One Good Turn

  Death on the Black Isle felt even more trite and formulaic to Martin than his previous books, something to be read and immediately forgotten in beds and hospitals, on trains, planes, beaches. He had been writing a book a year since he began with Nina Riley, and he thought that he had simply run out of steam. They plodded along together, he and his flimsy creation, stuck on the same tracks. He worried that they would never escape each other, that he would be writing about her inane escapades forever. He would be an old man and she would still be twenty-two and he would have wrung all the life out of both of them. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Melanie said. “It’s called mining a rich seam, Martin.” “Milking a cash cow for all it was worth” was how someone else, someone not on 15 percent, might have put it. He wondered if he could change his name—or, even better, use his real name—and write something different, something with real meaning and worth.

  Martin’s father had been a career soldier, a company sergeant major, but Martin himself had chosen a decidedly noncombatant’s path in life. He and his brother, Christopher, had attended a small Church of England boarding school that provided the sons of the armed forces with a spartan environment that was one step up from the workhouse. When he left this cold-showers and cross-country-running environment (“We make men out of boys”), Martin had gone to a mediocre university where he had taken an equally mediocre degree in religious studies because it was the only subject he had good exam grades in—thanks to the relentless, compulsory promotion of Bible studies as a way of filling up the dangerous, empty hours available to adolescent boys at a boarding school.

  University was followed by a postgraduate diploma in teacher training to give himself time to think about what he “really” wanted to do. He had certainly never intended actually to become a teacher, certainly not a religious studies teacher, but somehow or other he found that at the age of twenty-two he had already gone full circle in his life and was teaching in a small fee-paying boarding school in the Lake District, full of boys who had failed the entrance exams of the better public schools and whose sole interests in life seemed to be rugby and masturbation.

  Although he thought of himself as someone who had been born middle-aged, he was only four years older than the oldest boys, and it seemed ridiculous that he should be educating them in anything, but particularly in religion. Of course, the boys he taught didn’t regard him as a young man, he was an “old fart” for whom they had no care at all. They were cruel, callous boys who were likely as not going to grow up into cruel, callous men. As far as Martin could see, they were being trained up to fill the Tory back benches in the House of Commons, and he saw it as his duty to try to introduce them to the concept of morality before it was too late, although unfortunately for most of them it already was. Martin himself was an atheist but hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility that one day he might experience a conversion—a sudden lifting of the veil, an opening of his heart—although he thought it more likely that he was damned to be forever on the road to Damascus, the road most traveled.

  Except for where the syllabus dictated, Martin had tended to ignore Christianity as much as possible and to concentrate instead on ethics, comparative religion, philosophy, and social studies (anything except Christianity, in fact). It was his remit to “promote understanding and spirituality,” he claimed if challenged by a rugby-playing, Anglican, Fascista parent. He spent a lot of time teaching the boys the tenets of Buddhism because he had discovered, through trial and error, that it was the most effective way of messing with their minds.

  He thought, I’ll just do this for a bit, and then perhaps go traveling or take another qualification or get a more interesting job and a new life will start, but instead the old life had carried on and he had felt it spinning out into nothing, the threads wearing thin, and sensed that if he didn’t do something he would stay there forever, growing older than the boys all the time until he retired and died, having spent most of his life in a boarding school. He knew he would have to do something proactive, he was not a person to whom things simply happened. His life had been lived in some kind of neutral gear, he had never broken a limb, never been stung by a bee, never been close to love or death. He had never strived for greatness, and his reward had been a small life.

