The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  Lauren, I don’t know you at all, but I do know that you seemed interested when I was telling you about my feelings for Tim. Really interested. And you seem to care that he’s been charged with a crime he didn’t commit. I think you’re a good person (I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear in the brief period we spent together) and I hope that you’ll care even more if I tell you what Tim means and has meant to me. I need to make him matter to you as much as he does to me, so that you’ll do the right thing and tell the truth.

  You’ve known Tim more recently than I have, and you might well know him better than I ever did, but do you like him? Tim’s not always uncomplicatedly likable. He’s not uncomplicatedly anything. I sometimes think he’s the human equivalent of a question with no answer, and that’s why I’m so drawn to him. I’ve never met anyone more unresolved than Tim, or more contradictory. He makes me want to formulate theories, prove certain things about his character are true. I’ve never felt that way about anyone else. I should point out that this reaction is not unique to me. People want to solve Tim, cure him, define him, but no one ever can. Everybody tells themselves they will be the one to do it. If you know Tim well, Lauren, you’ll hopefully understand what I mean. You’ll know that every bit of time you spend with him makes you less certain of who he is, and more certain of who you are. He has a rare talent, but I couldn’t begin to describe what it is. As someone who can easily solve most analytical and practical problems, I have always found this annoying and irresistible.

  Are you still reading, or have you given up? I should try not to make this too complicated.

  I first met Tim in a library in Rawndesley called the Proscenium. It’s not an ordinary library. It’s also a private club that you can join, and anyone who isn’t a member or a guest of a member can’t go in at all, unless it’s to make an inquiry about joining. Among other things, the library has a large collection of very old, rare poetry books, mainly first editions, as well as lots of modern poetry—that’s its specialism. There’s also a restaurant where members and guests can have lunch, a drawing room where people can talk, though only quietly, and a reading room where if you talk AT ALL the librarian will descend on you in a fury and threaten to turf you out, member or not.

  Remember I told you I had my own company and sold it for millions? Well, when I was first thinking of starting up that company, I needed to find money to fund it. A lot of money. I’d done some research, and I had my eye on Sir Milton Oetzmann as a possible key investor. You’ve probably heard his name on the local news, but in case you haven’t: he’s a philanthropist (that means someone whose hobby is to give away huge amounts of money to worthy causes) and I knew he was a member of the Proscenium. I met him in person shortly after I joined the library. I was up-front with him about what I hoped he might be able to do for me, and he was keen. He saw there was a good chance he’d end up making a shedload of money.

  When Tim first approached me, I hadn’t seen him before at the Proscenium. I must have been blind, because he told me later that he’d seen me several times. But I didn’t notice him at all until he plonked himself down in a chair that had been vacated ten minutes earlier by Sir Milton after one of our long chats. I was packing away my paperwork, looked up and saw a face that shocked me (warning: this is going to sound very weird and corny) by being the face I’d been craving a glimpse of all my life, even though I hadn’t known that until I saw Tim. I didn’t even fancy him, not at first sight or for quite a while afterward. It was more a feeling of “That’s him,” accompanied by this craving for proximity that had nothing to do with sexual attraction, initially. It was far stranger than just fancying someone, nothing like the way I fancied Sean when I first met him. (Sean’s my partner, remember?)

  Does that make any sense at all? I couldn’t look away, and Tim didn’t seem to be able to either. We both understood that there didn’t need to be a reason why he’d come over and sat down next to me. The reason couldn’t have been more starkly obvious. After a few seconds, embarrassment set in. We realized that, as strangers, we would have to go through the motions of pretending we didn’t know what we knew, so Tim introduced himself and said he hoped I didn’t mind his accosting me, but he feared I was about to make a serious mistake. He was an accountant, he told me, specializing in tax planning, and one of his clients had had extensive dealings with Sir Milton that had made him want nothing more to do with him, even if that meant losing a substantial chunk of his funding stream.

