Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  He had heard a lot of confessions in his time; that was part of the work he did, to listen to the frightened and the dying and to grant the absolution of silence. He had heard, oh, all kinds of things, usually much more terrible than this, and they hadn’t very often made him angry. If this did, then he didn’t have to go very far to guess the reason.

  “So why tell me about it?” He held up his open hands in front of him and then let them come down on the edge of the table with a slap. “I’m sorry. Is that what you wanted to hear? I am sorry. I really am. But there isn’t anything I can do about it if you’ve had a lousy time with Holman Duelle—I didn’t exactly plead with you to marry him. I didn’t ask you to leave me in the first place, for that matter. And it strikes me as a little late in the day to be asking for refunds.”

  He pushed himself up out of his chair and walked into the living room, just as if she had been invisible. Whatever she would have to say, whatever answer, whatever wickedly clever little comeback she might be readying, he didn’t want to hear it.

  Even in the living room, Guinness could feel her eyes on him through the open door to the kitchen. From the dining room there was a sliding glass panel out to an enclosed porch and beyond that to the back lawn.

  He stepped out onto the grass that sloped, very gradually at first but then with increasing steepness, down to the surface of the lake. A bald spot here and there showed the usual red clay; the soil’s horticultural drawbacks were demonstrated by a pitiful little fruit tree, not much thicker through the shaft than a man’s thumb, that seemed ready, even eager, to collapse, if not for the garden stake to which it had been tied, like a crucified slave.

  There was still dew on the ground, at least where the shadow of the house extended; Guinness could see it glistening on the caps of his shoes. It wouldn’t last much longer, though. The sun was brutal, and it wasn’t more than a few minutes past eleven in the morning.

  There was nowhere to go, really, except down to the water. A small wooden pier extended seven or eight feet from the shore and, standing on the edge, Guinness could see a number of finger length fish of uncertain species—he was no fisherman—swimming lazily back and forth between the shade that the pier furnished and the slick, greenish light. They seemed to be waiting for something.

  “She feeds them.” He turned around and saw Kathleen sitting behind him on the lawn, not twenty feet away. She hadn’t made a sound. “She saves bread crumbs and feeds the fish every morning and in the afternoon, when she comes home from school. It’s one of Holman’s great jokes that he’s going to net them all and we’ll have a fish fry. He goes on and on about how good they’ll be and how you can eat the little ones heads and all. I’ve seen him make her cry that way, more than once.”

  “Will you shut up about Duelle?” he snapped, turning away from her. He jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and stared gloomily into the lake. “You don’t know what a bore it is to stand here listening to stories about what an ogre you married.”

  They were still there, just a few inches under the surface, his daughter’s fish. Probably she would never see them again, and she might spend a good part of the rest of her life wondering if Duelle had ever carried out his threat.

  He wished he had something for the fish; they might even eat it. Louise’s birds had known better and would never come down out of the telephone wires until after he had gone back into the house and closed the door behind him, but probably fish weren’t that spooky.

  “I’m sorry—I know I must sound awful.”

  He didn’t want to look at her; he didn’t want to feel sorry for her, to feel anything for her at all. But he had to, both to look and to feel. There were tears in her eyes, something he had seen too many times over the past few days, and she sat with her hands twisted together in front of her mouth, as if she were biting the side of a finger.

  “Not awful,” he said quietly, “just bitter and hurt—I suppose you have the right. I’m sorry too.”

  He smiled, and then she smiled back, and then things were okay again between them. They seemed to do the same thing over and over again, have these little spats and then make them up. They probably hadn’t spent more than seven or eight hours together since that first morning he had rung her front doorbell, but the tiny quarrels they had fought and patched up seemed beyond counting.

  He sat down beside her and put his arm over her shoulder—somehow it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do, as if they were still married and nothing had ever happened to change the way they felt about each other—and they talked.

