Paul Torday: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

‘Move, yes, as in relocate.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the man who went absent on sick leave won’t be coming back.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

I considered this; it seemed conclusive. So I asked, ‘For how long?’

‘I don’t know. At least for six months.’

‘Well, obviously that is impossible,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t.

‘Why is it impossible?’ asked Mary quietly, fixing me with a level stare and sitting upright.

‘Well, I mean, how can you? We’ve got a life here. My work is here. Our home is here.’

Mary was silent and ate some more pasta. Finally she said, ‘I’ve sort of told them I’ll do it.’

Well of course, after that I spoke my mind, and then Mary spoke hers. Now she is asleep in the spare room and I am sitting here writing my diary, and in a minute I will put down my pen and lie on our bed with my eyes open, grinding my teeth.

28 July

Today, like the last few days, has been spent mostly in meetings with Fitzharris & Price, either with me going to Harriet’s offices or she visiting NCFE. There were cost estimates to prepare, project plans to be drawn up, equipment suppliers to be located. At first we held our meetings in Smith Square, but David Sugden had a way of suddenly appearing in my office and asking to look at what we were doing. This took up a great deal of time, especially as he liked to explain to us how to do things which we had almost always already done.

He has a way of looking at Harriet that I do not quite like. This evening he said to me, after she had gone back to her own offices, ‘Bright girl, that, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, she seems very able.’

‘I suppose she’s a chartered surveyor by profession. She must find all this is taking her a bit out of her depth?’

I don’t know why I resented his remark. Perhaps it was the tone, not the words. ‘I think she is coping. She has a well-ordered mind.’

‘Attractive girl, too,’ he suggested.

When I did not reply he rubbed his hands together for a moment, looking at the lino floor of the corridor where he had stopped me on my way from the meeting room to my office. Then he asked if Harriet was married. As a matter of fact, I knew the answer to that one and told David that she was engaged. He said nothing further and returned to his office.

The reason I know Harriet is engaged is that she took me out to lunch today. We had spent the morning looking at spreadsheets and both of us needed a break, so when she suggested lunch (a meal I do not normally indulge in) for once I was quite ready to accept.

We found a Middle Eastern restaurant nearby, which seemed an appropriate choice. I ordered a salad and some water. Harriet ordered a salad and a glass of white wine. When it came she held the glass up and looked over it at me and said, ‘A toast-to the project.’

I raised my glass, but she wouldn’t allow me to drink a toast with mineral water, so wine was ordered, despite my telling her I never drank in the day, and then we raised our glasses and both said, rather solemnly, ‘To the project.’

Our eyes met as we sipped our wine together, and I looked away, embarrassed without knowing why. Harriet was undisturbed, and put her glass down and asked me if I was married. When I told her I was, she asked, ‘What does your wife do?’

‘Mary? She’s in finance with a big international bank.’

‘A career woman like me,’ said Harriet, smiling.

But Mary wasn’t like Harriet; she would never have ordered a glass of white wine at lunch, much less persuaded me to have one.

‘Alcohol is all very well in its place,’ Mary used to say, ‘and as far as I am concerned, during weekdays its place is in a bottle and nowhere else.’ And Mary didn’t dress like Harriet or, frankly, smell like Harriet. Mary didn’t believe in smart feminine clothes or perfume. Mary wore baggy brown linen work suits at home and grey ones at the office. She smelled clean, of rather antiseptic soap. She was always neat and tidy…To my dismay I found I was comparing the two women and the comparison was unfavourable to Mary. What was so wrong with wearing an elegant calf-length dress, rather than a suit that looked as if it had been designed by a junior member of the Chinese communist party? What was wrong with smelling faintly of peaches ripening in a greenhouse, instead of something that recalled a mild industrial disinfectant?

We talked for a moment about Mary, and her endless travelling.

The salad arrived, and I concentrated for a moment on chasing an olive around my plate with my fork. Then I decided it was my turn to keep the conversation going and asked Harriet if she was married.

‘No, but I will be next spring.’

‘Oh, have you just become engaged?’

‘It hasn’t been in the papers yet, but it will be as soon as Robert comes back.’

‘Comes back from where?’

Harriet put her knife and fork down on her plate and looked down for a moment, then said quietly, ‘From Iraq.’

‘What’s he doing out there?’ I said, watching her. Her smiling, easy look had gone and now her lips were compressed and she had turned pale. I suddenly realised she was on the verge of tears. In a panic I tried to make a joke: ‘Well, perhaps we can get a contract to introduce salmon into the Euphrates, and then you can join him out there?’

Whatever the merits of this remark, it did the trick. Harriet looked startled and then smiled. I don’t think she thought I was the sort of person who made jokes, and she would have been right. We talked about Robert and his adventures for a while.

‘He wasn’t expecting to go to Iraq,’ Harriet told me. ‘We were going to take a week’s holiday in France together before I became totally buried in the salmon project. Then he got a call and the next thing I heard he was ringing me from Frankfurt airport, to tell me what had happened and that he was already on his way.’ We sat in silence for a moment. Then she said, ‘The worst thing is the letters. Either they arrive weeks late or not at all. And when you do get them they are so heavily censored it is impossible to know what Robert was trying to say.’

After that, she didn’t seem to want to say any more about it. It was odd. A few minutes ago Harriet and I had been, in one sense, perfect strangers. I had spent time with her over the past week or two, quite a lot of time, but it had all been very professional. My admiration for her ability was unbounded, but I had been completely ignorant of her personal circumstances and perhaps would never have asked her a single question about herself if she had not suddenly suggested lunch.

Then I checked my watch and saw it was nearly two o’clock. We paid the bill and hurried back to the salmon project.

22 August

I’m working all hours, from seven in the morning until seven or eight at night. I’m mostly too tired to write up my diaries. I want to keep a record somehow now that, at last, I’m engaged in work of such immense significance. It’s nearly a month since my last entry and the Yemen salmon project is growing. We are spending real money: not hundreds, not thousands, not tens of thousands; we are spending so much money, so fast, that a firm of accountants has been hired. They have put financial controls in place and they prepare budget reports which go to the sheikh which I feel sure he never looks at. I flew to Finland for two days of talks with some specialist manufacturers of fish farm equipment, to discuss the design of the holding tanks in the Wadi Aleyn. I flew to Germany to talk to a company which manufactures tanks used to transport tropical fish, and we discussed how to design and build the transport pods which would take the first salmon out by plane to the Yemen. Mary flew to New York, and then back to Geneva to attend enigmatic-sounding conferences on risk management. Harriet flew to Glen Tulloch to meet the sheikh and then out to the Yemen with him to discuss matters unknown to me. Everyone was flying everywhere. Everyone except David Sugden.