The King's Shilling

by Fraser John Macnaught

  “It’s called puberty.”

  “I know, I told you, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ll have breasts soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I’ll have nice breasts?”

  “I’m sure you will. You have a nice everything else.”

  She squeezes my hand again and I squeeze back.

  “I think I’d be embarrassed talking like this with anyone else”, she says.

  “I know what you mean. So would I. It’s weird.”

  “No, it’s not weird. It’s good.”

  “Yes, you’re right, it is… It is good. We can tell each other everything.”

  She doesn’t say any more but she snuggles up to me and puts her head on my chest.

  I can smell her hair. Apples and something else.

  She runs a finger down my tummy.

  Then we hear a scream and we sit up. A rowing-boat has appeared, about twenty yards away on the lake. A man is rowing it. It’s Mr Fuller, the head gardener. He looks hot. Sitting opposite him is Sarah’s Mum and she has a parasol in one hand and a glass of something in the other and she’s looking at us and she’s screaming. Then she drops the glass in the boat and the parasol falls in the water and she covers her face with her hands and she says something to Mr Fuller and Mr Fuller rows faster and the boat disappears behind some trees.

  I look at Sarah and she looks at me and she looks a bit worried and I’m sure I do too.

  Then we look at the parasol floating upside-down on the lake and we wonder if it’s going to be all right.

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday April 24th 2013

  “Ahoy there!”

  Paul spun round to look where the voice was coming from and he saw Neil Morgan walking towards him from the orchard. He was wearing khaki pants and what looked like a black Lacoste shirt. Paul watched him as he approached.

  Morgan was smiling when he held out his hand.

  “I thought it was you. How are you?”

  “How are you? Any news?”

  Morgan looked away for a moment.

  “No. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Morgan said nothing and stared at him.

  “I’m trespassing again”, said Paul.

  “It’s a nice day for a spot of trespassing.”

  “But I’m not trespassing by a long way…”

  Morgan frowned.

  “What do you mean?”

  Paul jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the Cottage.

  “Greville Hartley left me the Cottage, the old gate-house. We’re neighbours.”

  Morgan looked blank.

  “Really? Good heavens… I had no idea. That’s odd, part of the estate wall belonging to someone else.”

  “I agree. It came as a bit of a surprise to me too. I’ve only just heard.”

  “Well… It was through Pearson and Pearson and…?”

  “And Shelby… yes. I saw them this morning. Or him… Mr Blake.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m not sure… I’m going to start cleaning up, but I have no definite plans for the moment.”

  Morgan kicked at something on the ground and then smiled again.

  “Well, neighbour… welcome to Calderwood Hall!”

  Paul’s phone rang. He raised an apologetic finger and took the call. Morgan wandered down to the edge of the lake and looked into the water. He turned back when Paul spoke.

  “That was the electricity company. They can’t turn it on until Friday, apparently.”

  “You’re not thinking of staying there are you? I mean, right away… it must be in a terrible state. I don’t think anyone’s lived there for years…”

  Paul shrugged.

  “I’m just taking it one step at a time.”

  “What’s the first step?”

  “Burn some rubbish, I suppose. Air the place out. Do a bit of cleaning…”

  “Need a hand? I’ve got nothing better to do and a bit of physical labour is probably just what the doctor ordered…”

  Paul couldn’t hide his surprise.

  “Erm, sure, whatever… fine. Thanks.”

  “Listen… I’ll just go and slip into something more uncomfortable and I’ll see you there in a jiffy…”

  “Ok…”

  Paul wandered back to the Cottage, not knowing what to think. But then he decided he was going to stop thinking so much and just do what he’d said: take things one step at a time.

  He changed into some overalls he’d bought and put on some old boots and unloaded the car: brushes and brooms, cleaning materials, firelighters, bottled water…

  He went up to the bathroom to see if the toilet was working and it was and he tried to clean it but soon realised he’d need a new one.

  He carried the broken shelves and the old desk down from the office and set them down in the back garden and cleared a space to build a fire.

  Morgan showed up a minute later wearing some jogging pants and sneakers and an old shirt that Paul thought may have been Greville’s.

  “So? Where do we start?”

  Paul’s phone rang again. As he answered it, he pointed to the old shed. Morgan mimed pulling it down and Paul nodded. Morgan went over to it and started heaving off rotten planks.

  Paul’s call finished and he went over to help Morgan dismantle the shed.

  “Bloody mobile phones, eh!”, Morgan said. “I’ve got two: one for work and one for play, and I never know which is which.” He looked Paul in the eye. “I keep saying ‘Hello darling’ to my lawyer!”

  Paul smiled politely. Morgan kept looking at him as if he were expecting a remark, then went back to work and ripped out a plank with a huge rusty nail sticking out of it. It swung away from him as it broke free and Paul felt the draught as it brushed past his head.

  “Oops! Sorry!”

  Paul watched him as he went to work. Morgan looked quite fit, but the sort of fitness you get from the odd squash game, not regular labour or work-outs. And he seemed a little clumsy.

  “So what was your call, without being indiscreet… work or play? What do you do, by the way?”

