Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  Ford threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Well, of course I’m a snob, dearie! I believe that people who’ve worked hard to achieve something are better than people who haven’t. I’m also an elitist, because I believe that taking the trouble to learn how to do something makes you better than someone who’s spent their time playing video games. I believe that knowledge is power, and that power is better exercised by people with some acumen than by people who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.

  ‘I believe that all men are created equal,’ he went on, warming to his subject. ‘But for the next sixty-odd years, what they become is largely down to themselves. Not everyone is cut out to be a mover and shaker. Not everyone wants to be one. But if nobody wanted to be one, the world would stagnate. It may be politically correct to think that some hippy making daisy-lace in a log cabin in the Forest of Dean is as important as the managing director of a big multinational company, but it simply isn’t true. No one dies from the lack of daisy-lace. People do die if there’s no power to heat their homes, or nobody keeping the drinking water clean, or no one to keep the garbage from festering. All life is precious. But some lives are only precious to their owners, and some lives are important to thousands of other people as well.

  ‘That’s what I believe. Call me a snob if you like. I think of myself as a realist. I suspect most people actually feel the same way, but haven’t the guts to say so.’

  Hazel wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That most people believed in the intrinsic worth of all human beings, and recognised that who they were was not defined by what they were. That it was not normal to value people according to their dollar-earning capacity.

  But Oliver Ford was a professional communicator, skilled at marshalling arguments and presenting them both forcefully and persuasively, and Hazel recognised – and it gave her an odd little thrill of satisfaction, as if his talent reflected credit on her – that anyone who went up against him in a debating contest was going to lose on points. He was clever and articulate. Perhaps he believed what he said, perhaps he just enjoyed playing devil’s advocate. Hazel could disagree with every word Ford said, and still admire his skill as a presenter.

  ‘OK,’ she decided, trying not to smile. ‘Ground rules. My friends are my friends. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to spend time with them, but you don’t insult them, at least not in front of me. For the record, Saturday isn’t a drug dealer. To the very best of my knowledge – and this is something I do know something about – he isn’t a drug user. He’s a decent kid who had some bad luck, and I’m helping him get back on his feet.

  ‘Also, my house may not be in the smartest part of Norbold, and even the smartest part of Norbold may not be smart enough for you, but it’s clean and it’s warm and it’s mine, and you may think you’re being funny but if you disrespect my home it feels as if you’re disrespecting me.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent together, Oliver. But you have to understand that I don’t belong to you. You don’t get to say what happens in my life – where I live, who I live with, what I do with my time.’

  Half contrite, half offended himself, he murmured, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Hazel. ‘Then let’s try again. Where are you going to stay while you look for this palace suitable to your image? There’s still time to change your mind and say you’ll come home with me, as long as you’ll at least pretend to be grateful.’

  Ford looked at her, head slightly on one side, as if he’d never come across anyone quite like her before. As kind, yet as forthright. As feminine, yet as strong. Who clearly enjoyed his company, but wasn’t prepared to tolerate the excesses of his personality.

  Being with her was a bit like being with his mother. But when she wasn’t telling him to mind his manners, checking that he’d got a clean handkerchief and reminding him to visit the little boys’ room before going out, she made him feel more alive than he had in years. He wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t a particularly inventive lover, and he didn’t feel other men’s gaze turning his way in envy when he walked with her. Apart from the haircut, she was an essentially conventional young woman, and Oliver Ford tended to look for something exceptional in a companion.

  Perhaps it was the very fact that Hazel Best remained steadfastly unimpressed by his celebrity status. Many of the women he’d known had claimed to be unmoved by the doors it opened, the envy it provoked, the way crowds tended to gather around him and then part as if he were Moses dipping his toe in the Red Sea. But in Ford’s experience, all of them were seduced eventually. Perhaps Hazel would be too. Certainly it would be interesting to find out.

  Aloud he said, ‘I’ve already got somewhere.’