  Forty approached, he was on an express train hurtling toward death—he had always found refuge in rather febrile metaphors— when he joined a creative writing class, being run as some kind of rural-outreach educational program. The class met in a village hall and was run by a woman named Dorothy who drove from Kendal and whose qualifications to teach the class were unclear. A couple of stories published in a northern arts magazine, readings and workshops (work in progress), and an unsuccessful play performed at the Edinburgh Fringe about the women in Milton’s life (Milton’s Women). The very mention of “Edinburgh” in the class made Martin feel sick with nostalgia for a place he hardly knew. His mother was a native of the city, and Martin had spent the first three years of his life there when his father had been stationed at the Castle. One day, he thought, as Dorothy rattled on about form and content and the necessity of “finding your own voice,” one day he would go back to Edinburgh and live there. “And read!”she exclaimed, opening her arms wide so that her voluminous velvet cloak spread out like bat wings. “Read everything that has ever been written.”There were some mutinous murmurs from the class—they had come to learn how to write (or at least some of them had), not to read.

  Dorothy seemed dynamic, she wore red lipstick, long skirts, and flamboyant scarves and wraps that she pinned with big pewter or silver brooches. She wore ankle boots with heels, black diamond-print stockings, funny crushed-velvet hats. That was at the beginning of the autumn session, when the Lake District was decked in its gaudy finery. By the time it had descended into the drab damp of winter, Dorothy herself was wearing less theatrical Wellingtons and fleeces. She also had grown less theatrical. She had begun the session with frequent references to her “partner,” who was a writer-in-residence somewhere, but by the time Christmas loomed she wasn’t mentioning the partner at all, and her red lipstick had been replaced with an unhappy beige that matched her skin.

  They had disappointed her too, her motley collection of retirees and farming wives and people wanting to change their lives before it was too late. “It’s never too late!” she declared with the enthusiasm of an evangelist, but most of them understood that sometimes it was. There was a gruff man who seemed to despise them all and who wrote in a Hughesian way about birds of prey and dead sheep on hillsides. Martin presumed he had something to do with the country—a farmer or a gamekeeper—but it turned out he was a redundant oil geologist who had moved to the Lakes and gone native. There was a girl, a studenty type, who really did despise them all, she wore black lipstick (disturbing in contrast to Dorothy’s beige) and wrote about her own death and the effect it would have on the people around her. There were a couple of nice ladies from the WI who didn’t seem to want to write at all.

  Dorothy urged them to produce little pieces of autobiographic angst, secrets of the confessional, therapeutic texts about their childhood, their dreams, their depressions. Instead they wrote about the weather, holidays, animals. The gruff man wrote about sex, and everyone stared at the floor while he read out loud. Only Dorothy listened with bland interest, her head cocked to one side, her lips stretched in encouragement.

  “All right, then,” she said, sounding defeated. “Write about a visit to or a stay in the hospital for your ‘homework.’ ” Martin wondered when they were going to start writing fiction, but the pedagogue in him responded to the word “homework,” and he set about the task conscientiously.

  The WI women wrote sentimental pieces about visiting old people and children in the hospital. “Charming,” Dorothy said. The gruff man described in gory detail an operation to remove his appendix. “Vibrant,”Dorothy said. The miserable girl wrote about being in the hospital in Barrow-in-Furness after trying to cut her wrists. “Shame she did
n’t manage it,” muttered one of the farmers’ wives sitting next to Martin.

  tin himself had been in the hospital only once in his life, when he was fourteen—he found that each year of his teens had brought some fresh hell. He had passed a funfair on his way back from town. His father was stationed in Germany at the time, and Martin and his brother, Christopher, were spending the summer holidays there on leave from the rigors of their boarding school. The fact that it was a German funfair made it an even more terrifying place for Martin. He didn’t know where Christopher was that afternoon, probably playing cricket with other boys from the base. Martin had seen the funfair at night when the lights and smells and shouting were a dystopian vision that Bosch would have enjoyed painting. In the daylight it seemed less threatening, and his father’s voice appeared in his head, as it was wont to do (unfortunately), shouting, 20;Face the thing you’re afraid of, boy!” So he paid the entrance fee and proceeded to skirt gingerly around the various attractions because it wasn’t really the atmosphere of a funfair that scared him, it was the rides. Even playground swings used to make him sick when he was younger.

