Loose Head Read Online Free
Author: Jeff Keithly
was on our recent tour to Vegas. I’ll see him tonight, in fact. The Ian Chalmers memorial bash.”
“Ah. Perhaps the opportunity will arise for a quiet chat.”
“Perhaps.” I felt a prickling of unease, as if a tarantula was crawling up my leg. “Hate to mix business and rugby, though.”
“I thought he was rich – thought all of the Hastewicke Gentlemen were, except for you.”
“So did I – it’s a mystery.”
Chapter 3
In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and I left work early so that I could dart home, slip into my lone dinner jacket, and head over to Bernie’s Belgrave Square abode for a private chat before the festivities. Why had Lord Delvemere, whose Devonshire estates yielded a startlingly large annual income, needed to borrow £100,000 from the most vicious loan-shark in England?
As anyone who has ever played – or even watched – a match will tell you, the game of rugby is governed by a most intricate set of laws. However, one of rugby’s most sacred rules isn’t set down in any manual. This unwritten law is simple and inviolable: what goes on on tour, stays on tour.
Even at the amateur level, touring is central to the life of any rugby team, a blissful, intoxicating, much-anticipated interlude of sport, beer and travel, in the company of two dozen or so congenial mates, to exotic locales, where you will meet – and often, appall – people you will most likely never encounter again. It’s a sort of turbocharged holiday, a delirious, testosterone-drenched escape from the harrowing banality of the everyday, filled with merry companionship, pranks, laughs and the sort of behaviour you’d never get away with at home.
Populated as it was with, myself excepted, the scions of wealthy and privileged English society, the Hastewicke Gentlemen Rugby Club toured more than most. During my tenure alone, the club had been to Italy, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand twice, Argentina, Texas, and, most recently, Las Vegas. On those tours, I had witnessed all sorts of reprehensible behaviour – drunken buffoonery, sexual misadventures, cattle tipping, the frequent theft of small boats and electric golf carts, and one particularly repulsive incident involving a marsupial. Any especially grotesque infringements were dealt with by the team, primarily via the kangaroo court held at the close of each tour. But because protecting the guilty is one of the most sacred tenets of rugby life, such events were never, on pain of excommunication, revealed to those outside the team – wives, girlfriends, co-workers. We all knew one another’s darkest secrets – and held them in sacred trust.
It was with a certain heaviness of heart, then, that I approached Bernie’s house in Belgrave Square. I didn’t know that his sudden and clandestine need for funds had anything to do with what had happened on our recent Las Vegas tour, though the timing, at least, was suggestive. What I did know was that, if my professional duties compelled me to shine the bright light of official inquiry into the tour activities of any of my teammates, it would be an unforgivable violation of the sacred bond that is rugby touring. I fervently hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
Bernie was in his study when the housemaid showed me in. An aromatic fire of split oak logs crackled merrily in the Georgian fireplace, keeping the autumnal at bay. The flickering firelight burnished a room of privileged wealth and good taste. Bernie stood on the hearth, struggling to do up his tie. “Here,” I said, “let me – you were always hopeless.”
“Dex! Yes, thanks -- never have gotten the hang of these bloody things.”
“You never had to – you even had a valet at school.”
“Yes, that was my mother’s doing, bless her soul. Whisky?”
“Yes, please.”
He handed me a heavy cut-glass tumbler half-full of nut-brown spirit. There was a wary pause. “So – to what do I owe this honour? You’ll be
“Ah. Perhaps the opportunity will arise for a quiet chat.”
“Perhaps.” I felt a prickling of unease, as if a tarantula was crawling up my leg. “Hate to mix business and rugby, though.”
“I thought he was rich – thought all of the Hastewicke Gentlemen were, except for you.”
“So did I – it’s a mystery.”
Chapter 3
In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and I left work early so that I could dart home, slip into my lone dinner jacket, and head over to Bernie’s Belgrave Square abode for a private chat before the festivities. Why had Lord Delvemere, whose Devonshire estates yielded a startlingly large annual income, needed to borrow £100,000 from the most vicious loan-shark in England?
As anyone who has ever played – or even watched – a match will tell you, the game of rugby is governed by a most intricate set of laws. However, one of rugby’s most sacred rules isn’t set down in any manual. This unwritten law is simple and inviolable: what goes on on tour, stays on tour.
Even at the amateur level, touring is central to the life of any rugby team, a blissful, intoxicating, much-anticipated interlude of sport, beer and travel, in the company of two dozen or so congenial mates, to exotic locales, where you will meet – and often, appall – people you will most likely never encounter again. It’s a sort of turbocharged holiday, a delirious, testosterone-drenched escape from the harrowing banality of the everyday, filled with merry companionship, pranks, laughs and the sort of behaviour you’d never get away with at home.
Populated as it was with, myself excepted, the scions of wealthy and privileged English society, the Hastewicke Gentlemen Rugby Club toured more than most. During my tenure alone, the club had been to Italy, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand twice, Argentina, Texas, and, most recently, Las Vegas. On those tours, I had witnessed all sorts of reprehensible behaviour – drunken buffoonery, sexual misadventures, cattle tipping, the frequent theft of small boats and electric golf carts, and one particularly repulsive incident involving a marsupial. Any especially grotesque infringements were dealt with by the team, primarily via the kangaroo court held at the close of each tour. But because protecting the guilty is one of the most sacred tenets of rugby life, such events were never, on pain of excommunication, revealed to those outside the team – wives, girlfriends, co-workers. We all knew one another’s darkest secrets – and held them in sacred trust.
It was with a certain heaviness of heart, then, that I approached Bernie’s house in Belgrave Square. I didn’t know that his sudden and clandestine need for funds had anything to do with what had happened on our recent Las Vegas tour, though the timing, at least, was suggestive. What I did know was that, if my professional duties compelled me to shine the bright light of official inquiry into the tour activities of any of my teammates, it would be an unforgivable violation of the sacred bond that is rugby touring. I fervently hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
Bernie was in his study when the housemaid showed me in. An aromatic fire of split oak logs crackled merrily in the Georgian fireplace, keeping the autumnal at bay. The flickering firelight burnished a room of privileged wealth and good taste. Bernie stood on the hearth, struggling to do up his tie. “Here,” I said, “let me – you were always hopeless.”
“Dex! Yes, thanks -- never have gotten the hang of these bloody things.”
“You never had to – you even had a valet at school.”
“Yes, that was my mother’s doing, bless her soul. Whisky?”
“Yes, please.”
He handed me a heavy cut-glass tumbler half-full of nut-brown spirit. There was a wary pause. “So – to what do I owe this honour? You’ll be
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