The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

by Paul Torday

  ‘Didn’t mean to intrude,’ said Charlie Summers, seating himself with alacrity. ‘Just happened to be passing through; fellow I met told me about this place, and I thought I’d look it up.’

  ‘Are you on holiday here for long?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not on holiday. Not as such. The fact is I’ve had a misunderstanding with Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue. I thought it better to take a leave of absence while my accountant sorts things out. It’s the VAT, you see. I never could understand VAT.’

  Charlie Summers accepted a glass of wine with every appearance of surprise, drank half of it down, and accepted a top-up.

  ‘Goes down a treat, this local wine,’ he remarked. ‘Forget what they call it, but they say it’s good for your heart.’

  Henry said, ‘Well, it goes down all right. Are you staying near here?’

  ‘Oh, I move about,’ said Charlie Summers. ‘I get a bit restless staying in the same place for too long, to tell the l ruth. Rather hoping to get back to the UK soon - a lot of unfinished business had to be set aside when these taxmen interrupted my affairs.’

  ‘What sort of business are you in?’ I asked. Charlie Summers turned and gave me a smile. The smile was unsettling. It was imbued with considerable charm, yet there was something not quite sane about it. It gave Charlie the look of an engaging, slightly manic schoolboy about to play a prank: like a middle-aged Norman Wisdom. It was odd to sit next to someone who, I had to admit, must look very much like me, even if a few years older - apart from that smile.

  ‘Dog food,’ said Charlie Summers.

  ‘Dog food?’ asked Henry. ‘What kind of dog food?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Charlie. He tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger. ‘I know what you’re thinking. It’s a very competitive business, dog food. Cash and carries, farmers’ cooperatives, all those people sell it. There’s a lot of cut-price food which you can buy by the ton. But that cheap stuff doesn’t do the dogs any favours. They do their business everywhere and their coats look like something that’s been left out in the rain.’

  ‘And you’ve found the answer?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Japanese dog food, that’s the answer. Full of alginates - that’s seaweed, to you and me. Cleans up the digestive tract, particularly good for black Labradors, makes their fur and noses blacker and shinier. But you need to know your way around the market. There are snags.’

  ‘What sort of snags?’ I asked. Somehow the conversation seemed to have gained a life of its own. The waitress arrived to take our orders, and before I could do anything about it, Henry had asked Charlie to join us for dinner. Later he admitted he couldn’t pass up the opportunity of seeing what to him were two almost identical red-haired, blue-eyed twins, sitting side by side and talking about Japanese dog food.

  ‘I could have waited for ever for that to happen,’ he told me.

  We ordered our food, and some more wine. When that had all been settled, Charlie said, ‘You were asking what sort of snags I found with the dog food business? The fact is, you can be tripped up. That’s one of the reasons I’m here at the moment. The first batch I shipped in from Japan turned out to have dolphin meat in it. It didn’t say so on the label, of course, but some bright spark sent a sample off to Trading Standards and they found dolphin DNA in it. Nothing to do with me; I was just the importer. I didn’t kill the bloody dolphins. But you know what people are like. The next thing I knew it was in all the local papers: I had Greenpeace round my neck, Save the Whale, you name it. It wasn’t good for business, I can tell you.’

  Henry was laughing.

  ‘Awfully bad luck,’ he said.

  ‘Not the sort of image I was aiming for,’ agreed Charlie. ‘When the VAT problem turned up on top of all that, I thought I’d cool my heels out here for a while, then go home and do a rebranding and a fresh launch.’

  'I must buy some for my own dog,’ said Henry, to make up for having laughed so much.

  ' What sort of dog do you have?’ asked Charlie.

  A black Labrador: a working dog.’

  'All, well, you see,’ said Charlie, ‘this food was developed for Akitas. That’s the Japanese fighting dog: used to go into battle on the shoulders of samurai.’

