The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

Sir Gordon has stated that the clumsy seasider gives the team a dimension of subtlety which brings out the best in his British teammates. “I am British through and through and have got rid of no fewer than eight foreign players since I bought the club,” Sir Gordon explained recently, “but I haven’t yet found a British striker who gives me exactly what Raduslav offers.”

The eponymous owner was not present in the Sir Gordon Coppinger Stand yesterday to see his Eastern European protégé miss yet more chances. Nor was Bogoff’s lovely wife, the svelte Svetoslava.

Could it be that her presence in Britain, and her absence from the match, has something to do with Sir Gordon’s continued faith in her hapless hubby?

Sir Gordon loved to read about other great men, and he knew that all truly great men had to be vigilant in their examination of themselves for traces of incipient paranoia. He was honest enough to wonder if there was a touch of the disease in his suspicion that there might be a connection between this story and the diary piece about Christina. Had the press decided to go on the offensive against him, albeit slowly and carefully, putting their toes into the ocean with little hints? Well, they were hopelessly on the wrong tack with Svetoslava. Apart from everything else, he didn’t know when he had seen a less svelte Slav.

But even this very gentle rumour and tittle-tattle made him feel uneasy, and he wasn’t used to feeling uneasy. He’d have liked a third cup of good old British tea, but it was out of the question. Great men can’t be seen clambering out of their Rolls-Royces for a quick pee at the side of the Kingston By-Pass, or taking a bottle with them just in case. To be seen by Kirkstall performing awkward manoeuvres into a bottle on the back seat, it was unthinkable. The urination of great men – and indeed of great women – must be hidden from the world.

Through the huge picture windows of the dining room he could now see that an unlovely dawn was creeping shyly in over the lush Surrey countryside. Dawns didn’t break, they arrived mysteriously. As a boy he had sometimes stood by the window in the dark in that little house in Dudley, stopwatch in hand, waiting to record the exact second when it began to get light, in order to enter it into ‘Coppinger’s Almanac’, his life’s work. He had always failed, and the failure had made him furious. He never failed now, and he was rarely furious. Fury used up energy that needed to be stored for more important use.

He was pleased that it was such an unappetizing grey morning. What was the point of being driven to work by a chauffeur in a luxurious Rolls-Royce if the hoi polloi in their ghastly clothes were standing at their bus stops in warm sunshine? He hoped it would chuck it down this evening, so that all the trick-or-treaters would get soaked.

He turned, reluctantly, to the financial pages.

Insecurity grows. House prices fall. CBI wants tax breaks to help young unemployed.

What? Tax breaks? Help for the young unemployed? He almost choked on his last sip of tea.

China: Don’t count on us to help you.

Bastards. Who was ever naive enough to think they would? He’d boycotted Chinese restaurants for five years now. That had shown them.

In a sudden surge of temper he flung the papers to the floor.

He clambered slightly stiffly out of his chair. That wouldn’t do. He was only fifty-six, and fifty-six was the new forty-three.

He picked the papers up, smoothed them down, and put them in a neat pile.

Thank goodness nobody had witnessed his brief rage. He never lost his temper. He was always cool and collected. Nobody ever saw him ruffled.

He would have been astonished if he’d known that this would be one of the reasons for the suspicions that would overwhelm him.

It was going to be one of those days (#ulink_5e4661d4-a427-503e-b3a4-8f84d277a0f0)

It was a day like any other, and yet it was a day like none other. Everything was as it usually was, yet nothing was as it usually was.

Every moment of every day in the life of Sir Gordon Coppinger (fifty-six), control freak, of Rose Cottage, Borthwick End, near Borthwick Magna, in the county of Surrey, was calculated, planned, and conducted with calm authority. On this grey Halloween morning, however, a ghost of anxiety sat on his shoulder, drove with him into that strange place known as Canary Wharf – half smart city, half urban village – accompanied him as Kirkstall steered smoothly past trim tower blocks whose names on their summits proclaimed the point of the place: Barclays, HSBC, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, Coppinger.

The anxiety walked with him up the steps and through the wide glass doors into the great foyer of the slim, sleek, Coppinger Tower, affectionately known, because of its ribbed structure, and the delicate frond-like curves at its top, as the Stick of Celery. The Coppinger Tower stood a little off the centre of Canary Wharf, but commanded a splendid view over a long bend of London’s river. At its top gleamed that single, powerful word, in gold letters: ‘Coppinger’.

On this grey Halloween morning he took with him, past all the huge rubber plants, only the appearance of calm authority. He was more shaken by the manner of his awakening than he would ever admit. It was as if for those moments of blankness he had been outside his body, and it was as if he still hadn’t quite slipped fully back in, didn’t quite fit neatly yet. And he was aware, too, that he was, almost subconsciously, nervous about the evening. He was dreading the birthday dinner with his wife. The hope that he might enjoy it this year had withered in the cruel light of dawn.

‘Good morning, Alice, how was your weekend? Did you and Tom do anything interesting?’

