Chapter 1: Dr Fraser I Presume

“If you want to keep your sanity,’ someone told Roger Fraser long ago, ‘don’t let the world run you.’

Huh, he thought, great maxim, not so easy to put it into practice. Moreover, replaying some inauspicious social events to date from summer 2011, he concluded fate abided as the chief culprit behind his interminable misfortunes. Superficially never far from controversy, albeit even when he had not been the source of discord, or alternatively the need to play the peacemaker in the face of overwhelming odds, somehow the altercation always fruited in him getting the rough end of the pineapple and ending up in the doghouse licking his wounds.

Shaking his head in disbelief he wondered, why do these damned things keep on happening to me, and why do I allow myself to get sucked into so many pulse-raising and unmanageable capers? First, the infamous dongle incident became a significant faux pas when he assumed the article approximated a man’s man-servant. Then the Fraser’s notorious garden party segued into a newsworthy saga for peer Kappa Corinthians Rugby Club players to mercilessly lampoon him with, unrestrained. Those capricious occurrences were followed by various family related disputes, coming to terms with his new trouble-shooter role at The Firm, and jousting with femme fatale schoolgirls in order to preserve his freedom and stay out of jail, during his involuntary evening classes helping them to accomplish top-grade A-level business studies results.

However, the piece de resistance took place at Greenwich Park, when his wife Charlotte had a brush with the law consequent to a major disagreement with a Godzilla-sized woman about the 2012 Olympic Games. When people disagreed with Charlotte’s often contentious views, she remained prone to side-lining her de facto responsible self in favour of fisticuffs. Though performed in an entertaining and often passionate manner, nonetheless Roger had encouraged her to curb her quick temper, particularly since James, the Fraser’s ever resourceful son, retained a video of the episode captured on his iPhone. Holding it over both his parents as a means to gain blessings in the pocket money department and reduce his household chores burden, James lingered fireproof, at least pro tem.

Ensuing from a set of unforeseen circumstances, largely beyond their control, well, Roger’s at least, for the first time in their twenty-plus years’ relationship, Charlotte had empathised with her husband, realising they were both in the doghouse. She told him, when she found a way to delete the scandalous Greenwich Park video, James would be toast. Until then, she promised to be on her best behaviour, much to her husband’s relief.

Still reeling from the unimaginable mishaps, he raised the bugbear of providence with wise owl friend Allan Mallory.

“Well, Roger, it’s akin to age creeps up like molten lava imprisoning everybody in its wake. You don’t notice the advent of its passage until actualisation sets in.” Laying a kindly paw on his shoulder, Alan prescribed, “you need to put your minor tragedies and calamities into perspective.”

“You mean, don’t dwell on them?”

“More the case, don’t allow them to become overbearing. Nothing you recited could be categorised as a grave cataclysm.”

“Of course, in the workplace I’m unassailable, whereas home environs are invariably a breeding ground for my apparent hopelessness and haplessness. I find the blessed dichotomy disarming. I take your point, but—” He simpered. “It seems to me, to avoid the beartraps, there needs to be a change in my domestic and leisure-time approach.”

Alarmed by the proposed upheaval, Alan assured, “you needn’t modify your amiable personality and propensity for gaffs, intentional or otherwise. That’d be a shame. You wouldn’t be the same person. Just accept the cavalier way you interact with people in the private sphere inherently results in the occasional, let’s call it, misunderstanding. And I must say, it seems to be a family trait in that others within your clan, and don’t take this the wrong way, also stray into a controversial sphere, more often than the norm.”

“You make it sound like the Fraser family is cursed! Maybe we should be renamed, ‘The Addams Family.’”

“I’d not go as far as that, although Charlotte would make a sensational Morticia Addams.”

“Hot damn, that makes me Gomez Addams or worse still, Lurch!”

“Well, you brought up the subject of kismet, Roger.”

~ * ~

As usual, Roger never had enough hours in the day to fulfil offbeat singular ambitions. What with the job, his family and of course Kappa Corinthians, every waking moment seemed to be consumed without any slack to tackle what he considered to be reasonable alpha-male desires.

In parallel with his investment banking career, he had partially-formed notions about starting his own British Touring Car Championship team with BMW, taking a three-months Route 66 road trip sabbatical with Charlotte and perhaps long-term friends the Hunts and the Andersons, and even exploring the upper reaches of the Amazon and the Blue Nile. Way back in his youth, Roger had briefly fostered yearnings about becoming an adventurer in the mode of Sir Richard Burton or Livingstone, tearing through the dense jungles of Brazil and Central Africa in pursuit of lost civilisations and priceless antiquities. Maybe he could even make a few bob out of the venture by writing about his experiences?

