The Woodcutter (16 page)

Back then I was devastated by the prospect that I might never see him again.

McLucky did his best to reassure me in his forthright Glaswegian way. He it was who ran a check on the hospital and discovered that it had possibly the best stroke unit in the north of England, and that Fred was there as a private patient funded by no less a person than my dear old father-in-law, Sir Leon! It was a strange irony that their shared opposition to a Hadda–Ulphingstone marriage had turned their strong employer/employee bond into something like friendship and ultimately Fred had graduated from being the estate’s head forester to more of an overall estate manager.

For several days, I could think about nothing else but my sick father and my estranged wife. I had plenty of time for thinking as, apart from the medical staff and DC McLucky, I saw no one.

As I’ve said, I’d never been a particularly sociable man and as I became rich and powerful, I put little faith in the pretensions of new acquaintance to genuine affection. But people seemed to like me and I did form a small circle of friends to whom I would once have applied the old-fashioned designation of
faithful and true
.

Not one of the faithful and the true made an effort to contact me or turned up to see me in hospital. Wankers! I thought. But why should any of them prove more faithful and true than my own wife and my good friend and solicitor, Toby Estover?

The only one I felt confident would show me some loyalty was Johnny Nutbrown.

As I’ve already told you, my first encounter with Johnny age fifteen was far from auspicious. On my return after my years away with the fairies, I was rather surprised to find him still around. While Johnny is always at ease everywhere, he never gives an impression of actually belonging anywhere. Of course he’d been to the same school as some of the others, including Estover, and also he had a bad case of the hots for Imo’s best friend, Pippa Thursby. So they were good enough reasons for him to be on the fringe of their magic little circle.

But I never counted him as being truly in it, which was a plus for me.

I’m sure Imogen had to put up with a lot of crap from her friends when she announced she was going to marry me. She never passed any of it on, and it wouldn’t have bothered me if she had. Frankly, I thought most of them were a waste of space that could have been more usefully occupied by a flock of Herdwicks. All the interest most of them showed in me was a prurient curiosity about the parameters of the sexual performance they were sure must be the basis of Imogen’s interest. I think I could probably have shagged the lot of them, men and women, if I’d been so inclined.

But Johnny saw me differently. Later, when we got close enough for honesty, he told me with that cynical grin of his, ‘The others looked at you and thought
big fucks;
I looked at you and thought
big bucks.
This guy is going where the money is.’

I couldn’t complain about this economic basis for our relationship as initially I only became interested in him when I realized he’d got the sharpest mind for figures of anyone I’d ever met. If it had been allied to an entrepreneurial spirit, he would have been a master of the commercial universe in his own right.

I soon realized we were made for each other.

The thing was that Johnny could do just about anything, so long as someone told him what to do.

An old schoolmate of his – in fact, Toby Estover my former solicitor, and former friend – told me about Johnny’s first appearance on a rugby field. As he evinced neither interest nor talent, they stuck him on the wing for a practice game. The first time the ball was passed to him, he caught it one-handed and was standing still, examining it with mild curiosity, when most of the opposing team jumped on top of him. When he’d got back on his feet, the games master expostulated, ‘For heaven’s sake, Nutbrown, I don’t expect you to do much when you get the ball, but I do expect you to do
something
!’

‘Yes, sir. What exactly?’ replied Johnny.

‘Well, ideally I’d like to see you run forward as fast as you can, not letting anyone touch you, until you reach those two tall posts sticking out of the ground, and then place the ball gently between them. Failing that, as I’m sure you will, just kick it as far as you can!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Johnny.

And next time he received the ball, he jinked and sidestepped his way the length of the field without anyone laying a hand upon him and touched down between the posts. The only trouble was the
next
time he took a pass he chose the alternative instruction and kicked it as far as he could, this being sideways over the line of poplars separating the ground from a river into which the ball plopped, never to be seen again.