  I’m sure you’re not interested in the finer details, Lauren, but in a nutshell: Tim said, yes, Sir Milton might be keen to invest in my company, but he’d also want to micromanage everything (be involved in every aspect of my business rather than just letting me get on with it), and I’d end up wishing I’d never gone to him. I was on the point of asking Tim if he was perhaps a bit biased because of his client’s negative experience when he said, “I’ll get you the money you need.” It was so outrageous, it made me laugh. I needed serious money from a venture capitalist (a person or firm worth several hundred million whose sole purpose and function is to fund start-up companies), and here was a local accountant offering to drum up a bit of cash for me. I asked Tim what he had in mind. Was he going to organize a raffle? Sell tickets to a karaoke night at his local pub?

  I stopped laughing when he told me he dealt with the tax affairs of the Lammonby Foundation, and that Peter Lammonby tended to follow his advice to the letter. I’d thought about approaching Lammonby instead of Sir Milton, and only hadn’t for a ridiculous reason: Lammonby’s daughter had just made a fortune (one she didn’t deserve, in my not at all humble opinion) from some new-age you-can-reinvent-your-life-type book. Not that that was her father’s fault, but still. Milton Oetzmann had no connection with any personal growth nonsense as far as I knew, so I’d decided to focus on him.

  “I think I know nearly as much about your business as Sir Milton does by now,” Tim told me presumptuously. “I’ve listened in on at least two of your conversations with him. I’m confident I could get Peter Lammonby on board, and he really would be hands-off—he’s your dream investor. My friend Dan might be interested too.” “Your friend Dan?” I said scathingly. “What, you think he’d want to bung in twenty quid or so?” “Maybe three hundred thousand quid or so,” Tim corrected me. “Gaby,” he said, sending a shiver of recognition through my body by saying my name, as if I’d heard him say it thousands of times before, “I know nothing about scientific innovations, but if what I’ve heard you tell Milton Oetzmann is true, I can’t see how your company can fail.” I told him any company can fail, but he waved it aside. “Give me a month to get you the funds you need to make a start. If I let you down, go back to Sir Milton and write me off as a deluded idiot.”

  I agreed on the spot. I’d have agreed to anything he suggested on the spot, I think. Tim was thrilled. We couldn’t stop talking, asking each other hundreds of questions, wanting to know everything about each other. Anyone listening might conceivably have thought nothing more was going on than two Proscenium members enthusiastically getting to know each other.

  We arranged to meet again. We had a lot to talk about, so we had to meet often—oh, what a shame! (That’s me being sarcastic.) We didn’t only talk about my work and the need to fund it. We talked about poetry. Tim was obsessed with poetry, and I soon was too, though I’d never given it a second thought before I met him. We had lunch whenever we could. We never mentioned how we felt about each other—that was taken as read; we didn’t need to discuss it, and it would have been awkward if we had. Tim had told me early on that he was married and that his wife would have been beside herself with fury if she’d known he was meeting another woman for cozy lunches. He also said that knowing this wasn’t enough to stop him, that he preferred my company to hers and there had been nothing in his marriage vows to say he couldn’t eat with or talk to another woman.

  I got the message: he wasn’t ready to do anything that was against the ru
les. He didn’t want to have an affair. Or, rather, he did, but he wasn’t going to. At that point, I thought I could live with it if things never went any further. Just being with him and knowing how we felt about each other was enough for me at first. Just looking at his face, hearing his voice, reading his text messages and e-mails, made me feel as if something was grabbing hold of my body from the inside and shaking it. As if I’d swallowed an earthquake.

  If you were here now, Lauren, I suspect you’d ask at this point how Sean fitted into all this. I can’t imagine you’d ever be a self-serving two-timing hypocrite in the way that I was. Sean and I were already living together, and, yes, I was betraying him, emotionally if not physically. What’s more, I was loving it—loving the idea that I was treating him badly. I had no moral problem with it whatsoever. When I tried to tell myself that I ought to feel guilty, I thought about how Sean complained whenever I had to spend a night away from home because of work and how he expected me to sit and watch him watch football whenever I wasn’t away, and I thought, “Sorry, but I’m putting my own needs first, and you won’t be able to complain about it because you won’t know.” My relationship with Sean is not ideal, Lauren, as I told you before. I’ve always known it wasn’t ideal, but it took a weird night in a shitty hotel with you to make me realize quite how hopeless it is.

