He waited, uninsulated in his Barbour. Gloveless, he blew on his hands and stamped his feet and tried not to think about the nerves he always felt whenever he took part in a shoot. He remembered something old Burdick had said when Renoir asked him if he liked shooting. I like it on my own land. Everywhere else I’m too worried about making a fool of myself to enjoy it.
In the lowering sun the temperature had dropped and already he could feel the ground had hardened, crust-like. Alastair wandered over within talking distance. ‘How’s the Gatehouse?’
‘They’re behind, goddammit. Too busy helping Hal over here. By the way, who else is shooting?’
Alastair gave some names, some of them known to Renoir, and explained that one of them was a young colleague down from London. ‘You’ll meet him at dinner; his wife’s here as well. Oh, and Conrad Benedict.’ He paused, and his voice assumed the slightest tinge of anxiety. ‘Have you met him before?’
‘No,’ he said, falsely easy. ‘Wasn’t he an old boyfriend of Kate’s?’
‘Years ago,’ said Alastair emphatically. ‘He’s chummy with Roddy. Actually, he used to be a client of mine.’ His voice rose a little. ‘Here they come, I think,’ and he walked back towards his peg.
Renoir stamped his feet again to keep warm and waited, hearing the whistling and clucking of the beaters, and the clackety-clack of their sticks as they beat the brush and trees at the crest of the rise along from the Gatehouse. Conrad Benedict. Not American – not in the slightest – but with the East Coast kind of name where either could be surname. Ogden Forbes; Oakley Honeywell. That kind of name, though at least the English eschewed the preposterous numerals after the name – William McKinley Nobody IV.
Fifteen years passage of time and her ill-fated marriage meant Renoir could hardly feel jealous about any of her former beaux, most of whom were the subject of funny accounts by Kate. Such as ‘Flip’, the aspiring politician (he had never won a seat) with whom the young pugnacious Kate had constantly argued – thrown out of their cheap Venice hotel one night for rowing too loudly they had gone to a hostel in Giudecca, only to be thrown out for the second night running when their tempers flared again. Or Karl, the Czech political philosopher she had brought home to a sceptical family when, aged twenty, Kate had declared Englishmen too boring. He had been labelled ‘Mars’ by Kate’s little sister Sarah because of a Bohemian abstractedness, most clearly revealed one Sunday morning when, leaving Kate’s bedroom for his own, he had wandered instead, half-naked, into the boudoir of the senior Palmers.
But there had been no funny stories about Benedict, and Renoir had only first heard his name mentioned by Roddy. ‘I learned about another of your old suitors,’ he said to Kate as they had gone to bed that night.
‘Which one?’ she’d said with a light laugh. ‘I had so many.’
‘Conrad Benedict,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said, with a sudden exhalation, as if he had hit her in the solar plexus.
He looked at her. ‘You’re blushing,’ he declared teasingly. ‘Your cheeks are the colour of Gravenstein apples.’
She gave a manic double shake of her head, and grimaced as if she had bitten into a lemon by mistake. He laughed. ‘Was he “the one who got away”?’
She made a deprecatory cluck with her tongue, but she wasn’t looking at him, and the flush stayed full in her face. ‘Some other time,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got a few floozies up your sleeve you don’t like to talk about.’
And he had been distracted then by the slight shame he could manage to feel about escapades in his own life – Dilys the drunk dancer who’d stolen all his Jim Harrison novels, and mad Susie Rendall, who’d almost got his brains beat out in a Tenderloin bar. So he had forgotten all about Conrad Benedict and the response his name had provoked in Kate. Until now, when quite by chance he found himself in the man’s company.
Suddenly in the fading light a cock pheasant sounded his guttural chukka-chuk and beat his wings with a noise like sheets being flapped out to dry and undulating once, then twice, swooped down the hill, seeming to gather speed as it straightened out its line of flight and then bang and the bird fell down just short of the road, where a solitary woman in a knee-length green Barbour and a headscarf stood with a black Labrador which had all of six steps to take to pick up the dead bird.
