I told him that I wasn’t sure I had the nerve for a flight in a helicopter. ‘If the engine on a jet fails,’ I said, ‘there’s another in reserve. And the thing can glide. But if the engine fails on a helicopter—’
‘You’re fucked.’
‘Exactly. You have a problem.’
‘Which is a major part of the excitement.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ he said, in a slightly coaxing tone.
‘Safety first, that’s me,’ I said, and as the words were leaving my mouth I sensed that Sam wouldn’t let the irony pass unremarked.
But in fact he merely shrugged, signifying that there was nothing more to say on the matter. ‘It was good to have a talk,’ he said, though it hadn’t been much of a conversation – I’d uttered one word for every two hundred of Sam’s. ‘We should do it again. What are you doing at lunchtime?’ he asked.
Wrongfooted, I started to bluster: ‘Well, I think Aileen has—’
‘I was joking,’ he interrupted, shaking his head and giving me a pat on the arm – a soft and patronising pat, as if to say: ‘Don’t worry, old chap.’
For a while I sat in the kitchen, reading the paper with Aileen. The background noise of Sam hammering on the roof made it impossible to concentrate – it was like hearing a saboteur at work. Aileen was going to take some stuff down to the recycling centre. I went to fetch a few bits of junk that we’d thrown into the shed; crossing the garden, I glanced up at the roof and saw Sam watching me – he gave me a wave that was almost a salute. A few minutes later, I opened the gate while Aileen was getting into her car; again Sam was watching, and again he gave me the salute-wave. I’d intended to go into town in the afternoon but I went now instead, largely to get away from him. Walking back, I had the image in my mind – for the twentieth time that day – of Sam explaining the situation to a distraught Aileen.
That wasn’t what I found when I got home. What I found was Sam on the roof, straddling the ridge, screening his eyes from the sun and gazing fixedly in the general direction of the Jermans’ place. It took me a few moments to realise that he was peering through a pair of binoculars. Clearly focusing on something in particular, he was immobile for perhaps as long as a minute, and then, as if he’d known all along exactly where I was standing, he turned to me and beckoned. ‘Come up here,’ he shouted, waving the binoculars. ‘Hurry up. It’s worth it.’ He was very happy about something.
I don’t know what I imagined he was looking at: Claire Jerman had crashed the mower, maybe, or David Jerman was doing his t’ai-chi routines in the middle of the lawn, or Sophie was sunbathing topless. ‘You need to see this,’ he said, when I’d reached the top of the scaffolding. He gestured me towards the ladder that he’d hooked to the ridge of the roof. ‘Come on,’ he urged. I crawled up the ladder, belly to the rungs, until my chin was resting on the ridge tiles. Sam leaned towards me, pressed a hand to my back to clamp me to the ladder, and held the binoculars to my eyes. I took hold of them, gripping the ridge with my other hand. ‘Find the pool,’ he directed me, ‘then go left. Slowly. To the edge of the trees. See?’ In the shadow of the trees a badger was foraging; three cubs were wrestling nearby, on the grass. ‘Now that’s something you don’t see very often,’ said Sam. I’m not sure which surprised me more: the spectacle of the tumbling cubs or Sam’s pleasure in the sight. ‘You ever seen that before?’ he asked me. ‘Badger cubs, in daylight? Lovely, no?’ he said, as if remarking on a good-looking girl. Yesterday, he told me, he’d seen a pair of jays right by the pool. All through the afternoon they’d been in the garden, off and on. ‘There is no more beautiful bird in the world,’ he said. The statement was so incongruous, I remember it exactly: ‘There is no more beautiful bird in the world.’ He spoke the words as though they were a quotation from a famous ornithologist. ‘Except the lyre bird, of course,’ he added. ‘Nothing touches the lyre bird. Or you could argue about hummingbirds, I suppose. But for me the jay is right up there. If I see them again, I’ll give you a shout,’ he offered. I thanked him and began to descend the ladder. Sliding down the roof, he escorted me back down to the platform.
