Читать книгу In the Blood - Philip Loraine - Страница 6

It wasn’t surprising that various objects had slipped down the gap at the back of the shelf and so into the cavity between the wainscotting, on top of which the shelf rested, and the wall behind it. This wall was damp, the panelling had warped, causing the gap to grow wider over the years; hence the arrival of Kevin and Ted from J. Frawley & Son, Builders; hence clouds of plaster dust and the splintering of rotten pine.

‘Ho,’ said Kevin, ‘got some treasure trove here,’ and he produced from behind the skirting-board a turquoise-blue comb with several teeth missing, a rusted pair of nail-scissors, two pencils, half a ballpoint pen, the china lid of a Gentleman’s Relish pot, several safety-pins, a tangle of string and a handful of pieces of paper: bills, shopping lists, a picture postcard of Notre Dame, envelopes and a letter or two: the detritus of years, laced with dusty spiders’ webs. The shelf, just by the kitchen door, had always been a good place for putting things so that you’d know where they were.

Kate Ackland took an old tray from the rack and piled the ‘treasure’ on to it. Her brother, Daniel, supported by his crutches and the wall, said, ‘That one on top, that’s Grandmother’s writing.’ Since the grandmother in question had lived here at Woodman’s for several years this wasn’t surprising. Kate took the tray into the living-room and put it on the table, thinking how strange it was that after so long she could still be amazed at the dexterity of her crippled brother’s movements; he swung himself from his crutches into the wheelchair with an economy of effort which was almost graceful, at the same time propping the crutches against the wall where he could reach them with ease.

She left him examining the contents of the tray, and returned to the kitchen to make tea for Kevin and Tom. Both young men eyed her with appreciation; both would probably have said that she was beautiful, but Kate knew she was nothing of the sort, or only at certain moments in certain lights. She knew she had good eyes, clear grey-blue, good skin, good hair and, thank God, a good slim figure; but, as she’d learned with some surprise over the years, these attributes were all subject to one other mysterious element: her personality was ‘attractive’, not only to young builders but to almost everybody—male or female—who encountered it. She accepted this as an endowment of providence, not even realizing how much of it was due to the fact that she liked people; was genuinely interested in what they had to say, gave them her whole attention.

Tea dispensed, she went back to the living-room and found Daniel, reading glasses on the end of his nose, examining what looked like a letter. She said, ‘Nothing really interesting, I bet—there never is.’

Daniel waved a sheet of creamy, damp-blotched paper. ‘This is interesting. Weird really.’ He pushed it across the table towards her.

My dear Lydia,

I’ve asked Sally to read you this letter, and I’ve explained to her that it concerns a very private conversation you and I had last Saturday evening. (I must add, in passing, that you couldn’t possibly have found a nicer, more tactful and loyal companion and/or pair of eyes.)

Lydia, don’t be angry with me, but I really do feel that somewhere, deep in the subconscious perhaps, this bee in your bonnet is connected with Richard’s death. Yes, I know it happened ten years ago, but you loved him so very, very much and, whatever some people say, one doesn’t ‘get over’ the loss of a beloved son, particularly under such sudden and shocking circumstances.

The other night you called me a coward. I know I’ve never been as strong-minded as you, but I absolutely believe that in this case I’m talking sense. Whether you’re right or wrong will make very little difference now; either way you’d be opening a disastrous Pandora’s Box, and either way people will just dismiss you as a ‘batty old woman’. Because the fact is, we are both old and one does tend to imagine things.

By now I’ve probably irritated you quite enough, but I must repeat what I said when we parted. If you do decide to take steps, for God’s sake talk to Andrew first. I know he’s a bore, like most lawyers, but he hasn’t known you for fifty years like old Godfrey, so his advice would at least be unbiased, and perhaps he can convince you to let sleeping (and perhaps dangerous) dogs lie.

Lastly, Lydia my dear, I must confess how sorry I am that I lost my temper when you said it was all in the blood—and I certainly shouldn’t have used the word ‘snobbish’. I was overwrought and so desperately worried about your state of mind.

I’ve asked Sally to burn this when she’s read it to you.

God bless you, my dear,

as ever yours …

The signature was not only an illegible scrawl but a brown stain of damp ran across the middle of it; moreover, the writer had put neither a date nor her address at the top of the page.

Brother and sister regarded each other in silence with identical eyes. Daniel’s hair was also the exact glossy brown of Kate’s; he was two years younger than his sibling, twenty-one, and like her, good-looking, though in his case the looks were pinched and hollowed by the years of pain he’d suffered because of his legs. She would not at the moment consider his legs, she spent too much of her time worrying about them. Besides, they were both disturbed by the letter which had so much of the past, of their own selves, contained in it.

