Second Intention Read online

  ‘Just shut up,’ I repeated. ‘It’s not funny and it’s not clever.’

  I turned and walked away, aware of a stunned silence behind me. Maybe I would come to regret it, years later, but at the time it seemed appropriate.

  One thing was certain, though. Toby and I were never going to be friends after that.

  * * * *

  The black clouds finally opened and spilled their contents when I reached Northampton, reducing my speed to an infuriating crawl. I just wanted to get home, be with Sue, and spend the rest of the day doing something normal. I wanted to forget about fencing for the moment.

  I knew I would have to phone Phil, my coach, later that evening, as he would be expecting to hear how I had got on. He doesn’t always get around all the Opens these days, so I make a point of calling him after each one to let him know where I felt I had done particularly well or badly. It’s useful to do this while it’s still fresh in my mind, and he can then spend a day or two thinking about it before my next training session two days later. I wasn’t looking forward to calling him that evening.

  Still, it could wait for the time being. Right then I had other concerns. I needed to give some thought to the direction my work was taking.

  Douglas, my Managing Director, had been saying for some months now that I really should be thinking about doing my I.P.S. exams, and that it was something that was going to take quite a big chunk of my life. I knew exactly what he was getting at.

  If I was happy to remain in my position as Purchasing Manager at Medicom then that was fine, but there was always the prospect of a directorship if I really pulled out the stops in the next couple of years. For that, though, I would need my membership of the Institute of Purchasing and Supply, which was going to be a big commitment. So big, in fact, that fencing would probably have to go on the back burner for a while.

  I was thirty-nine. If I dropped out of competitive fencing for two years would I ever get back into it? It wasn’t a decision I really wanted to have to make. I just wished somebody would tell me what to do.

  Sue was great about it, of course, as she always is, but it would have been easier if she had just told me one way or the other what she wanted. She knew that I needed to think about progressing in my career, which would obviously benefit both of us, but she also knew just how much I loved fencing.

  I wondered if she knew just how much I loved her.

  Two

  Every day I ask myself what I have done to deserve having somebody like Sue in my life.

  As I pulled the heavy fencing bag out of the back of the car I looked round and saw her there, standing in the open doorway, her arms folded and a sympathetic look on her face. She knows me well enough after nine years of marriage to read my mood easily, and my expression and body language, coupled with my early arrival, must have told her everything she needed to know. There was no way I would be back that soon if it was just from getting knocked out in the first round of the DE: I must have missed the check-in, and not got to fence at all.

  She made no comment, knowing that none was needed. She just put her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. Holding her like that felt good, and reminded me of what was most important in my life. Bugger fencing, I thought.

  ‘You want some coffee, pet?’ she said quietly in my ear.

  ‘Mmmm. Yes please.’

  She led me into the house and went through into the kitchen while I dumped the bag unceremoniously in the middle of the living room floor. It could wait there for the time being. Hell, I didn’t even need to unpack it, since it didn’t contain its usual sweaty, festering mess of fencing clothing, so I might as well leave it as it was until Tuesday when I went training. Yeah, it could stay there.

  I followed her into the kitchen. The place was warm, and the recently acquired Gaggia was doing its thing, infusing the room with a rich aroma. She was perched on one of the stools by the counter, the Sunday Times spread out in front of her, and looked absolutely gorgeous. The jeans, baggy jumper, and slippers did nothing to detract from it. Quite the opposite in fact.

  It’s funny how women sometimes don’t seem to understand how they can look their most sexy when they’re not trying.

  Yes, it was good to be home.

  * * * *

  I had first met her eleven years before, while I was up at a conference in the North East, and she had gone back up there for a few days to visit her father. She was a friend of a friend of friends, who had been deliberately trying to play matchmaker and got rather better results than they had ever bargained for.

  I thought she was one of the loveliest women I had ever met: tall, curvy, and blessed with an understated gracefulness which meant you noticed her the moment she walked into a room. Her thick dark hair, a testimony to her Italian-ness, glowed like polished ebony in almost any light, and I couldn’t understand how this beautiful vision could possibly be unattached.

  What I hadn’t realised, of course, was just how shy she really was. She didn’t see herself as attractive at all, thinking her glasses and Geordie accent spoiled everything, and had apparently been teased quite a lot at school when she was young.

  By the time everything fell into place, round about the age of eighteen if pictures of her in her youth were anything to go by, the damage had been done, and she regarded herself as one of life’s ugly ducklings. It would take a lot for her to see herself for what she really was after that.

  Of course, I couldn’t see it in the same way. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s perfectly true. The specs did nothing to put me off, and as for her accent … well, what can I say?

  There are some regional accents which do nothing for me. Take a beautiful woman and give her, say, an Essex Estuary or Brummie voice, and I’m afraid I don’t find it very attractive. The West Country or the Highlands of Scotland, on the other hand, have the opposite effect, and so does a North Eastern accent. When I hear Sue, who spent the first nineteen years of her life in Durham, say anything at all I think it’s lovely. Every sentence sounds like a song.

