When We Were Rich Read online

  I’m not religious about it. So to speak.

  I believe only about 12.5 per cent of what the Bible says.

  Do you?

  Yeh. I’m an eightheist.

  Oh right. Yeh. I’ve heard it, says Colin.

  Roxy looks over at the church.

  I sometimes think it would be nice to go again. I used to go when I was a kid. I used to like the quiet.

  It can be a bit boring, to be honest, says Colin. Takes a lot of sticking with. Some of the hymns nowadays are dire.

  I don’t mind boring anymore. I’ve had enough of exciting. You know when I was a teenager I always wanted to have adventure. But when you think about it, adventures are just moments when things can go wrong. And they usually do. Then you think adventures aren’t so much fun anymore.

  The food arrives and Roxy immediately starts gulping it down, having drenched it with tomato ketchup. Colin doesn’t touch his.

  What’s the matter? she says, chewing on a sausage as she talks, spraying small particles onto the table.

  It’s not Heinz ketchup. You have to have a bacon sandwich with Heinz ketchup or it’s not right.

  He picks at the edges of the bacon all the same, tiny scraps which he chews one by one.

  After they have finished, Roxy takes what’s left of his sandwich and eats that too. Then she checks her watch. Colin notices that it looks expensive.

  What is that?

  An Omega Deville.

  Aren’t they pricey?

  Not if you buy them in Koh Samui from a market stall. I suppose I should be getting off, says Roxy. I’ve got a shift at one. The sales are starting. It’s going to be murder.

  Shall I call you a limousine?

  That’s sweet.

  I was joking.

  I know. Anyway, it’s fine. I can get a train.

  She waves her hand in the direction of the railway arches a few hundred yards away.

  I’ll walk you up there.

  They walk to the station more or less in silence, each preparing, in their own way, for the farewell ritual, making decisions, considering options.

  Just as they reach the first arch Colin, taking a gulp of air first, his heart pounding, asks:

  Can I have another chance to beat you at GoldenEye?

  I expect you were just too drunk to be at your best.

  I suppose there’s always the chance you were better than me.

  A girl? Beat you? Office champion?

  It wasn’t only the drink. The pressure got to me.

  Given what you thought might be at stake.

  Yes.

  There is a pause. Colin feels his stomach turn. She isn’t interested, he is sure of it now. He feels himself flush with regret and embarrassment for having even suggested another date.

  Okay.

  Okay what?

  I’m up for another game.

  Colin grins, his face sparking to life from its usual tugged-down heaviness.

  When?

  You’re keen.

  Well . . .

  Don’t worry. I’ve been round the block too many times to play hard to get. We can have a rematch as soon as you like.

  Tonight?

  You’re really not very good at this, are you? Leave a girl a little pride. I’m probably busy. Bound to be.

  Sorry.

  I finish work at eight. I’ll come round after that.

  Without quite knowing who makes the first move, they kiss, as the District Line train to Upminster thunders overhead.

  It’s like that film, isn’t it, says Roxy, as she breaks off the kiss, smiling as if heartbroken.

  What film?

  What’s it called?

  I don’t know.

  Briefing something. Counter. Briefing Counter.

  * * *

  Three weeks later

  Frankie climbs into the green Mini Cooper emblazoned with the pale cream insignia of Farley, Ratchett and Gwynne which is parked in the port outside his house. Each side of the car has ‘FR&G’ emblazoned in giant, italic script. Also it’s inscribed on the roof. Nick Ratchett is responsible for this branding effort. Frankie likes to tease him about the possibility of the roof sign accessing a niche market in police helicopter pilots.

  The interior of the car had been valeted the day before, so it is spruce and tidy, although there is a half-empty pack of Camels on the floor of the passenger seat dropped carelessly by Frankie that morning. Frankie still treats himself to one or two a day, but he’s been trying to kick it ever since Ralph Gwynne had his heart attack. Ralph was a thirty-a-day man. Frankie takes one out of the pack and lights it anyway.