Renoir’s eyes shifted back up the orchard and three more birds were crossing diagonally, and he waited impatiently, and two of them cut back towards the middle of the line and he heard one bang then two, no three more, but the third bird continued and cut right across the line of Alastair’s gun next to him, which went bang bang in rapid succession, but the bird kept flying and Renoir fired before even realising he had pulled the trigger. He was too far ahead and he fired again and then watched as the bird skewed suddenly, pitching awkwardly and then low until he heard it hit heavily somewhere behind him on the road on the other side of the hedge. ‘Got him,’ waved another woman there and Renoir turned back and two more birds came in almost exact duplication of the cross-field traversing of the earlier bird, and this time Alastair took the right one with his first shot and Renoir swung beautifully at the second bird, feeling altogether confident in his timing, and missed the bird completely.
He felt at once exhilarated and flustered now, eager for more birds to come his way. It was becoming very hard to see; the Gatehouse at the top of the hill now merged with the trees behind it to form an undetailed bulk of dark. One bird flew straight down the middle of the field, then veered in the direction away from Renoir, and when he heard the gun of the peg at the other end of the line he could not see if the bird had been hit or not. He looked behind at one point, and saw that the woman in the road was no longer there, so he would have to look for his own birds, an incentive to hit them plug.
Birds were coming in ones and twos, but well down the line to his right. One strayed after a central gun missed and headed his way, but Alastair despatched it with his second barrel just before Renoir fired. He felt the usual agitation towards the end of a drive, worried lest the horn signalling its end go off before he had another shot at a bird. He was warm now and found the Barbour stifling; he moved a few feet over and carefully leaned his gun against the trunk of an ash tree, took off his coat and hung it from a branch. He remained under the tree, waiting in the hope of a last bird. Several flew across the line further down, drawing volleys of shots, and then Alastair called, urgently, ‘Bird left,’ and Renoir swung his gun up, tense and expectant, straining to see the pheasant in what was the later stage of dusk. And then he spied the bird, lifting suddenly from its low position well in front of Alastair – too far in front for him to fire, but moving very much Renoir’s way – and Renoir started to swing as the bird ascended high above the slope behind it, up higher even than the Gatehouse perched distantly at the top of the rise, and he could see it clearly against the background of ash-coloured sky and slid the safety off with his thumb and his barrel rose and then the horn blew.
He relaxed the gun at once and without question, despite his disappointment. He was about to open the breech of his gun and extract its shells when another gun fired, very close behind him, and its noise seemed especially startling because it was so unexpected. Then he felt a sharp sting against his neck and a double tap against his back, and he realised he had been hit by someone else’s shot. He put a hand up to his neck, and when he looked at it there was a smear of blood on his palm.
He almost dropped his gun; turning he saw no one between himself and the hedge in front of the road, some twenty-five yards away. Then he heard footsteps and realised someone was running on the road.
He went and got his coat, and walked over to join Alastair by his Land Rover. As he reached him Roddy detached himself from the group of gathering guns and stormed over, looking absolutely furious. ‘Didn’t you hear the horn?’ he demanded.
Renoir nodded but didn’t say anything. This seemed to infuriate Roddy even more. ‘Never fire a
fter the horn. Even you know that.’
Renoir started to explain that he hadn’t fired, but Roddy interrupted, scoffing, ‘Who else could it have been? You were the last peg.’
You tell me, he wanted to say, but it seemed pointless. Even Alastair would think he was fibbing. Then out of the growing darkness a figure loomed and joined them. It was Hal, a massive hulk of a man, with a black beard and wet ringlets of dark hair. He was holding a shotgun, broken, and handed it over to Roddy. ‘Mr Abeling’s other gun, sir. He left it in the Range Rover when we finished at Treefall Down. He was in a bit of a hurry and said he’d collect it from you tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, Hal,’ said Roddy, distractedly, but the interruption had served to stop the flow of his anger.
Alastair raised an eyebrow at Renoir, and asked quietly, ‘Do you want a lift back up the hill?’ Roddy stalked off to join the other guns.
