Talking to Strange Men Page 5

  It was on account of his pleasing personality and reputation for being easy to get on with that the City Board of General Practitioners had appointed him their representative on a particularly awkward mission. This was to call on an eighty-two-year-old woman who still had a medical practice and still saw patients and explain to her in the gentlest and most tactful way that it was time she retired. Old Dr Palmer had been making mistakes in prescriptions which, though no harm had yet been done, might one day result in disaster.

  She lived in one of the north-eastern suburbs, three or four miles away. Fergus had been worrying about this visit and what he would say to her, not just for the whole of Saturday but Thursday and Friday as well. In the event – as was so often the case in the event – things turned out perfectly satisfactorily and with the minimum of pain. Almost the first thing Dr Palmer said was that she was glad to have an opportunity to talk to him alone because she was thinking of retiring and would like to hear his views. Driving home again, one anxiety removed, instead of relaxing, Fergus perforce allowed the worry which the Dr Palmer business had temporarily displaced to return.

  What was he going to do about the surgery extension?

  If the city council’s planning committee allowed the extension there was no problem but he could not know for the next three weeks whether permission would be granted. In the meantime a building that had been specifically constructed as a private clinic had come on to the market. In a moment or two he would pass it, it was up here on Ruxeter Road. The asking price was seventy thousand pounds, rather less than the extensions were going to cost. He would have to take out a mortgage anyway, there was no question of anything else. His boys were at present costing him and Lucy the maximum, with Ian at university and Angus and Mungo both at their public school. And he would prefer to keep the beautiful old building in which the practice was currently housed. The top floor, for instance, would one day make an excellent flat if any of the boys should want it.

  While he waited for planning permission it was most likely that the clinic building would be sold to someone else. The estate agent had told him as much. He was passing it now, and stopping at a red light, turned to look at it. That stark sixties architecture, that box construction and plate-glass windows weren’t to his taste but how much did his taste matter? It might so easily happen that planning permission was refused and this building simultaneously lost to him.

  The lights changed. It was as Fergus was moving off that he caught sight of his son Mungo walking along the opposite pavement in the direction of a row of derelict houses, condemned to demolition and boarded up, and a public house called the Gander. Since Mungo could scarcely have any business at the condemned houses he must be going to the pub. Because of his great height he could easily pass for four years older than he was. Fergus very much disliked the thought of his youngest going into pubs at the age of fourteen but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He drove on with a fresh worry in reserve.

  On one side of the wide road were row upon row of little poky shops, opposite them a bingo hall and the old Fontaine Cinema. All those houses awaiting demolition didn’t improve matters. But when they were demolished and new blocks erected, what then? He could offer for that clinic building and proceed with negotiations while he was waiting to hear if planning permission had been granted. And then, if he got his permission, withdraw from the purchase. It would be dishonourable and underhand and Fergus knew he couldn’t do it.

  But suppose he lost both? What would happen then was that he would have to look around for other premises and whatever they were, they would cost him a hundred thousand pounds, not seventy. He put the car away in the garage at the bottom of the garden, a converted coachhouse. The Cameron garden was a pleasing wilderness of old pear trees and lilac bushes growing out of shaggy grass. Or Lucy said it was pleasing and the boys used to play in it when they were younger. Fergus would have liked a pretty garden with flowerbeds and rose bushes like his grandmother had had in Oban, but he wouldn’t have liked to do the gardening, as Lucy pointed out.

  She was lying in an armchair with her feet up. Ian and Gail sat on the sofa, holding hands and yelling with laughter at Some Like It Hot on television.

  ‘How did it go, darling?’ said Lucy in her sleepy, smiling way.

  ‘OK. Fine. Much better than I thought.’

  ‘Things are always much better than you think.’

  Fergus smiled rather sadly. ‘If life has taught me anything it’s that while most of the things you’ve worried about have never happened, it’s a different story with the things you haven’t worried about. They are the ones that happen.’