  Hazel stared at him in rank disbelief. ‘How? We’ve not left London since we got back.’

  ‘My agent,’ Ford said smugly. ‘Miriam’s been looking for me. She e-mailed me some details. I’m going to look at a couple of houses this afternoon, and I shall take one of them. Will you come?’

  Hazel demurred. ‘I have to get back. It’s time I got back to work. And I promised I’d meet this nanny of Gabriel’s.’

  ‘Please will you come?’ said Ford.

  Still she hesitated. Ford waited. Everyone said yes to him in the end.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Hazel.

  TWENTY

  Purley Grange occupied a wooded dell eight miles from Norbold. The name was inscribed on a slate plaque almost completely obscured by ivy: they drove past it three times before realising the gap in the hedge was actually a driveway. From the road there was no sign of the house. But there were new tracks in the mud showing someone had been here recently, so they followed them, the crowding trees closing darkly behind them as the drive veered.

  ‘The place has been abandoned,’ ventured Hazel. ‘It’ll need months of work before it’s fit to live in.’

  ‘Miriam knows what I want,’ said Ford confidently. ‘She wouldn’t have sent me here if it was a wreck. She knows I don’t do DIY.’

  Up ahead the sky broadened as the trees drew aside, and a final flourish of the drive – track, rather, its gravel long since compacted into the mud – revealed the house. Ford took his foot off the gas and let the car cruise to a halt while they studied it.

  It wasn’t what either of them was expecting. Hazel had been wrong: the place hadn’t been abandoned, or even neglected to any extent that showed from here. The roof was good, the woodwork recently painted, and someone had polished the windows until they sparkled in the October sunshine.

  Ford had been expecting something grander. It wasn’t a mansion but a two-storey brick building with gables in unexpected places and dormer windows like eyebrows in the roof. There was a little wooden porch round the front door, and a long wooden bench against it looking out over the garden. The plants were dying back now, but someone had devoted skill to their care, and the lawn had been recently mown. It made a charming picture.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ asked Ford, head tilted impishly.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Hazel was already out of the car.

  The key had been left under a flowerpot; which outraged Hazel’s instincts for crime prevention, until she remembered that they’d had trouble finding Purley Grange even though they were looking for it. It would probably have been safe to leave the front door wide open, and a bottle of whisky and a stack of unmarked banknotes on the hall table.

  ‘It’s Arts & Crafts, isn’t it? Nineteen hundred, nineteen ten – something like that.’ Hazel had only recently developed an interest in property. She had been born an army brat, living in married quarters that changed every couple of years but all looked the same. Then her father retired to become handy-man on a small country estate in Cambridgeshire, settling his family in the gate-lodge that came with the job. After that, Hazel had a succession of rented rooms convenient for university, her teaching job, the police studies course and her Norbold posting, until circumstances nudged her into renting the litt
le house in Railway Street. A few weeks of buying curtains and slapping on emulsion had her talking like the editor of Ideal Home.

  Ford was right: the house was ready to move into. The rooms were furnished, mostly with antiques, the cupboards stocked with pots, pans and cutlery, the linen-press with linens. There was even warm water in the taps. It was as if the owners had nipped to the shops shortly before their visitors arrived.

  ‘Are you sure this isn’t somebody’s home?’ asked Hazel, feeling like an interloper.

  ‘It is somebody’s home,’ said Ford, ‘but he’s abroad for two years. Something to do with the EU. He’s arranged for a local woman to come in twice a week to keep the chill off, but ideally he’d like someone living here.’

  ‘You?’

  Ford smiled. ‘Perhaps. Do you like it?’

  Hazel tried to be sensible. ‘It’s pretty remote. You’d be stranded if anything happened to your car.’

  Ford looked surprised. ‘If anything happened to my car, I’d buy another one. And actually, it feels more remote than it is. Wittering is only four miles in that direction.’ He pointed. ‘And Norbold only about as far again. Fifteen minutes – twenty if you get behind a tractor. It isn’t that much of a commute.’

