I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol now for 161 days – not that I was counting or anything – but that was largely due to a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of desire.
Initially, I had found things very difficult, and had often found myself clenching my teeth together in frustration. As the months had passed, the cravings had become a little easier to manage but there were still times when I would have almost killed for a drink. It made me worry how I would fare when I left this place, for I had no wish, or intention, to go back to dependence.
However, strangely, I also felt that I had lost something very precious to me. My alcohol intake had become a sort of comfort blanket for me, acting as a shield that I could hide behind, but now I was having to learn to live, fully exposed, in the real world.
If there was one thing I had learned from all the lectures, it was that the difference between a problem drinker and an alcoholic is that, while the problem drinker drinks too much alcohol for his own health and wellbeing, the alcoholic simply doesn’t have the capacity to stop, because he suffers from a physical addiction.
I thought back to my fateful encounter with the Dickinsons’ drink trolley. I had only intended having one small swig of vodka to help me sleep but, once I started, I had been unable to stop myself from consuming the whole bottle, and then some. The only thing that finally halted me on that night had been my inability to stand up and reach for any more.
My name is Miles, and I’m an alcoholic.
35
In the end, I did go to my grandmother’s funeral, and Rachel came with me.
I tried to put her off coming but she insisted.
‘I’d like to see where you once lived,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’d like to know everything about you.’
Hence, on that Friday morning, we caught an early train from Didcot to London, and then one to Malton via York.
On the way north, Rachel tried to tackle the elephant in the room, which was where I was going to live when I left Granby Manor.
‘You could move in with me,’ she said, but I knew she only had a small bedsit in a rented house that she shared with other nursing staff at the hospital in Abingdon.
‘Let’s get today’s proceedings out of the way first,’ I replied. ‘We’ll talk about it later. At least I should have some capital coming my way now, and that might help.’
‘How much capital?’ Rachel asked.
‘Half the farm. Certainly not a fortune. It’s very small and only viable because it has grazing rights on the high moor for the sheep. But Grannie didn’t own that land, of course. I think she paid an annual fee for its use.’
‘Even so, a farm’s a farm. It must be worth quite a bit. Who gets the other half?’
‘My uncle. He lives there and he’s been running the place since before my grandfather died.’
‘Can you sell your half with him still in it?’
‘I want him to buy me out.’
But, of course, that wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped.
* * *
Rachel and I took a taxi from Malton Station to the now-familiar church in Ellerburn,
If anything, this funeral service was even shorter than that for my grandfather, and with disappointingly fewer people. Indeed, apart from my uncle, Rachel and me, there were only four others present, and one of those was the vicar.
Then it was off to the crematorium in the undertaker’s car behind the hearse for a quick committal to the flames. To me, it all seemed to have been done with excessive haste.
Rachel and I, plus my uncle, were taken back to the farm where one of those from the meagre congregation was waiting. He handed us his business card and introduced himself as my grandmother’s solicitor, and he was there to read the will. It felt a bit like a scene from some old black-and-white horror movie as the three of us sat around the dining-room table facing him. There was even a grandfather clock ticking menacingly in the corner. It read one forty-five.
After some preamble about my grandfather and uncle being the executors, he got to the meat of the document.
‘I leave my entire estate,’ read the solicitor, ‘to my husband and, if he predeceases me, then my estate shall be split equally between my son and my daughter. Should either or both of them predecease me, then their shares shall be left, per stirpes, to their further issue, if any.’
I inwardly sighed. The will was just as I expected, and unchanged from what I had believed.
But my relief was rather premature.
‘However,’ went on the solicitor, taking another piece of paper from his briefcase, ‘there is a codicil.’
‘What’s a codicil?’ Rachel asked.
‘It’s an addition or supplement to a will. Something that is added at a later date.’
‘What date?’ I asked with concern.
‘The tenth of August last year.’
Just after my grandfather’s funeral, when my uncle had first spoken to me about securing the farm for himself.
‘And what does this codicil say?’ I asked in trepidation.
I could feel a slight tingling in my fingertips and my breath was beginning to shallow. I forced myself to breathe deeper and the moment subsided.
The solicitor looked down at the handwritten paper in his hand. ‘Whereas the ownership of the farm will be shared,’ he read, ‘my son shall have the right to live in the farmhouse and work the land, rent free, until such time as he dies or he alone decides to move away. During this period, no sale or partial sale of the property can be made without his consent.’
He laid the paper down flat on the table and we all sat there in silence.
So I did still inherit half the farm but I couldn’t realise my asset. Not for as long as my uncle was alive or wanted to live there. And for no rent.
The solicitor looked across the table at me. ‘You will, of course, be entitled to half the profit from the farm.’
I laughed. ‘This place hasn’t made a profit for years, decades even.’
My grandfather had almost boasted that he had never paid a penny of income tax in his life because he earned so little. In all the years I could remember, neither of my grandparents, nor my uncle for that matter, had ever taken a day off, let alone gone away on holiday.
‘Right then,’ said my uncle, standing up. ‘Would anyone like a sherry?’
