The Valley by Unknown Read Free Book Online

number 9 had shaped civilisation, and I would stand there nodding, slightly interested but hopelessly lost, appreciating the zeal in his eyes, and feeling a bit ashamed as I tried to steer the conversation back to something I could understand.
    Although Max was very social, I was never sure whether he really liked people. He had lots of acquaintances but very few friends. Previous guests would disappear from his party invitations at the drop of a hat, no reason given. Girlfriends were acquired and then disposed of before I even knew that he was keen on them. Three months was the record length for any of his relationships and often the girls would spend as much time with me talking about Max as they actually did with him.
    He was never unfaithful or wilfully cruel, just unbending. His hobbies – shooting, fishing, sailing, maths – were all either solitary or masculine, and he did not feel obliged to share or explain them. He would quite happily sleep with a girl but then leave her at two o’clock in the morning so he could lie in wait for a fox. In the end, the girls would always give up on him and drift away.
    Occasionally our gardening schedule was disrupted by the British army. Originally I had thought Max attended the university’s Officer Training Corps for the same social reasons as all the other ex-public school boys, who would willingly spend an hour being shouted at by a sergeant major, if afterwards they could attend a cocktail party in a smart officer’s uniform. I learnt, however, that Max went to the OTC out of contractual duty, not love. The public school he had attended had very close links to the army and Max had exceeded their expectations. In his gap year, he had attended Sandhurst, been commissioned, served six months in a regiment and then pledged to serve at least five further years upon graduation. In return, he drew an Officer Cadet’s salary, further adding to his wealth.
    In our second year at university, we had to move out of our hall of residence and Max asked me to share a small house with him. Its chief appeal was a huge garage where he could keep the weedkiller and fertilizer that we sold onto our clients. The bedrooms upstairs were dark and poky, and the bathroom squeezed between them was small and dirty. There was no central heating, but downstairs there was an adequate kitchen and an enormous unfurnished lounge – a perfect venue for Max’s parties.
    It was a social world that I would not otherwise have known or chosen. But due to the gardening and Max’s insistence that he, courtesy of the British Army, paid most of our rent, I was now quite wealthy for a student and I fitted into Max’s circle as easily as I had slotted into all the groups I had hung around with since I had come to England. What remained of my South African accent even gave me an exotic appeal. Soon I stopped mentioning the five years I had spent in a Durham comprehensive. When I said my stepfather worked in the diamond business, people assumed he was a rich South African mining magnate. I didn’t lie about it but I did not rush to correct their false impressions either. And nor did Max. In fact he seemed to delight in the deception, as if it was all part of a wonderful practical joke. And I was too busy having a ball to care about the shaky foundations on which my new life was based. The girls might have originally all come to our house because of tall, elegant, smart Max, but quite a few of them stayed because of me. I was the cute if slightly quiet one, with dark hair and a toned rugby player’s body; and if that was not enough to get them into bed, I would tell them half-remembered stories of wild animals prowling the night under starry African skies. Soon I had experienced enough romantic entanglements to forget all about joining my family in Australia.
    It was only after I had moved into the house with Max that I met his father. He was down in Bristol ‘on business’ he said, and insisted on taking us both