  They talked about a lot of things, great and small, about Rocky’s reluctance to join the Brownies and the weaknesses of the Pickens County school system, about Kathleen’s long and bitter feud with the Winn-Dixie over the unavailability of veal, all kinds of things. It might have been his lawn they were sitting on, and his house behind them. He might simply have been away on a long business trip, to be filled in on whatever of family history had occurred in his absence.

  He had drawn his knee up towards himself, and Kathleen had put her arms around it, precisely as she used to do in the old days in London, when they would sit on the floor of their apartment living room to kill a rainy Sunday afternoon listening to the phonograph. He understood, if she did not, that this was only a moment, an interlude, that it would pass and they would be again what they had become, simply strangers who had once, a long time ago, shared the past.

  But that could wait—the future had a habit of taking care of itself. They wronged no one if they stayed here a little longer, sitting on Holman Duelle’s lawn, pretending that he had never existed. He could be depended upon not to die simply because they two might fail, for a while, to remember that he lived. He was a durable fellow, no doubt, and would be back soon enough.

  In the meantime, Guinness could feel the ground moisture through the seat of his trousers and, conscious that he probably wouldn’t cut a very romantic figure with a grass stain covering his ass, decided it was time to get up. He and Kathleen could be warm and intimate together just as easily inside—easier.

  And then a thought struck him.

  “Let’s go toast some bread crumbs,” he said, watching the pier heave as it rode out the swell from a passing speedboat. It made an odd sucking sound each time a wave pushed it up.

  “What?”

  He smiled and slid his hand in between her rib cage and her arm. “I said, let’s go toast up some bread crumbs. You don’t want the fish to miss breakfast, do you?”

  His hand dropped down to his side, and she took it, and they walked back toward the house together.

  19

  Their honeymoon had been a weekend in a microscopic town in Cornwall called Padstow, and the rain had followed them down from London. They didn’t care, though—they could open their hotel room window and smell the sea, and the food was pretty good. And, anyway, nobody goes on a honeymoon to look at the scenery. The whole thing had been a tremendous success.

  And that Sunday afternoon, at least, it didn’t rain. They would be all night making the trip back, first by bus to Bodmin and then all the way to London by train; Guinness had a class of his sixth formers nine o’clock Monday morning. But they had a few hours yet, so they put on their boots and heavy sweaters and took a walk by the cliff side. It was glorious. The sea down below sounded like it meant to tear the world apart, and you almost couldn’t stand up for the landward wind. It made you think of Joseph Conrad—”If you want to know the age of the earth, look at the sea in a storm”—except that there weren’t any palm trees.

  By the time they had trudged back to the hotel, Kathleen’s hair was stiff with salt and tangled beyond any possibility of combing, and they both felt half dead from the effort of bracing against what almost amounted to a gale. They had never had so much fun in their lives.

  The next day, back in London, Guinness could barely keep his eyes open and actually fell asleep in a chair in the faculty common room. His colleagues thought it
was extremely funny and made a number of lewd jokes at his expense. But Guinness didn’t mind; he was twenty-seven years old, and he and Kathleen were going to be happy forever.

  They had been disabused of that notion fast enough. In Kathleen’s bed, in her second story bedroom, in this prefab, fake Early American house in the sovereign state of South Carolina, so many years and so many miles from the cliffs of Cornwall, he didn’t feel particularly immortal. He couldn’t answer for Kathleen, who seemed to be asleep and whose naked back beside him looked as smooth and strong as it had then; he couldn’t really say a word about Kathleen, but he didn’t need a fortune teller to persuade him that Raymond M. Guinness wasn’t getting out of this life alive.

  As he lay on his side, however, looking out at the treetops through the window facing the front of Holman Duelle’s house, he decided not to let it worry him. Like the poet said, men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. He had survived losing Kathleen once. She had survived. They hadn’t either of them been happy, perhaps, but still they had limped along. It doesn’t really kill you. Not really.

  In London, after she had left him, he had thought for a while that maybe it would. It had been a bad time.

