The Men Read online

  THE MEN

  Anthony Masters

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  4 July 1951

  Spirals of dust flew from the baked ground as Lucy pushed her shopping trolley up the Cut and past Conifers.

  The crackling sound had seemed part of the noisy wheels of the trolley as they rattled along the stones on the path. She knew one of the wheels was rasping and had asked Tim to do something about it. Of course he hadn’t. Crackling? Rasping? Surely there was a difference. Then she saw the smoke.

  Abandoning the trolley and clutching only her purse, Lucy Groves ran to the gap in the hedge that Peter had recently filled with wire. But it had been pushed aside and the smoke was drifting across the Cut, making her choke. Ducking down underneath the privet, she stumbled through, trying to see what was ablaze. Then Lucy saw the flames, heard the crackling increase in ferocity and caught sight of Sally running down the lawn still in her dressing gown.

  A period of withdrawal? One of Sally’s depressions? But now she was bounding along and they both arrived at the potting shed at the same time.

  ‘It’s those horrible boys,’ Sally shouted. ‘I saw them in the Cut from the window, but I had no idea they’d come in here. Look what they’ve done!’

  The smoke was blowing the other way now in the breeze, and as glass shattered Lucy caught a glimpse of upturned paint tins twisting in the heat and what appeared to be some kind of scrawl on the wall.

  ‘I should get the fire brigade,’ shouted Lucy. ‘Those flames might catch the trees.’

  An hour later, with hoses snaking up the Cut, the brigade had doused the flames and the shed was a mound of damp blackened ashes. But the trees had been saved.

  ‘Pure vandalism.’ Sally was outraged. ‘Those awful boys.’

  ‘There was something scrawled in paint on the wall. I think it said WILL TELL’.

  Sally’s lips worked for a moment and her skin was grey under the summer tan. ‘Of course. That’s him.’

  ‘That’s who?’ Lucy was bewildered.

  ‘William Tell. The boy I saved from those bullies. A scrawny child. They were laying into him on the green. I told them to leave him alone and so did the local Bobby.’

  ‘How did you know him?’ Why should she know him, wondered Lucy.

  ‘Will’s from Hersham. He sometimes gives Baverstock a hand.’

  ‘What a strange name. Is he really called William Tell?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She half-laughed and then looked alarmed. ‘Here comes a police constable.’ Sally zipped her dressing gown up to her throat. ‘Those louts might have burnt the shed to pay me out for rescuing the little lad – and wrote his name up.’

  Lucy was puzzled. Then she said, ‘You’d better tell the policeman then. Tell him about William Tell.’

  They looked at each other and burst into nervous laughter.

  Adrian was determined he’d have her.

  Sweating, trembling with excitement, he strode ahead, leading Molly up the steep rise to the wooded hill, the July sun shining limply through rolling dark clouds. Please God, don’t let the rain start.

  Glancing back, Adrian could see Molly was gazing up at the sky apprehensively, and at any moment he knew she would demand to go back. Somehow he had to persuade her to leave the path and head for the bushes. She might not give it to him even then, but it was worth a try. Bugger the weather. When they got off the bus the sky had been a promising blue.

  ‘Adrian!’ Molly called with her usual authority.

  He plunged on, the path between the beech trees narrowing, the foliage comfortingly thicker. Glancing back he saw she was still following, although rather more reluctantly. Should he stop and grab her now, start snogging and inch her knickers down? What about her clothes getting in a mess? Would she complain, or could he work her up enough to forget about them? He had never tried it like this before and the intensity of his anticipation was almost unbearable.

  ‘Adrian!’ Her voice was curt.

  ‘Yes?’ He swung round to look hungrily at her heavy body and large breasts, just contained by the red blouse. She was wearing nylons. Well, they’d have to come off too. She’d never do it in those. She was too particular. Was there a chance? Could he afford to be a little more optimistic? ‘What’s up?’ he asked, grinning at his unintentional play on words, trying to wipe the randy smile off his face.

