More Than You Can Say (8 page)

‘No, I don’t know him,’ I said. Freddy’s assumption that everyone who had ever been in the army must know everyone else was not untypical of people who had never served in it themselves.

‘Bertie Razen? Caspar Weingeld? Charlie Freemantle? Willy McLeod?’

‘Never heard of any of them, Freddy.’

As a matter of fact I had been here before. I now realised why the landscape had looked familiar when I glimpsed it through the tinted windows of Mr Khan’s Range Rover. Freddy had asked me down to shoot a year ago, in November. It was pheasants on that occasion, not partridge, but I remembered the contours of the valley. We must be just around the corner from the country retreat I had been holed up in for most of the weekend. I wondered whether I could get Freddy to tell me anything about the house and its owner – he was bound to know something.

I had first met Freddy across the card tables at the Diplomatic. On that occasion I had looked at his big, beaming face and listened to his conversation, which consisted mostly of expressions such as ‘Jolly good’ and ‘I say, what frightful cards you’ve given me’ and had jumped to the conclusion that he was both rich and thick. An hour or two later, when he had gutted and filleted me through a series of bluffs and double bluffs, in an extremely canny display of poker playing, I was forced to revise my opinion. Freddy was one of those people who, whatever their apparent lack of intellectual qualities, know how to hang on to their own money and how to prise it away from other people. In fact it was on the second occasion we played together that he took so much money from me he felt obliged to ask me shooting. ‘I tell you what, come and shoot a few pheasants with me down in Oxfordshire next Saturday,’ was how the invitation was phrased, ‘unless, of course, you have a better invitation?’

I hadn’t, I thought. ‘Why not?’ That was how I got to know Freddy.

Freddy put his dog in the back of his Range Rover, tossed the partridge to an older man who was bracing up the shot birds and hanging them in a game cart, and motioned to me to get in the front passenger seat. As I did so, another man climbed into the back of the car. Freddy introduced us.

‘This is Eck Chetwode Talbot. He and his wife Harriet have come down from Yorkshire for the shooting.’

The new arrival leant forward to shake hands with me.

‘Richard Gaunt,’ I replied. ‘Will your wife be joining us?’

‘No, she’s gone to visit her mother, near Cirencester, for the day.’

‘We call Richard the Leader of the Pack,’ shouted Freddy as we drove away. Eck Chetwode Talbot raised his eyebrows.

I shrugged and said, ‘It’s an unfortunate nickname that Freddy likes to use. It’s a long story.’

It wasn’t far to the house and I remembered the place as soon as I saw it: a comfortable-sized, double-fronted Victorian house. As we arrived, men in tweed plus twos and shooting coats were being decanted from various vehicles. There were nine of us including me. We all straggled into the house, depositing boots and guns, or in my case mud-caked shoes, in the entrance hall. Then we assembled in a long room that was used as a library and drawing room, where a substantial collection of bottles and glasses was arranged on a side table.

‘Help yourself,’ shouted Freddy. ‘Take no prisoners.’ After a few moments someone handed me a glass of white wine that I hadn’t asked for. Freddy was busy making sure his other guests had what they wanted to drink, so I found myself talking to the man called Eck.

‘Forgive my asking,’ said Eck. ‘But do you normally dress like that when you go shooting?’

‘My day started out rather differently to yours,’ I replied. ‘I had to assist at a wedding, but afterwards I somehow found myself mixed up with the beating line and then I bumped into Freddy.’ Even as I spoke I could see how profoundly unsatisfactory this explanation was. I tried to change the subject: ‘Freddy and I play cards together sometimes.’

‘Everybody knows Freddy,’ said Eck.

‘What’s that?’ said Freddy, appearing at my elbow clutching a pint glass tankard full of gin and tonic and lumps of ice. ‘Everyone knows Freddy? Not at all. I’m terribly shy and don’t get out much.’ He roared with laughter at his own joke, then said, ‘Leader, I need a satisfactory explanation of your presence here. Not that I’m not delighted to see you, but do admit it, you were a very odd sight in the middle of a hedgerow.’

