rescue plans for walk-through aquaria and rainforest terraces, and the subject of fierce controversy. Freddie had refused to sign the petition on behalf of the families who trailed recalcitrant children clutching Zeppelin balloons round the lions and the tigers. He could not accept that it was right to immure wild animals in minimalist cages, and was reluctant to put his name to the creation of what amounted to a theme park on his own doorstep.

The Zoological Society, beneath its clock and weather vane. Gloucester Gate. Any second now the milkman should be approaching, his electric float rattling with bottles of semi-skimmed milk and cartons of orange juice for the sleeping doorsteps. He was. Everything satisfactorily to time. The roundsman did not glance in his direction. He had once tried to cheat Freddie. Unaware that Freddie could multiply the number of days by the number of pints with the speed and precision of a microchip. Now the account from the dairy accounted for no more, and no less, than had been delivered.

Gloucester Terrace. Freddie wiped the sweat from his neck, savouring the punishment he inflicted on his body, as he headed into the straight with a sideways glance at the Danish Church in St Katharine’s Precinct with its echoes of Cambridge and weddings on Saturdays.

He and Jane had been married for seventeen years. They had stayed together while their contemporaries, in the throes of complex divorces or embittered battles over children or messes of contested pottage, played a marital version of musical chairs to the phrenetic music of the times. That the stability of their marriage was largely due to Jane, Freddie had little doubt. They had met in Cambridge. James, who changed his girlfriends as frequently as his socks, had brought her to the pub. Jane, on holiday from the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, was his latest acquisition. They were sitting at a corner table over glasses of lager. Jane was wearing a magenta dress, a panama hat encircled with yellow ribbons pulled down over the freckles. She held a miniature wire-haired terrier on her lap and was absent-mindedly stroking its balls. The moment he saw her, Freddie made up his mind to marry her. He had no qualms about seducing her from James.


James’ arm was round Jane’s shoulders in a proprietorial way. Freddie brought his beer over and sat down beside them. Jane did not change her position on the window seat, did not remove James’ hand from her waist where it had wandered, yet imperceptibly she distanced herself from him and moved towards Freddie as unequivocally as if she were crossing the street. They spent the night in his room. Tristan was three weeks old, and Jane and Freddie had been married for six months, before James, accepting the peace offering of being godfather to their son, forgave him.

Cumberland Terrace, its blue pediment topped with genteel ceramic figures representing the arts and sciences, was the grandest of all the terraces. As he thumped his way past its decorative arches, Freddie admitted thoughts of home and anticipated the hot needles of the shower with which he would soon reward himself.

Since his mother had taken him, first to feed the ducks, and later to play in Regent’s Park as a small boy, he had been mesmerised by the blank stares of the stately façades of the terraces. It was where he would live when he grew up. As he kicked his ball in the long grass and picked daisies for her first bouquet, he had enquired if the buildings were palaces and if the Queen lived there. You have to be very rich, his mother had said, taking him later to Buckingham Palace where he had counted the windows. So he had decided to be rich; and to marry his mother who was making a chain out of the yellow-centred daisies. And make her his queen. When his father, a much-loved physician, had died from a subarachnoid haemorrhage while he was playing cricket with the 6-year-old Freddie in the garden, Freddie was convinced that he had killed him. He kept a photograph of his father beneath his pillow while he slept, and wrote letters to heaven begging him to come back. He tried hard to remember him, but had few recollections at his disposal, and after a while there was only an aching void.


Freddie’s childhood had been filled with music. Its manifestation in Freddie was his passion for opera. His mother had been a professional pianist. His father, who played the violin, had belonged to an amateur string quartet, although Freddie could not remember it. He did not play an instrument. His mother, with little time to spare, had not been able to interest him in one. Her only son, born at the very end of her reproductive life, was destined to be a man who glittered as he walked. Brought up, single-handed, to be a credit to her, Freddie had conformed to her spurious vision of himself. Widely tipped to be the next chairman of his bank, he had not let her down.

