Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  So, the Irish visit was probably better than most. It had been a comfortable house, full of rather pretty furniture, and the wine and food had been good. I liked the people more than most and when we said goodbye I even asked them to come one day and stalk at Beinn Caorrun. What a joke! I hated going to Beinn Caorrun.

  On the journey back from Ireland, I began to feel that there was something different about Michael. I first noticed it on our way to the ferry terminal at Rosslare. But what it was that I had noticed I couldn’t exactly define.

  ‘Why do you keep looking at me?’ he asked, after another sideways glance from me.

  ‘No special reason,’ I said. Then, ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m feeling all right,’ he said rather snappishly. ‘Don’t I look all right? Is there a spot on the end of my nose?’

  There was no spot. He looked paler than usual, otherwise he appeared as he always did: an untidy mop of prematurely grey hair on top of an angular face with a long, aquiline nose and a good chin. He had grey eyes, to go with his prematurely grey hair, which were now directed at me in a not very friendly glance. He was wearing a grey cable-knit jersey over scruffy brown corduroys. This was the way he always dressed when he wasn’t fishing, or golfing, or shooting, or stalking - activities that took up most of his free time.

  ‘You haven’t shaved very carefully this morning,’ I said.

  ‘If that’s what’s bothering you, then all I can say is that I am deeply sorry,’ said Michael. ‘I will try to do better in future.’

  I could see we might be on our way to having one of our rows. They used to come out of nowhere, like a squall on a summer’s day, about once a month, but lately their frequency had been increasing. So I said nothing. It’s not a good idea to have a row in a car. You can’t walk out of the room and slam the door when the room is travelling at seventy miles an hour.

  I’m making it sound as if we had an unhappy marriage. That’s not true. It was what my mother used to call a ‘workable’ marriage. When I married Michael she warned me not to expect too much.

  ‘These men with too much money and not enough to do can be very self-centred,’ she told me. ‘I hope you didn’t choose him just for his money.’

  I didn’t choose Michael for his money; not only for his money. I met him at a dinner party about ten years ago, when I was in my early twenties; well, my mid-twenties. Michael was sitting on my left. The man on my right was the host, Peter Robinson, whose wife Mary had been my best friend since school days. I chatted to Peter through the starter and halfway through the main course, rather dry roast pheasant with gravy that tasted like dishwater. Mary is one of the sweetest people I know, but you don’t go to her dinner parties for the cooking. I don’t normally remember food unless it is very good indeed, but I remember everything about that night, when my life began to change.

  I decided I ought to turn my head in the opposite direction towards my neighbour, who was sitting in silence while the girl on his left was listening to a joke being told by someone across the table.

  ‘So what do you do with yourself when you’re not at one of Peter’s parties?’ I asked in a bright voice, after we had reintroduced ourselves.

  ‘Do?’ he asked, as if I had accused him of being a drug dealer. ‘I don’t do anything.’

  This was not a promising start, but Peter was now busy talking to the girl on his right, so I was stuck.

  ‘You must do something?’ I repeated.

  ‘Must I?’ he said. Then suddenly his face creased into the most charming smile. ‘People keep telling me that.’

  ‘You seriously do have to do something,’ I told him. ‘Otherwise how on earth do you get through your day?’

  ‘I manage my affairs,’ he said, still smiling. ‘They aren’t very interesting, but managed they must be.’

  This was hard work.

  ‘Do you live in London?’ I asked.

  ‘Some of the time,’ he said. I thought he was going to stop there, in which case I would probably have to pretend to faint, or run screaming from the room. Then he added, ‘But I live in Scotland some of the time too, in Perthshire.’

  ‘That sounds very nice,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘It is. It’s God’s country.’

  ‘What do you do up there?’

  ‘I look after things. We have some land ... and things to look after. What about you? You obviously expect everyone to be busy, so I imagine you are?’

  ‘I work for a woman’s magazine,’ I said, and told him the name.

  We talked for a while about life on magazines, and the London property market, which is mostly what I write about. I had only recently started my career as a journalist, and already lived in weekly fear of being sacked by Celia, my capricious editor. My neighbour made an impressive effort to appear interested, and I decided my first reading of him as a Triple A star bore might have been a bit harsh. Then Peter made all his guests do a manoeuvre, which normally I hate, but on this occasion I was grateful for. The men stood up and moved two places to their left and I found myself sitting beside someone different for the pudding course.

  After dinner, the men stayed behind in the dining room with a decanter of port, and I sat with Mary and the other girls in the drawing room. I managed to get a quick briefing on the guests I hadn’t met before. The second man I had sat next to I already knew from a previous evening at Peter and Mary’s flat, so I asked instead about the first one.