He put the binoculars into the khaki canvas bag in which he carried his box of sandwiches and coffee flask. ‘Wasn’t that something, eh?’ he said, grinning like a lad who’s just seen his team win a big game. ‘Just fantastic. Amazing.’ There was an ingenuousness about this enthusiasm, a quality that made me think that I was seeing an aspect of his character that was essential to who he was, rather than something that was being presented for a purpose – whatever that purpose might have been. ‘Glad I called you up? I mean, that’s the sort of thing you only see in documentaries, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said, and then I laughed. It was a brief, one-breath laugh, but it somewhat took me by surprise. I couldn’t recall having laughed at anything recently. I gave him his cash in an envelope; he thanked me, with a smile that wasn’t quite that of a hired worker, and lobbed it into his bag. As I was turning away he asked me how we’d feel if he were to come to work the following day, on the Sunday. The weather forecast said there was a chance of rain on Sunday evening, so he’d like to get the roof finished off before then. ‘But if that’s at all a problem, don’t worry. I can get a tarp over it. Not as good as getting the tiles down, but it’ll keep the worst of it out.’ I said I didn’t think it would be a problem.
Aileen had no objection, but she felt sorry for him. A young man like Sam should be with his girlfriend on a Sunday, not working. From the way he’d said to her, when she’d asked him if he was absolutely sure he didn’t want to take the day off, ‘I’ve nothing better to do, Mrs Pattison,’ she’d had the impression that there was no girlfriend, which was odd, she thought, because he was a nice-looking boy. She’d felt sorry for him ever since she’d learned that he lived in a caravan.
From what I could tell, I said, he seemed to like the arrangement.
Aileen doubted it. That might be what he said, she conceded, but she thought there was something sad about it. There was something sad about Sam himself, she thought – something vulnerable in his eagerness to please. ‘He needs someone to look after him,’ she said.
He struck me as a chap who was more than capable of looking after himself, I told her.
‘In some ways, yes,’ said Aileen. But there were moments, she said, when she felt quite protective of him. At lunchtime, she then told me, Sam had come indoors for a cup of coffee and noticed, on the side of the fridge, a flyer for Cerys’s show. She told him that our niece was in it, and he said that he liked musicals, as long as they were old-fashioned Broadway ones. There was such a sense of loneliness in the way he made the remark and the way he looked at the flyer, said Aileen, that she found herself asking him if he’d like to come with us.
I raised the newspaper to cover my face. ‘That was nice of you,’ I said, feeling as if I had a ball of bread wedged in my gullet. ‘And what did he say?’
‘He appreciated the offer, but didn’t think he could make it on the night we’re going.’
‘Oh well,’ I said.
‘He said he might pop along, if it turned out he was free. I’m sure he’s free, but I know he won’t come. He’s worried about intruding – that’s what it is. So I didn’t press the point. Do you think I should have tried to persuade him?’
‘Best to let it lie. You did the right thing,’ I said. This was my last word on the subject.
At nine o’clock the next morning the Toyota appeared. It was warmer than the previous day had been; and it didn’t rain, contrary to the forecast that Sam had supposedly seen. Aileen and I had lunch in the garden, as we often do in summer. It would have been one of our typical Sundays – slow and easeful and satisfying – had Sam not been there. But Sam was there – and worse, Aileen insisted that he join us. He accepted the invitation with gratitude. The food itself – pasta salad, followed by homemade chocolate cake – was received with copious compliments. ‘This,
Mrs Pattison,’ declared Sam, circling a fork above his plate, ‘is absolutely wonderful.’
He smiled at me, and the smile said that he knew that I now knew about the flyer, and that there was nothing I could do prevent him outmanoeuvring me again. I could hardly bring myself to look at him, let alone talk to him, but Aileen of course kept things going with ease, which only increased the torment of the situation: she was such a kindly person, so engaging, so warm, and I might lose her if Sam decided to talk. The prospect of that loss changed what I saw. I looked at Aileen in her chair, and I looked at the garden around her, and it was no longer a place in which she and I necessarily belonged – we were merely two bodies occupying a small part of this space at this particular moment, and I might be removed from it with just one sentence from Sam.
‘Dominic tells me you’re a birdwatcher,’ Aileen remarked, having accepted Sam’s praise with due modesty.
