Читать книгу House of the Hanged - Mark Mills - Страница 12

Chapter Seven

Others came and went over the summer months, and some even stopped by out of season, but the two weeks spanning late July and early August – when Leonard, Venetia and family were in residence at Docteur Manevy’s house – had always been sacred to Tom.

That sunstruck fortnight was the one fixed point in his calendar. It was also his gift to them, a hopelessly inadequate ‘thank you’ for all their kindnesses to him over the years. There was more to it than mere gratitude, though. Leonard and Venetia had nursed him through the worst of times, and he wanted them to see that their efforts hadn’t been in vain. He wanted them to know that he was all right now.

All this, he imagined, was lost on the two boys, if not Lucy. What were they to know of his troubled past? What did they care? Young minds were not inclined to unpick the tangled histories of their elders. Maybe that would come later, but for now Tom was simply an old friend and former colleague of their father’s who happened to be much closer to their mother in age, and whose company they were obliged to share for two weeks every summer.

He assumed that they favoured their fortnight in Le Rayol over the annual springtime pilgrimage to Aix-les-Bains, where they twiddled their thumbs and took French classes while their mother subjected herself to every conceivable form of water torture, from skin-wrinkling immersions through to high-pressure pummellings. Leonard was spared this annual mortification of the flesh by the ‘sudden and pressing work commitments’ which seemed to materialize as if by magic every Easter, shackling him to his desk at the Foreign Office.

Leonard’s devotion to Le Rayol had never been in question. He had fallen hard for the place during their first visit five summers ago, and each year he threw himself headlong into his ‘annual brush and polish on the Riviera’ with characteristic gusto. He was an outdoorsman by nature, surprisingly slim and sinewy for a man just shy of his sixtieth birthday, and although he wasn’t averse to a bit of loafing on the beach with a book, he was at his happiest when fishing or boating or bathing. He swam vast distances with no apparent effort, never fearing currents or cramps. He also spent endless hours prowling the craggy headlands with his fishing rod, as sure-footed as a mountain goat. He had once described life in Le Rayol as ‘a foretaste of paradise’, which wasn’t entirely true. Leonard’s perfect paradise would have included a grouse moor, a shallow chalk river for fly-fishing, and a golf course.