Michael Ridpath - See No Evil

Calder winced. ‘You sound dangerous.’

‘I’ve kept myself under control so far. But it is frustrating. We’ve been trying for a baby. He wants one, so I have to produce it.’

‘Don’t you want a child?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do. Especially if we’re going to be stuck in Somerford. But the point is I don’t think Todd even notices what I want. He’s a nice guy, a really kind man, but he’s used to everyone doing everything for him, to being the centre of attention. He just assumes that I will do what’s best for him, that our marriage is a partnership whose aim is to do what makes him happy.’

‘You’ve obviously been thinking about it a lot.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry to moan at you, and it’s terrible when he’s lying there unconscious, but yes, I have been stewing over it more than is healthy. Do you remember Dom?’

‘Your boyfriend at Cambridge? The cricketer?’ Calder could recall a tall, dashing cricket blue that Kim had gone out with for a couple of terms in their second year.

‘Yes. Todd’s a bit like him. Totally self-centred.’

‘Didn’t you catch him having it off with Emma?’ Emma was one of the three other students who had shared a place with Kim and Calder.

‘Yes,’ muttered Kim. ‘The bitch. In our house too! At least Todd doesn’t do that kind of thing.’

‘He seems like a pretty straight guy.’

‘Oh, he is. God, I’d forgotten how awful Dom was at the end. But I do remember how head-over-heels in love with him I was. I was young and innocent then.’

‘Well, young.’ Calder smiled. Kim had looked delectable at nineteen. She still looked pretty attractive fifteen years later, he couldn’t help noticing.

‘Yes, young. You were very good to me after all that.’

‘Probably just trying to get you into bed,’ Calder said.

‘Alex! And I thought you were such a kind, sympathetic man.’ Kim smiled that smile that Calder remembered so clearly from all those years ago.

‘And so I was. A kind, sympathetic man who wanted to get you into bed. Didn’t work, though, did it? Should have gone for the selfish bastard approach.’

‘Nah,’ said Kim. ‘You would have been really bad at that. Trust me. I know a lot about that technique.’

The level of the wine slipped down the bottle.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘When I asked you about the existence of a girlfriend you came over all grumpy. What’s up?’

Calder told her all about Sandy. Kim was generally sympathetic, although when Calder described the bust-up following his weekend alone in New York, she gently took Sandy’s side.

‘You know she probably felt just as badly about it as you did?’

‘If she did, she could have done something about it.’

‘Maybe she couldn’t.’

‘I know. But it’s still not going to work.’

‘What if you moved to New York?’

‘I’m not sure the relationship has progressed that far. Besides, the only job I could get over there would be in investment banking, and there’s no way I’m going back to that.’

‘Why not? I’d have thought you’d make a good trader. In fact I thought that was the perfect job for you after the RAF.’

‘I was a good trader,’ Calder admitted. ‘Very good. And I got a buzz out of it. But it’s not the real world. After a few years of flinging millions of dollars of other people’s money around you lose touch with reality. Everything has a monetary value. Your salary, obviously, your profit and loss, your bonus, your trading positions, your house, your car, before you know it, even your relationships. You begin to think that poor people are stupid people. Then you think that someone who won’t do what it takes to get a deal is a wimp. Not just a wimp, but a stupid wimp. It changes you.’

‘Oh, come on, Alex. Not everyone in investment banking is evil. There are plenty of ordinary decent people who work there.’

‘Yes, but there are fewer of them than there should be, and those few change. Look at Benton Davis! Martha said she trusted him: well maybe she could have done eighteen years ago, but she certainly wouldn’t now. The same thing was happening to me.

‘Remember I told you about my assistant, Jen, the one who everyone thought committed suicide? Her former boss had bullied her the whole time she was working for him, totally destroyed her self-esteem. That’s why she joined my group. Then in a bar after work one evening he suggested that she and I were sleeping together. Taken in isolation, that might not sound too bad, but for her it was the last straw. She decided to sue Bloomfield Weiss. Benton Davis and all the others made her life hell. And you know what I did? I tried to talk her out of it. I told her her career would benefit and she would make more money if she put up with those kinds of insults. Well, she was a brave woman, she stood up to them, stood up to them all. In the end she died. And only then did I really try to help her, when it was way to late.’

‘Wow,’ said Kim.

‘That’s why I’m here, tootling around with aeroplanes.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Kim said. She yawned. ‘It’s amazing how sitting around doing nothing all day can make you tired. I’m off to bed.’

‘Good night.’

As Kim disappeared inside, Calder sat alone in the garden, watching the night creep up around him.

Andries Visser pulled his Land Rover Discovery off the road and along the poplar-lined drive to his farm. The veld stretched brown and yellow in the distance to his left and right. He saw the large frame of his older brother Gideon sitting on an open tractor pulling winter feed for the cattle, a prize herd of Limousins. Gideon was a strong, hardworking, if unimaginative farmer. He lived in the cottage behind the main farmhouse, but he did most of the work. Andries and his family lived in the main house even though Andries’s physical contribution to the farm was negligible. He had provided the money to invest in the farm, and the ideas. If the place had been left to Gideon, the Vissers would still be scratching around in the dirt.

There was another reason Andries lived in the main house and his elder brother and his family in the cottage. Twenty years earlier, when their father was still alive and Gideon was in his late thirties, Gideon had got himself involved in a spot of legal trouble. Gideon and his wife and five children had gone to a braai at a neighbour’s farm. True to tradition it was an all-day affair, boerewors on the fire and Castle beer in the cool box. The weather was glorious, the kids were playing, the women were gossiping and Gideon and the neighbour were getting pleasantly drunk. Then there was a commotion from the sheds at the back. One of the farm hands had discovered a thief. He was a runt of a man, a black of course, and he had been caught stealing a can of red paint. Why he wanted to steal the paint wasn’t entirely clear, but Gideon and the neighbour were indignant, especially when Gideon, wrongly as it turned out, identified the man as a suspected thief of a cow from another neighbour’s farm the month before. The two Boers decided to teach the man a lesson, and in order not to scare the children they slung him in the rear of the bakkie and drove off. He was found the following day in a ditch, beaten to death.

The law took its course and several months later Gideon and the neighbour found themselves in the dock accused of murder. The thief, whose name was Moses Nkose, was incontrovertibly dead, but hard evidence of murder was difficult to pin down. Andries discussed the matter with his father and with Gideon, and the three of them came to an arrangement. Andries had a word with the right people and Gideon ended up with only two years for manslaughter. Andries, the son who was happiest wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, inherited the farm. Over time Gideon’s resentment had faded, and the arrangement worked well.