  Also on the kill list: pork scratchings, stuffed crust pizza and more than two pints of beer in a night. He wants to keep in shape now that he’s hit his thirties, although he’s not sure for whose benefit – Veronica, his own, or both.

  Frankie eases the car into gear and steers onto the furious tumult of the Goldhawk Road, sandwiching himself between a battered white van and a massive, growling HGV haphazardly piled with rubble and scrap metal.

  He checks his phone. He realizes that he has had the ringer switched off. There are four messages from Nick Ratchett. As soon as he puts the ringer back on, the phone sounds. He switches to hands free. Sure enough, it’s Ratchett.

  I’m just on my way in, Nick.

  Never mind that.

  What’s come over you?

  It’s Ralph.

  What about Ralph?

  He’s had another attack.

  What kind of attack?

  The heart kind, what do you think?

  Shit.

  Yeh. Shit is about size of it.

  Is he okay?

  He’s not okay. He’s in intensive care.

  Frankie’s attention has wandered from the road and he has to swerve to avoid a woman on a zebra crossing. He put his hand up in apology.

  If you want to see him, you’d better get a move on.

  What does that mean?

  There’s an ominous silence.

  He’s not in great shape. Polly was in a bad way when she rang to tell me.

  Where is he?

  St Mary’s.

  Pause.

  How did the sale go yesterday?

  Fuck off, Nick.

  Frankie hangs up. He finds it hard to concentrate on driving and stalls when the lights change. The white van pulls past him impatiently. The driver stares at him violently as he motors past and opens his mouth to shout something, presumably abuse, but then closes it again. The driver’s face configures itself in a way Frankie doesn’t understand, then he shifts the van up a gear and drives ahead without further remark or gesture. Frankie engages the motor of the Mini, and checks his mirror before pulling out. It is then that he notices the still-wet tear tracks on his face and his red, swollen eyes. He scrubs at his cheek with the sleeve of his suit.

  His Nokia rings again. This time the display shows it to be Veronica. He hits the speaker button.

  Ratchett’s been ringing me on my mobile. Wanted to speak to you. He sounded weird.

  Ralph’s had another heart attack.

  Ralph who?

  Ralph. Ralph. My boss Ralph Gwynne.

  Oh, Frankie.

  On my way to the hospital now. Yours.

  Shall I come and meet you?

  Aren’t you working?

  I can get away. My clients aren’t going anywhere.

  Yes. Thank you.

  I’ll be waiting for you.

  * * *

  Frankie manages to find a parking space just outside the entrance to St Mary’s in Paddington.

  My lucky day, he thinks, bitterly.

  He sees Veronica waiting under the awning that leads into the maw of the building. He parks, feeds the meter and crosses the road to meet her.

  Suddenly his legs feel shaky. Veronica supports him as he half-collapses.

  Frankie?

  I’ll be okay.

  He straightens himself up.

  You’ve go
ne grey.

  Have I?

  He inadvertently touches his hair.

  Your skin. Idiot.

  She smiles and Frankie manages a weak smile in response.

  I don’t feel too good.

  There’s a coffee bar inside. Let’s have a sit down for a moment.

  Frankie manages to make it through to a seat while Veronica fetches him a double espresso, which he knocks back in one shot. She touches his cheek tenderly with one finger.

  Colour’s coming back a bit.

  Have you found out which ward Ralph is in?

  I went to see him already. Didn’t know how long you would take to get here. I bumped into Polly. She said I should.

  Polly is Ralph’s wife of thirty-five years. She and Frankie always got along. He and Veronica would have dinner at their house in Baron’s Court once or twice a year. She was a terrible cook, Frankie remembers, randomly.

  How’s he looking?

  Veronica swallows, tries to find Frankie’s eyes. Locks onto them.

  He’s gone. He went before you got here.

  Gone where?

  He’s dead, Frankie.

  Frankie feels flat, blank for several seconds. Then a wave of something passes across him. He can’t at first identify it, but eventually finds a label for it.

  He thinks it might be relief but that makes no sense.

  Then, like a seventh wave after the sixth, comes grief, a giant black cloud of nausea and sharp edges.