  The food arrived and for a while we talked of things other than dogs. I found myself relenting a bit towards Charlie Summers. He had an odd air of self-confidence verging on cockiness, softened by a look of apology he gave from time to time, as if to say, ‘I can’t help what I am, I’m doing the best I can in the circumstances.’ He enquired about Henry and myself; not obviously interested in Henry’s description ill himself as being involved in ‘a little bit of farming’, he showed a more lively enthusiasm for my own career in the army.

  ‘I expect you were in Special Forces,’ he said to me.

  ‘No, just a regular soldier,’ I said, but Charlie wasn’t having it.

  ‘I know you’ve got to say that,’ he observed. ‘I respect a man who doesn’t brag.’

  Because of our new companion, we drank rather more wine than usual. Henry poured it freely in order to keep the talk flowing.

  ‘Are you a married man, Henry?’ asked Charlie. Henry admitted that he was. ‘And you, Eck? You’re not, are you? You have that bachelor look, like me.’

  ‘You’re right, I’m afraid,’ I said. For some reason, I felt as if I had been reproached.

  ‘Can’t make up your mind who to tie the knot with?’ asked Charlie. He grinned, looking more like Norman Wisdom than ever, then he added, ‘I used to be a bit of a ladies’ man myself, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘I can well believe it,’ agreed Henry, ‘a chap with your looks.’

  ‘Now you’re joking,’ said Charlie, but he seemed pleased, and was by no means disposed to deny that he had been, or perhaps still was, something of a Don Juan.

  We moved on to cognac and cigars as twilight settled around the square. It was midweek and the place was quiet. Candles were lit, and people talked in soft voices as they watched the last streaks of light fading above the jagged limestone hills.

  ‘Such a beautiful evening,’ said Henry, ‘candlelight and wine. All we lack is soft music.’

  He was not drunk, but had consumed a lot of wine. I had been more circumspect, as I was driving us back.

  Charlie said, ‘Oh, music; I can provide the music.’

  Then, quite without embarrassment, he stood up and put one foot on the seat of his chair, and began to sing in a surprisingly sweet and tuneful tenor. At first his voice was low, just audible to ourselves, but then it gathered in strength until the whole restaurant fell silent and listened to him sing. The tune was familiar from long ago, at school concerts and - later - weddings; the words, in Latin, were less easily recalled: ‘Panis angelicusl Pit partis hominum . . .’

  *

  The performance was as angelic as the words demanded. Where Charlie had learned to sing like that, I could not think. For a moment I forgot everything except the music itself, its emotional impact magnified by the beauty of the majestic hills behind the singer, augmented by the screeching of the swifts as they soared high up into the darkness. When Cesar Franck composed the music he no doubt had in mind the shadowy interior of some Gothic cathedral as the setting for its performance; one felt he would have approved equally of a Provencal hillside in a June dusk.

  There was a ripple of applause from around the restaurant when Charlie finished. He bowed slightly, and sat down.

  We both congratulated him and asked him where he had learned to sing so well.

  ‘Oh, in the school choir a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I don’t much look like a choirboy now, I know.’

  He did not seem to want to say more about his childhood.

  Not much later, it was time to go. We paid the bill, including Charlie’s share. He thanked us. Then he said he would stay on for a bit and smoke another cigar. Before we left, Henry pulled a visiting card from his wallet. The wine had made him companionable and dispo
sed to think well of everyone, even someone as eminently unsuitable as Charlie appeared to be.

  ‘If ever you’re in our part of Gloucestershire,’ he said, look us up. Bring some dog food with you.’

  Two

  As Henry remarked to me when we were discussing Charlie Summers one evening, there are sixty million people living in the United Kingdom, and fifty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand of them know very well what is meant by the phrase ‘Do look us up some time’. It is a perfectly plain form of dismissal, as used by the English upper and middle classes, indicating that any future crossing of paths would be distinctly unwelcome, if not actively resisted.

  Charlie was the exception to this rule.

