Second Intention Read online

  Second Intention

  by

  Anthony Venner

  Second Intention Kindle version

  Copyright © Anthony Venner 2013

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any form of storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Kindle version published by Blame Culture UK 2013

  Cover design by JD Smith Design

  Kindle formatting by Rebecca Emin

  To Lovelily

  One

  There’s something about the noise that makes any experienced swordsman twitchy: that ‘tip-tap, tip-tap, bzzzzzt’, which you can hear in any fencing salle anywhere in the world, as the light steel blades beat and parry during the delicate interplay of foil or epee, followed by the buzz of the electronic scoring apparatus as a hit lands. No other combination of sounds is quite like it.

  And, as I say, it always gets us going. Like the bell which made Pavlov’s dog drool, it is the trigger which really makes a seasoned competitive fencer want to pull their kit on and get stuck in.

  Hearing it on that grey November day in Cheltenham was, therefore, the most exquisite torture.

  I was there, at the tournament, but would be playing no part in the proceedings. I was late. I had missed the check-in by twenty minutes, and the organisers, understandably fed up with the constant re-jigging of their timetable thanks to the people wandering in to register late, had decided enough was enough. They were putting their foot down with a firm hand, and were quite adamant; no, I couldn’t compete. I had blown it, at least for that year’s Cheltenham Open.

  I tried to protest, tried to explain that I had woken to find two tyres flat on my car, and that it wasn’t my fault I had been delayed. Was it fair that I should miss out, and throw away the possibility of a big helping of national ranking points just because some drunken scumbag on his way back from the pub had picked my car for a bit of mindless spite?

  They were having none of it. The fat, bald bloke who sat at the desk with the entry list even seemed to be enjoying it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in the kind of voice which suggested he wasn’t remotely sorry, ‘but if I make an exception for you I’ll have to do it for everybody, won’t I? We’ll never get started, will we?’

  I sighed, and resigned myself to it. He was absolutely right, and in his position I would want to do the same, if only out of fairness to all those fencers who had got there on time and were, at that very moment, all warming up in the main hall through the doors behind him. They would, I knew, be fired up and ready to go. The last thing they would want was a further delay, now that each one had got into “the zone”.

  I began to turn away from the desk, knowing that it was pointless to protest any further, but he hadn’t quite finished. ‘You could always enter the men’s sabre,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Check-in for that doesn’t open for another half hour.’

  He had a bit of a smirk on his face as he said it, and I knew he was just trying to wind me up.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, politely, when I actually felt more like telling him where to stick his sabre.

  I turned and headed for the stairs which led up to the gallery overlooking the sports hall. There would have been no point in entering the sabre event. I’m an epeeist, and even if I’d been able to scratch around and borrow the requisite swords and metallic jacket from any sympathetic sabreurs, I would just have got slaughtered. I had the wrong training, the wrong build, and the wrong temperament for it. I wouldn’t enjoy it. I would have nothing to gain and everything to lose, just by competing so I didn’t waste my entry fee and the cost of travelling all the way to Cheltenham.

  Fencing is a wonderful sport, although in reality you could see it as three separate sports. You see, we use three different types of sword, the foil, the sabre, and the epee, and each one attracts a certain type of person. Foilists tend to be small and wiry, their chosen weapon’s lightness and limited target area calling for a dynamic, explosive style. Epee, on the other hand, is very tactical. It is the heaviest of the three fencing swords, and has an unlimited target, so you tend to get a lot of tall, fairly strong people going for it. Sabre, with its cut and thrust cavalry heritage, just seems to attract fat, knuckle-dragging hooligans.

  Apart from a few months at the beginning of my fencing career, where I was forced to practice foil by my first coach, I had only ever used the epee. In thirteen years I had actually done rather well, too. I certainly wasn’t about to blow my reputation (which was actually pretty decent) by demeaning myself with sabre now.

  Besides, Sue would never let me hear the end of it.

  I thought of her as I climbed up to the gallery. If I had managed to get all my stuff transferred across to her ancient Fiesta quietly enough she would, no doubt, still be fast asleep. If I hadn’t, and I’d woken her hauling the heavy bag out of my car and scrunching it across the gravel of the drive, she would have roused herself a few minutes after hearing me drive off, aware that the engine note hadn’t been right as her husband set off to yet another tournament. She would have got up, seen the double flat on the Audi, put two and two together and figured out what was going on. By then she would be unable to get back to sleep, and her Sunday would have started about three hours earlier than it should have.

  I really, really hoped I hadn’t woken her. She needed her sleep.

  Looking down at the rows of pistes laid out in the main hall I was close to tears. The sound was still there - ‘tip-tap, tip-tap, bzzzt’ - as two dozen epee fencers, all clad from head to foot in white, attacked, parried and riposted their way to readiness in those last few minutes before the opening pools were announced. At the edges of the huge room, their bags pushed up against the walls, another sixty or so were stood, chatting, laughing, checking weapons, and generally going through the unofficial rituals and routines of this crucial part of the day. I knew exactly what they were going through. I must have done it myself a hundred times, but now I was having to watch it as an outsider, and I hated it.

