by Michael Ross
I’ve missed some of their conversation.
“Sorry?”
“I said it’s been a topsy-turvy time for all three of you, I feel left out,” repeats Gemma.
“But I think we’re all happy, aren’t we?” Jess asks. “In fact, I would guess you might be the most unsettled of the four of us today.”
“I do not fancy going to work tomorrow, knowing you won’t be coming in. If that new woman gets the job to replace you on a permanent basis, I’m off. I’d rather walk the streets.”
“I’d like to be around when you do,” comments Edwin.
We are all shocked. Edwin is not the sort of person to say stuff like that. He does not do glib or light-hearted. He’s not poor company, but you don’t expect him to hit you with a one-liner. All three of us are slightly open-mouthed. This could go one of two ways.
“Well, Edwin Pedlar.” Gemma’s face is stern. There could be blood spilt; I’m ready to grab Jess and dive under the table.
“I’m sor—I just meant that—” Edwin is struggling to get himself off the hook, and from the look on Gemma’s face, she is more than happy to keep him on it and ready to put him in her creel before taking him home to grill for dinner.
“I didn’t mean that I thought you would walk the streets…you wouldn’t need to do that…”
“Ah, I see. So my clients would come to me, would they?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“So it wouldn’t be worth making the effort, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, no…”
“Edwin. She’s pulling your leg.” Jess leans over and rests her hand on his. “My ex-PA has a wicked sense of humour, which not everyone gets the first time. Gem, apologise for embarrassing Edwin—now.”
“I’m sorry, Edwin. I know it was some sort of male compliment. I thought it was funny, even though I didn’t laugh. If you pay for a pudding, I will forgive you.”
“Yes, of course I’ll pay. For everyone.”
“Edwin! I’m joking again. It would take a lot more than a crème brûlée to sweep me off my feet.”
“Gemma, stop teasing.” This time Jess does sound rather irritated.
“All right—I’m suitably admonished.” She drops her head and places both hands on her lap, which lasts for no more than two seconds before she starts laughing. But I catch a look passing between her and Edwin. She has thrown the gauntlet down at his feet, and Edwin doesn’t seem the sort of guy to turn down a challenge. Gemma gets her crème brûlée, and when we have finished eating, we wander into the lounge. Most of the other patrons have moved on and we have the room more or less to ourselves. We have an argument over the bill, but finally agree to split it equally four ways.
“I have to say that is the best Sunday lunch I’ve ever had in my life, and also the most expensive.” I lift my half-empty glass. “To good friends and good times. Cheers.”
We order some coffee and tea and make ourselves comfortable. Chan has rung to say she is staying another night at the hotel and will pop around to see me in the morning, so my time is my own.
“So, Edwin, tell us more about your charity,” Jess says. I reckon she has started the conversation to help put Ed back at ease.
“Okay. I will keep it as brief as possible. My uncle, and Danny knows some of this already, was an alcoholic and a drug addict when he was a young man, and he finished up destitute and living homeless on the streets. If my father had not come to his rescue, Dad reckons John would have been dead before he was twenty-five.”
“Is that why you don’t drink?” interjects Gemma.
“Between friends? Yes, that is why I don’t drink alcohol. I’m not being parsimonious or aloof or whatever. I witnessed the worst effects of alcoholism from an early age.”
Gemma looks even prettier with a serious face. Edwin has got our full attention, and starts to fill in the background to his family’s history.
“Some of what I know is second hand from my father. I was in my early teens the first time I met my uncle, and he scared me to death. His eyes were dead and he looked like a person twice my father’s age, when in fact he was the younger brother. The change in him was so slow that I wasn’t aware of it until my early twenties. I’d been having a problem with my bank account and I was sitting with him going through things when I realised I was talking to my best friend—the person whose advice I admired more than anybody’s. At the time, John had already set up the charity, having arranged a meeting room hire for Wednesdays, and had one or two people lined up to help. He had some ideas of what he wanted to do, but very little other than enthusiasm. Six years later, the charity is running like a well-oiled machine. Another two years, he has a stroke and is dead.”
I’m not the best person in the world for dealing with other people’s emotions, but Jess is. “This must be a very hard time for you, Edwin,” she says. “Tell us a bit more about the charity itself.”
“My uncle was a great reader—anything and everything…” He goes onto explain his uncle’s theory about communication and how reading helps unblock people’s communication dam, and therefore, help them turn their lives round. He pauses a moment and realizes he has a captive audience waiting for him to restart.
Jess gives him a nod, which seems to give him what he needs to continue.
