I watched.

And then suddenly her eyes were open; she was looking back at me and smiling.

‘Are you just going to stand there,’ she said, ‘or are you coming in?’

How different my life might have been, how very different, if I had stepped into her room instead of slipping back into the darkness as quickly and as silently as a dream slips from the waking mind.

∗

On Saturday morning I left the house before any of the others were awake, and returned to London. It was the last I saw of Joan for many years. Her parents retired to a village on the South coast, so we never met up again while visiting our families at Christmas. The only news I ever heard was when my mother told me (shortly before we stopped speaking) that she had moved back to Birmingham and married a local businessman.

On Monday morning, I telephoned the Peacock Press and accepted their commission to write a book about the Winshaws.

The same afternoon, I went out and bought my first video recorder.

Thomas

Few people remember anything about the first domestic VCR, launched by Philips as long ago as 1972. The price was high, the recording time was limited to one hour, and it ended up selling mainly to commercial and institutional buyers. Thomas Winshaw bought one, all the same, and had it built into a cupboard behind one of the oak-pannelled walls of his office at Stewards. But he decided not to invest at this stage. Although he was both privately excited by the invention and keenly aware of its commercial possibilities, he sensed that its time had not yet come. Almost, but not quite.

1978 saw the first real flurry of activity. In April JVC introduced its Video Home System, retailing at £750, and only three months later Sony launched the rival Betamax machine. Over the next few years these two systems were to slug it out in the marketplace, with VHS finally proving itself the clear winner. In the autumn of 1978, when Thomas Winshaw announced that the bank would be involving itself heavily in the burgeoning industry, his fellow board members’ initial reaction was one of dismay. They reminded him that Stewards’ flirtation with the film industry in the early 1960s had not been successful, and even invoked the crisis at Morgan Grenfell ten years ago, when a major commitment to film financing had ended in a potential disaster only warded off at the last minute by intervention from the Bank of England. Thomas dismissed these precedents. He was not suggesting anything as risky as investment in film production. He simply proposed taking a modest stake in one of the leading hardware manufacturers; the software market being, as he would be the first to admit, at this stage too new, too unstable and, frankly, too sleazy. As usual, his instincts were right. Over the next five years, imports of video recorders multiplied ten times over, and by 1984 there was a machine in 35.74 per cent of British homes, as opposed to 0.8 per cent in 1979. The bank profited handsomely. Then in 1981 they became advisers and fund managers to a firm which was rapidly building up a strong market share in post-production, distribution and film-to-video transfers. With Stewards’ help, this company went on to merge with an independent video duplication house and within a few years more than three quarters of its income was coming from duplication services. Once again, the bank reaped substantial dividends. Thomas slipped up on one occasion, however: he was an enthusiastic proponent of Philips’s videodisc system, LaserVision, which was put on the market in May 1982 but after more than a year had only collected sales figures of around 8,000. The obvious explanation was that it did not offer a recording facility, and when, a few months later, JVC abruptly cancelled their own disc system, and RCA decided to halt all player production in 1984, it was clear even to the least sophisticated industry analyst that the new technology had failed to catch on. Yet Thomas maintained his commitment to a £10-million disc-pressing plant in Essex, which was running at a huge loss.

Among themselves, his colleagues would puzzle over this curious blind spot. The amount of money involved was negligible, in Stewards’ terms: but it was still the only time in Thomas’s fifteen-odd years of chairmanship that he had persisted in offering uncritical support to a palpably loss-making enterprise. And they never did guess the real reason, which was that he was enraptured with the sharp picture quality and perfect still frames offered by the video disc, which suited his own needs so admirably and took him back to the heady, exhilarating days when he used to hang around the film studios and collect discarded footage of beautiful young actresses in various stages of déshabillé. The freeze frame, for Thomas, was the very raison d’être of video: he was convinced that it would turn Britain into a nation of voyeurs, and sometimes, as he sat spellbound in the dark with the television on, his fly buttons undone and the door to his office securely locked, he would imagine identical scenes being played out in curtained rooms up and down the country, and would feel a strange solidarity with the great mass of ordinary men from whose pitiful lives he normally took such care to insulate himself.

Only once, incidentally, did he forget to lock the office door. It was about seven o’clock in the evening and as luck would have it his secretary, who was also working late, made the mistake of entering without knocking. She was sacked on the spot; but the story still managed to make its way into a few of the City wine bars, and some people maintain that the phrase ‘merchant banker’ was introduced into the currency of rhyming slang at precisely this time.

∗

Thomas loved screens of every description. He loved the lie they sustained: that the world could be given shape by the four sides of a rectangle, and that he, the spectator, was in a position to sit back and watch, untouched and unobserved. In his professional life (not that he had any personal life to speak of) he was at constant pains to screen himself off from the world, which he watched as if it were a silent film from behind the protecting glass of many different screens: the window of a first-class railway carriage, for instance, or of Bob Maxwell’s helicopter (which he was occasionally allowed to borrow), or the smoke-tinted, one-way glass of his private limousine. The computerization of the foreign exchange markets, which alarmed some of the older bankers, seemed to him an entirely logical development. So did the abandonment of the stock exchange floor in 1986. At last, to his delight, there was no longer any need for dealers ever to come into contact with one another, and every transaction was reduced to the flicker of electric pulses on a video screen. He had a camera installed in Stewards’ own foreign trading room, connected to a monitor in his office, and here, staring at a screen which all day showed nothing but row upon row of his traders, themselves staring at screens, he would swell with quasi-sexual sensations of pride and power. It seemed, at such moments, that there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day’s intoxicating speculations. Banking, as he once told a television interviewer, had become the most spiritual of all professions. He would quote his favourite statistic: one thousand billion dollars of trading took place on the world’s financial markets every day. Since every transaction involved a two-way deal, this meant that five hundred billion dollars would be changing hands. Did the interviewer know how much of that money derived from real, tangible trade in goods and services? A fraction: 10 per cent, maybe less. The rest was all commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist. In that case (countered the interviewer) surely the whole system was nothing but a castle built on sand. Perhaps, agreed Thomas, smiling: but what a glorious castle it was …