Instead, a tall, slightly rumpled-looking man had appeared, ducking down to avoid hitting his head on the lintel of the kitchen doorway. He was wearing a darned sweater and corduroys, and though his bearing was military, there was nothing remotely staccato about him. If anything he seemed a little shy. Having poured out two stiff gin and tonics, he led Martin out into the garden, leaving Liz and her mother to catch up with the gossip. There, in the garden, through a wicket gate, Martin saw row after row of the dreaded rose bushes, all neatly pruned and bristling with flowers. He pointed at them politely. ‘ Formidable,’ he said.
‘Do you think so?’ said Edward. ‘Can’t say I’m keen on roses myself – and Susan can’t stand them. Thankfully, they belong to the nursery garden.’
Martin laughed in relief and the ice was broken; by the time they’d gone in for lunch a bond had developed between them, two ex-soldiers who had seen their share of terrible things. But Edward’s stories about his army days were light-hearted – a cache of plum brandy en route to the Falklands that gave his whole regiment a hangover for two days; a travelling circus, composed predominantly of dwarves, that had appeared out of nowhere during a patrol on the Northern Ireland border.
That evening they went to a village near Bowerbridge for a concert of chamber music, held in a primary school assembly hall. They’d sat on metal folding chairs and listened politely as Schubert’s Trout Quintet was played with excruciating slowness. At the interval, as they stood up, Edward said firmly, ‘I think we’ve earned a reward for that,’ and led them adroitly past the tables offering apple juice, then across the street for more robust refreshment in the pub.
Later, back at Bowerbridge, they’d all sat up talking until after midnight. At one point Edward described two weeks he’d spent on manoeuvres in the Arctic, where he and his men were stalked by a polar bear. ‘But, you know, we were never very cold there – thermal blankets work wonders. In fact, the coldest I have ever been was a winter in Kosovo…’
‘I was in Kosovo’, said Martin. And they discovered they had actually overlapped in their visits to that strife-torn country, had even known a few of the same UN monitors based there at the time. Then it turned out that Edward and Susan had recently taken a holiday in the Quercy, not far from Cahors, where until their divorce Martin and his ex-wife had owned a small cottage on the river. By the time they’d all retired to bed, he’d felt as if he were among old friends. He could see Liz was pleased by how easily they had all got on, and how much they’d laughed.
That was what he remembered most about the weekend – the laughter, and then the walk he and Liz had taken along the banks of the River Nadder on Sunday afternoon. She’d shown him her favourite spots, and where she used to sit as a girl to watch her father fish. Neither of them said much, but Martin sensed that Liz was letting him in to her past – and to her most private memories.
For the whole weekend they’d left their professional lives behind them – though there had been one moment when work fleetingly made its presence felt. On Sunday morning they had sat out on the small terrace, and while Liz and her mother read the papers, Edward had talked to Martin about his work for a charity which provided operations to improve the sight of blind people in the Third World. When he mentioned the staff in Mombasa, Liz looked up sharply from the Sunday Times Magazine. ‘Did you ever have anything to do with a charity called UCSO?’ she asked.
Edward shook his head. ‘Not professionally. I used to know its Director. Chap called Blakey. His wife was friends with mine, years ago – he was posted in Germany when we were there.’
‘You’ve not kept in touch?’
‘I have with his wife, but they’re not together any more. Bit of a bad show.’
Susan Carlyle interjected, ‘What Edward means is that David Blakey behaved appallingly.’
‘Now, now, Susan. Always two sides to that kind of story. Anyway, sun’s past the yardarm, at least in France. Who’d like a glass of wine?’
But that had been the sole remotely work-related moment of the weekend, and it was only as Liz and he drove back to London that Martin Seurat had felt his thoughts return to the job. He could sense that happening with Liz too, as they sat stuck in the traffic returning on the M4. Her face assumed a pensive, abstracted air, and he felt a momentary flash of sadness that she had drifted out of the weekend’s mood of relaxed intimacy.
Standing now in front of his window, as night came down in a dark blanket over Paris, he remembered how his ex-wife had complained about the same thing. She’d say, ‘You’re always drifting away from me. Always thinking of something else.’ That’s how Liz had seemed as they’d returned to London and their respective problems. But Martin couldn’t resent her for it; he understood it only too well.