  Henry told me it was perhaps two months after we had been in France together, some time in early August, that Charlie turned up at Stanton Hall. The ancestral home of the Newarks was set amid a few hundred acres of woodland and a couple of thousand acres of pasture. The house itself was Elizabethan Revival, built in the 1840s from the proceeds of successful property dealing by the Stanton family around the centre of Birmingham. In a region where villages were constructed, for the most part, from the honey-coloured stone that warms the hearts of visiting tourists and estate agents, this building had the distinction of being built in red brick. It looked like an early Victorian town hall that had lost its way and ended up in this quiet and hidden valley. Its flat front was relieved by large mullioned and transomed windows, and the roof of the house was punctuated by arrays of tall chimneys and a central spire. The place looked enormous, but did not have extensive living quarters: instead it was set among endless domestic offices and abandoned bakeries and brewhouses that seemed to have sprung up among these woods.

  The house was surrounded by formal gardens, which I have always found rather oppressive. Beyond them lay parkland containing a small herd of fallow deer and then encircling woodlands, rich with bluebells in the spring and heaving with pheasants in the autumn and winter. Henry had a very good driven pheasant shoot, and I used to join him for a day most years.

  Sarah Newark was kneeling on a weeding mat, deadheading the roses that filled two enormous beds on either side of the front drive. It was a warm afternoon without a breath of wind, and the sky was grey and overcast. Sarah would have been in her element, organising the flower beds safe in the knowledge that the nanny would keep her children out of the way until after tea. Charlie must have arrived by taxi, but she did not hear the car. She suddenly became aware of someone near by - a slight clearing of the throat, perhaps, alerted her - and she looked up to see a man, not smartly dressed by any means, standing diffidently in the middle of the drive. For a moment she frowned, unable to think who this might be, then her face cleared.

  ‘If you go around to the back of the house,’ she said, ‘and ring the bell, the housekeeper will come and show you where the meter is.’

  There was a pause while she and Charlie looked at each other in mutual incomprehension. Then he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You must have thought . . . the fact is, I’m a friend of your husband’s. I met Henry in France and he suggested I drop in some time. And, well . . . here I am. Charlie Summers is my name.’

  He laughed nervously and put down the bag he was carrying on the gravel. Sarah realised then that this was no meter-reader’s bag - if indeed they have bags - but a serious canvas holdall that might contain a week’s supply of spare clothing. Her heart sank. Henry had said nothing about this.

  She rose to her feet awkwardly, brushing dead petals and moss from her clothes.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Summers, but Henry isn’t in the house just now. He’s out and about somewhere.’

  Charlie was not sure what to do. Henry’s wife did not seem to be rolling out the red carpet for him, but he had been counting on being asked to stay. So he just said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Shall I tell him you called in?’

  Charlie Summers looked a little uneasy. He turned about and glanced down the drive, then up at the sky, then back at Sarah.

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Well, the awkward thing is, the taxi appears to have gone. I should have made him stay, but it cost a fortune to get here from the station and I didn’t want too many more pounds added to the meter. Would I be in the way if I waited somewhere for a minute? I just want to say hello, really, and then I’ll be on my way.’

  After that Sarah had to ask him into the house. They went in the back way, and she sat him in the kitchen and made him a mug of tea, which is also what he would have been given had he been a meter reader, as Sarah knew the importance of buttering up tradesmen.

  ‘Are you a golfing man, Mr Summers?’ she asked. ‘That’s what my husband normally spends his time doing in France. Is that how you met him?’

  ‘No, I don’t play golf,’ said Charlie. ‘We just met, in one of those little towns down there. I happened to be travelling in that part of the world.’

  There was a long silence. Charlie tried to drink his tea without making too much noise while Sarah Newark tried to choke down a rising tide of resentment at this interruption to precious gardening time. She realised she was in danger of being bad mannered.

  ‘Were you there on business?’ she asked.

  ‘In a way,’ said Charlie. ‘I was really taking some time out to think through a new business idea.’

  ‘And what is it you do, Mr Summers?’

  ‘Do call me Charlie. I’m a dog nutritionist.’

  He gave her a smile. He reminded her of someone, but before she could think who, the kitchen door swung open and a large black Labrador came bounding in, sniffed at Charlie’s crotch, and then went and said hello to its mistress.

