Ring Road (34 page)

But the breakthrough, when it came, like every lucky break, was not from some insight gained through research, but from a tip-off from a man in a pub. Billy had been in the Castle Arms, talking to his old friend Noel Savage, who is a landscape gardener. When he was still working up at the dump Billy used to allow Noel to offload straight from his trailer without using the weighbridge: tradesmen were supposed to pay a small fee for dumping, according to the size of the load, but Billy turned a blind eye for friends and people who were polite. Noel happened to mention to Billy that he was working on Frank Gilbey's garden, thinning out some of the trees, sorting out a couple of the borders, and Billy had asked Noel, offhand and unthinkingly, if he'd seen the famous horse trough and the drinking fountain that had gone missing, all those years ago, and which people always claimed had ended up at Frank's. Noel laughed and said he couldn't remember seeing them, but he said that Billy could accompany him to the garden if he wanted to, to check for himself.

Billy checked back first in the basement for old photos of the trough and the fountain, and he found some archive pictures from the 1950s, when the town still looked complete and still made sense, untouched by the spoiling hand of developers. It wasn't until 1984, after the completion of the road-widening
scheme at the junction of High Street and Main Street that anyone noticed that the trough and the water fountain had gone missing, and before anyone could protest they had been replaced with concrete bollards and a couple of trees in circular tree grates, and a bronze so-called piece of sculpture which looked like a man with half his head melted, all supplied by a firm owned by Frank Gilbey.

Billy dressed in his old boots and boiler suit to accompany Noel to the garden. It was a nice garden. Gardens in our town tend not to contain many mature trees, or flowers – they're more trouble than they're worth. We're more of an evergreen shrubby kind of a town, with the average plot not in excess of about 12 foot by 8. Frank's garden, in comparison, was something more like the forest of Arden, or the grounds at the palace at Versailles. Frank lives in a big bluff red-brick mansion, the biggest and the bluffest in town, right up at the far end of Fitzroy Avenue, where the town used to become country, and where it now becomes the ring road. Noel pointed out to Billy some of the plants trained up against the house: a wisteria, and a
magnolia lennei,
he said, and a palm, a
trachycarpus fortunei.
Billy wrote these words down in his notebook and asked Noel to spell them for him, in case they came in useful, ‘for colour', Billy had said and Noel had nodded, impressed. Noel had only known Billy as the man at the dump, and Billy only knew Noel as a gardener; he had no idea that a gardener might know some Latin, and Noel had no idea that Billy might want to write. It is customary here in town to underestimate other people – this is how small towns work. If you want a slap on the back for just being who you are, well, you're welcome to live in the city, where there are plenty of people who'll tell you how great you are. In a city, people talk each other up, that's the deal: everybody's great and everything is wonderful. In a town, we prefer to talk things down. If you think you're special, or you want people to think you're a genius, don't get to know your neighbours.

Spreading out in front of the flagged terrace at the back of the house there was a huge lawn, surrounded by mixed borders, and again Noel pointed out various shrubs and herbaceous plants. ‘Nicely done, ' he said, indicating to Billy how the shrubs broke up the line of vision, and created the impression of depth and space.

Billy agreed and he was pleased for Noel, that he was obviously an artist too, but he still couldn't see what he was looking for. Then, at the end of the lawn they passed through into a rose garden, with some old-fashioned shrub roses on trellis-work, and they came upon some pathways leading to different areas – an enormous old greenhouse at the end of one path, a small pool surrounded by hostas and shaded by tall trees down another. Variegated poplars, Billy wrote in his notebook, prompted by Noel. Mature oak. Eucalyptus.

‘What about down here?' Billy asked eventually, pointing down another gravel pathway. Noel had never been down there, and so they crunched their way past a long winding hedge and there, in the very farthest corner of the garden, hidden from the view of the house and from the Old Green Road running along outside, was a patio area, set with tables, and a large stone horse trough and a marble drinking fountain.

Billy had his scoop. He'd brought a camera with him. He took the photos.

Cigars all round.

As soon as he got the photos, Colin had made an appointment to go and see Sir George Sanderson, the proprietor.

Colin did not like Sir George, but he had to admire him, because Sanderson was old enough and rich enough not to care what people thought about him or his opinions, and actually his opinions happened to be pretty much Colin's own: like Colin, Sir George was counter-intuitive, except he was counter-intuitive by breeding rather than by choice. He simply knew that what most people thought was right was often
wrong, that hunting was a good, for example, and that nuclear power was absolutely fine and not something to get all fussed-up about. He didn't need to work out his opinions, like his wife had to. He had inherited them, along with the estate.

