Paul Torday - More Than You Can Say

A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

This ebook first published in 2011 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Copyright 2011 Paul Torday

The right of Paul Torday to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 0 297 85826 3

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Your story will be laughed to scorn. Of course people will be sorry for you they will say that a meritorious soldier, more notable perhaps for courage than for brains, has gone crazy, and they will comment on the long-drawn-out effects of the War.

John Buchan, The Three Hostages

A government-commissioned report is recommending that servicemen and women be routinely screened for mental health problems throughout their employment the report also calls for the creation of a specialist mental wellbeing website and online support network, focusing initially on troops returning from operations in Afghanistan.

ITN News item, 6 October 2010

The UK has had troops in Afghanistan since 2002

I had been living on the edge for the last couple of weeks. If I were truthful maybe for the last couple of years. Maybe ever since I had left the army. I had started looking over my shoulder again, mostly at things that werent there. Camilla, my girlfriend at the time, used to say I had paranoid tendencies. I used to reply that, if shed been where Id been, shed be paranoid too. It was a small thing, but it irritated her. Then at a party we had a falling out. It was one of those arguments like a summer thunderstorm, violent but not serious; at least I hadnt thought it was at first. I cant remember what the particular row was about. We were always having them. Anyway, I walked out of wherever we were at the time a party, somewhere in Kensington and went to a pub and had a drink. Then I had another drink.

It turned out it was serious after all the row with Camilla, I mean. Apparently Id said I would marry her. I cant remember exactly when I had proposed or whether she had said yes, Ill think about it was more her style, but after I left her she rang me on my mobile several times. Eventually this must have been after my third or fourth drink I decided to throw my mobile phone into a bin. Then I decided that was a bad idea, because someone might find it and run up an enormous bill that I would have to pay. So I walked all the way to the Embankment and threw it into the river. No more calls. No more Camilla.

Luckily I dont have the kind of job where you have to show up in the office every morning at eight oclock. If I did, I would have been fired. I didnt turn up anywhere much before noon for the next fortnight. I drank too much; talked too much when I could find someone to talk to; stayed up too late and then woke in the middle of the morning feeling hung over and sweating. Sometimes I was still wearing the clothes I had put on the previous morning. Then Id have a shower, tidy myself up a bit but not too much and go and have an enormous breakfast in the Greek caf on the corner of my street in Camden. Sometimes I would try to take some exercise go for a walk in Regents Park, or to the gym. But exercise for its own sake bores me, so if I didnt have any jobs to do for my employer, I usually gave up, went back to the flat and opened a bottle of wine, then read the papers until the sky darkened, the streetlights came on and it was time to go out.

Where I went to depended on my frame of mind. Sometimes I went to the cinema. Occasionally I would call up a friend, from the diminishing list of those who would still speak to me, and try to persuade him or her usually him, most of the hers had put a line through my name in their address book to go out for a drink or a cheap supper somewhere. In recent weeks the only invitation Id received was a gold-edged card inviting me to attend a reception at Lancaster House for veterans of the Afghan Campaign. I dont know why I didnt throw it out. I dont like those sorts of occasions, on the whole, but I suppose it was the thought that I might meet one or two people I had once known. In the end I wrote and said I would come. Maybe it would make me feel better to talk to someone else who knew what it had been like.

If I had nowhere else to go, I would go to the Diplomatic, a private members club. Why it chose that particular name I do not know as diplomacy was not an obvious quality of most of the membership, either professionally or personally. If there was any common ground shared by the members, apart from a love of card games, backgammon and roulette, it would be hard to say what it was. We had a German Graf, an English marquess, an East End property dealer and a Turkish Cypriot drug dealer on our list. We even had a few bankers who lubricated the club with real cash. Most of us preferred to rely on markers and IOUs in various forms. The stakes were never enormous but, all the same, if you played there regularly, it was quite easy to lose serious amounts of money.

That was one reason why I hadnt been near the club for the last few weeks: I owed quite a lot of money. Several members were carrying my markers for a few hundred pounds each and it was becoming embarrassing. But thats the way cards run. I hadnt held a decent hand for weeks. We play poker mostly, and believe me, you can be a great player which I am not but you still need to hold a few good cards if you want to win. The night on which my biographer, if I ever have one, will say I finally lost the plot, I was flush with cash for once. Id done a couple of jobs and to my surprise my employer had paid me not only for those, but also the considerable amount he owed me in arrears. That was the good news. The bad news was that he fired me.

What he actually said was, I think you need to take a nice long holiday. Ill call you some time.

I said, Dont you like the way I work? I thought that was why you hired me.

My employer my former employer said, You are showing just a leetle too much enthusiasm. You might need more balance in your life, I dont know. Ill be in touch.

Id been fired from all sorts of jobs before, for all sorts of reasons, but being fired for being too keen on my work was a first. Anyway, to get to the point, I had over two thousand pounds in cash on me when I went into the Diplomatic that night.

If you dont already know the Diplomatic, I wouldnt recommend you go out of your way to find it. It is down one of those little alleys that still exist in the one or two obscure mews of Mayfair which have not yet been bulldozed to make way for a new office building or a block of service flats for rich non-doms. There is a front door, with no nameplate to indicate what lies behind it, a single lamp burning above it, and a small CCTV camera reminiscent of the entrance to a brothel. Once inside, the rich aroma of cigar smoke the Diplomatic has not yet caught up with the anti-smoking laws and the sour smell of stale alcohol immediately dispel this impression. In the tiny hall is a large man squeezed behind a pretty leather-topped desk. This is Eric, the hall porter. Eric checks your name against a list, to see whether you are a member or an invited guest. His orders are to make sure no one is admitted who is not on the list, nor anyone who is not wearing evening dress, so I had put on all the kit. Part of Erics charm is that, no matter how often he meets you, he will always forget your face, or at least pretend to. If you can get past Eric and not everybody does you enter a larger, dimly lit room which is a bar. You can get almost anything you have ever heard of to drink there, and if you want to eat then you can order from the list of bar snacks. I wouldnt recommend the food, but if you want to try a new brand of tequila, or youd like a glass of Salon champagne, or if you want to drink one of the best dry martinis or whisky sours you can get in London, then Marco the barman will fix you up. Marcos dry martinis give your brain a jolt like an electric shock. I ordered one and sipped the chilly liquid for a second, waiting until the room reoriented itself around me. Then, feeling much better, I took my drink and myself upstairs.