One Good Turn

throw a light into every murky corner of his business dealings. He had arrived home late, the worse for wear, downed a double of Macallan without even tasting it, and then slumped on the sofa, staring at the television like a blind man. Gloria fried for him a lamb chop with leftover potatoes and said, “Did they find your secret books, then?” and he laughed grimly and said, “They’ll never find my secrets, Gloria,” but for the first time in the thirty- nine years Gloria had known him, he didn’t sound cocky. They were coming for him, and he knew it.

It was the field that had done it for him. He had bought a greenbelt site that had no planning permission attached to it, he had got the land cheaply-land without planning permission is just a field, after all-but then, hey presto, six months later the planning permission was granted and now a hideous estate of two-, three-, and four- bedroom “family homes” was under construction on the northeastern outskirts of town.

A tidy little sum to someone in the planning department was all it had taken, the kind of transaction Graham had done a hundred times before, “greasing the wheels,” he called it. For Graham it had been a little thing, his corruption was so much wider and deeper and far-reaching than a green field on the edge of town. But it was the littlest things that often brought big men down.

Once the ambulance containing the Peugeot driver had disappeared, the policewomen started to take statements from the crowd. “Hopefully we’ll get something on the CCTV,” one of them said, indicating a camera that Gloria hadn’t noticed, high up on a wall. Gloria liked the idea that there were cameras watching everyone everywhere. Last year Graham had installed a new state-of-the-art security system in the house-cameras and infrared sensors and panic buttons and goodness knows what else. Gloria was fond of the helpful little robots that patrolled her garden with their spying eyes. Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

“There was a dog,” Pam said, fluffing her apricot-tinted hair self-consciously.

“Everyone remembers the dog,” the policewoman sighed. “I have several very accurate descriptions of the dog, but the Honda driver is variously described as ‘dark, fair, tall, short, skinny, fat, midtwenties, fiftyish.’ No one even took down his car’s registration number. You would think someone would have managed that.”

“You would,” Gloria agreed. “You would think that.”

They were too late now for the BBC radio showcase. Pam was delighted that they had been entertained by drama rather than comedy.

“And I’ve got the Book Festival on Thursday,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Pam was a fan of some crime writer who was reading at the Book Festival. Gloria had no enthusiasm for crime writing, it had sucked the life out of her father, and anyway wasn’t there enough crime in the world without adding to it, even if it was only fictional?

“It’s just a bit of escapism,” Pam said defensively.

If you needed to escape, in Gloria’s opinion, then you just got in a car and drove away. Gloria’s favorite novel still resolutely remained Anne of Green Gables, which, when she was young, had represented a mode of being that, although ideal, hadn’t yet become impossible.

“We could go for a nice cup of tea somewhere,” Pam said, but Gloria excused herself, saying, “Things to do at home,” and Pam said, “What things?”

“Just things,” Gloria said. She was in an eBay auction for a pair of Staffordshire greyhounds that closed in two hours and she wanted to be in there at the finish.

“My, but you’re a woman of secrets, Gloria.”

“No, I’m not,” Gloria said.

4

Bright lights suddenly illuminated a white square, making the surrounding darkness seem even blacker. Six people walked into the square from all directions, they walked fast, crisscrossing one another in a way that made him think of soldiers performing a complex drill display on the parade ground. One of them stopped and began to swing his arms and rotate his shoulders as if getting ready for strenuous physical exercise. All six of them began to speak nonsense. “Unique New York, unique New York, unique New York,” a man said, and a woman answered, “Rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers,” while doing some kind of tai chi. The man who had been swinging his arms now addressed empty air, speaking rapidly without pausing for breath. “Thou-sleepst- worse-than-if-a-mouse-should-be-forced-to-take-up-her-lodging-in-a-cat’s-ear-a-little-infant-that-breeds-his- teeth-should-lie-with-thee-would-cry-out-as-if-thou-were-the-unquiet-bedfellow.” A woman stopped in the middle of her mad walking and declared, “Floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies.” It was like watching the inmates of an old-fashioned asylum.

A man walked out of the darkness and into the square of light, clapped his hands, and said, “Okay, everyone, if you’ve finished your warm-up, can we get on with the dress, please?”

Jackson wondered if this was a good time to make his presence known. The actors-the “company”-had spent the morning doing the technical run-through. This afternoon they were having the dress rehearsal, and Jackson had been hoping that he could take Julia to lunch before then, but the actors were already attired alike in brown- and-gray shifts that looked like potato sacks. His heart sank at the sight of them. Theater, for Jackson, although of course he would never say this to any of them, was a good pantomime, preferably attended in the company of an enthusiastic child.

The actors had arrived yesterday, they had been rehearsing in London for three weeks, and he was finally introduced to them for the first time last night in a pub. They had all gone into raptures- one of them, a woman older than Jackson, had jumped up and down in a parody of a small child, and another (already he had forgotten their names) dropped dramatically to her knees with her hands raised up in prayer to him and said, “Our savior.” Jackson had squirmed inwardly, he didn’t really know how to deal with thespian types, they made him feel staid and grown-up. Julia was standing in the background (for once) and acknowledged his discomfort by winking at him in a way that might have been salacious, but he couldn’t really tell because he had recently (finally) admitted to himself that he needed spectacles. The beginning of the end, downhill from now on.

The actors were a small ad hoc group based in London, and Jackson had stepped in when at the eleventh hour they lost their funding to bring their play to the Edinburgh Fringe. Not out of any love of theater but because Julia had wheedled and cajoled in her usual over-the-top fashion, which was unnecessary-all she had needed to do was ask. It was the first real acting job she’d had in a while, and he had begun to wonder to himself (never to her, God forbid) why she called herself an actress when she hardly ever acted. When she thought she was about to lose this part at the last moment because of the lack of money, she had been plunged into a profound gloom that was so uncharacteristic of her that Jackson felt impelled to cheer her up.

The play, Looking for the Equator in Greenland, was Czech (or maybe Slovakian, Jackson hadn’t really been listening), an existentialist, abstract, impenetrable thing that was about neither the equator nor Greenland (nor indeed about looking for anything). Julia had brought the script over to France and asked him to read it, watching him while he did so, saying, “What do you think?” every ten minutes or so as if he knew anything at all about theater. Which he didn’t. “Seems… fine,” he said helplessly.

“So you think I should take the job?”

“God, yes,” he said a little too promptly. In retrospect, he realized there was no question of her not taking the job and wondered if she’d known from the beginning that funding was going to be a nightmare and had wanted him to feel involved with the play in some way. She wasn’t a manipulative person, quite the opposite, but sometimes she had a way of looking ahead that surprised him. “And if we’re successful you’ll get your money back,” she said cheerfully when he offered. “And you never know-you might make a profit.” In your dreams, Jackson thought, but he didn’t say that.

“Our angel,”Tobias, the director, had called him last night, embracing him in a queeny hug. Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree. Jackson had nothing against gays, he just wished that sometimes they wouldn’t be quite so gay, especially when being introduced to him in what had turned out, unfortunately, to be a good old-fashioned macho Scottish pub. Their “savior,” their “angel”-so much religious language from people who weren’t in any way religious. Jackson knew himself to be neither a savior nor an angel. He was just a guy. A guy who had more money than they did.

Julia spotted him and waved him over. She looked flushed and her left eyelid was