Byron drank some of his lager. 'Not bad. I've sprayed the low paddocks. I wasn't sure about the soil quality but it doesn't look too bad. Maybe lying fallow all that time has done it good.'
'Great. Means nothing to me, mate, but Laura will be pleased.'
'There's deer in the hollow between the bridleway and the small copse. I saw a stag today, and a few does yesterday. I've scared them off for now with a few shots, but they'll be back.'
'That's all we need. They'll eat their way through the seedlings. Keep an eye on them.'
'Your new neighbour came out shouting at me for scaring the animals.'
'She did, did she?'
'Virtually accused me of shooting at her.' Byron seemed uncomfortable. 'I don't know if she's going to make anything of it. I should have told her it was just an air rifle.'
A bellow of laughter escaped Matt. 'Ah, blessed townies! Wants to rescue all the little Bambis, does she? Oh, that's marvellous.'
Theresa was edging her way back round the bar.
'Next time you see her,' Matt went on, 'say we'll set her up a little nature reserve. She can have all the bunnies and deer she wants off that land. We'll even throw in some birds - a few crows and starlings, say - for her to feed. She can be a regular Snow White.'
Byron smiled uneasily, as though mockery did not come naturally to him.
'Tell you what, we'll have a chat later, about you working for me on a more permanent basis . . . I reckon Pottisworth's land'll need a fair bit doing over the next year and I could use an extra pair of hands. You're twice the size of my son. I know it's not much in the way of forestry, but what do you reckon?'
Byron coloured, and Matt guessed that the younger man had been more concerned about his lack of a job than he had let on. That, and his history, could work in Matt's favour - he wasn't likely to ask too high a wage. Pottisworth could only have paid him a pittance.
'That . . . would be good,' he replied.
Matt caught Theresa's eye, and winked recklessly. He would ring Laura and tell her he was running late. It would be a shame to waste the evening. After all, he was in a very good humour.
Seven
'As you can see, it's in need of decorative repair, but you're really paying for the potential. This area, as you know, is becoming quite desirable.' Nicholas Trent smiled encouragingly at the young woman beside him as she contemplated the crack running up from the corner of the window frame, like a bolt of lightning. 'It may be new plaster,' he said, following her gaze. 'You get a fair amount of shrinkage with it. Nothing a decorator can't fix.'
She peered down at the details and muttered something to her partner. Then she said, 'Where's the third bedroom? We've only seen two.'
'The third bedroom.' Nicholas pulled open a door and fumbled for the light switch.
'That's a bedroom?' the man asked, incredulous. 'It's got no windows.'
There was nothing Nicholas could say to this. In former days, it would have been described as a large cupboard.
'It's very small,' said the woman.
'It is on the economical side,' he agreed. The baldly illuminated little space couldn't have been more than six feet by four. 'But to be fair, Miss Bloom, there are very few examples of this type of property with a third room. Most are only two-bedroom. I believe those lucky enough to have a third tend to use it as a study or computer room, where natural light isn't such an issue. Now, shall we view the kitchen?'
It took twenty minutes to show them the rest of the little flat, despite its limited size. And for each of those twenty minutes Nicholas Trent heard himself praising its limited advantages, and his inner voice contradicting what he was saying. This is a revolting flat, he wanted to tell them. It's right next to a main road, sits above a tube line underneath a flight path in a street that has a crack-den at both ends. Quite possibly it has subsidence, the rooms that don't have Anaglypta wallpaper have rising damp, and there isn't an original feature left in it. It is ugly, badly designed, poorly adapted and not worth a third of the asking price.
And yet there was little point. He knew that by the end of the day the couple would have put in an offer, and that in all probability it would not be so far below the asking price that negotiation was impossible. That was the way it was at the moment. Properties that would have gone for peanuts five years ago were being snapped up by people happy to sign themselves into debts that made him giddy.
Don't you remember that last crash? he wanted to ask. Don't you know what mortgaging yourself to a property like this could do to you? Can't you see you're about to ruin your lives?
