He led the way into a small pub containing a handful of customers. It was one of those rare old places which seemed to have survived the developers and avoided being turned into an Irish theme pub filled to the ceiling with harps, shillelaghs and fishing tackle. The clientele consisted of solitary drinkers staring into their glasses as if there lay the answers to the mysteries of life.
Hugo ordered pints and whisky chasers. It was a bad sign; he only drank chasers when he had to face something particularly unpleasant or shocking. The last time had been when he’d lost a packet during an illicit visit to Epsom, only to turn round and bump into his next-door neighbour, a noted blabbermouth. Apparently Juliette rated gambling on horses on a par with being a wife-beater or a socialist.
‘Bad business, this,’ he said, after inhaling half his pint. I was struggling to keep up, too entombed in my own thoughts about Susan’s departure.
‘Which specific bit of bad business are we talking about?’ I asked, keen to remind him that it had been a bad day in more ways than one.
‘Why, Susan’s leaving, of course. I – oh… you thought I meant the other. Sorry. Listen, I promise I knew nothing about that, Jake. God’s honour. A bolt out of the blue, I promise. I may work for HP&P but they don’t tell me what they’re planning to do. It’s all the new owners’ doing, I suspect.’
I waved away his protestations. I knew he wouldn’t have been involved; I’d worked for HP&P long enough to know that they operated a strict left-hand/right-hand policy. The kind which meant neither hand operated as if it were joined to the same body. It was a corporate nightmare but hardly uncommon.
‘Are you going to let me in on it or not?’ I finally prompted him, staring at his reflection in the bar mirror. It seemed easier than looking at him full-on; a bit like a confessional, although imagining Hugo as a priest was stretching things a bit.
‘It was Juliette who first told me,’ he said slowly. ‘She and Susan, they get on, you see. They talk about things. Always have. They trade secrets and… well, I suppose Susan needed someone to confide in.’ He looked at me in the bar mirror with a spaniel-eyed expression of regret, as if it was his fault for knowing more about my personal life than I did. ‘Like a bloody sponge, my wife,’ he continued dolefully. ‘She knows the secrets of half the married women in West London. I’d make a fortune if I could get her to write it all down. Why, there’s a merchant banker’s wife over in Ealing who–’
‘What did she tell you?’ I interrupted him, before he launched into a long story about someone neither of us knew or cared about. ‘Did she say why Susan left – or where she is?’
‘I don’t know why, other than what Juliette told me – which might or might not be reliable info, you understand. You see, Juliette hates anyone associated with HP&P, for some reason. You included, I’m afraid.’ He grinned nervously and sucked in more beer. ‘Come to think of it, I don’t think she likes me much at the moment.’
I sighed and took a sip of whisky. Its warmth burned all the way down. That was all it did, though, and if there was any answer in the bottom of my glass, it wasn’t in any format that I could decipher. Maybe one of the other drinkers would be able to translate it for me. Roll up, roll up… come and read my glass and tell me the secrets of where I’ve gone wrong.
‘Come on, Hugo,’ I said tiredly. ‘In the absence of Susan being here to tell me herself, it’s all I’ve got. So shoot, will you? I’m a big boy now – I think I can take it.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid – Susan left you because… well, she was bored.’
SIX
As the words left his mouth, the landlady, a woman of advanced years with a blue rinse and smoker’s cough was standing nearby, carefully pulling a pint of the black stuff. Her meaty hand stopped in mid pull and she gave me a look guaranteed to strip varnish. I wondered what she would have done if I’d been accused of serial adultery or molesting sheep. Hawked into my pint, probably.
‘What?’
‘Bored,’ Hugo repeated, unaware that the landlady was all ears. ‘She said you ignored her and spent all your time working.’
‘But I didn’t,’ I protested, as much for the landlady’s benefit as Hugo’s. Something told me she might be a hard-core feminist. ‘I never ignored Susan in my life. How could I?’ I didn’t dare, was the truth, since doing so carried an automatic health warning.