  Paul set some firelighters and lit them and added some sticks and some dry bits of wood.

  “I’m a journalist… travel stuff mostly…”

  “Really? Interesting work?”

  “Mostly. That was a bloke wanting a piece about the preparations for the Queensday do in Amsterdam next week…”

  Morgan dropped a plank on his foot and swore.

  “That’s your neck of the woods, isn’t it?”, Paul went on. “I hear you do business with Holland…”

  Morgan rubbed his foot and grimaced.

  “Absolutely. Not A’dam so much. Utrecht mostly, that’s where the company’s based over there. But I work in Hull mainly, that’s where the stuff arrives.”

  “Do you speak the lingo?”

  “It’s very hard, and it’s not an attractive language, and there’s no point really, they all speak better English than we do!”

  “I know”, Paul said.

  He carried some of the drier wood over to the fire and built a pyramid over the first flickering flames.

  Morgan glanced at him.

  “Do you know Amsterdam then? Have you been for work?”

  “I used to go five or six times a year. Not so much recently.”

  “I don’t know it well, myself”, said Morgan, his face reddening as he strained at a reluctant door-frame.

  “In fact….” Paul started, then stopped.

  “What?”

  He thought about what to say, and if he should say anything at all. And then he spoke.

  “The last time I saw Sarah… was in Amsterdam.”

  Morgan abandoned the door-frame and looked at him.

  “Really? When was that ? »

  Chapter 17

  Saturday May 14th 2005

  It’s the last leg of a
tour run by an organisation called Culture-Vultures. A guided tour of Europe’s major art museums: the Louvre, the Reina Sofia, the Uffizi, the Vatican… We started out at the British Museum in London and 10 days later we’re in Amsterdam for the Van Gogh.

  I’ve been doing this for a few years now. It’s ok. I know what I’m doing, so it’s easy. The money’s not bad. I get to see a lot of interesting places, and I meet a lot of people, not always so interesting. Some are boring and rude, others are friendly and curious. It depends. And I get laid a lot.

  After I left the farm in Sussex I went to London and worked in a pub for a few months, saving up some money, moving from one shared flat to another. Then I got a job in a restaurant and I waited tables for a while. At another restaurant I learned how to cook a bit and started getting interested in food. Some people can’t handle the discipline in a kitchen; it’s all very military and precise and there’s hell to pay when you fuck up but I liked it. I kept my head down and my mouth shut and I showed up on time and I think I was a good worker.

  But after a while I started getting a bit claustrophobic. I was fed up of sitting in buses and on the tube and in pubs and hearing conversations around me and understanding everything that was said and being drawn in to these people’s lives whether I wanted to or not. Without even thinking about it I knew where people came from and what kind of education they’d had and if they were rich or poor and even had an idea of who they’d voted for. I imagined people who heard me speak did the same thing. I was called Yorkie and a Tyke and a northern bastard and I felt catalogued and labelled. I didn’t want to be defined like that and I didn’t want my space to be invaded by other people who were catalogued and labelled, even if I was doing the cataloguing and the labelling myself. I was already fairly anonymous and I wasn’t who I used to be but I wanted more. I wanted a new world where everything would be unfamiliar and unrecognisable and I could appreciate the newness and the novelty and see things for what they were rather than how they fit in to a scheme of things that was too familiar and too much a part of what I’d been before.

  It all made sense to me at the time… and still does in a way, I suppose.

  So I went to Paris and after a while I got a job in a hotel, part-time barman and part-time breakfast cook. It was only a small hotel but it was quite chic. They sometimes had small groups from America or Asia and they had a van to take people around the sights and to museums and galleries and someone asked me to drive it on occasion. And the guests would ask me questions about where we were going or where we’d been and I did a bit of homework and pretty soon I could answer most of their questions and even anticipate what they would ask. The hotel was in the Saint-Germain area and it had a sister hotel near the Pantheon and they asked me to do the same thing for their guests too. So that’s how it started.

  I loved Paris. I still do.

  I can remember getting the night train from London, the first time I went, and lying on the top couchette, listening to the sounds flashing past outside. The clangs and the bells and the toots and the level-crossing warnings… they were different and evocative… like that deep booming train-horn sound you hear in American films that always makes you think of prairies and boxcars and hobos and pioneering journeys.

  And then I arrived in Paris and there were the smells. From the Gare du Nord down along the boulevards and through the narrow streets in the old neighbourhoods near the river, it felt like I’d just discovered my sense of smell. The city smelt like wet concrete and fresh bread. That’s the one I remember the most. Perhaps with a hint of piss and car fumes in a couple of places, but I was used to that after London. But there were perfume shops and hair salons and nail-bars, the open doors wafting out scents that awakened new sensations. The North African restaurants were new to me too; couscous and tagine and mechoui and sweet sticky desserts, along with the spices and herbs and combinations of both from places doing food from Mauritius and Guadeloupe, Vietnam and Senegal, Cape Verde and Madagascar… The only foreign food I’d really eaten had been Indian and Italian and the places where I’d worked had never done much more than burgers and steaks… The aromas were amazing. And there were cafés and bars everywhere; fresh coffee and hot chocolate and pastis and red wine… And the bakers… nothing beats the smell and taste of fresh bread… except perhaps lipstick on the lips of someone you love and perfume on their warm body… But Paris was a feast. And I feasted on it.

