Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

‘You are interested, yes? If you need a hipoteca … Sorry. How you say? Mortgage, I know a man in a bank.’

Prim looked at me and nodded. If I had said no I would have been deeper in the shit than the Dutchman. So instead, I said, ‘Yes, we’re interested. No, we don’t need a mortgage.’

Miguel beamed. ‘Good. That is very good! I will phone the Dutchman now and tell him.’

He disappeared into the bar, leaving us staring at each other, stunned. ‘Can you believe it?’ Prim whispered.

‘Just,’ I replied, ‘but to be on the safe side, we’d better find a lawyer, pronto.’

Miguel reappeared five minutes later, still smiling. ‘Everything is okay. Nine million is okay. He says he hopes you have better luck there than he did. Before he left he gave me power of attorney, so I can go to the notario with you to pass the escritura.’

He had read my mind. ‘But you, you should have a lawyer. Just so everything can be explained to you.’ He passed me a card which he had been holding between his fingers. ‘You go see this man. He is in L’Escala and he is lawyer for a lot of British people here. He is very good, very honest.’

His name was Ray Lopez, half Catalan, half English, all lawyer. We saw him next morning, and found that a phone call from Miguel had beaten us to it. Sr Lopez looked into the local and regional registers and pronounced everything as ‘Appropriate, Senor y Senora,’ and five days later Sr Osbert Blackstone and Sra Primavera Phillips were joint owners of the apartment of their dreams.

The dreams continued through the summer. Every morning we walked along the three-kilometre road to L’Escala, for coffee in the open air, either at the Casablanca by the beach, or at El Centre, beside the old church. Most afternoons we spent swimming in the sea and sunbathing on the beach below St Marti, or lying naked on the beds on the terrace. On alternate nights we would cook for ourselves, at home, or eat out, at one of our growing list of restaurants, occasionally with members of our circle of English ex-pat acquaintances which had developed out of a couple of introductions made by Ray Lopez.

Weeks turned into months as we enjoyed our idyll beneath the Spanish sun. It was there, on the twenty-first of September, that I clambered over the milestone of my thirtieth birthday. In the course of it all, we became sybarites, Prim and I. Without our realising it our voyage had turned into an exploration of the limits of self-indulgence, and in the process we were turning ourselves into different people.

I suppose that it had begun to dawn on us both, but as usual, it was Prim who said it first; on the terrace, in the still-hot autumn sun, on the day after my birthday.

‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

I took a swig of my beer, from the bottle as usual, and frowned back at her. ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve got quarter of a million in the bank in Jersey, we’ve got a house a lot of people would kill for, in a place we both love. We screw each other’s brains out every day … like half an hour ago for example. We’ve got no ties, no worries, no responsibilities. And you lie there with the Piz Buin glistening on your brown bosom and tell me that it isn’t working.’

She clenched her jaw. ‘Well it isn’t. We’ve found our place, sure. We’ve had our holiday, too. But it’s got to stop sometime.’

She had thrown me into a grim mood. I resisted. ‘Why has it got to stop?’

The frown grew deeper. ‘Well … our cash won’t last for ever.’

‘No? Where we have it, we’re earning a minimum of fifteen grand investment income. Jan’s starting to bank another four-fifty a month in rent of the loft. That’s twenty K without touching our capital. So!’ My voice rose of its own accord. I’d never snapped at Prim before. Come to think of it I don’t remember ever snapping at anyone before. ‘Why isn’t it working?’

She swung her legs round and sat on the edge of the lounger, pulling her knees up to her chin. The frown had gone, replaced by what looked like a plea in her eyes. ‘Because I, at least, need ties, need worries, need responsibilities. I need to be doing something. And so, if you’d think about it, do you.

‘When we met you were dynamic.You couldn’t stop moving if you tried. You swept me off my feet.’

‘As you swept me,’ I said. ‘As you still do.’

‘Fine, but if we become stagnant there will come a point when I don’t. Oz, we’re too bloody young to opt out. You say we can live on what we have now, but if we have kids … when we have kids … what then? What sort of role models would we be?’ She was in full cry now. ‘Remember that English bloke Trevor. The one we met at Gary’s restaurant.The fellow who’s been here for years, doing little or nothing, but knowing everything. How’d you like to have him for a father?’

‘Aw, come on!’ That was a sure sign that she was winning the argument. She knew it, and she closed in for the kill.

‘The last couple of months have been great, sure. But I’ve got to the stage when I’m conscious that all I’m really doing is sitting on my steadily widening arse watching you doing the same thing. And am I wrong or is the sex not quite as magic as it was at the start?’ She had me there.

‘Oz, we have to think about what’s ahead. It’ll be winter soon, even here. It’s time we got back to work.’

With a very ill grace, I gave up. ‘Okay, so what’ll we do?’

She beamed at me. ‘Why don’t we do what we’ve shown we’re good at? Investigations.’

I stared at her. ‘Investigations? Here? But we barely …’

She waved a hand, as if she was brushing me aside. ‘Let me finish. I mean investigations here for people in Britain. You were a private enquiry agent in Edinburgh. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing in Spain for people in Britain. All we have to do is widen the definition a bit. If a UK company wants some market intelligence we’ll do that. If a lawyer wants a witness interviewed, we’ll do that. If a travel company wants resorts checked out we’ll do that. If a parent wants a missing kid found, we’ll do that.’ All the time she spoke her smile was getting wider, and her eyes brighter.

‘We’ll place small ads in British newspapers,’ she burbled, ‘in the business sections. Something like “Phillips and Blackstone. Spanish Investigations. You want to know? Let us find out. Replies to a box number.” We’ll use the Telegraph, Sunday Times, Scotsman, Herald, and a legal magazine. We can mailshot the big law firms in London and Scotland, through a post office box here. It won’t cost all that much to try, and I’m sure it’ll be a winner.’

I looked across at her. I was on my fourth San Miguel of the day. The light in her eyes was beginning to hurt mine.

‘Couldn’t you just get a job nursing?’ I said wearily. ‘In Gerona or Figueras, maybe. Couldn’t we just buy a bar that I could run? That we could both run?’

She looked at me. Now the brightness of her eyes had turned into lasers, cutting me open. ‘Sure we could do that, Oz. I could go out every day and force myself to do a job I swore I’d never do again. Then I could come home at night — or worse still, be there all day — to watch you sat on your barstool, pontificating and turning into a replica of that arsehole Trevor.

‘You said it all really: “Couldn’t we just …”’ She twisted the word like a knife. ‘You meant find something, anything, to occupy our time. Well, you can become a cabbage if you like, Oz, but I won’t stick around to watch. If we’re going to stay here long-term, and I’d like to, we have to get a life that makes the most of our strengths, rather than indulges our weaknesses. Laziness is an easy vice to pick up. I can see it taking hold of you, and I can feel it growing in me.’