by Nick Thripp
The Code
Nick Thripp
Copyright © 2018 Nick Thripp
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For Hilary
‘Everything we do is governed by a code. The art of harmonious living is to identify the appropriate code and abide by it. Breaking the code results in social failure, ostracism and, in a very few cases, unparalleled power and riches.’
– Prof Ernesto Mutande, Istituto Merluzzo, Etra Panussenad (Trans: I Coglioni).
Contents
Chapter 1 Abbotsford Cemetery, 2007
Chapter 2 Sunday, 29th December, 1963
Chapter 3 John Beart, 1965
Chapter 4 Feston, 1965-68
Chapter 5 Mrs Beart, Summer, 1969
Chapter 6 Kitson & Co, 1970-1975
Chapter 7 London, 1976
Chapter 8 Reunion with John Beart, 1976
Chapter 9 Freewheeling, 1976
Chapter 10 Promotion, 1979
Chapter 11 Rachel, 1979
Chapter 12 Neil, 1980
Chapter 13 Settling down, 1981-82
Chapter 14 Promotion again, 1983
Chapter 15 Seeds are sown, 1983
Chapter 16 The Beart Enterprises Account, 1983
Chapter 17 Surrey, 1985
Chapter 18 Another reunion, 1986
Chapter 19 The Neighbours, 1986
Chapter 20 Martha, 1986
Chapter 21 Divorce, 1986
Chapter 22 The Takeover, 1990
Chapter 23 Neil again, 1994
Chapter 24 A Party at John’s, 1996
Chapter 25 A Death, 1998
Chapter 26 Suzie, 1999
Chapter 27 Senior Partner, 2001
Chapter 28 Sisters, 2001
Chapter 29 Honours, 2003
Chapter 30 Travelling back from Urtica, 2003
Chapter 31 Another Death, 2003-4
Chapter 32 Rachel disappears, 2004
Chapter 33 Dittington, 2004-2005
Chapter 34 Trials and Tribulations, 2005-7
Chapter 35 Rachel, 2007
Chapter 36 Devine Towers, 2008
Chapter 37 The Remains of my Life, 2008-2009
Acknowledgements:
Chapter 1
Abbotsford Cemetery, 2007
What I thought were tears were only raindrops dripping slowly from her hood onto her cheeks. That made more sense. I doubted whether Rachel would have cried for anyone, least of all a detested ex-husband.
Her stony eyes turned towards me.
‘Shall we go now?’
Nodding, I stepped away from the rain-sodden grave, and we started to trudge towards the car park. Wedges of clay stuck to my shoes. I glanced at the order of service. ‘John Beart, 1954-2007’.
I tried to dislodge the clay before easing myself into my black BMW. Rachel didn’t bother. She was already inside, staring ahead, clumps of red earth around her feet in what had been the immaculate foot well of the car.
We drove in silence to a pub we’d seen on our way to the cemetery. Built in the 1970s, its mock Tudor beams, inside and out, gave it an air of false solidity. The smell of cooking fat permeated everything.
Apart from the funeral director and his staff, the only other witnesses to John’s interment had been a handful of bored reporters who had soon abandoned the damp proceedings.
‘Not much of a wake.’ I raised my pint to my lips. A flicker of emotion crossed her face.
‘More than he deserves.’
*
I gave Rachel a lift back to her flat, above an Asian food shop in Solhurst High Street. She paused when opening the car door.
‘Do you want to come in?’
I wondered whether she was being polite. She’d spoken in that curiously intonation-free way in which some people speak a foreign language, her eyes no clue to her true feelings.
‘Well?’
I realised I hadn’t answered her question.
‘OK. Why not?’
The curtains were still drawn and the sitting-room was dark. She switched on the bare overhead bulb, casting a dim light which left most of the room in shadow. In the gloom, I picked out a threadbare blue sofa, a pale grey armchair with a large brown stain on the arm, and another covered by a golden oriental throw. I looked around for some personal touches—paintings, photographs, books, magazines, anything. There weren’t any.
From a cupboard she produced two glasses, and from the fridge a half-empty bottle of Bulgarian white wine. She saw my expression.
‘It’s all I’ve got.’ She poured it out.
I took a sip and coughed.
‘Like it?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘Rough as a badger’s arse.’
A look of recognition flashed across her face at this favourite phrase of mine from when we’d been members of a wine appreciation group, and she smiled for the first time since I’d picked her up that morning. At fifty-five she was still an attractive woman and, in the flat’s dim light, could easily have passed for fifteen years younger.
‘Who would have thought it?’ she said. I knew what she meant. We lapsed into a lengthy silence, during which I stared hard at my glass, not wanting to share what was going through my mind. It could have been so different. Perhaps… I suppressed the half-formed thought and drained the last of my wine.