Chester Terrace, with its colonnades and columns rivalling the Tuileries, was Burton’s final undertaking in the park. Turning into it Freddie experienced a frisson of delight, the daily suspension of disbelief that this rus in urbe was where he lived. He had worked hard for his success. Driven by his aspirations and performing best under pressure, possessed of reserves of energy normally associated with hyperactive children and resolved at all times to excel, his work was his life. He was never happier than when he was immersed in it. A scholarship to Trinity, where he had read economics, had followed his graduation summa cum laude from grammar school, after which, impatiently dismissing the year off taken by many of his contemporaries, he had gone straight into commerce to master banking from the grass roots. As he gradually distanced himself physically from his mother, who was reluctant to let him go, he changed from being a happy schoolboy, to an outgoing student and now, with his extraordinary zest for life, was a poplar and gregarious man, who made a point of keeping his many friendships in constant repair. Tough, but not insensitive, Freddie’s name in the City was synonymous with contentious takeover bids. He was an acknowledged trailblazer, an awesome adversary, a skilled negotiator who never missed an opportunity to make serious money for his clients or to further the interests of the bank. He had been brought up to believe that good manners and self-discipline were the key to personal happiness, and he looked for the same high standards from others that he demanded from himself. A reprimand from Freddie had been known to leave the entrails of his subordinates hanging from the ceiling.


Freddie’s goal, to have his own bank before he reached the age of 50, represented his deep-seated need to be in control. He coped with failure badly, was not good at forgiving himself and was incapable of forgiving others. He was hardest on those close to him, and the one closest to him was himself.

After their marriage, he and Jane had set up home in a rented, one-bedroomed flat in Earls Court where they waited for Tristan to be born. When Rosina was on the way, he had put down the first payment on a terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush and his move to a more senior position in a second bank, led to a Norman Shaw semi-detached in Bedford Park. A larger Norman Shaw, this time detached, coincided with his joining Sitwell Hunt International as head of the corporate finance division. His swift promotion to vice-chairman was the catalyst for their final move, to the house in Chester Terrace. Freddie had bought it in the days of the property boom upon which it had seemed that the sun would never set. By mortgaging himself to the hilt, he had realised the first of his boyhood dreams.


Outside his house, its stucco exterior painted every fourth year at the behest of the Crown, George, the postman, lopsided with the weight of his sack, was sorting letters. Running on the spot, to reduce his blood pressure slowly, Freddie waited impatiently for his mail.

‘Everything okay?’

George had recently undergone coronary bypass surgery. Walking was the exercise of choice. He would always be grateful to Freddie, who never failed to stop for a morning chat, for insisting that he have a checkup for the pains in his chest which he had put down to indigestion.

‘Mustn’t grumble…’ George handed Freddie a bundle secured with an elastic band. ‘Not with nearly three million out of work.’ He swung his bag over his shoulder. ‘As long as the old ticker holds up. If I go under, the chances of getting another job… I’d never get past question two on the form. Question one’s your name. Question two’s your date of birth. If you’re over forty they don’t want to know. It’s the kids I worry about. The kids, the mortgage, the insurance, the gas, the electric, the poll tax, the water, the TV licence… Everything going up every week. My wife goes shopping with a calculator. Trouble is there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. To tell you the truth, Mr Lomax, and you know more about it in your line than me, I think they’ve bricked the ruddy tunnel up.’


Opening his front door, Freddie stopped in the narrow hall with its parquet floor and giltwood mirror, and checked his pulse rate. Picking up the newspapers from the mat, he took the mahogany balustraded stairs two at a time.

In the bedroom, Jane was still asleep. She lay on her back with the sheets round her waist. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the words ‘Happy Birthday’ emblazoned in scarlet across her breasts. Smiling to himself, Freddie put the mail down on the bed. As he bent to kiss her, she twined unconscious arms tightly round his neck for a moment then promptly turned over and went back to sleep. Glancing briefly at the bedside clock, he crept into his dressing-room and closed the door gently behind him.




While his vice-chairman and head of corporate finance prepared to meet the day, Gordon Sitwell, chairman of Sitwell Hunt International – a bank founded by his grandfather to finance trade in the British Empire, America, China, and Japan – who had been knighted by Margaret Thatcher before her fall, for services to business achievement (also known as substantial donations to the party), was breakfasting in the kitchen of his mansion in Priory Drive, Stanmore, with his wife, Margaret.

‘Don’t forget we’re going to Freddie and Jane’s tonight.’ Margaret, whose candlewick dressing gown was drawn tightly over the cushion of her bosom, addressed the expanse of Financial Times behind which her husband might be thought to be hiding. The fact that there was no reply, that he had completely forgotten that it was Freddie’s birthday and that they were expected at Chester Terrace for dinner, did not faze her.

‘I’ll look for something on my way to the hairdresser’s. Men are always so difficult. Particularly men like Freddie…’ Margaret pushed the marmalade jar across the wooden table into the outstretched hand which appeared from behind the newspaper. ‘…Men who have everything.’ Margaret held her bone china teacup in both hands. ‘A book – but then I don’t know what Freddie reads – a tie perhaps, a photograph frame for the office…’

Gordon turned the page abruptly.

‘…Bittermints. He probably doesn’t touch chocolate. How about a bottle of something? More coffee?’