Alice Penfold, neatly groomed, intelligent, modern, confident receptionist, had slender legs and shapely knees that banished instantly any depression caused by the traffic on the Kingston By-Pass. Sir Gordon wished that she didn’t have a stud in the middle of her chin and a ring through the left nostril of her sweet flared nose, but they had the advantage of giving out a strong signal that this skyscraper was not a stuffy place. She blushed, as if she really believed that the great man was interested in her puny doings. That was the extraordinary effect Sir Gordon had on people. He asked about the wretched Tom at least once a week, but he had no interest in the man, who was a keen cyclist and birdwatcher, the twerp. He could just imagine Tom, with his heavy binoculars, his orange Lycra and his spots, stopping to pee behind some sodden hedge in Sussex. Strange. That was the second time that morning that he had thought about peeing at the side of the road.

‘We went to Brighton for the day, Sir Gordon. It was lovely.’

Brighton! Lovely! Dear God. And yet … he recalled a trip he had made, all those years ago, all the way to Llandudno, with Cindy on the back of his motorbike, and he felt, for Alice, a pang of envy, soon stifled with a slight, involuntary shake of the head – imagine it, a movement of the body that was unplanned, what was going on?

‘Good for you.’

What a stupid comment, but Alice seemed pleased.

As he walked towards the busy lifts, Sir Gordon saw the cheery bulk of Siobhan McEnery entering the building, and he slowed down to speak with her. She greeted him with a smile as wide as the Shannon. There was a warmth about Siobhan McEnery that reached even into Sir Gordon’s heart, and he wondered briefly what it would be like to take her to his secret seduction suite on the twenty-second floor. But then he wondered about this with most women.

‘Good morning, Sir Gordon.’

‘Good morning, Siobhan. Everything sorted for Saturday?’

Siobhan McEnery’s unofficial title was Head of Fun. Her official title was Head of Corporate Entertainment. Sir Gordon stretched this to include making all the preparations for his great biennial Bonfire Night bash.

‘Everything sorted, Sir Gordon. Oh, Liam and I are so looking forward to it.’

‘And how’s wee Ryan?’ Sir Gordon asked as they entered the lift. The database that was his mind saved the names of all his employees’ offspring.

Siobhan flushed with pleasure at this evidence of her employer’s interest in her family. She little knew that he couldn’t have cared less about wee Ryan.

‘The wee mite’s not so good this morning, Sir Gordon, but nothing to worry about.’

‘I hope not.’

Siobhan got out at the fourth floor. As the doors closed behind her Sir Gordon gave a little shake of the head at the thought of sex with her. He realized that the only other occupant of the lift, a courier, had seen that shake, and this shocked him slightly. It had been the visual equivalent of talking to oneself. He was beginning to grow old.

The glass lift, built on the outside of the Stick of Celery, took him swiftly, smoothly, silently up to the nineteenth floor. He smiled at the courier as if the unkempt oaf was his equal. As the lift rose it opened up a view of wharves and water stretching to the towers of the City of London itself, but he had no eyes for that. He had eyes only to turn in upon himself. He was remembering that he had always peed a lot, as a child, when he’d been nervous. He didn’t remember that he’d ever been nervous since he was a child. But he wanted to pee now. Odd how peeing was dominating his thoughts that morning.

He walked from the lift to his office past the massed ranks of his employees. He had asked for the floor to be designed that way. He liked to see them all hard at work making him richer in their awful open-plan working space. In the ante-office to his own, enclosed office sat his secretary, Helen Grimaldi, these days more grim than aldi. She gave him her smile which suggested that she still remembered that Tuesday, and flicked her eyes towards a young man seated on the white settee. Sir Gordon recalled that he had three meetings this morning. He thought of them as if he could see them written in his diary: ‘8.30 Martin Fortescue, 9.30 Fred Upson, 10.30 GI.’

Martin Fortescue was the twenty-one-year-old son of a man he didn’t like who had asked him to see the boy as a favour. He’d arranged for him to come in at eight-thirty, to test his punctuality. He was disappointed to see that the long streak of piss (oh no, another urine reference) was there already. His little lecture on the importance of punctuality would remain unspoken yet again. What was wrong with people, all turning up on time in these hard days?

The boy rose from his seat in the outer office, rose … and rose … and rose. Much too tall. And the innocence, the keenness. Sir Gordon suddenly felt as if he was seventy-seven.

‘See you in a moment.’

‘No problem, sir.’

Sir Gordon’s office was enormous, as were his rosewood (what else?) desk and his sleek swivelling chair. There were four hard chairs and four soft chairs for visitors. Whether he seated you on a hard chair or a soft chair had huge significance. Half the wall opposite the door consisted of a vast curved picture window. On the rest of the wall there were just five pictures: a portrait each of Lady Coppinger looking arrogant, his elderly father Clarrie looking wise, his banker brother Hugo showing all the warmth of a cheque book, his artist son Luke looking artistic, and his daughter Joanna looking as though she had never had a man and wouldn’t know what to do with him if she ever did.

There was no picture of Jack.

He kept the boy waiting for eleven minutes, just long enough to make him feel anxious, which would show he was the wrong type, not hard enough – or irritated, which would show that he was a different kind of wrong type, bit above himself. But the lad, to do him credit, seemed utterly unfazed. That’s what Winchester and Cambridge did for you, gave you confidence, damn and blast it. That’s what you had to find for yourself if you’d been to a secondary modern in Dudley.

He indicated the hard chair that he had placed in isolation at the other side of the desk.

‘Did they offer you a drink? Tea? Coffee?’

‘Yes, thank you. No, I’m fine, sir. I’m all right.’