It Had to Be You

A husband and wife were driving, in separate cars, towards two very different luncheon appointments. It was a glorious June morning, quite unsuitable for sudden death, yet only one of them would arrive.

Deborah Hollinghurst was driving along a quiet country road. She was in danger of being early, and she really didn’t think it would be stylish to be early, not today, not yet. So she was driving sedately, at a steady forty-five miles an hour along the winding road, to the irritation of the drivers of a couple of vans that had once been white. Her car was a convertible, but the roof was not down. She didn’t want the wind in her hair, not today. Next month she would be forty-seven. She was still lovely, but she was beginning to feel that her loveliness needed all the help it could get. Especially today. She felt excited, but also a little fearful. The fear was only faint, but it was getting stronger with every mile that she drove. She felt as if she was about to step off the edge of the world. Her world, anyway. She told herself that she didn’t have to step off. Nothing had been decided. She didn’t believe herself. She knew that everything had been decided.

A rabbit with myxomatosis stood at the side of the road, blind, impervious, a stone statue, like a ghastly garden sculpture of a rabbit. Deborah swerved to put it out of its misery, shuddered at the squelch of the tiny impact, on that glorious June morning, so unsuitable for sudden death.

A heron flapped slowly, contentedly across a field beside the road. Soon, if it had its way, a fish would meet
its
sudden death. The calm of the morning was illusory, its beauty marred by a thousand little tragedies.

To James Hollinghurst the morning had no beauty. The windows of the totally unnecessary 4 x 4 were closed, the air conditioning was on, his world was a mobile fridge, summer had no place in it, summer had been banished as a frivolous nuisance. He was on the M1, in the middle lane. He was in danger of being late, and he didn’t think it would be wise to be late, not today.

He was anxious. It was not going to be an easy meeting. He put his foot down. Eighty-five. Ninety. Ninety-five. He didn’t want to be caught on a speed camera, but anything was better than being late today.

He was listening to Classic FM. The adverts began, and he leant forward and pressed a button, which switched the radio over to another channel. He didn’t like the adverts. Their repetition irritated him. He had dark, unruly hair, thick untamed eyebrows, a high forehead and a low boredom threshold.

The next station that he found had music on it, or what passed for music. ‘Call that music,’ he shouted. He shouted at the radio a lot. It was what he had it on for. He was forty-eight. He was on quinapril, amlodipine and bisoprolol hemifumerate for his blood pressure, and simvastatins for his cholesterol.

Unfortunately the music stopped, and the DJ announced that he was going to speak to Tracey from Doncaster. James groaned. It was very possible that Tracey from Doncaster was a lovely girl. He often met people who were much nicer than the towns they lived in. But he didn’t think Tracey could tell him anything that he really needed to know at this moment. He switched back to Classic FM. The adverts were almost over.

‘We’ve more relaxing music for you in the next hour,’ purred the presenter in the honeyed, reassuring, faintly patronising tone adopted by almost all the announcers on Classic FM.

‘Relaxing?’ groaned James. He desperately needed to relax. Packaging was the first thing to suffer in a recession. If people had bought less, they had fewer things to pack. But he didn’t want to listen to relaxing music. He wanted to be transported into another world by
great
music. ‘I know you’ve done a lot for classical music,’ he told the presenter sorrowfully. After all, the man sounded nice and was probably kind to his wife. ‘But really, is that what you think great music is about? Did Beethoven say, “Darling, I think I created something memorably relaxing this morning”? Did Mrs Mahler find Mahler spark out as she brought him his morning coffee? “Sorry, Ingeborg, this symphony I’m writing is so relaxing I must have nodded off.” Give me great music. Stirring music. Please.’

He reached forward to press the button again, feeling a stab of pleasure at reducing the announcer to impotence. How he wished people could feel it when he switched them off. ‘Bad news, Monty. We’ve lost James Hollinghurst. The bastard was distinctly unimpressed. He’s switched over to BBC Radio 3.’

He accelerated with a sudden surge of impotent anger, and swung out into the fast lane. Surely, the way James was driving, if one of the Hollinghursts was to have a fatal accident that day, it would be him?

