Rain Read Free

eight. Leonard Chamberlain was a fine-looking man: tall, with a Roman nose and two uncapped chipped front teeth, giving him an oddly noble but friendly appearance. He was guilty of an aversion to hard work where charm and procrastination sufficed, and devoted himself to a blissful – if financially ruinous – life of Epicureanism. What he inherited when he was eighteen had by the time of his marriage to Constance dwindled to just enough cash to buy a farm cottage on the estate of an old army friend of his in Kent, near Chatham.
    People often described Leonard as a wasted talent, and correctly, but he was more complicated than that. The army friend – Tom’s godfather Sam Hockley – and he had joined the same regiment together when they were nineteen and just out of school, and had cavorted, gambled and drunk-driven their way through service in Germany, Belize and Cyprus via a succession of hair-raising and improbable escapades, the stories of which became all the better for their frequent and ever more baroque embellishments. But one day, as he explored the attic, six-year-old Tom came across an old photograph of his father on a Belfast street corner, more angular but unmistakably him, talking urgently into a radio while a dead soldier was carried away in a body bag. Tom kept the photo in the drawer of his bedside table and wouldoften look at it long after he had been put to bed by his parents.
    A few months later Tom was helping Sam out on the farm and, as they put some cattle feed in a trough, asked him, ‘Godfather Sam, did you and Daddy ever have to fight baddies in the army?’
    Sam paused, ambushed, pondering whether to obfuscate or to tell the truth.
Bugger it, the boy would have to learn sometime
. ‘Well, you see, Tommy, and promise me not to tell your father I said this, will you?’ He waited until he received a solemn nod. ‘Your dad and I were together in a town called Belfast. And it wasn’t very nice. A lot of people were doing horrible things. And of all the people with me out there, I’d say that your dad was the bravest. He had some tough times out there, but all his men loved him, and he made sure that a lot of them got home.’
    ‘So was he a hero then?’
    ‘Yes. Yes, he was.’
    ‘Were you a hero?’
    Sam took off his flat cap and pushed back his thinning sandy hair. ‘Well Tom, I don’t know if I was a hero. But I was certainly surrounded by them. Now, you promise me to never tell Dad what I just said, OK?’
    What Sam didn’t say was that Leonard’s problems – his alcoholism and spiral into near bankruptcy – had begun just after that tour of Belfast in 1979. Sam had seen his friend change from quite a serious-minded young man into a reckless, live-for-the-minute rogue. Leonard left the army in 1981, much to the chagrin of his superiors, who were grooming him for rapid promotion, and embarked on a three-year binge which knew no bounds and certainly every casino in the West End. Three years later, his inheritance down the drain, he woke up one morning next to a girl, had decided bylunchtime that he wanted to marry her and did so six months later.
    She was Constance Rowley, a secretary at a law firm in London, heaven-sent for the undeserving Leonard. She took him out of London, away from temptation, and with Sam’s help and generosity – borne more out of irrational loyalty than financial sense – they moved into the Old Mill on his estate. Constance got a job with a firm of solicitors in Rochester, but Leonard never rediscovered the appetite for work he had once had. It was very strange. Even when Tom was born in 1985 he was disinclined to finance their lifestyle, which although comfortable was not luxurious, any further by getting a job. Constance let it stand. She slightly suspected, for one thing, that all was not well with him. As indeed it wasn’t. On Tom’s first birthday, a quiet March day with a grey clanging arch of sky hanging over the house, Leonard told her that he