“I want it,” he said to the woman from the solicitor’s office who was showing him around.
“You and ten other people who’ve put in notes of interest,” she said.
She didn’t understand that when he said, “I want it,” it wasn’t a simple statement about house buying, about surveying and bidding and paying, it was a cry from the heart for a home. After an itinerant army childhood, a boarding-school adolescence, and a staff cottage on the grounds of the Lake District school, he craved his own hearth. At university he had once done one of those word-association tests for a fellow student’s psychology module, and when he was presented with the word “home,” Martin had drawn a complete blank, a verbal space where an emotion should have been.
When Harry, his father, retired from the army, their mother had tried to persuade him to return to her native Edinburgh but failed miserably in her mission, and instead they had gone to live in Eastbourne. It turned out (no surprise really) that Harry was temperamentally unsuited to retirement, temperamentally unsuited to living in one place in a solid three-bedroom terrace with a nice white-wood trim, on a quiet street five minutes from the English Channel. The sea held no attraction for him, he took a brisk walk along the beach every morning, but its purpose was exercise rather than pleasure. It was a relief to everyone, especially his wife, when, three years after he retired, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of an argument with a neighbor who had parked his car in front of their house. “He never accepted that it was a public highway,” their mother explained to Martin and his brother, Christopher, at the funeral, as if that was somehow the cause of his death.
Their mother lacked the will to leave Eastbourne, she had never been someone with any sap, but both Martin and Christopher gravitated back to Scotland (like eel or salmon) and lived about as far as they could get from her.
Christopher was a quantity surveyor, living beyond his income in the Borders with his neurotic, bitchy wife, Sheena, and their two surprisingly pleasant teenage children. The geographical distance between Martin and his brother was small, yet they hardly ever saw each other. Christopher was uneasy company, there was something stilted and artificial about the way he navigated his route in the world, as if he’d observed other people and thought by copying them he would be more acceptable, more authentic. Martin had long ago given up hope of being like other people.
Neither Martin nor Christopher referred to the Eastbourne house as “home,” their mother didn’t have enough personality to infuse a house with the sense of home. They always said to each other, “When are you next going down to the house?” as if the house had more character than their mother, yet it had hardly any identity at all, repainted in the same inoffensive shade of biscuit every couple of years, after which it never took long for the walls to acquire their customary stain of nicotine yellow. His mother was a heavy smoker, it was perhaps her defining trait. Martin believed that hell would be to endure forever a wet Sunday in his mother’s house-always four o’clock in the afternoon in January, with the smell of a shin beef stew cooking in the unventilated kitchen. Tobacco fumes, weak tea, the jaw-clenching sweetness of a fondant fancy. A rerun of Midsomer Murders on the video.
Their mother was tremulously old now, yet showed no sign of dying. Christopher, teetering on the edge of his income, complained that she was going to end up outliving him at this rate and he would never inherit the half of the Eastbourne house that his bank account needed so badly.
Martin had visited his mother not long after he had first made an appearance on the bestseller lists, and he showed her the week’s top-fifty in the Bookseller, explaining, “Alex Blake-that’s me, nom de plume.” He laughed, and she sighed, “Oh, Martin,” as if he’d done something particularly irksome. When he bought his house in Merchiston, he may not have been sure what it was that made a house a home, but he knew what didn’t.
Christopher had visited Martin’s house only once, just after he bought it-a difficult visit made more difficult by Sheena, a woman who ran with hyenas.
“What the fuck do you need such a big house for, Martin?” Christopher asked. “There’s only you.”
“I might get married, have children,” Martin said defensively, and Sheena yelped, “You?”
There was a small room at the top of the house, overlooking the garden, that Martin earmarked as a study. He felt it was the kind of room where he would be able to write something with strength and character, not the trite and formulaic Nina Riley but a text in which every page was a creative dialectic between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry. Disappointingly, not only did this not happen but all the life he had sensed in the house disappeared after he purchased it. Now, when Martin walked through the front door, it often felt as if no one had ever lived there, including himself. There was no sign of any merry japes. “Merry” was a word Martin particularly liked. He had always thought that if he had children he would give them names like Sonny and Merry. The name maketh the man. There was something to be said for all those religiously influenced names-Patience, Grace, Chastity, Faith. Better to be named for a virtue than to be landed with a forgettable “Martin.” Jackson Brodie, that was a fine name. He had been unruffled by events (“I used to be a policeman”) whereas Martin had felt sick with the excitement of it all. Not the good sort of excitement, not the merry jape sort, but the incident sort.
At university he had briefly gone out with a girl named Storm (because he had had girlfriends, despite what most people thought). It had been an experience-an experience rather than a relationship-that led him to believe that people lived up to their names. “Martin” was pretty dull as names went, but “Alex Blake” had a certain dash to it. His publishers hadn’t considered Martin’s own name to be “punchy”enough. The pseudonym “Alex Blake” was chosen after much deliberation, most of which excluded Martin. “A strong, no-nonsense sort of name,” his editor said, “to compensate.” For what, she didn’t say.
He accidentally kicked Paul Bradley’s overnight bag with his foot and felt something hard and unyielding where he had expected the softness of clothes. He wondered what a man like that-admirably competent even when injured-carried with him. Where had he come from? Where was he going? Paul Bradley didn’t seem like someone who had come up for the Festival, he seemed like someone with more purpose than that.
Martin looked for his watch on his wrist and remembered that he hadn’t been able to find it this morning. He suspected that Richard Mott had “borrowed” it. He borrowed things all the time, as if being in someone’s house gave you rights to all of their possessions as well. Martin’s books, shirts, and iPod (“You listen to some real shit, Martin”) had all been appropriated at one time or another by his houseguest. He had even found the spare keys to Martin’s car and seemed to think he could drive it whenever he wanted.
The watch was a Rolex “Yacht-Master” that Martin had bought for himself to celebrate selling his first book to a publisher. It was an extravagance that had made him feel guilty, and he had felt compelled to give an equivalent amount to charity to salve his conscience. “Prosthetics Outreach,” supplying artificial limbs for the victims of land mines. The cost of his Rolex was equivalent to nearly a hundred arms and legs somewhere in the unimaginable netherworld of so-called civilization. Of course, if he hadn’t bought the Rolex he could have bought two hundred arms and legs, so his guilt was doubled rather than assuaged. The price of the watch was puny compared to the price of his house in Merchiston. For the cost of his house he could probably have fitted artificial limbs on every amputee in the world. He still wore the watch, even though it reminded him every day of the incident in Russia. That was his punishment, never to forget.