CHAPTER SEVEN
‘And I bought the paddock too, because you could easily land a helicopter there.’
Graham laughed indulgently at the fancy, then realised from his host’s face that Robert Benham wasn’t joking. He didn’t joke. When he said he’d bought the paddock adjacent to his cottage as a helipad, that was exactly why he had bought it. And for someone who had become Head of Personnel at Crasoco by the age of thirty-four, the idea of owning a helicopter was not fanciful.
With sudden clarity Graham realised the truth that had only been hinted at hitherto — that Robert Benham’s ambition and potential did not stop at Crasoco, that Head of Personnel there was only another step on a staircase that would lead through many companies, ever onward and upward. Robert Benham was destined to lead the sort of life in which helicopters were necessary, the life of a real ‘success’. Even in ambition his new boss outstripped him. Graham felt diminished and parochial.
He searched for some comfort, as he always did when threatened, in his opponent’s failings. Everyone has an Achilles’ heel — a flaw of character, an awkward mannerism, a past failure, an ill-chosen mate, an unsuitable home — that can alleviate the pang of envy.
But in the case of Robert Benham, Graham could not find it. Certainly, judged on an absolute scale, the young man had moral shortcomings, but these were not of a kind to solace his rival. Rather the reverse, for Graham recognised his own qualities of efficiency and ruthlessness reflected with more intense concentration. Robert Benham shared his approach to life, but was better at it.
Benham’s mannerisms, too, were hard to fault. The inadequacies which Graham had immediately identified on their first encounter had been proved by success to be more than adequate to the challenges they faced. What Eric Marshall would have described as ‘a common accent’ and ‘lack of social graces’ had proved positive advantages. Benham had been preferred over Graham for being, amongst other things, ‘more in touch with the work force’. And Robert’s strong regional identity only increased the sense of rootlessness Graham had felt since his parents’ deaths.
As to past failures, there seemed unfortunately to be no blots on the Benham
Nor did his choice of accommodation let him down. Graham was prepared to take the Dolphin Square flat on trust; though he had not seen it, the address was sufficient to make him bitterly nostalgic for his own lost life in Kensington and Chelsea.
And what he was seeing at Stoughton denied him the opportunity of superiority. As the weekend approached, he had prepared a small armoury of pejoratives to describe the cottage. ‘Pokey’, ‘run-down’, ‘draughty’, ‘primitive’ and ‘damp’ vied with ‘tarted-up’, ‘precious’, ‘chocolate-box’ and ‘poncy’ as his imagination shifted.
But the reality of the place blunted his weapons. The thatched roof, neat white paint and Tudor beams seen as Robert’s Scirocco drew up outside on the Friday evening had given hope for ‘chocolate-box’, but this had been denied by the building’s imposing proportions. ‘Primitive’ was rendered inapplicable by the neat Calor gas tank and the bright blue burglar alarm affixed under the eaves. Though its size and condition ruled out ‘pokey’ and ‘run- down’, as they entered the cottage Graham thought ‘draughty’ might still be in with a chance, but this hope was quickly dashed by the blast of central heating and open fire that welcomed them. He toyed momentarily with ‘overheated’ and ‘smoky’, but was forced to reject them as inappropriate. ‘Tarted-up’, ‘precious’ and ‘poncy’ met the same fate. It was just a very nice cottage, practical, skilfully modernised, well-equipped. Above reproach, even for such a skilled practitioner of reproach as Graham Marshall.
And any hope that Robert Benham’s image might be shattered by a grotesquely unsuitable partner was dispelled as a girl issued from the kitchen to greet them.
Before he met her, Graham knew her primary attraction — that she was a girlfriend rather than a wife. The more he saw of Robert’s life, the more he blamed the unfavourable comparison of his own on his ill-considered and premature marriage to Merrily. She was his handicap; she was the obstacle to the full realisation of his potential.
He felt this with redoubled force when he saw how beautiful the girlfriend was. Not only beautiful, but
And Robert Benham actually possessed this creature who peopled the wet-dreams of the world. His recent weekend trip to Miami fell into place.
And Graham’s last hope of comfort fell into oblivion.
What was more, Tara Liston proved to be charming. His defensive wishful thinking that she might turn out to be a bitch, might even give Robert a hard time, dissipated through the evening. She was delightful, entertaining and apparently deeply in love.
Graham made the mistake at one point of mentioning his mother-in-law’s name, brandishing it as if to show his own association with the glamour of show business, in the way that had proved so successful in his early days at Crasoco. Tara was of course charming about it and, jutting out a dubious lower lip, said yes, she was sure she had heard the
The dinner she cooked for them the first evening revealed no shortcoming in domestic skills, and an imagination that contrasted with Merrily’s predictable offerings from the Corden Bleu partwork.
Neither Tara nor Robert could have been nicer to him. To compound his malaise, Graham had the knowledge that it all came from within himself.
At the end of the meal, the talk moved to drugs and he brightened at the prospect of showing his cosmopolitan insouciance on the subject. Those rare and over-dramatised puffs of pot taken in Lilian’s Abingdon cottage would now stand him in good stead. Even though it was a good ten years since he had smoked, he spoke of cannabis with familiarity and enthusiasm.
As Tara produced the little bag of cocaine, he realised his mistake, but he had already said too much. His refusal to participate, a reflex born of Calvinist upbringing and the fear of doing it wrong, left him feeling gauche and immature.
He watched the others covertly, but it was Tara who held his gaze for the rest of the evening. He stared, with fascinated envy, at the neat, practised way in which she snorted the white powder and, later, the unambiguous intent with which she led Robert off to their bedroom.
As he lay awake in his single bed, Graham’s mind lubriciously translated every creak of the old cottage to his own disparagement.
And, once again, as was increasingly the case, the only thought that gave him strength and identity was the knowledge that he was a murderer.
He was woken on the Saturday morning by more creaking. It was probably just the complaint of old beams at the impertinence of central heating, but again he provided an alternative, diminishing interpretation.
The envy he felt was, however, qualified. He did not wish he had Merrily with him, her angular body by his side to be rolled over and enjoyed with comatose morning compliance. It was a pleasure to be on his own. No wife, no squabbling children to force him out of bed on some expensive errand of ferrying.
And no responsibility for the attractive surroundings in which he found himself. The guest bedroom had been recently decorated. The straight lines of white gloss on the window-frames gleamed. The wallpaper clung close and lovingly round the contours of old plaster. The white emulsion on the ceiling and brick chimneybreast was immaculately even. It was the work of a professional, another sign of the financial latitude that bachelordom allowed. Graham contrasted it with the hasty do-it-yourself efforts of his own home, the slight mismatches of wallpaper patterns, the brushstroke whorls on surfaces that should have had another coat, the scalloped outlines of windowframes that Merrily had attacked with her usual imprecision.
The guest-room’s one flaw, a breadcrumb edging of unpainted plaster around the washbasin, offered Graham no chance of ascendancy over his host. The basin was obviously such a recent addition that its installation was not complete; it was just a matter of time before ‘the little man’, obedient to Robert Benham’s dictates, finished the job.
The cottage had ceased to creak. Either its beams had adjusted to the change in temperature or the