Not so.

Deborah came to a rare straight stretch of road. Four cars were proceeding smoothly in the opposite direction. A fifth, a Porsche, was overtaking them at speed. Suddenly she realised that it was going to be a close-run thing, if she didn’t slow down to let the driver through. Why should she, though? He was the one at fault, arrogant, rich, spoilt, in his expensive car. He deserved to have a moment of shock, of doubt, of fear. She’d brake, of course she would, she’d have to, but not for a couple of seconds.

It was the worst decision she ever made in her life.

It was also the last decision she ever made in her life.

A tall man, elegant in white linen, sat at a window table in the pink and cream restaurant, toyed with a glass of rather average house white and looked out over the gardens, which sloped down towards the gently flowing water. He wouldn’t like his name to be revealed. He shouldn’t be there. He’d chosen the place because he wasn’t known there. He’d kept his wits about him, and he was certain that nobody had followed him. The only private dick he needed to be concerned with was the one in his sharply creased trousers, which was so stimulated that he was finding it hard to keep it private. Let us allow him his precious anonymity – for the moment, at least.

There’s no need to name the hotel either. One of the things that had most attracted him to it was its obscurity. It was a long way from anybody he knew, and a long way from anybody whom the woman he was expecting knew. Let’s just say it was the Whatsit Arms, prettily situated on the banks of the River Thingamayjig, just outside the pleasant but not distinguished little village of Somewhere-juxta-Nowhere. It was mentioned in no guidebooks. It had no Michelin stars. It was perfect.

He had the table furthest from the door. He sat facing the door. Every time anybody entered he felt a frisson of excitement, soon dashed. My God, he said to himself with a wry internal smile, as he watched the lunchers enter, we’re an ugly race.

He wasn’t surprised that she was late. He’d expected her to be late. It was stylish for a woman to arrive late, and she was very stylish. He’d guessed that she would be eight, nine, perhaps ten minutes late. It was correct, and he always liked to be correct, which was why he’d had to be so secretive. There was no way what he was doing today was correct. A clandestine lunch with a married woman. Not his style at all. And, of all married women, this one.

Not just lunch, either. Or so he hoped. Not half an hour ago he had booked a double room for the night, just in case. He could hardly believe that he had been so bold. But if things went well, and if the mood was right, and if he did manage to persuade her, it might be disastrous to have to go through all the business of booking, of pretending to be a married couple, of giving false names. Do you need any help with your luggage? We have no luggage. Only baggage.

He’d had to give a name of course, fill in a form. Mr and Mrs Rivers, Lake View, 69 Pond Street, Poole. Utterly unbelievable, but it had aroused no suspicion from the Hungarian receptionist, whose skin was like a white pudding he had once eaten in the Languedoc. He’d blushed slightly at the boldness, the wild optimism of his choice of house number. He couldn’t remember ever having been even remotely risqué before. What had got into him? Love? Madness? The girl hadn’t reacted. Perhaps they didn’t use that term in the villages around Lake Balaton.

Suddenly he realised that he was wearing his wedding ring, and that might be tactless. He stood up abruptly, then calmed himself down and walked out of the restaurant, trying to look insouciant. He went to the Gents and forced the ring off his finger. He had never taken it off before, and it didn’t come easily, this was taking time, she would arrive before he got back, he began to panic. His finger felt trapped inside the ring.

At last it came off, and he breathed more easily again. But now he needed a pee, his third in the last hour. He had rarely been so nervous. Oh, hurry, hurry, lazy prick. She’ll be there. She’ll have arrived and found him absent, the great moment ruined.

He walked back, trying to look calm and carefree. She wasn’t there yet. For a moment he was glad.

Twelve minutes late. Thirteen. He began to feel just faintly uneasy.

James
was
late. The traffic had been heavy, but he should have allowed for that. And the BWC (Big White Chief) was a stickler for punctuality. The summons to the head office in Birmingham would have been unnerving at any time, but the recession was beginning to bite, the coalition’s threatened cuts hung heavily, and he felt very nervous. It shamed him to feel so nervous.

