Читать книгу Streaking - Brian Stableford - Страница 9

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lord Credesdale seemed more angry than pleased to see him, but that was just the pain. The old man was propped up on three voluminous pillows, but he was having difficulty holding himself steady.

“What’s all this about you flying over in a private jet?” he demanded, as Canny pulled up a chair so that he could sit as close to the bedhead as the beside table would permit.

“I got a lift, Dad,” Canny replied, brightly. “A real stroke of luck—I wouldn’t have got here till late afternoon if I’d flown Air France and British Midland via Heathrow. The streak’s still holding, you see.”

“Well it won’t hold much longer, if the diaries are reliable,” the sick man snapped. “I might not last through the night. This is the acid test, Can. This is when all your fine talk and snippy attitude will have to confront the reality of a situation.”

“Just like you did, Daddy,” Canny said, trying to make his voice sound soothing, “forty years ago. Hard landing, rude awakening, sobering experience. I know. I’m ready. If the luck really does run low, I’ll be able to tell all right—and I’ll take whatever action seems warranted. Trust me.”

“Trust you! How...?” The old man’s voice gave out under the strain. His ravaged face was tormented, as much by anger as distress. Canny rose to his feet and poured a glass of water from the decanter on the bedside table. His father tried to refuse it, but that was sheer stubbornness, and Canny eventually persuaded him to sip it.

“How can you trust me?” he said, softly. “I can see the difficulty, Daddy—and I know you’re right. All my life, I’ve had the family gift to draw on. It’s always been there, and I’ve taken it for granted while I’ve felt free to doubt it, scoff at it, resent it, kick against its discipline, throw tantrums about its sillier rules. But now the crunch will come. If the records are right, the luck will fade away to dormancy—unless and until I renew it, by following the rules. I know all that, Daddy—everything I need to know. I really will try to learn from your experience as well as my own. If things do go sour, I’ll be as desperate to get things back on track as you were.”

His father had settled back on the pillows, and had closed his eyes momentarily—but not because he was relaxing. Lord Credesdale was fighting his pain, fighting his anxiety—rebelling, like any true Yorkshireman, against whatever presented itself for resistance. As soon as Canny finished and sat down again, he rallied.

“If,” he echoed, contemptuously. “Always if. After all this time, all you’ve seen and been, it’s still if. Trust me, you say—but you won’t trust me, will you? You won’t take my word, or my advice.”

The old man tried to raise his hand in order to point an accusing finger, but he couldn’t do it. Canny took the hand in his own, startled by its frailty. The skin seemed slack and dry, lying upon the bone like ill-secured wrapping-paper. He couldn’t remember having held his father’s hand since he was a child, and he had no clear memory of how it had felt, but he knew that it must have been solid and strong, with a grip as firm as a carpenter’s vice. His father had been a tyrant then, a thunderous man of whom even Bentley walked slightly in fear, and more than slightly in awe. Now, he was a shell about to be shed by a monstrous molting crab. It was terrible—more horrible in confrontation than any mere diminution of the family lucky streak could possibly be.

“I believe you, Daddy,” Canny told him, squeezing the fragile hand as hard as he dared. “I always did. It’s just that...sometimes I have trouble admitting it to myself. It doesn’t mean that I won’t take care of things. You did. You tested it to the limit—but in the end, you took care of things. I know you haven’t always thought as much of me as you wanted to, but am I really such a disappointment to you that think I won’t take care of things? I have Mummy to look after, and the estate, and everything else. I know how much it all adds up to. There’s no if about that. I’ll do my best, Daddy. I’ll take care of things.”

That speech seemed to have the desired effect. It couldn’t do much to calm the physical pain, but it did seem to set the old man’s mind at rest, just a little. Canny knew that it was what his father had wanted to hear, had needed to hear. While Lord Credesdale composed himself, Canny glanced around the bedroom, taking note of the extent to which his father had reclaimed it since his last return from hospital. His mother’s attempts to modernize the decor and modify the ostentation of the Georgian furniture with a few light touches of the twentieth century had been carefully undone, although the modifications had stopped mercifully short of replacing the Alma-Tadema over the fireplace with one of the ancestral portraits from the upper landing. Even Daddy, apparently, could do without the cold stare of some censorious forbear zeroing in on his helplessness.

“You shouldn’t have run off like that,” Lord Credesdale muttered, eventually. “Gave the wrong impression. And no matter how skeptical you are about the family history—and I’ve been through it myself, so I know what I’m talking about—you’d be a fool to tempt fate too far. You should be engaged by now, if not actually married. Waiting nine months to reignite the streak would be bad enough. How long’s it going to take you now? Two years? Three?”

