The Long Kill

‘So no luck then,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Jaysmith. ‘The market seems pretty dead. In fact, with the weekend coming up, I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities, so I’ll check out tomorrow.’

Parker looked so taken aback that Jaysmith felt constrained to add, ‘I’ll pay for tomorrow night, of course.’

He had booked in till Saturday. If he’d made his target he’d have stayed the full week in order not to excite comment, but now there was no point.

‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ said Parker, slightly indignant. ‘It’s just that I heard today that there’s likely to be just the house you’re looking for coming on the market in the next couple of days. It’s called Rigg Cottage and it’s just outside the village, up the bank on the road towards Loughrigg. It belongs to an old lady called Miss Wilson who’s finding the long haul up the hill more and more difficult. Also it’s really too big for her with the garden and all. So she’s thinking of moving down into the village. There’s an old cottage become vacant. Semi-detached and her best friend occupies the next-door cottage. Actually the vacant one belonged to Miss Craik, another old friend, who died a couple of weeks back and the family had always promised to give Miss Wilson first refusal.’

He paused for breath and Jaysmith regarded him quizzically.

‘Your channels of information must be first-rate, Mr Parker,’ he said with hint of mockery.

Parker grinned and glanced conspiratorially towards the dining room. Lowering his voice he said, ‘To tell the truth, it’s Doris who told me all this. She’s quite chummy with Mrs Blacklock, the old lady in the other semi, and she passed it on, in strict confidence, of course. Like I’m doing to you.’

‘Of course,’ said Jaysmith.

‘Which is why there’s nothing to be done till Miss Wilson makes up her mind. But when she does, if I know her, she’ll want everything settled in five minutes which is why it’s a pity you’ll not be on the spot.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jaysmith, exuding regret as he moved fully into his William Hutton role. ‘A real pity.’

At dinner, he ordered a full bottle of Chablis instead of his usual half and settled to a mellow contemplation of the limitless joys of retirement.

O what a world of profit and delight … the words drifted into his mind and he sought their source. It wasn’t altogether apt. They were from Marlow’s Dr Faustus whose world of profit and delight had been purchased by selling his soul. Or perhaps the words were too apt. He pushed that thought away and concentrated on working out why he should know the quotation. Oriental Languages had been his subject, not English literature, but now he recalled that he’d once acted in the play at university; or rather not himself, but that incredibly, hazily distant young man whose name was now as vague as all those he had since inscribed on hotel registers in his career as Jaysmith. And he hadn’t been Faustus either. An ostler, that’s what he’d been. A grasping gull made a fool of by magic.

Shaking the memory away, he returned to the future. He could go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow, back to his London flat. Next, the Continent. Italy to start with; a villa in Tuscany till autumn died. Then on to the Med, Greece, North Africa, always south, keeping abreast of the retreating sun.

The prospect filled him with surprisingly little enthusiasm. It was odd, like looking at a beautiful, naked and available woman without feeling excited.

‘Everything all right, Mr Hutton?’ said Parker, doing his end-of-dinner mine-host round.

‘Fine,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Sit down and have a drop of Chablis.’

‘That’s kind.’

He filled a glass for the hotel owner and emptied the remaining drops into his own. He realized with amused interest another effect of his new relaxed state. A couple of sherries and the best part of a bottle of wine had left him feeling slightly drunk.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When you were made redundant, did you know at once what you wanted to do?’

‘Far from it, old boy,’ replied Parker, delighted to be invited to explore a favourite topic. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me, I see it now. But at the time, I was simply shattered.’

‘And you’d never thought of living up here and running a hotel?’

‘Never.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I more or less sat with my head in my hands for three or four weeks, then one morning I got up and knew what I was going to do.’

‘You knew that you were going to buy a hotel in the Lake District?’

‘Not exactly. But I knew I was never going to work for anyone but myself again. I was absolutely certain about that!’

Jaysmith felt let down. Hoping for some sort of dramatic revelation, instead he was hearing about a conventional revolt against the boss–servant relationship.

Nevertheless the idea of taking time to adjust, of letting things ripen at their own speed, was not without its appeal. But where to let the ripening process take place? Not London, that was certain. Whatever residual pressures might remain from his old life were centred on London.

The answer was absurdly obvious but he did not reach it by any kind of open-cast logic. Instead, after a couple of soporific brandies in the bar, he heard himself saying to Parker, ‘I’ve been thinking. There’s really no desperate need for me to be off in the morning. In fact, if that old lady’s not going to make up her mind for a few days, I can easily hang on into next week, if my room’s going to be vacant, that is.’

Parker smiled with triumphant delight.

‘We’ll be glad to have you,’ he said fulsomely.

Jaysmith did not return the smile. Faintly surprised, he was still trying to work out whose voice he had just heard speaking. It wasn’t Jaysmith’s, certainly. And it hadn’t even sounded like William Hutton’s.

