The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger - David Nobbs

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he didn’t. His body still didn’t stir.

      This was dreadful. Regret could play no part in his life. There wasn’t time for regret. Besides, he had everything he wanted. How can a man have regrets if he has everything he wants? Because he didn’t want to have everything he wanted? That was ridiculous. Because he didn’t actually have everything he wanted? Because it was impossible to have everything you wanted, because what you wanted came attached to what you didn’t want, as in fame and photographers?

      Photographers! If he had known what was to come!

      And yet – and again this only occurred to him afterwards – that morning he did have at least an inkling of what was to come. He had a presentiment. Perhaps, he would suggest to his doctor later, his blankness had been caused by his having, subconsciously, a presentiment that he was going to have a presentiment. His doctor, who was Scottish, would say that was a bit too fanciful for him. He would say that there must have been a physical cause, the position he had slept in, the supply of blood, maybe even some kind of very minor stroke. He would suggest tests. Sir Gordon would pretend to agree.

      At last he began to move, easing himself slowly out of the king-sized bed. He padded carefully across the thick, luscious carpet in the utter blackness. He knew from long experience the exact position of the door. He placed his hand on the handle, turned it ever so slowly.

      Lady Coppinger gave a low moan which seemed to Sir Gordon to be a rebuke of cosmic proportions, but she didn’t wake.

      He was relieved that his wife was still asleep, that he didn’t have to face her yet.

      So it had come to this.

       The suspicions that would overwhelm him

      He seated himself at the round rosewood (what else?) dining table in the exact centre of the gigantic dining room, whose panelling was as Elizabethan as it could be in a house built in 1932. The table seated twelve, and most mornings, as he breakfasted in solitary splendour, he derived pleasure from the sight of the eleven empty places.

      He was smartly dressed in the clothes Lady Coppinger had laid out for him the previous evening. He had no colour sense. She did. You couldn’t breed roses without having a colour sense.

      Farringdon emerged from the kitchens and slid gravely towards Sir Gordon like a stately home on legs. He carried a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a pile of newspapers. Sir Gordon, who was still feeling quite deeply disturbed by his lapse of memory, tried to look the essence of calm, and gave a small, studied smile.

      ‘Good morning, Farringdon,’ he said, and he thought he detected a slight nervous quiver in his voice. Farringdon didn’t appear to notice it, but then Farringdon would not have appeared to notice it if his employer had come in to breakfast naked. In the early days Sir Gordon had been slightly unnerved by Farringdon’s eyes. There never seemed to be any expression in them. It looked, in certain lights, from certain angles, as if he had two glass eyes. Sir Gordon was used to this now. He found it restful.

      ‘Good morning, sir. Sir has slept well?’ said Farringdon gravely.

      ‘Sir has slept very well, thank you, Farringdon.’

      ‘That is good news, sir.’

      The politenesses over, Farringdon got straight down to business, listing for Sir Gordon, in the unchanging daily ritual, all the pages of the newspapers that mentioned him: ‘Telegraph page seven, Times business page two, Sun page two—’

      ‘Opposite the totty!’

      ‘Indeed, sir.’

      ‘Mirror page twenty-seven—’

      ‘Page twenty-seven! That’s a bit far back.’

      ‘Indeed, sir, but perhaps the fact that it is a page lead will assuage the disappointment.’

      Sir Gordon wasn’t given to idle speculation, but even he did wonder sometimes if Farringdon had once discovered a night-school course on the Language of Butlers.

      Farringdon went on to list articles in the newspapers that the team judged to be of relevance to Sir Gordon, mainly from the business sections. Important though their impact on his day’s decisions might be, he would only turn to those after he had finished reading about himself.

      Sir Gordon took it entirely for granted that several of his employees had been up since three in the morning, driving the early editions of the papers down to Surrey, where other early risers had hunted through them for stories relevant to himself; while yet more, in London, were at their computers finding and collating references to him on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and, only slightly less important, news bulletins. He thought that his researchers trawled through every page of every paper. He hadn’t heard of Google Alert.

      He began the process of opening the newspapers at the pages that Farringdon had listed, and which he had not needed to write down. Sir Gordon was proud of his memory. His eyes swept contemptuously past several headlines that told of the sad state of our world in the autumn of 2011. Air-disaster fears soar as laser louts blind pilots. Thieves desecrate memorials to our war heroes every two days. Nineteen glasses of wine by the age of twelve. The behaviour of the lower orders from whom he had so thoroughly escaped was of no interest to him.

      He found the first reference to himself in the business section’s editorial comment:

       Rumour has it that the City is bracing itself for a disappointing set of results from SFN Holdings. While this is not particularly significant in itself, SFN being a fairly small player in the global game, any bad news from the Coppinger empire is bound to be …

      Farringdon arrived with a pot of tea, a jug of water, and a bowl of Coco Pops. Sir Gordon had a proudly sweet tooth.

      ‘Thank you, Farringdon. English Builders’ Tea, the best drink in the world.’

      Farringdon raised his eyebrows in agreement. Agreement would have figured largely in his job description, had there been one.

      ‘You can keep your champagne.’

      Again Farringdon, who had no champagne to keep, raised his eyebrows in agreement, and moved off, in his slightly bent, tactful way. He was three inches taller than Sir Gordon, and found it sensible not to emphasize the fact.

       … destabilizing at this sensitive time. Also, SFN is believed to be close to Sir Gordon Coppinger’s heart, if such an organ can be located, as it is in his native and beloved Dudley.

      ‘If such an organ can be located!’ Cheeky bugger. Rather flattering, though. Except … wasn’t he loved, despite his wealth, despite his ruthlessness, because he was British, not Russian or Chinese? A British oligarch. A walking assertion that Britons can still become rich. A patriot. And famously possessed of charm. When he wanted it. When he needed it. Which was most of the time. Which could become irksome.

      But could it be – no, it wasn’t possible – that the press were beginning to attack him, to test the waters? And why print these comments anyway, if not to destabilize? They must know that SFN Holdings made a loss every year, though he hoped that they didn’t know that making a loss every year was the whole point of SFN Holdings.

      By the time Farringdon returned with the crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, Sir Gordon had already located another story about himself. Well, this one was about Lady Coppinger, variously described in the press as fragrant, elegant, enigmatic – what a gift she was to the world of adjectives, and to imagery taken from roses, as in the headline to this particular story.

       A PIECE OF CAKE FOR THORNY CHRISTINA

       It’s a long road from selling Battenburg cake to breeding the champion climbing rose at the Baden-Baden October Flower Festival, but even that honour couldn’t make Sir Gordon Coppinger’s elegant wife Christina smile for long.

      

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