Borrowed Time - Couverture souple

Goddard, Robert

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0552164178 ISBN 13 : 9780552164177

Editeur : Corgi, 2011

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Chapter One
It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. I'd started out from Knighton that morning on what was projected to be a six-day tramp along the southern half of Offa's Dyke. I've always found I think best when walking alone. And since I had a great deal to think about at the time, a really long walk seemed one way of ensuring I thought clearly and well. Decisions masquerading as choices were closing in around me. Middle age was beckoning, a fork in life's path looming ahead. Nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be, nor as certain. But up in the hills, there was the hope it might seem so.

It was Tuesday the seventeenth of July 1990. A well-remembered date, well remembered and much recorded. A day of baking heat and unbroken sunshine, declining to a dusk of sultry langour. A day of solid walking and serious thinking for me, of bone-hard turf beneath my feet and hazy blue above my head. I saw no buzzards, as I'd hoped to, circling in the thermals, though maybe, after all, there was something hovering up there, out of sight, seeing and knowing what I was heading towards.

I'd travelled up to Knighton by train from Petersfield the previous day, happy to be away and alone at last. My eldest brother, Hugh, had died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine, five weeks before. It had been a shock, of course. A grievous one--especially for my mother. But Hugh and I had never been what you'd call close. Twelve years was just too big an age gap, I suppose. About the only time we'd really got to know each other as brothers was when we'd walked the Pennine Way together, in the summer of 1973. Since his death, the memory of those three distant weeks on the northern fells had become in my mind a sort of talisman of lost fraternity. My trip to the Welsh borders was partly a conscious act of mourning, partly a search for just a few of the pleasures and opportunities life had offered then.

Above all, however, the trip was intended to clear my mind and decide my future. My sister Jennifer and my other two brothers, Simon and Adrian, all worked in the family business, Timariot & Small, of which Hugh had been managing director. In that sense--and several others--I was the odd one out. I used to claim my career with the European Commission in Brussels gave me immunity from their parochial cares and perpetual squabbles. And so it did. Along with absolute security and relative prosperity. It had given me twelve years of that and could be relied on to give me at least another twenty. Followed by early retirement and an index-linked pension. Oh yes, the life of a Eurocrat has its undoubted rewards.

But it also exacts its penalties. And they'd begun to weigh me down of late. The Berlaymont, an X-shaped mountain of glass and concrete where I'd worked in one cramped office or another since arriving in Brussels, had become even more oppressive in my imagination than it was in reality. It's been closed since, following the discovery of carcinogenic asbestos dust in its every cavity. So, even if you shake the dust of the Berlaymont from your feet, it may still linger in your lungs, waiting patiently--for many decades, so the experts say--to claim its due. Well, there's nothing I can do about that now. And, at the time, it wasn't anything as tangible as asbestos that was choking me. It was the knowledge of all the kilometres of corridor I'd dutifully trudged, all the hectares of memoranda I'd solemnly paraphed, all the tonnes of institutional gravitas I'd played my small part in bearing--and would go on bearing, year after year, until kingdom or retirement or asbestosis come.

I would have done, of course. I'd have gone on for want of any alternative, becoming more cynical and disillusioned as the years passed, becoming more and more like those worn-down colleagues of mine in their mid-fifties, dreaming of Surrey bungalows and golfing days to come. It was already too late to avoid sharing their fate. It was already, as sometimes I realized in the bland Brussels night, over for me.

But then Hugh died. And it didn't have to be over after all. It gives me no pleasure to say this. God knows, I still wish it hadn't happened to him. But my life's turned around since he succumbed to his own punishing workload and slid slowly to the floor of his office just after nine o'clock one evening in June 1990. I could never have believed what his death would lead me into. And perhaps that's just as well. I'd have fled back to my dull but secure existence in Brussels if I'd known even half of it. That's for certain. But, despite everything that's happened, I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad to have followed this road.

At first, it just seemed like a savage bolt from the blue, a nasty intimation of my own mortality. But the signs were there at the funeral, in the tension that wasn't just grief. For fifteen years, Hugh had been Timariot & Small, sustaining it as much by his energy and commitment as by any nurturing of commercial advantage. Now he was gone. And the question wasn't simply who would replace him, but whether the company could survive without his hand on the tiller. Even at the crematorium, Simon and Adrian were eyeing each other in preparation for the contest to come, while Reg Chignell, the production manager, was eyeing both of them and clearly wondering if either was up to the job.