The top of Gordon’s grey head, which was all she could see of her husband, moved from side to side.


‘I’ll have a look in that shop at the bottom of the hill – the one that used to be the fishmonger’s. They sell all that in the supermarket now. Cadeaux. They’ve got leather things and cake plates and silver pillboxes in the window. I don’t suppose a silver pillbox…?’

Margaret was talking to herself. It was not unusual. The Financial Times lay folded against the marmalade jar, Gordon’s chair was empty, and he was already in his rose garden.

Growing roses was Gordon’s hobby. It encompassed the world of propagating and exhibiting as well as paying regular visits to the great rose gardens of the world. The diversion occupied most of his leisure moments, enabled him to forget his disappointment in his marriage, and provided a suitable antidote to the stresses of the City. His roses, on view annually to the public in aid of the National Gardens Scheme, were at the moment faring a great deal better than his bank.

As he selected a rose for the buttonhole of his pinstriped suit, a daily decision not taken lightly, he contemplated the dismal state of the British economy. After the euphoria of the eighties with its global markets, indiscriminate asset stripping, and sky-high share indexes, which had been followed by the seismic flutters of Black Thursday and the catastrophic nose-dive of Black Monday (when £100 billion was wiped from shares and thousands of job losses were triggered in the City), the spacecraft, which had been launched so optimistically, to break through the sound barrier with the Big Bang, had finally crashed to earth. With the collapse of the markets, the entire financial sector had suffered one of its biggest setbacks on record and was now undergoing the sharpest decline of the century. In the light of the gloomy forecasts and massive lay-offs, the party was well and truly over. There were few indications that the situation was going to improve.


In the past three months alone there had been almost 16,000 personal bankruptcies. Liquidations and receiverships were escalating, car sales were disastrous, house prices had dropped, consumer confidence had fallen, and people feared for their livelihoods. There was no area which had not been hit. The building trade had empty order books and showed the worst figures for a decade; Rolls-Royce aero-engine had closed two plants, imposed a six-month pay freeze – with the warning of more cuts to come – and drastically reduced its workforce, and thousands of civil engineering workers, highly qualified staff among them, had been paid off.

It was not only industry which was affected. There had been wholesale redundancies in publishing, insurance, advertising, television, and hospital services. Professionals, no longer able to honour their agreements with the mortgage companies, were in serious difficulties, and qualified lawyers, particularly those specialising in commercial property in London where thousands of square feet of office accommodation lay empty, were finding themselves out on the street.

Solicitors were not the only ones soliciting. Gordon excused himself the pun. Not since the time of Dickens, or the days after the First World War when amputees and gas victims rattled collecting boxes on every street corner, had London seen so many beggars. White-faced girls with shaven heads and youths with tattered trousers, had joined the winos and the bag ladies in the shadows of underground stations and shopping malls. They squatted in the doorways and declared themselves hungry. Gordon did not believe them. Many of the scavengers had been revealed to be con artists, with perfectly decent homes to go to, who belonged to begging rings and waged terror campaigns on the legitimate homeless. Be that as it may, the mendicants were a symptom of an economic climate which was as dismal as any that Gordon, at the age of 63, could remember. Although profits would be meagre and the appetite for debt, both amongst companies and personal customers, severely limited, he hoped that Sitwell Hunt International, backed as it was by so many years of family tradition and – if push came to shove – by the Bank of England, would be able to ride out the storm.


In his garden, laid out forty years ago when he had brought Margaret to Tall Trees as a young bride, Gordon Sitwell could forget the bank. Margaret, who came from Cornwall, had wanted a country garden, hollyhocks, sunflowers, foxgloves and delphiniums, such as she had been brought up with, but Gordon was unable to tolerate such rampant chaos and had settled upon a garden devoted to roses, for which he bought the best possible stock from the most reputable growers.

There was a great deal more to roses than simply digging a hole and planting a bush. Before he even lifted a spade, Gordon evaluated his site, made blueprints of his layout and set about making the necessary improvements to the soil. Now, a formal bed, flanked by an emerald frame of grass paths, traversed the centre of the garden. His instinct had been to fill the rectangle with a single shade, a single variety of rose, but common sense had prevailed. Taking into consideration the unkempt appearance which a paperwork of different colours would create, Gordon had staggered his planting, interspersing the bushes of red Hybrid Teas with clumps of white, yellow, and pink. For added interest, and bearing in mind the fact that a bed, unlike a border, had to be viewed from all angles, he had placed a column of standard Chrysler Imperials (the full fragrant flowers of which bloomed from June to November), at intervals down the centre. He did not allow underplanting. When Margaret had tentatively suggested that they might put in a few violas, some clumps of primulas, a little ageratum or lobelia beneath the Cologne Carnivals and the Summer Sunshine, or that he consider Super Star, or Sterling Silver, as suitable for indoor decoration, he had told her that if she wanted flowers for the house he would give her money to buy them, and that the next thing that she would be asking for was gnomes.


