by Paul Torday
‘You are assigning to Mountwilliam Partners collateral in the estate of Stanton Hall to the extent of two million pounds sterling. You need to sign here,’ I pointed to the box on the form, ‘to confirm it is yours absolutely and unencumbered to assign to us. Mountwilliam has the right to assign this debt to a specialist third-party mortgage lender. Mountwilliam Partners undertakes that you will receive two million pounds, less commission of one per cent.’
My patter was not unlike that of a surgeon just before you are taken into the operating theatre: ‘Just sign the consent form here, and here. We may have to cut off a leg or two if we find something suspect, but we won’t be able to wake you then to ask for your consent. Ha ha. So it’s better if you sign now, please.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘I know all that. Where do I start signing?’
‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘You agree that you will not actually receive the cash but that it will be invested on your behalf by Mountwilliam Partners to buy units in their Styx fund to the same amount. The price of each unit at market closing last night is the number shown here.’’
Again I stabbed my finger on the page. But for Henry, and for me too, the exchange was becoming too painful. Never do business with friends, someone once told me. You’ll find it easier to look them in the eye if you don’t. But that was all I did in those days: business with friends.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Henry. ‘Don’t let’s worry about all that. Don’t make it sound so technical, Eck. I’ve made up my mind it’s a good thing, and once I’ve made up my mind, you know quite well I don’t like to change it. Where do I sign?’
It was clear to me that, for Henry, the deal was already done, the money invested, with the dividends about to roll back in. Perhaps he was already spending the money in his imagination. Perhaps - I hoped to God not - he had already started spending it. It was none of my business what Henry did, or whether he listened to what I was telling him or not, but I had a feeling that if I asked him in five minutes’ time to tell me what I had just said, he wouldn’t have had a clue. He was closing his mind to the details of the transaction, and all its implications, in the way a man walking along the edge of a cliff closes his eyes to the drop below, thinking only about the next step he has to take.
The documents were flagged with yellow and red stickers in the numerous places where Henry had to sign his name, or where I had to countersign on behalf of Mountwilliam Partners. I showed him where to sign, and Henry called for his secretary, Mrs Vane, to come in from next door and witness his signature. The whole procedure took ten minutes, and then Henry pushed the documents back to me and said, ‘That bloody man.’
For a moment I thought he must mean Bilbo, but then he added: ‘Charlie bloody Summers.’
‘What’s wrong now?’ I asked. ‘Has he finally poisoned your dog?’
‘No, but he’s got debts running all over the place, and everyone in the village seems to think he’s something to do with me.’
‘Maybe you should have a talk with him,’ I suggested.
I put the documents back in my briefcase and Henry stood up.
‘Anyway, Sarah might be back soon. You’d better go. Sorry to chuck you out like this.’
‘I’ll see you soon, Henry,’ I said.
‘Yes, and don’t forget: I’m going to buy you lunch in London one of these days.’
‘Somewhere nice, I hope?’
‘Somewhere there’s a good wine list and they know how to feed a man properly.’
*
I said goodbye to Henry and drove off. On the main road out of Stanton St Mary, I saw a figure trudging along in the sleety rain that had now succeeded the drizzle; a damp-looking man in a shabby wax jacket and flat cap walking at the side of the road, weighed down by a heavy canvas bag he carried in one hand. Some instinct made me slow down: then I saw that it was Charlie Summers. For a moment my foot hovered between the brake and the accelerator.
I should have ignored him. What was Charlie Summers to me? He was a minor con man, living off borrowed time and the misplaced goodwill of strangers. But I found I couldn’t drive past him, or pretend I hadn’t seen him. Was it because he looked so much like me that it could have been me there by the roadside, breathing in exhaust fumes and dripping in the rain? Was there something like enchantment in Charlie’s ability to weave a fantasy around him? I couldn’t simply ignore him. I decided I had better give him a lift and make sure I got him away from the village before he was lynched, or made any further trouble for poor Henry. As I passed he stuck out his thumb and waggled it. When he saw my car slow down, he lurched towards it with the eagerness of a practised hitch-hiker.
