Читать книгу In the Blood - Philip Loraine - Страница 7

In her ignorance of passion—that unbroken maverick which can confound even the most cold-hearted—Kate was irritated to find that she could lie in bed, sleepless, her mind filled with one single and overwhelming desire: to feel Steve’s nakedness against her own.

After a time, a long time, she found that she could exorcise him by fixing her mind on another persistent dilemma: that strange letter. What bee in her grandmother’s bonnet could have produced so agonized, even panic-stricken a reaction from the unknown R of Salisbury? ‘You’d be opening a disastrous Pandora’s Box … If you do decide to take steps, for God’s sake talk to Andrew first … perhaps he can convince you to let sleeping (and perhaps dangerous) dogs lie.’ And why had the writer thought it necessary to ask Sally to burn the letter? It said nothing specific, was in fact maddeningly indefinite.

As for Daniel, he’d been teasing her when he’d said that if she wanted to know the answers to any mystifying questions concerning Lydia Ackland she had only to ask The Cousins. He knew as well as she did that old Lydia had never been on anything approaching good or intimate terms with her elder son, Mark—quite the reverse. Kate was vague as to the details; her parents had probably discussed them, but she had been ten at the time of her father’s death, and the antagonisms between the two brothers and, particularly, those between their mother and Mark would have fallen into the pas devant les enfants department; all the same, she’d gathered that the relationship had always been uncomfortable and could at times rise to savagery. No, there’d be no answers from The Cousins, even if she’d felt like asking any questions; and she didn’t.

Thinking about her family—as an antidote to Steve who had come bounding into her life with a flash of lightning like something out of pantomime—she realized that in fact she knew very little. If Grandmother Lydia had doted on her younger son, Kate’s father, and hadn’t a good word to say for his elder brother, surely this meant that Mark, in his youth, must have behaved very badly indeed. Now, on consideration, it seemed more than possible that this behaviour had led to his departure from England, a long time before Kate herself was born. Had he gone into voluntary exile, or had his mother and father brought pressure to bear on a black sheep? Pressure from Grandfather Robert would have been gentle, therefore bearable; pressure from Grandmother Lydia would have been absolute, possibly virulent.

He must have left some time in the late ’60s, shortly after his marriage to Helen, and had not come back until the 1980s, by which time his brother had been killed, and his mother (as a direct result of her favourite son’s death, Kate had heard it said) was going blind. The banishment, if that’s what it was, certainly had nothing to do with his marriage; Helen had been thoroughly ‘suitable’, coming as she did from one of the grander, if impecunious, families in the south of England.

All this was, to Kate, old old history, made more distant by her ignorance of the facts. What she, like everyone else, knew for certain was that Mark Ackland had now taken possession of his rightful heritage, donning the mantle of wealth and property which seemed to fit him very well. With his wife and children he lived up at Longwater in royal grandeur, for with the big house he had succeeded to the fortune and to the nearly three thousand acres that went with it. Since the estate was not far from Newbury, only fifty or so miles from London and therefore in an area much coveted by the well-heeled commuter, the value of those spreading acres was astronomical. He also owned villages and many farms, he even owned Woodman’s, graciously rented to Daniel, his crippled nephew, at a reduced rent. Apparently this was the ultimate extent of any family feeling; the old hostility towards his brother must have cut deep, and indeed, it seemed to have cut off that brother’s children from any familiarity whatever.

Oh, The Cousins were polite enough if chance led to some awkward meeting, and once a year before Christmas, Daniel and Kate were invited to a large party: the kind of party rich people are inclined to give for all the rag-tag-and-bobtail they feel bound—but not overly bound—to entertain. Knowing this, brother and sister never accepted. As far as The Cousins were concerned, she worked in some hotel—as a chambermaid for all they knew or cared—while he was crippled and did odd, charitably inspired jobs, and, to top it all, neither of them had any money. Finis.

