He smiled. “I’m not stranded—well, not in that sense,” he said, offering his hand. “Merrall, Gregory Merrall.”
“Khalid Azzam,” I told him. “You’ve moved to Oxenworth?”
“Bought the old Dunnett farm on the hill.”
I knew immediately—and I often look back and wonder quite how I knew—that Merrall would become part of our group. There was something, about him that inspired trust. He was socially confident without being brash and emanated an avuncular friendliness that was endearing and comforting.
I noticed that he was nearing the end of his pint. “It’s my round,” I said. “Would you like to join us?”
“Well, that’s very kind. I don’t mind if I do.”
So I introduced him to the group and he slipped into the conversation as if the niche had been awaiting him: the niche, I mean, of the quiet wise man, the patriarchal figure whose experience, and whose contemplation of that experience, he brought to bear on our varied conversations that evening.
It was a couple of weeks later, and I’d arrived early. Richard Lincoln and Andy Souter were at the bar, nursing their first pints. Richard was in his late sixties and for a second I mistook him for Gregory.
He frowned at my double take as he bought me a pint.
“Thought for a second you were Merrall,” I explained.
“The tweeds,” he said. “Bit out of fashion.” I’d always thought it paradoxical that someone who worked so closely with the Kéthani regime should adopt so conservative a mode of dress.
We commandeered our table by the fire and Andy stowed his cornet case under his stool. Andy was a professional musician, a quiet man in his late thirties with a cornetist’s pinched top lip. He conducted the local brass band and taught various instruments at the college in Bradley. He was the latest recruit—discounting Merrall—to our Tuesday night sessions. He ran a hand through his ginger mop and said, “So, what do you think of our Gregory?”
“I like him a lot,” I said. “He’s one of us.”
Richard said, “Strange, isn’t it, how some people just fit in? Odd thing is, for all he’s said a lot, I don’t know that much about him.”
That gave me pause. “Come to think of it, you’re right.” All I knew was that he was from London and that he’d bought the old farmhouse on the hill.
Andy nodded. “The mysterious stranger…”
“He’s obviously well travelled,” Richard said.
That was another thing I knew about him from his stories of India and the Far East. I said, “Isn’t it odd that although he’s said next to nothing about himself, I feel I know him better than I do some people who talk about themselves nonstop.”
For the next hour, as our friends hurried in from the snow in ones and twos, conversation centred around the enigmatic Mr. Merrall. It turned out that no one knew much more than Richard, Andy and me.
“Very well, then,” said Doug Standish, our friendly police officer, “let’s make it our objective tonight to find out a bit more about Gregory, shall we?”
Five minutes later, at nine o’clock on the dot— as was his habit—Gregory breezed in, shaking off the snow like a big Saint Bernard.
He joined us by the fire and seconds later was telling us about a conversation he’d had with his bank manager that morning. That provoked a round of similar stories, and soon our collective objective of learning more about our new-found friend was forgotten in the to and fro of bonhomie and good beer.
Only as I was wending my way home, with Richard by my side, did it occur to me that we had failed abjectly to learn anything more about Gregory than we knew already.
I said as much to the ferryman.
He was staring at the rearing crystal pinnacle of the Onward Station, perched miles away on the crest of the moors.
“Greg’s so friendly it seems rude to pry,” he said.
A week later I accidentally found out more about Gregory Merrall and, I thought, the reason for his insularity.
I arrived at the Fleece just after nine, eager to tell what I’d discovered. The group was ensconced before the blazing fire.
Ben and Elisabeth—in their fifties now and still holding hands—both looked at the book I was holding. Ben said, “Tired of our conversation, Khalid?”
Andy Souter laughed, “If we’re all doing our own thing, then I’ll get my cornet out and practice.”
Dan Chester made to cover his ears. “Spare us, Andy, please!”
I smiled. Everyone turned my way as I held up the novel, my hand concealing the name of the author.
“A Question of Trust,” Samantha Kingsley said. “I didn’t know you were a great reader, Khalid.”
“I’m not. I was in Bradley today, and this was in the window of the bookshop.”
“So,” Richard said. “Who’s it by?”
“Three guesses,” I said.
“You,” Stuart Kingsley said. “You’ve retired from the implant ward and started writing?”
“Not me, Stuart. But you do know him.”
Sam cheated. She was sitting next to me, and she tipped her stool and peeked at the author’s photo on the back of the jacket.
“Aha!” she said. “Mystery solved.”
I removed my hand from the byline.
Dan said, “Gregory!”
“This explains a few things,” I said. “His experience, his reluctance to talk about himself—some writers are notoriously modest.” I opened the book and read the mini-biography inside the back flap. “Gregory Merrall was born in 1965 in London. He has been a full-time freelance writer for more than thirty years, with novels, collections, and volumes of poetry to his name.”
Five minutes later Gregory hurried in, hugging himself against the bone-aching cold. He crossed to the fire and roasted his outstretched hands before the flames.
He saw the book, which I’d placed on the table before me, and laughed. “So… my secret’s out.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Richard said, returning from the bar with a pint for our resident writer.
Gregory took a long draught. “It’s something I don’t much like talking about,” he said. “People assume a number of things when you mention you’re a scribbler. They either think you’re bragging, that you’re incredibly well-off—would that that were so!—that you’re some kind of intellectual heavyweight, or that you’ll immediately start regaling them with fabulous stories.”
“Well,” Sam said, “you have told us some fascinating tales.”
Gregory inclined his head in gracious assent. “It’s just not something I feel the need to talk about,” he went on. “What matters is not so much talking about it, but getting it done.”
The evening unfolded, and at one point someone asked Gregory (it was Stuart, a lecturer at Leeds and something of an egghead himself), “How do you think the coming of the Kéthani has affected how we write about the human experience?”
Gregory frowned into his pint. “Where to begin? Well, it’s certainly polarised writers around the world. Some have turned even further inwards, minutely chronicling the human condition in the light of our new-found immortality. Others have ignored it and written about the past, and there’s a vast market for nostalgia these days! A few speculate about what life might be like post-death, when we take the leap into the vast inhabited universe.”
Richard looked at him. “And where would you put yourself, Gregory?”
Merrall picked up his novel and leafed through it, pausing occasionally to read a line or two. “I’m firmly in the speculative camp,” he said, “trying to come to some understanding of what life out there might be like, why the Kéthani came to Earth—what their motives might be.”
That set the subject for the rest of the evening: the Kéthani and their modus operandi. Of the nine regulars around the table that night, only three of us had died, been resurrected on the home planet of the Kéthani, and returned to Earth: Stuart and Samantha Kingsley, and myself.