Engleby

Author:Sebastian Faulks
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Psychological, Psychological fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Literary, Self-perception, Mystery fiction, England, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307387882
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2008-09-08T10:00:00+00:00

Eight

I bumped into Stellings the other day in Chancery Lane. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he looked sleek and optimistic. His clothes were obviously expensive.

I have this odd feeling that, not far from where I work, there are people suddenly making huge sums of money – I mean, preposterous, dizzying, comical amounts. They are doing it legally, every day, and getting home late. No wonder they look . . . Glazed. Honey-glazed. Money-glazed.

I don’t know how this happened. When I grew up in Reading, there were rich people, I suppose. The man who owned the paper mill, for instance. He had a new Jaguar and a house with remote-control gates. There were toffs who lived in the countryside nearby who’d inherited money. Then there were prosperous people who worked in industry or business and maybe at the top of the professions.

But there weren’t millionaires. Above all, there weren’t vacant-looking gonks in their twenties who had to keep opening new accounts in different banks to stop their inflow from flooding the pavements; there weren’t young men who, by making a few stabs in the dark about pig-iron prices found themselves grossing more than Portugal.

Do you know what? I think I missed a trick. Most Chatfield leavers went into the navy; some went to university; plenty went off to train as accountants. No one really contemplated ‘the City’. It was considered a last resort, appropriate only for boys who, even by Chatfield standards, were desperate. Bograt Duncan, for instance, became a stockbroker. I believe ‘Backward’ Page surfaced in the reinsurance business. Even Plank Robinson eventually found a berth playing housey-housey with futures prices in some sort of on-screen gambling outfit.

What I want to know is: when did these guys stop being charity cases and become arterial cash explosions? I made an error of judgement there, didn’t I? I didn’t find out enough about ‘the City’; I was sniffy about it, just because of the people I knew who tried it. Is it too late for me now to broke some futures, plant a hedge fund or take a few positions in derivatives? If it all went belly-up I could blame the ‘market’.

If only I could have my time again.

As for Stellings, he’s just a solicitor, for crying out loud; the father of a boy I knew at the grammar school was one of those and they used to live in a semi in Tilehurst. Stellings qualified as a barrister, but he didn’t like it; now he’s in the litigation department of Oswald Payne and he seems to like that very much indeed. He’s married to someone called Clarissa and they already have a child – a boy called Alexander. He mentioned twice in the space of our short talk on the pavement what a small wedding it had been – presumably so I wouldn’t feel put out at not having been invited. We arranged to meet for lunch at an upmarket curry house on the far side of

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