  ‘Oogiewoogiewoogie woo,’ said Sarah Newark. ‘And has his daddy come home? Has he had a nice time playing in the woods? Oogums.’

  A moment later Henry came into the kitchen, started to say something, either to his wife or the dog, and then stopped dead as he recognised Charlie.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, in a surprised voice. Then, gathering his wits, ‘How nice to see you - what on earth are you doing here? Get to your basket!’ This last remark was addressed to the black Labrador, who was investigating Charlie’s trousers again.

  By this time even someone as insensitive as me, for example - and I regard myself as reasonably thick skinned in most social situations - would have decided it was time to make my excuses and leave. The atmosphere was obviously not one of welcome; there was no rush to kill the fatted calf, or otherwise to celebrate Charlie’s arrival. But one of Charlie’s great qualities, as we all subsequently realised, was determination; if only it had been applied to more rewarding objectives.

  Now he stood his ground and said, ‘It was kind of you to ask me to look you up when we last met. I thought it would be rude not to, seeing as I was passing.’

  ‘Will you excuse Sarah and me for a second?’ Henry said. ‘There is something I need to tell her I don’t want to bore you with. Then let’s all have a cup of tea.’

  Charlie did not feel able to point out that he was already drinking a mug of tea, and that yet more tea was not as high on his list of priorities as, say, an early whisky and soda. Sarah stood up and left the kitchen with Henry, and I gathered from Henry later the gist of their conversation. I like to imagine that Charlie may have overheard whispered fragments: ‘. . . can’t turn him away . . . I did say something to him about looking us up ... I never expected him simply to arrive out of the blue . . .’

  ‘. . . quite out of the question . . . what on earth do you expect me to do with him . . .’

  A moment later Henry came back into the kitchen and said, ‘Sarah’s gone to find Lizzie, our housekeeper, to organise some proper tea. You must be hungry, after your journey. We’ll have some cucumber sandwiches put up. Where have you come from?’

  Charlie explained he had landed at Southampton that morning.

  ‘And you said you were passing through? Are you stopping with people near by? What are your plans, exactly?’


  ‘I’m going to start up my dog food business again,’ Charlie replied. ‘This seemed like a good part of the world to do it in: lots of money in Gloucestershire; lots of dogs, too.’

  Henry took Charlie by the arm and said, ‘Let’s walk in the garden until tea is ready. Leave your bag here.’

  They strolled amongst the rose beds. Henry had enough sense to see he had a small crisis on his hands, and the time had come for damage limitation. After a few more minutes’ conversation, it was established that Charlie might stay for supper, and for one night. Then he had to go. Henry promised to ring the Stanton Arms, in the local village of Stanton St Mary, where they did bed and breakfast at very reasonable rates, to make sure Charlie had somewhere to go on to. Then Henry went inside while Charlie tactfully examined the rose beds for a few moments.

  After a short while Sarah Newark came out.

  ‘So pleased you can stay the night, Mr Summers,’ she said grimly. ‘Do come and have some tea now, you must be famished.’

  ‘Call me Charlie,’ said Charlie, but she had already turned her back on him and was striding towards the house.

  Tea was taken in the large entrance hall, which doubled as a drawing room. It was served from a low table in front of a coal fire which sputtered and smoked. Despite the fire, the stone-flagged hall was cool and damp. There were two kinds of tea: Indian and China in silver teapots with ebony handles; cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off; crumpets with melted butter; and a large and poisonous-looking chocolate cake.

  Charlie helped himself. He found he was very hungry. He dropped some melted butter on to his blazer lapel, where he found it later that evening. In the middle of this feast, the conversation, which had been a little slow, was interrupted by the arrival of two small children and their nanny. There was a boy, called Simon, who looked about ten, and a girl, called Arabella, who was eight. Both had beautifully brushed blond hair and pale, innocent faces. The nanny was buxom, wearing jeans and an enormous jersey, with mousy brown hair enlivened by a streak of startling green.