'Have you got many more people to show round?' The young man had moved closer to him.
'Two this afternoon,' he said smoothly. It was the stock response.
'We'll be in touch.' The young man held out his hand.
Nicholas took it with rare gratitude. There weren't many people who shook hands, these days, especially not with estate agents. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'If this one goes, I'm sure we can find you something better.' He could see the young man disbelieved him. He saw the brief furrowing of his brow as he tried to work out whether this was part of some sales pitch, some secret agenda. That's what the property business does to you, thought Nicholas, sadly. Turns us all into suspicious fools. 'I mean . . . the decision is entirely yours, of course.'
'We'll be in touch,' the young man said again, and Nicholas held open the door of the little flat and watched them go, their heads down as they pictured their new life in it.
'Your wife rang,' said Charlotte, her mouth full of something that might have been muesli. 'Sorry, ex-wife,' she said cheerfully, thrusting a piece of paper at him. 'Don't like to say that. It sounds wrong somehow.'
It did sound wrong. It wasn't the kind of word one expected to apply to oneself. Ex-husband. Failed husband. Failed human being. Nicholas took it and thrust it into his trouser pocket.
The office was humming with activity. Derek, the residential manager, was leaning over his desk, one hand in the air as he talked into his telephone. Paul, the other residential agent, was drawing up some new instruction on their sales board. A middle-aged woman was talking with the lettings agent, sniffing occasionally into a handkerchief. The glass door closed behind him, muting the growl of the high-street traffic.
'Oh, and Mike somebody called - wanted to invite you over for dinner. Said you and he went back a long way. I told him about your wife because he didn't know and he said he was ever so sorry.'
Nicholas sat down at his desk. 'Please ring Mrs Barr,' said a Post-it note. 'Not happy about new survey.'
'Mike somebody.'
'He said he lives in Norfolk. It's nice round there.'
'Norfolk where?'
'I don't know. Most of it, I suppose.'
Buyers have pulled out of Drew House at point of exchange. Pls ring Mr Hennessy urgently.
He closed his eyes.
Kevin Tyrrell wants to reschedule viewing for 46 Arbour Row. Says he doesn't want people interrupting the football match.
He'd have to ring all four buyers he'd scheduled for that evening. All of them would be put out. But we couldn't interrupt Kevin's football, could we?
'He said he was at your wedding. Sounds ever so grand, Nick. You never told us you got married at Doddington Manor.'
'Nicholas,' he said. 'My name is Nicholas.'
'Nicholas. I didn't know your wife's family were so wealthy. Sorry, ex-wife. You're a dark horse. You'll be telling us you live in Eaton Square next.' Her cackle was interrupted by the telephone.
Eaton Square. He had once considered buying a property there back in the early 1980s, before the last property boom, when London was still full of rackety places worn thin through decades of rental. Places ripe for modernisation, for empire-building. He still remembered it, out of all the flats he had ever looked at for development, because it had had its own ballroom. An apartment in Eaton Square with its own ballroom. And he had turned it down, judging that the returns would not be great enough.
br /> He was haunted by the houses he had not bought, teetering profits he had not been brave enough to secure.
He sighed. Time to ring Mrs Barr. Not a happy bunny.
'Nick.'
Derek was leaning over his desk so he put the receiver back in its cradle. No sense of personal space, that man. He leaned so close to you that you could detect not only his last meal on his breath but the brand of soap powder he used. Nicholas forced his face into an expression of blank amenability. 'Derek.'
'That was Head Office. We're not meeting targets. We're two hundred and eighty K behind Palmers Green on commission. Not good.'
Nicholas waited.
'We need to move higher in the table. Even Tottenham East is catching us up.'
'With respect, Derek, I've agreed sales on four properties since the beginning of this week.' Nicholas tried to sound measured. 'I'd say that was pretty good by anybody's standards.'
