Robert Goddard: Borrowed Time

Copyright © 1995 by Robert Goddard

For help and advice freely and generously given me during the planning and writing of this novel, I sincerely thank the following.

Jonathon and Susan Stoodley and their many friends in Brussels, notably Xavier Lewis and Nicholas Chan, without whom Robin Timariot’s career as a fonctionnaire titulaire de la Commission Européenne would never have begun, but upon whom his disillusionments were in no way based; Alistair Brown of the Home Office Prison Department and Colin Symons, Assistant Governor of Albany Prison, who enabled me to imagine the life Shaun Naylor would have led inside; Nigel Pascoe, who proved a more enlightened judge than I would ever have been; and, last but by no means least, Malcolm McCarraher, who must sometimes have regretted offering to apply his expert mind to legal conundrums arising from the plot but never once complained.

I am also grateful to the Governor of Albany Prison for allowing me access to the institution; to Hugh Barty-King, author of Quilt Winders and Pod Shavers , a book which played a vital part in the literary genesis of Timariot & Small, cricket bat manufacturers of Petersfield, whose story this partly is; and to the late Edward Thomas, whose poems supplied a wonderfully evocative and eerily appropriate sub-text to many of the scenes I described. (Those specifically quoted from are, in order of reference, “The Cherry Trees,” “After You Speak,” “It Was Upon,” “Celandine,” “The Unknown,” “What Shall I Give?,” “Like the Touch of Rain,” “The Other,” “When First” and “Early One Morning.”)

It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. You know that, of course. You know all the wheres and whens. But not the whys. Not yet, at any rate. I do. I understand the entire sequence of cause and effect leading from that day to this. I can encompass it like a bird of prey circling in the sky above the intervening landscape. I can see the whole winding length of the road I followed from then to now. There were no exits I could have taken, no junctions where I could have left the route. It was always bound to end like this. A future becomes inevitable the moment it touches the present.

You know it all, or think you do. And now you say you want to understand. Very well. Clearly, I must try to explain. Not to excuse; not to mitigate; not to exonerate. Merely to explain. Merely to tell the whole truth for the first time. As I will. As I have to. Then you will understand. For the same reason. You say you want the truth. Very well. You shall have it.

It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. I’d started out from Knighton that morning on what was projected to be a six-day tramp along the southern half of Offa’s Dyke. I’ve always found I think best when walking alone. And since I had a great deal to think about at the time, a really long walk seemed one way of ensuring I thought clearly and well. Decisions masquerading as choices were closing in around me. Middle age was beckoning, a fork in life’s path looming ahead. Nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be, nor as certain. But up in the hills, there was the hope it might seem so.

It was Tuesday the seventeenth of July 1990. A well-remembered date, well remembered and much recorded. A day of baking heat and unbroken sunshine, declining to a dusk of sultry languor. A day of solid walking and serious thinking for me, of bone-hard turf beneath my feet and hazy blue above my head. I saw no buzzards, as I’d hoped to, circling in the thermals, though maybe, after all, there was something hovering up there, out of sight, seeing and knowing what I was heading towards.

I’d travelled up to Knighton by train from Petersfield the previous day, happy to be away and alone at last. My eldest brother, Hugh, had died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine, five weeks before. It had been a shock, of course. A grievous one-especially for my mother. But Hugh and I had never been what you’d call close. Twelve years was just too big an age gap, I suppose. About the only time we’d really got to know each other as brothers was when we’d walked the Pennine Way together, in the summer of 1973. Since his death, the memory of those three distant weeks on the northern fells had become in my mind a sort of talisman of lost fraternity. My trip to the Welsh borders was partly a conscious act of mourning, partly a search for just a few of the pleasures and opportunities life had offered then.

Above all, however, the trip was intended to clear my mind and decide my future. My sister Jennifer and my other two brothers, Simon and Adrian, all worked in the family business, Timariot & Small, of which Hugh had been managing director. In that sense-and several others-I was the odd one out. I used to claim my career with the European Commission in Brussels gave me immunity from their parochial cares and perpetual squabbles. And so it did. Along with absolute security and relative prosperity. It had given me twelve years of that and could be relied on to give me at least another twenty. Followed by early retirement and an index-linked pension. Oh yes, the life of a Eurocrat has its undoubted rewards.

But it also exacts its penalties. And they’d begun to weigh me down of late. The Berlaymont, an X-shaped mountain of glass and concrete where I’d worked in one cramped office or another since arriving in Brussels, had become even more oppressive in my imagination than it was in reality. It’s been closed since, following the discovery of carcinogenic asbestos dust in its every cavity. So, even if you shake the dust of the Berlaymont from your feet, it may still linger in your lungs, waiting patiently-for many decades, so the experts say-to claim its due. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that now. And, at the time, it wasn’t anything as tangible as asbestos that was choking me. It was the knowledge of all the kilometres of corridor I’d dutifully trudged, all the hectares of memoranda I’d solemnly paraphed, all the tonnes of institutional gravitas I’d played my small part in bearing-and would go on bearing, year after year, until kingdom or retirement or asbestosis come.

I would have done, of course. I’d have gone on for want of any alternative, becoming more cynical and disillusioned as the years passed, becoming more and more like those worn-down colleagues of mine in their mid-fifties, dreaming of Surrey bungalows and golfing days to come. It was already too late to avoid sharing their fate. It was already, as sometimes I realized in the bland Brussels night, over for me.

But then Hugh died. And it didn’t have to be over after all. It gives me no pleasure to say this. God knows, I still wish it hadn’t happened to him. But my life’s turned around since he succumbed to his own punishing workload and slid slowly to the floor of his office just after nine o’clock one evening in June 1990. I could never have believed what his death would lead me into. And perhaps that’s just as well. I’d have fled back to my dull but secure existence in Brussels if I’d known even half of it. That’s for certain. But, despite everything that’s happened, I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad to have followed this road.

At first, it just seemed like a savage bolt from the blue, a nasty intimation of my own mortality. But the signs were there at the funeral, in the tension that wasn’t just grief. For fifteen years, Hugh had been Timariot & Small, sustaining it as much by his energy and commitment as by any nurturing of commercial advantage. Now he was gone. And the question wasn’t simply who would replace him, but whether the company could survive without his hand on the tiller. Even at the crematorium, Simon and Adrian were eyeing each other in preparation for the contest to come, while Reg Chignell, the production manager, was eyeing both of them and clearly wondering if either was up to the job.