by Adam Thorpe
The voices sounded pleased with themselves, as if they owned the place. Very pleased with their lot. Very posh. Very superior.
‘. . . performed . . . ridiculous . . . really great . . .’
He felt a shiver of pleasure when he heard them; however superior they sounded, he had one thing over them, like the lord of the manor or something. He could just sit back and grin, knowing how this one thing made him superior without a single breath wasted on his part. Not just superior: it actually made him more real.
And it wasn’t planned, it had just fallen into his lap. It was fate.
He’d come with Susan to property-crawl; she wanted to live in the proper country, he’d lost his job at Doublegroup Systems and they reckoned, with the extra saved from the price differential between Guildford and here, he’d be able to start something on his own in the consultancy line: there were estates and individual homes sprouting like mushrooms in Berkshire. Also, they wouldn’t be too far from his mum in Tring, but not too close, either. They were meant to be having a recce of the prestige development in traditional brick-and-tile but Susan spotted the For Sale notice in the window of this long, low cottage and knocked on the door.
The owner was a nervous, arty type of woman in her fifties. She said, ‘In fact, I love it, but as you might have noticed I no longer have a wedding ring. He’s in New Zealand. God, that’s not far enough as far as I’m concerned.’ Her paintings were very sexual, they were all huge thighs and knockers and fannies put on with a trowel. ‘Of course, he’s just next door when it comes to money. Banks and solicitors, you know. I have to do everything. I could kill him. And his floozy.’ She was drunk, but she showed them round. The place smelt of cats and oil paint and woodsmoke and its sloping floors squeaked. Its thatch was green. ‘It’s all my mother’s fault. What do you think of therapy?’ The woman had a straight fringe that got in the way of her eyes; she kept shaking it out of her eyes, like a twitch. ‘All he’s left me of himself are these,’ she said, showing them drawers full of men’s socks.
It was definitely damp, and lacked central heating. Duncan’s heart beat fast through the whole visit. He and Susan didn’t talk about it, afterwards. They were late for their appointment and pretended they had got lost. Three of the five brand-new prestige houses at the end of the lane – a private road, apparently – had a new BMW in front. They had shaken hands with the estate agent and left and looked at three more houses in the area without once mentioning the old cottage. Anyway, it was too expensive, and the woman had said the price was already too low, that the cottage was historic, probably the oldest house in the village, the original smithy. Built 1492.
‘The year they discovered America,’ the woman had said. ‘Christopher Columbus.’
‘The film’s very good,’ said Susan.
The woman blinked at her as if she was backward. Then the phone started ringing and she picked it up and shouted down it, swearing.
The oldest house in the village. The original smithy.
They drove back to Guildford on the motorway and it was while they were stuck in a jam – a caravan had hit a tree and smashed to matchwood – that they admitted their feelings about the cottage. They were almost breathless, talking about it; Susan rubbing her swollen stomach and letting her eyes fill with tears of excitement and anticipation.
Now Duncan realised, five – no, six years later, standing there in the dark, that he had never been more content than in that hour, stuck in that jam on the M25. Probably not in his adult life, anyway. Anticipation. Everything still to play for. And somehow they had stepped sideways in buying the place. They had hitched onto someone else’s life. Hijacked it. That’s how it felt to him. That they didn’t really belong to the house, even though it filled him with pleasure, thinking about it. The oldest house in the village. The original smithy. They’d expected to change, become different and more interesting, but nothing had changed. In fact, they’d felt less interesting, compared to the house. Susan had got tireder and tireder. The country air, probably. Too pure. A bit ratty, she’d got, on a daily basis.
He wondered if people had noticed that he had slipped out. He headed back through the trees to the hall, but he stayed by the back door. He couldn’t face going inside.