Canny couldn’t help sighing, but he stifled the sound. “This is the twenty-first century, Daddy,” he said. You can get mail order brides practically by return of post, even in Yorkshire. Half the female population of Bridlington would marry a lord, sight unseen, faster than a Kosovan party girl would hitch herself to a British passport-holder.”

“Very funny,” the old man growled.

“Actually, it’s rather tragic,” Canny told him. “And if there’s one thing in the records that’s almost certainly based on blind prejudice, it’s the insistence on marrying so close to home.” He knew as the words escaped from his mouth that they would probably undo all the good work he’d just put in, but the old habit wasn’t about to die yet. Fortunately, his father’s reaction tended more to the plaintively maudlin than the righteously wrathful.

“That’s what I thought,” the dying man said, “and look what happened to me.”

Canny couldn’t actually “look” even in memory, because he hadn’t been born until his father had been safely hooked up with his mother, who was a Garforth girl, but he had heard the story of his father’s first wife a thousand times.

“It wasn’t because she was from outside the county that she couldn’t have children, Daddy,” Canny said. “There are as many barren women in Yorkshire as anywhere else, and at least as many fertile ones in every corner of the globe. The prejudices of the first dozen earls are based in the fact that not one of them ever went abroad any further than York, for lack of public transport or any desire to test the supposition that the people living south of Sheffield were all secret cannibals. We live in a cosmopolitan world now. The county has no official existence any more. Our postal address is in West Yorkshire now.”

“It’s not a matter of postal addresses or local authorities,” Lord Credesdale declared. “Calling the bottom end of the east riding Humberside doesn’t make it part of Lincolnshire. Yorkshire’s Yorkshire and always will be, even if Bradford looks more like West Pakistan.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Daddy. Anyway, breaking the rules didn’t do you any harm in the long run. I arrived in my own good time, and I for one am glad that it worked out that way. The matter’s not as urgent now they’ve invented antibiotics, and I’m not even going to mention IVF and nuclear transfer technology—but if it’ll set your mind at rest, I’ll promise to start courting just as soon as I can, starting in Tadcaster and Wetherby. When Mummy puts it about that I’m well and truly on the market, the local gentry will be hurling their daughters at me with catapults. The only difficulty will be persuading them to form an orderly queue.”

The tone of this speech might have been provocative on another occasion, but Lord Credesdale had grown used to Canny’s little ways over the years, and was not devoid of a certain dry wit himself. The old man condescended to make an effort to smile, although the expression he actually contrived was something of a travesty.

“And the gambling?” the old man said. “You haven’t got a habit, have you? You can let it go, when your luck dries up?”

Canny didn’t challenge his father’s use of “when” rather than “if”, although he still remained unconvinced that the allegedly inevitable diminution of the family gift following the death of an earl was anything but a patriarchal myth intended to prey on the minds of guilt-ridden scions. “An addiction, you mean?” he said, scornfully. “No—I’m as clean as a whistle. I can leave off for a year, or ten years if it’s necessary, and not feel a pang. I’ll run the portfolio defensively and keep the mill ticking over, until everything’s well and truly sorted. Or would you rather I put all the shares in a blind trust and gave the village elders carte blanche to oversee the mill’s businesses the same way they oversee the village shops?”

“Good god, no! At least you’ve got brains, even if your luck deserts you. Stockbrokers are all crooks, and the village elders are all fools. You can rely on Maurice Rawtenstall, though. He’s probably crooked, but he’s discreetly crooked, and it’s better to have a clever crook in charge of your cash cows than an honest idiot. If he creams a little off the top, that’s fine—just make sure we get all the milk. Keep everything under control. Use a tight rein, until you’ve done what you have to do. All of it.”

“I’ll follow the family motto,” Canny assured him, sourly but not entirely insincerely. “No matter how absurd it seems, it’s best to do it just in case.”

There was a sneer in his voice, but that too was what his father needed to hear. If he’d said it piously, Daddy wouldn’t have been able to believe it, but saying it as if it were something nasty that he had to swallow regardless, he could be convincing—or as close thereto as was humanly possible.

Canny could remember a time when his father wouldn’t have cared a tuppenny toss whether Canny intended to follow the rules or not, just so long as he got the lion’s share of the luck he’d renewed by siring a son as the rules required—but he didn’t doubt the sincerity of the old man’s conversion. Daddy really did care about the succession, about the continuation of the Kilcannon streak, not because he thought the Devil would have him if the bargain weren’t properly extended, but because it was the done thing. As men like Lord Credesdale approached death, they cared more rather than less about the state of affairs they were leaving behind: its order; its propriety; its continuity. Canny wasn’t at all sure that he wouldn’t go the same way himself, especially if the course of events did knock him off his high horse, and persuade him of the wisdom of following the rules just in case.

