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  ‘So was he a hero then?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

  ‘Were you a hero?’

  Sam took off his flat cap and pushed back his thinning sandy hair. ‘Well Tom, I don’t know if I was a hero. But I was certainly surrounded by them. Now, you promise me to never tell Dad what I just said, OK?’

  What Sam didn’t say was that Leonard’s problems – his alcoholism and spiral into near bankruptcy – had begun just after that tour of Belfast in 1979. Sam had seen his friend change from quite a serious-minded young man into a reckless, live-for-the-minute rogue. Leonard left the army in 1981, much to the chagrin of his superiors, who were grooming him for rapid promotion, and embarked on a three-year binge which knew no bounds and certainly every casino in the West End. Three years later, his inheritance down the drain, he woke up one morning next to a girl, had decided by lunchtime that he wanted to marry her and did so six months later.

  She was Constance Rowley, a secretary at a law firm in London, heaven-sent for the undeserving Leonard. She took him out of London, away from temptation, and with Sam’s help and generosity – borne more out of irrational loyalty than financial sense – they moved into the Old Mill on his estate. Constance got a job with a firm of solicitors in Rochester, but Leonard never rediscovered the appetite for work he had once had. It was very strange. Even when Tom was born in 1985 he was disinclined to finance their lifestyle, which although comfortable was not luxurious, any further by getting a job. Constance let it stand. She slightly suspected, for one thing, that all was not well with him. As indeed it wasn’t. On Tom’s first birthday, a quiet March day with a grey clanging arch of sky hanging over the house, Leonard told her that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver. It was a hereditary condition, apparently, but both couldn’t help wondering whether it had been accelerated by the excesses of the past few years. They kept it very quiet and hoped desperately that Leonard would live as long as possible.

  Leonard spent his days inside armed with a history book and a bottle of wine or whisky. Whenever Tom, who had only the vaguest notion of his father’s fragility, came in Leonard would look at him with a sparkle and challenge him to a game of chess or backgammon, or tell him to sit next to him as he read him passages from histories of the crusades and the fall of Byzantium. Tom didn’t fully understand but was enthralled by the exciting names and the thought of entire cities being sacked.

  When the end came it was swift. Seven year after his diagnosis, Leonard deteriorated in a couple of weeks; finally his immune system abandoned its long rearguard action. Tom was woken one morning at eight o’clock not by Constance crying but by the silence from downstairs. He tiptoed out of bed and down to the kitchen. It was all quiet; nothing had been touched. He felt the kettle. It was cold. Then he heard broken sobs from upstairs, and his fear vanished and numb realization hit him. He knew as surely then as he did a minute later when he opened the door to the bedroom that his father was dead.

  The next week they buried him, Tom walking with Constance behind the coffin. There were no more tears from Constance; she had long known this was coming, and after the first shock, save for dabbing her eyes occasionally at the funeral more out of form than necessity, she did not weep. She still squeezed Tom’s hand though, all the way through the service.

  ‘Stop it, Mummy, you’re hurting my hand,’ he whispered.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Tommy.’ She smiled at him and relaxed her grip, but only for a moment before unconsciously squeezing it again, even more tightly this time.

  After the wake, Constance ushered everyone out of the house and she and Tom sat forlornly in the kitchen, slowly getting used to the unwelcome quiet. Breaking the empty silence, as if seized with a sudden idea, Constance leaped up, went to her bedroom for a moment and came down with a letter in her hand.

  ‘Now Tommy, your father wanted me to give you this when you were fourteen or fifteen, but I’d like you to read it now. You should read it now, I think. You’re old enough. Daddy wrote it to you just last week. Would you like to read it by yourself? If you want to I don’t mind, but if you want me to be with you then of course I will.’

  Tom’s heart felt light as she handed him the stiff ivory-white envelope, bare save for ‘To My Darling Boy’ in his father’s beautiful spidery handwriting. He gulped.

  ‘Um, don’t worry, Mummy. I’ll read it outside.’

  Tom walked outside and Constance shut the door after him, ruffling his hair as he passed her. The letter felt heavy, heavier than the paper in it. He climbed over the fence and walked to his den, cut out of the middle of a large rhododendron. The setting sun bounced off the undersides of the leaves in yellow and gold. He fingered the envelope for some minutes, before gently prising it open. He unfolded the letter.

  My Dear Tom,

  Please forgive this letter. I so very much wish that I could have said all of the following to you in person. Face to face is so much better than the cold written word, but at least you will, should you want to, be able to keep this letter for a while. I am afraid that I did not talk to you before I died for two reasons. First, aged eight you are too young, I think, to deal with the concept of speaking to a man about to die, and I want to keep you young for as long as possible. You will be annoyed with me for not treating you as a grown-up, but I hope you will understand. The second reason is that I could not have brought myself to have spoken to you; I simply would not have been able to witness your reaction. So there you go; half out of concern for you, half for me. Please forgive my cowardice: I hope you understand it.

