by Paul Torday
The reason I know Harriet is engaged is that she took me out to lunch today. We had spent the morning looking at spreadsheets and both of us needed a break, so when she suggested lunch (a meal I do not normally indulge in) for once I was quite ready to accept.
We found a Middle Eastern restaurant nearby, which seemed an appropriate choice. I ordered a salad and some water. Harriet ordered a salad and a glass of white wine. When it came she held the glass up and looked over it at me and said, ‘A toast—to the project.’
I raised my glass, but she wouldn’t allow me to drink a toast with mineral water, so wine was ordered, despite my telling her I never drank in the day, and then we raised our glasses and both said, rather solemnly, ‘To the project.’
Our eyes met as we sipped our wine together, and I looked away, embarrassed without knowing why. Harriet was undisturbed, and put her glass down and asked me if I was married. When I told her I was, she asked, ‘What does your wife do?’
‘Mary? She’s in finance with a big international bank.’
‘A career woman like me,’ said Harriet, smiling.
But Mary wasn’t like Harriet; she would never have ordered a glass of white wine at lunch, much less persuaded me to have one.
‘Alcohol is all very well in its place,’ Mary used to say, ‘and as far as I am concerned, during weekdays its place is in a bottle and nowhere else.’ And Mary didn’t dress like Harriet or, frankly, smell like Harriet. Mary didn’t believe in smart feminine clothes or perfume. Mary wore baggy brown linen work suits at home and grey ones at the office. She smelled clean, of rather antiseptic soap. She was always neat and tidy…To my dismay I found I was comparing the two women and the comparison was unfavourable to Mary. What was so wrong with wearing an elegant calf-length dress, rather than a suit that looked as if it had been designed by a junior member of the Chinese communist party? What was wrong with smelling faintly of peaches ripening in a greenhouse, instead of something that recalled a mild industrial disinfectant?
We talked for a moment about Mary, and her endless travelling.
The salad arrived, and I concentrated for a moment on chasing an olive around my plate with my fork. Then I decided it was my turn to keep the conversation going and asked Harriet if she was married.
‘No, but I will be next spring.’
‘Oh, have you just become engaged?’
‘It hasn’t been in the papers yet, but it will be as soon as Robert comes back.’
‘Comes back from where?’
Harriet put her knife and fork down on her plate and looked down for a moment, then said quietly, ‘From Iraq.’
‘What’s he doing out there?’ I said, watching her. Her smiling, easy look had gone and now her lips were compressed and she had turned pale. I suddenly realised she was on the verge of tears. In a panic I tried to make a joke: ‘Well, perhaps we can get a contract to introduce salmon into the Euphrates, and then you can join him out there?’
Whatever the merits of this remark, it did the trick. Harriet looked startled and then smiled. I don’t think she thought I was the sort of person who made jokes, and she would have been right. We talked about Robert and his adventures for a while.
‘He wasn’t expecting to go to Iraq,’ Harriet told me. ‘We were going to take a week’s holiday in France together before I became totally buried in the salmon project. Then he got a call and the next thing I heard he was ringing me from Frankfurt airport, to tell me what had happened and that he was already on his way.’ We sat in silence for a moment. Then she said, ‘The worst thing is the letters. Either they arrive weeks late or not at all. And when you do get them they are so heavily censored it is impossible to know what Robert was trying to say.’
After that, she didn’t seem to want to say any more about it. It was odd. A few minutes ago Harriet and I had been, in one sense, perfect strangers. I had spent time with her over the past week or two, quite a lot of time, but it had all been very professional. My admiration for her ability was unbounded, but I had been completely ignorant of her personal circumstances and perhaps would never have asked her a single question about herself if she had not suddenly suggested lunch.
Then I checked my watch and saw it was nearly two o’clock. We paid the bill and hurried back to the salmon project.
§
22 August
I’m working all hours, from seven in the morning until seven or eight at night. I’m mostly too tired to write up my diaries. I want to keep a record somehow now that, at last, I’m engaged in work of such immense significance. It’s nearly a month since my last entry and the Yemen salmon project is growing. We are spending real money: not hundreds, not thousands, not tens of thousands; we are spending so much money, so fast, that a firm of accountants has been hired. They have put financial controls in place and they prepare budget reports which go to the sheikh which I feel sure he never looks at. I flew to Finland for two days of talks with some specialist manufacturers of fish farm equipment, to discuss the design of the holding tanks in the Wadi Aleyn. I flew to Germany to talk to a company which manufactures tanks used to transport tropical fish, and we discussed how to design and build the transport pods which would take the first salmon out by plane to the Yemen. Mary flew to New York, and then back to Geneva to attend enigmatic-sounding conferences on risk management. Harriet flew to Glen Tulloch to meet the sheikh and then out to the Yemen with him to discuss matters unknown to me. Everyone was flying everywhere. Everyone except David Sugden.
