by J M Gregson
‘I was stupid enough to say it.’
‘True. I find that disturbing. You’d better give me a full account of any extenuating circumstances. I know at least one complainant has sent a copy of his letter to me to the Chairman of the National Trust. I may have to account for my decision to him. Perhaps to Prince Charles, if news of the incident reaches him as our president.’
‘You’re really training the big guns on me, aren’t you?’
‘You trained them upon yourself, Hugo, when you used those stupid words.’
At least they were back to ‘Hugo’. And Cooper seemed to be admitting he’d been no more than stupid. ‘I appreciate that. I’ve already said I was stupid. But you don’t think of the repercussions when you shout something in a red mist of fury.’
‘But you should do, Hugo. In most respects, you have easier conditions here than in your previous post. As you’ve pointed out yourself on occasions, you don’t often operate far into the night and the standard of cuisine expected is not as high as Michelin three star. But you are working in a more public context than you have ever done before. When you took employment with the National Trust, you accepted that. You should have realized that a lapse like this could have far-reaching consequences.’
Hugo Wilkinson was suddenly sick of the man and his scoldings. He’d taken a step down professionally when he came here. He could get other jobs, if he needed to. ‘Look, Dennis, if you’re going to sack me, stop pissing about and get it done. I won’t be short of offers, if you want me out of here.’
‘You might not find the offers you anticipate. Prospective employers are sure to ring me up to find out why you left here. Are you in fact saying that you wish me to terminate your employment here?’
There was a long pause, whilst Hugo strove to control his anger. His palms felt very damp. ‘No. I’m happy here. I can do the job and it suits me. You haven’t had any complaints about the quality of the food or the way I run my kitchen.’
‘No. But you’re sitting in that chair today because of your own actions, not anyone else’s. And you shouldn’t have any illusions about this. It is a more serious complaint than someone finding your steak isn’t tender or your broccoli is overcooked.’
‘We were three short on staff, on a day when we served more meals than any other day so far this year. Shoab Junaid was very slow when we needed speed. Everyone else was operating at maximum capacity and he was holding things up. I’d already told him twice to get a move on. What I said was over the top, but I was under extreme pressure.’
‘It was racialist, Hugo. You might get away with obscenities under the stress of that situation, but not racialism.’
‘I know that. I know the law. I’ve already admitted I was stupid.’
‘The question any barrister would ask in court is what this says about you. Did you reveal the real Hugo Wilkinson in a moment of stress? Is the racialist in you concealed only by a thin cloth of courtesy which is ripped apart by a bit of pressure?’
Hugo knew what he had to say here. ‘I’ve asked myself that. My answer is that I’m not a racialist. I was looking round for the most violent words I could find to stir the man into action. I picked the wrong ones, that’s all.’ He’d no idea himself whether this was correct or not, but he knew it had to be stated.
‘Does Mr Junaid intend to take the matter any further?’
‘No. I’ve told him that I lost my temper under pressure and spoke without thinking. I’ve apologized to him and he’s accepted that his speed of work was unacceptable and a contributory factor in the incident. We’re working together amicably again.’
It was more or less what Shoab Junaid had said to Dennis Cooper when he had spoken to him on the previous day. He seemed a willing if limited worker, more anxious about keeping his own job than about exacting retribution from Wilkinson. Cooper reached forward and moved his pen minimally on the desk in front of him. ‘If what you said represents your real attitude, Hugo, you’d be better getting out now. Neither we nor you can afford any repetition of the incident.’
Hugo knew now that he was not going to be told to pack his bags and get out. His relief was more overwhelming than he had ever expected it to be. He must say the correct, contrite things now. It would soon be over, if he ate a little humble pie. ‘There won’t be any repetition. I can guarantee that.’
‘There mustn’t be, Hugo. I shall send you a formal written warning about this incident, which will state among other things that any recurrence will mean immediate dismissal. A copy will be placed on your file.’
‘I understand that.’
‘I hope you do. And I hope we can put this happening behind us and never discuss it again.’