  Tom, by this stage you will know all there is to know about looking after your mother and being the man of the house. I know you will have done a superb job, but I am just so sorry that a boy so young has had to grow up so quickly, too quickly. I know that you and your friends are impatient to grow up, but one day you will realize that it is a magical thing to stay young for as long as possible.

  So I will not lecture you about looking after Mummy; you will be doing that already and as I head towards death (gosh that is strange to write!) her safety is mercifully not on my list of worries (though the future of the English cricket team and your tree house surviving a storm are). You are a brave boy, Tom; I have always known that. Mummy may have told you that you were very ill when you were born; you actually very nearly died and the doctors and nurses had given up hope. One doctor told me, when you were at your worst, that you would not survive the night.

  The next morning that doctor came and saw you. Not only were you still there but you had somehow, from the night, drawn from some great invisible reserve of strength. The doctor was amazed; no baby had ever made such a recovery in that hospital, and all the nurses after that fawned over you, saying that you were their little hero.

  I wish I could have spent years and years writing this to you. I wish I could put down every single bit of advice I have ever heard myself, but I will limit myself to the following, in no particular order, but as they come into my head, apart from the last one, which is the most important advice I have ever been given. Some of it you will understand now, some you will understand later, some you will think is just rubbish!

  The eleventh commandment. Never get caught. If you obey this one you don’t have to worry about any of the other boring ten. Apart from ‘Honour your father and mother.’ You must do that!

  Always, always say please and thank you. It will amaze you how many grown-ups do not do this.

  Never be rude to girls.

  There is no such thing as a stupid question. If in doubt, just ask!

  The ancient Greeks had a great saying, ‘Nothing in excess.’ I have no doubt that you’ll see what that means later on in life. Unfortunately, probably only because you will have done something to excess or gone too far. But learn from it!

  You will do well to learn this quote from Walter Scott about the mess you will get into if you start telling lies: ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!’ Never a truer word sp
oken.

  Have a child. It is the best present in the world. But not for a few years at least!

  I don’t know who said this, but like virtually every other good quotation it was probably Johnson, Wilde or Churchill. ‘The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.’ Tom, I never worked very hard, and as you can see I haven’t been that lucky.

  You were born into a family which, if not wildly wealthy, at least does not struggle. Remember to look after those who have not had the advantages of a loving family and a good education and relatively secure financial background that you have. This will become clear later in your life. You will come to understand what I mean. In terms of university, jobs, exams, etc. I have two things to say.

  From me, your father. You must do very well and get a first at university. And then you must join the army, and after mastering that you must be in the cabinet, having made yourself (legally) into a multi-millionaire.

  From me, Daddy. As long as you are happy, Tom, and add value even to just one other person’s happiness, do whatever you want to do. If you don’t want to go to university, don’t. If you don’t want to touch the army with a bargepole, don’t. If you don’t want to work, don’t. But always add value.

  Goodness me, Tom, I know I will wake up tomorrow and reread this and think it is all drivel. But I don’t think it is. In any case, I am putting it in the envelope and sealing it now. I must go now; goodbyes are better short and sharp.

  Tom, I do wonder how you are going to do, but I am not scared about it.

  God speed, and with love, with all the love in the world to you, my brave, brave boy,

  Daddy

  Tom noticed that there were splodges on the paper, some old ones that were dry and some new ones his own eyes had made. Fearing for the letter’s survival, he folded it up into its envelope and hugged it to his chest. Tears were now streaming down his cheeks, and he ran back to the house, scratching himself on thorns, running, running through the dusk’s purple towards the light of the kitchen door, which was already being tapped by moths. He hurled the door open and threw himself into Constance’s lap, where he stayed for an hour crying his eyes out. He didn’t feel very brave at all.

  Leonard’s financial legacy was not impressive. They were able to stay – just – in the house, and while they weren’t ever exactly poor, Tom was denied the holidays and treats that his classmates had. But he was very popular at his primary school, where he always came top of the class while managing to be one of the chief mischief-makers. Constance was sad that she wasn’t able to afford to send him away to boarding school, but while Tom accepted having to go to the Henry VI Comprehensive in Chatham, a low, sprawling, prefabricated structure whose grim facade hid some excellent teachers, Constance seemed dumb with embarrassment every time she had to admit to one of her old friends that he wasn’t at an independent school. Tom, however, true to form, settled in without a problem. He was still the same old Tom, still climbing trees just out of curiosity to inspect the birds’ nests at the top, still unfailingly generous-spirited to all who met him, and he fitted in with his new classmates with consummate ease.

  Due to the combination of his father’s charm and his mother’s brains and ability to work hard, Tom eased into Cambridge, securing a place to read English at Sidney Sussex College. When he put the phone down after hearing his A-level results he hugged her, almost lifting her off the ground. ‘Thanks, Mum. If it wasn’t for you this would never have happened.’ Constance was thrilled. As he ran off with his lurcher Zeppo through the woods to go and tell Sam she flopped into a chair. So far, she thought, Tom’s doing all right.

