Corduroy Mansions

81. A Country House Weekend

This is hardly very traumatic, thought Barbara. She now reckoned that the moment had come to offer Hugh a further glass of Chablis, having felt until then that to mention Chablis in the midst of an encounter with past trauma would have been perhaps a little flippant.

Hugh accepted. ‘I was happy enough in Barranquilla,’ he went on. ‘My working commitments weren’t heavy and I had made a lot of new friends. It was warm and comfortable - a very easy place to be. You had to be a bit careful, of course - everywhere in Colombia has its dangers, and every so often there were items in the papers about kidnappings, and worse. As you know, in Colombia there are always guerrillas popping up and taking a swipe at the government. There were also thousands of narcotraficantes , who could be pretty ruthless. These people even had submarines that they ran from Barranquilla to the US to smuggle cocaine. It was a bit of a frontier town, in a way.

‘I thought, of course, that none of this would have anything to do with me. I was a very junior, insignificant teacher of a foreign language, and I didn’t imagine for a moment that I would see any of these things, let alone get involved in them. How wrong can you be?’

He looked at Barbara as if expecting an answer, so she replied, ‘Very wrong?’

Hugh took a sip of his Chablis. ‘Yes, very.’ He paused and looked at Barbara with concern. ‘You promise you won’t laugh?’

‘Of course I promise. I wouldn’t dream of laughing. I really wouldn’t.’

He seemed reassured. ‘Well, all right. One Friday afternoon I had a telephone call from the mother of one of my pupils at the school. These people, who were tremendously grand, did not live in Barranquilla but had an estate out in the country, some distance away. The school holidays were coming up, she said, and would I be interested in spending a couple of days on their estate? She explained that they were very isolated, but there would be plenty of opportunities to ride, if I wished, or I could just sit around and read and swim in the pool. She made it sound very attractive, and since I had nothing else to do I saw no reason not to accept the invitation. She then said that I would be picked up and flown there in their small private plane. Her husband, she explained, would send his pilot.’

Barbara Ragg watched him as the tale unfolded. He had a way of telling a story that was completely natural and quite transfixing. She could not bear the thought of waiting for the outcome, although she knew in advance that it was not going to end well.

‘I told the family I was staying with about the invitation, and they seemed a little bit concerned. I asked them whether they thought I should have turned it down and they said, rather enigmatically, that even if they had thought that, they would not advise me to refuse. “There are some people in this country,” they said, “whose invitations cannot be turned down. The only excuse they accept is that you’re dead and can’t come for that reason. Even then, they can be a bit grudging.”

‘I thought this very strange but I chose not to let it prey on my mind. When the car came to collect me to take me to the plane, I decided to take with me more than just the things I would need for only a few days. I took my trip diary and my walking boots and the very long Russian novel I was reading. It was just as well.’

Hugh had reached the bottom of his glass of Chablis, and Barbara reached forward to refill it. She was attracted by the slight air of vulnerability, both touching and profoundly appealing, that settled upon him as he told this story. Oedipus Snark would never have been able to achieve an effect like this - he was always in control of the world, defeating it, proving himself, like the hero of some impossible adventure novel. What have I done, she asked herself, contemplating Hugh now, to merit a move from that man to this? The gods of mortal concupiscence had been kind - far kinder than she could ever have imagined they would be to a thirty-something literary agent with a bad record for choosing the wrong sort of man.

‘Colombia is a strikingly beautiful country,’ Hugh went on. ‘I remember so vividly the flight in that small plane over the rich green landscape. The pilot said that we could fly low if I wished to see things: villages, colourful buses on the roads, fields, those great, towering trees they go in for. Then suddenly there was a landing strip on a sweep of land in front of a large hill, and we were down.

‘We were miles from anywhere, on a landing strip cleared out of thick bush. Under the trees to one side of the strip there was a jeep - two jeeps, in fact - one with two or three men carrying small machine guns. That did not surprise me all that much - I had become used to seeing machine guns in Colombia. People had to have them to protect themselves against attack from all sorts of quarters. It would have been surprising, in fact, if my hosts had not had any machine guns - it would have been a reason to be suspicious.

‘My hostess was waiting to greet me up at the main house. I had met her once before at the school when she had come to discuss her son’s progress, and I had quite liked her. She had the bearing that the South American rich have - a sort of imperious confidence that comes from knowing just what their wealth confers upon them, which is immunity from the lot of everybody else, whatever that may be. And they don’t hesitate to let you know that they have a lot of money. In this country the rich are discreet: “Rich? Not us! Oh no!” In South America it’s very different.

‘Apolinar, their son, was standing with his mother on the veranda when I arrived. He was thirteen or thereabouts, and he hadn’t made a particular impression on me at the school. I remembered his name, of course, as it was Spanish for Apollo. In fact, I found myself thinking of him as Apollo rather than Apolinar, which made things rather comic. Has Apollo done his homework yet? is rather a strange thing to ask yourself, don’t you think?’

Barbara laughed but then stopped herself, remembering that she had promised not to. But Hugh was laughing too. Then he became grave again.

‘I had no idea at the time,’ he said. ‘None.’