The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

by Paul Torday

  ‘So what does that mean?’ asked Henry, breaking my reverie. ‘My money’s still safe, isn’t it? I mean you said that the Styx fund invested in bank debt and was safe as houses, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid that may not be the case, now,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening any more than you do.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know what’s happening!’ Henry was almost screaming into the phone.

  ‘Calm down, please, Henry,’ I said, ‘and I’ll do my best to explain. I’ve been sacked. I haven’t been in the office since last Thursday. My guess is that an administrator will have been appointed by now and he will have been closing out all the company’s trades as quickly as possible. You might find your units in the Styx fund have lost value as they were designed to make money over five years. If the administrator sells them now they could be worth very little. I couldn’t be more sorry, but it’s out of my hands.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Henry. ‘You’re saying that the investment isn’t as safe as houses now. Have I got that right? You’re saying the opposite of what you and Bilbo told me a few weeks ago when I put the money in?’

  ‘I don’t know, Henry,’ I answered. I felt myself getting hot, as if the whole of my body were covered in a single, enormous blush. Beads of sweat trickled down my back. ‘The world has changed in the last few weeks. It’s likely you have lost money, that’s all I’m saying. If I knew anything for sure, I really would have told you before now.’

  There was another silence, while Henry thought about his next question. Then he asked, ‘Suppose, just for the sake of argument, the value of my investment has fallen? Let’s say it has fallen to zero.’

  ‘Well, that’s rather a worst-case scenario, Henry,’ I began to say, but he interrupted me.

  ‘Mountwilliam Partners going bust is rather a worst-case scenario, wouldn’t you agree? I’d like to know what could be worse than that?’

  ‘OK,’ I agreed weakly. ‘Let’s suppose.’

  ‘And Mountwilliam Partners arranged for me to borrow two million pounds against the value of the Stanton Hall estate so that I could buy units in their fund. Now that the fund is worthless - in my worst-case scenario, Eck, before you say anything - are they entitled to ask me to repay the loan, when they’ve lost it all?’

  This was the hardest part. I had to make Henry understand what I knew.

  ‘It won’t be Mountwilliam Partners who asks for the loan to be repaid. They sold the debt on straight away. The debt will be with a third party specialising in equity release. They are the people who will be asking for the money.’

  ‘They’ve sold my debt on to someone I don’t know?’ shouted Henry. I held the phone away from my ear for a moment.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s standard practice,’ I told him. ‘It’s in the contract you signed. I remember pointing it out to you.’ ‘Oh, in the small print, was it? I must say, Eck, you do sound quite the City boy now, don’t you?’

  The sneer in the voice hurt me more than anything he had said, yet I knew in some part I deserved it. Then he asked, more quietly: ‘So someone I’ve never heard of might turn up one of these days and ask me to pay back two million pounds I haven’t got. Is that right?’

  ‘It could happen, Henry,’ I told him. ‘I really don’t know what the position is at the moment. It might not be as bad as that. But, yes, it is possible. That’s the truth.’

  For a while there was silence at the other end of the line, and I might have thought Henry had hung up, except that the screen on the phone showed that we were still connected.

  ‘So your advice, your honest advice, would be to prepare for the worst? See what I can sell that might raise two million pounds in a hurry? Offhand I don’t know what that would be. The woodlands might raise some cash. I could sell them off, or fell them. We have some cottages we could sell. That would help, but the rent from those keeps Stanton Hall going.’

  His voice trailed off; then came back again louder.

  ‘What the hell am I going to tell Sarah? We were all right as we were. What in God’s name have you got me into, Eck? How could you drag me into a mess like this?’

  He hung up before I could reply. For a long while I sat at the wooden table, wondering whether I should return the call and, if I did, what I would say.