  MI-6 doesn’t like its people quitting—you were supposed to fall in the line of duty or, if you lived that long, which wasn’t very likely in Guinness’s end of the business, take your pension at the conclusion of a long and gory career and retire in silence to a cottage on the Isle of Wight. You weren’t supposed to tell them to go fuck themselves and then hang around London in an alcoholic fog; it made them nervous.

  So they had followed him around, waiting for the people at Whitehall to make up their minds whether to put a bag over his head and drop him in a hole somewhere, for keeps. He had made a point of being easy to follow, enjoying the game, keeping a small Spanish automatic in the pocket of his raincoat and staying just sober enough so that he would know what he was doing if things should happen to break that way. He planned to make as many of them come with him as he could manage. They could kill him if they wanted—hell, what did he care?—but it was going to cost them.

  In the end, of course, Whitehall saw the wisdom of relenting, and an accord was reached. Guinness even went back to work, for one final job. One last little piece of work and then good bye forever.

  He tried to push it out of his mind. He wanted to touch Kathleen, simply to touch her back as she lay beside him, but his hand was cold—his whole body was suddenly cold—and he didn’t want to startle her awake. So he threw his arm over his eyes and lived through it all again, as he had week after week, year after year, ever since it had happened.

  The retribution of memory, the recurring punishment he could never evade, had no right even to try evading. A justice visited upon him from time to time, something it was just necessary to learn to live with.

  An explosion, a burning car, the look on a man’s face as he realizes what is happening—all a long time ago, in sunny Italy. The woman inside the car is that man’s wife, and he will never forgive what is being done to her, even though another woman—who, like his own wife, simply got in the way—lies dead on a kitchen floor in sunny California. He will never forgive, even after you’ve killed him. Your punishment, it seems, will be to be left alive to remember.

  But it passes. Retribution is measured out in small doses, and not so often that there would be any likelihood of your ever growing bored.

  Kathleen was beginning to stir. He was only too glad. He moved across toward her and kissed her on the shoulder blade.

  “Mmh! What time is it?” She picked her head up abruptly and glowered at the wall behind her, as if annoyed that it hadn’t answered her question.

  “A little before one,” he answered, turning to look at the clock radio on the dresser. “Is that a problem?”

  She rolled over slowly, a cascade of lustrous, darkish blond hair and pink flesh, and pushed her arms straight up into the air, her fists clenched, seeming to wring the drowsiness out of them. She was still very firm; the businesslike voluptuousness of the girl he had once married on a rainy day in London was still there, and he experienced a little twinge of longing.

  “No, no problem. Rocky has her lunch at school—they sit out on the playground and exchange bullfrogs and peanut butter sandwiches. It’s quite social, really. She’d never forgive me if I made her come home.

  “Are you hungry?” she went on, suddenly brightening. “I could fix something; we could split a can of Chef Boy-Ar­Dee ravioli with cheese, always a big favorite.” Suddenly she brought her hands down to cover her mouth and laughed into her fingers. It was nice to know she hadn’t been serious.

  “We can eat lunch anytime.” He moved closer to her and buried his face in her hair, thinking that if he lived to be a thousand he would never shake this yearning for her, for the smell and the taste of her, for the small sound she made when he rested the side of his thumb against a certain spot on her back. No, he was reasonably sure he would hunger for these things for the rest of his life.

  She turned on her side, so that her breasts just brushed against him and their faces were very close. Her hand touched his face.

  “Well, if you’d rather not—”

  . . . . .

  “Our Friend the Atom is about atoms. It explains how atom bombs work and that atoms are made of little pieces called protons and neutrons and electrons. The electrons spin around the nucleus, just like the world does around the sun. Some atoms have more protons and electrons and are bigger than others. Hydrogen is the littlest and uranium is very big but not the biggest.”

  “Robinson Crusoe gets lost on an island where there are no other people and has to live there a long time. He gets to go home but first he saves a native from cannibals and has to fight pirates. He makes a boat on the island out of a tree and has lots of adventures. When he goes home he is attacked by wolves and is very rich.”

