It Had to Be You (18 page)

God forbid. That had done it. He hadn’t done a stroke of work for the company during the rest of the afternoon. He had found himself unable to concentrate on work. He had given his all at the meeting. He had spent himself.

Slowly, inevitably, Thursday had begun to loom. He’d found himself breaking off from his work to finalise arrangements. He’d rung the caterers to increase his estimate of the numbers who would come back to the house. He’d rung the undertakers to discuss the composition of the procession of cars to the crematorium. He’d finalised the arrangements for the arrival, the evening before, of the piano that Charles would play at the service. He’d rung Fliss to consider the delicate question of who should go in which car. He’d rung his mum to avoid being accused of not having rung her. He’d longed for … what? He hadn’t known what he had longed for. He had only known that he had longed for something.

And tomorrow evening he was seeing Helen. That, too, had begun to loom.

Why was he here? Because Roger Dodds had rung back, after he’d told him of Deborah’s death, and had suggested that they ‘show solidarity. Take you out of yourself.’ The only person, of course, who can take you out of yourself is yourself. James had almost managed to do this in the conference room. On the crowded pavement he had only been taken out of everything that was relevant to himself, but he had not been taken out of himself, so there he was, irrevocably himself, in a place which had no relevance to him and in which he didn’t want to be. Oh, why had he come?

Because they meant well. Because there might come a day when he wanted their friendship. Because he didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t been there. Well, that was a good enough reason.

Seb Meikle, who was too tall and felt it, bent down slightly to talk of the great cricket matches they had played on Sundays against the villages around Cambridge, and the fine times they’d enjoyed afterwards in the village pubs before catching the last bus and rushing to the nearest Indian restaurant with empty stomachs and bursting bladders.

Derek Hammond, who was too fat and hated it, gave detailed updates on the progress of his three children, the latest developments in his battles against moles, his itinerary for his motoring holiday in Germany, and the saga of his septic tank, which an ignorant surveyor from the big city had spelt ‘sceptic tank’. Every summer he invited them all to a barbecue where excellent wine flowed with immense generosity so listening to all this was a small price to pay.

Roger Dodds, who was neither too tall nor too fat and knew it, smiled and laughed and commented on everything and revealed nothing. He was very amusing on the subject of sceptic tanks, and informed them that he was the proud owner of a very cynical lavatory. The other three shared a look which stated, That’s the only thing we’ll ever find out about where he lives.

The thought led on in James’s mind to Roger’s party, which he had not held in his secret home but, typically, in a private room above a public house. He found that he needed to take this opportunity to find out more about the party. He was hooked on Ed’s death.

‘You had a party last week, didn’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes. Fiftieth.’

None of them had ever known what Roger had done between leaving school and going to Cambridge at the age of twenty. This, they had felt, had been taking the principle of a gap year too far before gap years were fashionable. But Roger was fun and you had to accept him for what he was and accept that you’d never find out what he was.

‘Mike was there, wasn’t he?’

‘Everybody was there, James.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘No. You weren’t. Right. My round.’

Roger struggled to the bar, and Seb went with him to help. While they were gone, while James was still wondering why Roger hadn’t invited him, Derek took the opportunity of imparting a little more information about his life.

‘Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon in Crete?’

‘Yes.’

‘About the farm we stayed at and the horse that got into the loft?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was amazing. We’d booked into this …’

James had to admire Derek’s masterly narrative powers. He made the tale last exactly the length of time that it took Roger and Seb to bring four more beers.

He tried to preserve his dignity and ignore the conversational itch that was assailing him, but in the end he had to scratch.

‘May I ask why I wasn’t invited?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, come on, Roger. Don’t piss about. We’re old friends. Why wasn’t I invited?’

‘Because three times you’ve accepted my invitations and not come.’

‘Ah. Fair enough.’

He had taken the invitations as opportunities to have some time with Helen. How egocentric he’d been. Well, more Helenocentric, really.

Now at last they got round to the extraordinary business of Ed’s murder, which none of them had wanted to be the first to mention for fear of being accused of having an interest in sensation that could not be described as cool.

‘He was there, at the party, was he?’ asked James. ‘Only I went out with Mike on Saturday – well, I do see him occasionally, I feel sorry for him – and he said he’d been at the party and I told him about Ed’s disappearance, which he knew nothing about, and he said it was a very crowded party and he hadn’t run into him.’

‘I hope he didn’t,’ said Roger. ‘I had my doubts about inviting them both, to be honest. But somehow, you know, whatever you thought about Ed, it wasn’t the same if you excluded him, and Mike, like you, sympathy, dreaded word.’