  ‘Michael Gascoigne?’ Mary said. ‘I saw you struggling a bit.’

  She smiled and I said apologetically, ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘No, but I know what he’s like. He’s really very nice if you get to know him.’

  ‘What does he do?’ I queried. ‘He was very offhand when I asked him.’

  ‘He’s embarrassed because he really doesn’t do anything at all, and in London everyone does something. That’s why he lives most of the time up in Perthshire. His family owns some land up there. There are a lot of trees, some sheep and deer, and I think he may have a few holiday cottages as well. Then there’s the house. It’s a very cold place. I’ve been there with Peter and I nearly died of damp and hypothermia. He mopes about up there, looks after his holiday lets and changes the light bulbs when they pop; generally keeps the show on the road. I think he gets an income from that.’

  ‘And he has a flat in London?’

  ‘Yes, near Baker Street. Peter’s just put him up for membership of Grouchers, so he must be thinking about spending more time in town.’

  ‘What’s Grouchers?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a very pompous men’s club that Peter goes to when he’s fed up with me.’

  Then the men came into the drawing room and that was the end of that.

  I thought no more about Michael that night, and by the next morning he had almost faded from my memory. Nevertheless, when I bumped into him outside Selfridges after work a week later, I recognised him almost at once. The first thing I saw was a tall, stooped man in an old waxed jacket and scruffy cords being tugged along the pavement by a black Labrador puppy. The man, even more than the dog, looked so out of place and un-London-like that he caught my attention, and then I recognised him.

  He did not recognise me. I heard him say, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ as the puppy wound the lead, one of those extendable affairs, around a lamp-post. He started to untangle the dog. I could have walked straight past and almost did, but for some reason I stopped. I don’t know why. There was something rather hopeless and vulnerable in the sight of such a big man being towed around by such a small dog. I put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Hello. Do you remember me?’

  He straightened up and looked at me, then smiled.

  ‘It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s clever of you.’

  ‘Not at all. I enjoyed meeting you. This is Rupert.’

  The puppy, already quite well grown, jumped up and put muddy paws on my skirt.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sor
ry,’ said Michael. ‘Get down, Rupert.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’ll brush off.’

  ‘At least let me pay for the dry cleaning,’ he said, ‘or let me buy you a cup of tea? He looked at his watch. ‘Or how about a glass of wine? It’s after six.’

  ‘It gets better,’ I said. ‘I’ll go for the glass of wine.’

  That is how I started seeing Michael Gascoigne. He was probably the least exciting man I had ever gone out with, yet, after a while, it was as if there had never been anyone else. He was very solid and dependable. I soon learned that whatever Michael said he would do, he did. He never boasted, or told an untruth, or made a promise he could not keep. He was the most utterly reliable man I had ever met, contrasting vividly with two or three hopeless boyfriends and indeed my own father, who had sauntered out of the family home when I was sixteen to go off with a girl half his age and live in the South of France. Yet there was a melancholy quality to Michael, a sense of bewilderment about him, as if at some point in his life something had happened to him that he didn’t quite understand. Sometimes I noticed a strained, puzzled look in his eyes which made me feel sorry for him, and want to look after him.

  I also learned that Michael was nowhere near as idle as he pretended to be. His mother had died when he was sixteen, his father five years later. (That was rather a tragic story: his father had been caught out in a snowstorm on Beinn Caorrun, the family mountain, and had never been found.) Since Michael had inherited at the age of twenty-one, he had been acting as his own factor, running the estate in Perthshire that had been in his family for the last hundred years or more. At the foot of the mountain is a valley through which the River Gala runs, and along its banks there were a good number of cottages, which had once housed foresters and shepherds and other estate workers. These Michael had done up and let out as holiday cottages. Then there were several hundred acres of forestry, and a bit of trout fishing on the hill lochs; and stalking, which Michael mostly let, although he kept a couple of weeks for himself and his friends, as it had always been a passion of his. All in all, the income from Beinn Caorrun had kept Michael comfortably off since he inherited it, and even marrying me did not cramp his style too much. But then he was never very extravagant in the first place.

  Caorrun Lodge was another matter. It was ghastly, and I wouldn’t go there unless I absolutely had to. Michael refused to spend a penny on it, and it was as close to falling down as a house could be while still standing.

  When I told my mother that Michael had proposed to me she raised an eyebrow. She had met him by then, of course.

  ‘He won’t set the world on fire,’ she said. It was one of my mother’s favourite phrases.

  ‘I don’t think the world needs to be set on fire,’ I said mildly. ‘Michael’s all right as he is.’