  ‘It’s going to rain.’

  Very much the weather-wise prophet, Adrian squinted know-ledgeably at the sky. ‘I reckon it’ll hold off for a while longer.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Let’s get off the path,’ he said, too casually. ‘Do a bit of exploring.’ Adrian felt so self-conscious that he was sure she would laugh at him. But Molly was still gazing up at the sky doubtfully.

  ‘Wasn’t that a drop of rain?’ She made it sound like Armageddon.

  ‘No!’ He grabbed her. Might as well be the wild beast right away, he thought. If he didn’t act now, his chance would be gone and his massive erection would have to be dealt with less pleasurably.

  ‘I told you. I’m not doing nothing in the wet.’ Her lips were pursed and Adrian felt such desire he could hardly control himself.

  The smell of fern and bracken and last year’s leaves increased his excitement still further and he began to run, pulling her with him.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Somewhere quiet.’

  ‘It’s going to rain!’

  But she didn’t struggle and Adrian knew that his luck might hold after all.

  They were waist high in bracken on a ridge just below the hill when another smell assaulted his nostrils, a smell that wasn’t in the least erotic.

  He choked, the noxious aroma in his throat, and Molly dragged him to a halt. They were just below an old oak tree, dead, lightning blasted, its roots exposed.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘Dead animal,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s go the other way.’

  ‘Oh Christ!’

  ‘What is it?’

  Adrian saw the thing at last. What he had taken for part of the root system of the blasted oak was a pale limb.

  ‘It’s a deer,’ he said in a vain attempt at reassurance.

  ‘No.’ Molly was insistent, and letting go of his hand began to walk purposefully through the bracken. He hurried to join her.

  The young man lay on his back, naked, one leg nestling in the roots of the tree, the other twisted grotesquely and brokenly beneath him. He had red hair which was cropped short and his cheeks were freckled. Ants had taken residence in the gash in his throat and a couple of bluebottles crawled lazily from the dried blood.

  Adrian tried to pull Molly away, but she was resistant, fixated.

  Then, mercifully, the drizzle began and she remembered that she hadn’t wanted to get wet. It was some time before Molly really understood and began to scream.

  1

  5 July 1951

  Lucy Groves was making sandwiches in the pavilion as the mellow sun swamped the cricket pitch in glowing tea-time light. She was acutely conscious of the strong scent of sandwich spread mingling with the dank smell of well-trodden grass. God, how she hated this ritual. Lucy gazed up bitterly at the stained wooden wall opposite her, with its rows of framed West End First Eleven photographs
, some yellowing, the backgrounds as bland as the cricketers’ smiles.

  In front of Lucy was a trestle table bearing an all too slowly increasing mound of sandwiches and a pile of equally slowly reducing fillings. They included the wholesalers’ jar of sandwich spread thoughtfully donated by the Chief Constable’s brother who was ‘in grocery’, the ham given by Glen Mackintosh, a local farmer, the hard lump of cheddar the Ladies’ Catering Committee had proudly provided, the sausage meat that Lady Grayson had manufactured in her own kitchen and the tomatoes from the vicar’s greenhouse. Not bad with rationing being such a bugbear. But the troops had rallied round for the sacred cause of leather on willow.

  If only Tim wasn’t a cricketer. How good it would be to potter in the garden or run down to Ferring instead. She could have walked along the cold south coast beach, watching the sea lick at the pebbles instead of the teams munching their sandwiches, homaging the game, their flat jokes as sharp as the lingering taste of sandwich spread in her mouth.

  Lucy knew she should never have started eating while filling, but purloining scraps of the valedictory feast was compensatory, despite the fact that the ham was leathery and even Lady Grayson’s sausage meat thin and tasteless.

  Tim’s illness was, as usual, central to Lucy’s thinking. Was she romancing what he had once been, colouring his memory purple? Had he really been planning to travel in austere and contemplative places and to take her with him? Or had she created some absurd fantasy? What he had been was so far from what Tim was now that Lucy couldn’t possibly connect the two.

