A Ghost at the Door (2 page)

Except that Costas hadn’t brought his wife, who was apparently summering in Greece, and instead was accompanied by a disgracefully young Estonian with a tongue-twisting name that even the
polymath Costas had trouble with; he shortened it to Annie. She was all clinging silk and cleavage, and Costas was as bald as she was blonde. He greeted his guests from the prow of the launch with
a glass of vintage Pol Roger in one hand and the other on the shoulder of his new friend. He explained that she was the niece of a business partner and was participating in some sort of
work-experience programme. Her English was as limited as her eyes were wide and they all sat on deck at a fine table decorated with crisp linen and crystal. Harry tried to make conversation.

‘What do you do?’ he asked.

‘I am . . . independent business consultant,’ she replied in a thick Baltic accent, spitting out each word. ‘Self-employed,’ she added, as if it were a badge of
honour.

‘What sort of business?’

Harry watched as the lips parted, formed shapes, but words came there none. Instead, she arched an eyebrow, shook her head to send her blonde hair cascading around her bare shoulders and offered
nothing more than a smile to feed his imagination while Costas fed her titbits of seafood from his own fork.

Harry felt awkward. The Greek had got it wrong. It wasn’t that Harry was a moralist or had led a life of particular purity himself, but he knew Costas’s wife and liked her; he found
himself struck by a case of divided loyalty, so, when they had finished eating and Costas dutifully suggested a stroll along the riverbank, Harry and Jemma declined. Costas assumed they were being
tactful and gave them a wink of gratitude, grabbing his business consultant and disappearing into the throng.

Harry and Jemma fell silent, lost in the embrace of the night. Gentle wisps of mist were rising from the river, twisting in the eddies, and Harry found himself taken back, lost in memories, old
pains, failures, the times he’d let down those he loved and been cheated upon himself, and a few reminders of good times, too. Not recently, of course, particularly not this last year, a
bottomless pit of time in which he’d sunk almost without trace, lost his seat in Parliament, lost his fortune, almost lost his life. He’d have sunk completely without Jemma. She’d
held him tight, dragged him back onto dry land. Hell of a woman. His dark memories tugged at the corner of his eyes; she noticed, as she always did, and once again rescued him from himself.

‘I’ve got a better arse than she has,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You were lost in thought. A dangerous habit in a man like you. Not thinking of hiring your own independent business consultant, were you, Jones?’

Harry shook his head. ‘No, Jem, I wasn’t there, wasn’t thinking of that at all.’

‘What, then?’

‘Just . . . To hell with it, I don’t know. You. And me.’

‘Sounds pretty profound.’

He leaned forward, took a deep breath, catching the scents of the summer night. He reached slowly across the linen-covered table, took both of her hands in his; her deep-hazel eyes turned to
gold with the light of many candles. ‘I was just thinking . . .’

‘What were you thinking?’

His thumbs were brushing the backs of her hands but suddenly they held her tightly. ‘That it’s about time. You and me. Isn’t it?’

She knew precisely what he meant, didn’t react immediately, searching his eyes. ‘You really have to ask? Damn, but I still have work to do on you, Harry. Could take me some
time.’ Her nose twitched, almost aggressively, then her face broke into the gentlest of shy smiles. ‘A lifetime, I hope.’

‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

It was later that evening when, unwittingly yet with extraordinary precision, she destroyed all the contentment that had taken hold of him with those five short words. She was in his arms, head
on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart, when she lifted her eyes. They were filled with a new sense of curiosity.

‘Tell me about your father.’

Johnson Eric Maltravers-Jones, Harry’s father, better known as Johnnie, had been both part icon and part enigma for his son. In translation, it meant he’d had the
propensity to be an unremitting bastard, although in his defence he would probably have said he’d needed to be. Johnnie’s own father had blown the family’s modest inheritance
during the Great Depression by following the advice of others, a weakness that Johnnie had sworn never to follow. By contrast and in deliberate contradiction to his father, the son was never likely
to be orthodox. His parents had fled to Cardiff to hide from the shame of bankruptcy and it was there, during an air raid and in an Anderson shelter dug deep into the back garden, that Johnnie had
been conceived. It was his father’s one moment of inspiration for, in almost all the other stretches of his life, he left behind little but grinding disappointment. He had hovered around the
margins of the advertising industry and, while others had found celebrity, he had encountered little but calamity, sliding ever backwards, to the point where at school Johnnie had been known as
Jones the Broke. That left scars, and had instilled in him a determination never to be as poor or as pathetic as his father. Money mattered. And, if that meant having little time to worry about
those who were being trodden on in the process, it was a price he paid without losing much sleep. Johnnie Jones didn’t do victim support.

He was bright. Won a scholarship. Got to Oxford, made his mark, then got married, and, by the time Harry came along, they lived in some style in one of those tree-lined avenues of Holland Park,
not the best avenue but still pretty damned in-your-face. Harry remembered an eddying autumn day when he was seven, answering a knock on the door. Standing in the rain on the York-stone doorstep he
found a nervous woman with pale face and red rims to her eyes begging to talk with his father. A little later, from behind his bedroom door, Harry heard them arguing. She was the widow of his
father’s business partner, recently buried, and now she wanted her share, for the children. Johnnie explained that he had a family of his own, that their business was in cash, no records, no
formal partnership agreement. Anyway, he had added, her husband had spent months dying and had contributed nothing. At that point Harry had quietly locked his bedroom door and buried his head in a
book. He knew how the conversation would end. It was a lesson he was to see repeated more than once during the next few years.