  Now Hazel was staring. ‘Commute? You mean me? I’m not going to be living here.’

  Ford smiled. ‘Can I persuade you to think about that for a little longer?’

  She had been effectively living with him for a fortnight. But that was abroad and then in London – and London was another country for someone from Norbold. She had imagined that when the holiday was over, she would return to her house and Ford to whatever he decided to rent, and they would meet up after work. She hadn’t realised he hoped to move her into Purley Grange along with his books, his computer and his suitcases.

  She did as he asked and considered it now. ‘You don’t even know how long you’re going to be here. If Emerald can reschedule the filming, you could be finished by the end of the month. What will you do then – throw me out on my ear? Send me back to Railway Street and Saturday?’

  Ford gave an expansive shrug. ‘Nothing’s forever. Well, not many things. What will I do when you find someone as smart, handsome and rich as me, but ten years younger? I’ll remember you fondly and get on with my life.

  ‘I don’t know how long it’ll take to finish filming, or even when we’ll be able to get started. I don’t know what I’ll do next. But the house is to let for two years, and if you want me to, I’ll take it for two years. You can live here and work in Norbold, if you insist on working; I’ll shoot off when I’m needed elsewhere, come back when I’m not. If we’re still a good thing after two years it might be time to buy something anyway.’

  Once again he’d managed to surprise her. It wasn’t exactly a proposal, but it was rather more than a proposition. While Hazel had been thinking of Ford as an extended holiday, he’d been thinking of her as at least a medium-term commitment.

  She found a window-seat and lowered herself carefully. She picked her words even more carefully. ‘Oliver, I think you know – I hope you know – how much I enjoy being with you. The whole Arabian Nights thing was a riot, the sort of thing I never do, never even think of doing. I’ll never forget it.

  ‘But now you’re talking of us setting up home together, and that’s a whole different ball-game. A holiday is a break from reality, and it comes with a natural time limit. What you’re suggesting now is that we create a new reality, with the intention that it should be a lasting change. And I’m not ready for that. I like my life – my ordinary life, where I go into work and dodge terrorists and come home to Saturday’s laundry dripping in the bath. I’m not sure I’m ready to give it up in order to be half of a couple. It’s too … grown up for me. I’m not ready to be somebody’s significant other.

  ‘I’ve never been much of a party girl. I like to let my hair down – well,’ she amended ruefully, ‘I used to like to let my hair down – as much as the next person, but at heart I’ve always been pretty conventional. At heart, I still think of a family as being a man, a woman, two-point-four children and a cocker spaniel. If I was to set up home with you, or anyone, that’s what I’d be looking for. I never have gone in for quick-change, flavour-of-the-month relationships. If I want to be with someone at all, I want to try and make a go of it.

  ‘This sounds as if I’m asking you to marry me,’ she said, looking up with a quick grin. ‘Relax: that’s not what I’m saying. We aren’t a good enough match to be talking about forever. We’ve had a lot of fun – at least, I’ve had a lot of fun, and I hope you have too – but it would be a mistake to read too much into that. It was a great holiday. I never for a moment thought it was the beginning of the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Is it the age difference that bothers you?’ Ford made it sound like an accusation. All the proprietorial pleasure with which he’d shown her round the house had gone from his manner, leaving him frowning.

  Hazel shook her head. ‘The age difference doesn’t trouble me. Nor does the fact that you’re rich and famous and I’m not. We’re just very different people, Oliver. And that’s fine for ten days in the sun, and a few more in a smart hotel. But if we tried to base a committed relationship on nothing more than a fortnight’s fun, I think we’d break each other’s hearts. We’d each be expecting things that the other couldn’t possibly deliver.’

  ‘I don’t expect anything of you,’ insisted Ford.