The fact was, Susan, attractive, auburn-haired and slim, bore inactivity badly. Whenever more than five uneventful minutes passed by, she became fretful, anxious to be up and doing. It wasn’t that she was hyperactive – she was just a born do-er and socialiser with a contacts list to rival Mark Zuckerberg’s. It was what I’d initially found so attractive about her: that she didn’t want to settle into a life of dull domestic ritual and produce a stream of kids like flicking peas from a pod until she slipped into matronly middle age years before her time. We’d talked around the subject of family a couple of times, in the early days and sometimes when one of her fecund pals announced yet another addition to the backseat of the family 4WD. We’d finally concluded that the usual two-point-four wasn’t for us, and left it at that. Susan seemed happy to be involved in the retail ventures, which took her to endless events all over the city and, in the absence of any further reports, I’d concluded that must be fulfilling enough for her.
‘You were never here,’ Hugo pointed out, by way of explanation. ‘She complained to Juliette that you spent too much time overseas, always flying off to some remote spot for days or weeks at a time. She said she knows the British Airways flight schedules better than they do, and had to book sex with you so you could take a run-up from Kazakhstan or some such God-awful place.’ He sighed and turned to face me. ‘You’ve got to admit, you have spent more time out of the country than in it, Jake. I’m amazed they haven’t put you in a special tax category all your own. You should ask for a rebate.’ He took another sip. ‘Did it never occur to you to throttle back a bit – or take her with you?’
I shook my head, amazed and ashamed all at once by a kaleidoscope of images spinning in front of my eyes: a pictorial list of evidence against me. It was a bit like what they claim happens when you’re in a moment of mortal peril. Only these images were somehow malevolent. Damning. Accusing. And unfair.
Most of the images were of me working in foreign parts… with few of Susan until I thought hard about it. And I realised that over the years the travelling had built up, increasing inexorably to meet the demand, extending from a couple of days to whole weeks at a time – easier to stay on a few more days rather than face another return trip. And taking Susan simply hadn’t been an option. One thing I’d learned very early in our relationship was that Susan didn’t do rough. Her idea of an adventure holiday was having to switch on the air-con herself.
‘But I was doing it–’ I stopped, about to come out with something horribly trite. I ordered another round instead.
‘You were doing it for Susan?’ Hugo nodded as his drink arrived and sank it in one go. Mine was slammed down unceremoniously by the landlady into a puddle on the bar, spattering me with stale beer. ‘Of course you were. We all do… or so we kid ourselves. But really it’s for us, isn’t it? The old career ladder. The treadmill. The corporate battlefield. But our wives need more, d’you see? They need the constancy.’ He peered distantly at the mirror like an old Greek sage.
‘Constancy? Is that even a word? Anyway, since when did you become so bloody wise in the ways of women? You’re the progeny of centuries of male chauvinist porkers.’
He looked almost hurt at that. ‘It means unchanging and dependable, you peasant. And I know women, believe me. They’re all the same, even Juliette. Although God knows, she’s the most independent woman I’ve ever met, bless her heart. Even sex takes a poor second place to a session at her beauty clinic or whatever it’s called. D’you know, she’s the only woman I know who can sleep deliberately?’
I must have looked blank, because he continued,
‘If she’s annoyed with me, she sleeps like a dead donkey: completely comatose. At least, that’s how it seems. I can’t wake her up for a kiss and cuddle – I’ve tried. It’s like trying it on with a corpse. I’ve often wondered if there are any other women like that.’
‘Only dead ones,’ I said bitterly, and wondered whether Susan had ever deliberately fallen asleep on me. If she had it had passed me by – evidently like so many other things in our relationship.
Hugo reached for his whisky and shook his head at my offer of a refill. ‘I’d better be going. Don’t want to leave it to fester, eh? Probably been relegated to the spare room as it is.’
‘Hang on. You still haven’t told me where Susan is.’