  Someone was calling my name. I glanced down to see Sean looking up at me and grinning. He was beckoning me down to the hall. Seeing him gave me a bit of a lift, as it always does, but only a little. It would take a lot to shake me out of the dejection in which I was now immersed.

  He shook me by the hand when I had plodded up to him, and threw in a cheeky little pat on the backside for good measure.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be changed by now, boy?’ he asked, the soft Irish lilt of his voice carrying mild amusement as well as curiosity. I told him the full story, and he nodded, recognising that my predicament was galling but unavoidable. The same thing had happened to him at Basingstoke only the previous month, so he knew how I would be feeling.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he went on, clearly trying to make me feel better, ‘a lot of the top fifty aren’t here anyway, so it’s not as if you’re going to lose that many points by not competing.’

  ‘Mmmm. Thanks.’ I muttered. He was probably right, but it didn’t really help. Not when I could still hear it - ’tip-tap, tip-tap, bzzzt’ - and not when I was thinking of the beautiful woman back in the bed from which I had dragged myself.

  I had always liked Sean. He was tall and rangy, as most epeeists tend to be, and he had a shock of dark hair which made him look quite dashing. He was very easygoing, which mean
t he could chat to anybody as though he had known them all his life, and he had a wicked sense of humour. This, coupled with his inbuilt Irish charm meant a lot of the women on the circuit fancied him something rotten.

  But he was excellent company, and we had always got on well. If it came down to it, there wasn’t a lot between us in terms of fencing ability - the general score over the years, on those occasions when we had had to cross swords for real in serious competition, being about even. If anything, I held the slight upper hand in the national rankings, thanks to his absence at Basingstoke, but he was very good about it. I felt that his comments now stemmed from a genuine desire to make me feel better about the situation.

  I didn’t really know what to say in response, so I thought I’d just mutter a few words of encouragement to him and leave, except it wasn’t that simple. The last person I wanted to appear just then did precisely that.

  Toby Rutherford was an annoying little sod at the best of times, but as he strode towards us, an enormous smirk on his face, he looked particularly unpleasant. He had obviously heard.

  He was pulling on his tracksuit top, sweat dripping from the tight ginger mop which crowned his head. He had obviously been working hard during his warm up bout, or maybe he was just ridiculously unfit. Who could say? He came from such a privileged background he probably had servants to wipe his backside for him.

  ‘Not fencing today then, Richard?’ he asked, his lips pulled back into a nasty grin, the upper class bray of his voice grating even more than it did normally.

  ‘No, not today,’ I replied, flatly. I really didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation with him.

  ‘What is it, then? Not up to it, or just can’t face the prospect of me beating you?’ He looked across at Sean. ‘Knows I’m on his tail, see. Running scared. I’d say. Eh?’

  It was a comment clearly intended to piss me off, and whilst I wouldn’t normally allow myself to be goaded by him, it was the wrong moment and he was doing precisely that.

  ‘Miles,’ I looked him in the eye as I spoke, ‘I could be clinically dead and you still wouldn’t beat me.’

  I instantly regretted saying it. Some blokes thrive on that kind of bullish exchange, but I’m not one of them. It’s really not my style, and comments of that sort can often turn round and bite you back.

  ‘Really?’ He tilted his head slightly to one side, his voice low. ‘Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we? As you’re not fencing today I suppose it will have to be Oxford then. I shall look forward to it.’

  He turned and walked back across the hall towards his kit, the swagger in his stride suggesting he felt that he, at least, had won this round. In a way, he had.

  His arrogant manner, borne of years of getting exactly what he wanted, coupled with the intense look in his green eyes, could be quite disconcerting. If I hadn’t known him to be a complete idiot I would even have found it a little menacing, but I wasn’t about to let a spoilt little brat like him throw me.

  ‘Hey,’ Sean said cheerfully, ‘without people like him in the world the rest of us wouldn’t look nearly so good, now, would we?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Look,’ he went on, glancing round to see a grey haired man carrying an armful of clipboards across to a microphone on a stand, ‘I’d best be getting sorted. They’re about to call the pools. I’ll see you at Oxford, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ I smiled. ‘I’ll be on time next Sunday.’

  ‘You doing Copenhagen?’

  ‘Er … I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’

  ‘Oh, go on. It’ll be grand. Take that lovely wife of yours for a romantic weekend away, and get a thrashing at the hands of Johnny Foreigner thrown in. It’ll be well worth it.’

  ‘Mmmm, maybe. Anyhow, you have a good one, eh?’