‘I’ve been staying with your neighbour,’ I explained. I realised that I needed to be careful about what I said. I couldn’t possibly let this crowd know that I’d agreed to marry a girl from Afghanistan for money. My reputation was already dubious. Yet there was really no way to account for my behaviour over the last forty-eight hours; even if some of the events that had occurred had been outside my control.

‘My neighbour? Which neighbour? What’s the name of the house?’ asked Freddy.

‘A man who calls himself Mr Khan. Although I think he might also be known as Aseeb. Do you know him, Freddy?’

Eck gave me a very sharp glance as I spoke, but before he could say anything Freddy said, ‘Khan? He’s the new tenant at Harington House. An odd story: the house used to belong to a well-known local family. Things hadn’t been going right for them for a long time; then one of the children inherited and burned through most of the remaining cash, so they had
to sell up. It’s a few years since they left now. About five years ago some City boy bought it with his bonus. Did the place up. No expense spared, our window cleaner tells me.’

Freddy lifted the tankard of gin and tonic to his lips and gargled for a moment. When he had lowered the level of the liquid by an inch or two, he went on:

‘Then this one went tits up, along with a lot of others last year. Sorry, Eck, I know you used to work in the City too: tactless of me to bring the subject up. Anyway, the bank repossessed the house. I bought the land, apart from about five acres of gardens and woodland next to the house itself, but they couldn’t sell the house, not at the price they were asking. I wasn’t interested. I mean to say, I’ve got a house already, haven’t I?’ Freddy laughed again. ‘But you can always use a few more acres for your farming. Anyway, since then Harington House has been let. Your chum Mr Khan has been a tenant for about six months, as far as I am aware. I’ve never met him. He’s obviously well off, travels a lot; I don’t think he is often there. How on earth do you know him, anyway? I wouldn’t have thought he was your speed at all.’

‘We just bumped into each other somewhere,’ I said. I could see that Freddy would have liked a fuller explanation, but then he looked at his watch.

‘Oh Lord, we’d better go through and have lunch. I promised the keeper we’d be back out again by two. Come and eat something, Leader.’

‘I’d love to, but may I then ring for a taxi to get me into Oxford?’

Over lunch I was stuck between two complete strangers, but everyone was friendly, as people in shooting parties so
often are, and the conversation did not require much effort. Just as we rose from the table and everyone was getting ready to go outside for the rest of the afternoon’s sport, the man called Eck asked me an odd question:

‘Did I hear you say that Mr Khan might also be called
Aseeb
?’

‘That’s what I gathered. Do you know him?’

‘I might have met him somewhere,’ said Eck. ‘It’s an unusual name.’

‘Not common in Oxfordshire,’ I agreed.

Eck reached into his pocket and found a small diary with a pencil tucked into its spine.

‘Give me your phone number, if you don’t mind. I might ring you. I’m curious to know if your Aseeb is the same man I used to know.’

He was suddenly very serious and I could see he wouldn’t be put off. I gave him my home number and we said goodbye. Another man was hovering beside me. He had been on the other side of the table at lunch but too far away for us to have spoken.

‘Did someone mention your name was Richard Gaunt, or have I got that wrong? My name is Charlie Freemantle, by the way.’

‘Yes, I’m Richard Gaunt.’

‘Sorry to bother you with such a personal question, but didn’t you used to walk out with a very sweet girl called Emma Macmillan?’

I felt a sharp stab of remembered pain when I heard the name.

‘Yes, but that’s all over now. Do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her. She’s a very attractive girl. I’m sorry you’re
not with her any longer. I suppose that means anyone can have a crack at asking her out now, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose it does,’ I said.

‘Come on, everybody, hurry up,’ roared Freddy. ‘This isn’t a cocktail party – we’re meant to be shooting things!’

I waved goodbye to Freddy and shouted my thanks across the room.

‘Come again, Leader, but do try to dress in something more appropriate to the countryside next time.’

As they left, I spotted a phone on the hall table, sitting on top of a telephone directory. Within a few minutes I had arranged for a taxi to pick me up and take me into Oxford. There I bought a pair of jeans, a tweed jacket and some new shoes, and put all the clothes I had been wearing into a carrier bag and stuffed them into the first litter bin I could find. I kept the gun. Then I walked to the station and took the next train to Paddington.