‘Are you going anywhere near Cirencester?’ asked Charlie, his face, covered in raindrops, beaming through the nearside window. Then he said: ‘Oh, good heavens, Eck, it’s you. I say - what a frightfully lucky coincidence!’
‘Hop in, Charlie,’ I told him. ‘I can take you as far as Cirencester.’
Ten
For the first mile, Charlie simply sat next to me and dripped all over the interior of the car. He was wetter than I had thought and I had to turn on the demister to compensate for the sharp increase in humidity. The car smelled of stale, damp clothes. I couldn’t think of a word to say to him. I was already regretting the charitable impulse that had made me stop.
‘Funny you driving past like that,’ Charlie said after a time.
‘I’ve just been looking in on Flenry.’
‘Ah,’ said Charlie. ‘Nice chap, Henry. Jolly decent chap, in fact: very kind to me during my time at Stanton St Mary.’
I drove on without replying to this unexceptionable observation. Then I asked, ‘Where do you want me to drop you off in Cirencester?’
‘Oh, anywhere; it doesn’t really matter,’ said Charlie. He pulled a grubby handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose.
‘I thought you might be off somewhere with that bag. Do you want the railway station, or the bus station?’ I suggested. Charlie didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, ‘Fact is, Eck, I may as well tell you: I’m doing a runner.’
‘Doing a runner, Charlie?’
‘I’m leaving behind a few unpaid bills in the village. I don’t know if Henry mentioned it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to be inconvenienced in any way: a decent chap like that. People are so impatient these days. There’s no trust any more. Everyone knows it takes time to get a new business off the ground. Money doesn’t grow on trees, does it? I mean, I’ll pay everybody every shilling I owe as soon as things look up a bit.’
He lapsed into silence again. I made no comment as nothing seemed more improbable to me than Charlie clearing his debts in Stanton St Mary. Road signs indicated that we were approaching Cirencester.
‘You didn’t say where you wanted me to drop you off,’ I said to Charlie.
He was slumped in his seat: a picture of despondency.
‘It doesn’t really matter, Eck. Anywhere you happen to be going past.’
‘But what are your plans?’
Charlie replied, ‘I don’t really have any plans.’
He reached into his pocket and took out his battered black leather wallet. There was a thin sheaf of notes, which he counted.
‘Fifty pounds I’ve got,’ he said, ‘and then that’s it. I believe I might have a couple of pound coins about me. There’s no point in blowing what’s left on a train ticket, or even a bus ticket. I don’t want to ask you for money, Eck, but the fact is I’m broke: absolutely down to my last few pounds in the world. When that’s spent I’ll be dossing down on the streets of Cirencester.’
Charlie’s words came home to me. Few of us know what it is really, truly like to be poor. When we say we are hard up we mean perhaps buying a cheap bottle of wine from the Pays d’Oc when we would have liked a bottle of Burgundy; taking our fortnight’s holiday in Cumbria instead of Tuscany. When we say we are broke, we mean negotiating an increase in our overdraft, or raising a loan against the house, or simply ringing up a
nd getting a better credit limit on our card. There might have been a time when I was, in my own way, fairly hard up. Now every post bore offers of further credit, loans at zero per cent, and my emails were full of special offers. I had not the least conception of what Charlie must be feeling. If he really was down to his last fifty pounds, that was so close to the edge of the precipice that I could hardly bear to think about it.
I turned off the main road that led to the city centre.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Charlie. ‘I’m probably better off in the middle of the town, Eck, if it’s all the same to you. I thought I’d find a cafe somewhere, have a cup of tea and dry off. Gather my thoughts, that sort of thing.’
‘I have a better idea,’ I said. I couldn’t leave Charlie alone and dripping on a chilly December day. I wasn’t sure that I liked Charlie. I felt that I had summed him up correctly the first time I saw him: a middle-aged drifter who left a trail of debts and damaged hopes wherever he went. But I couldn’t find it in me just to abandon him.
