Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  ‘Hi, I’m Archie. We met at that mill place, with those people, remember?’ He wished he could remember the girl’s name. Hayleigh or Leah or something.

  ‘Oh yeah, hiya Archie. You having a nice time?’

  ‘There’s about a million people I know here, like half my year, so it’s totally crazy, you know.’

  Gemma, who knew no one, was impressed. She also thought how fit Archie looked in his dinner suit. His hair was slicked back like a singer in a boy band. And he had these amazing silver cuff links on his shirt, like cogs and spanners, really big and chunky, and big accessories were the in-thing this season according to Glamour magazine. And she liked the way he was so relaxed, like he was completely used to being at society functions, and had a really cheeky smile.

  ‘Marlboro?’ Archie offered a cigarette from a packet.

  ‘Er, I don’t really smoke. Well, ok, maybe I will. Thanks.’ She extracted a fag and Archie lit it with his lighter. She liked the clicking noise the lighter made, and it’s see-through blue plastic casing. Nervously, she drew on the cigarette, hoping she wouldn’t cough. It was her third ever fag.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Archie clamped his arm around her back, palm pressed to bare skin, and directed her to the bar. ‘Cranberry?’

  ‘Er, can I have a water please.’

  ‘No, have cranberry.’ Then, to the barman, ‘Two cranberries.’ He winked at Gemma. ‘It disguises the smell—and the taste, if you don’t like it.’

  Gemma had no idea what he meant.

  Clutching the plastic cups, Archie carried them to a distant pillar in a corner near the emergency doors. Around the pillar at breast height was a narrow, circular shelf, covered with overflowing ashtrays and abandoned cups and water bottles. He placed the cups on the shelf amidst the clutter, and tipped vodka into both of them. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Drink up, it’ll get you in the party mood.’

  ‘Cheers, then,’ Gemma said, uncertainly. She took a sip and was surprised it tasted of nothing, just normal cranberry juice. So she took another sip and soon a warm, happy feeling crept over her, and she began to relax and think what an amazing party this was and how envious her friends would be if they could see her. There was nothing like this at home. When she finished the first cup, Archie fetched another and sloshed in more vodka, which she could taste this time because it had formed on the top in a viscous pool, and she’d taken a big gulp before she realised. Archie had his arm draped around her shoulders, and friends of his kept coming up and saying hello to him, and he never introduced her to any of them. Not that she really minded. She liked Archie. Her head felt fuzzy and she leant against him for balance.

  From the shelter of a nearby pillar, Mollie watched her brother and the girl. The girl looked extremely tarty, no surprise there, and drunk. Mollie wanted to go over and talk to them but felt wary, in case Archie snubbed her. Archie was weird at parties, sometimes he pretended he didn’t know who she was.

  Archie and Gemma were on the dance floor, and Gemma was alarmed by how weak her legs felt beneath her. They kept buckling like she was going to fall over, the room was spinning. Archie was boogying round the floor, almost independently of her, like a jokari ball on elastic, sometimes abandoning her to dance with a different girl, then springing back to her again. She didn’t know whether she’d been dumped or whether he’d return. He really did seem to know everyone, all the boys and lots of the girls too, who kept coming up and high-fiving or kissing him. Gemma found it disconcerting. But she was also flattered to be dancing with such a popular guy.

  They’d been dancing like this for half an hour when, out of the blue, they began snogging. There had been no build-up, no signals, it just happened; one minute they were bopping about freestyle, the next in a clinch with Archie’s tongue down her throat. She could smell cigarette smoke on his shirt and in his hair, and his warm hands were creeping about the tops of her legs, and brushing against her tits. The discotheque was playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Slade, one of Gemma’s all-time favourite tracks, when Archie said, ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we? This music stinks.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Leave. Go on somewhere. A nightclub or back to your place or something. You do have somewhere in London?’

  ‘I’m staying at a hotel,’ Gemma replied proudly. ‘It’s really posh, they give you all these free products.’

  ‘Yeah? Which hotel’s that?’

  ‘The Thistle.’

  Archie made a face. ‘Are they good? I hadn’t realised. Anyway, can we go there?’