* * *
The centre of Lambourn village hasn’t changed much in the seven years since I was last here. The convenience store on the corner, where I had bought my curry suppers, and the booze, is still there, although the name has changed, and a newsagents has been converted into yet another betting shop.
I travelled down from London on the train to Hungerford and then took a taxi to Lambourn, in exactly the same way I had done so often in years gone by.
I finally convinced Rachel that I would be fine on my own, especially after she admitted that she had an important early lecture to attend and then a course-assessment interview scheduled for the afternoon.
And fine I am, strolling at ease around the village centre. I even walk past the Minster Church of St Michael, where my father’s funeral was held, and then out on the Upper Lambourn Road, past the equine hospital, to the house where I’d spent the first fourteen years of my life, with not the slightest flicker of a palpitation nor a fingertip tingle to be found.
I really must be getting better at long last.
Rachel had to catch the 6:50 train from Paddington to get back to Oxford in time for her lecture, so we woke very early to fit in another extensive therapy session before I took her to the station. Hence I’d caught the 7:07, arriving at Hungerford just after eight o’clock.
I stand on the grass verge as a string of horses walk past me, on their way to the gallops, the riders dressed in padded jackets and gloves against the February cold.
‘Morning,’ one of them shouts to me from his lofty position.
‘Morning,’ I shout back.
He doesn’t recognise me. Why would he? I am just a not
particularly successful ex-jockey who used to live here for a while in the distant past.
I watch them go, remembering back to happier times when I would have ached to be among them. But my life has moved on and I now have other tasks to fulfil, so I make my way back into the centre of the village and then down the Wantage Road to the Dickinsons’ establishment.
I don’t go through the stable-yard entrance but walk a little further on, taking the driveway up to the house and ringing the bell. It is a quarter to nine and I have picked my time with care.
Sabrina answers the door and she is genuinely delighted to see me, at least I think so.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she says, giving me a huge kiss on the cheek. ‘Come on in.’
I step through the front door into the hall, and can’t prevent myself from glancing down to see if there’s still a mark on the parquet where I’d thrown up.
There isn’t.
We go through into the kitchen.
‘What happened to your arm?’
‘A dislocated shoulder and a busted shoulder blade.’
‘Fall off a horse?’
‘Something like that. I fell on the ice in St Moritz.’
‘Yes, Jerry told me you were there. The place must be jinxed. One of our lads broke his ankle doing just the same thing, and Jerry’s got a right shiner too.’
Yes, I thought, but all for different reasons.
‘I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment. He’s up on the gallops with the horses.’
I hoped he would be. That’s why I’ve chosen this particular time to arrive. I want to speak to Sabrina first.
‘Want a coffee?’ she asks. ‘And some toast? I was about to make some for myself.’
‘That would be lovely, thanks.’
She puts the kettle on the AGA hotplate and pops two slices of bread into the toaster before turning back towards me.
‘It’s been a long time,’ she says. ‘How are you, apart from the shoulder?’
‘Dry.’
She smiles broadly and claps her hands together. ‘I’m so glad.’
‘Only thanks to you. I haven’t had a drink now in years.’
‘No relapses at all?’
‘Only once. Soon after I left Granby Manor. I thought I could go back to social drinking but I found I couldn’t. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.’
She laughs. ‘The mark of a true alcoholic.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
She laughs again but then stops suddenly.
‘Seriously, though,’ she says. ‘I’m proud of you.’
She pours boiling water into two cups and butters the toast.
‘And how are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Much the same,’ she replies. ‘Struggling on.’
‘And Jerry?’
‘Jerry’s just being Jerry.’ She sighs audibly. ‘I swear he loves his bloody horses far more than he loves me. Mind you, he always has. I’m surprised he doesn’t sleep with them.’
‘And your son?’
‘Nigel? He’s still in New York. He’s living with someone now.’
‘Do you see much of him?’
‘Haven’t seen him in over a year. He came over for the Christmas before last. He’s asked us to go over there but Jerry never wants to go anywhere unless he can take his beloved horses. And he and Nigel don’t really get on.’ She sighs again. ‘I may go on my own in the summer if I can summon up the courage to fly. Or perhaps I’ll take a ship. I might not come back, either.’
‘Are things that bad?’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘But Jerry was sixty-two last birthday and, when I talk about the possibility of him retiring, he goes mad.’ She sighs once more. ‘We’ve been here thirty years now. Paid off our mortgage. We could sell this place for a fortune, buy a small house somewhere by the sea, and still have enough left to live on very comfortably, perhaps even take a cruise or two together before we’re too old to enjoy them. But Jerry won’t hear of it. He says that Mick Easterby trained winners in his nineties so why shouldn’t he.’ She rolls her eyes in dismay. ‘And when he’s not actually out with the horses, or at the races, he’s sitting in the snug watching the bloody stuff on the television. I want a bit more out of my life.’
‘Then leave him.’
She looks at me.
‘Don’t be bloody silly, Miles. I love the old bugger.’