He pulled a face and I guessed he’d been hoping to get away without having to answer that question. He stared up at the greasy, smoke-yellowed ceiling, then down at his feet, before putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘She’s, um…’ He shook his head and looked genuinely saddened. ‘Oh, God, how do I do this? She’s found someone else, Jake. Sorry.’
‘Found some–?’ My voice sounded faint even to me, and I had a sudden image of Susan in a tangle of naked arms and legs with another man and enjoying every minute of it. ‘Already?’
‘Sorry.’ He looked embarrassed.
‘Who? Do I know him?’ Could I take him in a fight, I began to wonder, before being stunned into silence by the sheer shock of finding I’d become the third wheel on a two-wheeled bike. Why do people always ask if they know the third party in a deception? Is it because when they hear of the unthinkable, they instantly lose all trust in their friends? I took another slug of whisky and tried to think of all the men I knew who might have looked even mildly covetously at Susan. In the end I gave up; there were too many. She was slim and beautiful and got noticed wherever she went. I reached across and finished off Hugo’s drink as well. If it burned on the way down I didn’t feel it.
‘Yes, you know him,’ said Hugo quietly. He gestured towards the bar. ‘Perhaps we should have another.’
‘No!’ I shouted, louder than I’d intended. The landlady glared at me. She’d obviously marked me down as a troublemaker as well as a wife-ignorer, and was on the look out for something kicking off. The other customers looked across in the hope, no doubt, of witnessing something exciting to finish off their uneventful evening’s glass-staring. ‘Who is it?’
Hugo ordered another round anyway, and I was forced to wait while he had a stiff jolt before continuing. ‘She met him at the office Christmas party last year,’ he said finally. ‘The one you missed.’
I remembered. I’d missed my flight from Bahrain – along with pretty much the whole of Christmas. It was an air traffic controllers’ strike, I recalled. Idle bastards. Clearly idle bastards who’d cost me my marriage. It’s always easier sharing the blame.
‘You go anyway,’ I remembered telling Susan on the phone from the departure lounge, anxious that she meet more of my colleagues and knowing that Juliette would look after her, vitriol dripping into her ear at every turn. It was a small price to pay for peace of mind, even if I’d have to do some damage limitation, involving a serious visit to the duty-free shop.
I also remembered a terse comment Susan had made about the party when I’d finally arrived home, jet-lagged and rumpled after the journey from hell, and asked her how it had gone. ‘I thought she was complaining about the party,’ I told Hugo, re-running her words in my head. ‘She told me she’d been bored rigid.’
He choked on his whisky and I had to pound his back with the flat of my hand before escorting him outside. It was then that he told me what had happened.
Susan had indeed been bored rigid, he said regretfully.
On a table in the computer room.
By my former boss, HP&P’s Operations Director, Niall bloody Dunckley.
By the time I’d got all the gruesome details we were halfway back to Hugo’s house. In spite of my deep shock and immediate, instinctive desire to search out Dunckley and erase his cod-like face from the earth, I was having to hold Hugo upright to stop him from pitching headlong into the gutter – something Juliette would never have forgiven or forgotten.
‘I can’t believe it,’ I kept muttering, as he drifted across the pavement. He’d lost control of his legs and was dragging me with him as he lurched from side to side like a great, fat trawler in heaving seas.
‘Can’t believe it meself,’ he muttered, a slurred echo. ‘But I saw ’em with me own eyes.’
‘But… Dunckley?’ I wailed. ‘How could she?’
‘Maybe because she–’
Whatever he was about to say was interrupted by the sight of two figures emerging from a pocket of shadow. They moved across the pavement and stood menacingly in our way. Both were tall and dressed in leather jackets and jeans, and neither looked like members of the Salvation Army’s pick-up-a-drunk patrol.
‘Oopsh,’ Hugo said, and breathed a disgusting mixture of tobacco and alcohol in my face. Then he focussed on the two dark strangers and wagged his finger angrily in their direction. ‘Treesh… we’ve got bloody treesh in thish shtreet, y’know.’
