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with sherry and as much Chateau Margaux as they could hold at dinner. Early next morning he would kiss his sleeping wife and children, slide his last negotiable instruments under the bedroom doors of his guests, take one of the matched Purdeys from the gun room into the spinney, and blow his brains out.

Chapter Six
     
    The first thing that one encountered on arriving at the Chandler Brothers building in the mornings, seated behind the front desk in the nondescript cheaply furnished lobby, was the raddled and painted gorgon of a receptionist. Just before nine o’clock the Essex crowd of accounts, contract wording and claims staff, who were required to start work half an hour before everyone else, would pour in from Fenchurch and Liverpool Street Stations. They clutched paper bags of buttered soft or crusty rolls, paid for with left-over luncheon vouchers at the greasy spoon, Luigi’s, on Tower Place.
    The rolls contained wafer-thin slices of pink processed meat, onto which mustard could be wiped from a plastic dispenser. They were eaten at the grey metal desks in the office and washed down with sludge-like coffee from the office machine accompanied by Embassy cigarettes.
    The brokers, who trickled rather than poured in over the course of the next hour, were mostly drawn from the middle classes. Those who lived furthest away and had to get up at an ungodly hour somewhere in the Home Counties to drive to the railway station, arrived complaining about the weather and the delays on the trains.
    After them came the middle-aged gentlemen from Knightsbridge, Kensington, and Holland Park, with their umbrellas and copies of The Daily Telegraph , good-humoured after leisurely breakfasts cooked by their wives. Last to arrive was the youthful Chelsea, Fulham, Wandsworth, Clapham, and Battersea set...and Freddie Garbanzo-Myers, who was not young in the sense of being under forty, but behaved as if he was.
    Late of the King’s Royal Lancers and most recently aide-de-camp to a general in the Middle East, Major Garbanzo-Myers was known as the Galloping Major, per the song written by Stanley Kirkby for the film of that name:
     
All the girls declare
He’s a grand old stager
Bumpety bumpety bumpety bump
Here comes the Galloping Major.
     
    Garbanzo-Myers was tastelessly well dressed and loudly unmarried, a self-proclaimed devil-may-care Casanovan gonad-piston. He always had a different exploit to recount—after returning from an illicit visit to the executive bathroom and sliding his wash bag and yesterday’s shirt, tie and underwear into the drawer of his desk that had contained today’s clean wear; he had enough drawers to last him from Tuesday to Friday without stopping on Jermyn Street on his way in, if he remembered to empty them on Fridays and drop off their contents at Lilliman & Cox for collection on Monday—about his latest unconfirmed conquest, in which he had starred in a bedroom farce written by him, for him, in addition to his having financed, musically scored, filmed from several angles, directed, and produced it for an audience of one.
    The brokers sifted through their copies of the white incoming telexes that had arrived overnight from their American clients, looking for ones addressed to them individually, and checked for errors in the outgoing pink sheets that had been redacted from their handwritten communications of the evening before.
    Anything relating to the accounts they handled personally they cut out and pasted on blank forms, which they then punched holes in and added to the prongs of the relevant contract file for that year: outgoing pinks on the left, incoming whites on the right. Exhibit cards were in the next section, and the cover-note in the next, and the most recent contract wording in the last. If the placement was not new the expiring slip, which underwriters needed to consult to ascertain their reference number before renewing their line, was somewhere in there loose. Brokers did not carry whole