He was, I think, becoming a little jealous of the way the project was growing, sending its tendrils into every corner of NCFE. There were groups of people building mathematical models to show what happened to oxygen levels in water at high temperatures; others were investigating the possible microbiological impact on the salmon of local Yemeni bacteria; another group had formed a committee to write a paper entitled ‘Vision 2.020: can the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) colonise the southern Indian Ocean?’ The idea was that my salmon in the Wadi Aleyn might one day run down the wadi to the sea and swim south across the equator, and down to the edges of the Antarctic Ocean, past the Kerguelen Islands, to feed on the giant shoals of krill at the edges of the polar ice cap.
I think it was that paper that tipped David Sugden over the edge. He came storming into my office today and said he wanted a word with me. I was on the phone to Harriet but told her I would call back, and hung up.
He pulled up a chair and sat down. He was angry, but trying not to show it. ‘This salmon project is totally out of control,’ he began.
I asked him in what way.
‘People are spending money like water. You’ve been on three overseas trips this month alone.’
‘It’s not our money, of course,’ I said. ‘The sheikh sees all the bills and all the projected bills and the reporting accountants check everything, and I’m not aware that he’s unhappy. And I can’t invent a technology for transporting salmon to the middle of a desert without talking to the equipment suppliers. We can’t buy this stuff out of the classified ads in Trout & Salmon magazine, you know.’
It gives me some pleasure to talk to David like this. I know there’s nothing he can do about it. The sheikh is backing me first, the agency second. Harriet has made that clear several times, and David knows it as well as I do. Feeling unable to pursue the point about the money any further, David started to complain about the committee writing a vision paper on Atlantic salmon in the Indian Ocean. ‘What happens if it all goes horribly wrong and gets into the press?’
‘If all what goes horribly wrong?’
‘This stuff about Atlantic salmon actually spawning in the wadis of the Yemen and then migrating to the edge of the Antarctic Ocean. The idea of Atlantic salmon swimming around somewhere south of the Cape of Good Hope is such an outrageous proposition, it could destroy the credibility of our centre for ever if the press got hold of it.’
I looked at him. This was the man who a few weeks ago had told me he would fire me if I didn�
�t come up with some ideas for the salmon project.
I was saved from answering by the phone ringing. I picked it up to tell the switchboard to hold my calls but a smooth voice said, ‘It’s Peter Maxwell here, director of communications from the prime minister’s office. Is that Alfred Jones?’
I said hello and put my hand over the mouthpiece and mouthed ‘Peter Maxwell’ at David Sugden. He sat up straighter in his chair and reached for the phone.
Maxwell said, ‘I gather David Sugden’s in there with you?’ then asked to be put on the speakerphone.
I hit the button and put the phone back in its cradle. Peter Maxwell’s voice came from the speaker now—oily but somehow also steely. ‘Hi, Fred. Hi, David. Can you hear me okay?’ We both said we could.
‘Guys, I’m going into the prime minister’s morning briefing meeting in a few minutes. Can you give me a heads-up on the project? How’s it all going?’
David said, ‘We’re on track, Mr Maxwell.’
‘A little more detail would be good.’
‘I’ll let Alfred talk you through that. He’s more involved with the nuts and bolts than I am.’
‘Nuts and bolts are what I want,’ said Peter Maxwell cheerfully. So I gave him a quick summary of the work going on.
‘Good stuff, Fred. Can you put all that in an email to me just after we finish this conversation. Have you got a pen? Here’s my email address.’
I wrote it down and then Maxwell said, ‘The PM is interested in this project. He wants to see it succeed. I’ll get myself more involved once you’re a bit further down the road with it all. David, for the moment I want you to come and give me a monthly briefing, starting one month from now, or sooner if there are any dramatic developments. Talk to my secretary and get dates and times from her. And I want everyone in your centre to keep away from the press. Nothing about the Yemen salmon project must get into the public domain unless my office clears it first. Okay?’
After that conversation with Peter Maxwell, David Sugden’s mood changed. Monthly briefing meetings at Number 10 were not something he had ever dreamed would come his way.
He left my office glowing with pleasure.
§
Later
Tonight Mary was back home before me. I am writing this in the spare bedroom. At first she was sweet. When I arrived home there was the smell of something delicious coming from the kitchen. Mary can be quite a good cook when she wants to be, which is not all that often. She was whisking up a sauce and wearing an apron. I kissed her hello and asked her what she was cooking. She told me it was pasta with scallops, and that there was a bottle of white wine in the fridge.
This was unprecedented. As I have noted, Mary never drinks in the week and not often at weekends.
‘I’ll just go and change,’ I said. ‘You must have come home early?’
‘Yes, I’m off to Geneva again in the morning so I thought it would be nice for us to have a proper dinner together before I go.’
Ah, so that was it. When I came downstairs dinner was ready, and two glasses of white wine were misting on the kitchen table.
‘This is really good,’ I said, after a mouthful. And it was. Mary shook her head and said something about being out of practice.
I sipped my wine and asked, ‘Do you still have no idea how long you are in Geneva for?’
‘Well, that’s just it,’ she said, putting her fork down. ‘I told you before that I’m standing in for someone who fell ill and died. They want me to stay there for at least a year, not just on a temporary basis. They’ve been very impressed with my work.’
