More Than You Can Say (11 page)

It wouldn’t have done. It was at the bottom of the Thames, or inside a fish. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had – or I would have – walked all the way to Oxford to complete my part of the bet, and this idle bastard hadn’t even got out of bed in time to drive there in his Mercedes. In other circumstances I might have taken the next plane to the south of France, found Ed’s villa, and strangled him. But these were not other circumstances. I needed his help.

‘I walked all that way, Ed, for nothing. What are you going to do about the bet?’

There was a silence.

‘Could you bear to cancel it?’ he asked, in what I think he hoped was a contrite voice. ‘Not the card debt, I mean. I’ll honour that whenever I see you next. But the double or quits bet: the extra three thousand pounds. Could you see your way to letting me off the hook?’

I let him dangle for a bit. Then I said, ‘If you will do me a
favour in return, I’ll think about it. It won’t cost you anything, either.’

‘Name it,’ said Ed. ‘Anything, just tell me what it is.’

‘I need a bed for a few nights, somewhere out of London. A couple of beds, in fact. I was thinking of Hartlepool Hall. Is it completely shut up when you are away?’

This time Ed laughed.

‘Hartlepool Hall? Are you sure it’s going to be big enough for you? Who are you taking with you? Who is she?’

‘Never mind all that,’ I said. ‘I’m not looking for somewhere to go and bonk someone. I’m trying to help a friend who’s in a bit of a jam and needs to be out of the way for a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’ asked Ed.

‘Say a week?’

Ed thought for a moment. Then he said. ‘Fair enough. I’ll call Horace. Do you remember him?’

Horace was the Hartlepool family butler.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’ll call him. He lives in a flat at the back of the house, and Mrs Dickinson, the housekeeper, lives in a cottage near by. They assist with the occasional functions that we have to have there – weddings and such – to help pay the bills. I may not go there much myself, but the bills keep coming in. I’ll ask them to make up a couple of rooms for you and get some food in. Don’t expect spectacular cooking, but you won’t starve.’

‘It’s a deal,’ I said. ‘Do this for me and we can consider your debt cancelled. One other thing … it’s very important.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t tell anyone. I mean no one.’

*

As I turned from the phone Adeena came out of the sitting room. She must have finished communing with God.

‘We can go now,’ she said.

I called a taxi to take us to King’s Cross, then I hid the gun. I didn’t want to be carrying it around with me. I packed a change of clothes. The taxi arrived and we left.

Ed’s house was an enormous pile in County Durham, about half an hour’s drive from Darlington Station. On the train there, I tried once or twice to get Adeena to talk, but she shook her head. On her face was the expression she had worn when I first met her: a look of desperation so profound I wondered what on earth was the matter with her.

When we arrived in Darlington we went to the shops, where Adeena bought some clothes and other necessities. Then we climbed into a taxi and I told the driver to take us to Hartlepool Hall. He didn’t need directions – everyone in that part of the world knew of the house. Adeena asked me no questions about where we were going, and I didn’t bother to explain. You couldn’t explain a set-up like Hartlepool Hall. You had to see it. As the taxi drove down the narrow country lanes, I thought about the very first time I had been there.

The first time I went to Hartlepool Hall was to a dance when I was in my early twenties. I forget the occasion for which the dance was given – it was a mixture of young and old people, and I think Ed’s father and mother gave the dance rather than Ed himself. It was a grand enough affair. There were over three hundred guests that night, as far as I recall. Hartlepool Hall is an enormous house but even so it had been necessary to erect a couple of adjoining marquees on the lawns outside. In one, drinks and dinner were served. In another a dance floor had been erected, along with a platform on which a group of men in white tuxedos played orchestral versions of songs such as ‘Yesterday’ and ‘I Did It My Way’. By common consent the band yielded to disco music towards midnight, and all the younger members of the party swarmed on to the dance floor.