I laugh but, at that point, the old bugger himself returns, and he is not as happy to see me as his wife is. I can tell that in spite of the ‘right shiner’ round his left eye, although the redness in the eye itself has decreased considerably since I’d last seen him at the clinic in St Moritz on Sunday evening.
‘Hello, Miles,’ he says, rather clipped. ‘What brings you here?’
‘Repaying a debt.’
I take a ten-pound note from my pocket and put it on the kitchen table.
‘You needn’t have bothered.’
But we both know that I am not here because of a ten-pound debt.
‘Let’s go and talk in the snug,’ he says.
‘Man talk, is it?’ Sabrina asks with a laugh. ‘Over what you naughty boys got up to in Switzerland?’
‘Something like that,’ Jerry replies, but he isn’t laughing with her.
Neither am I.
36
I resisted having a glass of cheap sherry at my grandmother’s wake.
To be honest, I was a bit shell-shocked from the reading of the will, and the codicil, so Rachel and I soon made our excuses and left, calling a taxi to take us back to Malton station.
‘Why didn’t you say something?’ Rachel asked when we were on the train to London.
‘Like what?’
‘That it’s so unfair. You need the money from the farm right now, not at some distant time in the future when your uncle dies. He might live to be a hundred for all we know.’
He probably would too, I thought. Just to spite me.
‘But what good would it do? That solicitor said that the codicil had been properly drawn up and witnessed.’
Rachel threw her hands up in exasperation.
‘For God’s sake. Why are you so bloody calm about it? You should launch a legal challenge. Fight back. Give your uncle what for.’
Did I really want to take my only living relative to court? Especially as part of me could see the sense of what had happened. The farm had been my uncle’s home and workplace all his life. Was I really prepared to have him made homeless?
I suddenly realised that I was, indeed, surprisingly relaxed about it. No anger tantrums at all. My therapy at Granby Manor must be working after all.
‘Have you ever heard of Bleak House?’ I asked.
‘Vaguely. Isn’t it a book?’
I nodded. ‘By Charles Dickens. It’s the only thing I studied in my English A level before I dropped out of school.’
‘What about it?’
‘Much of the story is about opposing factions of the Jarndyce family contesting a will. The arguments go back and forth through the courts for many years until it is found that the whole value of the estate has been consumed by the legal fees and there’s nothing left for anyone to inherit anyway.’
‘So you think that would happen here?’
‘It might. The farm is not worth that much and lawyers are very expensive. It would all go very quickly and then I’d end up with nothing.’
‘It’s still bloody unfair,’ Rachel said with resignation.
‘You’re right but, this way, I might get something eventually. And, when my uncle dies, I might get all of the farm, unless he leaves his half to the dogs.’
We laughed and then travelled on in silence for a while, holding hands and watching the countryside flash past the train windows.
‘You could always hire a hitman to bump him off.’
I laughed again. ‘I’m not that desperate.’
How lucky I had been to end up in Lincoln Hospital on that dreadful night after Market Rasen. Meeting Rachel had changed m
y life. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have dug that tunnel with the ex-City trader and escaped from Granby Manor to a life of drink, drugs, disaster and, no doubt, an early death. As it was, I was looking forward to a future, and one with her in it.
We travelled on again in silence as the rolling hills of South Yorkshire gave way first to the woodlands of Nottinghamshire and then to the flatlands of the Fens near Peterborough.
‘So what have you decided to do?’ Rachel asked, finally confronting the elephant head on.
‘For the time being, I’m going to stay where I am,’ I said. ‘The director has said he will find me a place on their advanced scheme. I’ll have to move out of the main house into one of the self-contained flats in the grounds, but it means I can continue to participate in the therapy sessions.’
Rather than being pleased, as I’d thought she would be, she is clearly concerned.
‘How can you afford it without selling your half of the farm?’
I smiled. ‘It seems that I’m entitled to housing benefit and that pays for almost everything.’
‘What do you mean by almost?’
‘Well, the housing benefit pays for the accommodation. I have to find a bit more to cover the cost of food but that’s all. And I’ll be able to claim the dole once the Dickinsons finally do the paperwork to terminate my job; and, until they do, I’m technically still employed by them.’
And that was all thanks to Sabrina. She had insisted that I remain on the stable payroll during my time in treatment. I could only imagine what Jerry thought of the idea and I knew it couldn’t go on for much longer.
‘Or I’ll just have to find a job,’ I said. ‘Maybe stacking shelves or something. There’s a huge new supermarket opening down the road. They’ll be looking for staff.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘The director is actually very keen on the idea. As a sort of halfway house to getting back to full independence.’
She finally seemed to be satisfied, happy even.
‘That’s good. You’ve done so well.’
I thought I could still detect some hesitancy in her voice. Maybe it was because I had not committed to moving in with her but, for some reason, and as much as I loved her, I wasn’t yet ready for that. Perhaps it was the strong belief I had inside me that I needed to get away from everything in order to get better and that taking on another responsibility would be too much, at least for a while.
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