any clothes. I think if I hadn’t found him there he’d have died there of hypothermia.’
‘And so you seduced him, after you wrapped him in a blanket and made him a mug of cocoa.’
‘No. I didn’t. We got into bed and he fucked me. He fucked me like a man possessed. Since you seem so interested, that was how it began.’
FOUR
S aul Abercrombie sat and stared at the stained-glass depiction above him from the interior of the church at Raven Dip. It was overcast outside, still relatively early on a day that had broken dankly. He had trailed a path through dew on the quad on the route there. But for the noise of the engine, he had travelled in silence.
He sat on a shooting stick, its point precisely wedged at a spot where stone flags intersected on the floor, his increasingly skinny butt secure in its small saddle. He had a picnic blanket wrapped around his shoulders against the chill. The church interior was always cold, even when the sun shone outside and bathed the building in light and warmth, as it seemed unlikely to do today.
The shooting stick was a memento of sorts, a relic from the short season of trying to blast clay pigeons from the sky of a decade earlier. It had been one of the many pursuits he had tried and failed to enjoy successfully in the company of his dead wife. There had been power boating and an attempt at riding to hounds most notable for what he still thought of as the fancy dress. There had been a box for the ballet at Covent Garden.
The blanket was a happier reminder. They had enjoyed picnicking together. He had owned for a while a mill house in Cambridgeshire and he had chilled wine from a net moored for the purpose on the bank where the River Cam wound its way through the property. They had eaten and drunk and listened to an old solid state Roberts radio tuned to a station that stuck rigidly to its playlist of soul classics. Sly and the Family Stone had provided their soundtrack, Marvin Gaye and Roberta Flack and the Isley Brothers.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ Saul crooned to himself. He pulled the blanket around him, staring still at the stained-glass image. It was a good question. It was one he would be obliged to answer in part, but only in part, when Tom Curtis returned to them later in the day. He had promised. He had given his word of honour to the man entrusted to deliver on his forest dream. ‘Brother, brother, brother,’ he said, now, to nobody in the empty church.
How often had he and Susan done that? How many times had they sipped river-chilled Chablis, listening to Marvin while the Cam gurgled by and the evening gathered securely around them? In his mind they had done it in an endless cycle of idyllic summer nights. In actuality, they had probably done it on no more than half-a-dozen precious occasions.
Those picnics had made his wife happy. But making her happy had been a long way behind making money in his list of priorities and most of the time she had spent at the mill house had been endured by her alone, he being on trips and their only child away at boarding school.
His business life had been one long litany of money-shots, no-brainers, done deals and fire sales and ball-breakers. He’d been so fluent in the language of boardroom machismo he’d forgotten how to communicate in any other way. Profit subsumed everything. Claret on the carpet, suppliers manacled by contract clauses, partners in enterprise permanently yoked to a junior role. Everywhere he looked he was looking only for the bottom line of a balance sheet.
It had taken the cancer to stop that.
First had come the ominous suspicion that something was wrong with his throat. He’d had trouble swallowing. His tongue had felt numb. His mouth no longer told him accurately whether a drink was hot or cold. The timbre of his voice changed. It roughened. There was a sense in which his speech came to feel somehow blurred. And he was tired. For the first time in his life, he felt bone-weary and the weariness was
‘And so you seduced him, after you wrapped him in a blanket and made him a mug of cocoa.’
‘No. I didn’t. We got into bed and he fucked me. He fucked me like a man possessed. Since you seem so interested, that was how it began.’
FOUR
S aul Abercrombie sat and stared at the stained-glass depiction above him from the interior of the church at Raven Dip. It was overcast outside, still relatively early on a day that had broken dankly. He had trailed a path through dew on the quad on the route there. But for the noise of the engine, he had travelled in silence.
He sat on a shooting stick, its point precisely wedged at a spot where stone flags intersected on the floor, his increasingly skinny butt secure in its small saddle. He had a picnic blanket wrapped around his shoulders against the chill. The church interior was always cold, even when the sun shone outside and bathed the building in light and warmth, as it seemed unlikely to do today.
The shooting stick was a memento of sorts, a relic from the short season of trying to blast clay pigeons from the sky of a decade earlier. It had been one of the many pursuits he had tried and failed to enjoy successfully in the company of his dead wife. There had been power boating and an attempt at riding to hounds most notable for what he still thought of as the fancy dress. There had been a box for the ballet at Covent Garden.
The blanket was a happier reminder. They had enjoyed picnicking together. He had owned for a while a mill house in Cambridgeshire and he had chilled wine from a net moored for the purpose on the bank where the River Cam wound its way through the property. They had eaten and drunk and listened to an old solid state Roberts radio tuned to a station that stuck rigidly to its playlist of soul classics. Sly and the Family Stone had provided their soundtrack, Marvin Gaye and Roberta Flack and the Isley Brothers.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ Saul crooned to himself. He pulled the blanket around him, staring still at the stained-glass image. It was a good question. It was one he would be obliged to answer in part, but only in part, when Tom Curtis returned to them later in the day. He had promised. He had given his word of honour to the man entrusted to deliver on his forest dream. ‘Brother, brother, brother,’ he said, now, to nobody in the empty church.
How often had he and Susan done that? How many times had they sipped river-chilled Chablis, listening to Marvin while the Cam gurgled by and the evening gathered securely around them? In his mind they had done it in an endless cycle of idyllic summer nights. In actuality, they had probably done it on no more than half-a-dozen precious occasions.
Those picnics had made his wife happy. But making her happy had been a long way behind making money in his list of priorities and most of the time she had spent at the mill house had been endured by her alone, he being on trips and their only child away at boarding school.
His business life had been one long litany of money-shots, no-brainers, done deals and fire sales and ball-breakers. He’d been so fluent in the language of boardroom machismo he’d forgotten how to communicate in any other way. Profit subsumed everything. Claret on the carpet, suppliers manacled by contract clauses, partners in enterprise permanently yoked to a junior role. Everywhere he looked he was looking only for the bottom line of a balance sheet.
It had taken the cancer to stop that.
First had come the ominous suspicion that something was wrong with his throat. He’d had trouble swallowing. His tongue had felt numb. His mouth no longer told him accurately whether a drink was hot or cold. The timbre of his voice changed. It roughened. There was a sense in which his speech came to feel somehow blurred. And he was tired. For the first time in his life, he felt bone-weary and the weariness was
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