‘She seemed fine,’ I said.
The descent wasn’t steep but it was long and my neck hurt from reaching down to squeeze the brakes. In the flat along the bottom, the fields were being watered and where the spray fell across the road, mixing with dirt, the surface was muddy. Ollie, just ahead of me, had no mudguards and I laughed to myself as a stripe appeared up the middle of his back — a tyre-wide line of mud, brown on black, like the mark of Cain.
Em was my rock. But rocks aren’t amenable, rocks offer no comfort, rocks can crush and kill — and lately she had hardened against me. Perhaps it would be better if we parted. Someone else could give her a child, while — with Ollie dead and Milo off the scene — I made a life with Daisy.
Mens sana in corpore sano, they say. But sometimes, when I’m exercising, wild thoughts invade me and I’m not what I am.
As we climbed the second hill, Ollie pressed ahead. It was another mile before I caught him up at a T-junction.
‘It’s straight across here,’ he said, ‘then down to the sea. OK?’
Though we rode alongside, he seemed to have run out of conversation. ‘How was Daisy?’ he had asked, clearly worried. Had he intuited that he might lose her, even before he died?
As we neared the coast, the landscape changed from grassland to bracken, a whiff of brine mixed in with sage and thyme. Bank holiday Sunday was the highpoint of the summer season, but it was early morning, and the beach we were heading for remote — the last half-mile an unmade road — and when we finally hit the shingle (a hit it was, the small smooth stones subsiding under our tyres and stopping us in a flurry and a smack), there were only a few sad fishermen to see, their angled green umbrellas serving as parasols. We dismounted and wheeled our bikes over the shingle, stopping at the tideline and sitting down, each of us with a drinks bottle unclipped from the frame, the water tepid and tasting of plastic but refreshing for all that. Our bikes sat upended behind us, like two pairs of giant spectacles, no breeze to stir the wheels, the sea a putrid turquoise. With our shoes and socks off, we sat throwing pebbles at a wooden stick (one point for hitting, three for knocking it over, first to twenty), a game that might have become serious and which I suggested, only half joking, might replace the bike race, but which Ollie, 17—16 behind, abruptly terminated. Time was short, he said, and we ought to go. I cooled my toes before we did. The waves were too languid to call breakers, flopping pathetically at my feet.
‘Ready?’ Ollie said.
‘Ready.’
‘First one to the house makes tea.’
‘Do you want Assam or Earl Grey?’
‘Fuck you.’
Up the unmade road, a fisherman was arriving with his gear and stared as we panted by. With those long legs of his, Ollie had all the advantages, and I was tempted to let him go. His morale would suffer terribly if I beat him again, and by losing I could atone for last night. Yet I owed it to him to compete. He would expect no less of me.
At the T-junction he was ahead by fifty yards or so, a gap
I could easily narrow if I chose, though he, for his part, could surely open it up again, since — terminally ill or not — he seemed to have plenty in reserve.
It was a cat-and-mouse game. Competitive, certainly, but not life-and-death. I wanted to win but there would be benefits in losing. So I told myself till we reached the second hill.
In retrospect, I may have misread what happened. I’d seen how quickly Ollie could negotiate hills, but he made no move on the first one and I’d little difficulty keeping him in my sights. On the plateau, I closed right up, into his slipstream. We were hunched low for maximum speed, our bodies flat against the frame, our heads beneath our shoulders. Glancing round, he seemed surprised to see me, then smiled. There are friendly smiles, and sarcastic smiles, and because I couldn’t believe Ollie was feeling friendly — with me up his backside, not shaken off — I decided he was taunting me: Wimp, sneak, get alongside, come on you puny whipster, overtake me and set the pace for a while, why should I do all the work here? Provoked, I pedalled harder, my heart revving and my breath coming in clumps. As I crept up by his rear wheel, I was so focused on passing him I didn’t see what happened, just felt the jolt, the judder of something striking my front wheel, an object large enough to tilt the bike to one side and make me career off left, braking, wrestling, struggling to stay upright, with the grass verge rushing at me and a metal fence which I knew would smash my skull and be the death of me because I wasn’t wearing a helmet, an omission which was surely Ollie’s fault for having offered me one so half-heartedly. All this in an instant before I skidded to a halt.