The exterior halogen shone on his hands and glowed on the roll of his shirt where it hid his belt. He thought about the girl’s hands, the girl who had played the cello. She was known locally, was quite attractive with long straight hair that she allowed to fall down in front of her when she was playing. At least two people said afterwards that they reckoned she was copying Jacqueline du Pré, were almost sniffy about it. The pianist was a teacher from the posh boys’ school, Downley College – a Latin teacher, not a music teacher. Nolan had introduced him as a music teacher and had been corrected and Nolan had then made a witty remark which Duncan couldn’t recall. That was Nolan all over, part of his Irish charm. The fact that he was also a bloody good clarinet player helped, too. Nolan was potty about music, in fact. He should have been a musician instead of a businessman – could have been, really. The fact that it was just a hobby increased people’s admiration for him. Duncan had once asked him why he hadn’t gone professional and Nolan had scoffed at the idea. What, end up boring his knickers off in some two-bit provincial orchestra earning ninety-eight quid a throw? Perhaps Nolan wasn’t so good after all, Duncan considered: a big fish in a tiny pool. Like the business.
Why ninety-eight quid? Why not a hundred? Nolan never rounded things off, that’s why.
The Latin teacher played excellent piano, according to the experts present. Plump, with wild grey hair like Beethoven. By the name of Colin Skeeton-Ash. Susan had talked to Mr Skeeton-Ash, afterwards, about the fees, how much it cost to send your son or daughter to Downley College, and Mr Skeeton-Ash had looked at her as if the questions were distasteful. When he told Susan how much one might expect to cough up annually to keep a child at Downley – he’d actually used that expression ‘cough up’, peculiar coming from someone double-barrelled like him – Susan had looked startled. Duncan felt demeaned; not because the amount was pretty well the equivalent of his annual salary, but because Susan had given herself away by looking startled.
Posh-shop, he’d thought. It was Andrea who’d recruited the pianist, of course – she had friends in the college. Contacts, anyway. Nolan gave Mr Skeeton-Ash a bottle of decent Aussie red, afterwards, £15.99 at Oddbins – Duncan had chosen it. Duncan had never actually said thank you to the bloke and had made a point of doing so as he was leaving.
‘Thank you very much,’ Duncan said (almost adding ‘sir’). ‘On behalf of everyone present, Mr Skeeton-Ash.’
‘Good cause, good cause,’ the teacher replied. ‘Sorry about the andante in the Schubert.’
‘That’s quite alright.’
A prime prat’s thing to say, he now realised. He didn’t even know where the andante was in the Schubert, whether andante meant fast or slow or something else like ‘loud’; he knew next to nothing about classical music, although he didn’t object to Classic FM on long drives, if he needed to relax. The public-school arsehole of a teacher had smirked, of course, seeing right through Duncan and out the other side. He’d even looked down his nose at the label on the wine and said, ‘Oh, Aussie. Oak chips and barbed wire. Well, there’s always a first time for anything.’ You can’t go wrong at sixteen quid, though. Fifteen ninety-nine.
There was laughter behind him, through the varnished wooden door with its old-fashioned latch. They hadn’t changed the doors. They were solid originals, from the 1920s, but let in draughts. Duncan thought he detected his business partner’s high laugh and found himself stiffening like a rabbit. He’d almost finished his cigarette. The muffled crashing of the chairs had stopped. How many had come, in the end? A hundred and fifty? Two hundred? Packed, anyway. Each one paying seven quid for the privilege. It wasn’t Rosterpovitch, but it was quality stuff for the area. And all in a good cause. You can’t get a better cause than a children
’s hospice.
He smiled to himself and flipped his cigarette into the black grass of his shadow. He’d met the director of the hospice, David Wilkes, at the Briar Hotel cocktails six months ago. Wilkes was new to the region, and about the same vintage. Although he was a northerner, they’d got on, mainly because of their mutual ability to parrot whole passages from old episodes of Only Fools and Horses. Duncan had been on form that day and established from Wilkes that there was no security system at the hospice. It was a huge rambling Victorian pile, with a couple of naff extensions, and not a dead bolt or an alarm anywhere. There were smoke detectors, and fire extinguishers, but nothing against intruders. It took kids in from a big area – though more kids got mortal illnesses than you realised, said Wilkes, and it all needed a lot of complicated technology.
‘Keep mum about that.’
‘About what?’
‘The technology. These days,’ Duncan pointed out, ‘being a kid’s hospice is no guarantee against a break-in. And then there’s the paediatric angle. Peeping toms and stuff.’
‘Paedophile, don’t you mean? Perish the thought.’