  If Gail hadn’t been there he would have said something about Mungo. He went downstairs to get himself a drink. Fergus usually made himself a cup of cocoa in the evenings and in the mornings too sometimes. He made it with whole, full-cream milk and real cocoa – not drinking chocolate – and white granulated sugar, first mixing cocoa, sugar and a little of the milk to a paste in the mug, then pouring on the milk at the zenith of its boiling. His wife and children laughed at this and always refused offers of his cocoa, which Fergus had never understood: why it should be funny, why there was apparently something intrinsically funny in the very idea of cocoa, when in fact it was the most delicious drink he had ever tasted.

  He found his son Angus in the kitchen, with a slice of cold pizza in one hand and a blue cardboard box, something to do with the computer, in the other. Since he and Lucy had given Angus that computer for his birthday he had been obsessed by it.

  ‘I was looking for somewhere to keep the floppy discs.’

  ‘Why can’t you keep them in your room?’ said Fergus, opening a new tin of cocoa.

  ‘When I’ve saved a file to archives I don’t want the floppy discs in the same area as the hard disc, do I? I mean suppose there was a fire in my room?’

  Fergus didn’t know what he was talking about. For form’s sake, he offered cocoa. Angus shook his head abstractedly, climbed up on to a stool and put the box on the top shelf of a cupboard, up among the wine-making equipment no one had used for ten years.

  ‘Angus, do you think Mungo goes to pubs?’

  ‘Mungo? What would he do that for? He wouldn’t even have a glass of wine at my party.’

  ‘I thought I saw him going into a pub.’

  ‘Unless maybe he’s a secret drinker.’ Fergus’s children were never much comfort to him. They seldom allayed his fears. ‘Where was this pub then?’

  ‘Ruxeter Road, near where all those houses are going to be pulled down. I shouldn’t talk to you about him. It’s not fair on you or him. I daresay he was just walking home, only it was a funny way for him to be going.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Dad,’ said Angus. This was the sort of thing people always said to Fergus. He knew they wouldn’t worry, that wasn’t the problem.

  He took his mug of cocoa back upstairs. Angus stood eating his pizza. It was quite clear to him where Mungo had been going, to the safe house which was one of the middle ones in the condemned row between the Gander and Collingbourne Road. He would have been meeting someone there or even hiding someone there from Stern, would most probably be there now.

  And Angus realized that he too worried about Mungo, not like his father did, not jumping to crazy conclusions about Mungo’s slinking off for illicit pints or gin and tonics, but about Mungo’s being so – well, fixated on Spookside. Did he ever think of anything else? Didn’t his school work suffer? He was probably a bit young to be thinking about girls, Angus could understand that, but did he have ordinary friends? Did he have any other interests at all? This mantle that had fallen upon Mungo’s shoulders was his own. And ‘fallen’ was the wrong word anyway, for he had taken it off himself and placed it over Mungo. He had taught Mungo everything he knew, had inculcated in Mungo a passion for, espionage which he himself no longer shared. At fifteen he had grown out of Spookside. Surely the same would happen to Mungo, surely there would soon be signs of we
ariness . . .

  Angus could remember it all very well. Sometimes, now he had the computer, he thought of putting it on that and keeping a record, though he didn’t know for what purpose. For his own children, if he ever had any? For some sort of future social study?

  The beginning of it all. Its inception. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’ – Angus had read that under the picture on the Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin but apparently it came from the Bible. He thought it expressed what had happened with him and Guy Parker and Spookside, as someone had christened it. As Guy had christened it. And now it was a world away, down there in his childhood when he had had other priorities and other needs.

  He had been thirteen and Guy Parker had been thirteen too, a month or two older. They had known each other all their lives, been friends since, according to their mothers, those mothers met at the baby clinic. And Mrs Parker used to mind him and Ian while his own mother was working at the hospital. Guy and he went to prep school together, Hintall’s, where Ian had been and Mungo was then in the second form.