  Her lack of confidence took a further dent when she went to Oxford, where I think she got a bumpy ride from posh knobheads like Toby, so by the time I got to meet her she had a fairly low self-esteem, in spite of her gorgeousness.

  Anyhow, we hit it off straight away, and got on like a house on fire. When we learned that we were both just visiting the area, and that we actually lived within forty minutes of each other back down south, that was it. Our future it seemed, was settled.

  Except that there was one obstacle to our union. Her father, Mario.

  Mario Puccetti was a remarkable man: wealthy, self-made, and fiercely protective of his only child, especially since the death of her mother when she was eight.

  He had started out as a nobody in the mid-sixties with just the one ice cream van, an Italian expatriate who must have cursed his choice of the cold wet North East as the place from which to start his new life, instead of the sun kissed South. Within ten years, though, he had expanded the one van into a successful fleet, married a local girl, and gained great respectability within the local community. He had been blessed with a daughter, and even begun to venture into a string of ice cream parlours around Durham, Middlesborough, and Newcastle, when tragedy struck. His wife, Sue’s mother, was killed in a boating accident while on a trip with her sister, and Mario never got over it.

  After that, he almost never took his eyes off his little princess, which I suppose was understandable, since she was all he had left. It did put something of a damper on her social life, though, and I think her decision to study at Oxford, instead of Durham University (which was right on their doorstep) came in part from a need to get away from him.

  When Mario and I finally met I don’t think he really thought that much of me. He was an imposing figure, burly, and with a thick black moustache, and he regarded me with some suspicion. Nothing personal, I later realised, just the notion that few men were going to be good enough for Sue, least of all
a quiet, bespectacled warehouse manager from Bedfordshire.

  He softened a little, I suppose, when he learned that I was a fencer, since it’s something of a national sport in Italy, but it was only a little since I wasn’t actually very good back in those days.

  No, what did it was my persistence. I was determined to show him that I was a regular guy. I wasn’t going to cheat on her, or abuse her, and I wasn’t just after her money. I wanted her for the most honourable of reasons.

  It took a while, but it finally paid off, and he finally consented to allowing the lovely Miss Susan Maria Puccetti to become Mrs. Susan Maria Teasdale the following June.

  He led her up the aisle with a proud smile on his face, and clearly felt at last that this was a good thing. It most certainly was.

  Poor Mario never did get to see the grandchildren he had hoped for, as a massive coronary claimed his life just eighteen months after our wedding, the cumulative result of years of brandy, cigars and ice cream, with a side order of overwork thrown in.

  It affected Sue quite a lot, and in an unusual manner. She had lost the last close member of her family, and she really had loved the old bugger deep down, but in a way it was a release for her. He had been such an oppressive presence in her life that his passing was an enormous weight off her shoulders.

  It also brought quite a bit of money our way. Not a huge amount, you understand - we would both need to keep working - but enough to allow us to buy a very nice house in the beautiful fenland city of Ely, which suited us perfectly.

  What nobody realised at the time of his death was that Mario’s longed-for grandchildren weren’t going to happen. We had both wanted kids, once the dust had settled on our matrimonial bliss, and it brought about a change in our sex life after a while. Our lovemaking at the start had been passionate, frenzied, adventurous, and sometimes downright bizarre, then mellowed into more regular practices once we had agreed that we really wanted a family. Anything where there was no possibility of conception was off limits, at least for the time being.

  It’s funny, the stages you go through when you try to do it and it doesn’t happen: hope, persistence, puzzlement, bedevilment, desperation and, finally, despondency. You start to think ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not me’ and then immediately think ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not her’. You want to ask for help, but hate the thought of having to own up to something as intimate and personal and private as not being able to make a baby.

  It all became clear, eventually. Susan’s condition was an extremely rare one. Nobody really knew why fate had chosen her to be its next victim, but it had and that was that. She would be okay most of the time, but would be prone to spells of exhaustion now and again, would be unable to eat certain foods, and was unlikely to ever have children.

  It was distressing, it changed our lives, and it made us revise our plans, but, strangely, it brought us closer together. We had each other, and that was very special to us.

  I can honestly say that we love each other more now than ever.

  * * * *

  By three o’clock I was feeling wound up. She knew I needed to let off steam, having been psyched up for the tournament, and suggested I go out for a run and have a shower while she fixed the dinner. It had stopped raining, for the time being at least, and I knew it was the sensible thing to do. Exercise is always good at a time like that.

  Just as I was setting off I thought I’d take a look at the tyres on the Audi.

  Whoever had done it knew exactly what he was up to. The dust caps were off, and a matchstick had been wedged into each valve, between the outer tube and the inner pin, to hold it open. The perpetrator had deliberately chosen the tyres on the side away from the house, where there was less chance of his being seen, and where the hiss of air escaping was less likely to be heard.

  Yes, he had known exactly what to do, but the funny thing was that to get to the car he would have had to cross a good five metres of gravel drive to reach it. The chances of doing that in complete silence, if it were just some drunk on his way back from the pub, were slim.