  I turned and walked back to the main doors, leaving him to go and find out who he had been drawn against in his opening round pool. I had no real curiosity to see how they had been done. Sometimes the organisers do it fairly, apportioning the best fencers equally around the different pools for the first round, so you get an even spread of hotshots and bunnies, but more often than not they cock it up, and you can either find yourself in with complete novices (which is good) or some of the best fencers in the competition (which can be disastrous). If it didn’t affect me, though, I wasn’t that bothered.

  I spent a bit of time at the Leon Paul equipment stand, where I had to get a few bits and pieces for the inevitable routine maintenance of my weapons, then decided it was time I got out of there. Any moment now I would hear that noise again, except that this time it would be the sound of fencers in competition. The competition in which I should be taking part.

  I got back to my bag, where I had left it out in the corridor by the check-in desk, and was a little puzzled. I’m normally quite a security-conscious kind of person, and although there are lots of people in the world of fencing who just leave kitbags lying around wide open, I’m not one of them.

  I was absolutely certain that when I had left it there it had been zipped up.

  * * * *

  I slammed the tailgate, flopped down into the driving seat of the little Ford, and wondered what I was going to do next. It was only half past ten. I was tempted to make the most of the opportunity to take a look around Cheltenham, since it’s a very fine old Regency town, and we never normally get to see much of the places where tournaments are held. A lot of people think it must be great, travelling all over the place on the domestic circuit, but actually there are few chances for sightseeing: we travel to the venue, we take part in the competition, and we go home. The inside of a sports hall in Exeter is pretty much the same as the inside of a sports hall in Peterborough or Leeds or Bath, so it’s not really all that exciting.

  But today even Cheltenham just didn’t suit my mood, and dark skies were looking threatening. I really just wanted to get back home. Back to Susan. I turned the key, and headed out towards the A435.

  I must do thousands of miles each year on my way round the country for tournaments, and apart from the events where Sue comes along to support me I nearly always travel alone. I’m not really antisocial, it’s just that I enjoy my own company. I get to do a lot of thinking when I’m in the car, and I can take my time over the journey home if I want, and listen to whatever I like on the stereo.

  On that particular drive back I got to thinking about what had happened. The business with my bag was a little unsettling, since I was absolutely sure that it had been zipped up when I left it, but nothing had gone missing so I put it down to a simple mistake on somebody else’s part. Obviously some guy had gone to put something in his own, or a friend’s, kit bag which was the same make and pattern as mine. He would have then realised his mistake, and just left it. No harm done.

  What rankled more was Toby Rutherford and his self-assured smugness.

  I suppose you could say that Toby and I had something of a history. We had first crossed swords about three years before, while he was still a student. It had been a fairly minor team competition, certainly nothing to get worked up over, but he showed his true colours from the word go, doing everything he could to throw us off our stride. Nothing outside the rules, you understand, just a succession of little irritations and distractions, from asking for all our weapons to be retested to continual pauses in the fencing so he could retie his laces or wipe the sweat off his glowing, freckled face. It was the sort of thing an unsportsmanlike kid would do to gain an advantage, although it didn’t help him at all. We still won, and he was most ungracious in defeat, his team captain having to order him to come and shake our hands after the match finished.

  He was a brat, pure and simple. I later found out that he was the only son of enormously wealthy parents, who continually doted on him, and his belief that he was somehow better than everybody else was further honed during his time at Harrow and Oxford.

  It was the Oxford thing that really did it for us in the end. Not because I’ve got any axe to grin
d about it, but he clearly did have. It really got to him that I, as a graduate of a fairly minor provincial university and therefore his inferior, should still be outfencing him, since he had never succeeded in beating me on the piste. The real crunch came, however, when he found out that Sue had also studied at Oxford, and on learning which college she had gone to wouldn’t shut up about it.

  Toby, who had been at Christ Church, launched into a well-rehearsed routine, which was obviously hilarious if you were nineteen and an upper-class arsehole:

  ‘Here - here’s a good one,’ he brayed to the little crowd of fencers stood around. ‘What’s the difference between a Somerville student and a shopping trolley. Eh? Eh? A shopping trolley’s got a mind of its own!’

  I tried to ignore this juvenile performance, but he wasn’t about to make it easy. Oh no.

  ‘Hey - did you know?’ he went on. ‘If all the girls at Somerville were laid end to end, nobody would be a bit surprised!’

  He roared with laughter, obviously finding this all very entertaining, even if nobody else was.

  I wasn’t about to let it carry on. It was bad enough that he was being an annoying prick, but he was trying to insult my wife, who was kind, caring, gentle, and had graduated with a starred first. He had absolutely no right to think he was in any way superior to her just because of which college she had been to.

  ‘How can you tell when a Somerville girl’s had an orgasm? Eh? Eh?’

  He looked round at the assembled audience, some of whom, I was disappointed to see, were beginning to smirk a little.

  ‘Shut up, Toby,’ I said flatly.

  He stared at me. He obviously wasn’t used to being interrupted. There was a look of shock on one or two other faces as well. Nobody in the entire history of mankind, it seemed, had ever had the nerve to tell Toby Rutherford to stop.