Plainly neither of the men had heard of the anti-crime concept mooted by the local councillor. They stared at Hugo with the tired look of men without patience or pity who desperately needed someone to punch lumps out of to make the night worthwhile.
‘Spare some change?’ said the one on the left with heavy sarcasm. He was holding a length of metal pipe down by his leg, the street lights glinting off the metal. I didn’t think he was a plumber touting for business.
His colleague glanced around, checking the scenery, then nodded and held out his hand. ‘Give us your wallets. Now.’
‘What for?’ I asked, some deep instinct making me search for a way out and realising that flight was not an option. To flee, you need two things: the ability to run and a sense of direction. And right at that moment, Hugo and I had neither.
‘We want your money, twat!’ the pipe man said savagely, and whirled his weapon through the air, swishing it like we were in a bad martial arts movie.
The thought made me burst out laughing and I nearly dropped Hugo in the process.
‘Oi – what’s so bloody funny?’ demanded the other man. He’d clearly never mugged two idiot drunks before.
Then Hugo joined in and we stood leaning against each other like two precariously-balanced statues, braying like a pair of jackasses.
‘They’re nuts,’ the pipe man said. He was looking twitchy, and even in my inebriated state, I could tell he was gearing up to do something nasty.
Hugo must have noticed, too, because he waggled his finger again.
‘D’you think,’ he mumbled seriously, ‘d’you fellas seris– serisly think… that if we had ’ny spare change we’d be in this cond… ondit – as sober as this?’
For a split second he stared at them, then howled with laughter. It was enough to set me off as well and we both hooted, tears streaming down our faces as we staggered across the pavement towards the road. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the two muggers shake their heads despairingly and disappear into the gloom.
We eventually arrived at the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to Hugo’s shiny black front door. At least I think it was his; with every door in the street looking the same it was hard to tell.
‘Did you bring a key?’ I asked him.
He shook his head, seemingly unconcerned by the wrath he was going to face inside. Always assuming he got back inside. At least since our confrontation with the two muggers he’d sobered up quite a bit and sounded almost lucid. ‘No. Forgot. Don’t worry, old boy. One of the kids’ll let me in. Withhold all pocket money for a month, otherwise. Say, would you like to come in fr’a wee drinkie?’
‘No thanks.’ I turned him towards the house before he lost direction and stepped away. Apart from feeling over-stocked already, I didn’t fancy getting a close-up of Juliette waiting inside. I’d had enough excitement for one night.
‘Wait,’ I said, remembering he’d been about to tell me something before we were rudely interrupted by the two footpads. Something about Susan and Dunckley?
‘What?’
‘I said “How could she?” and you said, “Maybe because she”… something or other. But you didn’t finish. Maybe because what?’
‘Christ, I don’t know,’ he breathed, and began to lean sideways at an alarming angle.
I grabbed him and he hauled himself upright, but it was the last effort of a nearly comatose drunk.
‘Go to bed,’ I said, and he launched himself up the steps in a rush and pounded on the large, brass door-knocker with enough enthusiasm to wake half of West London, let alone a deliberately-sleeping Juliette.
I waited until a light came on, then turned and slipped away, avoiding shadows until I found a late-night café where I sank three strong Americanos in quick succession. If I was going to face my kid brother, I might as well do it as sober as I could manage.
SEVEN
Brotherly love was clearly in short supply because Marcus didn’t look very pleased to see me. I could tell by the way he stuck his head out of the window and asked why I was trying to effing break down his effing door. He also called me a knob, which I thought was unnecessary.
It was accidental, I tried to explain. The front door of the cesspit he shared with his mates was, like Hugo’s, up a flight of steps bordered by iron railings. Unlike Hugo’s des and expensive res, Marcus’s steps were crumbling through neglect, carpeted in a green, moss-like substance, and the top slab had a loose segment just waiting for the unwary. I hit it dead centre and was hurled headlong into the front door with a crash, sending a dozen empty beer bottles skittering sideways into the basement moat below with the sound of a collapsing greenhouse.
Smart Moves Page 4