‘The Cousins are rat-shit. Amen.’ Kate had never been bothered by them and was not bothered now; they had never played any part in her life, a non-situation which, as far as she was concerned, could continue until they all dropped dead. Ah, but how far was she concerned? And how far had a certain letter, not at the moment understood, altered the balance of all their relationships … ? But she had forgotten the letter, she had forgotten The Cousins, she had even forgotten the demon lover. She was asleep.

Daniel was not asleep. He slept very little: perhaps three or even four hours a night if he was lucky. His legs pained him, but they’d been doing that for nearly two-thirds of his life; he could live with it, he knew how to arrange them to their best advantage. What really worried him now was the knowledge that his right leg, the one they’d eventually been able to reconstruct with such success, was weakening. He didn’t want to go back to hospital; hospitals had scared him from the very beginning when he had lain there feeling trapped while groups of men and women had discussed his legs which, due to anaesthetics, could well have belonged to someone else. Since then he had returned five times for further surgery, and had once or twice descended into such deeps of despair that he had seriously considered the cold, practical advice of his grandmother: for different reasons they neither of them had any obligation to cling to life if it became intolerable.

He felt that things would have been very different if he could have stayed at university and taken his degree; then his life would have had a clear-cut purpose, keeping him in touch with the world and with people; moreover the purpose would have been an end in itself, validating his disability. Daniel Ackland, lawyer, could have heaved or wheeled himself about some city, secure in the knowledge that he was of use. Daniel Ackland, part-time researcher, was too aware of his uselessness even to consider a city life with its many mind-saving interests; and so he lived in a delightful cottage in the middle of beautiful woodland where his only links with the world were books, radio not television (by choice), his work, and the loyalty and love of his sister. Without Kate he might well have foundered, and they both knew it.

In a way he had genuinely loved his grandmother, Lydia; her spiky and eccentric ways made sense to him, even as a boy, and he had often found echoes of her in his study of the Law, with which, though she despised it, she shared an outstanding lack of sentimentality. So it was in many ways fitting that the discovery of an old letter, written to her and then lost, was about to release him from the bondage of uselessness.

It was the kind of situation which even she might have found amusing; he had only ever seen her smile at the wry contradictions of life.

Kate’s visits to her brother at Woodman’s always felt like weekends, but they could never occupy any part of Saturday or Sunday, when Hill Manor was always filled with guests and fully booked for every meal. Only with the arrival of lackadaisical Monday, or sometimes Sunday evening now that she’d trained her assistant, Maureen, could she escape from her commitments. She knew that in many ways she now was the Manor; people who wanted to book asked for her by name and expected her to be everywhere at all times. Alex, in his kitchen, was the most vital component but, a shy man, he preferred to remain unseen; it was Kate’s efficiency and poise, and in particular her charm, which oiled the mechanism and kept it in smooth running order. So almost every week, and because Alex gave her very special licence, she was able to spend Sunday night, the whole of Monday and part of Tuesday with Daniel.

This particular visit was almost over; would have been entirely over if Daniel had not said at breakfast on Tuesday morning, ‘You know that woman who used to clean the place for Grandmother … ?’

‘Mrs Tyson, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. She still lives in the village.’

For Kate this was a minor turning point. An hour ago in her bath she had decided that the whole business of their grandmother’s death, and the ambiguous letter which had preceded it, were matters best left alone. Her review of their relationship with The Cousins had only strengthened this decision. The past had been turbulent, often bitter, and was best left to moulder away in other people’s memories, since neither she nor Daniel had any personal memory of it at all. The letter had intrigued them, but if damp had not attacked the wainscotting just to the left of the kitchen door they would never have known of its existence, never have been drawn towards the peculiar but irrelevant questions it raised. They had their own lives to lead.

But, she now supposed, there was something more profound lying beneath the calm surface of such reasoning, because her heart jumped at her brother’s piece of information and she knew that nothing on God’s earth could make her drive away until she’d heard what Mrs Tyson might have to say.

‘How would we … I mean, she’ll think it a bit odd, us suddenly asking questions about things that happened years ago.’

‘Why?’ He held up the now dry but still stained sheet of creamy writing-paper. ‘Why shouldn’t we be curious? She’ll remember that shelf.’

