One Good Turn Read Free

homemade black-currant jam, clotted cream. Overhead, swallows sliced through the blue, blue sky, swooping and diving like Battle of Britain pilots. The distant thock of leather on willow. The scent of hot, strong tea and new-mown grass. Surely these things were infinitely preferable to a terrifyingly angry man with a baseball bat?
    Martin had been hauling his laptop around with him because the lunchtime comedy showcase he had been queuing for was a detour on today’s (very tardy) path to his “office.” He had recently rented the “office” in a refurbished block in Marchmont. It had once been a licensed grocer but now provided a bland, featureless space—plasterboard walls and laminate floors, broadband connections and halogen lighting—to a firm of architects, an IT consultancy, and, now, Martin. He had rented the “office” in the vain hope that if he left the house to go and write every day and kept normal working hours like other people, it would somehow help him to overcome the lethargy that had descended on the book he was currently working on (Death on the Black Isle) . He suspected it was a bad sign that he thought of the “office” as a place that existed only in quotation marks, a fictional concept rather than a location where anything was actually achieved.
    Death on the Black Isle was like a book under an enchantment: no matter how much he wrote, there never seemed to be any more of it. “You should change the title. It sounds like a Tintin book,” Melanie said. Before being published eight years ago, Martin had been a religious studies teacher, and for some reason, at an early stage of their relationship, Melanie had got it into her head (and never been able to get it out again) that Martin had once been in a monastery. How she had made this leap he had never understood. True, he had a premature tonsure of thinning hair, but apart from that he didn’t think there was anything particularly monastic about him. It didn’t matter how much he had tried to disabuse Melanie of her fixation, it was still the thing that she found most interesting about him. It was Melanie who had disseminated this misinformation to his publicist, who had, in turn, broadcast it to the world at large. It was on public record, it was in the cuttings file and on the Internet, and no matter how many times Martin said to a journalist, “No, actually I was never a monk. That’s a mistake,” he or she still made it the fulcrum of the interview: “Blake demurs when the priesthood is mentioned.” Or “Alex Blake dismisses his early religious calling, but there is still something cloistered about his character.” And so on.
    Death on the Black Isle felt even more trite and formulaic to Martin than his previous books, something to be read and immediately forgotten in beds and hospitals, on trains, planes, beaches. He had been writing a book a year since he began with Nina Riley, and he thought that he had simply run out of steam. They plodded along together, he and his flimsy creation, stuck on the same tracks. He worried that they would never escape each other, that he would be writing about her inane escapades forever. He would be an old man and she would still be twenty-two and he would have wrung all the life out of both of them. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ,” Melanie said. “It’s called mining a rich seam, Martin.” “Milking a cash cow for all it was worth” was how someone else, someone not on 15 percent, might have put it. He wondered if he could change his name—or, even better, use his real name—and write something different, something with real meaning and worth.
    M artin’s father had been a career soldier, a company sergeant major, but Martin himself had chosen a decidedly noncombatant’s path in life. He and his brother, Christopher, had attended a small Church of England boarding school that provided the sons of the armed forces with a spartan environment that was one step up from the workhouse.