  Three years later, after his final week at Cambridge, Tom took the entrance exam for the army. To his great relief he passed; he had made absolutely no provision for anything else. Halfway through July, after a month of helping on Sam’s farm, he got his results: he had got a first. To celebrate, in August he left with his girlfriend Cassie Foskett to travel around Europe by train.

  He had always felt insecure around Cassie; he couldn’t ever really believe that she was going out with him. They had been in the same college at Cambridge and had shared tutorials since the start. It was only at the end of the first term that Tom had summoned up the courage to talk to her properly outside a tutorial, over-engineering a meeting in a coffee bar to talk through ‘bits of Austen that he was having trouble with’. She humoured him, and Tom soon found that behind a cool, fierce exterior lay a warm smile and an infectious, cackling laugh.

  She was funny, Cassie. She seemed to Tom otherworldly, almost timeless, indefinable. She was a chameleon, both in looks and character. Sometimes she would wear floaty dresses and put flowers in her hair as though she was at Woodstock – what she wore around her college friends, when Tom thought she was at her most liberated and best. Sometimes though, when she was with friends from other colleges who knew her through the octopus-like public-school network that permeated the university, she would dress and act differently: immaculate hair and expensive, fussy clothes combined with a haughty, icy air. He didn’t mind this, but it puzzled him. As he got to know her better, it meant that Tom always felt that just when he was on the brink of really understanding her she would slip away from him.

  Halfway through their second year on a warm March day they were lying on the banks of the Cam sharing the earphones to an iPod, listening to ‘American Pie’. The lyrics woke Tom out of his slumber near the end of the song. He brought himself up onto his elbows and looked at Cassie. She was asleep, or dozing, and he wondered how on earth he was going out with her. Messy hair tumbled over her face. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful, and he lay there transfixed. He was right there, right next to her, and his arm could feel the soft, near imperceptible rises and falls of her chest, but he still didn’t know what was going on inside her head, what exactly she thought of things, how exactly she saw herself. How she saw him. When he got close to her she always slipped away into the mist. Always turned away at the last moment.

  She opened her eyes, green and soft, and stretched like a cat.

  ‘What you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing. Just trying to work you out. Riddle wrapped inside an enigma.’

  She laughed almost derisively, and then her expression switched into sweetness and innocence. ‘More chance of getting the theory of relativity than of getting me. Sorry, buster.’

  He looked hurt.

  ‘Don’t worry, silly. It’s not an insult. I just don’t think you need to worry about it. I love you, you know. And anyway I don’t understand you and I don’t lose any sleep about it.’ She smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘Come on. Lie down. Chill.’

  In the third year they didn’t see as much of each other, as she lived out of college in a flat with some of her public-school friends and they both busied themselves with revision for their finals. Sometimes she asked Tom to house parties, invitations which he always found reasons not to accept as he found her friends quite intimidating – cocaine addicts dripping with privilege who would at best barely register and at worst baldly resent his presence. But they still shared tutorials, and Cassie spent a lot of time with him in college, occasionally accompanying Tom on visits to his mother.

  A further complication was her parents, whom he found almost unbearably awkward. Her mother Lavinia at least talked to him, although as if he were an interesting curio rather than a realistic marriage prospect. Her father Jeremy, on the other hand, a successful QC as short of charm as he was long of wallet, acted as though Tom’s sheer presence in a room with Cassie sullied his daughter’s character. Still, Tom was unfailingly polite, and while he would occasionally, even often, make Lavinia laugh, he had no such luck with the old man, who was obviously desperate for Cassie to get her act together and ditch him at the first opportunity.

  All this meant that throughout their final year, while Tom found himself falling more and more in love with her, the fear was growing within him that he would never be able to keep her, that she would slip from his grasp.
But over that post-university, pre-army summer he had Cassie all to himself for four weeks.

  And he loved Europe, being taken around all the great cities, churches and museums by Cassie, who seemed to know everything about everywhere they went. Tom had not been on many holidays and was initially embarrassed about his ignorance, but she laughed it off and took to her role as his guide and teacher with huge enthusiasm. Tom had never been happier, but sometimes at night when they were both drunk or when he looked at her during the day across a stuffy train he thought he could see something. What was it? Sadness? Coldness? Blithe indifference? But then she would look at him, remember herself and smile, blink sparkle into her eyes, and all his worries receded until the next time he caught the look.

  Their travel plan was simple. Bouncing around cities and towns that took their fancy in guidebooks, they plotted a rough circle, going south through France into Switzerland, down into northern Italy, up to Austria and then beginning the route home from there. They stayed in dingy youth hostels and used the money they saved to go to the best restaurants in town. It worked like a dream.

  One night, money nearly exhausted, they stayed in a hostel down a back street in Graz, with domestic arguments from nearby tenements and barking dogs a discordant lullaby as they tried to sleep. Tom, sweating in the late-summer air, lay in the dark watching a decrepit fan wheeze its way around above them. He heard her quietly crying.