  As she automatically trimmed the edges of yet another sandwich, Lucy remembered their first expedition, walking desert and ocean-side trails through the barren interior of Baya California after Tim’s graduation in the summer of ‘36. She had photographed him under an enormous flowering cactus, in his shorts and khaki shirt, so full of life and so different from other men in his restlessness, his need for change. They had planned to travel the world. No, Lucy told herself firmly, I never made Tim up. He was there. Once.

  ‘He’s a free spirit,’ his mother, Susan Groves, had told her. ‘He’s not going to settle. Tim’s a doer.’

  Now he was more like a changeling. The little people had stolen the old Tim and put someone else in his place.

  After the war was over, the shadow Tim had worked for her cousin’s estate agency. Soon there was an additional tragedy; Lucy had been told she was barren.

  The word gave her a vision of bare fields under a winter’s leaden sky. A single crow picked at the arid loam.

  A fearless flying ant, having hovered for some time on the edge of her bowl, suddenly fell into the powdered egg mayonnaise. With considerable pleasure, Lucy briskly added the insect to the mixture.

  She glanced up at a burst of muted clapping, observing through the open door Tim slowly walking back from the pitch in the hazy sunshine, his white-clad figure shimmering as if in a desert mirage. The desert? Little chance of that now. All she was likely to see for a good long time were the mock Tudor gables of Esher High Street and all she was likely to hear was the chirpy buzz of chatter in Caves Café. Unless she intervened.

  As Tim came nearer to the pavilion he seemed more emaciated than ever, his features gaunt and craggy, his wrists and forearms under his rolled-up sleeves painfully thin.

  ‘Tim’s been run out.’ May Latimer arrived, plain, staunch and stoic. She always managed to oppress Lucy with her total lack of imagination. Not for May the call of the leopard, virgin sand on a Mexican beach, the pleasure of uncertainty. She often felt more like a gaoler than a friend, a continual reminder not to ask for too much, accept the status quo and, above all, put down roots that would be relentlessly encased in concrete.

  ‘Who by?’ asked Lucy, boredom making her voice dull.

  ‘Gerry Warburton.’

  ‘What a fool that man is.’

  May smiled tolerantly. She had long since given Lucy the label ‘rogue’, an arrangement by which they managed not to quarrel.

  May was married to Martin Latimer who, along with Peter Davis, had shared Tim’s wartime escape. Lucy had tried to like them at first, making them welcome for Tim’s sake, but she had soon almost convinced herself that Martin and Peter had deliberately moved to Esher after the war to watch over him, rather than to cement a friendship from which their wives would always be excluded. Now, five years later, she sensed they were still watching.

  The Men, Lucy thought bitterly, bastions of a masculine world that had become a fortress. Tim’s guardians, his trustees.

  At other times, Lucy was sure she was exaggerating the situation, creating a fantasy based on her own antipathy. She had to accept that the three men were simply bonded together by their experiences. But unlike Tim, Martin and Peter were unscathed, and for her they had come to epitomise the Surrey suburbs and their relentless conformity. Both had found their officer status useful in peacetime employment. Peter had joined the Prudential Assurance in Holborn, Martin the Midland Bank, professions to which they would depart on the 7.43 each morning, bowler-hatted, pinstriped, swinging their umbrellas, leaving Tim behind in his baggy tweeds, jobbing clerk to Lucy’s cousin in Lyle and Watson. She was sure Bruce had employed him out of charity, regarding him as yet another war casualty likely to make a ‘slow recovery’ with his ‘bad nerves’.

  ‘Lot of flies in here,’ commented May as she advanced on the trestle table, ready to resume her duties as fellow sandwich-maker.

  ‘It’s like a charnel house with Lady G.’s sausage meat.’

  ‘Talking of charnel houses,’ May commented in the strained risqué voice she sometimes assumed when she wanted to gossip, ‘did you hear about the murder?’