‘No, I’ll be fine.’ Alastair could go with the others on the road back to the Hall, where the game wagon would be unloaded by the stables, the visiting guns each given a brace, and Hal the keeper tipped. ‘By the way, where was Hal during the drive?’
‘Behind the beaters. He’s always the last one down. Why?’
‘No reason. Anyway, Let me give you some money for him.’
‘Forget it,’ said Alastair. ‘Abeling gave me more than enough. Thirty quid. I’m tempted to keep ten of it for myself. Or give it to Roddy, miserable bugger. See you back at the Hall.’
He had a long soak in a hot bath, feeling shaken by the last drive. He could live with his ‘disgrace’ in Roddy’s eyes, since he had done nothing wrong, but he was puzzled and a little alarmed by the fact he’d been hit, however glancing. Such accidents had been known to happen. Shooting in the woods, pellets fired far away would often come down through the leaves like rain sprinkling a tin roof. He was more mystified than frightened, though having worked since childhood to contain it, he found it strange to feel fear starting to curl around him again. And he especially disliked any sense of threat when its source was unknown to him.
At work there had been the odd bad moment, inevitable in a job that required him to poke around the darker side of people’s private lives. He’d had his tyres slashed once, right outside the apartment on Lake Street. And there had been Makito, a Japanese-American employee whose five-yearly check threw up some financial oddities, explained by Renoir’s discovery of the man’s weekly visits to an expensive escort off Telegraph Hill. Makito’s wife had shown up at the Cupertino reception and insisted on seeing Renoir. Because he’d emerged cautiously, his guard up, he managed to avoid the thermos of boiling water she’d tried to throw in his face.
No one was doing anything so overt now. But it was the fact that there was ‘no one’ that troubled him – he would have suspected Hal at once, but he had been behind the beaters throughout. There had been a woman picking up when he’d first taken his position in the scrappy woods. What had happened to her? He shook his head and tried not to think about it.
He was slightly late coming down to dinner, but there was still time for a drink. Everyone had changed, though the women were better dressed than the men, for they wore dresses and jewellery, whereas none of the men except Alastair had bothered with neckties. There was a younger couple staying, he the junior colleague whom Alastair had mentioned, his wife young and nervous-looking; also a local couple who trained racehorses near West Ilsley; and the Benedicts, though Renoir wasn’t sure which woman was Benedict’s wife.
He made himself a weak Scotch and talked to Alastair and his young colleague. Then he had a second whisky, even weaker this time, and was beckoned by Beatrice to join her and Sarah and the colleague’s wife by the fireplace. They were listening to Benedict, who was standing against the mantelpiece. He was dressed in a tweed jacket of chocolate brown with a blue silk handkerchief that flowed out of his jacket’s breast pocket like an iris in bloom. The effect, as with his shooting jacket and its fur ruff, was cocky, almost floppish.
As Beatrice introduced him to Renoir, Benedict gave a cool, knowing nod. Renoir was quite unprepared for the handshake which followed, bone-crushing in its strength. Benedict was an inch or two taller than Renoir, and quite a bit wider, and was one of the few grown men Renoir had encountered who acted as if this made a difference.
‘Don’t let me interrupt,’ said Renoir, as he withdrew his hand. Benedict was talking about his time as a soldier in Northern Ireland. While he spoke, Renoir inspected him carefully. He had a heavy jaw and a small straight nose beneath cold grey eyes, with short hair which was greying at the temples. Renoir was only half listening as Benedict described a patrol he’d led in Belfast, how they had been harassed by a sniper, who then stopped to light a cigarette, which gave away his position with fatal consequences. Benedict joked, ‘Saved by the Paddy factor again.’ Renoir tried not to react.
‘Did anyone like being posted to Northern Ireland?’ asked the wife of Alastair’s colleague. She looked to be in her late twenties, her youth emphasised by the contrastingly old-fashioned black velvet dress she wore, and a necklace that looked as if it must have come down from her grandmother.
