The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

‘Oh, this baby she is going to have, of course. It was all she could talk about.’

‘Ah. Well, I can see how that might seem –’

‘She’s always been like this, you know, Harriet. I’d forgotten what she was like. I’d forgotten how much I hated her.’

‘When is the baby due?’ I asked, rather shocked by his language.

‘Oh, in a few months. I wasn’t going to flatter her sense of self-importance by asking her questions like that. Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’

We left the tiled gloom of the restaurant behind us and spent the rest of our lunch hour in the pleasant green space of Finsbury Circus, a short walk away. It was now early in March, and just about warm enough to sit outside reading a book in the weak sunshine. I had with me a copy of The Hawk in the Rain, the first collection of Ted Hughes, then a little-known poet. Roger was reading his well-thumbed edition of Witchcraft Today, by Gerald Gardner. This sensational volume had been published about five years earlier, and had attracted considerable attention, especially in the popular Sunday newspapers which liked to titillate their readers with the notion that modern witches’ covens existed the length and breadth of suburban England, where sex orgies and acts of naked devil-worship regularly took place behind respectable closed doors. Roger dismissed these reports as lurid fantasies and insisted, on the contrary, that Mr Gardner’s book was one of the most important publications of recent times: he maintained that it had uncovered a vital, authentic spiritual heritage which stretched far back into the pre-Roman era, and provided a valuable counter-tradition to the repressive authoritarianism of the Christian Church. Mr Gardner’s name for this alternative religion was ‘Wicca’, and its main characteristic was that it involved the worship of two Gods, or rather a God and a Goddess, represented respectively by the Sun and the Moon. Not being much inclined towards religious belief of any sort, I tended not to listen too closely when Roger was expounding on this theme, although I do remember what he said to me that afternoon in Finsbury Circus. ‘You should pay attention to this, Harold, if you’re serious about wanting to write. The Goddess is where all poetic inspiration comes from. Read Robert Graves if you don’t believe me. You’d better keep on the right side of her. Unfortunately …’ (he put the book down and lay back on the grass, his head resting on folded hands) ‘she absolutely disapproves of homosexuality, and has terrible punishments in store for those who practise it. Bad news for the likes of us.’

I said nothing, but a shiver of protest went through me when I heard this remark, which was thrown out casually, as if merely the statement of an obvious truth. I knew that Roger sometimes took pleasure in being foolishly provocative. It was also that afternoon, I remember, that he first mentioned his intention to place a malediction on his sister.

Meanwhile, Roger did not neglect the more material side of our affairs. Over the next few weeks, he came to a series of further financial arrangements with Crispin Lambert and his numerous bookmakers, each one more ambitious and more elaborate than the last. I heard talk of each-way bets, four-folds and accumulators. Then we were on to any-to-come bets, fivespots, pontoons and sequential multiples. Each one of these bets was recorded on a betting slip: Crispin would calculate what this slip might be worth if the race had the desired outcome, and would then sell us an option to buy the slip off him when the result was announced. Somehow – I presumed because Roger and Crispin were accurate in their calculations, and in their study of the horses’ form – we seemed to make a profit every time, and everybody came out of it a winner. Soon we became bolder, and the agreements we signed no longer gave us the option of purchasing Crispin’s betting slips when the race was over, but imposed on us the obligation to do so. We chose to do this because the terms he offered us were more favourable, even though the risk involved (on our side) was much greater. Steadily, however, our travelling fund grew larger and larger. Roger became increasingly excited about the prospect of giving up our jobs and embarking on this voyage, until he could barely talk about anything else: it became his absolute obsession. The cultural pleasures on offer in London seemed to have palled, as far as he was concerned, and we rarely went to concerts or the theatre together any more. Instead, if we were not poring over maps of Pompeii and drawings of ancient German burial mounds, he preferred to stay indoors and study his growing library of volumes on witchcraft and paganism. And somehow, subtly, indefinably, although our trip was still talked about very much as a shared endeavour, I felt the closeness between us beginning to slip away, was more and more conscious that I had somehow disappointed him, failed to meet his expectations, and this realization upset me deeply.

Then, one day in the middle of the week, he came to me with a proposal which caused me some alarm.

‘I was with Crispin most of last night,’ he said, ‘in The Rising Sun. He really is a very decent fellow, I think. He really wants to help us raise the money for this trip. Anyway, last night, we worked out a way we could do it – all in one fell swoop. By Saturday evening, the money could be ours. We could hand in our notice next week and be on the train to Dover within a fortnight. What do you say?’

Naturally, I said that it all sounded wonderful. But I was less enthusiastic when he told me what he had in mind.

The proposal, in fact, was for one single, gigantic bet – or rather, a phenomenally complex spread of bets – to be placed with five bookmakers on Saturday’s races. I cannot remember the details now (not surprisingly, since I could never really understand them then), but among the different terms being floated were ‘single stakes about’, ‘round robin’, ‘vice versa’, ‘the flag’, and ‘full-cover multiples’. As before, it was Crispin who had chosen the horses, calculated the odds, placed the bets, and had bundled the whole package up into one financial instrument – the usual signed piece of paper, taken from his pocket book – which he was now offering to sell to us for …

‘… for how much?’ I said to Roger, incredulous.

‘I know it sounds a lot – but the winnings will be five times that, Harold. Five times!’

‘But that’s the whole of our fund. Everything we’ve saved up so far. All the sacrifices we’ve made to put that money together … Supposing we lose it all?’

‘We can’t lose it all. That’s the beauty of it. If we were just to place that money in a single bet, like most punters would do, then of course we’d be taking a huge risk. But the system Crispin and I have worked out is much cleverer than that. It’s flawless – look.’ He handed me a sheet of foolscap paper, on which were written a series of calculations and mathematical formulae far too complicated for me (or any other averagely intelligent being) to comprehend.

‘But if this system worked,’ I objected, ‘everyone would be doing it.’

‘If they had the brains to work it out, yes.’

‘What are you saying? That you’ve found a way of making money out of nothing? Out of air?’

Roger smiled a proud, secretive smile as he took the paper back. ‘I’ve told you this before,’ he said. ‘You, Harold, are earthbound. You need to develop a more spiritual outlook. Don’t become one of those lesser mortals who inhabits the material world. The world where people spend their lives making things and then buying and selling and using and consuming them. The world of objects. That’s for the hoi polloi, not the likes of you and me. We’re above all that. We’re alchemists.’