  There was nothing I could say. Every word Henry had uttered was true. He had lost his money; I was in no doubt about that. He would have to sell up some - or perhaps all - of an estate that had been handed down in his family for nearly two hundred years. It was all, in the end, about greed: I had baited the hook and he had risen to take it. I hadn’t meant to ruin my oldest friend, but that’s what I seemed to have done. That was how I had earned my living. And the call from Henry might be only the beginning. How many other phone calls like that might come?

  I stood up, and took the empty cup and saucer inside and stacked them beside the sink. Then, as I had done for the past few days, I wandered around the house, trying to find odd jobs to do. Nothing needed doing. My mind would not focus. I still had a creepy feeling of being under threat. I hoped the feeling would go away soon. In the daylight I rarely thought twice about it, but when night fell, I remembered what a lonely place I now lived in. None of my neighbours except for the Pierces knew I was permanently back at home. I hadn’t rung any of them, and none of them had rung me.

  The previous night I had gone to the gun cabinet, unlocked it and taken out one of my shotguns. I had loaded it and slept with it by the bed, where my trailing fingers could find it in the dark. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the creaks and sighings of an old house cooling down after a warm day, feeling embarrassed by my own nervousness.

  Now, as I moved restlessly about the house, I was thinking of the words Henry had used: ‘. . . your advice, your honest advice’.

  My advice had been well intended: I had not set out to deceive Henry. I was paid to take money from people like him and give it to our traders, in the sincere belief that one day they would return it to him in greater quantities than he could have dreamed of had he sent it anywhere else. Better yet, I had shown him how to put his capital to work: he had once told me that he was ‘land rich, but cash poor’. Mountwilliam Partners had shown him how to extract value from his land and put it to work for him.

  I believed that I had been honest. But what I, what we all, had forgotten about was the price of risk. We had behaved as though risk had been banished; but, like some awful monster crouching in the shadows beneath the stairs, it turned out to have been there all the time.

  I cannot remember a worse twenty-four hours than the day and night I passed after Henry’s phone call. Was that how everyone would now think of me: as a sharp salesman, who had drawn a fat salary while his investors - and his friends - lost their money? I had to assume that I too had lost my investments in Mountwilliam Partners; soon, no doubt, I would have to sell off my London flat to pay for the equity I had ‘released’ from it in order to buy more units in one or other of their funds. The same debt collectors who would soon call on Henry would also be calling on me.

  It was time I moved on and started to think what to do next, how I would manage to pass the days and earn some sort of a living.

  *

  It was exactly a day after Henry’s call that the phone rang again. I looked at the screen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to speak to Henry if it was him, but I knew I would have to. It wasn’t Henry; it was Harriet.

  ‘Eck,’ said a distant voice, and yet it was as if she were in the room beside me.

  ‘Harriet,’ I said. ‘I was going to ring you.’

  ‘I’ve just seen last week’s newspapers. I never get round to reading them until the following week. I saw the articles about you in Afghanistan,’ said Harriet. ‘How could they say such awful things about you? You were only doing your duty.’

  ‘Someone thought it would make a good story,’ I replied. ‘Well, someone ought to be taken out and shot,’ Harriet pronounced f
iercely. ‘You must feel awful. What do people at work say? Are they being supportive?’

  ‘That’s the other thing,’ I said. ‘I’m not at work any longer.’ I explained as briefly as I could about the demise of Mountwilliam Partners.

  ‘So where are you?’ asked Harriet. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Well, it’s only just happened, so I’m not doing anything. I’m living at home, at Pikes Garth Hall, for the moment. Don’t tell anyone that, Harriet, because I don’t want people to come and bother me just now.’

  There was a pause, and I had an irrational but strong conviction that Harriet was waiting for me to ask her to come and join me. There were a lot of reasons why I wasn’t going to do that just yet. To start with, I wasn’t sure how safe she would be in my company. I didn’t want Harriet to come here and walk into a team of investigative journalists, or perhaps something worse. And even if I was overreacting to recent events, I wasn’t going to be very good company for a while. I longed to see her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it at that moment.

  Harriet spoke again: ‘Are you still there, Eck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should have rung me before now.’