We drove down the street at the end of which stood The Laurels. I still had the keys with me and had been meaning to drop them off with Mr Gilkes on the way back to London. Instead, as I switched off the ignition, I turned to Charlie and said, ‘Come on, bring your bag. This house belongs to me and my cousin, and it’s empty at the moment. You can stay here for a few days.’
Charlie looked at me, his mouth open, displaying teeth in need of a visit to the dentist.
‘Are you serious, old boy?’
I didn’t answer and climbed out of the car. Charlie did the same. The rain had eased off and a squally wind was rattling the leaves of the laurels and rhododendrons. A small dark woman in a brown coat was walking down the path from the house, carrying a plastic carrier bag. I decided it must be Mrs Graham, the cleaning lady, and greeted her.
‘Thank you for looking after the house,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Oh, yes, sir. Are you the gentleman Mr Gilkes was telling me about?’
‘I’m Eck Chetwode-Talbot,’ I said, ‘and the house belongs to me and my cousin Harriet, now that Miss Branwen has passed away.’
‘And is this your brother, sir?’ asked Mrs Graham, looking cautiously at Charlie. Charlie flashed his Norman Wisdom grin at her, which did not reassure Mrs Graham in any way.
‘This is Mr Summers,’ I explained. ‘He’ll be staying in the house for a day or two. I’ll leave him my keys. I was wondering, if you have the time, whether you could make up the bed for him in Miss Branwen’s room?’
Mrs Graham obliged, and a ten-pound note changed hands. While she was upstairs, I showed Charlie around the house.
‘Don’t use the back bedroom,’ I told him. Seeing the place where Harriet and I had made love suddenly gave me the most tremendous pang, and I had to turn away from Charlie in case some treacherous emotion showed on my face. The thought of Charlie lying on that bed would have been too much to bear.
We went back downstairs, where Mrs Graham was waiting for us in the hall.
‘There’s nothing to eat in the house,’ she reported, ‘but everything works, except the television. The telephone is still connected. Mr Gilkes is paying all the bills until the house is sold, he told me.’
‘That’s all right, Mrs Graham,’ I replied. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll be back same time next week. Unless your brother - the other gentleman, I mean - wants me to come in and do some ironing?’
I didn’t want Charlie to feel he could take up permanent residence at The Laurels, so I noted down Mrs Graham’s phone number and told her I would call if we needed her. When she left, Charlie and I stood and stared at each other.
‘Well, this is tremendously kind of you, old chap,’ he said.
‘It’s only for a day or two,’ I told him. ‘We’ll be putting the house on the market soon, so we’ll need you to be out of here.’ This wasn’t strictly true, but I felt Charlie was quite capable of settling in for the next few months, if nothing better turned up. I was at a loss what to do next, and had a sudden irrational desire to jump into my car and drive off to London, leaving Charlie to fend for himself. Once again, some inner monitor prevailed and I remembered that there was no food in the house.
‘I suppose we’d better go to the nearest supermarket and get some supplies in. We can’t have you starving to death here,’ I said.
Charlie followed me meekly back to the car and we drove around the ring road until we came to a supermarket where I bought some basic supplies. As an afterthought I added a couple of bottles of cheap wine and a litre bottle of whisky to the haul. Charlie kept thanking me every time I put a tube of toothpaste or a roll of loo paper in the trolley until at last I told him to shut up. Then we drove back to the house.
By the time we had unloaded the car, the day was getting on. I looked at my watch. I wouldn’t be back in London now before the middle of the afternoon, and Bilbo was away this week in New York. The fact was, there was nothing much to do at the office except file expense claims and write up a few notes on my meeting with Henry Newark. These activities would take about a quarter of an hour, and then I would have to sit in front of my computer, pretending to be busy, until half past six - the earliest feasible time to leave the office without attracting contemptuous glances from my colleagues, for whom long hours were a badge of merit. There wasn’t any point in going back to London just now, 1 thought, and 1 wouldn’t be missed.
I took a jar of Nescafe and a pint of milk from the carrier bag that lay on the table, and found a couple of mugs.
‘Come on, Charlie, let’s have a cup of coffee to warm ourselves up. Then I want you to tell me everything that’s been going on in Stanton St Mary.’