Duncan had physically blushed at his mistake. But he’d told Nolan the next morning that the hospice might be their next big job. They needed a big job; the firm was steering very close to the wind financially, for reasons neither partner could really fathom. They worked seventy-five-hour weeks, not including weekends. Surelock Security Systems had a reasonable rent in the slightly shabbier part of Stourminster. They employed four reliable blokes and a part-time secretary, Sheena, and ran a couple of three-year-old Ford vans. With all the new private estates springing up, their services were in demand. Yet the figures got the accountant shaking his head.
‘You need a break,’ he’d said, at the last meeting. ‘And not break as in holiday. One big job. Too many piddling little alarms for old biddies. The Army, for instance.’
‘Already sewn up,’ said Nolan. ‘They take their own boys, insiders they can trust.’
‘Don’t tell me, Mr Murphy,’ simpered John Wills, the accountant, ‘that they don’t trust a decent fellow from Londonderry.’
So the hospice break had got them both dreaming. And then, when Nolan was wondering what charity to support for his concert, Duncan had made the kind of suggestion he’d been valued for by his previous employers. He had that sort of mind; it was brighter and faster than he knew, except that he knew that he didn’t know. Perhaps there was a section of it, sort of cordoned off, that was better developed than the rest.
What’s more, he’d wheedled out of Wilkes the crucial information that the place was going to have its insurance reassessed in 2003, following new European bloody guidelines. Wilkes was worried: the medical equipment was valuable, there were video machines and a couple of Macs. He’d heard that bedroom doors had to have code-locks on them, the type where you tapped out a four-digit number. Duncan had given him his card.
‘That’s our line of work,’ he said, gearing into the prattle. ‘Home security systems. Twenty-four-hour monitoring. I can come and look it over, if you want. Free estimate. I’d recommend swipe cards for the bedrooms and multi-access keypad entry for the rest. And entrance function, of course.’
‘Entrance function?’
‘The door stays unlocked from the inside. Useful in case of fire. Given you’ve got a lot of kids, who’ll maybe be sleepy and confused in the middle of the night. Of course, you’d top that up with panic hardware for the main doors. Better safe than sorry. What’s your access control?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean, if your system was networked you could control up to eight doors at once. Or more if the electronics are built into the reader itself. You can choose. The technology’s moving all the time, it’s incredible, it gets better and better. And what I can say is that we don’t charge for the software, which is extremely powerful.’
‘Fire,’ Wilkes had repeated, feebly, as if the possibility had never occurred to him before.
‘What you don’t want to be is caught out by the insurance bods, who’ll have a hotline, or maybe even be affiliated with, the big home-and-business security boys.’
‘Is that true? Are they? Jesus.’
Wilkes looked bewildered: there he was, in charge of fifty-odd dying children, and he knew nothing about the real world.
Nolan had been tempted to activate Plan X on this one, but Duncan thought it unnecessary and somehow immoral, given it was a kids’ hospice, and for once Nolan had agreed. Anyway, to stage a minor break-in was always, to a certain extent, dangerous. Plan X was only to be used in very specific circumstances, like the time Roger Deakin of ATT Computers had just taken over the Thatched Barn in Swinley Beauchamp and reckoned a couple of Yale locks and leaving the radio on would do the job. Plan X – Sheena’s glamour-boy with the bad complexion doing his bit – had decided him otherwise, and Nolan was on hand in the saloon bar of the Highfield Hotel at just the appropriate hour, Roger being a man of ingrained habits. That one job alone had saved them for another six months, because a couple of Roger’s mates in the business, in equally inappropriate buildings, followed suit.
‘Won’t the bastards get in by the thatch, now?’
‘Roger,’ Nolan had replied, leaning on Deakins’s Astra and looking up at the picturesque roof, ‘eighty per cent of all break-ins are through a door. You’ve got infra-red access control, motion-detecting outdoor floodlights, an integrated alarm system and twenty-four-hour CCTV showing Andy Warhol’s latest.’
‘Eh? Andy Warhol’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘But there’s one aspect that still worries me, looking at your very attractive place. Fire does not use a door. Fire looks at thatch and goes yummee.’
‘You don’t happen to do fire security, do you?’
‘Roger, we do. It’s not our main line, but we’re developing it.’