If parental tyranny had achieved nothing else as he’d grown older under its spur, it had certainly inculcated the habit of doing his petty penances and performing his petty rituals because compliance was far less troublesome than non-compliance. He hadn’t had the benefit of Stevie Larkin’s personal tuition, but he’d read enough psychology to know how easy it would be to take aboard the age-old obsession with lineage and continuity along with all the rest of the petty rituals once the responsibility of managing the family luck was his alone. He wasn’t under any delusion that Daddy’s death would free him, or that burning all the portraits of his ancestors would render their commanding stares impotent.

Canny had never met the thirtieth Earl, but he had a strong suspicion that Daddy had turned into a replica of his own Daddy—and now that he was looking down at the hollow wreck of the man his father had once been, it was all too easy to imagine that he might be forced into the shoes of the departed tyrant, possessed as he had been by exactly the same obsessive ghost.

“I’ll ring for Bentley, Daddy,” Canny said, softly. “It’s time for your shot. You need to rest.”

“Bugger that,” said the old man, hoarsely. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Right now, it’s not pleasant dreams I need. Look, Can, it’s hurting me to talk to you almost as much as it hurt me to stay awake fidgeting, fretting that you wouldn’t get here, but if I take the morphine I’ll be away with the fairies till supper-time. The least you can do is hear me out and save your smart remarks and sarcasm for someone who appreciates them.”

“Yes, Dad,” Canny said, meekly. He always shortened “Daddy” to “Dad” when he was making a show of being serious. He released his father’s hand and sat up straighter in his chair.

“You think I’m going to give you the usual load of crap about your responsibilities, don’t you? To your mother, the estate, the villagers. Well, I’m not. You’re not the only one who’s noticed that it’s the twenty-first century. Your mother’s as tough as an old boot and the villagers are perfectly capable of looking after themselves in spite of the fact that we’ve kept them wrapped up in cotton wool for the best part of two hundred years. The mill was never a part of the family heritage, and the patchwork pig’s ear it’s turned into is an irrelevance. It wouldn’t matter a damn if the entire folly went up in flame tomorrow, as long as the insurance was paid up. What concerns me is you, Can, and what you make of yourself.”

The dying man had to pause for breath then, but Canny knew that he wasn’t supposed to interrupt. He waited, patiently, for his father to find breath enough to continue.

“You’ve probably always thought of yourself as a means to an end,” Lord Credesdale went on, eventually. “That the only reason I ever had a son was to renew the Kilcannon streak. And you’ve probably always thought that I resented having to share my luck with you as much as you’ve lately come to resent having to share yours with me. Well, there’s no denying it—you’re absolutely right. You were a means to an end, and I have always resented the sharing. But that’s never been the whole story.”

Again, Canny waited out the pause.

“You’re my son, Can. I don’t know how other men feel about their sons, or other sons about their fathers, but it seems to me that nobody actually needs a streak like ours to mix up their motives and complicate their feelings. As far as I can see, it’s normal. Other people have their rules just as we do, and benefit in their own ways from sticking to them even while they seethe with frustration. I want you to get it right, Can. I very nearly didn’t, and maybe you’d say that I never did, as a husband or a parent, but either way, I want you to do better. I want you to succeed. That’s why I’m telling you, as firmly as I can. not to test the system to destruction. You’ve had the luck all your life, and maybe it won’t seem too different at first to be without it, for a couple of months or a couple of years—but in time, the cumulative effect of being without that house percentage will take its toll. Believe me, I know.

“To begin with, I dare say, a little common-or-garden bad luck might seem like a novelty. You’ll be able to bear it easily enough—but over time, it’ll wear you down. Oh, you’ll always be able to look around at your friends and neighbors, and see most of them getting by perfectly well under the dominion of honest probability—but it’s the ones who aren’t that you need to study carefully. Look at the ones who lose more often than they win, not just at their predicaments but at their attitudes. You and I know that their misfortunes are just a matter of chance, and so do they—but that’s not the way they feel. They feel victimized, Can. They feel tormented. They feel that fate has it in for them. Only a few of them get around to thinking, consciously, that they must have deserved the bad things that happen to them, but it doesn’t matter whether they get that far or not, because it’s just as bad thinking that they didn’t deserve it as it is thinking that they did.”

Canny felt the expression on his own face setting hard as the words got through to him. Even his father it seemed, had drunk his fill of popular psychology. Even his father had worked out the elements of psychological probability. The old man’s eyes were as dark and taut as they had ever been—no slackness or hollowness there!—and they were boring into him with all the fervor of a mind that desperately needed morphine to ease its distress but wasn’t prepared to compromise, for the moment, between raw wakefulness and sugared dreaming.