  He searched in his pocket for change and bought a Kartoffelpuffer from a food stall. His grasp on the language was slippery, but he felt pretty safe with Kartoffel. The fritter was greasy and tasted oddly sugary and sat in his stomach like lead, so it really was a bad time for his father’s voice to make a reappearance in his head, just at the moment that Martin wandered past a huge swing, like a ship. He didn’t know the name for it in German, but in English, he knew, it was a pirate boat.

  The pirate boat was rising and falling in a huge, impossible parabola in the sky, the cries of the occupants following the trajectory in a swoop of terror. The very idea of it, let alone the palpable reality in front of him, struck an absolute kind of horror in Martin’s breast, and on that principle, he tossed the remains of his Kartoffelpuffer into a waste bin, paid the fare, and climbed aboard.

  It was his father who came to the civilian Krankenhaus to take him home. He had been taken to the hospital after he was found on the floor of the pirate boat, limp and semiconscious. It wasn’t a mental thing, it was nothing to do with courage, it turned out that he was particularly sensitive to g-forces. The doctor who discharged him laughed and said, in perfect English, “If you want my advice, you’ll not apply to be a fighter pilot.”

  His father had walked right past his hospital bed without recognizing him. Martin tried to wave to him, but he failed to see his son’s hand flapping weakly on the covers. Eventually someone at the nurses’station directed him to his son’s bed. His father was in uniform and looked out of place in the hospital ward. He loomed over Martin and said, “You’re a fucking fairy, Martin. Pull yourself together.”

  “There are some things that have nothing to do with character weakness, there are some things that a person is constitutionally incapable of dealing with,” Martin concluded. “And, of course, that was another country, another life.”

  “Very good,” Dorothy said.

  “It was a bit thin,” the gruff man said.

  “My life has been a bit thin so far,” Martin said.

  For the last class of the session, Dorothy brought in bottles of wine, packets of Ritz crackers, and a block of red cheddar. They appropriated paper cups and plates from the kitchen of the village hall. Dorothy raised her cup and said, “Well, we survived,” which seemed an odd kind of toast to Martin. “Let’s hope,” she continued, “that we all meet again for the spring session.” Whether it was the imminence of Christmas or the balloons and shiny foil decorations hanging in the village hall, or indeed simply the novel notion of survival, Martin didn’t know, but a certain celebratory air washed over them. Even the gruff man and the suicidal girl entered into the jubilee spirit. More bottles of wine emerged from people’s backpacks and A4-size bags. They had been unsure if there was going to be an end-of-term “do” but had come prepared.

  Martin supposed that all of these elements, but particularly the wine, contributed to the surprising fact of his waking up the next morning in Dorothy’s bed in Kendal.

  Her pale face was pouchy, and she pulled the covers over her and said, “Don’t look at me. I’m a fright first thing.” It was true— she did look a bit of a fright, but, of course, Martin would never have said so. He wanted to ask her how old she was, but he supposed that would be even worse.

  Later, over an expensive dinner in a hotel overlooking Lake Windermere, which Martin reckoned they both deserved for having survived more than just the course, she toasted him with a nice steely Chablis and said, “You know, Martin, you’re the only one in the class who can put one word in front of another and not make me want to fucking puke, excuse my split infinitive. You should be a writer.”

  Martin expected the Honda driver to pick himself up off the ground and search the crowd to find the culprit who had thrown a missile at him. Martin tried to make himself an anonymous figure in the queue, tried to pretend he didn’t exist. He closed his eyes, he had done that at school when he was bullied, clinging to an ancient, desperate magic—they wouldn’t hit him if he couldn’t see them. He imagined the Honda driver walking toward him, the baseball bat raised high, the arc of annihilation waiting to happen.

  To his amazement, when he opened his eyes, the Honda driver was climbing back into his car. As he drove away, a few people in the crowd gave him a slow hand-clap. Martin wasn’t sure if they were expressing disapproval of the Honda driver’s behavior or disappointment at his failure to follow through. Whichever, they were a hard crowd to please.