'A blind one-legged deaf-mute could have agreed sales on those properties with the market as it is. Property's flying, Nick. It's got legs. We need to be reaching out more, selling better properties, pushing up our margins. And we should be selling harder. You're meant to be the big dealer round here. When are you going to start acting like it?'
'Derek, you know as well as I do that more than forty per cent of the properties in our area are ex-local authority. They don't produce the same prices or the same margins.'
'So who's getting the remaining sixty per cent? Jacksons. Tredwell Morrison. HomeSearch. That's who. We should be eating into their market share, Nick, grabbing those properties for ourselves. We want to see Harrington Estates boards all over this town like a bloody fungus.'
Derek stretched his arms behind his head, revealing two damp patches. He strolled round the office, arms still raised. Like a combative baboon, Nicholas thought. Then he turned back to rest both palms on his desk. 'What appointments have you got for this afternoon?'
Nicholas flipped open his desk diary. 'Well, I've got a few calls to sort out, but my Arbour Row viewing has been postponed.'
'Yeah. Charlotte said. You know what, Nick? You should get out there on the streets, rustle up a bit of business.'
'I don't understand.'
Derek reached behind him and picked up a pile of glossy papers. 'Go and drop some flyers for us this afternoon. Down the better streets. Laurel Avenue, Arnold Road, and by the school, that end. I had these printed this morning. Let's see if we can pull some of that business our way.' He slapped them on to Nicholas's desk.
Out of the corner of his eye Nicholas saw Paul smirking into his phone. 'You want me to push flyers through people's doors.'
'Well, Paul and Gary are chocka. And you said you've got no appointments. No point us paying some youth-training-scheme git to do it when he's likely to dump half of them in the bin and bugger off down the snooker hall. No, Nick,' he slapped the older man on the back, 'you're thorough. I can rely on you to do a job properly.'
He walked back to his desk, arms once again raised over his head, as if in victory. 'Besides, do you good to walk a few pounds off. You never know, you might be thanking me later.'
If it hadn't been for the leafleting, Nicholas thought afterwards, there was little chance he would have accepted Mike Todd's invitation to dinner that Saturday. His social life had dwindled almost to nothing since Diana left, partly because fewer invitations came his way - she had always been the more sociable one - but mostly because he did not want to have to explain his new circumstances to people he had known in his previous life. He had come to recognise that look of appalled pity when they grasped how far he had fallen. In the women's eyes a kind of sympathy, a glance at his thinning hairline; in the men's discomfort, barely hidden impatience to move on, as if what had happened to him might be catching.
Four years after the crash, he knew he looked different; they remembered the Savile Row suit, the top-of-the-range Audi, the easy charm. The steel. Now they saw a middle-aged man, hair greyed with stress, complexion no longer burnished by trips to Geneva and the Maldives, working as a negotiator in a bottom-rung estate agent in a run-down part of London.
'You going to this dinner, then?' said Charlotte, as he got off the phone. 'Be nice for you to get out a bit.' She had chocolate on the side of her chin. He decided not to mention it.
So here he was, about to put himself through it again. Dinner would give him no chance to elude questions about his life, no music, no moving screen in which he could pretend to be absorbed. Half-way up the M11 he was wondering why on earth he had agreed to come.
Then he remembered Thursday afternoon, spent tramping rubbish-strewn streets, the desolate clatter of letterboxes, the suspicious twitch of greying net curtains, the distant barking of furious dogs as he pushed each leaflet through. The rain that steadily permeated his once-handsome wool suit. The bleak realisation that, at forty-nine, this was what his life had become. An uninterrupted, lonely vista of disappointment and humiliation.
Mike was a good sort. He had never been so successful that he was likely to be a painful reminder of what Nicholas had lost. And he had only met Diana once. That was always a help. Nicholas crunched the gears on the old Volkswagen, trying not to remember the seamless change of his old automatic, and swung the car back into the middle lane.