That was the thing about Johnny. You had to tell him what to do, you had to be clear what you were telling him, and you had to tell him every time. We suited each other perfectly. I had the ambition, the energy and the imagination; and he had a mind that could run over my proposals, detect flaws, point out shortcuts, and calculate risks, often in the time it took to down the two large vodka martinis that were the inevitable precursor to lunch and dinner.

Without Johnny, I don’t doubt I would have still managed to become stinking rich, but with him, the sweet stink of success came a lot quicker.

Without me, Johnny might well have degenerated into a sort of old-fashioned lounge-lizard, charming enough money to get by on out of a succession of susceptible women. I took some pride in having saved him from this fate, but rather less in having been responsible for his marriage.

Pippa Thursby, like many best friends, was all the things that Imogen wasn’t.

While Imogen defied friends and family to marry the man she loved, Pippa never made any secret of the fact that though she found Johnny to be hugely attractive, highly entertaining, and a maestro of the mattress, he was merely (as she put it) stopping her gap until she could get her hands on some seriously wealthy old guy who would set her up for life by either death or divorce. She had her sights set on the MD of the advertising company for which she worked. Pippa was no featherbrain, she had excellent IT skills and could have carved out a successful career for herself, but she saw no reason to catch a train into work every day when she could get somebody else to do that on her behalf.

So Johnny was fun but marriage to someone so feckless simply wasn’t an option. Then he and I got together, and things changed as it dawned on Pippa that my eruption towards the financial stratosphere was dragging Johnny in its wake.

Johnny himself was more than happy with his long-standing no-strings relationship, but he was dead meat once Pippa decided that life as Mrs Nutbrown could be a five-star arrangement after all. So three years after my own wedding, I was standing as best man at Johnny’s.

As my closest colleague and my closest friend, I had hoped, nay I had believed, he would stand by me in turn.

I put it to the back of my mind as I set about trying to make sense of what was happening in my marriage.

DC McLucky had proved to be a rough diamond with a heart of gold. He even apologized obliquely for not being allowed to leave the phone permanently plugged in by my bedside, but he fetched it without demur whenever I asked for it. I tried without success to talk with Imogen. I rang Pippa but she told me bluntly that she couldn’t help me and put the phone down. I rang my office and found the number was disconnected. When I got on to BT to complain, there was a long silence then I found myself connected to a DI in the Fraud Squad. I told him all the money was buried in a dead man’s chest on a South Sea island but I’d lost the map, which wasn’t very clever but I was getting beyond clever. I rang just about everyone I knew and found they were either uncommunicative or unavailable. A call from me clearly sounded like the tinkle of a leper’s bell.

But I made no attempt to contact Johnny Nutbrown. I didn’t mention him even when I spoke to his wife. I think it was superstition. If Johnny deserted me, then I was truly fucked. He would surely come to see me of his own accord. And in his own time, of course, for one thing you soon found out about Johnny was that his own time was not as other people’s time.

But as the days passed and he didn’t appear, I was ready to sink into despair.

Then one afternoon I woke up from yet another involuntary nap to find a lean, rangy figure sitting by my bed. His face was hidden behind a copy of the
Racing Times
but I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was.

I felt a huge surge of happiness.

If you’re interested in drawing a detailed map of my emotional progress, Elf, here is a significant moment to sketch in.

That is the last time I can recall feeling happy. I mean, what the fuck have I had to be happy about in the last seven years?

But, moron that I was, I felt happy then.

Johnny had come at last.

ii

As I fixed my one eye on Johnny, a second emotion came to join happiness.

It was relief.

The thing was he looked so relaxed, so completely unchanged from the man I had last seen many months earlier, or indeed from the elegant figure who’d winked at me as I passed him his wedding ring all those years ago, that it seemed impossible there could be anything seriously wrong with my life or my business.

‘My dear old Wolf,’ he said. ‘So glad you’ve decided to join us.’

I pressed the button that raised the top end of the bed.

‘Johnny, good to see you,’ I croaked. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘Ten minutes or so. Chap in the corridor with a speech defect wanted to stop me, but I managed to talk him round.’

It was a comfort to know that not even DC McLucky was immune to the Nutbrown charm.