  Martin knelt on the ground and said, “Are you okay?” to the Peugeot driver, but then he was politely but firmly set aside by the two policewomen who arrived and took control of everything.

  3

  Gloria hadn’t really seen what had happened. By the time the rumor of it had rippled down the spine of the queue, she suspected it had become a Chinese whisper. Someone had been murdered. “Queue jumping, probably,” she said matter-of-factly to a twittery Pam standing next to her. Gloria was stoical in queues, irritated by people who complained and shuffled as if their impatience were in some way a mark of their individuality. Queuing was like life: you just shut up and got on with it. It seemed a shame she had been born just too late for the Second World War, she possessed exactly the kind of long-suffering spirit that wartime relied on. Stoicism was, in Gloria’s opinion, a very underrated virtue in the modern world.

  She could understand why someone might want to kill a queue jumper. If it had been up to her she would have summarily executed a great many people by now—people who dropped litter in the street, for example, they would certainly think twice about the discarded sweet wrapper if it resulted in being strung up from the nearest lamppost. Gloria used to be opposed to capital punishment, she remembered, during her too-brief time at university, demonstrating against an execution in some faraway country that she couldn’t have placed on the map, but now her feelings tended to run in quite the opposite direction.

  Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things. Gloria liked rules that said you couldn’t speed or park on double-yellow lines, rules that told you not to drop litter or deface buildings. She was sick and tired of hearing people complain about speed cameras and parking wardens as if there were some reason that they should be exempt from them. When she was younger she used to fantasize about sex and love, about keeping chickens and bees, being taller, running through fields with a black-and-white border collie. Now she daydreamed about being the keeper at the gates, of standing with the ultimate ledger and ticking off the names of the dead as they appeared before her, giving them the nod through or the thumbs-down. All those people who parked in bus bays and ran the red light on pedestrian crossings were going to be very sorry when Gloria peered at them over the top of her spectacles and asked them to account for themselves.

  Pam wasn’t what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
Pam was married to Murdo Miller, Gloria’s own husband’s closest friend. Graham and Murdo had attended the same Edinburgh school, an expensive education that had put a civil polish on their basically loutish characters. They were now both much richer than their fellow alumni, a fact which Murdo said “just goes to show.” Gloria thought that it didn’t go to show anything except, possibly, that they were greedier and more ruthless than their former classmates. Graham was the son of a builder (Hatter Homes) and had started his career carrying hods of bricks on one of his father’s small building sites. Now he was a multi-millionaire property developer. Murdo was the son of a man who owned a small security firm (Haven Security) and had started off as a bouncer at a pub door. Now he ran a huge security operation—clubs, pubs, football matches, concerts. Graham and Murdo had many business interests in common, concerns that spread everywhere and had little to do with building or security and required meetings in Jersey, the Caymans, the Virgin Islands. Graham had his fingers in so many pies that he had run out of fingers long ago. “Business begets business,” he explained to Gloria. “Money makes money.” The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

  Both Graham and Murdo lived with the trappings of respectability—houses that were too big for them, cars that they exchanged each year for a newer model, wives that they didn’t. They wore blindingly white shirts and handmade shoes, they had bad livers and untroubled consciences, but beneath their aging hides they were barbarians.

  “Did I tell you we’ve had the downstairs cloakroom done out?” Pam asked. “Hand stenciling. I wasn’t sure to begin with but I’m coming round to it now.”

  “Mm,” Gloria said. “Fascinating.”

  It was Pam who had wanted to come to this lunchtime radio recording (Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Showcase) , and Gloria had tagged along in the hope that at least one of the comics might be funny, although her expectations were not high. Unlike some Edinburgh residents who regarded the advent of the annual Festival as something akin to the arrival of the Black Death, Gloria quite enjoyed the atmosphere and liked to attend the odd play or a concert at the Queen’s Hall. Comedy, she wasn’t so sure about.