  As promised, Tim got both Peter Lammonby and his friend Dan (Jose, of course) on board to the tune of nearly three million pounds, initially, with a guarantee of more from Lammonby if things went according to plan. Tim thought it would be a good idea to spread the opportunity around a bit, to which end he came up with a genius idea that made me fall even more deeply in love with him, if I’m honest. He told me he was sure several of his high-net-worth clients would be interested, but many would be nervous about something so risky. My company hadn’t actually done anything yet, so people would literally have been chucking their money at a hope and a prayer. Tim asked me if I’d be willing to spend fifty thousand pounds of the company’s money (which would have meant borrowing it from the bank at that point) in order to finance what he at first obliquely referred to as “a show of confidence.”

  I asked him what he meant. Tim outlined a plan that was as neat and perfect as a Shakespeare sonnet: I would spend fifty thousand pounds on his professional services and the services of a Geneva-based firm called Dombeck Zurbrugg. I don’t want to bog you down in details, Lauren, so I’ll explain this as simply as I can. Dombeck Zurbrugg is a company that helps UK high-net-worths (HNWs basically means very rich people) avoid tax by setting up trusts and parent companies that allow them to have their businesses based in Switzerland, for official purposes. They provide company director and company secretary services and a fiendishly complicated layered structure that makes it look as if it’s a Swiss company when it isn’t, apart from on paper. This enables the UK HNWs to pay much less tax. It’s not foolproof, and the UK tax authorities could certainly unravel it if they were willing to devote huge amounts of time to doing so, but many, many people have got away with it and saved millions.

  I told Tim straight-out that I wasn’t prepared to do it. Not because I’m a fan of paying lots of tax (I’m the opposite: I think there should be a fixed, low rate of tax, the same for everyone) but because I didn’t want to have to be looking over my shoulder the whole time, wondering if the Inland Revenue was going to come after me. Tim nodded when I said this, as if he’d anticipated it. “No one’s going to come after you because you’re not going to do it. You’re not going to actually put any money into the vehicle DZ will set up for you. It’d be tricky anyway, unless you were prepared to relocate to Switzerland—you wouldn’t be, would you?” I asked him flirtatiously if he would relocate with me, then wondered what I’d said that was so wrong. Tim looked as if I’d punched him in the stomach. For an awful second, I panicked in case I’d misread the dynamic between us: maybe his interest in me was solely professional, maybe he stared deep into the eyes of all the technological entrepreneurs he met.

  “Gaby, I need to be honest with you about something,” he said. “I don’t think I have it in me to do . . . anything like that. Leave my wife or even . . . well, anything. I hope that isn’t going to ruin our friendship.” A fortnight earlier, I might have nodded and said, “Fine,” but I’d been falling more irreversibly in love with him every day, and his declaration of unavailability sounded so horribly final. He was telling me that, on a fundamental level, I had to give up on him. The disappointment was crushing. It was nearly a minute before I could get any words out. “Moral scruples or fear?” I asked him. “The latter,” he said, then qualified it. “No, both. I fear that if I do something that’s generally agreed to be wrong . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. I was furious, though I tried not to show it. What was he so scared of? Couldn’t he ignore the general agreement and think for himself? How could he think that us being together could be wrong on any level?

  I said none of these things. His ethical qualms made me feel ruthless. Actually, I’ve always kind of known I’m ruthless, Lauren, but, truth be told, I’ve always quite liked that about myself. I thought I was ruthless in a nice, healthy way, but suddenly Tim had made me feel like a callous husband thief.

