LITMIR.BIZ

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a pre-dinner drink that evening.

      ‘Evening, Mr Hutton. Any luck today?’ called Philip Parker, the Crag Hotel’s owner-manager, and it took Jaysmith a moment that could have been significant to a practised observer to react to the name.

      Pseudonyms and cover stories might now be totally irrelevant but they could not just be shed at will. At the Crag he was William Hutton, businessman; and in conversation with Parker he had let it slip that, as well as the fellwalking, he was on the lookout for a house or cottage to purchase. It was those sharp country eyes again; he wanted an excuse to be seen anywhere, walking or driving, during his stay.

      ‘No,’ he said, slipping onto a bar stool and accepting the dry sherry which Parker poured him. ‘No luck at all. But I enjoyed my walk.’

      ‘Oh good. The weather’s marvellous, isn’t it? Excuse me.’

      Parker went off to the side hatch of the bar where one of the girls from the dining room was waiting with a drinks order. Parker’s quietly efficient wife, Doris, looked after the kitchen and dining room, while he exuded bonhomie in the bar and at reception. He was a rotund, breezy man in his early fifties, a redundant sales executive who’d sunk his severance money into the small hotel five years earlier and, as he was willing to explain to anyone willing to listen, had not yet seen any cause to regret it. In fact his enthusiasm for the Lake District was so evangelical that Jaysmith had soon regretted the intended subtlety of his cover story. From the start, Parker had taken an embarrassingly close interest in his alleged house-hunting and now, the dining room order dealt with, he returned to the topic.

      ‘So no luck then,’ he said.

      ‘No,’ said Jaysmith. ‘The market seems pretty dead. In fact, with the weekend coming up, I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities, so I’ll check out tomorrow.’

      Parker looked so taken aback that Jaysmith felt constrained to add, ‘I’ll pay for tomorrow night, of course.’

      He had booked in till Saturday. If he’d made his target he’d have stayed the full week in order not to excite comment, but now there was no point.

      ‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ said Parker, slightly indignant. ‘It’s just that I heard today that there’s likely to be just the house you’re looking for coming on the market in the next couple of days. It’s called Rigg Cottage and it’s just outside the village, up the bank on the road towards Loughrigg. It belongs to an old lady called Miss Wilson who’s finding the long haul up the hill more and more difficult. Also it’s really too big for her with the garden and all. So she’s thinking of moving down into the village. There’s an old cottage become vacant. Semi-detached and her best friend occupies the next-door cottage. Actually the vacant one belonged to Miss Craik, another old friend, who died a couple of weeks back and the family had always promised to give Miss Wilson first refusal.’

      He paused for breath and Jaysmith regarded him quizzically.

      ‘Your channels of information must be first-rate, Mr Parker,’ he said with hint of mockery.

      Parker grinned and glanced conspiratorially towards the dining room. Lowering his voice he said, ‘To tell the truth, it’s Doris who told me all this. She’s quite chummy with Mrs Blacklock, the old lady in the other semi, and she passed it on, in strict confidence, of course. Like I’m doing to you.’

      ‘Of course,’ said Jaysmith.

      ‘Which is why there’s nothing to be done till Miss Wilson makes up her mind. But when she does, if I know her, she’ll want everything settled in five minutes which is why it’s a pity you’ll not be on the spot.’

      ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jaysmith, exuding regret as he moved fully into his William Hutton role. ‘A real pity.’

      At dinner, he ordered a full bottle of Chablis instead of his usual half and settled to a mellow contemplation of the limitless joys of retirement.

      O what a world of profit and delight … the words drifted into his mind and he sought their source. It wasn’t altogether apt. They were from Marlow’s Dr Faustus whose world of profit and delight had been purchased by selling his soul. Or perhaps the words were too apt. He pushed that thought away and concentrated on working out why he should know the quotation. Oriental Languages had been his subject, not English literature, but now he recalled that he’d once acted in the play at university; or rather not himself, but that incredibly, hazily distant young man whose name was now as vague as all those he had since inscribed on hotel registers in his career as Jaysmith. And he hadn’t been Faustus either. An ostler, that’s what he’d been. A grasping gull made a fool of by magic.

      Shaking the memory away, he returned to the future. He could go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow, back to his London flat. Next, the Continent. Italy to start with; a villa in Tuscany till autumn died. Then on to the Med, Greece, North Africa, always south, keeping abreast of the retreating sun.

      The prospect filled him with surprisingly little enthusiasm. It was odd, like looking at a beautiful, naked and available woman without feeling excited.

      ‘Everything all right, Mr Hutton?’ said Parker, doing his end-of-dinner mine-host round.

      ‘Fine,’ said Jaysmith. ‘Sit down and have a drop of Chablis.’

      ‘That’s kind.’

      He filled a glass for the hotel owner and emptied the remaining drops into his own. He realized with amused interest another effect of his new relaxed state. A couple of sherries and the best part of a bottle of wine had left him feeling slightly drunk.

      ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When you were made redundant, did you know at once what you wanted to do?’

      ‘Far from it, old boy,’ replied Parker, delighted to be invited to explore a favourite topic. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me, I see it now. But at the time, I was simply shattered.’

      ‘And you’d never thought of living up here and running a hotel?’

      ‘Never.’

      ‘So what happened?’

      ‘I more or less sat with my head in my hands for three or four weeks, then one morning I got up and knew what I was going to do.’

      ‘You knew that you were going to buy a hotel in the Lake District?’

      ‘Not exactly. But I knew I was never going to work for anyone but myself again. I was absolutely certain about that!’

      Jaysmith felt let down. Hoping for some sort of dramatic revelation, instead he was hearing about a conventional revolt against the boss–servant relationship.

      Nevertheless the idea of taking time to adjust, of letting things ripen at their own speed, was not without its appeal. But where to let the ripening process take place? Not London, that was certain. Whatever residual pressures might remain from his old life were centred on London.

      The answer was absurdly obvious but he did not reach it by any kind of open-cast logic. Instead, after a couple of soporific brandies in the bar, he heard himself saying to Parker, ‘I’ve been thinking. There’s really no desperate need for me to be off in the morning. In fact, if that old lady’s not going to make up her mind for a few days, I can easily hang on into next week, if my room’s going to be vacant, that is.’

      Parker smiled with triumphant delight.

      ‘We’ll be glad to have you,’ he said fulsomely.

      Jaysmith did not return the smile. Faintly surprised, he was still trying to work out whose voice he had just heard speaking. It wasn’t Jaysmith’s, certainly. And it hadn’t even sounded like William Hutton’s.

      No, it had been both more familiar and more distant, like the voice of a dead loved one conjured up by a medium at a seance. And then it came to him that in some odd, ghostly fashion, the voice he had heard belonged to that naively hopeful, irretrievably remote young man who had once played the foolish ostler in Dr Faustus.

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