  ‘Life’s been a bit muddled,’ I said. ‘There’s been a lot of other stuff going on that I can’t explain over the phone.’ ‘Well, unmuddle yourself, then,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ll call tomorrow and you can tell me the rest of it. Look after yourself, dear Eck.’

  She put the phone down before I could reply.

  *

  When the mobile rang the following morning I was all set to explain everything to Harriet. Now wasn’t the time for us to be together; there were problems; it was related to what had happened in Afghanistan. I rehearsed various versions of this speech but none of them made any sense, even to me. When I looked at the phone, the screen simply said ‘Unknown Number’. For a moment I hesitated. It could be anyone: it could be Bilbo; it could be a car salesman from Audi wanting to pitch a new model; or it could be Osama Bin Laden. I decided I had to answer the call however much I didn’t want to.

  ‘Hello?’ I said cautiously.

  ‘I say, old boy, is that you?’ asked a familiar, but for the moment unrecognisable, voice.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Charlie, don’t you recognise my voice? Charlie Summers speaking here. You gave me your mobile number, remember?’

  ‘Charlie,’ I said. My voice must have sounded rather flat; I couldn’t quite bring myself to be any more enthusiastic.

  ‘Am I calling at a bad time, old chap? Are you in a meeting?’

  ‘No, Charlie, I’m not in a meeting.’ I thought he might possibly be somewhere in London, wanting to cadge a few pounds from me, so I added: ‘I’m in my house in Teesdale.’

  ‘Teesdale! Well, that is a nice surprise! I’m just down the valley from you, in Middlesbrough.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing there?’ I asked, dismay creeping into my voice. Then I remembered that Charlie had once told me he had family in Middlesbrough. ‘Are you staying with your family?’

  ‘All passed on,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve got an auntie in Stock-ton, but we’re not on speaking terms. No, I’m calling you from the Sally Pally in Trimdon Road.’

  ‘The Sally Pally?’

  ‘Salvation Army Centre, old boy. I’m a bit low on funds at present and the council has very obligingly given me B&B accommodation for a few nights. I drop in here because it’s somewhere to go. They give you coffee. They’re jolly kind. Quite a lot of praying goes on, though, and it’s Ladies’ Fellowship Night tonight, Eck. I’m not sure I can face it.’

  When Charlie had begun the conversation he had adopted the tone of martial bonhomie he sometimes used in my company, as if we were both temporary members of the same officers’ mess; but now his voice cracked as he told me about ‘Ladies’ Fellowship Night’ and I thought I could hear him crying.

  ‘Are you all right, Charlie?’ I asked.

  ‘Just got a bit of a cold,’ he said, clearing his throat noisily. ‘Anyway, I won’t bother you any further, Eck. I just thought I’d say hello and have a bit of a chinwag. Don’t want to disturb you if you’re busy. Hope things are going well. Hope you get together with that dishy-looking girl in the photograph. I’ll say goodbye now.’

  He hung up. I expelled the breath I didn’t know I had been holding in a sigh of relief. Thank God for that. The last person I wanted to see was Charlie.

  I walked about the house some more, congratulating myself on my escape from Charlie Summers and his importuning ways. I didn’t think he would ring back. He had sounded very down; almost desperate. That was the last sort of person I needed for company.

  What had he said? He was broke? He must be at a low ebb indeed if he was staying in council accommodation for the homeless, and spending his days in the local Salvation Army drop-in centre. It sounded as if Charlie really had, at last, reached rock bottom. The wine business, unsurprisingly, mustn’t have worked any better for him than the dog food business.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and found myself drumming my fingers on the tabletop. Thinking about Charlie made me uncomfortable, for some reason. He was nothing to me, and I had a great many more important things to think about, including deciding what to do with my own life. With an effort, I banished him from my mind.

  *

  Half an hour later I was in the Audi, and on the road to Middlesbrough.