  ‘Of course you do! You expect that I’ll keep you company when it’s more fun than being alone, and keep out of your way when you need your own space. You don’t expect me to go to work with no clear idea of when, or in what state, I’ll come home. You expect that I’ll cook us a nice meal on a Sunday night. You don’t expect that, if the phone goes just as we light the candles, I’ll dash off and leave you to eat your beef Wellington on your own. That’s not what you need in a partner. You’ll come to resent it. You’ll want me to give up my job and let you provide for us.

  ‘And that isn’t going to happen, Oliver. The life I have is too valuable to me. Let’s stay friends. Let’s enjoy a nice meal out from time to time, and a dirty weekend if the fancy takes us, but don’t let’s make promises we’re not going to be able to keep. I don’t want to disappoint you. I don’t want us to end up angry at one another.’

  If he’d snapped back with what was in his mind right then, that would have been the end of them. She’d have made him drive her back to Norbold and never seen him again. Ford had the sense to swallow the surge of recrimination before even a word of it was spoken, and say nothing for the minute and a half it took him to consider what she’d said and formulate a response.

  Then he said, quietly, ‘Hazel, I’ve had a great time too. It has been fun – that’s exactly what it’s been. I don’t remember the last time I enjoyed myself so much, and with so little obvious reason. We didn’t do anything very special. We didn’t spend a fortune going places and doing things neither of us had ever felt the need to do before. We didn’t do anything very much. So what I was enjoying was you.

  ‘You say you’re ordinary, but actually you’re anything but. There aren’t many people as completely without artifice as you. With you, what you see is what you get – and that’s incredibly rare in my business. Being with you is like opening the windows to my soul and letting the fresh air blow through.’

  She smiled at that, and he smiled back.

  ‘You say you’re not ready for commitment. Hazel, that’s fine. I can wait until you are. I may be older than you, but I’m not in my dotage! I can afford to be patient. One advantage of getting older – there aren’t many, but there are some – is that you know your own mind. You know what you want, and how to get it, and whether it’s likely to be worth the trouble. I want us to stay together. As friends, yes, but more than that. I want you to be the last thing I see when I fall asleep at night. I want to wake up with your curlers poking me in the eye—’

  ‘I do not wear curlers!’ Haze
l interjected indignantly.

  ‘I don’t want anything from you. I just want you to be there. I want a home – a proper home, not just a succession of places to live – and I want you to be the warm heart of it. And if I have to wait until you realise it’s what you want too, that’s what I’ll do.’

  ‘But Oliver …’ Her voice had sunk to little more than a whisper. ‘What if it isn’t what I want? What if you wait, and I never come to feel the same way?’

  ‘Well …’ He reflected. ‘I suppose I’ll just bill you for my time and expenses.’ He grinned in delight as he saw her think, just for a moment, that he meant it. ‘You don’t get many guarantees in this life. You do what you think is for the best, and most of the time you don’t even know if you were right or not. If things work out, you think you were clever. If they don’t, you think you were unlucky; but you never know what would have happened if you’d chosen differently.

  ‘Of course I can’t know that a time will come when you feel the same way about me as I feel about you. It’s an act of faith. I believe I can make you feel that way. I may be wrong. If so, we’ll go our separate ways. And it’ll be awful. But I’d rather risk losing you than be too scared to give us a chance.’

  There was a long pause. Then he said it again. ‘Give us a chance.’

  All her life Hazel Best had been the sensible one. The sensible girl at school; the one who could be trusted with the pencil sharpener and the milk money. The dependable teenager, who made sure everyone got home before the parents organised a search party. The reliable probationary constable, who could be counted on to defuse difficult situations rather than exacerbate them.

  And common sense said, This isn’t what you wanted. Common sense said, If someone had asked you three months ago, you would never have said it was your ambition to shack up with a celebrity! Common sense said, You could be getting in over your head here. And there’s no need to. You don’t need what he’s offering. You were content before you ever met him.