When Colin arrived he found Sir George and Lesley Sanderson in the library, hoovering. They no longer kept a staff and they did pretty much everything themselves. Colin knew they'd lost a lot of money a few years back, when the dotcom bubble burst, having invested heavily in their gay son's on-line dating business, but this was something that was not talked about.
*

‘Rimmer!' said Sir George. ‘Good of you to come. Well?' Sir George did not waste his words. You didn't get to where Sir George is on pleasantries and chat.

‘I have a story that I want to run, but it might be a bit controversial, ' said Colin, who wasn't a great one for the small talk himself.

‘Controversial! Good! That's what the place needs. A good shaking up. Nothing to do with me I trust?'

‘No. But it does concern Frank Gilbey.'

Sir George had known Frank Gilbey for many years and he'd done a lot of business with him – who hadn't? – so there was a bond of loyalty there. Then again, Frank was a horrid
little man, who'd ogled Lesley at one of those dreadful Rotary Club dinners a few years ago, and he dressed like an American gangster. Sir George glanced at Lesley, who raised her eyebrows non-committally – she'd never liked Frank, for obvious reasons. He was common.

‘Is it business?' asked Sir George.

‘No, ' said Colin. ‘It's personal.'

‘Well, I can't see any problem then.'

Colin started to open his mouth to tell Sir George the details.

‘No!' said Sir George. ‘No need to know.' If he didn't know he could always deny it. ‘Run it past the lawyers, though, won't you?'

End of conversation.

End of Frank Gilbey.

The story was going in tomorrow.

And there was still champagne to be drunk tonight.

The snow, when it came, started as a flurry, hardly enough to worry even the most anxious of bookmakers – in our case here the Cuddys, Hugh and Eamonn, twins, two men in grey suits who look like greyhounds but who enjoy all the human vices, or at least all those available to the middle-aged man of means here in town. They like to smoke whatever they can lay their hands on and to drink to excess at home and at length in public bars, and to use just a touch of gel on their thinning hair and a dab too much cologne in the mornings. They like to do these things, to commit these small-town sins, almost as much as they like to gamble. The Cuddys are men for whom a day has almost never gone by without them placing, accepting, collecting or paying out on a bet. They were racing snails at the age of three, they ran a poker school pretty much full-time at St Gall's, worked as tick-tack men down south in their teens, and once they'd reached their twenties they'd travelled the length and breadth of the country and been back and forth to America, surviving only on bar bets and working their system in clubs and casinos. They'd been barred from more places than the average punter could even dream of visiting, and they only retired from full-time gambling when Eamonn broke both his hips when he was thrown down
some concrete stairs by bouncers acting on the instructions of the management at a casino in Reno. These days you can tell the difference between the twins quite easily. Eamonn's the one who walks with the sticks and Hugh is starting to get a little heavy – his wife, Patti, is American, from Toledo, Ohio. Hugh met her in an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant in Chicago, where she served him big bowls of chowder and half a dozen plates of lobster and langoustine, and she's a great cook, renowned for her generous hand with the butter and spices, and in the evenings, after dinner and before bed, she and Hugh play poker, which makes her pretty much the perfect partner according to Hugh, and according to Eamonn also, who just wishes that Patti had a sister.

People say that alcoholics should never run pubs and that gamblers should never run a bookies, but who else would bother? Here in town, as elsewhere, you don't so much choose a profession as it chooses you: here we are lived by our lives rather than the other way around.

The Cuddys have to pay out for a white Christmas only if flakes are actually falling on Christmas Day, so a chilly wind and some sleet on Christmas Eve are nothing for them to worry about. Even snow on the ground on Christmas Day, deep and crisp and even, doesn't count – it actually has to be coming down on the day itself and the chances of that, as the Cuddys could tell you, are pretty slim – so they were comfortable in the Castle Arms, the pair of them, as was their wont on Christmas Eve, their frowns and stoops as yet unsoothed and undiminished by drink and tobacco, smoothing their hair, straightening their ties, preparing themselves for some serious end-of-season drinking and reflecting on another good year.

We like to gamble here in town as much as anyone else, although we probably gamble smaller sums of money and with a lot less expertise – Wonderland, the big new Bingo hall up at Bloom's is the closest thing we have to a casino – and the brothers Cuddy have done well out of us. It's horses for
most of us, of course, but we have also been known to throw away our money on football and dogs, and every other kind of game, race, fight, or pointless endeavour that humans can possibly have a punt on. The Cuddys had opened a book on the Third World War a while back, and there was even some money coming in from that. Not at Christmas, though: people tend to lose interest in wars around Christmas. They have their families to think about.