Meg Tyson had not changed at all in the five years since they’d last seen her. She was one of those women, aged perhaps fifty, in whom one could clearly see the girl she had been at fifteen: a tip-tilted nose, a firm mouth not much given to smiling, fairish hair, hardly showing a streak of grey, pulled back into a bun. Kate would have betted that she still put it in pigtails at night.

They joined her for a cup of tea in her small kitchen where an ancient but immaculate washing-machine grumbled and gushed in the corner. On the other side of the room an old man sat on a window-seat, filling in football-pools with much reference to various tattered sports pages.

‘Takes them serious, don’t you, Dad?’ There was no answer. Mrs Tyson touched her ear by way of explanation. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear that a number of things had dropped down the back of the shelf. ‘Tried sticking Sellotape along it, I did, but the damp soon put paid to that.’

When it came to somebody whose christian name began with R who lived in Salisbury, who had stayed a weekend with Lydia Ackland shortly before her death, Mrs Tyson was flummoxed, with good reason: ‘I used to go up Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, you see. There was that much to do here come weekends.’ So any guest arriving on a Friday and leaving on Sunday evening, or even early on Monday, moved in and out of Woodman’s with her never having seen them. ‘I remember helping Sally make up the spare bed a while before Mrs Ackland’s death, but just when …’ She shook her neat head.

Kate said, ‘We thought we might talk to Sally too, but we don’t know where to find her.’

‘Ah! Well that’s something I can tell you. Never misses a Christmas, bless her.’ She went to a drawer in the dresser. ‘Such pretty cards, I can always put a finger on them. There we are, Mrs Ferris she is now.’

She had hitherto shown a commendable lack of curiosity about the contents of the lost-and-found letter, but now, as she put the Christmas card on the table, Kate noticed her taking a good look at it. She and Daniel had decided that they’d be wise to keep its contents to themselves, so she placed Sally’s card on top of it and pushed them both over to her brother; he made a note of the address and telephone number, returned the card with a smile, folded the letter and put it in his pocket.

Kate said, ‘It’s just curiosity on our part.’

‘And why not? I can tell you I was pretty curious myself. There was something … I don’t know, something not quite right about any of that.’

Daniel said, ‘You mean her death.’

‘Bless you, yes. It wasn’t … like her to fall, now was it?’

At this, the old man on the window-seat, whose hearing can’t have been bad at all, looked up and said, ‘Fall! That’s a good’un!’

‘Now you be quiet, Dad. Why don’t you go down the Woolpack and do them pools there?’

With surprising obedience he stood up immediately, gathering his pieces of paper, and crossed to the open back door. There he paused, looked back at brother and sister, and said, ‘Fall my arse!’

Meg Tyson was a trifle—but only a trifle—put out. ‘Men! And they call us the gossips!’

Both Daniel and Kate had been fascinated by the old man’s parting shot. Daniel said, ‘Was there … you know—a lot of talk about her death in the village?’

‘In this village there’s a lot of talk if a cat has kittens.’

‘But your father,’ Daniel persisted, ‘seems to think she didn’t fall. What’s that supposed to mean, that she was pushed?’

‘Oh heavens, there wasn’t no end to the daft stories went around! But if you said, “All right, who pushed her then, and what did they stand to gain?” they’d scratch their heads and look stupid—and so they are. Then there was a lot of nonsense about thousands of pounds under the floorboards and a fortune in jewellery. I sometimes think you could certify this whole village and do no injustice.’

‘All the same,’ suggested Kate, ‘you just said it your-self—there does seem to have been something not quite right about the way she died.’

Despite her little speech concerning the stupidity of her fellow villagers, Meg Tyson was by nature sensible and cautious; she considered the matter in silence for a moment, clearly wondering whether or not to go any further: which lent added weight to her words when finally she said, ‘Put it this way. I must have seen Mrs Ackland come down those stairs dozens—no hundreds—of times since she lost her sight, and never once did she ever falter.’ With which she shut her prim little mouth tightly to indicate that enough had been said.

