Charlie Had His Chance

by Ellis Major

  “But you got a certificate did you?” Lance demanded.

  “Yes, International Studies I think it was.”

  “You think! Charles Tiptree BA, then.”

  Charlie shrugged. “It’s not something I boast about. Like I said, it was more to keep company with some of the guys from school.”

  “They work do they?”

  “Mostly. I know what you’re thinking, Lance. It’s something of a con, as the name implies to the true cognoscenti. Does anyone check out the college properly or not when you’ve put Oxford on your CV?”

  “But you don’t work, Charlie, or are you like me, ‘between jobs’?”

  Charlie smiled. “No, my parents were pretty well off. They got killed in an accident a few years back and I ended up with a Trust Fund to my name – all very complicated the Trust business. I got this flat, too, and then when my Aunt died I ended up with another Trust Fund and her Bentley. I didn’t inherit the chauffeur; he retired on what she left him.”

  Lance nodded. “So you’re what, twenty three? Graduated three years ago, right, as we used to do our exams a year early? Never worked?”

  “That’s right,” Charlie confirmed. “I know. It sounds pathetic, Lance, but why work if I don’t have to? There are plenty of unemployed people out there who need a job. I don’t.”

  “What do you do all day?” Lance suddenly snorted. “You go swanning round Victoria looking for losers, or what?”

  Charlie shifted a little uneasily in his chair and laughed awkwardly. “I suppose I go out a lot,” he explained. “But not to Victoria. I’m out late and that means I don’t get up that early.”

  “So that’s why Magda was so gobsmacked this morning? I thought it was me freaking her out.”

  Charlie smiled. “Oh hardly, Lance. Magda and I barely ever see each other. I do like music, Lance. I suppose the big thing in my life is music. My mother used to play the piano and she started me off on it when I could barely walk. After they died, well I couldn’t really have given it up if I’d wanted to. It would have betrayed her memory, you know.”

  “Yeah,” said Lance. “I know all about that. Never seems to worry the bastard politicians, though. They’ll make their noises one minute and take you out with the job only half done the next. All those blokes died for nothing then, didn’t they.”

  “Yes,” muttered Charlie quickly. He wanted to steer away from a possible shouty subject. “I sing a bit too. I can sit down at the piano and an afternoon is gone before I know it.”

  “These are flats. What about the noise? That stupid old bat we saw yesterday must moan if you fart too loudly.”

  Charlie laughed. “Not yet. I’m careful what I eat, but I’ve had to double the insulation under the carpet and I have to be careful not to open the windows too wide in the Summer. As for playing beyond about eight at night, forget it.”

  “So you’re good are you, with all this practice?”

  “I’m alright.”

  “Why not take it up professionally?”

  “I do play a bit for friends sometimes. Someone I know, Mary, has these Soirées. I play at those but, well, if I played professionally it would be in the evenings I expect, and that would cramp the social life.”

  There was that sudden flash of focus. Lance’s dark eyes were on Charlie for a second “Yeah, Charlie, what about the social life? Lot of fun, lot of women I should think. This flat, a man of money, own Trust Fund, you’d have to fight them off wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m not that unusual in being fairly well off,” Charlie said slowly. He supposed it was a reasonable enough expectation. There might well be a series of doped-up bimbos floating around in search of a fresh supply of rolling notes.

  The truth was that Charlie had a strange relationship with the opposite sex. He liked women, liked them a lot, more than men in many ways. They were, when he got to know them, generally more open, happier to talk about a wider range of subjects, those that he called friends, anyway. Charlie had no great intellectual pretensions and he had, formerly, found fascinating the brainless prattle of even the floatiest airhead. Handbag shades and sizes, shoe heel heights, the size and nature of accessories, texts for his opinion on which type of coffee to drink, whether a hair tint was a shade too daring - it had been a fascinating world to him. It was now becoming, even before the advent of Lance, rather less inspiring. To spend hours in the company of such a creature, however superficially attractive she might be, no longer held out much allure at all. Those women he really liked were clever - and this was the nub of the Charlie’s problem.