‘Best be off.’ I hauled myself out of my armchair as she stared into the middle distance, her eyes glazed. I wasn’t sure she’d heard what I’d said, or was even aware I was still there.
Chapter 2
Sunday, 29th December, 1963
I’d seen Mrs Beart before and felt nothing, but on 29th December, 1963, I fell in love with her.
My grandparents had taken me for Sunday lunch to Chez Antoine, and Mrs Beart, accompanied by a burly, thick-necked man, was sitting at a table in the corner. The man, his voice reverberating around the restaurant, ordered a bottle of wine.
‘I’ve smelt more fragrant jockstraps,’ he boomed on sniffing its bouquet. ‘Bring me another.’
At first I thought the scene comic, but my eyes were drawn to Mrs Beart’s face, where deep sadness seemed to lurk beneath her half-smile. The more I stared at her, the more bewitched I became. A week before, my best friend, Neil Wallington, had stumbled across
a portrait of an almost-naked Nell Gwynne by Sir Peter Lely in a dusty art history book, and a succession of lustful boys had made their way to the school library to pore over it. What struck me now was that Mrs Beart bore an uncanny resemblance to Nell Gwynne. As I screened out the tedium of my grandparents’ conversation, I felt an uneasy, pleasurable stirring in my loins.
To avoid embarrassment, I quickly redirected my thoughts to school and, in particular John, Mrs Beart’s son, who was two forms below me at Bedlington House.
He had already earned Neil and me a caning from the headmaster by telling on us when we’d skived off a school cross-country run. Shortly after, also thanks to Beart, we received a pummelling from Ronald Carrot-Top and his Valley Park gang when they found out that Neil and I had knocked down a shelter they were building in the woods.
Fortunately, Roberts, my protégé in his class, tipped us off both times that Beart was the informant so, despite his tears and denials, we exacted full retribution.
The real problem was that Beart didn’t abide by the schoolboy code, even though it was very simple. As Philip, my older brother, said to me the day I started at Bedlington House, there were only two things you had to avoid doing: sneaking and blubbing. Beart did both.
Chapter 3
John Beart, 1965
Two years passed without my seeing Mrs Beart again, and the intensity of my daydreams, in which I’d been simultaneously her saviour, her protector and her slave, all gradually faded leaving only the memory of her in Chez Antoine and the persistently irritating presence of her son to remind me of her existence.
Though Neil and I, now both thirteen and in our last term at Bedlington House, became quite adept at avoiding Beart, sometimes it was impossible. Like that hot May afternoon when several of us bunked off to a secluded spot to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes purloined from our homes, only to be busted by Mr Summerbee, the English teacher, and beaten with a gym shoe. We were puzzled how he’d found out, until Roberts, my ever-trusty informant, whispered Beart’s name to me.
‘It wasn’t me, I swear,’ Beart, his eyes filling with tears, whined to the kangaroo court we’d assembled. Of course, his refusal to own up only increased our anger.
I’m not sure who thought of stripping him down to his underpants and spreading his clothes around the wasp-infested orchard, but it was my idea to smear him with honey stolen from the school kitchen.
Then he was sent to Coventry for a week.
We were sure Beart would have learned his lesson, so it came as quite a surprise when, a week later, he sauntered up to me.
‘I’ll get you for that. And Wallington. You wait and see.’
He was such a little squirt I could have pushed him over, but I restrained myself. He walked off and joined a group of boys we called ‘The Mollies’, who started whispering, pointing in my direction and giggling. It was too much. About to launch myself at them, just in time I saw Mr Summerbee approaching. The Mollies were his favourites. He would take them on excursions after school and sometimes, so it was said, invite them to his houseboat to look at the mollies in his aquarium and enjoy a sumptuous cream tea.
I aimed a deft kick at a stone and sent it scudding into the bushes.
‘He’s a runt, a nothing, a nobody,’ I muttered to myself.
Chapter 4
Feston, 1965-68
Dean College, a gaunt Gothic mansion, rose from the marshland that lay to the north-east of Abbotsford, and was renowned for harbouring pathologically idle boys whose affluent parents were reluctant to consign them to the educational wasteland that was Valley Park Secondary Modern.
I’d failed to get into King Henry’s School, my father’s choice and where, gallingly, Neil had gained a place. Dean College accepted me without even an interview.
Bedlington House had prepared me well for Dean College. The combination of lazy, uninterested teachers with dubious moral and educational backgrounds, the vain and capricious prefects, and the atmosphere of summary and brutal punishment, were all reassuringly familiar. I knew how to survive and kept a low profile. When I wasn’t at College, I was forced to make Feston the centre of my social life, thanks to the local bus service which ceased operations shortly after 8pm.
I’d grown up with most of the youngsters who lived in Feston. We started pairing off, not because of any great romantic inclinations, but because that’s what everyone was doing.