This piece of investigation had taken too long, and Kate, who was always back at the hotel by midday, was now late—which meant driving up and over the Cotswolds faster than she felt to be safe. She was therefore abstracted, and Daniel, sensing it, didn’t ask questions or pursue his own reasoning out loud. When they reached Woodman’s he rolled swiftly out of the car and upright on to his crutches.

Kate said, ‘Sorry! You know what I’m like.’

‘It doesn’t matter—we can discuss it next week. And don’t drive too fast, you’re not that late.’

He stood there, watching her go, and, as always, the sight of his slightly twisted figure, diminishing in the rear mirror, then lost to sight, aroused in her the usual pang of pity and admiration and love. Sometimes she dreamed he was cured—or was it a dream of their youth before the crash?—and they were running together over short springy turf, running and laughing.

Hill Manor Hotel could hardly have been more perfectly positioned as far as Kate was concerned: only fifty miles from Woodman’s, door to door. Daniel had been right, she wasn’t that late, but swung into her parking space in front of the no-nonsense Early Victorian façade with ten minutes to spare. The first thing she saw when she went behind the desk was that Mr Stephen Callender had booked into his usual room, Number 22—there had been no prior arrangement.

All thoughts of her grandmother’s death and of the mysterious letter, which had occupied her mind during the drive, were instantly forgotten. Her stomach dropped inside her and she could not, for a good minute, think of even one of the many duties she ought to be performing. The reaction seemed to her too extreme; it offended her sense of efficiency.

He did not emerge for luncheon but, according to Room Service, ordered a smoked salmon omelette, green salad, and a bottle of Pils to be sent up to him. This was unusual, but Kate, going into the dining-room to check tables, didn’t altogether mind being rid of his presence which, though undemanding, demanded all her attention. The meal on this sunny Tuesday provided trouble enough, with twice the number of expected guests and everybody, for some reason, wanting Dover Sole. Many had to make do with something else because, as was well known, Alex refused to freeze fish or meat.

But despite such preoccupations, Kate’s heart was pounding furiously when, at four o’clock, she tapped lightly on the door of Number 22 and went in. She had expected him to be working, but he was standing at the window staring down into the garden, and even though he was smiling when he turned, some trace of a previous thought, an uneasy thought, still clung to him. Kate ran into his arms and, locked in them, his demanding mouth over hers, fell on to the bed beneath him. They had not seen each other for five days—an eternity.

But sexual satisfaction, however absolute, was one thing, that shadow of unease another. Later, when he was propped on one elbow, gazing down at his hand as it moved gently over her body, she again caught some shadow of it behind his eyes. ‘Steve, what’s wrong?’

Still caressing her, he said, ‘This is.’

She sat up, perturbed, but he pressed her down, leaning on her, hairy chest holding her flat. She said, ‘Look—if this is some kind of brush-off I’d rather have it straight. I’ll survive—probably.’

He grimaced and shook his head. ‘I told you I’d never felt like this before; you didn’t believe me.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘It’s true.’ She saw that it well might be. ‘I want to be with you, Kate. I want us to spend time together, know each other. I don’t go for these … hurried sessions.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Five past five. Less than an hour and you’ve got to be on duty.’

She nodded.

‘I was free all weekend—wanting you, not knowing what to do with myself. But you were working. Then, on Monday when you were free, I had to be in Leeds at a conference.’

She looked away from his troubled eyes.

‘And even if I hadn’t been in Leeds, there’s your brother—don’t say anything, of course you have to be with him, poor sod!’

‘I can’t … Steve, I won’t give up my job.’

‘Why should you? You’ve worked damned hard to get where you are.’ He didn’t need to say that the same was true of him, she already knew it. Like her, he had seen no point in further education, and in any case, he came of a humble background and didn’t possess the qualifications for university even if he’d wanted to go to one. Also, he had a widowed mother in Hounslow who, in spite of a variety of unskilled and demeaning jobs which he hated her doing, was in reality dependent on him.