And yet . . . And yet, despite it all, despite the unreliability, the rows with his mother and the times he simply disappeared from their lives, his father had offered moments that Harry had
cherished. Like the Christmas Day when Harry had woken to find the streets covered in snow. He’d been so excited until he found his mother in tears. The Aga had broken down, the fire gone
out, their day destroyed. Harry remembered her being almost fearful of his father’s reaction, yet Johnnie hadn’t even raised his voice. He’d hauled an old wooden sledge from the
attic, placed Harry on top wrapped in his overcoat and favourite football scarf, and they had walked through the park to the Dorchester Hotel for their dinner, his father pulling Harry all the
while. The snow had fallen around them every step of the way, laying down memories that would last a lifetime but that would never quite manage to swallow up the darker moments.

Harry had never been able to get to grips with how his father earned his living – the term ‘financial adviser’ covered so much ground. The family had covered a fair amount of
ground, too, spent their holidays in Val d’Isère, Cannes, Antigua and Australia, and Harry’s life had lacked for nothing in a material sense. His father had taught him to drive
in the South of France in a green, three-litre, 1924 Bentley with a leather strap across its bonnet and a wicker hamper in the boot. He’d been barely sixteen when he’d first sat behind
that wheel, another sparkling father–son moment that, as so often, Johnnie had soon contrived to ruin. It was on that same trip that Harry had slept with his first woman – something
else his father had arranged. Yet, for Harry, in hindsight, it was too much. Surely that moment of all moments should have been a private matter, not something for his father’s holiday album
or banter in the yacht club. Anyway, Harry suspected that his father had screwed the girl, too, but it was the 1980s and the word ‘excess’ seemed to have been banned from the
language.

Other women had always been a feature of his father’s world. After his mother had died, alone in her large bed in her empty house in Holland Park, one woman in particular had, for a while,
become a part of Johnnie’s life. Harry thought for a while she had driven them apart. It was about the time that Harry had applied for a place at Cambridge – he had no intention of
following in his father’s footsteps to the other place, Oxford, as Johnnie had tried to insist upon. The son could be stubborn, too. So, when the crested letter of acceptance had arrived, his
father stared at him across the kitchen and said Harry was now on his own, that the fountain of money would be switched off, that he had to learn to stand on his own feet – ‘just as I
did’. A barrier was built between them. At first Harry blamed the new woman, but she eventually disappeared, was replaced, but nothing changed. His father still spent vacations in exotic
places but no longer with his son. Harry paid his way through college by working nights at McDonald’s and weekends at a call centre. Communication with his father diminished. In his final
year at Cambridge, Harry waited for his father to call him. He waited six months. Then he deleted Johnnie’s number from his contact list.

‘Tell me about your father,’ Jemma had said. Harry didn’t even want to tell himself, yet she stirred something inside him that for several days had distracted him, made him
seem distant. He was soaking in his bath, remembering too much, when Jemma walked in. She hadn’t a stitch of clothing on her. He appeared not to notice.

‘Seems I need to pay a hell of a lot more than a penny for them,’ she laughed – she always laughed so easily.

‘What?’ he said, raising his eyes in confusion.

‘Your thoughts.’

He went back to staring at his water-wrinkled toes. ‘Sorry, Jem. But you got me thinking about my father.’

‘I’d like you to tell me more.’

‘I don’t even know where to start.’

She wrapped a towel around herself and perched on the end of the bath. ‘OK, let’s start at the end and work backwards. When did he die?’

‘Oh, back in 2001. Early summer,’ he replied reluctantly.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not. Left me a fortune.’ The comment was uncharacteristically callous. His father seemed to bring out a dark side in him, yet in Harry’s eyes Jemma could see a rare
sheen of vulnerability.

‘Where did he die?’

‘On a yacht. Off Missolonghi in Greece. It was where Byron died.’

‘Poetic.’

‘Not really.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘I do sometimes.’

Hell, she was persistent but she had a right to know. He sighed. ‘My father was sixty and screwing one of his women. In her twenties, apparently. Didn’t pace himself, never could.
Heart attack.’

‘You Joneses, you always rush things. Still, he died in bed.’

‘On the sun deck, I’m told.’

‘I really am sorry, Harry.’

‘No need. He and I, we . . .’ He seemed about to add something, but trailed off. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

It didn’t matter? He had lied to her before, of course, as all couples do, but nothing more than modest white lies, usually to protect her. This was the first time he had lied to protect
himself.

‘Where’s he buried?’ she encouraged softly.

‘In Greece.’

‘Not here?’

‘It all got a little complicated. You see, the boat was owned by a Russian and registered in Panama. Flag of convenience, fewer rules, lower taxes, that sort of thing. And it was sailing
off the Corinth Canal in international waters. So when it happened no one wanted the responsibility, not the Greeks, the Panamanians, certainly not the British consul in Patras, and least of all a
man from Moscow who was on the make. Even when he was dead my father proved he could be a very accomplished pain in the arse.’

‘But what about you? You were next of kin.’

‘Didn’t hear about it for a while. No one could find me. It was the time when I was finishing off my days in the Army, in West Africa and very officially out of contact, doing a
little job that even our own Prime Minister wasn’t supposed to know about.’

There had been quite a few of those, during his military career. He’d told Jemma about them, even though she wasn’t supposed to know, either; he’d had to find some way of
explaining the collection of scars that decorated his body. Anyway, there were little things like a Military Cross and Distinguished Service Medal that rather gave the game away.

‘No one wanted an unclaimed body hanging around,’ he said, hoping to finish with the story, ‘so someone decided to deal with it.’

‘But who?’

‘I’ve no idea. And frankly I didn’t particularly care. What the hell does it matter, anyway? My father didn’t deserve a state funeral.’ This was said in a tone that
betrayed his discomfort. Harry hauled himself up from the cooling bathwater, suds meandering in sluggish streams down his body. He’d had enough of this conversation, but Jemma wasn’t so
easily put aside.