‘It’s a bit of an obsession, Mrs Pattison, to be honest,’ he replied, with a bashfulness that struck me as being at least seventy-five per cent bogus. On days off – ‘So you do take days off?’ Aileen interjected, relieved to hear it – he might drive right across the country sometimes, if there’d been a report of a rarity. Suffolk was his favourite spot – especially a place called Minsmere. Last year he’d had an amazing experience at Minsmere: he’d seen a bird called a Baikal Teal. Just one of them, paddling through the reeds. The Baikal Teal, he informed us, is a migratory species (for a minute his style of speech was that of an instructor with an adult education class), which breeds in the forests of eastern Siberia and spends the winter in Japan, Korea and China. The world’s total population of Baikal Teals, some 300,000 birds, lives in a single flock, Sam explained – ‘So God knows what that one was doing in Suffolk.’ This was notable too – ‘God knows’, he said, whereas with me it would have been ‘Fuck knows’. In Aileen’s presence he didn’t swear once – not on this occasion, anyway.
‘A duck,’ he said. ‘I saw one little duck and that was a highlight of the whole year. How sad is that?’ he said. A self-deprecating grimace, deployed for Aileen, produced the desired result.
‘Not at all,’ she answered, and asked him to continue.
He’d sat around half the day, eyes trained on the reeds, waiting for a glimpse of that bird. Patience was something he’d learned in Ireland, in the army, he told Aileen, who was duly intrigued. ‘People think it’s all Action Man stuff,’ he said. ‘I thought it was going to be Action Man stuff. But it wasn’t. It was boring, a lot of the time. Dead boring. Stag is the most boring occupation you could imagine,’ he said. The dash of jargon – dropped into the conversation carelessly, or so it appeared – prompted a request for clarification. Stag, he explained, was guard duty, lookout duty, hour after hour of standing in a little room on the top of a tower, watching the sky change from grey to greyer. Yet he’d learned things doing stag, he said. For one thing, he’d learned that he was capable of doing it, which he wouldn’t previously have thought was possible, because he’d been a boy who always had to be on the go, doing stuff. But he’d found that he liked having time to think, and even when it became so boring that he couldn’t really think, sometimes being bored to the bone was a good thing, he discovered. ‘Rather like meditating, I suppose. Emptying your mind. It can be good for you. You know what I mean, Mrs Pattison? Or does that sound daft?’ It did not sound daft in the slightest, Aileen assured him. And the other thing he’d learned, Sam continued, was that wildlife was fascinating. He’d found himself in the same company as a lad from Dorset, a real country boy, Jake by name, who knew everything there was to know about the birds of the British Isles. ‘Bit of a nutter, if I’m honest with you. Black belts in everything. But he did love his birds. For some reason we clicked, and he taught me a lot. Got so I could spot a bird from way off and put a name to it right away. No confusing martins and swallows with this boy. A good teacher, he was,’ said Sam, giving the last sentence a touch of wistfulness.
‘Are you still in touch with him?’ Aileen asked.
Jake, we were told, was currently a guest of Her Majesty, as a consequence of having over-battered an Irish barman in a pub in Plymouth. ‘Well, two Irish barmen, actually,’ he said. ‘Like I said, he was a bit of a psycho, and he had a thing about the Irish. His attitude to the natives didn’t exactly chime with my way of seeing things.’ Sam elucidated the differences between their ways of seeing things: whereas he’d had a lot of sympathy for the nationalist community (this sounded like a phrase parroted from the news), perhaps because there was a bit of Irish in the family (‘as I was telling Mr Pattison’), as far as Jake was concerned the Catholics were either scumbags who left bombs in pubs and blew children to bits, or idiots who thought that these low-lifes were heroes. ‘And don’t get me wrong, Mrs Pattison,’ said Sam, leaning forward and lowering the voice, as though to impart information in confidence. ‘There were some evil characters hanging around. When we arrived we were shown this book – The Catalogue. Pictures of killers and their associates. Known killers – this wasn’t just rumours. And you’d pass these specimens on the streets, knowing what they’d done. It was hard, and to Jake’s way of thinking it was all wrong. Instead of talking to these creeps we should have given the SAS enough time to finish the job. Let them off the leash, kill all the bad guys, job done. As far as I was concerned, if we’d done that we’d have been fighting till the sun went cold. But I didn’t go out of my way to broadcast my views on the topic. I did once tell him I thought things weren’t black and white, and he looked like he was about to smash my face in for me. He was rather a dangerous boy, it has to be said.’ He stopped for a moment and glanced to the side, frowning – it appeared – at the memory of mad Jake.