He stood up and Wilkinson followed suit, realizing that the meeting was at an end, hesitating awkwardly for a moment as he wondered whether the curator was going to shake his hand.
Dennis Cooper sat still for a long time after the head chef had left his office. He pondered whether he should have raised his other concern with Wilkinson, but decided that he had been right not to do so. This was a formal reprimand and a formal warning about a serious incident in the man’s working environment. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to raise anything else.
Cooper unlocked the top right-hand drawer of his desk and made a note in the small notebook he kept there. He’d need more than mere suspicion, to raise anything as serious as what he suspected.
Most of the younger gardening staff at Westbourne thought Alex Fraser was a loner. In his first few months there, he had been quite prepared to foster that impression.
He’d never had to think about company in Glasgow. The gang had seen to that. But when he’d moved south into an alien world, he’d chosen to keep himself to himself. That had been the advice of the only social worker for whom he’d had any respect, the man who’d hauled him out of trouble and then helped him to keep out of it, in the teeming Scottish city where he’d spent his turbulent adolescence.
‘Keep your nose clean and join a golf club. The English will like that,’ Ken Jackson had said, after he’d helped him to get the apprenticeship at Westbourne. He’d smiled when he’d said it, almost smirked. Golf was a very odd thing for Alex Fraser to have in his armoury. Even in Scotland, where golf cuts across the class divisions much more than in England, a lad of Fraser’s background didn’t often get near a golf course, unless it was for theft or other mischief.
Five years ago, when Fraser was fifteen, someone at the council had thought it a good idea for some of the boys in care to attend a golf clinic at the neighbouring municipal course. The tuition was subsidized by the golf authorities, who thought it was a splendid idea to introduce youngsters to their game, so it was very cheap. No doubt that appealed to council staff perennially in pursuit of economies. The slight young man with freckles and ginger hair spoke very little, but he showed a talent for the game unexpected by him as well as those who controlled his life. Ken Jackson persuaded the authorities to buy Alex a yearly ticket for the municipal course; at least one of their charges would be safe from the multiple temptations which beset youth in their great city. The boy improved rapidly, and his fiery red hair made him recognizable from great distances on the fairways, so that his excellence was apparent to all observers.
When Fraser moved to that strange country called England and that strange district they called the Cotswolds, Ken Jackson had made a few phone calls and arranged for him to join the Ross-on-Wye golf club. Alex’s low handicap secured him immediate entry; every golf club was anxious to have young players of his standard. It was a course set in beautiful country, with the Malvern Hills splendidly visible and scarcely a house in sight. That in itself was strange for Alex Fraser, who had never played on anything but a public course surrounded by housing.
But the strangest experience of all was belonging to a private golf club. Alex Fraser was still tackling the arcane mysteries of etiquette and precedence that this involved. Perhaps because it was so different from any experience he h
ad ever had before, he was secretly rather enjoying it. The English gentry at play revealed more of themselves than they ever suspected to the shrewd young observer from north of the border. He found it both amusing and instructive. He’d even played a couple of weeks ago with a detective chief superintendent and a detective sergeant, and he’d actually enjoyed it. What would the lads in Glasgow have made of that?
Alex had taken to riding his battered little motorbike down to the club on summer evenings. Once there, he would either team up with someone for a few holes or hone his considerable skills on the practice ground. He was fit and well fed through his work at Westbourne and hitting golf balls even further and straighter as a result. ‘Keep out of trouble and join a golf club’ had been good advice from Ken Jackson.
If only he had held to it, life might have continued serenely for Alex Fraser.
It was Tom Bracey and Matt Garton, the two local apprentice gardeners, who persuaded him to go into Cheltenham for the night. Matt’s brother was having his twenty-first birthday party; a room had been set aside for the celebration in one of the pubs near the centre of the town. It would be a laugh and a good piss-up. They’d arranged a lift to Cheltenham with one of the other gardeners and they’d share a taxi back. A responsible way to end a riotous night.