Erica, who worked in the stationer’s shop was, at the age of sixteen, my first serious girlfriend.
It was a cool, windy April evening when I saw her sitting on a bench at the edge of the youth club disco in a pink miniskirt with a duffel coat round her shoulders. She was filing her nails as her friends gyrated with their partners on the dance floor.
There was a convenient lull in the music between tracks.
‘Hello Erica, long time no see. Remember me?’
She glanced up before resuming her manicure.
‘Yes, I know you.’ She was solidly built with brown eyes set too far apart and a nose like a small potato. Even in the strobe lighting, I could make out the freckles splattered across her cheeks.
My Generation started to blare out from two four-foot-high speakers.
‘Do you like The Who?’ I yelled above the noise.
‘Don’t mind them,’ she mouthed.
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, desperate for something else to say, while she examined her nails in the dizzying light for any minor imperfections.
‘What about The Stones?’ I screamed just as the track finished, and several pairs of eyes turned inquisitively towards me.
‘All right, I suppose,’ she muttered, her eyes fixed on the floor.
Satisfaction started playing and I grabbed her hand, dragging her onto the dance floor. There was no one else left and I was determined not to be the only one of my friends to end up as a wallflower. I strutted my Mick Jagger impersonation while she bobbed up and down round the handbag she’d placed in front of her.
At the end of the evening we clinched loosely and kissed. Her lips were limp and her breath smelled faintly of onions, but I was elated at having got off with her.
After a few months of fumbling, we ineptly consummated our relationship on the faded leather upholstery of my father’s cherished Rover 90.
As the weeks passed, our couplings became less frequent. It wasn’t a surprise when, one Wednesday evening, she met me on my way home from school and told me she couldn’t see me the following Friday.
‘I’m washing my hair,’ she said, leaning against the bus stop.
‘You washed it last night. You never do it more than once a week.’
She curled a long strand of it around her forefinger and shuffled her feet.
‘I’m seeing Ronald on Friday.’
‘What, Carrot-Top, the greengrocer’s boy?’ I’d had to endure Ronald and his gang’s insults again as I’d scurried past them at the station the previous week. ‘What can you possibly see in him?’
‘His hair’s auburn and he’s much more romantic than you. And he’s got a steady job. He knows all about vegetables.’
‘I’m sure you two will be very happy together then.’
I wasn’t sorry to be splitting up with Erica; what irked me was that she had chosen that thug. Still, I was determined not to let her see my annoyance so I gave her a broad smile, a farewell peck on the cheek and consoled myself by conjuring up images of the gingery and freckled offspring their union might generate.
Three brief and desultory relationships with other girls followed before I concluded that a few moments physical pleasure snatched in a sea front shelter or, if you were lucky, in a beach hut among the deckchairs, deflated rubber rings and furled up wind breaks, wasn’t worth the bother.
A life of celibacy beckoned.
Chapter 5
Mrs Beart, Summer, 1969
My parents let slip the scandalous news that Mrs Beart had moved into a house in Earl’s Court with her rich developer friend though, as I found out when I answered an advertisement in the newsagent’s, she’d kept her ground floor flat in Feston. Shortly afterwards, arguing that it was the only job available, I overcame my father’s objections and became her weekly gardener.
Though my brief was to cut the grass and keep things tidy, I couldn’t help imagining how beautiful her garden could be, and how sensuously she would stroll through it, her dark hair streaming behind her and her skirt billowing in the fresh sea breeze.
So, after a lot of thought, I drew up a planting plan, costed it, and slipped my proposal through her letter box.
Her reply, enclosing a cheque, arrived in the post three days later saying, ‘Much appreciated, please go ahead’, followed by an illegible signature.
I chose and bedded in the plants carefully. The garden would have white, blue and purple flowers continuously from Spring to Autumn. The bees would love it and I hoped she would too.
I saw her rarely. But, one Saturday morning as I trundled my lawn mower through the side gate, I caught sight of her huddled on a bench under the old pear tree, crying. I was on the point of withdrawing when she looked up and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. I mumbled something incoherent and she nodded as though she’d understood.
As I approached her, through the streaks of mascara I could make out the contours of a livid bruise on the side of her face. She didn’t meet my gaze.
‘I walked into a door.’
It was my turn to nod. She looked so delicate and tremulous I wanted to put my arm around her. Instead, we went inside and she offered me a cup of tea and told me John had won a maths prize at Beauhampton College, the well-known minor public school he attended.
Each week as I negotiated the side gate with the mower, I hoped to catch another glimpse of her. In all, I only saw her another half a dozen times while I was still her gardener. On the last occasion, her face was plastered with thick make-up, presumably to mask another injury. My heart was pumping so hard it pounded in my ears.
