Pleasure and a Calling (5 page)

That should have been that. But there was one last thing I had to do. And it was surprisingly easy. There was no guard on my door. This wasn’t Soviet Russia. And with Marrineau not yet back from A&E and the story of my infamy not yet fully broadcast, there was nothing to stop me simply walking out of the house and across the playing fields – the pitches busy now with thudding tackles and cheering boys – and straight into the first-team changing room. No one challenged me. Marrineau’s black tracksuit, with its yellow captain’s stripe, was not hard to find. His keys, along with a few coins, were in one of his trainers, under the seat. I guessed Marrineau would come straight back to the tournament, and I was right. I watched from beneath the trees as he eventually arrived like a returning war hero to the cheers of his supporters, a bandage and sticking plaster across his face, his eye bloodshot. Now I saw that he was negotiating with Mr Frith, head of games. He couldn’t play, it seemed, but he could referee. He pulled on an official’s bib and swung a whistle on a ribbon while he talked. Mr Frith assigned him two teams of Minors and he ran off with them. The smaller ones struggled to keep up. How proud they would be to be refereed by Marrineau. His supporters watched him go, uncertain whether to follow and be obliged, like him, to stand among the Minors, or save their roars for the Majors of Hooke and Bentham. He was on his own.

With Marrineau pinned down by the nonsense of rugby, I walked calmly to his room. And what satisfaction to turn the key
in that lock, to push open that forbidden door, to breathe the stale odours of that sacred place as if they were pure mountain air. There were things to see and appreciate. From all surfaces came the dull gleam of sporting trophies. On the wall were framed certificates, and a photograph of Marrineau shaking hands with a sporting personality. In a drawer I found the tan crocodile-skin shaving kit he deployed with such nonchalance in ablutions, drawing the razor smoothly through his enviable stubble with that natural grace only athletes have. I lay on his bed, leafing through a rugby programme, several years old, for a match between South Africa and the British Lions. I tried to feel its value to him. I prised open the staples and removed the double-page photograph at the centre – a final school souvenir. The last thing I found, hidden carelessly under the bed, was the chess set. I clicked it open to find a label taped under the lid inscribed with the name of its rightful owner – it belonged to one of the boys from the chess club. I guessed that Marrineau had taken it from the boy in some act of spite or bullying and simply kept it. I vowed to return it.

And now I opened the wardrobe. Here was the handsome tobacco-coloured rawhide cowboy jacket I’d seen him wear at weekends in the town with his gang and those excitable girls – perhaps Sarah herself had been there – who gathered around the games machines in the café.

How disappointing that Marrineau proved so lacking in imagination and substance. How little of him there was to cling to. The trick, I saw, was to step away before you felt the heat of a person. In the afternoon sunshine I could see the crowds of players running around and hear their distant shouts. I tried to pick Marrineau out, but he was too far away and much reduced. I put on the jacket, heavy and worn. It was too broad in the
shoulders and yet in a way felt right and fitting enough. I stood at the window like the giant statue of Jesus above Rio de Janeiro, arms stretched wide, as if ready for crucifixion, long leather fringes hanging from the sleeves. To be honest, I felt like a king myself. And, of course, I too would rise again.

A
UNT
L
ILLIAN FOUND A
private sixth-form college for me, starting in September. In the meantime, undoubtedly out of fear of having me creeping around her house for months, she fixed me up with a summer job at a firm of estate agents, Mower & Mower – two relatives with distant links to the family. It didn’t surprise me to learn that they were located a hundred miles away from Norfolk, or two hundred if you went by train. Old Mr Mower – the other Mr Mower was apparently long dead – picked me up from the station and drove me to my accommodation, a fragrant guesthouse run by a nice Mrs Burton whose bedroom, I discovered (some minutes after unpacking), was home to a vast collection of ceramic farm animals.

Mr Mower picked me up after breakfast. I was almost entirely ignorant of what estate agents actually did. But, oh my, when I found out – when we arrived at his client’s house and Mr Mower didn’t knock on the door but simply unlocked it and ushered me in …

‘The owners just give you their keys?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Mr Mower, taking off his trilby in deference
to being in someone else’s house. ‘If they’re working, or on holiday, or too busy to be around. It happens often. Then you have to make sure you arrive in good time, ahead of the prospective buyer. Make sure everything is ship-shape.’

We made our way round the house, Mr Mower pointing things out. Upstairs, he opened a door to a large study with an old-fashioned writing desk and swivel chair and bookshelves and two small paintings on the wall. We went to look out of the window.

‘What can you tell me about the garden?’ he said.

‘The lawn has been mowed?’

‘Excellent. What else do you see?’

‘Trees? Bushes?’

‘Good boy. Which means it’s not overlooked by the neighbours. People like their privacy.’ Mr Mower tapped the side of his nose. ‘When the buyer arrives, that will be one of the first things I shall tell them.’

When the buyers turned up, a married couple with twin girls whom they left in the car busy plaiting each other’s hair, he gave them the same tour, but added things about the roof guarantee, low crime figures and good local schools. Then he drove me back to the office to meet his staff. Rita, his slow-moving secretary, explained the filing system and how to answer the telephone if everyone was busy. In the afternoon Mr Mower and I went out again to two more properties, one to measure it up for sale with the owners, counting the rooms and asking about the boiler and whether curtains would be included in the price. Mr Mower filled out a form as he talked. He introduced me to clients as ‘young William’.

By the end of that day I knew there was no way I would go back to school; that my life must begin anew here in this leafy,
bustling town, as Mower & Mower’s sales literature called it, only forty-eight minutes by fast train from the centre of London. I instantly became the keenest, hardest-working employee the firm had ever had, and by the end of the summer Mr Mower was delighted, though taken aback, at my wish to stay on. Aunt Lillian, grateful for any result that kept me a hundred miles away from her, agreed to send me a monthly allowance, which I calculated would more than cover my meagre living expenses and allow my modest wages to mount up in the bank. ‘And do you know what you need?’ said Mr Mower, beaming. ‘Driving lessons.’

