This was a kind of brinkmanship designed to force the rules of the trip, i.e. I would not abandon her, in a cloud of powder snow, to make her own way down the black piste. I had been skiing since I was six, she since she married me. It was a source of marital tension, made worse by the fact that every year we stayed at my parents’ rudimentary ex-ruin, 30km down the valley from Val d’Isere.
As a concession and an incentive, I allowed her to invite Chip, an American friend of hers who had been angling for an invitation.
Alick had been unable to get in a skiing holiday so a few weeks previously I had invited him. It could do no harm to my career, I reasoned, and he was a nice enough chap apart from a certain intolerance: of Henry for doing the crossword, the analysts for doing no work, and of the Americans for being American. His wife was inconsiderately about to drop mewling puker number three, so his skiing plans were up the spout.
Part of the attraction of inviting him was that he said he was a very good skier, and had never skied with anyone better than he, so he might be fun on the slopes. I had also invited Niall, fellow stalwart of the St Andrews University ski team, and completely fearless madman, who used to do scree skiing down disused slag heaps (i.e. with no snow on). I had a lurking fear, or perhaps hope, that Alick would be shown up. And not only by Niall, but by myself, formerly number sixty-three in Great Britain in slalom, and in 1980, the fastest through the bumps at the British Freestyle Championship by six whole seconds (worst points for style, result: second last).
Alick had grown markedly less bullish over the weeks about his brilliant skiing. He hadn’t had time to get fit and, because his wife had developed the habit of having a baby at this time of the year, hadn’t had a decent skiing holiday for several years. I was gently disabusing him of the notion that he would be staying in my parents’ ‘chalet’, or indeed in a Peter Mayle-style rustic idyll surrounded by lots of cheery yokels with bloodshot cheeks from drinking too much vin rouge. He was going to stay in a converted cowshed, parts of which still contained fossilised cow dung.
Chapter 5
On Friday evening Rika and I went round to dinner with Rory’s parents. Gen and Rory cavorted upstairs until about eleven o’clock. Rory had got Scalectrix for his fifth birthday.
‘That’s quite a generous present for such a young child,’ I remarked to Rory’s Dad.
‘Oh, it was only ninety-three pounds’ he replied. It must have taken considerable negotiation with Rory’s Mum to have got away with not getting something wholesome and wooden from the Early Learning Centre for about the same amount of money.
Rory’s Mum was adamant that Rory would not be allowed to play with guns, a disappointment to Gen who was heavily into the Gulf War at the time. He became quite adept at smuggling arms into Rory’s house. I got a bit of an earful from her about the secret arms factory discovered under Rory’s bed. Rory had said Gen made them. I tried to explain that boys play with guns, cars and bicycles, and girls play with dolls, but she would have none of it.
Rory’s Dad was a partner in a big City law firm, plutocratic, but slightly embarrassed about it. The other guests were carefully selected to offset capitalist pig-dogs like him and me; a teacher, an artist, a doctor and his wife. Why was it that when asked my profession on occasions like this I always found myself saying ‘investment banker’ rather than ‘equity salesman’ or even plain ‘stockbroker’?
Next morning, Gen woke up at 8.30-ish, a bit of a result from an exhausted parent’s point of view, but still far too early for me. He acceded to my exhortations to go downstairs and play with his toys for about five minutes before coming back up alternatively to bounce on my head and try to force my eyes open with his fingers. For some reason I lost the battle to have a lie-in, so ended up giving the urchin his breakfast while his mother snored on upstairs. In any case, now was the time for sycophancy if I wanted her to come skiing with me; in addition to getting up early I dusted the mantelpieces, changed the sheets, washed them, hoovered upstairs, put the rubbish out, and on Sunday, even bought Gen some boot-legged shoes as instructed (Reebok, five pounds reduced from thirty-five, as smart as Rory’s) from the car boot sale.
On Monday I was late to work because, as usual, I had forgotten to iron a shirt. Rika had embraced those parts of the Western feminist canon that suited her with great enthusiasm, and had never been known to do one for me.
My brain was already on holiday. Had it not been, I would have noticed the car pulling out in front of me on the Elephant and Castle roundabout. I had read some reassuring statistics saying that only eighteen Londoners had been killed on bicycles that year, a highly acceptable rate of attrition, making it much safer than the tube. I executed a neat, if involuntary, somersault over the bonnet before landing on my feet unhurt, my bicycle was also undamaged, thereby avoiding becoming the nineteenth. The only casualty was a limp-looking wing mirror on the car.
I recounted my tale to Alick, who said ‘I bet he was black’. Irritatingly, he was right.
The morning meeting was dominated by some unpronounceable Swedish company’s results; Rock tools good, Cemented Carbide weak, Special Stainless poor, Wire and Strip poor, but Tubes OK, and the tax charge respectably low. Earnings per share would fall in 1991, and probably be lower still in 1992, because of exposure to the US car industry. A bunch of Swedish speculators had been ramping the shares recently so it was an obvious sell. I wondered how I was going to explain all this in Japanese.
Mr Hoshide took the plunge and bought some of the unpronounceable Swedish tool maker; he was humble enough to admit that he had been a bit of a turnip not following my advice on the oil price, and made this order as a sign of trust. £500,000 was a large size for him, indeed the biggest order I’d had for several months. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been recommending a sell. Fund managers are grown people and can make their own decisions, I reasoned. Who cared anyway, when the money belonged to a group of policy holders in Fukuoka, a group whose existence was, to me, entirely abstract.
After getting Gen to bed at the unheard of early hour of nine o’clock, I enjoyed a lovely romantic candlelit dinner cooked for me by Rika, who was free, for once, of the exigencies of her jovial Japanese workmates and their requirement to wind down from their documentary on the Changing of the Guard in a karaoke bar.
Over dinner she told me that she would probably be able to come skiing, but on certain conditions.
1 I would carry her skis.
2 Every lunchtime would be spent in a restaurant.
3 I would never abandon her at the top of the mountain and say, ‘Meet you by the car’.
4 I would devote time to teaching her how to ski.
5 She would not have to do any cooking, washing or cleaning. (This was not so different from the way things were at home.)
6 On the other hand, she wanted to be in charge of the shopping. (I would use the word ‘spending’ not ‘shopping’.)
7 She demanded a single bed, because she knew what too much vin rouge does to me. (My father, in his concern over the decay in morals coincident with his children’s late teens and early twenties, built only bunk beds to a careful design of his own, impossible to push together, but there was still one double bed. I had my hopes.)
Normally, Monday evening would be early-to-bed night, the night when I caught up on the sleep I had failed to catch up on at the weekend, but with a holiday looming I was feeling a bit demob happy, indeed a touch reckless. I had survived a near fatal accident, got some decent business off Mr Hoshide, and the wife was coming skiing. I reckoned I might get luckier still provided, of course, I disabled all Rika’s telecommunications equipment so that nobody would ring in from the Tokyo morning to the middle of the English night.
Tuesday morning passed in a haze. I was tired but happy. I didn’t even notice what Giussi was wearing.
Mr Hoshide phoned up very excited. His unpronounceable Swedish stock had gone up five per cent already. ‘Thank you Parton san, very good recommendation. Why is it so strong today?’ I modestly admitted that we’d been doing a bit of buying. The fact that it