I stood there trembling but unharmed. The bike was upright, and whatever struck the wheel hadn’t broken the spokes. I looked ahead to where Ollie was streaming up the hill. I looked behind to where the offending object lay in the road: a wooden branch rather than a metal rod, but there were no trees around and I hadn’t seen it lying in the road. To examine it would take time and Ollie was already way ahead.
I felt shaky, like someone in a road crash too shocked to recall what led up to it. But I did remember Ollie’s face, and that smile — sinister, even malevolent — and then the bang to the wheel which, were I not an experienced cyclist, would surely have sent me headlong.
Ruthless though he was, I couldn’t believe my old friend had thrown a heavy branch or swung an iron bar with the intention of wrecking my spokes or, worse, of knocking me off. I couldn’t believe it and yet I did. That he’d not looked round, even once, only clinched it.
I set off in pursuit, thinking back to the night before — Daisy’s dreamy face, the flow of her body, her nails raking my back in excitement. She must have been waiting for me, unmarried, all these years. To Ollie — a cheat and liar — I owed nothing, not even guilt. I’d already taken Daisy off him. Now I would take ten grand off him, too.
Propelled by rage and self-righteousness, I caught him on the far side of the hill. For a moment, his manner disarmed me. He was ambling, barely pedalling at all in fact, and as I drew alongside he smiled — with no hint of malice — and said: ‘You all right? I was beginning to worry.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, ‘no thanks to you.’
‘Fighting talk, eh? Good.’
‘You bet I’m fighting.’
‘Great.’
I couldn’t be sure Ollie had tried to make me crash. But a sense of outrage fired me up. Twenty years back, he’d stolen Daisy from me. He’d not scruple to steal Em from me, either. He deserved to be beaten.
And I think I could have beaten him. There were only four miles left, along the flat, and I was pumped up, adrenalin coursing through me, the shock of my near catastrophe sending a chill to combat the heat. For two miles or so I set the pace, with Ollie in my slipstream biding his time. When he finally made his move, I pretended I’d no energy left and tucked in behind, calculating how long to wait before accelerating past again. Whether I took him half a mile out or outsprinted him up the farmhouse drive seemed an irrelevance, since I felt in control. Even when he upped the pace and — as I responded — my foot slipped off the pedal (which painfully shinned me and left a cross-hatch of scratches up my leg), the slip was over in an instant, and I felt confident about clawing him back. Why I didn’t — why Ollie drew steadily away — still baffles me. I suppose that I hit the wall marathon runners talk about. Or that I was suffering from sunstroke, dehydration and lack of sleep. Or lacked the sadism to humiliate him a second time. He was in my sights and I didn’t give up till the last two hundred yards. But when he turned into the drive, I knew it was over: at that point he could have fallen off and still got home ahead of me. Easing off, I leaned down to examine my wheel again. The spokes were intact, the tyres fully pumped up. Hardest of all to admit, the object that struck my hub had probably not been thrown by Ollie. He had beaten me fair and square.
I no longer felt guilty about Daisy. Fucking her was due punishment for all the times Ollie had fucked with me. We were even.
; I skidded to a halt then flopped forward on the bike frame, like a rower collapsing on his oars at the end of a boat race.
‘One—all,’ he said. ‘When’s the decider?’
As a rule I don’t like discussing money; few Englishmen do. Perhaps if I earned more I’d be less inhibited. But teachers are paid badly, as everyone knows, and primary-school teachers — especially those, like me, unfairly denied promotion — do worst of all. All I’ve ever wanted is for Em and me to have what other middle-class professionals take for granted — a decent house, foreign holidays, a new car now and then. Our salaries alone could never buy those. To live as we do, I’ve had to raise our income by other means.
I’m not a big-time gambler compared to some I know. But my father instilled the habit when he used me as his runner. And it persisted at university and beyond. Betting shops, poker games, fruit and slot machines are in the genes. And more recently, there have been websites, so various and alluring and easy to use. I began with just the one, but playing on several makes more sense, just as spreading your bets does — safety in numbers. It’s the sites that have run me into debt, I don’t mind admitting. I had hoped to wean myself off them during the summer. All that cycling, golf and going to the gym was meant to distract me. It didn’t work. Every afternoon I stopped off somewhere for a flutter or roll. And at home in the evening there was the Internet. It needn’t have been like that. I could have cooked supper, taken Em to the pub, sat watching television. But most nights she either fell asleep on the sofa or went to her room to work, and that’s when temptation came back in. Marooned, I’d turn on the PC for something to do, and before I knew it, three hours later, I’d be down a few hundred quid, or occasionally, gloriously, up a few hundred, my finances radically altered without my even having to leave the house.