  ‘Murder?’ Lucy imagined May was joking. ‘Someone done in the Chief Constable?’

  Guy Bretherton, Chief Constable of Surrey, was one of West End’s finest bats.

  ‘Actually, his wife told me.’ May blushed. ‘A young couple found a corpse at the Clump.’

  ‘A corpse at the Clump?’ Lucy stared at her, unable to take in what she was saying. The phrase seemed to have a rhythm of its own, almost like the beginning of a popular song.

  May gazed down at the egg mayonnaise as if seeking a solution.

  ‘Has anyone identified –’

  ‘It was the Da vises’ gardener.’ May’s voice shook. Murder was impossible in Esher’s leafy tranquillity.

  ‘Good God!’ Lucy found it hard to believe such an event could really have occurred. It seemed to belong to the special territory created by The News of the World. ‘The gardener they’ve just taken on?’

  ‘He came from over Hersham way,’ said May, as if that explained everything and then added casually, ‘Someone cut his throat.’

  ‘On the Clump?’ Lucy’s unease was now directed at the location rather than the act. She often tramped alone over the hill with its ancient oaks and dense undergrowth. ‘Do the police know who did it?’ she asked woodenly.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ May was a teacher at Beacon House, the local prep school, and strongly believed in keeping anything out of the ordinary well under control. A corpse on the Clump definitely came into this category. Yet, despite all May’s reserve, Lucy had once sought her advice, largely out of desperation and loneliness. It had been a mistake.

  She and May had been strolling the banks of the River Mole and had sat on the trunk of a fallen silver birch, gazing down into the lazy, muddy water. Suddenly, surprisingly, Lucy had found herself telling May about Tim.

  ‘If only he’d talk to me.’

  ‘Martin won’t discuss the war either, and I know Sally says the same about Peter.’ May had spoken brusquely, as if the subject was improper. The conflict was in the past and should be kept there. War was the men’s business. It had been started and finished by them. Their women had no part in its aftermath.

  Lucy had wondered if May secretly despised Tim for not keeping a stiff upper lip, for dwelling on the morbid that must be swept aside. The men were back in Esher
now. Outside life lay safely in the City of London rather than the battlefields of Normandy.

  ‘Sometimes I think I should go back to France with Tim, walk where they walked.’ In fact, Lucy had only just had the notion and had never envisaged such a course of action before. The unlikely idea, she remembered, had considerably surprised her. May’s response had not been encouraging.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ she had said firmly, as if to some idiotic request by a wilful child. May’s thumping good common sense had seemed as thick as the grey loam that lay heavily in the fields around them. Barren.

  ‘This murder,’ Lucy said abruptly, realizing she was holding the jar of spread aloft, as if she was about to make a sacrifice to the gods. ‘What on earth did the Davises say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Of course, the young man had only been with them a month. They don’t have much luck, do they? First that nasty piece of vandalism. Now their gardener.’

  So he could easily be disposed of, thought Lucy. Forgotten because he hadn’t fully penetrated Esher’s chintz and damask surface. Forgotten because he came from Hersham. The gardener’s funeral oration would be made over the coffee cups at Caves Café and then he would not be mentioned again. The vandalism and the burning of the shed were different, more outrageous in their full frontal attack on the middle classes by the Hersham mafia.

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Baverstock.’

  ‘Was he married?’

  ‘He was only seventeen.’ May’s lips were set as if she wanted to bring the subject to a close rather than continue to explore it. Her morality had beaten her curiosity. As always. ‘Anyway. We must get on. They’ll be off the pitch soon, hungry for their teas.’ She made it sound as if she and Lucy were about to be besieged by a ravening horde, rather than twenty-two men and an umpire who would have preferred beer to the thinly-spread sandwiches and brackish urn tea.

  May and Martin were childless too, although May wasn’t barren. Martin had wanted to ‘wait a bit’ and not have babies until there was ‘a bit more cash around’. Always accepting, May didn’t seem to mind.