I said it seemed a bit hard on me that she was the only person in the bank they could find to send out there. Mary frowned and said, ‘Why not me? I’m very good. It’s a great opportunity. It’s promotion, even if the salary isn’t very different.’
It was happening again. Mary could have been one of Napoleon’s generals: for her, attack was not just the best form of defence, but the only form of defence. We began to argue. Despite my intention to keep the conversation at the calm, rational level I prefer I too became annoyed. I remember saying, almost shouting, that I didn’t think she had spent five minutes considering what my feelings might be. So she told me how selfish I was and how little account I took of her career, and how I was always impossible to talk to because I thought of nothing but my bloody, bloody fish.
‘I must have told you a dozen times, if I get offered the job in Geneva as a permanent position, the next step is almost certainly a senior posting to London. I’ve told you a dozen times,’ she repeated.
‘At least a dozen,’ I said. This was not helpful of me, but I couldn’t stop myself.
‘Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve been boring you. Well, here’s a bit of news which I won’t repeat too often because I won’t be here to repeat it. I’m going to Geneva tomorrow. I will be away for at least six months before I am entitled to any leave. I can’t come home at weekends because they work Saturday mornings in the bank. If you want to come and see me, my address and some other notes for you are on my desk in the study.’
She was really angry now. She told me I didn’t care; I was buried in my own career, and now on our last evening I was being sarcastic and self-centred. She pushed her plate away and I heard her run up the stairs and slam the bedroom door.
I haven’t the nerve to go in there tonight. I’ll try and catch her in the morning before she leaves.
§
23 August
This morning I made a last effort. I felt shattered by the evening before. These emotional exchanges take it out of me, and I felt bilious all night long. Despite that I was up at five, and went downstairs in my pyjamas to find Mary’s cases in the hall. Mary herself was sitting drinking a mug of tea at the kitchen table.
She looked at me in a not very friendly way and asked me what I was doing up at that time of day.
‘To say goodbye, of course,’ I said. ‘Darling, don’t let’s part on a sour note. I’m going to miss you.’
‘Well, you should have thought of that before you were so unpleasant to me last night.’
The front door bell buzzed. It was her taxi.
Mary stood up. She allowed me the faintest peck on the cheek by way of a kiss, and then in a few moments she, her cases and the taxi had gone. Gone for how long, I wonder. For a year? For good?
6
Correspondence between Captain Robert Matthews and Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
Written and posted in Frankfurt airport
10 May
Darling Harriet,
I don’t know how to tell you this. I tried you on your mobile and left a message, but by the time you pick it up I will be out of the country and not contactable by phone or email.
I was rung by the adjutant and given about five minutes’ notice to get packed and out to the airport. We flew commercial to Frankfurt, which is where I am now. I’m writing this in a little coffee place in the departure lounge. We have a few minutes before our connecting flight out to Basra.
Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to Iraq and that means our week together is in ruins. Darling, I feel as sick about this as you will do when you read this. One thing I have already decided: I’ll do my tour here, which is meant to be about twelve weeks, but when I come back I’m going to put in my papers. I’m going to leave the forces. I’m not especially ambitious for promotion—I can’t be bothered to go to staff college. I only joined up because Dad wanted me to, and I was never going to get to university. I just wanted a few years of fun. Well,
I’ve had lots of fun and they’ve looked after me very well, so I suppose when they tap me on the shoulder and send me somewhere slightly unpleasant, I can’t object.
But now I’ve met you, as a way of life the marines are no longer for me. It’s just as you say. It would be so good to settle down and become part of somewhere again, instead of constantly passing through.
That’s small consolation for a bust holiday, but I hope you will understand. Don’t wor
ry about Iraq, it’s just a routine rotation of people. I wasn’t on the list but someone had a slight accident so I was pulled in to replace him. We won’t be doing any dangerous stuff. The place has calmed down a lot over the years. It’s more public relations than anything else. I’d almost prefer it if we saw some action, because otherwise it can be a very dull place to be stuck, particularly at this time of year when it’s almost too hot to go outside.
Anyway, I’ll be thinking of you. We’ll go away the minute I get back. That’s a promise.
Write to me as soon as you can c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace, Basra, and it should reach me pretty quickly. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. If I’m on the base at Basra I should get letters almost straight away, but if I’m in-country there might be some delay before I have a chance to see them.
So don’t ever worry about me. I’ll be all right.
Love,
Robert
Letter
Captain Robert Matthews
c⁄o BFPO Basra Palace
Basra
Iraq
12 May
Darling Robert,
You can imagine my first reaction when I picked up your message on my voicemail. I went in a rage to my desk and pulled out the file with all the copies of the hotel and car hire reservations and tore them up. Then I burst into tears.
In other words, I behaved just as badly as you might have expected, but I think you will admit I had some excuse. I was looking forward to our holiday in France together so much. Now I’ve got over that I spend all my time imagining something ghastly might happen to you, but I know that’s just me being stupid again, plus a hyperactive imagination. I don’t think you have any imagination at all, and never worry about anything. Or at least that’s what you always tell me, and of course you will be perfectly all right with your friends around you, and because you’ve done it all before.