I already knew who Emma Macmillan was, because our parents were friends. We had been in each other’s houses and I knew that I liked her, but had never got beyond a feeling that I liked her on the few occasions when we had met. Most of the people of my age at that party were from Yorkshire or Durham or Northumberland and I didn’t know that many of them. In those days the Pennines were a social as well as a physical divide and I was on the wrong side of them that evening, as far as I was concerned. Then I recognised Emma,
sitting at a table talking with two other girls, so I asked her to dance. We bopped away energetically to a couple of songs and then left the marquee, which was very hot, and went into the house to cool off. Quite a few people were wandering about in the enormous marble entrance hall, or staring at the pictures. There was a drinks table attended by a waiter in one corner, and I managed to obtain a couple of champagne cocktails. As we sipped our drinks I asked, ‘Emma, why do I have to come all the way to Yorkshire to meet you when you only live an hour and a half up the road?’

‘You must know the answer to that question better than me,’ she replied.

I smiled. ‘Fair enough. Do you think you could face another dance with me when we’ve finished these drinks?’

We returned to the dance floor a few minutes later and, as luck would have it, it was a slow number. Some time during this dance, I pulled Emma very close to me and we kissed. When we did this, I felt a tingle like an electric shock go right through me to the bottom of my feet. Emma seemed to have experienced something similar, for I felt her body quiver against mine. It was very hard to let go of her when the kiss ended. Nothing further of consequence was said or done that night, but when we said goodbye – she left with her parents at about one o’clock – both of us knew that something momentous had happened.

That dance was at the end of August, and in September my leave ended and I went back to my regiment. But it was the beginning of my long affair with Emma. After a year we became lovers, during one of my leaves. Two years later we were engaged, but our agreement was that I would take the junior staff course I had put off for so long and apply for promotion when I was thirty. Then I would become a major
and we would get married. We were both faithful to each other. As far as I knew Emma never even looked at another man. And with each leave it was like the beginning of the affair all over again, except that Emma lost her plump, puppy look and her features became more finely drawn. She was a grown-up woman with her own job and her own life. She would have been a catch for anyone but, miraculously, she kept herself for me.

But the innocent schoolboy in the photograph – the person who had gone to Sandhurst all those years ago and was going to be a colonel one day – had disappeared. I had gone into the army feeling cheerful, optimistic, certain that I could help make the world a better place, confident in the expectation of a happy future when I came out. It hadn’t worked out like that.

It took me a while to realise what had changed. At first I thought it was everyone else who was behaving oddly. After a while I realised something had gone wrong inside
me
. Very wrong. Emma was the only person who understood what had happened, and the only person who tried to do anything about it.

The taxi slowed down and I saw that we were approaching the twin stone pillars and the lodge that marked the entrance to Hartlepool Hall. Adeena was sitting bolt upright. The taxi entered the long drive that led in a great curve first underneath an avenue of limes, the leaves now turning golden, then an avenue of wellingtonia, then blue cedars. Adeena spoke for the first time in what seemed like hours: ‘Where are we going?’

‘This house belongs to a friend of mine. He is away in France so the house is empty.’

At that moment Hartlepool Hall came into view. You can
visit the website, or look it up in Johansens or Hudson’s, but nothing quite mirrors the effect the house itself has on you when seen for the first time. The grand front was interrupted by a portico with a great colonnade. Uncountable windows gleamed in the late-morning sunshine, and the house was crowned with a stone balustrade above which appeared leaded roofs and a central dome of white marble, contrasting with the grey stone all about it. Behind the house were stables, estate offices and a sign that indicated the way to the gift shop and tearoom (closed until Easter).

The taxi pulled up in front of the house and I paid the driver, then unloaded my overnight bag and Adeena’s carrier bags from the boot. Horace appeared silently at my side and took the bags from my hand. I turned, startled.

‘Lord Hartlepool called to say to expect you, sir. Everything is ready for you.’

Horace was ageless. Silver-haired and slightly stooped, he nevertheless betrayed no evidence of the fatigue that many decades of buttling for the Hartlepools must have brought upon him. By now he would have been well into his seventies, but his face was unlined and rosy-cheeked and his eyes were clear. He turned and bowed to Adeena, who stared at him.

I said, ‘This is … you’d better call the lady Mrs Gaunt, Horace.’