  Candidates usually sit the Public Schools Entrance in June. The examination is the same for all schools within the Headmasters’ Conference but papers are marked and results judged at the particular school of the candidate’s, or more probably his parents’, choice. There was no question but that Angus would go on to Rossingham. His father had gone there and Ian was there. And Guy Parker was also going to Rossingham, it was an understood thing that they would be attending the same public school, and no one, as far as Angus knew, had ever disputed this. Later, in all fairness though, he couldn’t have categorically stated that Guy had actually told him so.

  The results came and Angus was in, which was no great surprise to anyone. It was holiday time and the Camerons were all off to their annual fortnight in Corfu, so he had no opportunity of seeing Guy Parker until after they got back. Besides, he hadn’t felt any pressing need to see Guy. He knew they would both be going to Rossingham in a month’s time and they’d be bound to meet a couple of times before that.

  He went round to the Parkers’ because Mrs Parker phoned up and asked him and Mungo to lunch on one of the days both his parents were working at the same time. Mungo was only a little kid of ten then and it was always a bit of a problem getting him looked after in the holidays. When he got there Angus realized he had never actually asked Guy if he had passed that exam, though he was bound to have done. It was a well-known fact that you had to be quite dim not to pass and Guy was very bright. They were alone together in the place the Parkers called the playroom, having exiled poor old Bean to the kitchen with Mrs Parker and Guy’s little sister.

  ‘Have you got all your gear yet?’ Angus asked. ‘I reckon those hats are the end, the pits. We had to go to London to get mine. Tuckers don’t stock them any more.’

  Had Guy looked embarrassed or ashamed? If he had Angus hadn’t noticed, but perhaps he hadn’t. For a moment or two he didn’t say anything, then:

  ‘I don’t have to have a hat.’

  ‘Yes, you do. It’s on the list.’

  ‘They don’t wear hats at Utting.’

  Angus didn’t have to ask him to elucidate. He knew at once. Guy had the grace to looked abashed. They were silent. It was a long awkward unpleasant silence. And in those minutes, while Guy took from his bookshelves the paperback novel of espionage he was going to lend Angus, while they descended the stairs together in response to Mrs Parker’s shout of ‘Lunch!’, Angus felt the first real pain of his life. Or he thought of it that way, perhaps it wasn’t. But no one had ever done anything like that to him before, no one had ever deceived him.

  Going to schools like Hintall’s was supposed to start you off on the stiff upper lip thing. He could remember his Scottish grandfather calling it that. He hadn’t had much faith in it himself but perhaps it was true. At any rate he was able to conceal his feelings and eat Mrs Parker’s lunch – he even remembered what it was, a very good lunch too, steak and kidney pie, scalloped potatoes, fresh garden peas, blackcurrant shortcake and cream – and to keep his cool. After lunch Guy explained. He didn’t want to go to Rossingham. It was conventional, reactionary and old-fashioned.

  ‘I mean, look at that hat thing.’

  ‘What hat thing?’

  ‘Well, having to wear a bloody straw boater. Who needs it?’

  Utting was progressive. They took girls in at all levels. They did a Russian course. They had an amazing new technology department. You could play polo if you wanted or learn to fly a helicopter.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Angus.

  ‘Well, they’ve definitely got a helicopter. And an ice rink. And it’s all first names and everyone gets to have a bedroom of their own.’

  Angus took his pain home with him. He thought it was only being deceived that he minded but he found he also minded the loss of Guy. He would not see Guy again until half-term and probably not then, for the half-term holidays of Rossingham and Utting would not necessarily coincide. Three months, which was the length of a term, is a very long time when you are thirteen years old. Guy ought to have told him, at least when they sat the exam if not before, that he planned on going to a different school. But this dislike of being deceived was as nothing compared to their separation.

