The Club(19)

On their arrival at The Causeway Inn, people had been directed into The Boot Room and invited to order a drink at the bar, above which was a neon piece by Keith Little: I Love You, Now Fuck Off in a three-foot-high illuminated scrawl. A great start? Probably not. Nor had it been a great sign, in retrospect, that they had all arrived en masse on the dot of seven thirty wearing the same aggrieved expression.

When Ned made the previous landlord an offer he could not refuse, The Causeway Inn was one of those run-down, pint-and-pork-scratchings pubs – swollen-nosed old-timers sitting alone at the bar, sticky carpet, toilet doors that didn’t lock – that Londoners dream of buying, sloshing around a few tins of Farrow & Ball ‘Badger’s Fart’ and serving scallops and samphire in. But the bones of the place, its wooden beams and oak panelling, thatched roof, leadlight windows, were solid – and then of course there was that view out over the water: the island a mysterious silhouette in the distance, the causeway a winding silver squiggle in the foreground, the whole thing framed by the gently clinking masts of the sailing boats on the old quay. The design team’s very first task on this whole project had been to give The Causeway Inn a Home makeover, and so now, with its chestnut leather button-back benches, brass sconce lights, ornate etched mirrors and parquet floor, it looked like the kind of ersatz British boozer a successful expat actor might build for himself at the end of his LA garden. An expensive, knowing, parody of itself.

The locals had not been impressed. Not by the refurb, not by the discovery that from now on, entry to The Causeway Inn was restricted to Home members and their guests.

Nor was it easy to think of anything else that he and Ned and the Home Group had done since they’d come to town that had attracted the approval of any of this lot.

Clearly there had been a lot of back and forth in advance about how they were all going to play things tonight, who was going to say what, the points they wanted to get across. They were a sea of suspicious frowns and folded arms. Adam had not even finished introducing himself before someone in the front row who seemed to think he should know who she was – which of course he didn’t because why would he remember every frumpy middle-aged woman he met – demanded to know where his brother was.

‘Is Ned Groom planning to make an appearance at all? Or are we not famous enough to be graced with his presence?’ harrumphed someone from further back.

Adam apologized, tried to explain. The woman sat there with her mouth pursed, her arms still crossed, intermittently shaking her head at him. There were a couple of other head-shakers behind her, one man in the back row who kept half raising his hand to interject.

Adam pretended not to see him, took someone’s point from the other side of the room.

As it turned out, this was a big mistake, because the lady he picked – ‘Yes, you, um, please, with the, uh, purple . . . is that a cardigan, would you say?’ – proceeded to give him a very thorough dressing-down about everything from Island Home’s impact on the traffic to the way she had been spoken to by a receptionist when she had called to complain.

Adam frowned, he nodded, he looked contrite. Several times as someone was berating him, he would begin to respond to one of the points raised – ‘Well, if I could just . . .’ – only to be glared down for interrupting. Occasionally he would jot down a note on a piece of paper – a note he had no intention of ever reading on a piece of paper he planned to chuck as soon as this meeting was over. He kept telling people how sorry he was to hear they felt that way, how disappointed he was at what they were telling him. About their dog, and how much all the building work had upset it. About the damage done by one of his construction vehicles to the verge on their lane. About the impact this was all going to have on the character of the village.

He glanced at his watch and his heart sank. Already they had gone way over the hour originally agreed. Every time one person finished speaking, or even paused for breath, a sudden forest of insistent, indignant hands would shoot up around the room. Every point someone made, someone else would announce ‘Exactly!’ or turn half around in their chair to nod along vigorously with the person speaking. Every time Adam said anything, someone would announce, ‘Not good enough,’ or demand to know why they should believe him.

They had a point. It was a pretty village, Littlesea. Nice green, nice pub (the one the locals were still allowed in), nice church, nice tea shop. If he’d lived here all his life, if he’d retired here to concentrate on his gardening, he would probably resent exactly the same things they did. ‘What should I tell them?’ he had asked his brother. ‘Tell them anything you fucking want,’ had been the answer.

The thing was, once upon a time, Adam would have thought of this kind of assignment, this sort of special bloody project, as a chance to impress his brother, to show how useful he could be. And he had made himself consistently useful, he hoped. On several occasions he could name, he had made himself very useful indeed. But then something had changed. And instead of getting ever bigger, the tasks, the responsibilities had started getting smaller, more demeaning. It was something he found hard to talk about, even with Laura. It was something he wondered how much Ned himself was conscious of. How consistently now the sensitive assignments, the delicate stuff, went to someone else. How often the jobs he got were the ones that either no one could fuck up or it didn’t really matter if they did.

Tell them anything you fucking want.