  Charlie looked thinner and his face more lined than when I had last seen him. He was wearing a very crumpled grey suit and a grubby, open-necked shirt. He suddenly seemed years older. At first he couldn’t believe it when I walked into the hostel. He was sitting at a table by himself, nursing a mug which turned out to be empty.

  ‘Eck,’ he said. ‘My God, Eck! What on earth are you doing here? You’re not down and out yourself, are you?’

  ‘I’ve come to offer you a bed for a couple of nights, Charlie,’ I told him. ‘Just a couple of nights, that’s all.’

  His face, an old man’s a moment before, split from side to side in a beam of pure joy.

  ‘I say, old boy, that’s awfully good of you. Are you sure?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come, or not?’

  ‘I don’t have any other engagements at present, Eck. I don’t mind telling you my diary is pretty empty.’

  ‘Then we might as well go.’

  ‘My things,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m stopping a couple of streets from here, and all my belongings are there: my pyjamas and my toothbrush. Would it be a bother to collect them?’

  We collected Charlie’s scant belongings, which were still in the same battered canvas holdall, and then drove back up the valley to Pikes Garth. In the car Charlie kept looking at me sideways. I thought he was going to thank me again, in which case I would have to tell him to shut up. He surprised me by saying, ‘Are you all right, Eck? You look as if you’ve had a bit of a rough time yourself.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told him.

  ‘I saw that story about you in the papers, you know,’ said Charlie shyly. ‘I just want you to know that I wish we had more soldiers like you in our Special Forces.’

  ‘Thank you, Charlie,’ I said. ‘It’s something I’m trying to forget about. And I’m not in the army, any more.’

  Charlie winked at me and said, ‘I quite understand, old boy.’

  *

  We drove on in silence until we came to the winding lane that led between dry-stone walls to Pikes Garth.

  ‘My goodness!’ said Charlie. ‘What a heavenly spot you live in, Eck. I can’t think how you can bear to spend any time in London with a home like this to come back to.’

  ‘Don’t be using the address for any credit card applications, this time,’ I warned him as we parked outside the house. Charlie looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry about that,’ he muttered. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t be troubled by anyone, as you said you were going to sell the place.’

  We went inside. I showed Charlie a
spare bedroom, and the linen cupboard, and told him to make his own bed. While he was doing that I looked for my mobile, as I had forgotten to take it with me when I left the house. It was on the kitchen table. To my annoyance I saw that it was showing a missed call from Harriet. I rang back, but there was no reply.

  Charlie came back in.

  ‘All shipshape,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Now, how can I be of use? Why don’t you let me cook lunch, Eck? I once had a job in the kitchens on a cruise ship. There isn’t a lot I don’t know about cooking.’

  It turned out later, as we sat sharing a bottle of beer and eating corned beef hash, that Charlie’s job had been more in the washing-up line; but, as he said, ‘you can learn a lot watching top chefs in action’, and the corned beef hash was surprisingly good.

  After lunch Charlie excused himself and said he needed a rest.

  ‘I haven’t slept a lot recently,’ he explained apologetically. ‘I’m at a bit of a turning point in my career, and I’ve had quite a lot on my mind. Two hours of Egyptian PT will put me right, I’m sure it will.’

  It was early evening before he re-emerged in the kitchen, awakened no doubt by the smell of roast chicken. I had dug the bird out of the freezer after lunch in order to provide some dinner for the two of us.

  We sat and drank whisky together before dinner. He told me what he had been doing in the time since we had last met: about his trip to Holland, and Chateau Kloof, and the disastrous wine-tasting evening in York. But he was quieter than he had been in Cirencester, when I had found it difficult to get him to stop talking. Now Charlie’s manner could almost be described as thoughtful.

  ‘I’ve got to get my life straightened out, Eck,’ he said. ‘I’m sure your turning up at the Sally Pally was providence. I couldn’t think in there. People were always coming up and asking me if I wanted to share my worries with them. They meant to be kind, of course. I expect they thought I was going to top myself.’