‘I lost a year’s work in that break-in. My bloody back-ups won’t boot.’
‘Water sprinklers. That would do it. Like in the films. Prevention is better than cure, when there’s no cure, Roger.’
Now and again, worrying about finances, Duncan wondered if Director Murphy was pilfering from the till. He and Andrea had just bought a mill-house somewhere in France, and Nolan’s new car was a show-model BMW. Andrea had appeared tonight in a fabulous outfit, all green and sparkling, which had made Susan’s maroon two-piece look dowdy. The only element Duncan felt superior about was, of course, his own domicile. Nolan’s house was B for Boring – a kind of big Barratt with knobs on: kit conservatory, fold-away pool, huge open windy fireplace they never used. Andrea would come for dinner at the Old Forge and joke about the low beams and sloping floors; she was green with envy underneath, though. You could tell. Susan appreciated this, and would salt the wound by making the place look very romantic – dipping the halogens and relying on candles in the brass sconces she’d got from the Past Times catalogue while Duncan pointed out something new and historical he’d dug up about the house from some old codger or other.
‘The oldest habitation in the village,’ he’d say, pouring out the Premier Cru. ‘Complete with a ghost. A very good nose, this one, Nolan.’
He could hardly believe it himself – about the house. That’s how people would sometimes introduce him at village socials: ‘Duncan has the oldest place in the village, lucky man.’ Nolan was impervious: he couldn’t care a toss about history, he was too present in the present and too big about the future. Quite often one got the impression that Nolan was chafing against the ropes, that he was destined for much greater ends. He’d started out, Duncan knew from Andrea, in Aer Lingus, checking over the planes’ electricals; had risen to some responsibility, fallen out with the unions and gone his own way without a bean. The story was that he’d spent his first months in England sleeping in a rusty old container in Docklands, before the area was done up. Then it was snow and no picture until Andrea, the nice house and the snazzy suits. Duncan had once asked him, during a boozy conference in Basings
toke, to fill him in on this transitional period, but Nolan had clammed right up.
‘I bought new shoelaces and walked across the sea, Duncan,’ was all he’d said, in a sort of ponderous sing-song over-Irish’d way. Which had made Duncan feel even smaller.
We’ve got the oldest house in the village. The original smithy.
He lit his second cigarette of the evening and took another turn towards the wood. It was very black, the countryside. Business ought to be better than it was.
Susan was permanently frightened, living where they did. The Old Forge looked extremely classy. It must be a target, she said. The floors and beams would creak on their own and she’d wake him up, white-faced.
‘There’s someone there.’
‘No there isn’t.’
‘Yes there is. What’s that noise, then?’
‘The fairly disturbed axe man of Sutton Dewey.’
‘Go and see, Duncan. Please.’
‘We’ve got an alarm and floodlight system, Susan. Installed by you-know-who.’
‘Exactly, Duncan. That’s why I’m so bloody worried.’
‘Not even a cockroach could get through.’
‘Duncan! Please!’
And he’d have to crawl out of bed and investigate. He was a bit frightened himself, but not of burglars. The oldest habitation in the village had a proper ghost. He’d never seen it, but he’d been told about it. It was of a young woman who’d been burnt to death in a fire in the early nineteenth century. The house was so still, in the middle of the night. Full of old crooked corners and shadowy ends of rooms. Waiting for something. For them to get out, probably. She appeared – was supposed to appear – at the bottom of the old stone staircase that led up to the TV room and adjoining guest-room. Stark naked, long hair down to her waist, her skin all purple. How come, he’d scoff, her hair wasn’t burnt? Nevertheless he’d stand on that spot and test it, half-jokily. Testing himself, really. Testing his nerves. Because if she appeared, if you saw her, it meant she had your number. It meant you were doomed. It was a warning, a warning from the other side. But he never felt anything. Nothing at all. It was disappointing, because he didn’t really believe that stuff about being doomed if you saw her. One man in the nineteen twenties had seen her and then fallen out of a tree a week later, that was why. A certain Mr Wilfred Kingston. He was picking pears, up in the tree. It was all written down in black and white in Our Lovely Village, by Esther M. Podleigh, who’d done the sketches, too, back in the sixties. Now Duncan was in one of the sketches, as it were.