  Frankie? Are you okay?

  Frankie nods but says, No.

  Polly said when you got here . . . to come and see him. Say goodbye. He’s still in the bed.

  Frankie stares at her. She stands up and holds out her hand for him.

  It’s on the third floor. Polly’s waiting.

  Frankie remains seated.

  I can’t.

  She specifically asked . . . she said . . . that you should . . .

  I can’t, Vronky.

  She’s in pieces. We’re her friends.

  He bursts into tears. Veronica strokes his hand.

  She lets it rest. His tears dry. Minutes later, Frankie gathers himself, lets go of her hand, leaves the reception area and returns to his car, twenty minutes still left on the meter.

  * * *

  Two weeks later

  In the office bathroom mirror, Frankie uses the polished edge of a manicured fingernail to explore his mulberry-coloured birthmark, the size of a hefty cornflake and the shape of Australia. It stains the hairline along his right temple. It seems to him, as he examines it, larger than it was, but it may be simply that his hair has begun to recede. Since Ralph’s death he is sure it has thinned out.

  He’s at the same age the fallout started with his father, Mickey, who was completely bald by the age of forty. Or so his mother, Flossie, has always told him, with a strange kind of triumph. Bald as a billiard ball he went. The reflection was enough to blind you on a sunny day. Not that there were many of those in those days.

  Having located the imperfection, Frankie finds himself violently sawing at it with the tip of the nail, as if trying to obliterate the blemish altogether. Almost immediately, he gives up, defeated. The birthmark, now carrying a faint purple weal, is more noticeable than before.

  He shifts the examination from fingernail to fingertip. Is it just in his imagination that the texture of the mark feels slightly different from the rest of his skin, giving out a shade more friction to the touch, like the finest grade of sandpaper? Odd that he should even notice something novel about it, after thirty years of anxious examination. No – perhaps more like twenty-five years, since there must have been a time, before self-consciousness, when it did not press down on him, marking out his difference, announcing his disfigurement.

  Shortly after their wedding, he had allowed Veronica to touch it. It was possibly the most intimate thing he had ever experienced – to allow another human being to inspect his mark, to maul and explore it. She was gentle, but he had flinched, felt himself bunch up within. She tried to reassure him, insisting it was an inseparable part of an integrated whole. No perfection without flaws, she said.

  One day he wants to be rid of it. A gift to himself for the new millennium, perhaps. Over the last five years several female friends have had cosmetic surgery, for tightening, reducing, stretching or plumping up. But none, he knows, has tried to erase a part of themselves in this way, to this extent.

  He applies his hand to the hot air dryer, enjoying the pressure of invisible force. Shaking them free of stubborn germs, he returns to the shop floor, to his functional but expensive desk which sits beneath a large hand-painted sign in italic script

  Farley, Ratchett and Gwynne

  Estate Agents and Valuers

  Est. 1973

  The walls are covered with immense fluorescent orange maps of the local area, as if these particular postcodes have become lurid and bloated. There are five other desks in the room, all of which face forward towards the plate-glass window that fronts FR&G. The office is new: the old one, just to the east of the roundabout leading to Holland Park Avenue, had its rent hiked beyond what was possible. So they have lost their fashionable W11 postcode. But so far, trade has been unaffected.

  Furthest from the property displays, at the back of the room, sit Nicholas Ratchett and Simon Farley, the two remaining partners in the firm. Closer to the front, Frankie’s own desk is flanked to the right by Victor Strudwick, the lugubrious, rubbery-lipped mortgage broker, his thick curly hair bursting from his head like an unwelcome thought.

  At the front of the room, at the coal face, neat in business suits, are the office junior, Jane (thick, posh, fat, Alice band) and Maree, who specializes in rentals and is Ratchett’s idea of glamorous (highlighted brunette hair, expensive cosmetics), hence her position close to the plate-glass window. As Ratchett never quite tires of telling Maree – and Jane, in a rather more openly critical tone of voice – appearance and presentation are going to be the keys to success in the new millennium.