  People said of their family that Ian and Mungo were like their father, tall and skinny and fidgety, while he was like their mother, not only in physical appearance but in temperament too. He was supposed to be placid. Angus did not think anyone was ever very much like anyone else. He wasn’t placid but he was good at not showing his feelings. No one suspected at home that he was unhappy, that he carried Guy’s betrayal around with him as the boy in the fable carried the fox that gnawed at his insides.

  His dismay turned to anger. He had borrowed the Yugall paperback from Guy – it was Mole Run – but when he had finished it, instead of taking it round to the Parkers’ house he got Mungo to put it through the letter box when he was passing on his way to his fencing class. A couple of days after that the Rossingham autumn term started.

  Angus missed Guy very much. New school was strange anyway, and although the old fagging system had been abolished and things were quite civilized compared to in his father’s day, although bullying had virtually gone, there was still bewilderment to contend with and mystifying rules. He told himself he hated Guy and was glad to see the back of him. Soon he made a couple of friends, one of them being Bruce Reynolds, who he supposed he could say was now his closest friend. Half-term passed without occasion to go near the Parkers but when the Christmas holidays came, a few days after Rossingham broke up, Guy phoned.

  His mother took the call. He heard her speak Guy’s name and then he went and hid in the top-floor lavatory, not answering when she called him. He knew she would tell Guy he would call him back, which in fact she had done. Angus thought he and his brothers were lucky to have a mother who never fussed, who wouldn’t dream of asking such searching questions as where had he got to and what was he up to and why hadn’t he answered when she called him. On the other hand he knew better than to ask her to tell lies for him over the phone or anywhere else. She would never have stood for that.

  He didn’t call Guy back. The Parkers always went away for Christmas, to Mrs Parker’s sister in Devon or Mr Parker’s sister in France, and by the time they got back the new term would have started. By Christmas Eve he was rather regretting he hadn’t called Guy back. He was missing him again. Among his Christmas presents was the new Yugall novel. Guy and he were crazy about espionage fiction and they loved all the great masters of the genre but their current favourite was Yves Yugall, whom for a while they preferred even over Len Deighton, though it was a close-run thing.

  Yves Yugall had written about twenty books by that time and he and Guy had read them all, Mole Run being the latest. The latest in paperback, that is, for they couldn’t afford to buy hardcovers. Of course the books always came out in hardcover about a year before the paperback appeared but they just had to wait unless
they could get them out of the library. The new one, Cat Walk – Yugall always had the name of an animal in his titles – was from his mother and father along with the track suit he had asked for and the really good ballpoint pen they thought he ought to have. It was a brand new hardcover, seven pounds ninety-five and with an artist’s impression of the Brandenburger Tor on the jacket.

  Angus read it at a sitting, or a lying really. He read it in bed on Christmas night, staying awake till three to do so. When he had finished it he thought, I’ve read it and he hasn’t. Too bad. If we were still friends I’d have passed it on to him the moment I finished it. Probably what he would have done was to send Guy a coded message – a note by hand of Mungo or some little pal of his – letting him know he had the book and to come and get it. Guy would have had to break the code and decipher the message. But they were good at that. It had really started because their parents all made a fuss about the amount they used the phone and what it cost.

  Cat Walk went back to school with Angus. Bruce wasn’t interested, he didn’t want to read it. Angus started thinking a lot about Guy and one night he dreamed about him. He was at Utting, visiting Guy, and it was an amazing place with bedrooms like in an hotel with en suite bathrooms, and an ice rink and saunas and one helicopter to every ten boys, flying lessons being a weekly event. Guy had his own built-in cupboards in his room and a chest of drawers and two bedside cabinets instead of the drawer under his bunk and narrow hanging cupboard which was the lot of boarders at Rossingham. When Angus woke up he thought that if the dream had gone on he would have secretly put Cat Walk into the top drawer of the chest in Guy’s room for Guy to find when next he opened it to take out a pair of socks.