The Lydia to whom it was written had been their paternal grandmother, and the Richard whom she had loved so very very much had been their own father; moreover his death ‘under such sudden and shocking circumstances’ had been caused by the same car crash which had crippled his eight-year-old son. Kate, in the back seat, had survived unhurt, and their mother happened to have stayed at home that afternoon, making curtains. Twelve, no thirteen years ago. If Kate closed her eyes she could see, in the most exact detail, the blue BMW crumpled against the concrete buttress of the flyover, firemen, ambulance crews, police at work around it, the line of crawling cars from which shocked or merely curious faces contemplated disaster, the angered policeman who was urging them to get a move on. It had been one of those hot white summer days, the trees almost black against a glaring sky: somewhere the distant grumble of combine harvesters. Luckily the car had not caught fire or they would never, they later said, have been able to cut Daniel out of it alive.

Brother and sister knew that they were sharing, insofar as they could, the same thoughts and memories; they always knew when this was so. Daniel tore them both away by saying, ‘What do you suppose the bee in her bonnet was on that occasion?’

‘God knows! She always had one.’ No need to add that they were often eccentric or unreasonable. For instance, she had never really forgiven her grandson and granddaughter for surviving the crash when her darling Richard had not. She knew how unfair this was, being neither stupid nor bigoted, but, as obviously, whenever she thought of them or—worse—whenever her cool grey eyes came to rest on them, she could not stem the surge of anger and grief. In fact, it was some years before she could bring herself to speak to them at all. As for their mother, the widow, Lydia had considered her eventual remarriage to be outright betrayal, even though it came five years after Richard’s death; but then she had naturally never liked her daughter-in-law in the first place.

Daniel said, ‘I’d almost forgotten Sally.’

‘We only met her two or three times.’

‘She was marvellous with grandmother, I don’t know how she stuck it.’

‘I think she quite loved her in a funny kind of way.’

‘I wonder what became of her.’

Kate considered possibilities and replied, ‘Well, if she’s not married, men must be stupider than I thought.’

Daniel pulled the letter to his side of the table and stared at it, frowning. ‘“A disastrous Pandora’s Box”! She must have got her teeth into something really nasty. Who’s this lawyer called Andrew?’

‘No idea.’

‘I suppose Sally put the letter on that useless shelf, and then drove herself around the bend looking for it, wanting to burn it as instructed.’ He peered at the bottom of the page. ‘Looks like an R, doesn’t it? Rosamund?’

‘We’re not likely to know, Daniel, we never … really entered into her life, did we?’

‘No date either.’ He sounded disapproving. ‘Just what you’d expect of a woman who thinks all lawyers are bores!’ His work, at which he was expert, was research, legal and to a lesser degree historical; dates mattered to him. The university had started him off in this capacity when yet another operation had put paid to his chances of a degree in Law. Research meant frequent visits to various libraries which he managed in a specially converted Mini with automatic transmission; his right leg could operate the pedals … but for how long? Only last week the specialist had told Kate that the leg was deteriorating; she had already sensed this; Daniel made no mention of it, naturally. His bravery, the sight of his brown head bent over the letter, and his glasses sliding down his nose as usual, brought tears to her eyes, tears of pity and of anger—she loved him so very dearly.

Brushing away any sign of emotion with the back of her hand, and pretending the movement was really made to stifle a yawn (he couldn’t bear to be pitied) she found herself wondering whether this all-absorbing love for him tended to unbalance her feeling for other men. Recent events indicated that it might be the case; she had become embroiled in the kind of emotional trouble for which previous experience had, very evidently, failed to prepare her.

She was relieved to be jolted out of these thoughts by Daniel saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ The semi-trained legal mind had come to life. ‘I wonder if the envelope’s here.’ He spread out the mess of old bills and shopping lists, and found a matching crumple of cream-coloured paper. ‘Yes. Same writing.’ He smoothed it out carefully and held it nearer to the window. ‘By God, you can actually read the postmark for once. Salisbury. Can you think of an R who lived in Salisbury?’

‘No. Is the date legible?’

‘Quite recent. 1990.’ He leaned towards the lights, gave the wheelchair a twist and moved a yard forward. ‘November 1990, can’t see the actual date, it’s smudged.’

Kate said, ‘She died in November 1990.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So this must have been about the last bee she ever had in her bonnet. Poor old Gran!’ As always the thought of Lydia’s death made her glance towards the staircase which clung to the further wall of the living-room. She stood up and went to look at it. Since their grandmother’s day an electric chair-lift had been installed for Daniel’s use—press a button and it made a purring ascent or descent, sliding on a rail.

‘If this had been there then she’d never have fallen.’

‘You think she’d have used it!’ Daniel took off his reading glasses and leaned back, smiling.