On the train I sat and stared out of the window. It had been an odd couple of days, to say the least. On the whole, I could not look back on my behaviour with any satisfaction. Even the temporary thrill of punching Kevin a couple of times had dissipated. It seemed to me I had, without much reflection at all, sold my soul for ten thousand pounds: a Faustian bargain of the most useless kind, as I was unlikely ever to be paid. The thoughts kept rattling around my head. So I did what I always did when what remained of my conscience gave me trouble: I tried not to think. Outside rain streamed across the window.

Nature abhors a vacuum and into my empty mind came thoughts of home and family. It had been raining the last time I had been home. I remembered that very well: the sheets
of rain descending from low streamers of dark grey cloud as I drove down the winding road, trying to avoid the occasional sheep that strayed in front of my car, through the remote green Cumbrian valley towards my parents’ house. I had left the army: my last two leaves had been spent with Emma and I hadn’t been home for nearly two years. I felt strange about seeing my parents and my little sister again, but I longed to be with them too. Home would make me feel better.

Hardrigg Manor sat in a steep-sided valley at the western edge of the Pennines. Dark fir woods clung to the slopes and grey stone walls divided the hillside into small compartments filled with the white dots of grazing sheep. The grey walls were covered with lichen, and the winter grass was an exhausted brown. Above where the walls ended was a wilderness of fell and rushes, where fell ponies and sometimes red deer could be seen.

The house itself was a jumble of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Victorian Gothic: an extraordinary confection of turrets and gabled roofs and false crenellations. Leaded and mullioned windows looked out across the valley. My mother had made a water garden, using slates to create little cascades and rills, so that if you were walking near by, the music of the water was always with you.

It had been a wonderful place to grow up. I had scrambled among those hills as a child, had lain on the floor in the book-filled space that my parents had used as a drawing room, reading every book they would let me get my hands on. It had been a very happy childhood and now, coming back home after all this time, I anticipated the warmth, the feeling of security and comfort that would course through me as soon as I walked through the front door. I felt I could almost smell
the woodsmoke from the fires even though I was still half a mile from the house.

My parents and Katie were waiting for me in the hall. At first our meeting was wordless. We hugged one another, and then my father stammered out a few phrases in which ‘old chap’ and ‘good to see you’ were the only distinct words I could hear. My mother had tears in her eyes. My sister Katie, my little sister, now in her twenties, smiled her crooked smile at me. For many years that smile had carried a message: ‘They may love you more, but I’m the one who looks after them.’ Now I saw only that she was pleased to have me back home. I wished that Emma had been there as well, the girl I had been engaged to since my mid-twenties and whom I had known since I was fifteen. It had long been understood that Emma was the girl I would one day marry. But that meeting was for another day; tonight was just for family.

Greetings over, I was allowed some time to myself, and went up to the bedroom that used to be mine. It was warm and welcoming. The curtains had been drawn against the darkening evening, clean towels had been set out for me on the bed, the lamp had been switched on, and at one corner the sheets had been pulled back. The thought of climbing straight into that bed and sleeping for a week was almost overwhelming.

Instead, I had a bath, and then changed into ‘home’ clothes: jeans, a pullover, loafers. When I went downstairs the three of them were waiting for me, their faces happy and smiling. A bottle of champagne had been opened, too. I didn’t really mind whether I drank the stuff or not, but I knew it would make them happy if I did, so we all raised our glasses and my father said, ‘Here’s to your safe return, dear boy. We’re so glad to see you.’

Over dinner my mother, fortified by a large gin and tonic on top of the wine, recovered the power of speech.

‘Was it very hot in Afghanistan, dear?’ she asked.

‘Very hot by day, and very cold by night.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What a wonderful climate. So much easier to get a good night’s sleep if it’s cold, don’t you think? Did you get the silk underwear I sent you?’

‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I did.’

My father cut in. ‘I know you must have been busy and probably didn’t have time – but did you manage to follow the cricket while you were out there?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I replied. An image came into my mind of myself trying to pick up the cricket scores on Radio Five Live against the background noise of small-arms fire and incoming RPGs as we drove towards Musa Qala.