Benedict chuckled. ‘Some of the men did – it takes all sorts to make an army. Still, it keeps lads out of trouble who would otherwise get locked up back home. Didn’t you find that?’ he asked suddenly, turning towards Renoir.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You were in the army, weren’t you?’ Renoir nodded. ‘Didn’t you find your men included a few who anywhere else would have been dangerous?’
For a moment Renoir didn’t understand this, and then it clicked. He said simply, ‘I didn’t have “men”. I wasn’t an officer.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Benedict with a false politeness, although he looked as if Renoir had broken wind, a faux pas which he, Benedict, would be gentleman enough to ignore. The two men locked eyes, no love lost.
The wife of Alastair’s colleague stirred with mild embarrassment, and Beatrice declared, rather than enquired, ‘Why don’t we go through to dinner?’
Renoir was more accustomed in his California existence to barbecues or picnics, or occasional assemblies of friends in restaurants. Occasionally a director would invite him to a gathering at home, but they were kept deliberately low key, since in the meritocratic world of Silicon Valley there were plenty of employees who, however gifted (some to the point of genius), didn’t know a soup spoon from a butter knife. And Renoir’s own entertaining had, in the days with Jenny, rarely extended beyond supper thrown together in his tiny kitchen for another couple after seeing a movie, or latterly, with Kate, to feeding Ticky large plates of pasta when she was looking unduly boyish and thin.
But over a year’s experience of Belfield evenings had schooled him in most of the niceties, and he found he could glide along quietly enough without disgracing himself, watching the proceedings around him all the while. Kate had spotted this early on: ‘Honestly, you survey people the way Mummy eyeballs paintings. You like watching best. You should just sit back and take it all in.’
Yet he could by now take part in the usual Belfield table conversation without much effort, affecting an interest in gun dog pedigrees, the myriad and, if closely inspected, contradictory effects of global warming, salmon fishing in Iceland, the name of the shop selling lavender bread in Hungerford and the presence of nightingales on the Kenmarty estate ten miles away. And when interest proved impossible to feign, it was never difficult to draw other people out, since England, like America, had plenty of inhabitants who liked nothing better than to talk about themselves.
Tonight in the dining room the extenders were out on the pale oak table, and the silver feather-edge forks were laid. The room was impressive – there were family portraits on the wall, in one corner stood a beautiful four-fold leather screen with tooled scenes of country life. But this was formality that didn’t require staff, and food was put on the sideboard, not served.
The first course was already on the table, a cold
game terrine with baskets of almost equally cold toast. Beatrice sat at one end, and directed him to a seat, where he found himself between an older, dark-complexioned woman (Mediterranean he thought – Turkish maybe) and Julie, the young wife of Alastair’s colleague. On Julie’s far side, at the end of the table, sat Roddy, presiding in what had always been his father’s place.
Renoir sat down to find Roddy in full conversational flow with Julie, and Mrs Benedict was taken up by Alastair on the other side of her. So he sat in silence and ate his terrine, staring across at the two Roberts pictures of the Holy Land, one a watercolour, the other a – what was it Kate had said? Aquatint? Mezzotint? He didn’t know the difference, but he loved its graceful lightly etched beauty, the innocence conveyed from a time when Petra saw only travellers and explorers – tourists had yet to be invented. But then the English were a nation of travellers and explorers, even now when there was nothing novel left to explore.
And how this vagabonding passion had persisted, with so many Englishmen still intent on ‘exploration’. Not for them the mental journeys of Pascal which Ticky had once told him about, all conducted from an armchair. Since in exploring terms almost everything had been done, they were driven to the most outlandish acts: ballooning around the world with their shirt off, walking 120 miles a day on their hands, swimming across the Channel with one arm tied behind their back, crawling backwards on all fours to the North Pole.
What funny people, he thought, although the patronising view of the English as quaint folk, mild in their ways, utterly harmless, was receding fast for Renoir. He thought with a slight chill of the unpleasant postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pellets which had sprinkled his neck and Barbour. What was the line in Goldfinger about coincidence? Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action. He wasn’t in action yet, but he wasn’t popular with someone, that seemed clear.
Keeping Secrets Page 13