‘But I’m not invited,’ Alex Fraser objected.
‘Don’t matter,’ said Matt in his confident West Country accent. ‘Our Jake won’t mind us being three instead of two, and after an hour no bugger will give a shit!’
Secretly, Alex was pleased to be asked, to be included as part of the group. He wasn’t a natural loner. Besides, he’d never been to Cheltenham. He knew its reputation as a quiet spa town, the haunt of retired army colonels and ageing ex-pats. Vicarage tea party this place would be, compared with the Gorbals on a Saturday night.
All the same, he couldn’t get rid of a strange feeling that he was doing the wrong thing. He decided he’d better take certain precautions, even though it was odds-on that they’d never be needed. ‘Be with you in a minute,’ he called after the others. Then he slipped back to the tallboy in the corner of his tiny cottage bedroom and opened the bottom drawer. He moved the socks aside, stared for a moment at what was beneath them, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.
In the early evening, Julie Hartley watched the three apprentices drive off with the older gardener in his car. The lads looked spruced up and excited, as if they were anticipating a lively evening. She wished for a moment that she could spirit fifteen years away and be back at that age, when everything seemed new and vital, and life had stretched invitingly before you as a challenge.
She smiled as she heard Oliver’s shrill voice. She rounded the end of the hedge and found her son holding the tennis ball above his head in both hands, celebrating the catch he had just unexpectedly held. ‘You missed it, Mum! I caught Dad out!’ he said. Then he flung the ball as high in triumph as his six-year-old body allowed him to do. It was no more than a few feet in the air, but no doubt it seemed much higher to him.
Jim Hartley smiled at his wife and Hugo Wilkinson invited her politely to join in the game. ‘We can always use another fielder, though you’ll have to be good to catch it like Oliver.’ Sam, who was pacing out his run with the intense seriousness of an eight-year-old as he prepared to bowl to his father, directed her imperiously to field at mid-on.
‘Sorry, chaps, I’m not available. I have to go out.’ Julie turned towards her husband’s interrogative face. Jim stood looking a little ridiculous with the boy’s bat which was so much too short for him. ‘I’m sorry, but Sarah left some library books in the car when I gave her a lift home. I’ve no idea when I’ll see her again, so I’d better take them round. Shan’t be long. Read you a story, boys, if Dad doesn’t keep you out here too long. Bye!’
And she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared. The smile disappeared abruptly from her face as soon as she was out of sight. She was appalled at how easy she had found it to lie.
It was no more than three miles, but you couldn’t rush it, with the narrowness of the lanes and the innumerable blind bends. These roads had been designed originally for horses and carts. She glanced impatiently at the car clock. It was after half past seven already. She mustn’t stay long. She really shouldn’t have come at all.
Julie Hartley rapped hard on the door of the cottage, felt the familiar, absurd surge of pleasure as she heard the steps inside, then saw the surprise on the fresh-skinned face as the door opened. She followed Sarah inside, scarcely waited until they were in the living room to seize her shoulders and turn her. She kissed her, first gently and then more fiercely, running her hands up and down over the familiar shoulder blades, sliding her hands under the blouse on to the smooth skin beneath it.
The pub in Cheltenham was much noisier than Alex Fraser had expected. The party had its own room, but to Alex it quickly became an overcrowded box. As things got rowdier it seemed that everyone except him knew everyone else in the room. He was an interloper, and he shouldn’t have come here.
He went out to the Gents, then tried a door in the corridor and found himself outside, in a little courtyard behind the building. It was almost dark now, though above the wall he could see the purple of the western sky where the sun had set. It was probably private ground here, but he was doing no harm, was he? He just needed a few minutes in the open air, a little period to gather his resources together. Then he would paste on his determined smile and rejoin the boisterous celebrations he could hear twenty yards away.
‘You with Matt Garton?’
The voice came from the shadows behind him, near the door he had used himself to get here. He hadn’t heard it open and shut to admit the mystery newcomer. Alex turned to look at him, his hand automatically in his pocket, feeling the reassuring touch of metal. ‘What if I am?’