  My mother searched in her handbag and extracted her cigarette holder and a packet of cigarettes. She stuck a cigarette in one end of the holder and lit it with a small gold Dunhill lighter. The smell of Turkish tobacco filled the air as my mother exhaled, arching her eyebrows to emphasise her resemblance to someone in a play by Noël Coward.

  ‘You won’t be poor, at any rate,’ she said. ‘I knew the parents a long time ago. They were very dull and very rich. I dare say Michael has inherited some money as well as his Scottish place.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m marrying him,’ I said, blushing. My mother saw my blushes and smiled, but spared me further comment. After all, while I was (more or less) independent from a financial point of view, my mother herself depended on a very erratic alimony payment and a trickle of dividends from some shares my grandfather had left her. It would be a relief for her to take me off her worry list.

  ‘And you’ll be marrying the dog, as well.’

  ‘I adore Rupert,’ I said. I was on more certain ground there. My mother leaned back in her armchair and drew on her cigarette again. Through the wreaths of smoke she looked at me. This time the brittle tone of voice that was customary to her was gone, and she spoke gently.

  ‘You don’t really love him, do you?’

  She meant Michael, not Rupert.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Mummy, I wish you wouldn’t ask me about such things.’

  ‘It’s something parents tend to do,’ she said. I could see, without her needing to say anything, that she was thinking not of me, but of her own marriage, which had once been full of promise yet ended in desertion. She sighed.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be happy enough.’

  ‘Michael will look after me,’ I said confidently. ‘And I’ll look after him. It’ll work out, Mummy.’

  I was not quite sure myself why I had accepted Michael’s proposal of marriage. It had taken me by surprise when it came. I had thought, if I had ever thought about it at all, that my affair with Michael would one day just fade away. He would forget to ring me, or I would forget to ring him, and that would be the end of it. Sometimes I thought that our relationship was like lying in a warm bath; it is very agreeable for a while, but when the water cools down you have to make an effort and climb out.

  The evening that Michael proposed to me he had asked me out to dinner at the Italian restaurant just around the corner from his flat. We had been there several times before, and they knew us. The food was average, but the people were friendly and knew what we liked. At some point in the evening, Michael refilled my glass of wine, and then raised his own and said, ‘To us.’

  This was rather theatrical for Michael, so I raised my eyebrows. ‘And what is the occasion?’

  He put his glass down and said, very seriously, ‘You know, since my father went missing, I’ve been an orphan. I need someone to look after me, Elizabeth.’

  I went rigid. He couldn’t, could he? He wouldn’t, would he? What the hell would I say if he proposed?

  ‘Oh dear, put like that, you probably do need looking after,’ I said, or some such rubbish.

  His face assumed a contorted look as one hand dived into his trouser pocket. Men can be so clumsy. I hoped he might be about to sneeze, and was looking for his handkerchief, but out came a small blue leather box. He put it down carefully on the table, then opened it. We both stared at the ring inside. It was a rock, a seriously large diamond in a pearl setting.

  ‘It was my mother’s,’ he said. ‘Thank God she wasn’t wearing it when she drowned.’

  Michael had mentioned his mother’s accident before but had never gone into actual details of how either of his parents had died. Now did not seem like the time.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, looking straight at me, with his steadfast, boring look. There was no mistaking it now. My past started racing through my head.

  ‘Elizabeth, will you marry me?’ he asked.

  Time slowed down. On the one hand, could I really face spending the next forty or fifty years with a man whose idea of an adrenalin rush was playing bridge at his club? On the other hand, Michael was kind. He would, I felt sure, never mistreat me or betray me, or wander out of my life with a girl half his age as my father had done. And he was well off. How well off I did not know, but there was evidence of real wealth in his life: the pair of guns he had inherited from his father which he once told me were insured for fifty thousand pounds; the ring in front of me, with its enormous diamond; the estate up in Perthshire which I had not seen at that point. My own life was precarious enough. I didn’t need to get married yet. I was still young - although several of my friends had already married. I had a job that I had a love-hate relationship with, but it was anything but secure; people were fired in my office for turning up at work in the same coloured dress as Celia. One’s subconscious mind, however, makes all the real decisions and I must have weighed all this up a good while ago, for it took me only a moment or two to answer, even if it felt like days.

  ‘Yes, Michael,’ I said. ‘I’d love to marry you.’

  He beamed all over his face and leaned across to kiss me. There was a burst of cheering from the Italian waiters who were clearly
in the know, and then one of them came forward with a huge bouquet of white and crimson roses which had been hidden behind the bar. Suddenly everyone in the restaurant was laughing and talking, swept up in the occasion, and Michael was even laughing out loud.