Heaven's Light (3 page)

She was offering him the bottle. He shook his head, said he’d prefer tea. She sighed, getting up. She was a tall woman, keenly aware of the impact she always made on men. Lately, she’d taken to wearing dresses with deeply scooped necklines, emphasizing the heaviness of her bust. I’m still in the game, she seemed to be saying. I still count.

Barnaby waved her back into the deckchair, asking whether she wanted anything to eat. He was thinking of fixing himself a sandwich. He’d bring a plateful up. She looked at him a moment, a vagueness in her eyes, before sitting down again.

‘Jessie,’ she said.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s supposed to be coming to lunch.’

‘
Lunch
?’

‘Yes. I dropped a little note into the college a couple of days ago. She phoned back. I thought I’d told you. I’m sure I did.’

Barnaby shook his head. He remembered no such conversation. Jessie had become another of the no-go areas between them, a minefield you entered at your peril.

‘Haagen coming too?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘No.’

Barnaby smiled, turning away. Haagen, he was certain, was one of the reasons they saw so little of Jessie. From the day she’d set eyes on him, she’d had room for nothing else in her life. It was sweetly ironic, therefore, that Barnaby himself should have made the introductions. Not that he regretted their relationship. Far from it.

‘What time?’ he said, stepping back into the bedroom.

Liz looked at her watch. ‘It’s twenty past twelve.’

‘I meant lunch.’

‘Oh, I said four. I thought we’d eat late. That OK with you?’

Barnaby glanced back over his shoulder. Liz was reaching for the Tio Pepe again, not waiting for an answer.

Downstairs, Barnaby circled the kitchen. Most of the equipment was brand new, recently installed to Liz’s specification. She’d only found out about Kate after the affair was over, a spiteful confidence from a friend, and part of the peace settlement had been a tacit understanding that their marriage should be buttressed henceforth against the outside world. That had meant money, the least of Barnaby’s problems, and with the kitchen had come a bigger
monthly allowance and a brand new car, visible evidence for anyone who cared to look that their relationship was out of intensive care and well into convalescence. It hadn’t worked, of course, and they both knew it, but sheer exhaustion had locked them into settling for what they had. They still talked. They were still friends. They still, occasionally, made love. Even these small intimacies put them well ahead of other couples they knew, and both of them, deep down, had no appetite for starting all over again. There were worse things in life, Barnaby told himself, than a successful legal practice, and a £200,000 view of eternity.

Barnaby filled the kettle. He was still hunting for the tea-bags when he heard the front-door bell. He went to the window and peered out. Jessie never arrived early. Never. The bell rang again. A man in his forties stepped back from the door, looking up. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of scuffed Reeboks. He had a holdall in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. The blaze of blond curls was even wilder than Barnaby remembered, but there was no mistaking the big square face and the puckered grin. Charlie Epple.

Barnaby opened the door, following Charlie’s pointing finger. The man never bothered with formalities. He hadn’t been down for nearly a year but it didn’t seem to matter.

‘Lancaster,’ he was saying. ‘Look.’

Barnaby shielded his eyes in time to see the silhouette of the big four-engined bomber roar past. Behind it, in formation, flew a Spitfire and a Hurricane. At the end of the street, the promenade on top of the sea wall was black with people. Barnaby found himself explaining about the memorial service. Behind the Lanc would come a fly-past. Tornados. Yank planes. Everything you could think of.

Charlie was still watching the Spitfire as it banked over
Southsea Castle and climbed away. Finally he turned round, shaking his head, holding two fingers to his temple, cocking his thumb like a pistol. It was a gesture Barnaby remembered from years back. It meant that the sight of the aircraft had blown Charlie’s mind. He stepped past Barnaby, presented him with the bottle and tucked the holdall neatly beneath the line of hanging coats. Then he was outside again, looking skywards.

‘Pint?’ he said. ‘Somewhere with a view?’

They drank all afternoon, moving from pub to pub, never leaving Old Portsmouth. By four o’clock, they were down by the harbour mouth, joining the crowds watching the Queen reviewing the fleet. The warships were drawn up in long grey lines a mile or so offshore, straddling the stretch of water known as Spithead, and Barnaby could see the dark blue hull of the royal yacht steaming slowly past the bulk of a big American aircraft carrier.