  Maybe I imagined all this. Maybe I just wanted it to be different and exciting and new, but I didn’t care. I felt like a foreigner. And it was good. I didn’t understand what people were talking about on buses and metro carriages and in bars and cafés and I felt liberated in some way. Their lives didn’t invade mine. I was lost in the crowd, with no connection to the people around me, and I wanted to be lost.

  I loved Paris from the start but I knew I wouldn’t stay that long. I knew there would be other places where I could be lost too. And there were.

  I was in Barcelona when I found out my parents had died. It was a ridiculous fluke. I was shepherding a flock of English tourists along La Rambla. They’d just arrived, and I heard a very familiar accent. I asked the man where he was from and he said Halifax. I didn’t say anything, but he pulled out a copy of the Halifax Courier to prove it and he said it was from yesterday and he’d read it and by the sound of my voice I was from round there and did I want it. For some reason I took it and back at the hotel that evening I leafed through it and by chance my eyes fell on a short article entitled “Car Crash Couple Dead”. The names of the couple were Mr and Mrs Alan Boyd.

  I got drunk that night. And I got into a fight with a couple of German skinheads near the beach. The next morning my eyes were red and swollen. But they hadn’t hit my face.

  I called the Courier and finally found out that the funeral was in two days time. I managed to get myself replaced, and I went ‘home’.

  So now I’m in Amsterdam and we’ve done the Van Gogh and I’ve taken the group to a Rijsttafel restaurant not far from the flower market. Indonesian food is fantastic, I can’t get enough of it.

  The group is composed of art lovers from Chicago: patrons of the arts and benefactors and enlightened amateurs and they’ve been pretty decent on the whole. Most of them are women. Most of them are aged between 35 and 50. And most of them are horny. I’m 25 and I’m not bad-looking and I can make them laugh and it doesn’t take much imagination to work out what happens in such situations.

  But discretion is important. People aren’t blind and they aren’t always stupid and the women on European tours have to go home to their husbands and families, and their friends and colleagues and fellow tourists sometimes blab.

  So there are certain rules. Once the initial signals have been established, you never sit next to the person concerned. You make friends with her less than attractive sister or cousin or co-worker and you’re a perfect gentleman. You never do anything too early on the tour. The last evening is ideal in many ways, but it’s often complicated, because everyone wants to have a last-night drink and dinner and it goes on late. So one or two days before is usually the most practical. But this time we’ve been thwarted so far and so tonight’s the night. She’s called Susan Kenworthy and she’s 38 and she’s hot to trot.

  She’s already told me her room number three times and made it clear she’s planning an early night, perhaps to take a bath, a nice long hot one, and curl up in bed with a thriller. I’ve heard more subtle come-ons but it wasn’t bad.

  I try to avoid analysing my motives. I don’t dwell on the emotional aspects of it, for her or for me.

  I’m a bastard, in a way. I’m exploiting the loneliness and the desire for romance and the closeness that comes of being together for 10 days or two weeks in beautiful, exotic places. But I’m not a total bastard. I don’t go out of my way to seduce anybody. There’s a mutual interest, there has to be. And I don’t lie. I don’t say how pretty someone is if I don’t believe it. I don’t engineer situations that are designed t
o spark something off. And I don’t think I’m doing anybody a favour. I’m not that vain or stupid.

  I’ve forgotten Sarah.

  I haven’t seen her for almost eleven years apart from those 50 seconds at my parents’ funeral. I know she’s working in New York because I saw a photo of her in a colour supplement, speaking at some charity do. There’s an ocean between us now, and we have no connection any more. Or at least, no connection I can relate to. She’s got her life and I’ve got mine. End of story.

  So I have relations with women I know for a while and generally appreciate and find interesting and attractive and sexy and then they go away. And it’s fun while it lasts and then it’s over. And I move on.

  Susan’s watching me and the meal’s over and some of the group are talking about moving on to a cabaret somewhere. I take out my cigarettes and make it clear I’m going out for a smoke and two minutes later she’s followed me outside and we’re standing by a canal. She’s lithe and fit and looks like that blonde actress from one of those TV cop shows.

  “Hey”, she says.

  “Did you enjoy the meal?”

  “Fabulous. You know how to satisfy a girl’s appetite.”

  Oh God, I’m thinking. That’s a terrible line.

  She laughs as if she’s thinking the same thing.

  “Are you going to join the others?” she asks.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll think I’ll hit the hay.”

  “Me too. Would you like to join me for a nightcap?”

  She’s looking me right in the eye and her voice is level and straightforward and sincere.

  “Yes, I would”, I say. “I’d like that very much.”

  “Ok. I’ll see you in half an hour?”

  She takes a quick look back into the restaurant and then glances at me, her eyebrows raised a little.

  I nod, pursing my lips, telling her I understand that I shouldn’t walk in there and tell everyone I’m going back to the hotel to screw Susan Kenworthy.