TIME and MONEY

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The number one rule of shooting an interview in a TV studio is? Turn off your phone.

Stories abound of people being fined or even fired on big movie sets when their phone has rung during a recording. The thing is, everyone has done it at one time or another, and the reason this particular embarrassing error stayed in Ryan’s mind is because of the nature of the call.

The two person interview he was helping shoot was for a long established, left of centre political website, Insight, the topic was the collapse in the global birth rate.

The interviewee, a Professor from University College London was half way through explaining some of her reasoning behind the catastrophic drop in births round the globe when the familiar buzzing could be heard.

Ryan’s phone was on silent but he’d left it on a table alongside the laptop and hard drives that would later be used to edit and upload the interview.

The interviewer looked over at him, as did Faye, the woman who’d hired him. He realised at that moment that he was the only man in the room, and he had screwed up.

‘Ryan!’ said Faye, ‘For fuck sake mate.’

‘Sorry, very sorry everyone.’ said Ryan as he reached over, grabbed the still vibrating phone and killed the call. ‘My bad, phone is off now.’

After a little bit of shuffling and a brief discussion, the interviewer, a well known face on British TV, asked the previous question again and they resumed their concentration.

An hour later, as Ryan was ingesting the footage onto a hard drive and helping Faye pack away the lights, he pulled out his phone and checked who the call was from.

It was his brother, Giles.

His brother did not ring very often, in fact his calls were very rare and usually involved bad news.

He decided to wait until he’d finished the rough cut, but then noticed 4 text messages, 2 from his brother and 2 more from his wife Hazel.

He rang Hazel. ‘It’s your mum Ryan, she’s gone.’

So it was serious although not as shocking as these moments can be. His mother had been in a coma for the previous two weeks and her inevitable farewell was predicted. In fact she lived a week longer than her doctor suggested. She was 87 years old.

No question, however much you think you are prepared to learn such information, it’s still a punch in the guts. He told Hazel he would be back soon and hung up, then sat down and stared at his phone, as if it was going to tell him anything. His mum had died, she had gone. He would never see her again.

When Faye learned his news she put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and told him to go and be with his family, she could clear up the rest of the kit and send the footage. Ryan hugged Faye and thanked her, she was very good to work for and he didn’t want to mess up the relationship with his phone going off and his dramas. He kept his work life and private life fastidiously separate.

Even though his relationship with his mother was never particularly easy, she was his mum. She was a snob and she was proud of it.

“I have high standards in life, what’s wrong with that?’ was a phrase he had heard many times.

His mother had always wanted him to have a profession, lawyer, doctor, architect, or even a dentist. She thought being a camera operator was similar to being a plumber or carpenter, it was a working class job and she made it clear she thought her children could do better.

‘We are all upper middle class and there’s no point trying to deny it just to fit in.’ he remembered her saying, again and again over decades.

His brother Giles worked in the town planning department in Coventry so he was half way there, at least Giles had an office, holiday pay and a pension. Ryan had a van full of kit. Ryan knew he was a disappointment to his mother, it wasn’t a hunch, she had said it numerous times.

When he pointed out his name on the credits of one of her favourite murder mystery detective shows, she was almost impressed, that was as good as it ever got.

In the following weeks, between freelance jobs he helped arrange the funeral, the cremation, the little headstone in the cemetery of the Parish church in Chalfont St Giles, the village where she was born.

Then Hazel, Giles and his wife Sheila spent a weekend going through the contents of the bungalow on Rodham Avenue where his mum had lived for the 23 years since his dad died.

There was no argument about who got which item as part of the inheritance, no one had their eye on the Gainsborough portrait worth £12 million because there was no portrait. If his mother was ‘upper middle class’ as she had always maintained, it didn’t show in the contents of the bungalow. There was very little money in his mother’s bank account, although they would eventually sell the bungalow and all benefit to a small degree from that.

However, in a box at the back of a wardrobe in what had been the spare bedroom, a bedroom Ryan had stayed in every now and then when he was younger, there was a pile of papers. The deeds to the bungalow, very important, their father’s old will, worth reading later, tattered newspaper cuttings about a nearby neighbourhood murder in the early 1970’s. And an envelope with Ryan’s beautifully written name on.

He sat down on the bed and opened it. It was from his great Aunt Maude, a beautiful hand written letter covering both sides of several pages. He scanned the first page which mentioned that she was leaving him £5,000 in a private bank account.

Up until this point he hadn’t thought about his Aunt Maude in decades, she had died when he was around 13 years old and his main memory was of being in an uncomfortable shirt at her funeral.

As he started to read the letter, he was reminded that his Aunt had left him some money, not that day, but 27 years earlier. His mother never gave him the letter. He wondered what had made her keep it all those years, or indeed, if she didn’t want him to have it why she didn’t dispose of it. But there it was, not exactly hidden in a box of paperwork.

He shrugged and carried on reading the opening paragraph which explained he would just need identification and a long account number she wrote beneath the explanation. She explained in slightly opaque language that it was a very special savings account and he wouldn’t have a cheque book or any printed information about his account. The bank ran a very discreet personal service which she hoped he would appreciate.

He remembered then that she was, in effect, writing to a 12 year old boy, which was his age at the time she wrote the letter, about a year before she died.

This sounding bank account was held by a very old fashioned sounding outfit called J Hussey and Company. He read the name a couple of times, wondering if she had misspelled the it. He’d never heard of J Hussey and Company. It was all a bit baffling.