“It was trial and error: one-to-ones, group meetings, day trips, talks from outsiders. He tried so many ideas, but each failure would bring a little taste of success. Some of the affiliated charities around the area started sending people his way, people who others thought might have an outside chance of recovery. Then, after about three years, he tried a new tack. It was something close to his heart anyway, but it all started when he was reading with this new member who could only work one-to-one and could only read successfully if he read out loud. This particular guy found it impossible to read quietly in his head. It was a eureka moment for John, because he realized that that’s what reading is: It’s communicating with yourself. It’s you as a reader talking, but with no sounds.
“So he started by organising his users into member groups. He decided that if he called these people with problems members, it gave them dignity—an inference that they belonged to a society. He organised them into small groups and they would sit around a round table twice a week and read through chapters of a book together. The therapeutic effect it had was amazing.
“You even had people in the room who had been university professors.
“I’m being absolutely serious here. There was this university professor who had walked away from his life and for years had lived homeless. He even had a job to remember his own name because he’d been known as ‘Prof’ for so long. And Prof would be sat at a table alongside a girl who had walked out of home and school, drifted into prostitution at thirteen—a girl who would take several minutes to read a small paragraph. But the words brought them together.
“John talked me into attending a meeting and I was instantly hooked. That particular morning John had this group discussing scenes from Julius Caesar, and I sat there incredulous at the lively way the group debated things. My uncle was at the core of it all, conducting them like they were an orchestra. For the last three years, I’ve been running my own group on Tuesday evenings. It’s one of the highlights of my week. I’m sorry, I must be boring you.”
“No,” we all say together.
“Please carry on,” I tell him.
“So the success of John’s ideas has made people sit up and take notice. The charity has a long-term lease on a three-story house in Westbury at a peppercorn rate, courtesy of one of Dad’s friends. It now has two full-time staff and five part-time helpers, and at any one time, twenty members flowing through the system. We have figures that prove one in five of our members successfully turns their life around. To you that might sound like failure, but in fact, it is a massive achievement. John had plans to expand the charity to create a network of Life’s Ladder centres around the country, and through the instructions of his
will, the charity has more than enough in funds available to carry out his wishes.”
“But?” I ask.
“I can keep the charity ticking over. I could possibly run an extra group a week, but I know my own limitations. There is so much funding available if approached the right way. Hundreds of thousands of pounds waiting in trust funds and deposit accounts, if we had the expertise to put together a professional presentation. Then there is the sensible recruitment of staff, acquisition of properties, management of growth, control of expectations. I can go out and buy a piece of wasteland and transform it into a nice housing development. But all that other stuff—I know my limitations, and I can’t do all that.”
I am studying Gemma, waiting for her to say something, but she does not so Ed carries on.
“I’m torn. One side of me knows I am duty bound to honour my uncle’s vision for the future; the other side knows I’m incapable and I could destroy all that he has built. It would take me years to develop all those skills needed. I have not got the time without destroying the family business and putting dozens of good people on the dole.”
Is someone going to say something? No. So Ed sums up.
“I have all these wonderful flow charts and cost projections and time scales and I don’t understand them. Well, not to the extent I need to.”
“I know who does.” At last, Gemma has spoken up. She continues, “There’s this Norwegian guy I know…” What? What! She looks delighted at the look on our faces, before elaborating. “No, I’m being silly. You’re describing Jess.”
“Jess?” It’s like Ed has been talking inside his head for the last few minutes, as if he was unaware of the people sitting around him. He does a good impression of a mad scientist who realises he cannot see because he hasn’t turned the lights on.
“Hang on, I’ve got some paperwork in the Range Rover.” And he’s gone.
I’m saying nothing: zero, zilch. If Gemma is in trouble, she’s on her own. I see Jess throw Gemma a look. I’m glad I dodged that one. Boy is Gemma in trouble.
“Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?” Gemma asks.
Of course not, you silly girl.
“Yes it does, doesn’t it?” It was my idea as well. Damn, damn, damn.
Ed comes back with a thick folder under his arm, sits down and starts leafing through the papers before he settles on a page and reads it through a couple of times before breaking into some small talk.
“How much do you earn a year, Jess?”
Edwin Pedlar, I think, you don’t ask people that! You can ask them their sexual preferences, if they’ve brushed their teeth today, even discuss their bowel habits. Anything except ask them what they earn.
“One hundred and forty k, plus expenses.”
“Ah.”
“Ah?”
“Yes. I’ve got all my projections here and we have a salary set for a chief executive at thirty-five thousand pounds a year…with a generous petrol allowance.”
“Thirty-five thousand pounds a year.”
“Yes.”
“That’s less than one hundred and forty, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Considerably less.”
“Yes.”
“But there is a petrol allowance?”
“Yes.”
“Then I won’t dismiss it out of hand. I could be interested in talking with you further.”
