‘Good. I’m pleased to find myself sitting opposite a man of taste and refinement.’
The man held out his hand, and I shook it. Then he introduced himself: his name was Roger Anstruther. We talked a little more about Eliot, then – touching also, I seem to remember, upon the work of Auden and Frost – but what I remember best about that first conversation was not its substance, but the strange sort of electric thrill which went through me in the presence of this singular and overbearing man. His hair had a slightly reddish tint, his beard was thick but closely trimmed, and although the sobriety of his suit marked him out unmistakeably as a working denizen of the Square Mile, a yellow handkerchief with pale-blue polka dots protruded from his top pocket in a manner that suggested some idiosyncratic sense of personal style – if not actual foppishness.
Abruptly at a quarter to two he rose to his feet and looked at his watch.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘They are playing Faure at the Wigmore Hall tonight. The E minor quartet among other works. I have booked two tickets for the front row, where I intend to lose myself in delicious mists of French introspection. Here is the other ticket. We shall meet at The Cock and Lion a few doors along the street, at seven o’clock. If you get there first, mine will be a large gin and tonic, with ice. Goodbye.’
He shook my hand again, draped a long, black cashmere overcoat upon his shoulders, and was gone with a flourish. I gazed after him in shocked silence. But when the shock had receded, my predominant emotion was a throbbing, delirious happiness.
Roger Anstruther was, it goes without saying, completely unlike any other man I had ever met in my short, circumscribed life.
Music was his passion and, although he did not perform, his knowledge of the classical repertoire, from the baroque period to the present day, was flawless and comprehensive. But he could also discourse, with absolute authority, on any other branch of the arts. Architecture, painting, drama, the novel – there seemed to be nothing he hadn’t read, seen, heard and thought about. And yet he was only one year older than me. How had he acquired so much knowledge, and experience – and
So, at any rate, began what I consider to have been my real education. From now on, Roger and I would go out together almost every night. Orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall; experimental theatre in Soho and Bloomsbury; the National Gallery; Kenwood House; poetry readings in windowless basements or the upstairs rooms of shabby Hampstead pubs. And when we could find nothing of that sort to interest us, we would simply walk – walk through the mazy, empty backstreets of London, long into the night, while he pointed out strange architectural features, quirky buildings, forgotten landmarks with some recondite fragment of London history attached to them. Once again, his knowledge seemed inexhaustible. He was enthusiastic, opinionated, fascinating, indefatigable and infuriating, in equal measure. He could be frivolous and loveable; he could also be impatient and cruel. He dominated me completely. It was a relationship which (at first) suited both of our needs perfectly.
Many of our evenings together started directly after work, in a pub called The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, close to Smithfield Market. I would usually get there first, shortly after five o’clock, and buy Roger his gin and tonic while waiting for him to arrive. I had discovered that he worked on the Stock Exchange floor, but not in as exalted a capacity as I might have imagined. He was what used to be known as a ‘Blue Button’ – someone at the very lowest level of the trading hierarchy. Essentially he was, like me, an errand boy, although he was certainly closer to the centre of things than I would ever be. The men who actually traded in shares on the Exchange floor were known as jobbers: they were not allowed to deal directly with members of the public, so they took their orders from the brokers, many of whom had little offices (or ‘boxes’) on the periphery of the floor. The Blue Buttons were intermediaries between the brokers and the jobbers: they carried messages, relayed instructions, and were generally required, during trading hours, to do whatever their jobber instructed them to do, however trivial or eccentric. I couldn’t help thinking that for someone of Roger’s praeternatural intelligence (as I thought of it) and lofty ambition, this job was rather on the demeaning side.
‘Well, I won’t be at it for long,’ he told me one evening, as we sat over our drinks in The Rising Sun, a fug building up inside while flurries of snow continued to swirl along Cloth Fair in the January wind. ‘My disillusionment with the world of high finance is more or less complete.’
These were grand words, you might think, for a man of twenty-two. But this was the tone in which Roger always expressed himself.
‘I always knew that the Stock Market would be a frightful place,’ he continued. ‘But I’d also noticed that the people who worked there – while they invariably seemed to be dreadful bores – never gave the impression of being short of money. Of course, for a lot of them, it’s all inherited from Mummy and Daddy. Most of the brokers have been to Eton – and half the jobbers as well – and we all know that kind of education doesn’t come cheap. But still, they’re making a show of opening the place up to grammar school boys like me, and I reckoned that if I at least got a sense of how large amounts of cash tend to be traded back and forth, then surely some of it would come my way eventually. But I think I was being naive. And besides, I don’t have the temperament for it. I don’t love money enough to want to spend my whole life thinking about it. That’s where I differ from Crispin, you see.’
Crispin Lambert was, I knew, the name of the jobber for whom (or with whom, as Roger preferred to phrase it) he had been assigned to work.
‘How do you get on with him?’ I asked.
‘Oh, well enough,’ he said. ‘He’s decent, I suppose, by the wretched standards of this place. But he’s just a typical product of the system, really. Charm personified, on the surface. If you ever meet him, you’ll think he’s the friendliest fellow you’ve ever set eyes upon. But that’s just a mask for his fundamental ruthlessness. He loves money more than anything else, and he wants money, and he’ll use any means at his disposal to get it. That’s what I mean when I say these people are all such bores. For me, money is a means to an end. I’d use it to travel. To see the world in style. I’d like to be able to afford good seats at the opera. I’d like to be able to own a Picasso or two. But for Crispin and his ilk, money
‘Doesn’t he have, you know … pastimes? Hobbies, recreations?’
‘He’s a fiend for the horses,’ Roger admitted. ‘Studies the form assiduously. Knows the name of every trainer at every stable in the country. But I’m not sure it gives him any
As it happened, I did meet Crispin Lambert a few weeks later: by which time, various subtle but disquieting shifts had taken place in my relationship with Roger. For one thing, I’d had my first experience of his facility – one might almost call it a relish – for creating embarrassing situations. We had attended a production of
