The Final Round by Bernard O'Keeffe

Author:Bernard O'Keeffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

Monday 15 April

Whenever Garibaldi told anyone he lived in Barnes, they assumed he was a man of great wealth living in a huge house. To most people this is what Barnes was – a place for the rich, a place you lived in if you were tempted by a move to the country but wanted to stay in London. Sandwiched between Hammersmith and Richmond, nestling beside a loop in the Thames, Barnes felt like a country village. It was more than the Saturday farmers’ market, more than the Barnes residents’ penchant for green wellies and dog walking, more than its sense of community. There was something about its very physical appearance – the village pond, the picture-postcard Sun Inn, the independent shops, the quiet leafy avenues – that made it seem like a throwback. Just as a ferry from the mainland to the Isle of Wight could make you feel you were back into the 1950s, so could a bus south from Hammersmith Bridge, followed by a right turn at the Red Lion, make you think you were back in some gentler, more innocent time. This was no place for urban hipsters or metropolitan cool. It may, at one stage, have been a place for the artistic and the intellectual – a south of the river, low-voltage version of Hampstead – but extraordinary rises in property prices had, over the previous decade, driven such residents out. Mammon had very swiftly displaced the mind, and Barnes was now almost exclusively the preserve of the rich. Garibaldi winced every time he passed the young bankers and lawyers parading their wives and dogs, pushing kids in over-large buggies and speaking with loud weekend-dad voices on Saturday mornings.

When people thought of Barnes they didn’t think of Rutland Court, a block of flats nestling behind the high-street shops, and Garibaldi’s home for the last two years. When his marriage to Kay ended, he had moved out of the marital home in Mortlake (their combined income from his police salary and her accountant salary had made a decent three-bedroom semi just within their range) and into the two-bedroom flat. The rent, like all London rents, was ridiculous, but he could just about manage it, and he enjoyed living there, the neighbours being a more mixed bunch than you would find in the surrounding streets or in the area of Putney where Kay now lived. Dominic’s money had not only facilitated Alfie’s disastrous move of school but had also enabled Kay to move into an area whose residents, in her more reasonable years, she would have joined Garibaldi in mocking.

When Garibaldi got back to Rutland Court that evening he put on Emmylou Harris (the voice that always soothed), poured a whisky, tried to forget about Nick Bellamy and thought about the evening ahead – and his chat with Alfie. Then he thought about Rachel.

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