Gerald Seymour: Home Run

Tall, bearded, a fine looking boy. Mattie had known young Eshraq so long that he would always regard him as a boy. But Charlie did not seem to Mattie like any other 22-year-old that he knew, not in build and stature, not in temperament or attitude. A hell of a fine young man, but then so had his father been… He reached the tree. He drew at his breath. He had run all the way from Century on the other side of the river, over the Bridge and across Whitehall to the park. He would have to put in some extra training if he were to finish the half marathon this summer.

"Tied up, dear boy. Apologies."

"No problem, sir."

Mattie liked the way that Charlie addressed him. That was his father's stamp on the young man, and his mother's too, in fairness to her.

"Long time, dear boy."

"It's a new skill for me, learning to write reports, sir. I hope it will be of use to you." Charlie reached into his blazer pocket, took out a thick envelope, handed it to Mattie. Mattie didn't examine it, just slid it down into an inner pocket of his suit then drew across a zip fastener at the top of the pocket, another old habit. Wouldn't do for a Desk Head to get his pocket picked in the Underground.

"I'm looking forward to it… Heard from your mother?"

" N o. " Charlie said it as if it didn't matter to him that his mother never wrote nor telephoned from California. As if it was nothing to him that the golf course and the bridge club and the riding school filled his mother's days and evenings, that she regarded him as a relic of a former life in Iran that was best forgotten, that was pain to remember.

"I read about your escapade, the good old Tehran Times.

Carried on the radio as well."

A slow smile on Charlie's face.

"… You weren't compromised?"

"There was a search afterwards, plenty of roadblocks. No, they didn't know what they were looking for. They put it down to the 'hypocrites'. It went quite well."

Mattie could almost have recited the text of the IRNA communique reproduced in the Tehran Times. In separate incidents in south Tehran two Islamic Revolutionary Guards martyred in broad daylight by MKO ( Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation) counter-revolutionary mustaqqfin (hypocrites) working in conjunction with American mercenary agents.

Now that Harry had retired, gone more than four years, the IRNA communiques reached him ahead of the BBC's transcripts. He missed the messenger's service.

"We came up with a nice one for the next run," Mattie said. He offered the supermarket bag that was taut from the weight of its contents. "Instructions inside."

"Thank you."

"I'll want another report."

"Of course, sir. Mrs Furniss is well?"

"Grand form, and the girls. You'll come down to the country when you're back? We'll round up the girls. Make a weekend of it."

"I'd like that."

"You alright for money? I could scrape the bucket a bit for you."

A present in a plastic bag he could manage with ease. Money was harder. Money had to go through Audit. The present in the plastic bag was by his own arrangement with Resources/

Equipment, on the ninth floor.

"I'm fine for money, sir."

"Glad to hear that."

He saw the boy hesitate. The boy looked as though he were framing his request and not certain as to the best face to put on it. He felt the first drops of rain, and he was sweating now from his run.

"Cough it out."

"The target that I want most has an escort and his car is armoured."

"Meaning?"

"It would be difficult to get close enough."

"And… " Mattie wasn't going to help.

"I need what they call stand-off capability. Do you understand that, sir?"

"I understand." Mattie gazed into the boy's eyes. The hesitation was gone, the request had been made. There was cool and attractive certainty in the boy's eyes. "You would have to go for longer, your reports would have to be regular."

"Why not," Charlie said, as if it was a small matter.

Mattie thought of the boy's father, a generous host, a true friend. He thought of the boy's uncle, a mountain of a man, a superb stalker of boar and a brilliant shot. He thought of the boy's sister, delicate and winning her arguments with the brilliance of her smile, and kissing him when he brought gifts to the villa. He thought of Charlie's mother, brittle because she was uncertain, brave because she had tried to blend and assimilate her foreignness into that society of the wide and prosperous avenues of North Tehran. It was a family that had been dismembered.

"That would be very expensive indeed." A sharpness in Mattie's voice. Yes, he was a stickler for protocol and procedure. No, he should never have allowed his Service life to meld with the crusade that was the boy's.

"I could pay for it."

Mattie Furniss was off on his travels, and that was no business of the boy's. And he didn't know his schedule yet.

He did not know when he would return, when they could next meet. So much to talk about. They should have been talking in comfort of gentler matters, relaxed, they should have been gossiping – not prattling around the subject of stand-off capability and armour-piercing weapons under a tree in St James's Park for God's sake, with the rain beginning to come down in earnest. He took out his pen and a sheet of paper from a leather backed pad. He wrote briefly on it. A name, an address.

"Thank you, sir," Charlie said.

The keen statement. "In for longer, the reports more regular."

"Please give my best regards to Mrs Furniss, and to the girls."

"Of course I will. They'll be glad to know I've seen you."

He wondered whether the boy had been more than a friend to his daughters, either of them. They'd been very close, down in the country, and when his brood were all in London and the boy was their guest. It had been in London, three years before, in their little drawing room, the boy on his first trip from California and away from his mother, that Mattie had told Charlie Eshraq, as straight and as baldly as he could, what had happened to his sister and his father and his uncle.

He had never seen the boy cry since then. Bottled it all up, of course. "When do you go, dear boy?"

"Pretty soon."

"You'll telephone me, at home, before you go?"

"Yes."

"You'll go steadily?"

"Yes."

The rain dribbled over Mattie's face, and caught at his trimmed and silver moustache and darkened the front of his shirt. The boy's face was a blur in front of him and masked by the fullness of his beard.

"If anything happened to you, while you're away, Harriet and I, and the girls, we'd be…" Mattie squeezed the boy's shoulders.

"Why should it, sir?"

They parted.

He walked home. Mattie felt dirtied because he encouraged the folly of the boy, and yet he did not know how he could have dissuaded him. And he had the thick bulk of the envelope in his pocket, and the boy had said that he would be going in lor longer, and that the reports would be more regular. He thought that in a decent world Matthew Cedric Furniss would deserve to be flailed alive.

He fervently hoped that Harriet would still be up and waiting for him. He needed to talk to her, play a record, and be warmed and wanted. He had never in three years seen the boy cry, and the boy had murdered two Revolutionary Guards and planned to go back in again with his present in a plastic bag. The boy was talking about stand-off and armour-piercing.

He was talking about war, dammit, and the boy was no less than a son to him.

Mattie said an abbreviated prayer for Charlie Eshraq as he crossed at the traffic lights outside his London flat. And if the boy had bedded his daughters then good luck to him.

He was soaked. His face ran with water. His sodden trousers were clinging to his shins and his shoes squelched. When he looked up he saw the light behind the curtain welcoming him.