Gemma jumps from her seat, hugs Jess, then hugs and kisses Edwin. I sit there like the cat who has a supply of best-quality cream delivered direct on a daily basis from a prize-winning herd of cows. I am chuffed to bits.
We go back to Ed’s Range Rover and make our way homeward to Cotswold Lodge. I get the impression that we are all feeling a little bit drained, all in our own little worlds, going through in our heads what has just happened. I have this feeling I need to keep us all together as a group for a bit longer, that if we go our separate ways at this point in time, some invisible chain will be broken.
“I insist, and I am not prepared to listen to excuses, that you all come back to the lodge and help me collect apples,” I announce.
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I am serious. I am very new to this country life, but I can tell you from my limited experience there is something very satisfying about plucking a fruit from a tree. As a special bonus, I am making my plum tree available to successful plucking applicants. And before you say a word, you are all now confirmed as successful plucking applicants. I have spoken. It is the end of the matter.”
If they had any excuses tucked up their sleeves, they all evaporate when they see the empty apple basket outside my front door. I don’t say a thing, just deliver a look that means they are shamed if they do not join my harvesting party. It works. The girls go around barefoot, Ed and I climb the trees like we are fifteen again, and we only stop because the basket is full.
“Enough, back inside. I have arranged for apple and blackberry pie and a cup of tea for each and every one of you.”
“Yer so kund, sur.” For a girl of Caribbean descent, Gemma does a mean country yokel impression. “I love this house, Danny.” Does that matter?
“Thanks, Gemma. Although I guess to some of us it would be rather cramped.” I look pointedly in Jess’s direction.
“What, Jess’s you mean? You have got to be kidding. She lives in an upmarket prison cell. Well, upmarket hotel suite then.”
I look at Jess, but she is not following our conversation.
“All she has is like a bed sitting room with an en-suite bathroom. Her father rattles around the rest of the house on his own.”
“Whose father?” Jess asks.
“My father,” lies Gemma. “I was saying he rattles on too much about the price of things.” She whispers to me, “Get used to that. She may as well be on another planet at the moment.” She turns to Ed. “I can tell you now she is thinking very, very seriously about what you said. She goes down into these deep thinking zones, and it’s best to let her get on with it.”
“So in that enormous house, she only has one room?” I need this to be confirmed.
“Correct. She made peace with her father years ago, but she struggles in large spaces. She’s a dormouse who likes to cuddle into small spaces.” She winks at me.
Living and learning, that’s me.
Chapter
Forty-Six
“Get that smug look off your face,” Jess says.
“They do look good together.”
“Get that smug look off your face.”
Jess has decided to stay the night, and the smug face is me contentedly watching Ed and Gemma drive away together.
“I’m not convinced they are cut out for each other,” she says. “They are total opposites.”
“That works sometimes.”
“Of course it does, but I can’t see it being a long-term thing.”
“But that’s okay, isn’t it? As long as they don’t end up hurting each other.”
She gives me a hug. “Sometimes, Danny, you say the nicest and sweetest things.”
“Only sometimes?”
“Come on, let’s watch some rubbish on telly.”
“I have this premonition that you are going to have a go at the Life’s Ladder project. If you can cope with the slight reduction in your salary, it appears to be exactly what you need. A big challenge and the chance to make other people’s lives better.”
“Yes. I am seriously considering it.”
“I would never have guessed.”
“Really?”
“Yes—you’re very good at keeping your cards close to your chest.”
Aw…she is so cute. “I feel that the timing is right, that whatever I have been looking for in my life is now in front of my eyes.”
“Like you’ve been chasing something that’s always been there?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Shall we forget the telly and go to bed early?”
“Yes, but you haven’t got a telly, have you?”
“No—not yet.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
“I’m too tired to think of one?”
“Too tired?”
“No, most emphatically not ‘too’ tired.”
“So the only choice is bed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Chapter
Forty-Seven
The anniversary of my moving into Cotswold Lodge seemed like the perfect day for a celebration—to celebrate a topsy turvy year, where the good things in life far outweighed the bad. Lord Brabham turned out to be not in the least pompous or standoffish—a “toff” by all means, but for all that, a very decent man. The main dining room in Cotswold House has been available for private events for several years, and on first enquiring I was told there was a two year waiting list However, a word in Bill’s ear and hey presto! Not only available for the day, a Saturday, but charged out at half price.
It’s a glorious autumn evening and Rob and I are sitting on a bench looking over the manicured gardens. Rob speaks. “You’d make a good gardener.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Danny, you. You’re patient and caring. Organised.”
“Have you heard a rumour or something? Am I likely to need a new job in the near future?”
“No.”
“You’re just making conversation is that it?”
“Yes.”
“You’d make a good toilet cleaner.”