The crowds were already six deep on the harbour front and Barnaby followed Charlie as he pushed through towards a low wall that gave access to the boatyard belonging to the sailing club. Charlie had a pint glass in one hand and a Union Jack on a stick in the other. He’d bought a flag for Barnaby, too, but Barnaby had already given his to a passing child. At the front of the crowd, Charlie handed his glass to Barnaby, then scrambled onto the wall. Another climb took them onto the flat slab roof of a sail store. The sun was in the west now, late afternoon, and they settled down against the warm brickwork at the back of the roof. The view was perfect: the ebb tide flooding out through the harbour mouth, the sunshine splintering
on the dancing waves as a succession of tourist boats churned to and fro.

Barnaby reached for his glass, swallowing another mouthful of beer. It could have been his fifth pint. Or sixth. He didn’t care. The afternoon had tugged him back to his youth and he’d put aside the pain in his leg and the disappointments of the weekend. Enough, for now, to be sitting in the sunshine, with the best seat in the house, listening to Charlie Epple.

He’d known the man since adolescence and he’d always been a kind of hero. They’d been classmates at the grammar school, Charlie already the rebel, already tipped for stardom. Average in more or less everything else, he had a rare talent for a certain kind of writing. Not short stories or anything literary, not the kind of turgid essays that took you up the foothills of the A-level course, but condensed little pieces, occasionally poetry, sometimes song lyrics, but more and more often the kind of casually brilliant scribblings the advertising industry called copywriting.

It was a gift that Charlie had always shrugged off. His real interests were music and women. But at Barnaby’s insistence, he’d entered a national copywriting contest organized by one of the big London agencies and, to no one’s surprise but his own, he’d won. With a cheque for £500 had come the offer of a job, and so Charlie had boxed his precious collection of rhythm and blues LPs, and loaded his brother’s Bedford van and departed for the big city. Within six years he’d become one of the hottest properties in Adland. Poached by a succession of agencies, he’d made – and spent – a small fortune, and with the money had come the applause of his peers. His ads for Bacardi rum and Oxfam had won the industry’s top awards, and by the eighties, when the Tory government decided to
auction the nation’s silver, Charlie had been the natural choice to shape the campaigns. He helped sell British Telecom. He was in at the rebirth of British Gas. And as Smith Square warmed to his handiwork, he got richer and richer.

Throughout this period, Barnaby had kept up with his career. Frequently in London himself on business, he’d find time to meet Charlie for a drink or a meal, amazed and delighted at the latest twist in the story. Often, these encounters included Charlie’s friends, mates from the industry, and from them Barnaby was able to piece together exactly what it was that made Charlie so irreplaceable.

The advertising business ran on adrenaline. The big prizes went to the agencies who could think on their feet, make sense of impossible briefs, meet silly deadlines. This guaranteed an ongoing state of chaos, something for which Charlie had considerable affection. In consequence, he never panicked, never lost his cool, but simply came up with another half-dozen brilliant ideas. In his own phrase, they were the bullets he sent into the oncoming hordes. When the account execs were going crazy on the fourth floor, it was Charlie’s nasal drawl that brought them to a halt. Barnaby had heard these men talking about him and, as far as they were concerned, Charlie Epple had two priceless assets: low blood pressure and a talent for the killer copyline. Together, they’d given him a huge helping of the one thing he couldn’t handle: success.

He was talking about wife number three. She was Spanish. She was exactly half his age. And she was driving him mad.

Barnaby was watching the royal yacht steaming away down the Solent. He glanced at Charlie. None of his marriages had ever worked. This one was evidently no different.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘She’s a kid. And she’s stupid. She just wants to talk all the time. And fuck.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘You ever tried it?’

‘No.’

‘It gets incredibly boring. Really dull. If she sits on my face again, I’ll sue. Invasion of privacy. I’m serious.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Nothing. It’s greed. Pure and simple. Just helps herself. Can’t stop. If it was food, she’d explode.’ He paused. ‘Nice thought.’

