The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Yes, he would be, Max thought. At the age of eight and a half, Joe was already starting to manifest his father’s omnivorous, bright-eyed curiosity, while Lucy, only one year younger, seemed content to exist in a world of her own, composed almost entirely of fantasy elements: a world of dolls and pixies, kittens and hamsters, cuddly toys and benign enchantments. He was trying not to worry about it too much, or to feel resentment.

‘So I told him a little bit about investment banking. You know, just the basics. I told him that these days, when you said that someone was a banker, it doesn’t mean that he sits behind a counter and cashes cheques for customers all day. I told him that a real banker never comes into contact with money at all. I told him that most of the money in the world nowadays doesn’t exist in any tangible form anyway, not even as bits of paper with promises written on them. So he said to me, “But what does a banker do, Dad?” So I explained that a lot of modern banking is based on physics. That’s where the concept of leverage comes from. Gears, ratchets and so on – you find terms like this coming up in modern theories of banking all the time. Anyway, you must know all about that.’

Max nodded, even though he didn’t, in fact, know any such thing. Caroline, who knew her husband well (too well) after all this time, saw the nod and recognized it for the bluff that it was. The little private smile she offered to the kitchen floor was tinged with sadness.

‘I told him that a lot of modern banking consists of borrowing money – money that isn’t your own – and finding somewhere to reinvest it at a higher rate of return than you’re giving to the person you’re borrowing it from. And when I told him that, Joe thought about it for a while, and said this very interesting thing: “So bankers,” he said, “are really just people who make a lot of money by cheating.”’

Max smiled appraisingly. ‘Not a bad definition.’

‘It isn’t, is it? Because it brings a different moral perspective to bear on things. A child’s perspective. What the banking community does isn’t illegal – at least most of the time. But it does stick in people’s throats, and that’s why. At the back of our minds we still have unspoken rules about what’s fair and what isn’t. And what they do isn’t fair. It’s what children would call cheating.’

Max was still thinking about this conversation later that night, when he and Caroline were lying in bed together, up in the attic bedroom, both on the point of falling asleep.

‘I didn’t think Chris would have gone for all that “out of the mouths of babes” stuff,’ he said. ‘Bit too cute for him, I would have thought.’

‘Maybe,’ said Caroline, non-commitally.

Max waited for her to say more, but there was only silence between them; part of a larger, magical near- silence which hung over the whole of this coastline. If he listened closely, he could just about hear the noise of waves breaking gently on the strand, about half a mile away.

‘Close, aren’t they?’ he prompted.

‘Who?’ Caroline murmured through her encroaching cloud of sleep.

‘Chris and Joe. They spend a lot of time together.’

‘Mmm. Well, I suppose that’s what fathers and sons do.’

She rolled over slowly and lay flat on her back. Max knew this meant that she was almost asleep now, and conversation was over. He reached out and took her hand. He held on to her hand and looked up at the restless clouds through the bedroom skylight until he heard her breathing become slower and more regular. When she was fully asleep he gently let go and turned away from her. They had not made love since Lucy was conceived, almost eight years ago.

When they prepared for their walk the next morning, the skies were grey and the estuary tide was low.

The two wives would be staying behind to prepare lunch. Pointedly sporting a plastic apron as her badge of domestic drudgery, Caroline came out on to the lawn to wave the party off; but before they all struck off through the fields and down the path towards the water’s edge, Lucy took her parents to one side.

‘Come and see this,’ she said.

She clasped Max’s hand and led him across the wide expanse of lawn towards the hedgerow which marked the boundary of the farmland. Out of the hedge grew a young yew tree, with a single, gnarled branch stretching out back towards the lawn. A piece of knotted rope hung from the branch, and underneath it, the earth had been scooped out to form a deep basin, now choked and brimming with a dense thicket of stinging nettles.

‘Wow,’ said Max. ‘That looks nasty.’

‘If you fell in there,’ said Lucy, ‘would you have to be taken to hospital?’

‘Probably not,’ said Max. ‘But it would really hurt.’

Caroline said: ‘Not a very good place to put a rope, really. I don’t think you’d better do any swinging on that.’

‘But that’s our game,’ said a boy’s breathless voice behind them.

They turned round to see that Joe had run over to join them. His father was following.

‘What game would that be?’ Caroline asked.

‘It’s a dare game,’ Lucy explained. ‘You have to get on the rope and then the others push you and then you have to swing across like ten times.’

‘I see,’ said Chris, in a tone of resigned understanding. ‘Somehow this sounds like one of your ideas, Joe.’

‘It was, but everybody wants to do it,’ his son insisted.

‘Well, I don’t think you’d better.’

‘What would you do,’ Caroline asked, ‘if one of you fell in there? The stinging would be terrible. It would be all over your body.’

‘That’s the point of the game,’ said Joe, with the triumph of one stating the obvious.

‘There are lots of dock leaves,’ said Lucy. ‘So if you fell in, you could make yourself better.’