No, it had been both more familiar and more distant, like the voice of a dead loved one conjured up by a medium at a seance. And then it came to him that in some odd, ghostly fashion, the voice he had heard belonged to that naively hopeful, irretrievably remote young man who had once played the foolish ostler in Dr Faustus.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_7ed95aef-bca1-5593-bf7d-d43286b14d5f)

Summer was dying like a lady this year. Leaves flushed gently from olive to ochre with no savage assault of gale to rip them down; bracken singed at the edges and heather burned purple with no landscape-blackening downpour to dampen the glow. The locals assured Jaysmith, not without nostalgic pride, that it was not always thus.

Jaysmith took their word for it. Though he had presented William Hutton as a long-time lover of the Lake District, his only real previous acquaintance had been as a small boy on a day trip to Windermere with his mother and stepfather, who had stared indifferently at the mountains and lake, explored the souvenir shops, eaten ice cream and fish and chips, and left him in the coach with a packet of crisps at each of the many pub-stops on the sixty-mile journey back to Blackburn in Lancashire.

His mother had died when he was fifteen. His stepfather, to do him credit, had supported him through the loss and the next couple of years at school till he got the exam results needed to take him to university. But first had come National Service. After basic training he had been posted to Hong Kong. He went home on embarkation leave, and the night before his departure his stepfather had told him apologetically but firmly that his stepbrother, four years his senior, was getting married and coming to live in the family home. His wife-to-be was pregnant. The strains this would put on the limited accommodation made it sensible for him to think from now on of making arrangements to look after himself.

He had never been back to Blackburn since that day.

His first taste of the East had brought balm to his pain. From the very moment its first rich warm exotic scents came drifting over the sea, he was fascinated. He had been planning to read French and German at university, but within a couple of months of reaching Hong Kong, he was writing to ask if he could transfer courses to the School of Oriental Languages. The facility with which he learned Chinese made him a highly valued member of his unit, but it was another talent which the Army spotted and nurtured that won him all those privileges and comforts a regiment bestows on those that bring it honour. He turned out to be a natural marksman capable of winning trophies at the highest level, and thus rapidly promoted to sergeant, well out of the way of any parades, fatigues or guard duties which might dull his eye.

For his part, he enjoyed his unsuspected excellence, and even let his enjoyment spill over into civilian life, becoming a prominent member of his university shooting team. But he never dreamt that this was a talent with any commercial value. It had taken fate at its most unpredictably tragic to nudge him onto that path.

And now it had taken a fractional weakening of the right eye to nudge him off it.

For the next three days he put past and future out of his mind and set out to turn his pretended intimacy with the fells into fact. A need to be fit and the demands of his job had taken him into some of the roughest terrain in the world. He was expert both practically and with maps. But hitherto his expertise had been focused on one thing only – the job in hand. Landscape to him was considered solely in terms of best approach, best hide, best line of fire, best escape. Here in the Lake District for the first time in two decades he went exploring simply in search of delight. He did not have far to seek. Eschewing guide books in his desire for personal discovery, he spent the days in long high walks, armed only with map and compass. Any feeling of condescension for this somewhat narrow area of rather lowly mountains soon disappeared. The physical demands were great; he never had to look far for the exhilaration of danger; and whether he was standing windblown on the bald head of Gable with the stark wildness of Wasdale stretching below, or descending from the gentle swell of Silver Howe in the gathering dusk towards the sun-gilt shield of Grasmere which at the end of a long day felt very like home, he was ravished by the sheer beauty of it all.

Small the Lake District might be, but three days’ exploration was scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its great variety and when Parker greeted him on Sunday evening with the excited news, ‘She’s made up her mind! Miss Wilson. She’s definitely going. I can arrange for you to see Rigg Cottage tomorrow!’ Jaysmith felt surprisingly put out.

He had what looked like a perfectly splendid walk mapped out for Monday and it was most irritating to be forced to postpone it for what was now an unnecessary piece of role-playing.

Doris Parker who was standing alongside her husband sensed his hesitation. She was a pleasant, calm, down-to-earth woman who was used to coping with her husband’s enthusiasms.

‘Don’t take any notice of Philip’s hard sell, Mr Hutton,’ she said. ‘There’s not need to look at Rigg Cottage unless and until you want to. I only heard at church tonight that Miss Wilson is definitely selling.’

‘But the whole point is for Mr Hutton to get in quick before it comes on the open market,’ protested Parker.

‘It might be worthwhile,’ conceded his wife. ‘She’ll certainly not be happy about paying an agent’s commission. But it’s up to Mr Hutton if he wants to see it, dear.’

Her broad-set grey eyes fixed speculatively on Jaysmith and he smiled at her and said, ‘Of course I’d like to, if you can arrange it. I’m really very grateful.’