Free The Valley by Unknown

trading?’
    ‘I did it for over two years.’
    ‘You made a lot of money.’
    ‘I made a lot more for other people.’
    I barely saw Max for the next year. Several times when we were due to meet up, he cancelled at short notice, snowed under by work. Everything that could go wrong with his development went wrong. First the ground was contaminated; then a change in building regulations meant he had to alter his designs; house prices fell and interest rates rose. Finally the bank panicked and pulled the rug out from under him. His property company went into liquidation and Max quickly followed it into personal bankruptcy. He lost everything and slipped out of the country, signing up to become a crew member on a large ocean-going yacht. It had taken him less than four years since leaving university to win and lose a fortune.
    I was one of the last people to see him before he left. I came back from work and he was waiting for me. By his feet he had a green canvas holdall and beside it was the same faded blue trunk that he had kept in his room at Bristol, and which he had been trying to haul up the stairs the first time I had met him.
    ‘Could you keep this for me?’ he said. ‘It’s got all my possessions in. Or at least everything the receiver doesn’t know about. There’s nothing particularly valuable, just sentimental stuff.’
    I looked at it and noticed it had a sturdy combination lock.
    ‘It’s set to my birthday – 0804,’ Max said. ‘You’re quite welcome to open it if you ever want to. And if I drown at sea, everything inside it is yours.’
    The trunk was too big for my room so together we lugged it down the stairs to the small damp cellar. We placed it on top of some old paint pots, where it would be safe from flooding.
    I offered Max dinner but he picked up his canvas holdall and said he had to take the train to Southampton. He would not even accept a lift to Clapham Junction, saying he wanted to stretch his legs. As he walked off down the street, he turned around to wave goodbye, and I saw he was grinning from ear to ear.
    He said he would stay in touch, but apart from one postcard sent from the Bahamas six months later, describing the local marlin fishing, he never did. Whenever I went down to the cellar to read the electricity meter, and saw his blue trunk, I would wonder where he was. And when I met George for lunch in the City – who to his own surprise, if not mine, had since become a rather successful stockbroker – we would speculate on when Max would come back and what he would do.
    George was certain Max would eventually return to the City. But I was not. Max had always told me that he thought that comebacks were a mistake, and there was something inherently restless about his character. He had effortlessly changed from an army officer into a derivatives trader and then a property developer, and I could easily imagine him becoming a gamekeeper, or joining the navy, or running a sheep station in Patagonia. The only thing that would have surprised me was if he stayed in the same place doing the same job for several years.
    One day, I decided to call Max’s father to hear if he had any news. I had not stayed at the Lodge in Glen Avon since I had left Bristol, but I still had the telephone number, so I rang it from work the next morning. When there was no answer, I obtained the phone number of the estate office at Glen Avon from Directory Enquiries and rang that. The woman who answered told me that Max’s father had left the estate over two years ago.
    I gave up after that. The fact that Max had never even told me that his family had moved from Glen Avon seemed to prove how much we had outgrown each other. And I had other things on my mind. The sleepy British merchant bank where I worked had been taken over by a much more ambitious German bank and in the resulting turmoil, I struggled to hang on to my job, And just when that was settling down, I went on a skiing holiday, and met a slim girl