  ‘Well, my mum’s meant to be collecting me outside here at midnight. She’s up in town too. We’re sharing a room.’

  Archie looked disappointed. ‘That’s nearly two hours. We could go to Holland Park Square, I suppose.’ He seemed doubtful. ‘My parents are out having dinner … well, so long as we’re quick.’ He French-kissed her again, then manoeuvred her past the ball marshals whose job was to keep everyone inside the party until they were collected. ‘Just taking my sister outside for some air, she’s feeling faint. Won’t be a minute.’

  On Hammersmith Broadway he hailed a taxi and in what felt like five minutes they had drawn up outside a huge white house in a wide street. From outside, it looked like a hotel, it was that tall, with steps up to a double front door with bay trees in lead planters on either side.

  Archie supported her up the steps, while he unlocked the door. The cold December air, coming after the heat of the party, made her nauseous, her head was spinning worse than before. No wonder she was cold; dimly she realised she’d left her coat in the cloakroom at the party.

  Archie seemed pleased the burglar alarm was on. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘No one’s home. I thought Conception might be in.’ Deactivating the code, he guided her into a book-lined room off the hall, with a mahogany desk, sofas and several telephones. ‘Dad’s study,’ Archie said. ‘He’d kill us if he knew we were in here.’

  He guided Gemma to a sofa and she fell back into deep cushions. Looking around, she had a fleeting impression of fax machines and a computer terminal and framed photographs propped up along bookshelves. Most contained pictures of an older, handsome man whom Gemma remembered from the party at the mill. He must be Archie’s dad. In one of those pictures he was standing with another man Gemma thought she recognised, then realised it was John Major, the Prime Minister before Tony Blair. In another, he was with the Queen. There were other people she thought she’d seen before too, but couldn’t remember their names.

  Archie joined her on the sofa and immediately began kissing her again. It felt very nice to be in this warm room with him, on this comfy settee, and she snogged him keenly back. Her head felt all woozy; she could easily drop off here, Gemma thought, if she shut her eyes.

  Archie was lying horizontally on top of her now, and Gemma wasn’t sure she liked that. She kept pushing his hands away from her, as they became more exploratory. But as soon as she moved them, they crept back.

  ‘Don’t,’ she began. But she was slurring. ‘Don’t, Archie.’

  Archie seemed not to hear. His hands were advancing inside her skirt, higher and higher. ‘No, Archie. Stop that.’ His fingers were exploring the rim of her Topshop knickers, now she could feel them entwined in her pubic hair. ‘No …’ But he had covered her mouth with his own, kissing her, forcing her head into the cushions.

  She tried to push him off but he was too strong, and she didn’t want to appear naïve. Maybe everyone did this down in London, maybe it was expected, normal. Now she could feel him fumbling one-handed with his fly buttons, and she became conscious of a new, dangerous presence on the sofa. Archie was tugging at her knickers, tugging them down around her knees, all the time kissing her so hard she couldn’t speak. She tried to force her head up, pushing back against him, which seemed only to excite him more. Now he was pushing apart her thighs, and then, shockingly, painfully, he was deep inside her, thrusting away on the sofa.

  On and on he went. Distantly, Gemma was aware of a
long fax spilling out of the fax machine in an endless coil, and the sound of a car door slamming somewhere outside in the street.

  Then, much closer, a key in the front door lock, and a man’s voice saying, ‘That’s odd. The alarm’s off. You didn’t forget to put it on, Davina?’

  Archie heard it too, and looked stricken. As he moved to pull out, he suddenly spurted inside her. A snail’s trail of semen was deposited across the sofa cover as he withdrew.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ Miles stormed, bursting into his study. ‘And who the hell are you?’

  Archie was pulling up his trousers, jibbering explanations.

  ‘Actually I don’t want to hear, I’ve seen quite enough. What I do want, Archie, is for this young lady, whoever she may be, to be out of this house in the next three minutes. And you will never, never do you understand, bring any girl back here again. Particularly not into my study. Now, I shall leave you two to get dressed, but I don’t expect her to be here when I return.’ Then he slammed the door.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Archie said. Deflated by ejaculation and chastened by his father’s anger, he just wanted her out. Looking at Gemma on the sofa, skirt still high above her waist, Archie was disgusted. What a scrubber. She didn’t look as pretty as she had earlier, and he wanted to go to bed, alone, before his parents could get at him.