  “The ladies,” he sighed, as Lance waited. “I have friends who are ladies, Lance, I really do. That may sound strange but it’s true. Perhaps it’s easier these days than it used to be. The thing is that’s great, and with any of them I wouldn’t want it to be any more than that because it would ruin the friendship. But...”

  “You haven’t met the right girl, Charlie. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I think I have now and again, but I’m obviously not the right boy.”

  “What, never went anywhere?”

  Charlie laughed. “Never started, Lance. I don’t know. Women never seem to take me that seriously, not the ones I’d want to anyway. What about you?”

  “No time for all that,” Lance told him bluntly.

  “It must be hard,” Charlie said. “In your situation, if you’re married or in a relationship.”

  “Yeah, harder for them. They never know what you’re doing, so they have to worry all the time. When you’re in the thick of it you know whether you’re safe or not. They have no idea.”

  “What a life,” Charlie sighed.

  “Yeah,” Lance gave the faintest of smiles, the first Charlie had seen. “I got out because I thought my luck wouldn’t last. Look at me now, drinking too much, I’ve walked out on my parents and I’m sitting opposite a bloke from school I hardly know.”

  Charlie didn’t like to ask but he wondered how it was that someone so obviously disturbed could have been left in charge of other soldiers – unless they were all like it. Lance seemed to guess what Charlie was thinking.

  “I wasn’t like this out there,” he said. “You’re all in it together. You support each other. When you sleep, you’re too tired to have nightmares. Out there, you’re busy all the time. It’s when you come out you have time for all this crap, thinking about it, having it prey on your mind. You don’t have to keep it together any longer. You have no responsibilities, you have no banter, you have no one who knows what it’s like, and it’s easy to lose touch with anyone who’s still in because they’re wrapped up in it.”

  Charlie nodded sympathetically.

  “Look Charlie,” Lance told him. “I was pretty dazed yesterday and it was good of you to help me out but you’ve got your own life to lead and I need to get out of it.”

  “Why is it you can’t talk to your parents?” Charlie asked suddenly, ignoring what Lance had said. “It was something your father said. You talked to me, though.”

  Lance sighed and hung his head. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I want to protect them maybe. I think I can get through this with a bit of time and space, but they go on about finding something to do as if I’m some workshy dosser. I want to tell them. I want to scream at them but I can’t, so I tried to get out of the house as much as I could.” He snorted. “But you can’t stay out of the house twenty four hours a day.”

  “Lance,” Charlie told him. “Look, if it helps to talk to me then stay here, at least for a few days. It’s not as if I’m short of space and I don’t have a lot of work commitments do I?”

  Lance’s eyes abruptly bored into Charlie’s. “You mean that? You’re not just being polite and hoping I’ll fuck off back to where I came?”