He drove past the ugly, glass and stained concrete building that housed the world HQ of Globpack. He turned right at the side of the building, then at the back turned left. A bar blocked his way into the car park. It irritated him that the intercom was so inconveniently placed that he had to get out of the car to speak into it. The intense heat of the city was a shock after the iciness of his car.

‘The car park’s full,’ announced a crackly disembodied Birmingham voice with barely concealed delight.

He gave his registration number, and added, ‘I have a space reserved.’

‘I have no record of this, I’m afraid,’ said the voice, sounding more pleased than afraid.

James swallowed. He found it difficult to be assertive to people when they weren’t on the radio.

‘I think you’d better find me a space,’ he said. ‘I’m the Managing Director of the London office.’

The bar rose. James got back into his car. Its iciness was a shock after the intense heat of the city. He drove in. The car park
was
full. He managed to squeeze his Subaru into a corner, at a somewhat humiliatingly awkward angle. Every little setback was making him feel even worse about the day’s prospects. He strode towards the ugly back of the building, which was called, as it deserved to be, Packaging House.

He had forgotten the four-figure security number that would unlock the back door. He would have to go round the front. He was getting later and later. This was bad. He didn’t feel like the Managing Director of the London office. He felt like an underling. And that was what he was, in reality, when he was meeting the Managing Director of the whole global venture.

He longed to break into a run, but in this heat it would have brought him out in a sweat, and that would have been disastrous. The BWC was a stickler for hygiene. Americans usually are.

As he walked towards the main entrance, James remembered something his father had said. This tended to happen at moments of stress. The voice came clearly to him from that Christmas fifteen years ago.

‘I feel guilty about you, James. I haven’t dealt with my children fairly. I’ve given Charles my artistry, Philip my brains, and you my eyebrows.’

How typical of his father, to have wrapped a grenade in a coating of sympathy. Fifteen years, and it still rankled. If only Deborah was with him, striding beside him on her long, strong, fleshy farmer’s daughter’s legs. He closed his eyes for a second in a sudden revulsion at how he had treated her, and almost fell as his foot caught the raised edge of a paving stone.

Careful, James. Get a grip.

Easily said, but in a few minutes he would know what this summons was all about. Surely it couldn’t be the sack? He’d been chosen to make the speech on behalf of the company at the big luncheon next Wednesday to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of Globpack UK. They’d hardly do that and then sack him.

Or would they? Maybe that would give out a sign of the company’s ruthlessness very effectively. No, he wasn’t secure.

Nobody was.

And even if it wasn’t the sack, it might be the dreaded news that the London office was to move to share premises with the global HQ – in Birmingham. That would be almost as bad.

Globpack! How had they come up with that? He had inherited a bit of his dad’s artistic taste, and he found it hard to believe that a career that had begun in the Basingstoke Box Company had led him, inexorably, to being employed by a firm called Globpack.

Another intercom outside the main entrance.

‘James Hollinghurst to see Mr Schenkman.’

The doors opened, with, it seemed to James, a sigh of resignation. We don’t want to let him in, but we can find no reason not to.

‘I have an appointment with Mr Schenkman. I’m afraid I’m late.’

The receptionist winced sympathetically, phoned Mr Schenkman’s office, and then said, to James’s surprise, ‘He’s coming down.’

Did this mean … could it mean … lunch? His spirits rose.

In the early years of their relationship, James had enjoyed many lunches, lunches marred only by the fact that the giant American was so abstemious that James had felt like an alcoholic every time he took a sip of his wine.

And now here the man was striding gigantically and rather aggressively over the even more gigantic foyer.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ said James, just before he was enveloped in Mr Schenkman’s global handshake. ‘The traffic!’

Dwight Schenkman the Third frowned. James felt that the frown said, Anticipation of difficulty is halfway towards success in the intensely competitive world of global packaging. No. He was becoming paranoid. The man was addicted to verbosity, but he must stop attributing quite such pompous words to him.