  ‘You know where you’re going, do you?’ he asked, opening the front door. Outside, the temperature had dropped to zero, and Gemma shivered without a coat. ‘You’ve got money for a cab, I suppose?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s … in my coat pocket … at the ball.’

  Archie fished in his trousers and produced a £10 note. ‘That should be enough. It’s all I’ve got.’

  Gemma looked at him and felt like she was going to cry.

  ‘The best place to find a cab is on Holland Park Avenue,’ he said. ‘There are usually plenty.’ As she stumbled down the limestone front steps, Gemma heard him bolt and chain the door behind her.

  Archie crept upstairs. He didn’t want to be cross-questioned, not tonight anyway. For one thing, he didn’t even know the silly tart’s name.

  9.

  Miles was buying wine in Stockbridge on Saturday morning errands when the next outrage reached him.

  He had ordered four cases of claret and two of white burgundy, and was telling the assistant to have it delivered to the Chawbury address, when the man asked, ‘Is that to the Manor or the Park, sir?’

  ‘Chawbury Manor. You’ve been dozens of times before. There is no Chawbury Park.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, we had a delivery for Chawbury Park earlier in the week.’

  Miles looked blank, so he went on, ‘That new place they’re building, that’s Chawbury Park. Where the old cottage was.’

  Miles’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re telling me they’ve changed the name to Chawbury Park?’

  ‘A lady and gentlemen were in here, I made a delivery of beers and ciders up there for them. They were having drinks for their builders, to celebrate getting the roof on. I’m sure they said Chawbury Park. I remember thinking that’s going to be confusing, with you being Chawbury Manor and so close by.’

  By the time he got home, Miles was apoplectic. He shook with indignation. Chawbury Park, indeed! Chawbury Park! Park! The sheer pretension of it! You couldn’t believe it, except you could, having met Ross and Dawn. He assumed the ‘Park’ bit was Dawn’s idea. Park! How could you call that hideous Barratt Home a ‘Park’? The whole county would die laughing. Not that Miles particularly wanted them to hear about it, because he felt it reflected negatively on himself, being provoked in this way. Wouldn’t people be slightly laughing at him, too, the victim of the Cleggs’s one-upmanship?

  Quivering with fury, he announced the news to Davina, Archie and Mollie, whom he found reading newspapers in the kitchen. To add insult to injury, Davina and Mollie scarcely seemed to register or care, though Archie instantly got the point.

  ‘They’ve called their house Chawbury Park, dad? That’s so weird. Park is better than Manor, isn’t it?’

  Miles nodded. ‘It goes Palace, Park, Court, Hall, Manor, then Rectory and House …’ Miles could grade practically anything; he could recite the pecking-order of fashionable London restaurants, Caribbean islands and hotels, advertising agencies ranked by billings, Kensington squares ranked by house-prices …

  ‘Are they allowed to just change the name? What was it called before?’

  Miles shrugged. ‘It was only ever “Silas’s cottage,” far as I know. Or Tumbledown Cottage. Certainly not Park!’ He stumped off to make a jug of Bloody Mary, muttering, ‘Park indeed. “Chawbury Park” for that ridiculous eyesore. “Chawbury National Car Park” more like.’

  Once again, Miles felt outmanouevred, and it wasn’t a good feeling.

  10.

  Samantha Straker, accompanied by her friends Rosie and Hetty, was starting the day as they began every day, having breakfast on the terrace of Surat Thani Guest House on Chaweng beach. It was slightly before midday and they had been staying on Koh Samui for four months, though long ago lost all sense of passing time. As Sam put it, this holiday was turning into the longest uninterrupted veg-out of all time. Before arriving in Thailand, there had been plans to travel round the whole country, including treks in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, but all that had been forgotten. Instead, their itinerary consisted of late starts, breakfast-into-lunch at the Surat Thani, then chilling in hammocks under palm trees until nightfall when the island came alive and the video cafés opened. Sometimes they even paddled out into the turquoise blue sea, where you had to walk a hundred yards through rippled sand shallows until it was deep enough to swim, but mostly they sunbathed or had forty-baht massages on the beach.