  “This summer we went to Myrtle Beach for a vacation. After a week daddy had to come home to Clemson and mommy and I stayed in a house on the beach. It was very hot there. Mommy says that next year we may go to Washington.”

  The paper was heavy and almost gray, with wide lines. There were pages and pages of this sort of thing, some of them with little drawings in one corner but most without. The handwriting was surprisingly mature and, even more surprising, there were no misspellings. Guinness read through a few more—a book report on turtles, a paragraph on John Calhoun, a three sentence description of a trip to Atlanta—and decided that his daughter’s mind owed more to Kathleen’s genetic endowments than to his own. Very much a girl for the main point was little Rocky, no pestering oneself with nuances. The kind of intelligence that sees life in decided and clear terms.

  They were sitting in the kitchen, at opposite sides of the circular glass breakfast table. Kathleen had brought a shoe box down from the bedroom closet, and it was filled with this stuff. Report cards, essays, drawings in crayon and garish, watery paint.

  “Would you like to see her room?”

  Guinness shook his head. “Not yet—later.” He smiled, not wanting to seem uninterested or to hurt her feelings, but finding it impossible to explain. “In a little while.”

  The fingers of one hand were resting on a Mother’s Day card and he tried to look as if he were reading it; in actual fact, he could barely see it. It seemed to swim in front of his eyes.

  Kathleen was being very kind, but it was astonishing that she couldn’t grasp what this crash course in their daughter was doing to him. How could he possibly tell her that he would be better off not knowing anything? To know that she was safe and happy and well, that would be something, a positive pleasure; but to know her. . . What good could memories do him? He had too many as it was.

  “Never tell her. Promise me you’ll never tell her.” To his own ear the words sounded thick with strain, uncertain victories over something that almost amounted to grief. But perhaps Kathleen might not have noticed. These thin
gs didn’t always show.

  But of course she had noticed. She wasn’t blind.

  “If you want,” she said, putting out her hands to be held. It was an awkward embrace across even such a small table. “But it wouldn’t kill her, you know. She could use a father; she’s never really had one, and even if you only saw her once in a while—she might just prefer what you are to what she has now.”

  Guinness released her and got out of his chair, turning to stand beside the kitchen window that looked out on the street. Damned stupid woman, what could she possibly know about what he was now? When had she ever had any idea about what he was?

  It wasn’t that he was ashamed; it wasn’t quite as simple as that. But how could a nine year old girl ever be expected to understand that her father murdered people on retainer? And if she could understand, really understand, then wouldn’t that be worse? No, there were certain burdens he would vastly prefer that his daughter should not have to carry. The pleasures of family life would be small in comparison with the damage he would do. It had been that way with Kathleen, and after her with Louise. It would always be that way.

  “What will you do?” he asked, still looking out through the filmy curtains. It was a way to change the subject. “Will you go back to Seattle?”

  Her tone, when she answered, was surprised and a little bitter.

  “I suppose. I suppose you can file a divorce there as well as anywhere—maybe I’ll even use the same lawyer.”

  “Will you marry again?”

  Her response was prefaced by a chilly silence, and then a short, contemptuous laugh. It was just as well that he had his back to her.

  “How stupid do you think I am? Thank you, no. I’ll settle for being a two time loser. I’m not ambitious to make it three.”

  They left it at that for a while; there are times when perhaps it’s better not to have everything spelled out for you, and if they went on they’d only end badly. Neither of them wanted that.

  So Guinness stayed at his window, pretending to watch the grass grow, and Kathleen sat behind her cup of by now room temperature tea and perhaps wondered what great crime she could have committed to be so punished in her private destiny. They had never understood each other. Not really. Each in a personal, peculiar way had loved the other. Even now, even at this extremity, they might still be said to be in love. Guinness knew perfectly well that, provided there would be time for such things, he would probably die with her name upon his lips, even if he lived to be an old man. Perhaps the same might be true of her, he couldn’t tell. But if it were, then it would prove not only the great strength of love, of the grand passion that the ancients had regarded as the worst curse of the gods, but also how little it depends on sympathy and insight.