  I looked again at the drive. Crossing it without making a noise would call for a level of stealth few spiteful, pissed-up kids possess.

  * * * *

  I felt better for a run and a shower, and still had time to re-inflate the tyres on the car before dusk fell. It was turning distinctly chilly, and a biting November breeze was beginning to set in. I had thought of suggesting a stroll down to the Cutter for a pint later on, but I could see Sue wouldn’t be lasting out the evening, and it looked like it was going to be a night for staying indoors anyway.

  Dinner was wonderful, as always, and we washed it down with a very fine bottle of claret. By seven I was feeling very mellow, and although I knew I should have been giving some thought to the I.P.S. prospectus Douglas had passed to me, I really couldn’t be bothered. It would have to wait until the morning when I got in.

  We had planned to curl up in front of the TV and watch a re-run of Foyle’s War, but she was fading by eight so I steered her off to bed. She had kept her work going in spite of it all, and would be going in the following morning, but it meant that she was all the more knackered the rest of the time.

  It must have been about an hour after she had gone to bed that the phone rang. I snatched it up, anxious that it didn’t wake her.

  ‘Hello. Richard Teasdale.’ I said, quietly.

  On the other end there was silence. Well, not complete silence. There was no voice, or heavy breathing or anything, but there was a strange echoey sound as though there was somebody actually listening at the other end but just not speaking.

  ‘Hello?’ I repeated.

  Still nobody spoke. Then, after a couple of seconds, there was a click and the line went dead.

  I dialled 1471, wondering if it was somebody I knew who hadn’t been able to hear or speak at their end, or just a wrong number.

  ‘You were called - today - at - twenty one - thirteen,’ the recorded voice said. ‘The caller withheld their number.’

  Hmmm. A puzzle. I am always suspicious of people who withhold their I.D. when they are telephoning, since to my reasoning that is, in itself, something of an admission that they have something to hide and are therefore up to no good. Surely it wouldn’t be a telesales call at this time on a Sunday? Had they wanted to speak to the lady of the house and hung up when they got me? Or was it just kids pissing about?

  Kids pissing about.

  I know coincidences happen, but twice in one day? First the car, then a prank phone call?

  I smiled. What was this? Was I beginning to start at shadows? Did I really think I’d got myself a stalker? Come off it, I told myself - you’re just not important enough.

  Yes, coincidences do happen, and that’s precisely what this was.

  All the same, the business with the car was a pain in the backside because it would affect my position in the national rankings. By not competing today I would drop down the order, since I would automatically lose all the ranking points I had got at Cheltenham the previous year (thanks to our wonderful “rolling rankings” system) but had no chance to replace them with an equal, or greater, number of points this time.

  How many points had I lost?

  I fixed myself a scotch and soda then plodded quietly through to the study and switched on the computer. The British Fencing Association has a very good website which makes it easy to see how you are doing in the rankings. I logged on, clicked on the appropriate links, and saw the national ranking list for men’s epee appear on the screen. Last year’s Cheltenham results were still listed, and by scrolling back I could see exactly how many points I had got then.

  Damn. Three hundred and eighty-one. It had, I remembered, been a pretty good performance, and it was a lot to discard with no replacement of points today.

  I went back to the main list and tried to work out how much I would drop down the rankings. Quite a lot, it seemed. If everybody else had done about the same as last year then I would lose about th
irty places, which would put me well outside the top hundred, nationally.

  Then I saw it. There, about twelve places below me in the current list, a name jumped out at me.

  Toby Rutherford.

  Bugger. Unless I really outperformed him at the City of Oxford Open the following weekend, which was the only competition left before the list was updated at the end of the month, he was going to overtake me in the national rankings.

  He would never let me hear the end of it, I knew, if he managed to edge ahead of me by even one place. I know I shouldn’t let something like that get to me, but I really didn’t want it to happen.

  He had done very well out of me having two flat tyres that morning …

  I poured myself another glass of whisky, then spent some time just surfing around the various fencing sites. I was still in two minds about whether to enter the international in Denmark, which would be happening two weeks after Oxford. Being a ‘B’ grade competition I didn’t need to make it through the national team selection progress, and could take part as long as I paid for it all myself and arranged my own transport and accommodation. It was very tempting, and Sue and I could enjoy a bit of pre-Christmas shopping in Copenhagen after I got knocked out of the direct elimination. I’d have to ask her whether she fancied it.

  I logged off, aware that I had been sucked into the internet trap of just flicking through the sites for no real purpose. Almost immediately the telephone rang again.

  ‘Hello. Richard Teasdale.’ I said.

  Again, nothing. Just that faint hiss of a connection to somebody else, who was saying nothing.

  ‘Hello?’

  Click.

  I dialled 1471 again, which, as expected, gave me the same story as before.

  I didn’t like this. There was something rather creepy about it, and while I like to think I can take care of myself, I hated the thought of whoever it was doing it while Sue was here on her own and scaring her.