hadn’t sold off chunks here and there). It was the gearing that was so attractive: it gave, historically — and there were few businesses in the world with a longer history than the venerated Lloyds Insurance Company — very high returns and few instances of loss years, all against an asset one could continue, in theory, to earn off as well — that is, if farming was profitable which it wasn’t, hence Gordon Trambert’s decision to find something that jolly-well was. But imagine if farming hit an upturn, too, is what he dreamed about.
Backing natural disasters not to happen and health litigation on a mass scale against international chemical companies and the like took time to come through on the Lloyds books. In 1992 Gordon Trambert was just another Name informed that the 1990 year had been the worst in Lloyds’ underwriting history and so instead of a healthy cheque in the post he received a bill. For cash he didn’t have. So off was carved another twenty-acre part of the farm to housing developers. And soon another ugly hundred little box dwellings one had to look at getting nearer and nearer to his stately old place. 1991 was an even worse year. Furthermore, the local market for housing land was depressed so he had to sell double the acreage for the same price as the year before. And what with the restaurant gone sour, too.
Hope being another name for desperation, Gordon Trambert hung in one more year, knowing he’d have to wait for at least a year before he knew if he’d called it right. He hadn’t. ’92 was another disaster. And then he found out his undertaking was unlimited when he had assumed it to be to the value of the asset he’d pledged. Murphy’s Law now.
Disgruntled Names hit as hard as himself and worse began making noises about the underwriting process making them, the faraway from London Names, sitting ducks for such things as mass employee asbestosis claims which large conglomerates had hastily insured against in those bad years. By some miracle of picking up a conversation between two friends to dinner — indeed it was at the very dinner of Grace Heke outside hanging herself — both of them Names, Gordon had heeded this private exchange of advice (bugger them, as a friend they should have warned me, too) and written express instructions to his Lloyds agent in London not to underwrite anything that included any form of health claim by employees against their companies. And as the noises about serious mishandling by underwriters became a loud outcry, Gordon Trambert joined those who were refusing to pay out on these Lloyds letters of demand for huge amounts. Or he’d have to sell the farm, the house, everything. The letter was his only hope, as representatives of Lloyds were in the country going to each and every Name demanding they honour their contracts.
He started seeing ironies everywhere, of his parents, their parents, modelling themselves, more or less but usually more, on the upper middle-class English societal model, adopting the style of well-enunciated speech, the private schooling, the pieces of imported English antiques, and the English reserve, and now this member of this generation losing most of the family fortune to one of the Mother Country’s most venerated business houses. And there was the Saturday rugby sideline irony of whispers about him being rich. And there was that troubling incident of one Grace Heke ending her life on his inherited property, it just wouldn’t go away. Losing himself in his sombre Russian choral music became more and more Gordon Trambert’s nightly habit — helped along by the gin bottle. Hardly noticing a wife losing respect for him.
NINE
S HE SEARCHED HER purse, a seven dollar and seventy cent start, the house beginning upstairs in her room, found a few coins there including (glory be!) a two-dollar coin, so she was getting close, forget the kids’ room they wouldn’t have any and she didn’t wanna wake them, not yet; downstairs to
Backing natural disasters not to happen and health litigation on a mass scale against international chemical companies and the like took time to come through on the Lloyds books. In 1992 Gordon Trambert was just another Name informed that the 1990 year had been the worst in Lloyds’ underwriting history and so instead of a healthy cheque in the post he received a bill. For cash he didn’t have. So off was carved another twenty-acre part of the farm to housing developers. And soon another ugly hundred little box dwellings one had to look at getting nearer and nearer to his stately old place. 1991 was an even worse year. Furthermore, the local market for housing land was depressed so he had to sell double the acreage for the same price as the year before. And what with the restaurant gone sour, too.
Hope being another name for desperation, Gordon Trambert hung in one more year, knowing he’d have to wait for at least a year before he knew if he’d called it right. He hadn’t. ’92 was another disaster. And then he found out his undertaking was unlimited when he had assumed it to be to the value of the asset he’d pledged. Murphy’s Law now.
Disgruntled Names hit as hard as himself and worse began making noises about the underwriting process making them, the faraway from London Names, sitting ducks for such things as mass employee asbestosis claims which large conglomerates had hastily insured against in those bad years. By some miracle of picking up a conversation between two friends to dinner — indeed it was at the very dinner of Grace Heke outside hanging herself — both of them Names, Gordon had heeded this private exchange of advice (bugger them, as a friend they should have warned me, too) and written express instructions to his Lloyds agent in London not to underwrite anything that included any form of health claim by employees against their companies. And as the noises about serious mishandling by underwriters became a loud outcry, Gordon Trambert joined those who were refusing to pay out on these Lloyds letters of demand for huge amounts. Or he’d have to sell the farm, the house, everything. The letter was his only hope, as representatives of Lloyds were in the country going to each and every Name demanding they honour their contracts.
He started seeing ironies everywhere, of his parents, their parents, modelling themselves, more or less but usually more, on the upper middle-class English societal model, adopting the style of well-enunciated speech, the private schooling, the pieces of imported English antiques, and the English reserve, and now this member of this generation losing most of the family fortune to one of the Mother Country’s most venerated business houses. And there was the Saturday rugby sideline irony of whispers about him being rich. And there was that troubling incident of one Grace Heke ending her life on his inherited property, it just wouldn’t go away. Losing himself in his sombre Russian choral music became more and more Gordon Trambert’s nightly habit — helped along by the gin bottle. Hardly noticing a wife losing respect for him.
NINE
S HE SEARCHED HER purse, a seven dollar and seventy cent start, the house beginning upstairs in her room, found a few coins there including (glory be!) a two-dollar coin, so she was getting close, forget the kids’ room they wouldn’t have any and she didn’t wanna wake them, not yet; downstairs to
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