It’s not a sickness. I’m no addict. I could stop tomorrow. But if I stopped I’d no longer experience the moments of triumph. ‘You’re afraid of happiness,’ Em once said. She has a point. I think happiness is overrated. A man should experience the full range of emotions, bad as well as good. But I’m not afraid of happiness. I’ve known happiness on slots and fruits, and I’ve known it on sites. And once you’ve tasted it, life’s never the same. When you’re on a roll, flush with dosh from an ace and king. Or when you’re skint and an inch from quitting, but there’s a horse at 50—1 you put your last tenner on and it comes in. Those are moments stronger than love.
When Em first discovered my habit she was upset, naturally — not so much because she had to bail me out (with a couple of thousand she had been saving for a holiday) but because I’d kept the truth from her. She felt betrayed, she said, as if she’d been living with a stranger. I promised to give up, and I did, for nearly a year. The second time I was down less than a thousand, a piddling sum. But before Em agreed to clear the debt she made me promise to contact Gamblers Anonymous. I did look at their site — a site for people addicted to sites — but having read the stuff on the noticeboard I knew it wasn’t for me. I’m a middle-class professional in a responsible job, not a loser. The common refrain from the partners of addicts goes: He doesn’t know when to stop. I’m not like that. I know my limits. If I go further than seems rational, it’s not from weakness but from strength — because I know my luck’s about to turn, with a 27 on the wheel, say, or a 9 of diamonds.
Most punters are like my dad. They tell you they’ve studied the form on the racing pages. But for all the good it does them, they might as well close their eyes and use a pin. The same with poker: when my dad played with his cronies, he used to reckon he knew which cards they were holding from their expressions — yet he’d finish out of pocket every time. I’m not like that. I have a system. One of my tricks is to use variants on 1729, which (as all mathematicians know) is a special number. On a roulette wheel 7 sits next to 29. And whenever I’ve won with four of a kind in stud poker, it’s been with aces, twos, sevens or nines. It’s a matter of keeping your head and sticking to the laws of probability. Did you realise that with two dice there are six ways of throwing seven but only five ways of throwing six? Knowledge like that can change your life.
If I lost my way in the weeks before Badingley, Campbell Foster and the tribunal were to blame. I had been looking forward to a weekend away because temptation would be removed: out in the sticks there would be no betting shops or Internet, and even if there were I’d be too proud to frequent them with Daisy and Ollie around.
Yes, Badingley would be a break, I thought — till Ollie conned me into making the biggest bet of my life.
There was a surprise when we entered the living room. Though it wasn’t yet ten, Em and Daisy were sitting there fully dressed. And opposite them, on the sofa (the sofa where I’d lain with Daisy a few hours earlier, and which I imagined might still be damp with our exertions), sat a stranger. He was a man of about sixty, small in build and with the kind of face usually seen only on toby jugs: bulging eyes, slobbery lips, bulbous nose and raw-red cheeks. A local tradesman, I thought, come here to flog us fish or firewood, until I took in his suit, with its cheap city sheen. He looked awkward in it, not as a farm worker might, wearing it as Sunday best, nor because the day was too hot for ties, but because the boldness of the stripes and double-breasted collar overwhelmed him.
‘Darling,’ Daisy said, addressing Ollie not me, ‘Mr Charles is here about the house.’
‘It’s Quarles, in fact, with a Q,’ the toby-jug man said, standing to shake hands. ‘Albert Quarles.’ His left heel was built up, I noticed — three or four times as thick as the right.
‘Ah, our landlord,’ Ollie said. ‘We didn’t know you were in Badingley.’
‘I’m not, as a rule,’ Mr Quarles said. ‘But I felt it imperative to pay a visit.’
‘Imperative’ sounded curious, coming from him. But it worked on Ollie.