The flurries had started around eight, just as Margaret was pulling Hugh his first pint and Eamonn was tucking into the first of his double whiskeys, which he drank several of daily, medicinally, for the sake of his hips. They were drinking the proceeds from the annual White Christmas bets – people never seemed to learn. When the pint had settled, Hugh raised his glass and proposed a toast to the ghost of Charles Dickens. They have a lot to thank Dickens for, the Cuddys: the idea of snow in particular.

Mr Donelly – a Dickensian figure if ever we had one, a man despairing of decency and who might well have suited a frock coat and beard, had he been born a couple of hundred years earlier, which frankly he wished he had – was himself setting out for the pub that selfsame evening, at around the same time, at the beginning of the flurry, stone-cold sober but completely befuddled, with his dog, Rusty, who like all good dogs is a thoroughly Dickensian dog, generous in every way, limited only in intelligence, and shabby-genteel in the style of a cross-breed and the lower middle classes. Recently the dog has not been well. She's incontinent, and Mr Donelly wondered also if she was going senile – she hadn't been behaving the best. There'd been lots of rages and barking, and her coat was turning grey. Mr Donelly was already having to give her anti-inflammatory drugs for her arthritis, and the poor thing had been bitten by another dog a few months back and her left ear had been stitched back on, a bit wonky, by
Becky Badger in her Animal Centre and Pet Surgery. It broke Mr Donelly's heart these days to see the dog shuffling along in front of him and himself shuffling along behind. He'd nearly skipped the walk tonight, but he didn't want to be in an empty house on Christmas Eve.

Once his wife had been decently buried and his children had returned to their former lives, briefly interrupted, Mr Donelly found himself alone with his dog and living the life of an indigent gentleman. He would wake early in the morning and dress straight away, in clothes he had left folded on the end of the bed, clothes which he had to admit he no longer changed every day. He'd always felt that fresh, clean clothes were an extravagance, like embossed toilet tissue, and he felt he had now been proved right. Constant washing, of the self, of one's clothes and of the house, was a kind of conspiracy, according to Mr Donelly, like so much else in modern life. Mr Donelly believed that democracy was a chimera; he believed that if voting changed anything they would have abolished it; that the European Union was an unmitigated evil; that modern washing powder rotted clothes; that cleaning products were a waste of money; and that for most chores and grooming purposes you'd be better off using some bicarbonate of soda mixed with a little vinegar. If the worst came to the worst, a bit of borax did for most things. He had never been able to convince Mrs Donelly of these obvious truths, but he hadn't bought a single bottle of bleach now since she'd died and the toilet looked just fine, and he could easily stretch his clothes for a week, if not more, and no one ever noticed, or at least no one commented. And Europe was a mess and the country was going to the dogs. So.

He'd quickly established a new routine. Routine was everything when you were living alone. He would get up, put on his stinky clothes, use the rimey toilet, and go and walk the dog, and buy a newspaper from Eva in Wine's, and then go into Scarpetti's, where he would drink boiled tea and eat cold
toast and occasionally have the fry, although the Parmesan cheese was not to his taste early in the morning or indeed at any other time of day, and he stuck to brown sauce. He sometimes sat with Billy Nibbs if he was in – he'd known Billy's father, Hugh, and like every other decent dog owner in town he was sad when Hugh had died, the death of our last real and jolly butcher, with the consequent loss of a ready supply of free scraps and bones. Tom Hines, the remaining so-called and miserable butcher, charges for bones, which is outrageous, clearly, and a sure sign of a civilisation, or at least a small town in decline. So Rusty was back on the Pedigree Chum. She seemed not to mind. It was Mr Donelly who minded. Feeding the dog from the butcher's had always appealed to Mr Donelly's great sense of the tragedy of life, life as a series of bloody scraps and bones thrown down into the sawdust from the butcher's block. But you get no real sense of pathos from a can, and the sight of a two-kilo bag of multicoloured doggy biscuits just about summed up what the world had come to for Mr Donelly.

After his cup of tea and his toast in Scarpetti's, Mr Donelly would take a stroll home and potter around in the garden or in the house until lunchtime, which was any time between about 10.30 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Sometimes he skipped lunch, in fact, and went straight from breakfast to a kind of high tea around 4, plus a late-night supper, or an early-morning breakfast and an early lunch and a full dinner later on, but sometimes breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and supper all just seemed to segue from one into another, to merge into one vast unregulated day-long snack. He was surviving like a dog on scraps, in fact, eating when he wanted to, whatever he wanted to. He was eating a lot of frozen potato waffles at the moment, actually, having worked his way through everything else that was in the cupboards and the freezer, and he couldn't understand why everyone didn't eat them, they were so easy: you just pop them in the toaster and they're done,
and you can have anything you like on them. He liked a fried egg himself, or a couple of tinned sardines – he could eat that any time of the day or night. It was a movable feast.
*