  “No, Lance. I do mean it. We can go day by day and if I’ve had enough I can tell you. Deal?”

  ~~~

  That third morning, as she was putting away her shopping, Magda felt that the atmosphere had
lightened. Charlie seemed less fatigued and Lance actually spoke to her for the first time. Previously he had merely nodded or grunted.

  Magda,” he asked with that scary stare from his dark, dark eyes. “Have you ever heard Charlie play the piano and sing?”

  “No,” she told him, cautiously. Charlie had explained to her briefly, and privately, that Lance was staying and that he wasn’t all that well. The first day Magda had been scared, and had made sure she was never alone in a room with him. He was big, powerful and, to her, had a real sense of menace about him. She couldn’t understand why Charlie would have him in the flat. The second morning she called out and ventured no further into the hall until she heard Charlie’s muffled response. She hated to think it, but she’d half expected to find Charlie strangled in his bed or, worse still, cut to pieces with one of his own kitchen knives. Magda had initially concluded that Lance was schizophrenic, and that his medication should be stronger – or, better still, that he should be in a secure institution. This morning, however, she was experiencing the first doubts over her diagnosis. Either that or the dose had been increased to a safer level.

  “Amazing,” Lance told her.

  “Oh come on.” Charlie was smiling. “I was only mucking about.”

  “I can’t imagine how you can remember all those sodding songs.”

  “I suppose I’ve played them so many times.”

  “Magda,” Lance grunted. “Can you believe this; he played for what, two or three hours, without needing to so much as a glance at a sheet of music.”

  Charlie smiled. “Well they’re all my favourites, Lance. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Gershwin - you can’t really get better than that.”

  Magda’s face was as blank as Lance’s when he had first heard the names. She made a mental note to check them out on the Internet.

  “So was this your parents’ influence?” Lance asked. “I mean, you’re younger than me and I’d never heard of them.”

  Charlie nodded. “My mother used to play a few and I’ve gone on from there.”

  “They’re soothing, so many of them. You know, it helped, Charlie, really, no bullshit.”

  Charlie’s sudden smile was dazzling. “Well, good,” he replied. “Music can be like that. It’s funny; a friend of mine used exactly the same words the last time I saw her.”

  He continued to smile as Lance frowned. Lance had misunderstood. “Nothing to worry about,” Charlie assured him. “She was a bit down in the mouth about going out to Patagonia for so long and I was trying to cheer her up; she didn’t die or anything extreme like that.”

  “Was this the one that got away?”

  “No! She’s a friend, Pam, very pretty and very clever. She was going off to do this research for her PhD. Don’t look so puzzled, Lance. It’s not so strange that I could be friends with an academic.”

  “No, but given what you’ve told me about the types you mix with, I wonder how you met her. Was it at one of the Soirées you told me about, the ones that Mary woman has?”

  Charlie laughed. He visibly brightened up. “No, it was my cousin; she was the reason Pam and I met. My cousin got this idea in her head. Her mum, my aunt that is, came to visit me. I suppose, what with both my parents being dead, she thought she should keep an eye on me.”

  Lance nodded. “Good of her.”

  “Well-meaning, yes, like her daughter Daisy, although in a lower Division when it comes to doing good. I’d been out a bit late the night before so I didn’t look exactly the brightest specimen, and I think I went on a bit much about the social life. Aunty must have reported back to Daisy because not long after I got an invitation to go and visit her down in your part of the world.”

  “Godalming?”

  “Surrey, Woakshott. Daisy and her husband David live there. He’s very mild mannered and obedient – anything for a quiet life. It’s a substantial property, Lance, and it’s surrounded by a ‘sufficient’ number of acres - sufficient that is for a tennis court, swimming pool, pleasant gardens and rough grazing for a couple of the ponies. They’ve got a son and two daughters, and you know every girl in Surrey has to have a pony.”

  Lance smiled faintly. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Charlie was warming up now. Lance could see that he enjoyed telling a tale. Charlie was definitely more animated than Lance had seen him thus far. His face was cheerful and his eyes were bright. Lance settled back in his chair. He was suddenly interested. “Go on,” he prompted.

  “Ok, then,” Charlie continued, noting Lance’s interest. “You could describe my dear cousin Daisy as an organiser of some ferocity. I think even her closest friends would agree with that. No worthy local cause is safe from her attentions, and you hear all about them at length. It can be a bit tiring. The WI, the church, the charity shop, the Woakshott Ladies’ reading circle, the local pony club; she cracks the whip over them all.”

  Lance nodded. “I know the type. You need people like that but they’re often not all that popular.”

  Charlie laughed again. “I think she’s learned that the hard way, but at least her children are paragons, not like most of the evil little creatures.”

  “So what was the problem? Did she take you to AA? That’s where my mother wanted me to go.”