‘I’m not with you. Why should you worry about inviting them both?’

‘Well, when Ed went bankrupt that second time and opened up again in Jane’s name he owed Mike thousands, nearer six figures than five, I’d say, and Mike got about five per cent. It’s what really pushed Mike’s business over the edge. Five years ago, I’d say it was.’

Just when he’d started seeing Helen. Lost touch with what was going on. Taken himself out of the loop.

James had been aware, as they stood on that crowded, noisy pavement, of a growing and inexplicable tension. Now the tension began to be less inexplicable. A disturbing possibility had entered his mind, the possibility that Mike had murdered Ed. It was astonishing and disturbing and at the same time curiously exciting to think that a man you knew well might have killed another man you knew well. He hoped, almost desperately, that none of them would move on to speculate about Ed’s death. He wasn’t ready to confront this possibility.

He needn’t have worried. Derek said, ‘We sat on the same table as a bankruptcy expert on one of our cruises,’ and the conversation moved on to other topics, including the complete itinerary of the cruise on which Derek Hammond had sat at the same table as the bankruptcy expert. James had never felt so grateful for one of Derek’s excruciatingly boring stories.

Roger said he had to leave fairly soon after that, giving no reason. Seb went off to go to the theatre. Derek returned to his memories of the bankruptcy expert, listing every item of food that the unfortunate man had been unable to eat due to the delicate state of his intestines. It wasn’t riveting stuff, but it was better than sitting at home on his own, and James was quite sorry when Derek announced that he had to leave in order to catch the 8.44 to Coulsdon.

The first magical hint of rose was creeping over dewy Islington when James woke. The world was silent, sleeping. Only a hissing milk float, harbinger of the rumpus that would soon be London life, disturbed the uncanny calm. It was far too early to get up.

He turned over, to face the empty side of the bed. To think that he’d fantasised about Deborah’s death. How he missed her now.

He couldn’t bear to see the place where she wasn’t. He turned back onto his right side again. But there was no peace to be had there either. His worries crowded in on him, jostling for places in his brain.

Helen, his last, long love. He was seeing her tonight. He was dreading it. Why? Jane, his brief, first love. He was seeing her for lunch. Why? Oh, James, you idiot, why? Mike, his second oldest old friend, with whom he had enjoyed a curry on Saturday. If Mike really hated Ed…

No. He was imagining things. He was in a heightened state of tension. He wasn’t himself. Such things only happened in a parallel world, the world other people lived in. Or on television, in the land of blood and pathologists.

But pictures of Mike presented themselves to him unbidden. Horrid images that he hated. Mike plunging a knife into Ed’s stomach. Mike tipping Ed out of a forklift truck into the muddy water of a Fenland river. Ridiculous. Mike was his drinking buddy. Ed had done a dreadful thing, but, damn it, they had both been to Cambridge. Mike was bitter, twisted, but … a killer? Never.

But somebody had murdered Ed. That much was clear. And Ed
had
done Mike out of a huge amount of money and in essence ruined his life. And Mike
had,
not surprisingly, hated Ed, according to Roger Dodds. And they
had
both been at Roger’s party. And Mike said that he hadn’t seen Ed there, which seemed unlikely.

This was all terribly vague. Derek Hammond had been at Roger’s party. Seb Meikle had been at Roger’s party. Either one of them might have hated Ed. He was being ridiculous.

Neither Derek Hammond’s life nor Seb Meikle’s life had been ruined, though.

Stop it. Had some great times with old Mike … Think of something else. Count sheep. Pretend to be making love to … no! Don’t. None of it was any use. All of it was confusion. His thoughts churned in circles.

Cancel Jane. That was a must. There was still a question that he needed to put to her, though. He would have to have that lunch.

He could phone her. There was absolutely no need to have lunch with her.

She had been beautiful. Tall, statuesque, a little intimidating. She would still be tall. She would still be statuesque. But would she still be beautiful? He would rather like to find out. Besides, if things with Helen didn’t … what? What was he thinking? He was rather dreading seeing her, because he was ashamed of his failure in bed on Sunday. That was all. Nothing more. Nothing serious.

No, there was absolutely no point in seeing Jane. He didn’t like her. And he knew for certain now that she had been in cahoots with Ed, that she had been a partner in the activities that had ruined his best friend, who was not a killer.

He would phone and cancel.

He felt relieved that he had made a decision. He turned over onto his left side again, stretched his legs, closed his eyes and made another attempt not to think about these things. He made a map, in his mind, of the faint, feathery cracks in the ceiling. He opened his eyes to see how accurate his map had been. Hopeless. Way off the mark.