But all these activities relied on him sustaining his health and mental alertness. With the onset of middle age creeping ever nearer, plus additional trouble-shooter demands, those dual recognitions amplified his awareness time rested as the most valuable commodity at his disposal. Finite life coupled with the perception that the unexpected could rifle through and decimate any scheme made him deduce, sooner rather than later, he needed to augment his grand designs into plans. I must make every minute count, let alone every hour, he recognised.

Since graduating from Kings College Cambridge with a degree in economics and achieving chartered financial analyst status, Roger’s life appeared to be one long white-knuckle ride through domesticity and career. There had never been an intermission when he could take a deep breath and make calm calculation about other things he’d like to fulfil before the grim reaper came knocking. His aspirational dreams persisted, caught in foggy flight, never quite distilling into discernible features he could grasp and make reality.

During his sometimes distinguished and enduring rugby career, he had suffered several injuries. But for the grace of god they could have incapacitated or more severely invalided him, as he had seen happen to fellow players. With advancing years, he became mindful any legacy injury might seriously affect his later life and thereby the opportunity to enact the halfway-defined objectives, occasionally creeping into the forefront of his consciousness.

When he discussed his latent vocations with Charlotte, she maintained there’d be plenty of scope for whatever he wished to effectuate when he retired from The Firm. Notwithstanding, despite the daily challenges with Essex boy traders in the bullpen and the generic vagaries of investment banking, calling for a constant reinvention of the modus operandi, Roger failed to see a demarcation ahead when he retired. Besides, the green trouble-shooting responsibility had put extra zip into his stride. Howbeit the complete irregularity of the tasks and their impact on his analyst function needed to be carefully managed, he found both twisters stimulating and very satisfying. In his prepossession, he saw himself jetting off to Tierra del Fuego, Kathmandu or Timbuktu to settle some thorny hang-up The Firm’s London operation had run into for decades to come.

Most analysts had built up enough private equity investments to retire comfortably by age fifty-five, the strategy certainly applying to him. Roger had been making provision for retirement since his early twenties, assembling enough dividend-bearing assets to pull the ripcord and float gently down into his dotage when he hit forty. That landmark had come and gone, leaving him still motivated to make money and securing sufficient kicks out of investment banking’s daily battleground to want more. But by sixty, even for a top-of-the-pile analyst, noises would be made at The Firm regarding forced retirement. If he could keep fit and healthy, once past the sixty cut off point, he estimated he might go on until seventy, at least in a casual consultancy capacity. Only the executive layer evaded retirement at sixty, with the likes of ‘Ayatollah’ Luther Bembridge and Toby ‘Top Cat’ Chalcroft upholding their careers for however long they desired. Some execs even went on into their eighties, or until their toes finally turned up on the job.

Revisiting the trouble-shooting province, he assessed it undeniably added another dimension to his career longevity. Based on Top Cat’s appraisal for awarding him the job, it became vividly transparent the Ayatollah and he wanted experience coupled with drive and determination to succeed to broker whatever trouble-shooter undertakings were thrown up. Requiring Roger to call upon his diverse market knowledge and interpersonal skills to resolve difficulties and thereby conserve The Firm’s precious business reputation, to date each engagement had been markedly different, with little repeatability of solution applicable from one tricky situation to the next. Reasoning, as he got older, wider familiarity would be supplemented to his canon, making his acquired currency even more valuable to The Firm, he felt self-assured if still fit and healthy at sixty, surely he’d not be put out to pasture?

Applying analytical techniques, he worked out his options. While still relatively young, it made sense to embark on all his fancies. Waiting until he enrolled in the part-time consultancy stage of his career might be too late. By then, what physical and mental shape could he be in, presuming he still lived? Jostling with all the variables, Roger finalised until siblings Wendy, James and Heather were safely off his hands in terms of economic and emotional dependencies, it’d be foolhardy to jeopardise his city career to bring off intimate cravings. 2025 rendered the earliest watershed date, when Heather, the Fraser’s youngest child graduated from university, and he neared fifty-eight. That left little room for manoeuvre to cram in his perennial goals before he slammed into sixty, and possible enforced retirement.

Aiming to decipher the poser, he reflected on the immense names graduating from Kings; Robert Walpole, E.M. Forster, Rupert Brooke and Alan Turing among them. Even economics guru John Maynard Keynes came to mind. Having seen their disastrous monetary and fiscal effects justified by Gordon Brown, as a necessary constituent for creating the big state, Roger had denounced Keynes theories. Even so, he pondered if Keynes and the other Kings’ luminaries had wrestled with the conundrum of family and professional career verses clandestine lodestars.

Setting about seeing to the callings of home and The Firm, the symmetries continued to confront Roger Fraser. His facsimile image of a latter-day Stanley discovering him in the guise of Dr Livingstone, ensconced in a vine and coconut laden paradise, away from the perpetually taxing and infinitely tangled worlds of creature comforts and high finance, hovered as a remote vision.