  Frankie continues to chew over the thought of plastic surgery, but the sound of the phone ringing on his desk tugs at the edges of his distraction. It joins the chorus of three others in the room, as if each is calling for a mate. The property market is irrepressible even this early in the new year. Two of the receivers are immediately picked up, but Frankie ignores the insistent dring of his own, earning himself a dark sideways glance from Nick Ratchett who is, as usual, dressed in a black-blue Prada suit – he owns three, all identical – slightly tight across the shoulders, a white tailored-fit satin striped shirt and a grey silk tie, loosened at the neck and releasing a tiny burst of springy, oily chest hair that makes Frankie think of mattress filling escaping under pressure. Sometimes the colour of Ratchett’s tie changes – perhaps emerald green or duck-egg blue. Sometimes he even sports a straight knitted version, with a squared-off tip, usually maroon. But the tie is the only variable. Even his socks are uniformly, perpetually, doggedly charcoal.

  The suit, despite its label, would have been bought at a knock-down price from someone, or from somewhere, possibly in a pub. Ratchett never paid full price for anything if he could possibly help it, either in his behaviour – in which he was adept at avoiding responsibility – or in his shopping habits. Those habits themselves were purely functional. At his Fulham home, which Frankie had only once or twice visited in his seven years at FR&G, Ratchett had worn cheap saggy T-shirts and fraying sweat pants, while he draped himself over expensive but anonymous-looking, hard-wearing furniture, watching undemanding programmes on a cheap TV. Style in clothing was not a pleasure for Ratchett, but an unavoidable business tool.

  Aware of Ratchett’s critical gaze but indifferent to it, Frankie checks his Tag Heuer. It was Veronica’s wedding present to him. On receiving it, he couldn’t resist looking it up in the catalogue, finding himself slightly disappointed that it hadn’t been more top of the range. After all, £750 wasn’t so much for a watch nowadays, not one which sealed marital vows,
anyway. He had spent five times as much on her, technically at least, since he kicked up for the honeymoon and, of course, the engagement ring. Then, clinical pathologists like Veronica didn’t earn that much, he supposed, especially in the NHS.

  The exasperated jangle of the phone cuts off. Ratchett takes a three-and-a-half inch disc out of his PC, examines it idly, shoots him another glance, replaces it with another disc, then rolls his eyes at Simon Farley. Farley, fat and self-satisfied, but sweet in his way, although weak and pliable as far as Frankie is concerned, gives a half-smile in acknowledgement before politically distracting himself by rustling papers on his desk.

  Frankie turns to Ratchett, his face arranged into a conscious evocation of profound weariness.

  Stop eyeballing me, Nick.

  Instead of responding, Ratchett pointedly surveys the office with bloodshot eyes that customarily look both dismayed and irritated. This at-rest expression disappears under the necessity of supplication when he is selling property. White shows above the grungy, cardboard-brown iris, giving him a slightly crazed look.

  Frankie notes a sizeable crumb lodged in Ratchett’s carefully clipped and groomed salt-and-pepper stubble, close to the left edge of his sharp, violent mouth. Quarter pounder with cheese, Frankie guesses – not so much because he can infer this from the shape and texture of the residue but because this is pretty much what Ratchett lives on during the daytime. Ratchett’s diet only seems to vary when dining out with clients, in which case he always chooses steak, game or some form of expensive offal. As a child, he once told Frankie, his favourite food was ox hearts. Ratchett’s failure to die of a heart attack is a surprise to Frankie as well as an enduring disappointment. Why is it always the good that go first? Poor Ralphie.

  Frankie dials up the internet on his Apple iBook Clamshell, with 56K dial-up modem, listening to the dialling tone and the ensuing agonized squeal. The screen, as was so often the case, is struggling to load.

  Jane, get me a cup of coffee will you? says Ratchett, loudly.

  Jane, employed by Farley largely for her submissive nature, starts to rise from her chair.

  Frankie glances across at her.

  She’s not your secretary, Nick. She’s an intern on a training programme.

  Two sugars. Just a splash of milk.

  Don’t let him bully you, Jane.