Читать книгу The Moor is Dark Beneath the Moon - David Watmough - Страница 7

“Are you going to her funeral?” Davey Bryant’s lover asked. “I see here in the paper there are some incredible buys on the airlines. The old girl couldn’t have died at a better time.”

“I was thinking about it,” Davey told Ken Bradley. “It’s only two summers since we had her here, but it seems like yesterday. It was just six weeks and felt like forever. And to think, if she hadn’t fallen ill it would have been the same all over again this year. Christ, what we’ve been spared! But if you say there’s a ticket bargain to London, then I could take in her funeral and also get some new shirts for you at Gieves. I could see Cousin Alyson and her kids. Maybe take ’em to the London Zoo where they belong!”

Davey brightened then to the task of planning. “I could also bring back some things from Marks and Sparks. You’re always complaining the stuff they sell here isn’t the same, so we could stock up on the nonperishables. I could do all that before going down to Tintagel and burying her.”

Ken leaned forward to ruffle his partner’s silvering hair. “Yet another reason to thank Auntie for popping off now. You might bring back a local Cornish recipe for a genuine saffron loaf. I don’t really like the one I’ve been using with the bread machine.”

Davey attempted to smile seraphically. “That’s because you don’t really like saffron bread in the first place. You only bake it for me. I think you also believe I need a break and that’s why you’re encouraging me to go and see the old girl off after that excessively long and miserable life.”

His partner of nearly forty years wagged a lawyer’s finger in the style with which he’d so often addressed an accused in court. “You’ve got it all wrong, sweetheart. It’s I who could do with you out of my hair for a few days. I want to go through all that crap in the cellar, give away stuff we’ll never read again, and fling out some of the junk we’ve been accumulating for thirty-eight years. I can’t do that with you around interrupting me and weeping sentimental tears.” Ken carefully refolded the Globe and Mail and dropped it neatly on the stool by his armchair before turning to kiss the man who was almost identical in height as they were within months of the same age. He then left the spacious living room. Seconds later Davey heard the bathroom door slam.

The retired editor of a city newspaper, suddenly restless, turned and faced the plate-glass window. There were wraiths of mist around the base of the scattering of spruce and cedar that framed the view of the open Pacific halfway down the Sunshine Coast, some miles north of the Vancouver where he had previously worked.

Davey had been restless of late. Both of them had. Now they were both approaching seventy, and every day brought reminders that each wasn’t quite as capable of coping so effectively with things as they had done a decade earlier. When he first stood and stared out that same window, most of the trees had been saplings, the lawn had been a field, and the landscaped garden was nonexistent. The human intrusion before their arrival had been hardly more than the occasional cutting of timber and sawing of logs.

He ruefully recalled that the distance to the open sand and sea had tended to be traversed by a limber and sprightly middle-aged gay couple—themselves when they first bought the silver grey Cape Cod house—rather than the slower-moving and now hoary-haired gents who walked with arthritic-paced steps and stuck prudently to the flagged path on the rare occasions they still boldly confronted the ocean at its very edge.

Davey thought of these things because of his Aunt Hannah. Compared with her, of course, they were still youthful! Over the past twenty months, since her steady decline from health and her finally quitting his late uncle’s house and moving into the nursing home, she had attained her ninety-sixth birthday. And when she was being particularly gloomy in her scrawled letters—which was most of the time—he would write back and tell her they were both waiting to see her telegram from the queen when she made one hundred.

A deer sauntered across the lawn toward the clump of arbutus that screened them from the view of the Strait of Georgia. Davey moved closer to the window to watch. The deer was beautiful in its shyness and gliding motion yet appeared to lack any concern at the proximity of the weathered frame house at the edge of the forest. By its antlers, he could see it was a stag, and for some reason— maybe because it seemed more greyish than most of them around there—he thought it might be an old boy. But it wasn’t limping and certainly held its head proudly high.

That brought him back to Aunt Hannah’s last visit, and her incessant litany of aches and pains. It was a schedule relieved only by elaborate complaints about her neighbours in the village of Pentudy, whom she had learned to detest since the days of World War II when his Uncle Wesley had taken her home as a late-in-life bride with a face as plain as her smart London clothes were incongruous in that isolated Cornish village. Or so a judgemental twelve-year-old Davey had glumly observed of a newcomer—come, surely, to disturb their close-knit family life.

He didn’t know how much Cornish memory lane he would have indulged in then and there, the deer now a white throat patch and a reddish buff coat creating an incredible camouflage from such a short distance, but at that moment Ken walked in to give Davey a playful punch in the back and ask if he wanted him to call a travel agent to see what airline had the better deal. Davey was instantly back in the immediate world before he could swivel round and answer yes. He was often embarrassed by his Cornish daydreams.

Ken’s eyes brightened. He so loved it when Davey even verged on spontaneity. So much of the time his partner was distracted and either didn’t answer Ken at all, or claimed the next day he’d never heard his query or comment. With an ardent mea culpa, Davey now flung himself into Ken’s world of handling the challenges and chores of life as if for him, like the retired lawyer, it was also second nature.

Davey told him he’d go the very next day, after he called the Breakers (the old folks’ home had notified him of his aunt’s decease), suggested the following Saturday afternoon would be the earliest he could attend Hannah’s obsequies, and asked them to duly inform the undertakers and anyone else they considered necessary.

He then so flung himself into the alien role of efficient being, à la Ken, that he was packed by noon and had reserved dinner for two at a small restaurant near Madeira Park, which Ken had recently discovered and in which he delighted. In fact, they both loved the restaurant’s attempts to graft a French cuisine to the best of such local fare as the mushrooms and mussels, a special salad concocted from the establishment’s own garden-grown vegetables and, of course, the abundant salmon and herring from the rivermouth waters on which La Périchole perched.

Before their sortie up the winding road to tackle gastronomic pleasantries and the kind of conversation they’d developed over the years for such sporadic à deux dinners in special places, Davey made a spate of phone calls to England and also, for the hell of it, to friends in both Paris and Vienna. He was even tempted to call George in Moscow, who was trying to construct a banking system along American lines. But Ken caught him searching for their friend’s address and number and persuaded him that calling George merely to announce he couldn’t see the man as he was only going to Cornwall to bury an ancient aunt wasn’t only unnecessary but a gross waste of time and money. Common sense, as always, reigned with Ken.

The dinner was bliss. Well, almost so. Before the end the subject of Aunt Hannah arose again and, not for the first time, Ken mildly rebuked his partner for being so excessively harsh in judging her. Davey parried by asserting how incredibly she had nursed grievances over his conduct, way back as a child, when admittedly he had sometimes mocked her behind her back. Ken also insisted that the slapdash and self-indulgent Davey was far too exigent over someone who, after all, had been only a frail old lady without benefit of education and the kind of love they enjoyed with each other.

Davey saw there was a truth in the rebuke but that didn’t necessarily improve his disposition. Typically they avoided any kind of outright rupture, but enough sense of discord adhered to them to assure an uncharacteristic silence on the drive home and through the familiar choreography leading to bed. They didn’t forget to kiss each other good-night before plumping pillows and turning back to back, but this time there was no chirpy little comment about the congenial La Périchole and the pleasure of each other’s company.

There, in the darkness, Davey shivered to the sense of that omission, but it hung as a disturbing presence about him the following morning when travelling at some thirty thousand feet and didn’t dispel until the bustle of Heathrow and the subsequent challenge of London, Cousin Alyson, and her two ebullient offspring.