All this had been woven into his thoughts as he’d stood at the window waiting for Kate, and the more he considered their relationship the less tenable it seemed. He’d become involved with the one girl among hundreds, thousands, whose life ran counter to his. They were fixed in different orbits, forever sweeping past each other in opposite directions.

Steve Callender had started out as a nothing, a dogsbody in one of the larger advertising firms, but he’d been a bright lad, eager to learn, personable, clever at hiding his ambition from those who would resent it. His rise may have seemed spectacular to others, but to him, with his nose to the grindstone, it seemed exactly what it was: years and years of slogging application. The first time he changed jobs it really did look as if he’d misjudged the upward leap and would fall into the gaping abyss of failure. In the event he’d managed to claw his way upward once more and the gamble had paid off. It had also given him courage when, two years later, the opportunity arose again. Knowing he was too young and inexperienced he’d taken another, even more dangerous leap across the chasm to Boyd Electronics; exerting every iota of charm and audacity at his command, and lying through his teeth, he had managed to heave himself up and over and into an executive position: now the executive position.

No, he wasn’t going to abandon that for any girl, not even for Kate, and because of it he understood that she wasn’t going to abandon her job either; she knew it backwards, she was good at languages, and within a year or two she could jump from the eminence of Hill Manor (highly recommended in every guide he’d ever seen) to almost any job she wanted anywhere in the world.

Studying his face, watching the shadows of his thoughts flitting across it, she realized that after all these weeks she was only now seeing it clearly for the first time. Because he was a successful young man in a cut-throat world she had not, until this moment, really believed that he was as soft and vulnerable under the carapace as any other human being. He wanted to spend time with her, he wanted them to know each other and understand each other as deeply in their hearts as they had, from the first moment, understood each other in their bodies.

It shamed her that he had the courage and honesty to face up to the fatal divergence between them whereas she had not. Somewhere at the back of her mind arose the unwelcome thought that he could do this because he genuinely loved her while she had merely been overcome by lust for him.

She rolled off the bed and went into his bathroom for a shower. Normally he would have joined her and they would have indulged in the usual amorous games; but this time he did not, and she felt bereft, already lost without him.

Enfolded in a vast towel she went back to the bed, where he was still lying, and studied him. Weakly, but then she felt weak, she said, ‘I … don’t think I can take it, Steve.’

‘Oh God, how d’you think I feel?’

She would like to have said that she loved him, but had long ago made up her mind never to say it until she was absolutely sure. So she wasn’t absolutely sure! Looking up at her woebegone expression, he reached out and pulled her into the sitting position, facing him squarely. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s really nothing to do with us as people, it’s our jobs. We’re neither of us going to give them up; why the hell should we? We’re not children, we know what life’s about. You may want to go on with this … hole-and-corner affair, I don’t. I care for you too much, Kate, and we’re going nowhere.’ He echoed it with passion: ‘Nowhere!’

‘Do we … you know, have to make it final?’

‘Jesus, how do I know? What’s “final” anyway? But we’ve got to break the link, we can’t go on seeing each other, it’d be too painful.’

‘It’s painful anyway.’

‘Kate.’ He took her by both shoulders and shook her a little. ‘We must be able to live without this constant …’

‘Interference?’

‘Sounds awful but it’ll do. Interference. Always wanting to be with you when it’s impossible. I damn near cocked-up an important meeting yesterday.’

Kate stood and moved away, troubled by a suspicion that he might be right. What about the stab of irritation she’d experienced because his unheralded arrival had momentarily undermined her famous efficiency? And hadn’t she been relieved not to have him in the dining-room, knowing how much his presence there would have unsettled her? She grimaced at these thoughts and said, ‘I tell you what, let’s plan to go on holiday together. We really might … one day.’

Gently, because she sounded so forlorn, he replied, ‘Yes, love, we might.’

‘I know it’s a bit wet, but I can bear it that way, Steve. It’s the finality I can’t take.’

‘OK. I’ll book a couple of weeks in Shangri-La—how about September?’

They smiled tenuously at one another. Only later would Kate wonder if, like her Scottish mother, she was subject to second-sight.