For a reason he couldn’t articulate, he folded the letter back into the envelope, slipped it into his inside pocket and carried on moving furniture out of the house.

He didn’t tell Hazel, or his brother or anyone. The envelope was very clearly addressed to him and no one else. He was intrigued and wanted to find out more. The money would help, he wasn’t going to turn it down or donate it to charity, times were tough in the TV industry. But how the hell would he get his hands on it. J Hussey and Company just didn’t seem real.

But the bank was very real, although very, very discreet. It did not sport a brightly lit sign, it did not advertise on panels on London tube trains or big brightly lit digital advertising hoardings on the A40 in West London. No one could waltz in and open an account, mainly because you wouldn’t know where to waltz in to. You couldn’t find an address, there was no web page or app where you could sign up for an account in three clicks, there was no web presence of any kind.

A quick search for J Hussey and Company would reveal absolutely nothing.

The following day, after Ryan drove his van, loaded to the roof with his mother’s furniture and clothes to a charity warehouse just outside Godalming, he went shopping in a vast supermarket.

He returned home and cooked a dinner for Giles and Sheila, helped Hazel clean up after they’d gone, checked all the doors were locked and Hazel went to bed.

Only then Ryan pulled out the envelope, sat down at their small dining table and read the letter again.

He learned that his great grandfather, Aunt Maude’s father, was a wealthy grocer who made a considerable fortune during world war two. He ran a large import-export business in North London which supplied fruit and veg to the British army. Ryan remembered being told that his great grandfather sold the business after the war just before he died.

Aunt Maude inherited some of that wealth along with Ryan’s grandfather William. It appeared Grandpa Bill as he was known, drank through most of his money, but Aunt Maud was a little more canny and bought properties around the family home in blitz damaged Islington, North London.

Ryan knew that his mother had a respectable nest egg when she got married, but they had already discovered that particular fortune had dwindled to near nothing by the time she died. “Aged care is very expensive.” was a thing he remembered his mother saying. After a private nursing home had looked after his mum for the past 7 years, he knew what she meant.

But the £5,000 Ryan had received from his Aunt seemed to be untouched. The question was, other than the letter and the account number, he had no clue as to how to get his hands on it.

The following morning, Ryan had packed his van and drove to Birmingham to shoot a match between Aston Villa and Manchester City at Villa Park.

This was his bread and butter money. For the first 15 years of his career as a camera op, he avoided sporting events because he knew he’d be bored. Ryan had zero interest in sport, but as all the alternative jobs, studio shoots, drama shoots on location, documentary stuff overseas all started to get scarce and ever more poorly paid, the lure of the big stadium shoots with huge budgets and above average catering became more tolerable. Over the past 5 years he had started to regularly spend a few hours pitch side, headphones on, ignoring the roaring crowd behind him, following young men running around chasing a ball.

On the same morning, Mary Congrieve inserted the very large key into the dark brown street door of J Hussey and Company, private bankers.

Once inside, she locked the door again and turned on a rather dull overhead light. The hallway led to a small, neat reception area. Again Mary turned on the lights by moving a stiff old switch on an ancient looking bakelite fitting next to the entrance. The low lighting revealed 2 leather wing backed Chesterfield chairs. The chairs faced a large, ancient looking mahogany desk, maybe 16th Century, and this heavy piece of furniture was graced with a steel anglepoise lamp with a green shade. There were no pictures on the walls, only a large Victorian era clock with an audible tick.

Beneath the clock, an imposing looking door leading into an inner office. This was Mary Congrieve’s domain. She entered her office and turned on another light, again the light was weak and clearly from an ancient incandescent bulb.

On the righthand side of her office was another door that led back into the entrance passage, allowing clients to leave the premises without going through the reception area, and of course not seeing or being seen by other clients.

Neither of these rooms had windows, neither of them had any sign of electronic devices of any sort, not even old fashioned land line telephones. If a gentleman from 1865 had entered the office, other than the electric lights, everything would have looked very familiar.

As Mary Congrieve hung her neat coat on a hanger in a large and ancient looking wardrobe that stood beside a row of heavy wooden filing cabinets, she heard the street door open again.

Keith entered the reception area. ‘Good morning Mary.’ he said. Mary did not know Keith’s full name, and likewise all Keith knew was that his boss was called Mary.

Keith was the receptionist and of course, the first and formidable line of security. He was ex military, a man in his early 50’s who was very capable to dealing with stressful situations. A man who understood discretion and the need to keep various parts of an organisation separate to optimise operational hygiene as he had said in his initial interview.

Both Mary and Keith knew there were further offices upstairs, they had discussed this on occasion over the years. They referred to the what they assumed was the rest of the bank as ‘them upstairs.’

Those offices used a separate entrance on Shoe Lane, just around the corner. They never had contact with, or any knowledge of, the people who may have worked there. They would occasionally hear footsteps as people climber the stairwell above them,

The only direct communication between the two floors was the vacuum tube in Mary’s office, using this she would send and sometimes receive documents, but that was it.

By any modern standard, this was a very peculiar looking arrangement, it would not be out of place as an exhibit in the Museum of London that was barely half a mile away. An office preserved in Aspic from, maybe not the Victorian era but certainly the inter war years. Mary had never questioned the way things were run, neither, to her knowledge, did Keith.

The thing they both appreciated was the stability and predictability of the company, the quiet working environment right in the middle of London, the easy to use transport links and of course the not insubstantial income.

They were both examples of happy and importantly, loyal employees.