Uncle Larry had come out of retirement to chair the board on a temporary basis. It was he and my mother who put a suggestion to me the day after the funeral which I was still mulling over a month later when I set out from Knighton. Though the youngest of us, Adrian had worked in the company the longest. He also had two sons, which was two more than the rest of us put together and by my uncle's quaint logic made him a fitting guardian of family tradition. Moreover, by virtue of some shares held in trust for the eldest of those sons, Adrian brought more voting power to the table than Simon, Jennifer or me. The managing directorship was properly his, they explained. With the support of Hugh's widow, Bella, who had inherited his shares, they proposed to offer Adrian the post. But they foresaw friction between him and Simon. Well, that hardly required a crystal ball. What was needed was a calming influence, somebody to succeed Adrian as works director and bring the cool good sense of a trained economist to the board's deliberations. What was needed, in short, was me.

Their case wasn't, to be honest, a strong one. I'd worked in the factory during university vacations and in the office during the eighteen months or so it had taken the European Commission to decide they wanted me. But that was all a long time ago and my background in economics was so much eyewash. What my mother really wanted was to lure me home and see me settled in Petersfield, ideally with a wife and children, before she died. Uncle Larry was more than willing to play along. And I was tempted to do the same--for reasons of my own.

I didn't tell them how eager I was to leave Brussels, of course. I didn't want them--and I especially didn't want my brothers or sister--to think they'd be doing me a bigger favour than I'd be doing them. I did my best to imply that for the sake of the family I might be prepared to give up my lucrative career--on the right terms. But there was the rub, as the Commission's conditions of service artfully ensured. The terms would never be good enough. Frustrated or not, as a fonctionnaire I was feather-bedded. With Timariot & Small, I was going to feel the draught.

Then there was the future of the company to consider. I wasn't absolutely sure it had one. A past, yes. In 1836, my great-grandfather Joseph Timariot went into partnership with John Small making cricket bats in a modest workshop in Sheep Street, Petersfield. With one change of site--to the present factory in Frenchman's Road--the business had grown since into something like the third largest manufacturer of cricket bats in the country. But that hardly made it General Motors. It employed about fifty people in a medium-sized Hampshire market town, using old-fashioned methods to turn out a handcrafted product in one branch of the sports industry where the Far East hadn't yet caught up with English traditions. The past it proudly possessed, in faded medal certificates from the Great Exhibition, in brown-edged letters of appreciation from Edwardian cricketers, in the sawdusty air of the workshop my father walked through in the footsteps of his father and his father before him. But the future? Did that really hold a place for the likes of Timariot & Small?

The Timariot family, as I saw it, was in danger of putting all its eggs in one very old and increasingly frail basket. I don't think my father ever thought all five of his children would work for the company. Until his retirement, only Hugh had done so. Then Adrian went into the business straight from school. Uncle Larry retired a few years later and was succeeded as finance director by Jennifer, who until then had been working as an accountant for a supermarket chain. When my father died, Hugh became chairman in fact as well as name and promptly installed Simon as marketing director, rescuing him from some long and inglorious struggles as a photocopier salesman. Which left only me on the outside.

Where good sense suggested I should remain. But the offer of a directorship had been made. And, flushed with generosity following his move to the top of the table, Adrian was happy to confirm it. Simon and Jennifer, seeing me, I suspect, as some sort of check on Adrian's power, urged me to accept. I went back to Brussels promising to give them a decision during the fortnight's leave I'd booked for late July.

So, in a sense, the Rubicon rather than the Severn waited for me at the end of Offa's Dyke. But careworn was the last thing I felt when I stepped out of the George & Dragon in Knighton early that Tuesday morning. I took one glance up at the clock tower, then headed down Broad Street in the direction of the Dyke. My rucksack was full, but, stra...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

One fateful summer evening, businessman Robin Timariot meets a strikingly beautiful woman while out walking. They exchange only a few words, but those words prove to be unforgettable. A few days later, the newspapers are full of the rape and murder of Lady Louise Paxton - and to his horror, Timariot realises that this was the woman he met just hours before her death.

A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a series of bizarre events begin to convince Timariot that all is not what it seems. Against his better judgement, he is soon sucked into the tortuous complexity of the dead woman's life. But the closer Timariot gets to the truth, the more hideous and uncertain it seems to be. And far too late, he realizes that anybody who uncovers it is unlikely to live...

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Corgi
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0552164178
• ISBN 13: 9780552164177
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 480