  Charlie made a face. Half a bottle of spirits a day didn’t seem too high an intake to him, even if it was Scotch.

  “Worse,” he said, with a grimace. “She thought I needed a wife.”

  Lance smiled faintly again. “So? She told you to find one or what?”

  “No, far worse than that! She lined up a bevy of lovelies. It was the start of a campaign and she’s like some crazed cyborg, Lance. Once she gets her mind set on something, she won’t ever stop. She programmed herself to find me a wife and that was that.”

  “Except you don’t have one, unless I’ve completely scared the crap out of her - or you’re divorced already.”

  “No, Lance, no wife and no Daisy lurking for now either. I had to do some thinking, which is not my strongest point. I had no idea about her plan of course. I wandered into this quagmire of good intentions in blissful ignorance. She’d given me some spiel about needing an extra man to make up numbers for a social event she was having with some clients who just happened to have three daughters.”

  “Got it. Like low-speed dating.”

  “Yes, well it’s obvious when I tell you, but as I said, I didn’t twig. There were two other blokes there from her husband David’s office. They’d been warned off, to leave the field open for me. She had this whole weekend programmed out with all these events, riding, tennis, walks, swimming so that we all did things with the different girls. It was like a sort of crazed scout camp.”

  “And all this to find you a wife? That’s fucking ridiculous in this day and age.”

  “It’s hardly an arranged marriage, Lance, and plenty of that goes on under the radar. She thought if I hit it off with one of these girls, great. If I hadn’t, well, no problem, she’d have gone on and lined up some more.”

  “But you could have just said no, or carved a few more notches in your bedpost while you pretended.”

  Charlie pointed an accusing finger at Lance. “I thought you said you knew the type. They’re very persistent and I’m not really a notches kind of person. I think she had visions of marrying me off and then of moving us down to Surrey where she could keep a friendly on me and my new wife.”

  “I know they can be persistent but, shit, Charlie, that’s going beyond what I’ve ever met, even in Surrey. So how did you dodge the trap?”

  “She lined up three very different girls. There was Pam, who I mentioned. She’s plump and very pretty, clever, an academic. Then there was this creature with bright blonde hair who’d had a nose and boob job, was trying to get into modelling and, finally, this awful farmer’s daughter.”

  “That’s what you call a mixed bag. So when did you guess what Daisy was planning?”

  Charlie laughed. “The two blokes from David’s offic
e told me. We had dinner the first night and they took pity on me the next morning when I bumped into them. They gave me the low down.”

  “Good of them. You could have thrown a fit and they’d have ended up with a big-time bollocking.”

  “Yes, they were a laugh. I suppose they guessed I wouldn’t shop them but I had to think fast. A few minutes later Charmaine’s father was sounding me out about joining the Board of his discount store chain.”

  “Nice! Charmaine being the model with the modifications.”

  “Exactly. Daddy was a self-made man and he liked my accent. He thought I’d add a touch of class to the operation. It was a bit of luck I was in a panic because I made a fool of myself. I mentioned a few mags one of my friends buys and asked which ones Charmaine had been in. That was not the modelling plan at all. Mummy was very put out.”

  Lance smiled. “Yeah, tricky. But then why have the boob job if you weren’t going to do soft porn or worse?”

  “I didn’t go as far as asking that. Things were frosty enough already by then. I couldn’t really ask why she’d had them enlarged if it wasn’t to show them off. Damage might have been done to the Tiptree physique.”

  Lance nodded. “You wouldn’t want that, I can understand. Did you ever find out, though?”

  “She muttered something later about the shape of her figure and being the centre of attention. It was almost as if they didn’t belong to her. I wasn’t really that fussed by then. I had my plan. Thinking about it now I wonder if her head was so full of air they were a kind of ballast.”

  “Charlie, don’t start having uncharitable thoughts now I’m here. Your cunning plan I can suss though. You were off as you wanted - on a losing streak.”

  “Exactly,” Charlie confirmed. “It was a good start and, of course, it gave me the idea of being a complete dummy when it came to the farmer’s daughter. Do you know any farmers out in Surrey, Lance?”

  He nodded. “One or two of the guys in my unit were from land-owning families, so I guess that counts, although they were from Hampshire.”

  “Well, tell me if they’re all like her. I’m hardly an expert on affairs agricultural but I have the nous to know that meat doesn’t grow on trees, although it may roost there. I thought I could ask a couple of nice questions just to break the ice and take it from there. We were going riding and had to walk down to the stables. This girl Jane, she was a large, solid lass. I met her by the front gate. She cantered over to me, this big powerful body encased in a dark blue riding coat, her black boots shining. She had these magnificent thighs, Lance, you had to see them. They were very fetchingly displayed in these skin tight white riding breeches. Just by way of being polite, once I’d got over the sight of the thighs, I asked whether her family farm was arable or if they grew animals.