Then, against all the odds, sleep came. With it came Mike, lunging at him with a bread knife. He sat up, wide awake in the empty room. This was ridiculous. His eyes felt as though they had sunk into his head, like his mother’s, but he wasn’t going to get any more sleep. There was no alternative but to get up.

It was seventeen minutes past five. What on earth was he going to do?

He padded down to the kitchen, made himself a cup of builder’s tea, unlocked the back door, and took his tea out into the narrow, elegant garden. The roofs of the houses were still touched with red. No leaf stirred. The dew lay silvery on every blade of the long grasses. The cast-iron bench was soaking. The gravel was darkened by moisture. The little Elizabeth Frink, their prize possession, was soaking. Diana, the huntress, was soaking. This was not the garden of a man who was big in packaging. This was Deborah’s garden.

He began to shiver. The morning was still surprisingly cold. Or was he just shivering with fright?

Mist was rising from every plant and every roof. It was a fairyland. He finished his tea, and went back inside. The house smelt of tiled floors. He switched the television on, then switched it off for fear that even at this early hour the pathologists would be about. I’m developing a pathological fear of pathologists, he told himself.

He switched the radio on. ‘… but my essential point about modern Britain’s decline is …’ He switched it off. It struck him how strange, how amazing, how magical the communication systems of the modern world are. A self-important prophet is intoning, you hear none of it, you switch the radio on, you hear nine words, they depress you beyond belief, you switch it off. The man drones on, his smug pessimism unaffected by your decision, but you can hear nothing.

How silent the house was. He put the kettle on, just to hear it whistle.

He thought of switching the radio back on, the radio was his friend, there were no pathologists on it, or, if there were, they were talking about pathology and not cutting people up. But he couldn’t, not here. He would need to shout at it. That was fine in the car, but if he shouted here it would wake – if not the dead – the neighbours.

He had a shower, washed his hair, dried it, got dressed. It was twenty-three minutes past six.

He actually thought about driving round and round Islington, with the radio on, shouting at it. He thought of going down to the Emirates Stadium and shouting, ‘Come on, you Spurs.’

He made his breakfast, put honey on all four half-slices, shouted, ‘That’s surprised you, hasn’t it?’ He ate the toast very slowly.

He took his pills.

He drank the herbal concoction that Holly prescribed to get rid of the dry cough that was a side effect of the pills.

He made himself a cup of black coffee to get rid of the taste in his mouth that was a side effect of the herbal concoction that Holly prescribed to get rid of the dry cough that was a side effect of the pills.

It was seven minutes to seven.

He went into his study and opened his address book. He went right through the book, making a list of people whom he thought that perhaps, marginally, he should have told about the time and place of the funeral.

He decided that if he telephoned them today, giving them only two days’ notice six days after Deborah’s death, the brighter among them might realise that they were marginal. Besides, already more people were coming than could be coped with by the chapel and the house.

He screwed up the list and tossed it towards the waste-paper basket.

He missed.

He found himself downstairs again, rummaging in a bureau, without any recollection of having decided to go there. He found a large envelope he didn’t think he had seen before. On it was written, in Deborah’s generous hand, ‘
Glebeland, 1979
’. He opened it, and found a large photo of a group of girls. There was Deborah, her beauty not yet quite formed, smiling with such vast optimism that he shuddered at the knowledge of her death. Helpfully, she had written the names of all the other girls under the photo. Amanda Castlebridge, hating to be photographed and making a silly face. Constance Thrabnot, no warmth in her narrow smile, so that her sticky end (which need not concern us) didn’t seem surprising. Grace Farsley, the one that got away, whom Deborah missed so much, her niceness, her openness, the warmth of her wide smile shining through from thirty years ago. He lingered over the photo, drinking in these girls and their hopes, and all the while the funeral was like a black spot in the barbecue sky, a black spot that was growing like something in science fiction, a black spot that would slowly spread all over the sky, that would bubble and suppurate and strangle.

Of course it was possible for him not to go to the funeral. He could just go to Brighton for the day. People would put it down to stress. He could get away with it.

Or he could just disappear altogether. Get away from all his tensions and escape to a new life.

These thoughts soon passed. There is no escape. Everywhere is somewhere else. Nowhere is nowhere.

At eight o’clock he wondered if it was too early to phone Jane and cancel lunch. He decided that it was.

Suddenly he remembered that he needed to transfer money from his business account to his personal account.