  ‘It’s not like we don’t deserve a rest,’ Samantha assured her old school friends. ‘We were made to slave all last year for exams, so we needn’t feel guilty if we don’t sightsee every day.’

  As a result, in the first fifteen weeks they’d spent in Thailand, they’d visited the floating market in Bangkok, a temple they didn’t know the name of on Koh Samui, and that was it. Samantha was proud of her tan, which had turned a rich golden brown. Her only disappointment was the low standard of men travelling in Thailand. It was all student backpackers and Australians. Hetty had had a one-night stand with an Aussie called Rick who she’d hooked up with at the scuba dive shack, but spent the rest of the week avoiding him.

  Samantha was picking at a plate of som tam—spicy green papaya salad—which was her regular brunch order, when she saw the man eating scrambled eggs on his own. There was something about him that made her stop and look. He certainly wasn’t handsome. With his heavy jowls, thinning brown hair and small, darting eyes, he wasn’t remotely her normal type, and she flinched at the leather sandals and purple shirt. Nevertheless, he had something. Not charisma exactly, but something approaching it. Compared to most of the travellers hanging out on the beach, he looked purposeful and intriguing.

  Samantha noticed him again that evening, eating alone at one of the shacks along the beach, and then again next morning at the Surat Thani. This time he was reading an English newspaper, The Observer, which was weird for two reasons: hardly anyone read papers on the beach, especially imported ones which cost a fortune; and Samantha didn’t normally see The Observer in any case or anyone who read it. According to her father, it was a chippy socialist rag, and they didn’t take it at Chawbury. The man was carefully studying every page, including all the columns and political bits. She couldn’t tell how old he was, probably about twenty-four.

  The following day the girls had planned to go over to Ko Pha-Ngan for a short stay. This long deferred excursion, to the island forty minutes by boat from Koh Samui, was something they’d been meaning to do for weeks. According to the Lonely Planet, Ko Pha-Ngan was like Koh Samui had been twenty years ago—before the airport got built, and beach bungalows and video cafés turned the place into a tourist hub—with empty beaches and ch
eap accommodation and half-price fresh fish. They were hanging about Bo Phut pier waiting for the ticket booth to open when the man appeared again. He was carrying a small, grey backpack and a heavy paperback, an academic textbook it looked like, to do with economics and politics. To Samantha, it looked deathly dull, but she found herself alert.

  Predictably late, the ticket booth opened, there was a mad rush for tickets, and the boat prepared to leave. It was smaller than they’d expected, a narrow motorboat, low in the water, painted yellow to the watermark and below that a faded pale green. Thirty or so travellers filed on board, setting up camp on the open deck, marking out their territory with backpacks and rolls of bedding. Samantha watched the man squat against the wall of the engine room, immersed in his book. Even when the boat pulled out of harbour and into open sea, and the quay and warehouses became smaller and smaller behind them, he never once looked up. Samantha increasingly regarded him as a nerd.

  Alongside the boat, where the water was disturbed, the sun played tricks in the wake; gold shapes spun beneath the surface, and shoals of fish followed behind them, just below the surface, so they trailed their hands in the sea and tried to catch them. When Rosie thought she’d touched one, and it was slimy and scaly, the shrieking and squealing brought the man to their side of the deck.

  ‘Keep the noise level down, can’t you? It’s distracting.’

  ‘Distracting from what? Your book?’ Samantha looked up at him provocatively. She was resting on her elbows in bikini-top and shorts. ‘What are you anyway, a university professor?’

  He laughed. ‘Not a professor. Studying for a PhD.’

  Samantha screwed up her face. It sounded like he was from Birmingham or somewhere. The momentary disappointment was followed by a strange development; an unexpected desire to win his approval. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she wanted his respect, to be seen as a person with a brain and not an airhead.