‘No, she probably wouldn’t.’

‘I’m damn sure she wouldn’t. She was an independent, bloody-minded old woman.’

Kate nodded. There were redeeming features, but in the years following her favourite son’s death the description was by and large fair. ‘You do take care, don’t you, Daniel?’

‘Care! I rise into heaven like Apollo in some eighteenth-century opera.’

‘No, I mean at the top, with your crutches.’ She had never been able to erase from her mind the irrationality of her grandmother’s death. ‘Why the hell didn’t she call for Sally if she felt … shaky?’

‘Oh, come on, you know she wouldn’t! She’d want to prove she could still do it on her own, shaky or not.’

Kate turned an abstracted gaze on him. ‘Just the sort of thing you’d do.’

‘Kate, I am not going to fall, I don’t want to.’

‘You think she wanted to?’

‘I don’t think she gave a damn, not after Father died. She more or less told me so.’

‘Told you! You were only a child.’

‘That made no difference. You don’t seem to have understood her at all; she didn’t mind being cruel.’

Kate nodded uncertainly. ‘She shouldn’t have said things like that to you.’

‘But that was the point. Since his death she was crippled mentally and I was crippled physically. She was telling me that we were neither of us duty-bound to cling to life if it became impossible.’

Kate was shocked; also touched at how easily he seemed to have accepted old Lydia’s parallel which struck her as lopsided, perhaps immoral. He added, ‘I was rather impressed—grateful in a way. She never used to treat me as a child; I’m surprised you didn’t notice.’

‘I suppose I did. She treated me like a child, she treated you like Father.’

‘Without the love.’ He could say it quite uncritically. Sometimes he made Kate feel young and inexperienced, which, in a way and compared with him, she was.

She went back into the room and sat on the sofa. From the kitchen came continued sounds of splintering wood and falling plaster. Kate kicked off her shoes and put her feet up. Daniel asked, ‘How’s the hotel, how’s Alex?’

‘Making money, mostly in the restaurant—his cooking gets better and better. He wants me to marry him.’ She had worked at Hill Manor for seven years now, ever since, at sixteen, she had decided against higher education in favour of earning money. Any academic talent in the family seemed to have been allocated to her brother: the only thing at which she excelled was languages. This may have had something to do with her finding a good job so easily. She’d answered an ad in The Lady and, a week later, been interviewed by Alex and Rosie Stratton at their already successful country hotel. He was then thirty-four and Rosie thirty-seven, wedded less to him than to the gin bottle: plump, lazy, good-natured even in her cups.

From the start, beaming, she had said, ‘Better watch it, Katie, Alex has got his eye on you.’ Whether this was true or not—and at sixteen it had seemed to her unlikely—she made very sure that neither he nor his wife would ever regret having engaged her. She worked hard, for long hours, and exerted all her charm on their behalf. But Rosie had been right: from his first sight of her, Alex had fallen in love, quietly and gently as he did everything else.

Within three years Rosie had relinquished all responsibility to this level-headed nineteen-year-old, and a year after that she left Hill Manor with relief and forever, going to live with her sister in Torquay, where they both drank gin, played bridge, and behaved like tipsy merry widows. She’d give Alex a divorce, she said, any time he wanted one. He wanted one now; he wanted to marry Kate, eighteen years his junior.

If her brother was surprised by this information he didn’t show it. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said it was a bit of a shock.’

‘Which it wasn’t.’

‘Right. I said I didn’t think I wanted to get married just yet.’

‘I suppose,’ said her brother judicially, ‘you could do worse.’

‘Of course I could. But I’m twenty-three.’

‘And he’s fortyish.’

‘I don’t care about his age.’ But even at that moment, thinking of Alex, there flared across her mind the picture of a very different man: young, flushed, black hair falling forward, black eyes glittering as he knelt above her, naked. Steve—one of her less favourite names, but what the hell had that got to do with it? And he didn’t want to get married either, he’d made that quite clear.

She sighed, thinking that probably the most extraordinary part of it was that it hadn’t happened to her sooner. Carefully she said, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve … sort of fallen for another guy.’

‘Poor old Alex! What’s he like?’

‘Sexy.’ She shook her head violently so that her fine brown hair flew wildly and she had to push it away from her face. ‘Oh God, I don’t know what he’s like. Appalling probably.’ She had postponed discussing this with her brother for four weeks now; it seemed unkind, even indecent, in view of the fact that he himself was forever denied any kind of sexual fulfilment; yet she had always discussed everything with him. She was touched when he jumped the hurdle for her, as he so often did: ‘“The ruling passion, be it what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still.”’ These occasional quotations seemed to slip into his mind unlearned and unbidden: something to do with his habits of analysis and note-taking. Kate was always astonished. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Pope, I think.’