He dialled his bank’s automated business service. He had to answer several questions asked by a recorded voice. Account number. Sort code. Date of birth. Third and sixth letter of his security code. His mind went blank for a moment, then it came to him. Helen’s date of birth. 151174. He felt a sense of shock. 1974! He’d forgotten how young she was. She would still have time to find someone else.

He was impatient at the best of times, and now the voice-recognition system failed to recognise his voice three times, forcing him to repeat himself. When at last he was asked to wait for the next available advisor, he found he had to wait for more than three minutes. He was forced to listen to idiotic music constantly interrupted by another mechanical voice thanking him for the patience he hadn’t got.

When at last he got a human voice it was young, adenoidal and irritatingly friendly.

‘Good morning!’ she said. ‘My name is …’ She knew her name so well and had announced it so often that she gabbled it so fast that he had no idea what it was. And he could barely understand her thick Black Country whine anyway. ‘Do you mind if I call you James?’

He hesitated for just a moment, wondering whether to let it pass. But he was too irritated for that.

‘Yes, I do mind,’ he said. ‘I mind very much. How dare you presume an intimacy you haven’t earned? How dare you force me into sounding like the kind of pompous prig I can’t abide?’

There was a brief silence.

‘How can I help you, Mr Hollinghurst?’ she said, in a thin, hurt voice.

He felt dreadful.

‘I just want to transfer some money from my business account to my personal account.’

‘Certainly, Mr Hollinghurst. I can do that for you.’

May as well try to be polite, make amends.

‘Thank you very much.’

‘How has your morning been so far, Mr Hollinghurst?’

Replies whizzed through his mind like combinations on a fruit machine. ‘Fucking awful.’ ‘Mind your own business.’ ‘Do me a favour, get on with it, I’m paying for this call.’ ‘Lonely, my wife’s just died.’

He couldn’t. He had to make amends. This slip of a girl was forcing him, a Managing Director, to make amends. That was what was so intolerable.

‘Not very good, to be honest. Which is why I was so short with you. I really don’t think there’s any reason why we should be on first-name terms. But then I’m from an older generation, and the generation before mine, my father’s generation, didn’t even call their close friends by their Christian names. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so rude.’

Who’s talking too much and building up the phone bill now?

‘That’s all right, Mr Hollinghurst. How much money do you want to transfer?’

When he had finished the call, James sat at his desk for almost four minutes, motionless. His chat with the girl at the call centre had upset him. Next week he faced another haircut. An eleven-year-old girl would wash his hair, wetting the collar of his shirt in the process, and she would ask him, ‘Are you doing anything exciting this weekend?’ and he would want to scream at her, and the person he should scream at was the creator of the training courses that taught these people how to deal with the public.

But he had been even more shaken by something else, by something he had thought while talking to the voice-recognition system.
He’d forgotten how young she was. She would still have time to find someone else
. What had he been thinking about? She had him. They were for ever.

He desperately needed to get out of the house. He decided to pop down to the travel agent’s, get some brochures, start thinking about what cruise they could go on and pretend to have met on.

He would never forget his visit to the travel agent’s, which was as hot and airless and boxlike as a holiday hotel room.

He smiled at the staff, mumbled, ‘Just looking,’ and set himself to work. There were so many brochures, such large ships, so many facilities. He could see within minutes that the industry was going in a way that was not for him. The latest ships were the largest. The thought of three thousand people disgorging themselves into some quiet port revolted him. He had seen big ships arriving in Venice, dwarfing the palaces, destroying the unity of the place they were bringing people to see. There were whirlpool spas, golf simulators, bungee trampolines, champagne bars, all-night food, chocolate festivals, art auctions, nightclubs, champagne fountains, casinos, posh restaurants in the names of celebrity chefs who had probably never stepped on board. The vulgarity was staggering, and, since most of the cruises began and finished in Southampton, which involved crossing Biscay twice, for much of the time the passengers would probably be staggering too. He couldn’t see himself and Helen on these ships.

Then there were really smart ships, top of the range, altogether more tasteful, but, he still felt, they were dealing only in a rather more tasteful vulgarity. He could feel the soft, carpeted pampering, the anodyne background music in the lifts, the excesses on the table, the galloping consumption of the passengers, however well-bred and discreet it might be. No, somehow, for some reason, he couldn’t see himself and Helen on those ships either.

There were other, altogether more promising cruise lines, smaller ships, ships for people who wanted to explore the world, ships with lecturers who knew about the places they were visiting, ships that James liked the sound of, ships that would eventually be squeezed out in an industry increasingly being run by people who thought that profit was the whole point of it all, rather than being the necessary and admittedly pleasurable ingredient that made all the other pleasures possible.