Over the next couple of hours I heard a great deal about Yoruza, and the intransigent nature of the British dog lover and his (or her) reluctance to accept progress in the field of dog nutrition. Once he had started to talk, Charlie began to take me into his confidence. 1 heard about his relationship with Mrs Bently.
‘I was so fond of that woman,’ he said, becoming sentimental for a moment. ‘1 would have done anything for her. I thought she would have done anything for me too, but I was wrong. When push came to shove and I asked her, just once, to put her hand in her pocket for a perfectly marvellous little investment opportunity, she wasn’t there for me.’
This intrigued me, and I began to feel I wanted to hear more of Charlie’s story. But listening makes you hungry and it had been a long enough day already without eating anything. I looked in the telephone directory and found a Chinese takeaway not too far way from The Laurels that did deliveries.
To kill time while we waited for the food to arrive, I poured us both a tumbler of whisky and water. For a while Charlie was silent, staring moodily at the gas fire I had lit to keep out the chill of the December evening. I too was absorbed in my own thoughts. My mind kept going back to that morning’s meeting with Henry. I believed that investing in Mountwilliam Partners was the right thing for him to do. Bilbo’s track record as a hedge fund manager was beyond doubt. Still, what if something went wrong? What then? But that was not how the City worked, I reassured myself. These days, nothing went wrong: there might be a few ups and downs along the way, but it would come out right for Henry, and all our other investors, in the long run. The doorbell rang; the Chinese food had arrived. While I paid for it, Charlie disappeared with the silver-foil packets into the kitchen. I heard him singing to himself a moment later, in that sweet, clear voice I remembered from the first time he had sung for Henry and me in a little Provencal village. It was not Handel this time, however:
'There was heggs, heggs, walking round on legs
In the stores, in the stores
There was heggs, heggs, walking round on legs
In the Quartermaster’s stores
My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me . . .’
A moment later he appeared with two plates laden with sweet-and-sour pork, chilli pr
awns and egg fried rice.
‘What did you do before?’ I asked Charlie, as we forked the food into our mouths. ‘I mean, before we met you in the South of France?’
Before I was in the dog food business, you mean?’ asked Charlie. ‘I did various things. My experience is broad rather than deep.’
I wasn’t going to let him get away with such a general answer.
'Give me an example,’ I pressed him.
'Well, for instance, I was a travel executive for a while,’ .aid Charlie. ‘I enjoyed the work. We went to all sorts of interesting places. We did coach tours, and outings for elderly people. My job was to chat to them over the PA system in the bus, point out places of interest and stop them falling asleep. I did karaoke for them as well. They liked to hear me sing. The clients were not always our sort of people, Eck, but they were good people at heart.’
‘Why did you give up the job?’ I asked.
‘My style was not compatible with the management’s. I value my independence, as you probably realise. I don’t much like being ordered around.’
‘Come on, Charlie, what was the bust-up about?’
Charlie had no objection to telling me more about his career. He was, I realised, a not uncommon type: so absorbed in himself that he found it almost impossible to engage with the real world.
‘We had to organise a knees-up for a group of pensioners. We arranged an outing to a pub outside Birmingham: scampi and chips for dinner, one free glass of white wine and then a cash bar and a karaoke session. They loved to hear me singing to them. Some of the old dears used to dance around their handbags. Sometimes they’d get so carried away you’d worry they’d do themselves a mischief, give themselves a heart attack or something. But they had fun and that was the important thing. We reserved a room at the pub for the party and drove them there in a coach. At the karaoke, I sang the songs I knew they liked. You know: ‘Twenty-four Hours to Tulsa’; ‘Edelweiss’; ‘Puppet on a String’, all the classics. The old girls were happy as could be, but our driver was an odd lad. He hated it when I was the centre of attention. Said he didn’t like my singing. He insisted on going to the jukebox and playing ‘YMCA’ by the Village People, over and over again. It wasn’t the clients’ sort of music. I told him to stop but I think he’d had a few by then. He was goose-stepping up and down the room doing Nazi salutes, and singing completely out of tune.’