Selecting his roses, and increasing his stock, represented only a fraction of Gordon’s extra-curricular activities. He protected his plants from disease and, keeping an eye out for blackspot, blind shoots, scorching, and reversion, tended them when they were sick. In the mornings, the dew soaking his slippers, he dusted the leaves against pests, and in the evenings he sprayed them. He hoed and mulched, tied and watered, deadheaded and disbudded. He waged war against the froghopper, the sawfly, and the aphids, and drew up his battle lines at the first sign of mildew, canker or rust.


Pruning was his forte. Taking care not to do it so early as to risk injury from frost, nor leave it so late that the sap had begun to flow, he carried it out at the first sign of new growth. He was a ruthless pruner, attributing the success of his roses to the efficiency with which he annually cut them back.

Now, as he contemplated a perfect bloom for his buttonhole, one which would reflect his mood and set the tenor of his day, he was aware of Margaret walking towards him across the York stone terrace, between the pergolas of Golden Shower and Albertine. She was wearing a print frock, the garishly coloured flowers of which went ill with the deep, rich crimson of Madame Louise Laperrière and the orange-yellow of Beauté, and overpowered the creams and ivories of Virgo and Pascali. He disliked the frock almost as much as he disliked her candlewick dressing gown.


Marrying Margaret, forty years ago, had been a mistake. With roses you got exactly what you paid for, bushes of good breed, purchased from a reputable grower being a guarantee of success. Margaret, a young rose from Truro, deliciously perfumed, deep-bosomed, falsely promising to flower over a long period, seemed perfect for bedding. He had been beguiled by the short-lived radiance of her bloom.


It had been a lacklustre marriage. Once the novelty of Margaret’s suffused white breasts, minuscule waist, and thighs hardened by riding on the Cornish sands, which he thought would squeeze the life out of him, had palled, the children began to arrive, and she had turned her limited intellect to the romances of Mills & Boon, Gordon had found little to engage him in the girl he had married. She had been a good wife, he could not deny Margaret that. But their only meeting points, now that the children were grown up, were discussions about the grandchildren, their holiday plans, or what they were to have for dinner.

As far as sex was concerned, sleeping with Margaret was like making love to an aquiescent mound of well-risen dough, and was equally exciting. He gave her her ‘jollies’, which, aroused by her reading matter and lost in her own fantasies, she still expected, but for his own gratification he cruised the pavements of the London streets at night, appraising, but not handling the goods. Once, as he kerb crawled, he had found himself staring into the face of a smooth-chinned police officer through the window. Ordered out of the car, he had stood abjectly amongst the flaccid condoms and used syringes that littered the wastelands of King’s Cross, while he was questioned. He had been let off with a caution, but aware of the scandal which his arrest would have precipitated in the banking world, he had restrained his nocturnal activities for some time.


‘What do you think, Gordon…’ Margaret said, holding out the shiny pleats of her skirt before him.

Gordon noticed that she had applied lipstick in much the same shade of scarlet as the poppies on her dress, and that it had leaked into small unattractive tributaries around her mouth.

‘…for Freddie’s party?’

An invitation to Chester Terrace was a high spot in Margaret’s life. Although she and Gordon rattled in Tall Trees now that the children were gone, and had sufficient china and glass to feed a regiment, few people came to dinner. When they did, although Margaret was a good cook, it could in no way be compared with an evening at the Lomaxes’. No matter how hard Margaret tried, she could not turn her house into a palace and herself into a queen, not even for a night. She could not move through a room delighting the women and riveting the men, convincing each one in turn that he was the guest of honour. She could not sparkle and dazzle, giving the impression that everything that came out of her mouth was either stupendously important or devastatingly witty. She could not flirt and seduce, fascinate and entrance, captivate and charm. She was neither attractive nor animated, neither elegant nor graceful. Her eyes were not green and her hair was not red. Her skirts were not short and her legs were not long. She was not Jane Lomax.

Gordon, walking ahead of her with his pruning knife, was contemplating the orange-veined Bettina and the gilded Gail Borden for his buttonhole, with a gravitas equal to that he gave to the affairs of the bank. He would not cut a rose for Margaret and she knew better than to ask for one. Margaret did get roses. The first rose of summer, the last rose, remembrance of things past, left wordle