Barnaby tried to suppress a grin and failed. Charlie had never had a problem pulling new girlfriends. That bit was easy. They loved his directness, his lack of inhibition, the way he cornered them at parties or functions and talked them cheerfully into bed. It was afterwards, often weeks afterwards, when they had to swop the body oils and the laughter for real life, that it got a little trickier.

Charlie was studying his empty glass. His latest wife was called Conchita. They had a big house in Wimbledon. He thought he might leave her the key and run away.

‘Where to?’

‘Anywhere. Here.’ He nodded up-harbour, towards the tangle of masts in the naval dockyard. ‘It’s real. It’s got atmosphere. It’s sane. I’m serious.’

‘And is that why you’re down?’

‘No.’

He glanced sideways at Barnaby and then explained about the new client the agency had just picked up. It seemed that Portsmouth City Council had decided to invest in a little serious self-promotion. Nineteen ninety-four was the eight-hundredth anniversary of the city’s first charter.
The celebrations had coincided with the D-Day jamboree, and next month, Pompey was playing host to a stage of the Tour de France. The cyclists would start and finish on Southsea Common. The world’s cameras would descend on the city once again. It seemed, said Charlie, a sensible time to cash in.

Barnaby tried to follow the logic but three hours’ drinking made the obvious difficult to grasp.

‘You mean the city council?’ he said. ‘Here?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Our lot?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They want to hire you? To sell…’ Barnaby waved his glass at the crowds below ‘… all this?’

‘That’s right.’

Barnaby thought about the proposition. After another mouthful of beer it didn’t sound so fanciful. You could sell anything nowadays. Even Pompey.

‘And you’ll do it?’

‘No question.’ Charlie nodded, watching a big yacht wallowing in through the harbour mouth. On the foredeck lay two girls in bikinis. One got up, stretched, then reached for the rail and began to wave at the crowds. Charlie waved back, grinning.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ he murmured. ‘Meet the client. Discuss the brief.’

‘Eleven o’clock when?’

‘Tomorrow.’ He blew the girl an extravagant kiss. ‘Did I mention about staying the night?’

They were back home by five. Barnaby had trouble opening the front door, and when he turned to say something to
Charlie he realized that his car wasn’t there. He peered down the street, wondering what might have happened. Maybe Liz had gone to pick Jessie up. Maybe she’d phoned for a lift. But why should she do that when Jess had been so determined to keep them away from that flat of hers?

‘Mercedes coupé,’ Barnaby said vaguely, ‘silver grey.’

‘What is?’

‘The car.’

Barnaby looked a moment longer, nonplussed, then opened the door. Inside, the table was set for three. He could smell roast beef but when he crossed the room to the kitchen he found the oven turned off. He reached for one of the saucepans on top of the hob and removed the lid. Florets of cauliflower swam in lukewarm water. He turned round. Charlie was at the table. Under a bottle of Burgundy, he’d found a note. He handed it to Barnaby without a word. Barnaby read it. Liz had been called to the hospital. Jessie was in the Emergency Unit. Barnaby looked up. Charlie was already on the phone. He was Jessie’s godfather. The bond between them had always been close. He caught Barnaby’s eye across the room.

‘Cab,’ he said tonelessly.

Portsmouth’s Accident and Emergency Unit is in the Queen Alexandra Hospital on the slopes of Portsdown Hill to the north of the city. Charlie followed Barnaby into the reception area. The woman behind the desk made a note of Barnaby’s name and lifted a phone. After a while, a young doctor appeared, took Barnaby by the arm and walked him towards a pair of double doors.

‘Where’s my wife?’ Barnaby kept saying. ‘Where’s Liz?’

‘She’s through here.’

The doctor opened one of the doors, letting Barnaby pass. Right and left were lines of curtained cubicles. At the end, on a chair, sat Liz. Barnaby quickened his step. He wanted to know what had happened. He wanted Liz to tell him. She got up slowly. She looked pale and drawn, and her mascara had run, big black smudges under her eyes. The doctor stood to one side, talking to the sister in charge, who was consulting a chart and shaking her head.

‘What’s happening?’ Barnaby said. ‘What’s going on?’

He felt Liz’s hand on his arm and he caught it, grateful. His wife tugged him gently towards the row of empty seats.

‘She’s on a drip,’ she said. ‘She’s got a tube in her arm.’

‘But why? What’s wrong?’