Although he had two sales consultants, Guy and Stella, I was the one Mr Mower took under his wing. Guy, who was probably in his late twenties, glowered, and would invent menial tasks for me to do, or send me to the café to queue for his lunchtime sandwich and various unhealthy snacks. He took pills for a mood-altering stomach ulcer. But I brought out the mothering instinct in Stella, the senior of the two, who occasionally brought me in a baked edible from home and twinkled with quiet amusement as I followed Mr Mower hither and thither, carrying his bag, but also internalizing the nuanced lessons of mortgaging, conveyancing and consumer law, or helping him dream up new marketing strategies and ads for the paper. He taught me how to read detailed blueprints and always to look a man in the eye. On my nineteenth birthday, in front of the whole staff, he presented me with a pair of opera glasses. (‘For roof inspections,’ he explained. ‘A crucial part of the agent’s armoury.’) He decided that I had a creative bent and had me accompany Cliff, the photographer, to clients’ houses as artistic director. Perhaps he feared that I would get bored. Perhaps he thought, as a young man who had forfeited the chance of university – renounced, as Mr Mower saw it, the life of the mind – that I required every last intellectual
stimulus that selling houses could offer. In fact it was all the stimulation I needed.

It was months, however, before I found myself alone with a house to plunder. Rita tended to arrange visits when the client was at home; Cliff would pick me up at the office in his van and then after the job would drop me back there. It was a while before I realized that Cliff, who worked at a photographic supplies shop in town, could simply be sent on his way once we’d done the job. So, when Rita announced one day that I would have to let myself into a property with a set of keys, it was as if I had spent my life preparing for it. I worked with Cliff as usual, pointing up the most saleable aspects of the house, taking the dustbins out of shot and so on. Afterwards I told him I had other errands, and would walk back to the office.

‘Ah, I get it,’ he chuckled, in his Welsh accent. ‘A bit of time off, is it? A bit of truanting? Well, don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ He winked.

How perfect. Perhaps he had errands too.

Once he was out of the way I doubled back and let myself into the house again. I didn’t have much time and I didn’t know much about the couple who lived there, but I’d been round the house once with Cliff and knew which cupboards and drawers I needed to get into. I sat on the sofa in the front room and popped grapes from the fruit bowl into my mouth while I leafed through photographs and bills and letters. They had a piano, and a son not much younger than me to play it. I imagined they were nice parents. And I envisaged a teenage boy they could be proud of. But who could know?

I know now that you can’t know everything about everyone. You have to think of it as a thrilling, ongoing project. Crossing the threshold of a strange house is like the opening line of a
gripping story. At its best, penetrating deeper, it is like falling in love.

So, even as I locked the door, I knew I had to go back. I had a copy of the key made at the shoe repairer’s on the high street (these days any outlying supermarket will do it without so much as a good morning, and certainly without wondering what you need it for), and handed the original back to Rita. By the time I went into the house again a week later I had my own camera – an expensive Polaroid bought out of my savings from Cliff’s shop (‘Oh, it’s your own camera now, is it? I’d better watch out!’). I took pictures of everything, and I borrowed documents – contracts, scribbled notes, bank statements, payslips, passports, birth certificates, address books – which I then photocopied in the library in the evenings. I took a file from the stationery room at the office and filled it with their secrets. How I came to adore these people! When I sat down with an album of photographs they had taken one summer in the Canary Islands, I felt the sun on my own face; heard with my own ears the cries of their fellow holidaymakers across the blue pool. It delighted me to follow their busy schedule, chart their routines gleaned from the calendar hanging from a magnetized hook on the fridge or from the grey desk diary in the sideboard drawer in the hall where I left my mark (the first of many in this town) scraped inside the walnut case of an old chiming clock. One morning I watched the family leave their house at 8.20 in their blue estate. The next morning I saw them arrive at Wengham Grammar, where the boy got out (8.32) without a word and stomped up the drive carrying his flute case. The morning after, I was at the station in time to see the estate turn into the car park (8.39), where the man of the house got out and, pausing to plant a kiss on his wife’s offered cheek, took the 8.55 to London, where I happened to know he worked
as an accountant for GGV, a French-owned insurance company. The next morning (8.45), equipped with my opera glasses, I watched his wife arrive at the upmarket Aube Massey store in town, where she sold soft furnishings on the second floor. That lunchtime, I saw her at work, showing customers bolts of fabric in her saleslady’s white blouse and black skirt and fashionably tousled hair, clacking back across the sales floor in her heels to answer the telephone. As she passed I recognized her perfume from the master bedroom. It almost came as a surprise to hear her speak.

So there we are. I squeezed the juice out of them, though they didn’t know it. Simon and Jennifer (Jenny) Finch and their young Thomas, 45 Holland Road. They were my first subject. The first butterfly pinned to my board. There would be rarer and brighter ones, but they were the first.

And so we love, we tire, and we move on. Eventually the house was sold, of course, but I didn’t mind. I knew where they’d gone (3 The Maples, on the north side of town). And who could say that I wouldn’t get a hankering to see them again one day when the world had turned a few more times and the adventure seemed fresh and thrilling once more.

The new people, incidentally, were equally fascinating. That’s another story, but also the point. They are all other stories.

In case I haven’t said, this was the job from heaven.

But, you ask, what does this become? I can say that it grows and evolves and makes its own idiosyncratic demands; that it’s a faith or master that will not be easily spoken against by ordinary reason; that this faith or master is a joy to serve; and that you proceed from first principles.