‘Do please sit down,’ he said. ‘I trust the girls have offered you coffee.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Mr Quarles said, nodding at the cafetière on the table. ‘And excellent it is too.’
‘Right then. How can we help?’
I could tell from his excessive politeness that Ollie was pissed off. He was hot, he was hungry and he wanted a shower.
‘I had two reasons for calling. First, to check that you were happy with the accommodation.’
‘Perfectly,’ Ollie said, not looking at Daisy.
‘Because I understood from Mrs Banks you had some complaints.’
I remembered Daisy describing Mrs Banks as a battleaxe.
‘Whatever gave her that idea?’
‘She said you said that the house looked damp and unlived in.’
‘Me? Really?’
‘And that the owner should be strung up.’
‘Not at all.’
‘She was adamant.’
Ollie shook his head, and the two of them sat in silence, not sure where to go next, until Daisy spoke.
‘That must have been me, Mr Quarles.’ I looked forward to her giving him what for but all she said was: ‘When we arrived it was raining heavily and there were a couple of leaks.’
‘Leaks? I’m not aware of any leaks.’
‘Well, they sounded like leaks. The point is it was late, and dark, and I was tired after the journey, and not at my best, and I may have said something I didn’t really mean.’
‘I don’t often rent the place out,’ Mr Quarles said, ready to be placated, ‘and I pride myself on satisfying clients.’
‘We’re very happy here,’ Ollie said.
‘And we’re sorry for upsetting Mrs Banks.’
Daisy isn’t usually deferential. Was she afraid of a scene? Desperate to get shot of Mr Quarles? Or out of sorts from the previous night?
‘That’s all right,’ Mr Quarles said. ‘Between ourselves, Mrs Banks can be oversensitive.’
‘You mean she dragged you all the way here to throw us out?’ Ollie said.
‘No. I had a second reason for calling. I was intrigued by what you said when yo
u booked, Mr Moore.’
‘I’ll get more coffee,’ Daisy said, now the discussion had moved on. Her face looked pale, her hair lacking its usual sheen. Had last night been too intense for her? Doubtless she’d lain awake, guilty and fretful, then been forced downstairs by Mr Quarles’s arrival. Em’s presence must have been difficult too: there she was, full of goodwill, helping to cope with the strange intruder, unaware that Daisy had seduced me.
‘In your email you said you’d stayed here before,’ Mr Quarles said.
‘That’s right, as a teenager.’
‘Under the name Moore?’
‘Yes. My father’s name.’
‘It’s odd. My father used the place as a holiday home and only let it out three or four times a year at most. I’m the same.’
‘We were lucky then.’
‘He kept a visitors’ book. When I looked through I couldn’t find the name Moore.’
‘I recognise the house, the barn, everything. We were here in 1976.’
‘I remember that summer,’ Mr Quarles said. ‘My wife and I came with the children.’
‘Not in late August. That’s when we were here.’
‘I suppose it’s possible. Bit of a mystery, though.’
‘Not to me,’ Ollie said.
Embarrassed by the impasse, Em began asking Mr Quarles about his family and I got up and left the room. My plan was to snatch a word with Daisy — even a kiss. But as I entered the kitchen, she swept past with the coffee. To return would have looked odd, so I walked out onto the terrace. No sign of Milo. It was too much to hope he had returned to London; maybe he’d gone out for the day.
I felt embarrassed for Ollie. The story of finding the house had seemed fishy from the start and now Mr Quarles had made it look even less plausible. Perhaps the tumour was disrupting Ollie’s normal brain functions or had skewed his memory. The need to devise fantastic stories was disturbing nonetheless.
Rufus trotted past as I stood brooding, and I followed him as far as the orchard fence, through which he squeezed in search of rabbit scents in the field. Shorn of its wheat cover, the scorched earth had split open, like crazy paving or shattered glass. I called Rufus back before the stubble could lacerate his pads. Leaving the orchard, we ambled to the end of the drive. Most of the blackberries in the hedge had shrivelled to ash but those lower down looked more promising — until I touched them and they imploded, black corpse blood staining my palms. I knelt and wiped my fingers in the grass, like a killer removing the evidence. When I looked up again, there was Mr Quarles, tottering towards us on his raised heel. It seemed to take for ever, as if the house had him in its force field and wouldn’t let go.
The Last Weekend Page 17