‘Congratulations, sir,’ said Horace, without a flicker. ‘Lord Hartlepool did not mention that the person accompanying you would be your wife. I had been instructed to make up two bedrooms, Mr Gaunt, sir. I hope that is correct.’

‘I’m a bad sleeper,’ I replied. ‘That is correct.’

Adeena and I followed Horace up the wide stone steps and into the hallway. This was a vast space, with a black and
white marbled floor, and walls covered with pictures depicting scenes from naval battles, rural idylls or stories from Greek mythology. At one end of the hall was an enormous white marble group portraying a she-wolf suckling the twins Romulus and Remus, a testimony to the deep purse and imperial longings of an earlier Lord Hartlepool, who had purchased it on his grand tour. At the other end was an enormous fireplace, unlit. Beams of light shone down from the circular dome above the hall.

Adeena gazed around her in amazement. Horace stopped and put the bags down.

‘I have lit a fire in the Green Drawing Room, Mr Gaunt. If you and Mrs Gaunt would like to go there I will have these bags taken up to your rooms. May I bring you some refreshment?’

I declined anything for the moment and steered Adeena towards the drawing room. A log fire burned merrily away and, after the hall, the room had a more human quality. The walls were hung with green silk, and yet more enormous oil paintings hung from the picture rail. On a side table stood a drinks tray. I looked thirstily at it, and wished I had accepted Horace’s offer of a drink.

Adeena looked around her for a moment longer, then turned to me and said:

‘Your friend: is he a government minister?’

‘No.’

‘Or a general?’

‘No, he is just the man who owns the house.’

Adeena went to the door of the room and stood looking again at the cavernous splendour of the hall.

‘Why is your friend not here?’

‘He lives in France,’ I explained.

‘If he is in France, who lives here? How many families?’

‘Nobody lives in the house just now. My friend may come back here again one day.’

Adeena shook her head in disbelief.

‘
One
man lives in this house? One man only?’

‘Well, he isn’t here at the moment. They keep the place going, though. I expect it gets used now and again.’

‘There is enough wealth here to buy a whole province in Afghanistan,’ Adeena said, ‘Why do the British bother to come to our country when they have such houses as this?’

Horace returned before I could think of an answer.

‘Your rooms are ready, sir, and I have taken the liberty of unpacking your bags. Lunch will be served in the dining room in half an hour, sir, if that is convenient?’

‘Fix me a gin and tonic, please, Horace,’ I said. ‘And the lady – Mrs Gaunt – would like … what would you like to drink, Adeena?’

‘A glass of milk.’

When Horace had served us our drinks I took Adeena out through the French windows at the other end of the room. We stood on a stone terrace, looking down across banks of dark green rhododendrons towards the lake. A family of mallard, disturbed by our arrival, skittered across the water half in flight, then subsided back on to the surface a few yards farther on and paddled away demurely. Clumps of water lilies floated on the water. From the other bank a heron flapped lazily into the trees.

‘It is very beautiful here,’ said Adeena suddenly, her tone different to before. ‘I have never seen a place like this. So green, and so quiet.’

We walked to the end of the terrace, where there was a view of the formal gardens beyond the house.

Adeena drank her milk and gazed thoughtfully at the scene. Then she said, ‘I would like to stay in this place for a while. I feel safe here.’

‘I’m afraid we can only stay for a few days,’ I replied.

‘Why is that so? If your friend does not like his English house and stays in France, why should we not stay here longer?’

It was a good question.

A little later Horace appeared at the doors that led from the drawing room on to the terrace and announced that lunch was served. After lunch Adeena and I went for a walk in the formal gardens. It was a glorious autumn afternoon. The sun still felt warm: a last memory of summer. There were displays of dark green topiary, plain avenues of yew, bushes that had been sculpted into birds, dogs or other shapes too indistinct to define. As I walked, Adeena followed quietly just behind me, not speaking. I was trying to work out what I was doing here, and what I was going to do next. Since Kevin had knocked me over in his car four days ago, I felt as if I had never got my balance back. Although I had been off balance for a lot more than four days.