‘Puts it in a nutshell.’

‘He usually does.’

‘His name’s Stephen Callender, he calls himself Steve, he’s twenty-eight, he was born in Hounslow, he’s sales director for Boyd Electronics.’

‘Young to be a director of anything.’

‘And our meeting stepped out of the pages of True Romance.’

Daniel laughed.

She’d seen him coming into the dining-room, alone but sure of himself, and had moved forward, as usual, to escort him to a table. As soon as he sat down he looked up at her and their eyes met. Something peculiar and hitherto unknown took place in her stomach. She gave him the menu and beat a hasty retreat. But, as in True Romance, there was no unqualified retreat short of walking away from Hill Manor there and then. When she took him his wine—a good one—he watched her opening it and nodded at her proficiency; then said, ‘Can we meet for a drink later, in the bar?’

Naturally, she could have said ‘No,’ but her heart was pounding in an alarming manner and she felt an overwhelming desire to touch his black hair; she had no control whatsoever over her reply: ‘I can’t see why not.’

She was sure that Alex would see them together in the bar; if he did, he would immediately sense that the situation was abnormal: Kate alone with a good-looking young man. She had very occasionally been known to join one or two of the old regulars, but only for an anniversary perhaps, or for a birthday celebration: once or twice because they were so rich or famous that refusal would have been professionally undiplomatic. And of course, Alex did see them, and the expression on his pleasant, fastidious face told her that he understood her better than she understood herself.

Meanwhile, as if it was the most usual thing in the world, Steve rested a firm dry hand on her leg under the table, and she, after a moment’s witless hesitation, put her own on top of it; their fingers intertwined; the attraction between them was like a powerful spring pulling navel to navel. To Kate it was all bizarre, the more so because it seemed so natural. Well, for God’s sake, it was natural; and when they eventually found themselves in bed together she realized, as most women do if they ever encounter it, that until this moment she had known nothing about sex, either as airborne ecstasy or remorseless quagmire.

Later, peering at her in half-darkness, he said, ‘Have you got a thing going with the boss?’

‘No. But he’s in love with me.’

‘Figures.’ And, frowning: ‘You’ll probably think this is bullshit, but I’ve never … felt quite like this before.’

She did think it was bullshit, but she didn’t care. To her brother she said, ‘It’s hopeless, I’ve just … gone overboard.’

‘Had to happen, didn’t it?’ He leaned forward and, at his most gentle, added, ‘Katie, you’re a smashing girl. Don’t think I expect to have you all to myself forever.’

The gentleness struck her like a blow in the face, knocking all thought of Steve right out of her mind. She flared up in sudden Kate-like anger: ‘What the hell are you talking about. No one, absolutely no one, ever, will make any difference to us!’ In anger she looked for a moment quite beautiful, which seemed to her brother to make the words even less believable. People who have been ill and in pain for a long time possess enormous reservoirs of patience and resignation upon which they can draw at any time; he was amused but not surprised that his sister didn’t yet realize this. Grandmother Lydia had realized it all right, because she shared it; that was why she had treated him as a grown man, even when he was fourteen.

As so often, Kate was aware of what was in his mind; her eyes strayed back to the staircase. She said, ‘We weren’t all that interested, were we? I mean, we heard that she’d fallen downstairs and killed herself, we didn’t do anything about it.’

‘She was never very nice to us, not after Father died. And anyway, I was in hospital yet again, you were virtually running a busy hotel, and Mother was married to Colonel Alistair in Aberdeen.’

‘She was always beastly to Mother.’

‘Always.’

‘We didn’t even come down for the funeral.’

‘I’m not sure we were asked.’

‘I hate funerals anyway, but that’s not the point. How did it happen, Daniel? And why wasn’t Sally around? Suddenly I want to know.’

‘Then pop up to the big house and ask The Cousins, they’ve probably got all the answers.’

‘The Cousins’ was their generic term, dating from childhood, not only for Giles, Lucy and Miranda Ackland who were in fact their first cousins, but also for Uncle Mark Ackland and Aunt Helen Ackland, his wife. The appellation had gained considerably in meaning when Kate and Daniel had come to read John le Carré and could appreciate the subtle, faintly derogatory manner in which, according to that writer, British Intelligence referred to American Intelligence as ‘The Cousins’. It exactly fitted their own uneasy relationship with the rest of their family.

In answer to her brother’s suggestion, Kate replied, ‘I don’t want to ask The Cousins.’

‘Ditto.’

‘I don’t even want to see The Cousins.’

‘Ditto.’

And, in unison: ‘The Cousins are rat-shit. Amen.’

It was the old childhood litany, and still, so many years later, it made them both laugh.