It had taken some doing, his accountant had said afterwards, to crash so spectacularly when the rest of the market was going up. His complicated empire of mortgages, developments and rental property had fallen like a house of cards. He had bought an eight-bedroomed detached house in Highgate, putting down a non-refundable deposit to secure the property against the other developers who had been circling it. Then the sale of his finished house in Chelsea had fallen through, and he had been forced to borrow the remainder of the deposit. Two other deals had collapsed, just when he had to complete on the Highgate house, and he had been forced to borrow against two properties he had owned outright. He could still remember the nights he had spent in his office, calculating and recalculating, juggling interest-only mortgages against bank loans. It had all begun to collapse inward, equity lost in rising interest costs. And so incredibly swiftly what had felt like an impermeable fortress of property interests had become so much financial rubble.
It had cost them their own home. Diana had just finished decorating the nursery for the children they had not had. He remembered how her gilded head had lifted as he explained the depth of their problems, and her beautiful cut-glass voice saying, 'I did not sign up to this, Nicholas. I did not sign up to bankruptcy.' If he had listened hard enough he would have heard the farewell in her voice back then.
He had done pretty well, all things considered. He had avoided bankruptcy by the skin of his teeth, and, four years on, had finally paid off the last of the big debts. On some days he could tell himself he was on the way up again. It had been a surprise to receive a bank statement with a black column on the right, rather than a red one. But he had lost the trappings: the houses, the cars, the lifestyle. The respect. He had lost Diana. Yet people recovered from worse. He told himself this all the time.
The traffic had thinned, signalling the shift from commuting territory to true country. Nicholas turned up the radio, ignoring the interference that stemmed from the broken aerial.
He was close enough now for the village's name to appear on signs. He had not been to Mike Todd's home for years. He remembered a weekend spent somewhere large and beamy, a yeoman's house, Mike had said proudly. Higher ceilings. It hadn't stopped Nicholas banging his forehead several times.
He had just passed the first sign for Little Barton when the nagging discomfort became urgent. He needed a service station, but the country was wild now, and he wasn't sure there was even a pub. He drove another two miles, then knew he could hold on no longer. He took a left turn down a single-track lane. If he couldn't have a proper loo, at least he could find privacy.
He regretted this decision almost as soon as he'd made it. He couldn't risk stopping in case someone came thro
ugh, and there was no passing place. He was forced to continue, lurching over potholes, until finally he found somewhere to pull over, deep in woodland. He leaped out of the car, leaving the engine running.
There was nothing like relieving yourself after an interminable wait. Nicholas stepped back from the tree-trunk and checked that he had not splashed his shoes, then climbed back into the car. He'd have to continue down the track as there was no obvious place to turn round. He swore and drove on, trying to protect the car's suspension against the worst of the bumps, telling himself that it had to end soon. All tracks had to end somewhere.
The car made an ominous grinding sound as the chassis hit a rut. Next time, he told himself, I'll forget decorum and become one of those white-van men who please themselves. 'I'll pee on the verge,' he said aloud, then wondered if this was a sign of new liberation, or simply that he had crossed a line and started talking to himself.
The track split, swung to the left, and he could just see the outline of a white-fronted coach house. Then, as his car lurched to the right, he glimpsed through the trees two misaligned sets of battlements and a curiously majestic flint and red-brick facade. He hit the brakes, his engine idling, and stared for a minute, not just at the house, which, he observed immediately, was architecturally flawed. Probably some late-nineteenth-century folly, some ill-thought-out piece of grandeur that had been swiftly reconciled to an architectural dustbin. But the setting! Flanked by woodland, the house looked out over water. The overgrown lawns and unkempt hedging were unable to disguise what must have been the aesthetically compelling vista of that landscape, the grandeur of its classical setting.
The lake was eerily still, the soft grey skies reflected in it, the gentle curves of its banks providing a narrow green margin before the woodland. Beautiful, ancient woodland of oak and pine, the tops of the trees touching the far horizon of the distant valley, the colours fading to an impressionistic haze. It managed to be both grand and intimate, wild, yet with a hint of formality, far enough from the road to offer complete seclusion, yet with a decent driveway . . .