The newcomer stepped forward. Alex was pleased to see that the mystery man looked younger than he was himself. More to the point, he seemed even more nervous. ‘I got stuff for Matt. I can’t take it in there.’ He flicked his head backwards, towards the noise from the private room.
‘Why not?’
The youth looked shocked by such a question. ‘Too public, ennit?’
‘What do you want with Matt?’
‘Don’t want nuffink. I’m delivering gear.’
‘Gear?’
Alex looked blank, but the man didn’t believe his bafflement. ‘It’s all paid for. I promised him delivery tonight. You gotta give it him for me.’
He produced a small package, tightly wrapped in a plastic bag from a supermarket, and thrust it into Fraser’s hand. ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.’ He set his finger against the side of his nose in a gesture he had obviously executed many times before. It made him look ridiculous, as if he was guying a much older man.
Alex broke the tension with a little laugh. The finger on nose gesture reminded him of Fagin; he had seen only the Fagin of Oliver! and not Dickens’ older and darker creature of the London stews. Disturbed by this unseemly mirth, the youth flashed his hand from his face to set it on top of the package Fraser held in his hand. ‘You just deliver, or it’ll be the worse for you, mate. Understand?’
Alex could see the zits on the youth’s forehead, could smell the foulness of his breath. ‘You do your own deliveries, mate. You wait here. I’ll send Matt out to you, if he wants to come.’
But the man was gone, back into the darkness whence he had come, closing the door behind him with a crash. The noise made Alex realize for the first time that they had spoken in whispers throughout their strange, unsatisfactory exchange. He looked at the small package in its innocent-looking covering. Drugs, probably. That Matt was a young fool. He’d tell him so when he gave him this. He slid it into his pocket and took a last look at the top of the wall and the faint light of the dying day at the top of it.
It seemed even noisier and hotter in the room where Matt’s brother was having his party. It was too crowded for Alex to get
anywhere near Matt, who presently made a drunken speech about the twenty-one-year-old’s life to date amidst much hilarity. Alex, despairing of making contact in a room now very packed, mouthed, ‘I’ve got your package’ at Matt over quickly moving heads, but he wasn’t sure whether Matt had got the message or not amidst the prevailing raucous confusion. He couldn’t hand it over here, in any case. He’d keep the little parcel in the pocket of his jeans until they were safely in the taxi at the end of the evening. He’d give Matt a bollocking for being stupid at the same time.
Meanwhile, he might as well relax and join in the mirth and the celebration. The party moved towards its conclusion with a number of drunken toasts and ragged cheers. Alex didn’t know most of the people involved, but he raised his glass obediently. It was a reaction encouraged by Matt’s sister, who seemed to have taken a fancy to the fresh-faced young Scot with the fiery hair. She embraced him enthusiastically after each toast. He got the message and roared his approval of these people he did not know, being rewarded by kisses and ever more fierce embraces with each name they toasted.
He accepted a chaser with his final pint, downing the whisky and beer and wiping his mouth with a flamboyant gesture. Then he wrapped the enthusiastic young female body around himself and the erection hardening beneath his jeans. The Cotswolds seemed now a splendid place, and Cheltenham not so fusty after all. His companion was wrenched away from him with bawdy admonitions by her family. She pressed a scrap of paper with her phone number upon it into his palm as she disappeared with hand held high towards him in a final gesture of affection. He hadn’t even known her name was Lisa until he glanced at the paper.
He was back with Matt Garton and Tom Bracey as they shot through the pub exit and into the street, propelled like corks from a bottle by the crowd behind them. A shoulder brushed hard against his face, almost bursting his nose with the force behind it. He was still trying to decide whether the collision had been deliberate or accidental when he felt friendly arms pulling him back into line. At the same moment, he realized that there was another ragged line of men opposite them. A line mouthing insults, yelling the obscenities calculated to cause offence and propel his side towards the violence of a gang fight.