He said, ‘Brought you a bunch of grapes. Could only get them processed, I’m afraid.’

He was wearing what he called his poacher’s jacket. I don’t think it was altogether a joke. Johnny would much rather help himself to a neighbour’s birds than accept an invitation to an organized shoot. From one of the deep internal pockets he drew a bottle of red wine and from the other two goblets.

‘Thank God for screw tops, eh?’ he said, opening the bottle and filling the glasses. ‘Bottoms up.’

We drank. It was my first alcohol and it tasted foul, but symbolically it was nectar. Despite everything I found myself thinking, with Johnny here, things must be on the up.

I said, ‘So how’re things looking, Johnny?’

For a moment my heart leapt as he said, ‘Not so bad if you like lots of blue sky.’

Then he added with a grin, ‘Of course, not much else to see when you’ve gone belly-up.’

It was then I recalled that never in any crisis situation, professional or personal, had I seen Johnny anything but relaxed! Here was a mind that could make sense of a vast acreage of figures at a glance but had no more concept of tomorrow than a gadfly.

‘It can’t be as bad as that, surely?’ I said, still scrabbling for some scrap of hope.

‘You weren’t there,’ he said. ‘Might have been different if you had been. Did what I could but it was
sauve qui peut
with the rest of them. That arse Massie in charge of Off-shore just vanished. Even helped himself to those rather nice Gillray prints from his office wall. Then those awful Fraud Squad people started crawling all over the place. I stopped going in after that. Nothing to do and they’ve got absolutely no conversation.’

I was genuinely bewildered by this indication of just how serious my business worries were.

I said, ‘What the hell’s going on, Johnny? Hell, we pushed the boundaries like everyone else, but we didn’t step over them, or at least not very far.’

He shrugged and said, ‘You know what they say, Wolf. When the tide goes out, that’s when all the crap shows up on the beach. Not a lot of sympathy around for anyone just now, and with this other business, you are pretty well at the bottom of the list.’

‘You mean the kiddy-porn stuff? For God’s sake, Johnny, they can’t make that stick.’

‘No? Well, if anyone can beat the rap, I’d back you, Wolf.’

I didn’t like the way he phrased that.

I said sharply, ‘Johnny, you don’t believe any of that crap, do you? I shouldn’t need to tell you that it’s just not true!’

He shrugged again and said, ‘Whatever you say. Doesn’t matter what I think, does it? Like my great uncle Nigel. Had this thing about sheep, no one in the family gave a damn, they were his sheep, weren’t they? But when it hit the papers, that was different. Had to resign from his clubs. What the papers are saying about you, Wolf, well, all I can say is, if you can prove it’s not true, no need to worry about the business. You’ll be able to live like a lord on your profits from libel actions!’

I looked at him aghast. I’d always known Johnny lived in a different world from the rest of us, now I saw he lived in another dimension.

At least if he was giving me the truth as he saw it here, he was my best bet to get the truth about what took pride of place at the top of my mountain of worries.

I said, ‘Is Imogen still staying with you?’

‘Good lord, no. Moved out a few months back. Went up to Cumbria, easier to set mantraps for the press boys up there.’

‘And Ginny?’

‘Went with her, I think. Some talk of sending her off to this school in Paris, all the top people have their kids there so they’ve got better security than the Pentagon. Don’t know whether she’s gone yet or not, though.’

‘Have you talked to her at all – Imogen, I mean? About the divorce?’

I don’t know what I was looking for. Perhaps I had some faint hope that what Imogen was doing was in some way tactical, a legal move to put herself and some of our fortune beyond the reach of the circling sharks while I lay in a coma.

I wanted truth from Johnny. I got it.

‘Yes, I had a chat when Pippa told me that was the way Imo was thinking. Nothing else for her to do really. I mean, it’s a nobrainer. I expect Toby told her the same. Husband either a vegetable, or if he wakes, a convicted kiddy-fucker and fraudster. Either way, no point hanging about, get out quick as you can with as much as you can. Though the way things are looking, you’ve really got to be sorry for the poor old girl.’