In the afternoon he sometimes watched TV: the TV was great company, he'd found. Mrs Donelly had always been a great one for the quiz programmes and the soaps, and Mr Donelly had never really bothered with them, he'd always stuck to sport and documentaries and films. But actually some of the quiz programmes on in the afternoons were quite good, he was surprised. You got a sense from some of them that the presenters actually knew you, which was nice. He was even coming round to the soaps. You could get quite involved in the stories after a while. In fact, Mr Donelly had ended up watching nearly all of Mrs Donelly's programmes, as if he had somehow inherited them from her. Maybe this is what people mean when they say that an individual lives on through the lives of others. All good things must come to an end, but TV goes on and on, and now, with videos and satellite and cable, your love for
Fawlty Towers,
say, or the early episodes of
Countdown
need never die.

Mr Donelly was also spending more and more time up at Bloom's. He probably spent at least two days a week up there, and he would pop in first to see people he knew when he was working in the delivery warehouse, and then he'd go to one of the coffee shops – to Café Kilimanjaro, which does a nice caramel square, made properly, the old-fashioned way with condensed milk, or to Bradley's, which is designed more for the young people, with big sofas and video screens but
which does free coffee refills, an innovation Mr Donelly would have liked to see copied across town. He'd mentioned it to Mr Hemon in Scarpetti's, but Mr Hemon had just laughed.

‘Why not?' Mr Donelly had asked.

‘Coffee costs money, ' replied Mr Hemon, before plating up another fry.

There was no answer to that and it got Mr Donelly to wondering how Bradley's could afford to do it. It was probably because, while Mr Hemon charged 40p for a cup of coffee, Bradley's charged £1.50. To get his money's worth from Bradley's Mr Donelly had therefore started drinking up to five cups of coffee at a sitting, which was no mean feat for a man of his age and with his bladder. You got to watch a lot of MTV on five cups of coffee; five cups of coffee represents an awful lot of flesh and jiggling around.

If he was spending the day up at Bloom's, after his coffee and his tray bake and the toilet Mr Donelly would wander around the shops, in a kind of caffeine-and-sugar-and-MTV daze, refreshed and tingling, not buying anything, just looking at all the nice bright clothes in Gap, and the shiny new glasses in Specsavers. Lovely stuff, all of it. He particularly liked a shop called Fine Things, which sold the full range of fine things, including Lilliput Lane, and the Harmony, Kingdom and Sherratt ranges of whimsies and figurines, Royal Doulton, Tyrone Crystal, Swarovski, and a whole lot of other sorts of china and glassware. He could spend hours browsing, which was strange because he'd never have done anything like it before with Mrs Donelly. He used to leave all the shopping to her – he took no interest in or responsibility for things like shopping. To his knowledge he'd never even bought anyone a birthday or Christmas present, not even Mrs Donelly herself. He just used to give her the money and she'd spend it in the January sales, usually buying herself a new nightie: Mr Donelly had never known a woman like it with the nighties. A new one every year, at least, by his calculation, while he'd been
running the same two pairs of pyjamas in tandem since the early 1970s. He'd miss the new nighties, though. He looked at them in Marks, trying to guess which Mrs Donelly would have chosen – she was quite daring, actually, right into her sixties. She'd probably have gone for the one with the puffy sleeves and the plunging neckline.

He wished he'd known about browsing round the shops, that it was so relaxing. When he'd worked in the warehouse at Bloom's it was just like working in a warehouse anywhere, and he'd hardly ever set foot in the mall, but now he'd really come to appreciate the atmosphere and the environment – warm and welcoming, without being too stuffy. He'd turned off all the radiators in the house because he didn't agree with central heating, so it was nice to go somewhere where there was a bit of heat and no draughts, a nice, safe, controlled, constant environment, where the unpredictable had been all but eliminated. Uniform temperature. Uniform light. Men in uniforms at the door. Mr Donelly had used to think it was like a morgue, Bloom's, like you see on the telly in detective programmes about serial killers and psychopaths, and it was, a bit: the temperature, the humidity, the cleanliness. No windows. No street noise or dirt. He used to think it was all artificial and he didn't like it. But now it suited him and he didn't think it was like a morgue at all any more. It was the opposite, in fact: Bloom's seemed to him full of all of the possibilities of life. Youth, warmth, companionship. It was absolutely true, the slogan: ‘Every Day a Good Day, Regardless of the Weather'. He had to leave the dog outside, but that was OK. Bloom's was clearly no place for an incontinent Dickensian mongrel like Rusty. The only dogs you ever saw in Bloom's were guidedogs for the blind, stately Labradors, dogs which looked like they only ever ate from Marks & Spencer's.