  None of this made me love him any less, unfortunately for me. If a sexually frustrated friendship was all that was on offer, I was too much in love with him to turn it down. Keeping my tone light, I asked, “Does the ninety midnights rule still apply?” Tim told me it did. (If you don’t want to pay UK tax, you can’t spend more than ninety midnights in the UK.) “So we could spend two hundred and seventy-five midnights in Switzerland together, and then for ninety midnights every year we’d come back to the UK, you’d live with Francine and I’d live with Sean. Who, frankly, gets more of my midnights than he deserves at the moment.” I often made barbed comments about Sean to Tim. He mentioned Francine as infrequently as possible. I thought it was an attempt to be gentlemanly at first, until I realized he couldn’t bear to say her name.

  Tim was keen to turn the conversation back to business planning. He told me it didn’t matter that I wasn’t prepared to become a tax exile and move to Switzerland. I only needed to be willing to waste fifty thousand pounds. He and Dombeck Zurbrugg would then do the work and set up a labyrinthine scheme that I would never use. The important thing was that Tim would be able to tell his clients that I was so confident of making a fortune, I was willing to spend a fortune on tax planning. “A lot of companies in Switzerland and the Isle of Man offer similar services, but DZ are the best and the most expensive,” he said. “If I tell my high-net-worths you’re spending fifty grand with DZ at this stage, believe me, they’ll be queuing up to invest. They’ll think, ‘this woman knows she’s going to make tens if not hundreds of millions.’”

  He turned out to be right. My wasting fifty grand on the Swiss setup that I never used brought in all the investors I needed, and all of them were Tim’s clients apart from Dan Jose, who was Tim’s best friend. But that’s jumping ahead. That night, after Tim told me he would never leave Francine, I told Sean I wasn’t feeling well and was going to sleep in the spare room. I stayed up all night weeping—with frustration as much as sadness, to be honest. How could Tim accept so readily that what he wanted wasn’t possible? I’m the sort of person who believes that anything and everything is possible. Anyone who doesn’t believe that makes me angry.

  By morning, my optimism had returned and I’d decided that it was up to me to show Tim that there was a brave man inside him, waiting to be let out. I drew up the romantic equivalent of a business plan and made a concerted effort to make him love me more—so much that he would soon be thinking, “Who’s Francine, anyway?” as willing to discard her as if she were a used paper napkin. (Are you disapproving of this, Lauren? If you are, then perhaps you’ve not yet met a man you love as much as I love Tim. I needed him. For me, Tim was the difference between feeling a hundred percent alive and feeling one percent alive. It’s easy to
abide by a principle when you aren’t in the grip of a blazing need that won’t be denied.)

  My campaign worked. One day, in the Proscenium’s restaurant while we were having lunch, Tim reached for my hand under the table. It was the first time we’d touched, apart from brushing against each other by-accident-on-purpose. Other people were there who might have seen. Tim knew he was being indiscreet, but was willing to take the risk. I thought to myself, “No matter what happens from now on, even if my heart ends up in pieces, this makes it all worth it, this moment.”

  From then on we held hands regularly, under as many of the Proscenium’s tables as we could: in the restaurant, the reading room, the drawing room. People must have noticed, but everyone pretended not to. One day, Tim asked me if I’d be willing to have dinner with him. I was over the moon, then puzzled when he told me that Dan Jose and his wife Kerry would be there too. “They’re eager to meet the genius who’s going to make them rich,” he said. I was confused. The way he’d started the conversation—“Will you have dinner with me, Gaby?”—had sounded like a different proposition. “So this is a business dinner?” I asked. “Nope,” Tim said cheerfully. “Dan and Kerry are my closest friends. It’s about time they met you. If they don’t know you, and know you and me together, then they don’t know me, and I think they ought to, since they’re my elective relatives. Is that okay with you?” I told him it was more than okay. “Only a matter of time until Francine’s history,” I thought.

  Tim and I never had dinner alone, but the dinners with Kerry and Dan (our chaperones, as Tim called them) became a regular thing. So did kissing. I was blissfully happy for a few months, thinking things were going my way. Then I started to get angry. Tim’s love for me was plain to see, but he hadn’t said he loved me, not once. I hadn’t said it either, and at a certain point I decided I wouldn’t, not unless he said it first.