“If it’s like that for them, Can,” the old man went on, relentlessly, “imagine what it’s going to be like for you. You’ll be the thirty-second Earl, Can, at the tail end of a winning streak that’s lasted eight hundred years. Imagine what it’s going to feel like if things go wrong for you! Whatever you believe now about the necessity or otherwise of following the rules, you won’t be able to forgive yourself if things go awry after you’ve decided to break them. Oh, you’ll tell yourself that it’s just a coincidence, not your fault at all...but you’ll never be able to believe it. You’ve been favored by fate all your life, and for you the dominion of probability really would be victimization by neglect. For you, it really would be torment. Believe me, Can, I know. I came back; I saved myself—but I’ve been to the kind of Hell that’s specially reserved for people of our kind, and I’m telling you that it’s a place to stay out of if you can possibly avoid it, and that it’s certainly not a place to spend your entire life.”

The sick man finally trailed off, and slumped back against the heaped-up pillows, exhausted and agonized. Canny knew what an effort it had cost him to say all that, and exactly what his father now needed to hear—but he also realized, belatedly, that there were certain things he could only say to his father, and that the opportunity to say them would soon be lost. On the Riviera it had seemed easy enough to be alone with his burden, his doubts and his questions—but now that he was home again, it suddenly seemed very much harder.

“Thanks, Daddy,” he said, sincerely. “I know you needed to say that, and I did need to hear it. You probably think I’ve never loved you as much as I could and should, because I always resented sharing my luck, blah de blah de blah, but we can cut that crap now. We’re in the same boat. Your luck’s running out, and so is mine. Maybe if I wasn’t benefiting from my half of the partnership, that crab would never have got its claws into your guts. Who knows? We’ve both looked long and hard at the family tree, and we know that our kind of luck isn’t the kind that guarantees long life. How could it be? Renewability implies death. If any father had ever outlived his son, the streak would have ended there and then, according to the rules. The death of the father, before or soon after the marriage of the son, is part of the pattern.”

It was his turn to pause, without fear of interruption.

“Cancer of the liver and pancreas isn’t a pretty way to go,” he continued, “and it certainly isn’t a painless way to go, but we have morphine now. Maybe that’s an aspect of the Kilcannon luck—a gift of fate to ease our passage, which just happens to be useful to millions of others as well. Maybe all the progress of the last eight hundred years has been the spin-off of fate’s partiality to the Earls of Credesdale, and a few others like us with whom we’re careful never to meet up, let alone compete. So, we’re in the same boat—my loss of luck may be temporary and repairable, while yours is permanent, but I can still look at you and see my own future. At seventy, or seventy-five, or maybe eighty, I’m going to be lying pretty much where you are, suffering the same ultimate indignity, feeling victimized as well as tormented, wondering whether I somehow deserved it. A pity, isn’t it, that we can’t find the first Earl’s magic formula, to summon up the devil for a second time and renegotiate a few key clauses in the contract?”

He was speaking metaphorically, of course. None of the last ten earls had believed in the literal truth of the family legend that credited the Kilcannon streak to a thirteenth-century pact with the devil. However the first earl had contrived to start the streak, it had been no formal agreement signed in blood—but that didn’t mean that the metaphor wasn’t sound.

“What’s your point, Canny?” Lord Credesdale whispered, his voice as ragged as a well-worn dishcloth. He always switched from “Can” to “Canny” when he relaxed the sternness of his posture. He never called his son by his full name, any more than Canny ever addressed him as “Lord Credesdale”.

“My point,” Canny said, this time letting his sigh be heard, “is that I understand you better than you seem to think, Dad, and sympathize with you more than you seem to think. For what it’s worth, I also need you more than you seem to think, and I’d really like to talk to you about the family secrets while I still can, and while you’re still up to it. We’re not only in the same boat, Daddy, we’re the only ones in it. If we can’t help one another, nobody can—and this isn’t the kind of situation where we can draw lots to decide which of us gets to eat the other one—all that’s been taken out of our hands. We are what we are, where and when we are. I want to try to make the best of that, and I need your help—more help than just one lousy lecture. I’m sorry that I ran away, Daddy, but I’m back now. I’m not going to run away again. Can I call please Bentley to give you a shot? I think you’re suffering a little more than you need to, now—and I need you to sleep so that you can wake up a little stronger a few more times before you give up the ghost. Besides, I may have a little treat for you later, and you’ll be better able to appreciate it if you take a nap first.”

Lord Credesdale looked up at him, breathing awkwardly. The old man tried to say yes, but in the end could only manage to nod his head. Then he tried to say something else, but only contrived to form the ghost of the word “keys”.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Canny said, as he got up to ring for Bentley. “I understand about the keys. We’ll do it tonight, if that’s what you want, after your surprise—or tomorrow, if you prefer. Either way, we’ll talk again. We’ll get things straightened out, for both our sakes. That’s a promise.”