Twice Sam had used the word ‘rather’. The word had jarred the first time, because it sounded inauthentic coming from him; the second time, it occurred to me that it was a word that I often (too often) use myself. Instantly I was convinced that Sam was copying me, consciously. And now, as Aileen looked at distracted Sam, it seemed to me possible that, having heard the echo of me in what Sam had been saying, she was beginning to detect another resemblance. She was turning to me, questioningly – but her face, I saw, was simply requesting me to speak. I was aware that I hadn’t said anything for a while. ‘So,’ I said to him, ‘this Jake – is he the one who couldn’t stand being in a helicopter?’
There was a vagueness to Sam’s expression, as if he were emerging from sleep. It took him a couple of seconds to reply. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘That was someone else. Barry. Barry Mettyear.’
Sam was telling Aileen about Barry Mettyear – how he’d forced himself to go up the Eiffel Tower to try to get over his problem, but had keeled over in the lift before he was halfway up – when the phone rang. It was Eleanor; this, as I told Sam, could take a while.
What I wanted him to say, and expected him to say, was that he should be returning to work, and it did at first seem – as he placed his knife and fork carefully on the plate, folded the napkin neatly, sipped the last of his water – that he was going to leave the table. But then he settled back in his seat and said to me: ‘You know, I really do like your wife. She’s great.’ The remark was made in a way that seemed to signify that he was glad to have found her so likeable, because he was going to be around her for a long time. ‘The thing that gets me,’ he said, ‘is that she’s an accountant. I mean, I’d never have guessed. Not in a million years.’
‘And why is that?’ I asked.
He assumed a lavish expression of incredulity. ‘Come on. She’s cool. Accountants aren’t cool.’
Many different adjectives might come to mind upon making Aileen’s acquaintance: steady, calm, capable, congenial. I doubt if anyone – including Sam – has ever thought her cool. ‘Not all accountants are dull little bean-counters,’ I said.
‘No,’ he conceded, ‘but still, you wouldn’t think she was in that line of work.’
‘And what line of work would you think she w
as in?’
Sam scratched at the nape of his neck and scowled as he considered the question. ‘Don’t know,’ he answered. ‘A cook? That would fit. A top-notch cook.’
‘Something more womanly – is that what you mean?’
‘Lot of male cooks nowadays,’ he countered. ‘Turn on the telly, there’s a geezer with a frying pan.’
Aileen, I informed him, was the one who’d made our business work. I might have had the idea, but without her financial know-how we’d never have got where we were today.
‘And where would that be?’ asked Sam. I told him that I didn’t understand the question. ‘Only joking,’ he soothed. ‘I can see where you are,’ he said, surveying the garden. ‘You’ve done well. I’m impressed. Very impressed. This is a nice place. And you’ve got a smart operation going. Nice shops. I take my hat off to you,’ he said. ‘And Mrs Pattison, of course.’ Standing up, he placed a hand on each shoulder in turn and swivelled his arms, like a swimmer warming up. ‘Making a go of it, being your own boss – I admire that. Really, I do,’ he said, looking everywhere except at me.
‘Aileen deserves much of the credit,’ I said.
‘If you say so,’ he said, with a face that said – but only if you didn’t look too closely – that he commended my modesty. He was moving away from the table, rotating his arms and turning his head this way and that. ‘Who picks the staff? In the shop. Is that you?’ he asked. ‘North Street, I’m talking about.’ I told him that the manager did the hiring. He nodded deeply, as though something had now been explained. I refused to ask the question he wanted me to ask, so he volunteered that the new girl was very nice. ‘Polish girl. You seen her?’
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