The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  He said, "Happy with the way it's going?"

  "I reckon so," she replied.

  "Alina got curious. She's gone over for a closer look."

  "And what about you?"

  "I can live without it. Dance with me?"

  "Sure."

  The marble-floored hall as almost deserted now, just two couples moving slowly under the glitterball light. There were chairs around the sidelines with one or two pairs of beady eyes watching from the gloom. It was the kind of music where you had to dance close. Perhaps that was why he'd waited.

  They took hold of each other with an awkward kind of formality, and he said, "I was looking for you earlier."

  "I've been around," she said as they moved out onto the floor. It was hopeless. Maybe one day, she was thinking, her head and her hormones might agree over something; and on that day the sun would rise and shine all morning, and fish would leap in the river, and all of her bills would turn out to be rebates.

  "Listen," Pete said, and she sensed a deliberate change of track. "I'm not sure how to say this, but I want to ask you something. I've been working on it for most of the week, so don't make me mess it up. Okay?"

  "Go ahead."

  "Would you go out with me?"

  She waited.

  And then she said, "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  "And you're being serious?"

  "Now, wait. There's been a big misunderstanding and I want to clear it up before it gets any worse. You get to hear that I'm sharing my house with a five foot bombshell who can make a grown man go weak at a single glance, and you leap to the obvious conclusion. Right?"

  "Who wouldn't?"

  "Well, you're wrong. Dead wrong, and that's what I have to explain. I like you, Mrs Jackson, and I think I could get you to like me. And life's too short to miss out on the chance of it for the wrong kinds of reasons."

  "You can keep talking, Mr McCarthy. But you'd better bear in mind, I've been worked-over and walked over by experts. If you're going to tell me that she's your sister, I'd say you'll have to try harder."

  He shook his head.

  "I barely know her. The more I see of her, the more I realise how much of a stranger she is to me. She came over to me one night and she asked me for a lift. She had nowhere to aim for and she was just about destitute, and there was trouble following her as well. She asked me for nothing more, she didn't want to cause me problems, but I couldn't just walk away from her. So I brought her to the valley. I didn't expect her to stay so long, but I made the offer and I have to stick with it. We've got separate rooms, we lead separate lives, most days we don't even meet up. We're only together tonight because you put us both on the same invitation. I don't know what else I can tell you, Diane, but that's the way it is. What do you say?"

  He seemed serious. She said, "Why are you so keen to convince me?"

  "Say you're convinced, and you'll find out. Well?"

  He was watching her. Either he was dead straight, or else he was the sharpest operator — bar none, including the guy she'd met on a singles' holiday who'd almost managed to convince her that he was on his final fling with only ninety days left to live — that she had ever encountered.

  He was still watching her.

  "I'm thinking about it," she said.

  With their curiosity satisfied and the music too slow to be interesting, Wayne and Sandy had taken themselves out into the gardens to cool off. It was dark out there and it was relatively private, and Wayne had managed to spirit out an entire punchbowl, still half full. They sat against the wall of the house, just under the stone parapet of the first floor terrace. Wayne was hoping that nobody else would get any ideas about joining them.

  He said, "So that's the lord of the manor. What did you think of him?"

  "He's okay," Sandy said, in the same kind of tone that she'd probably use to describe an indifferent sandwich. "A bit too smooth, though."

  "He didn't look it," Wayne said. His own feeling had been that Dizzy Liston looked like some amiable, well-heeled scarecrow.

  Sandy said, "They're the dangerous ones," and then she looked into her glass even though it was really too dark to see anything of it. "What's in this stuff?"

  "Fruit juice, mostly," Wayne said airily. "Maybe a bit of wine."

  "How strong is it?"

  "Not very. They water it down, that's how come there's so much of it knocking around."

  Tentatively, he put his arm around her. She leaned against him comfortably, and he began to wonder about the possibilities in aiming for the wide sleeve of her dress.

  "I expect my mum would like him," Sandy said. "She likes them well worn but lovable. Comes from listening to a lot of Country and Western music."

  "What would it take to make her like me?"

  "Well, you could stop picking me up in that van. And you could inherit a couple of million and go to Oxford. And maybe win a medal for rescuing Prince William from a fire."

  "You think that would do it?"

  "You'd be about halfway there."

  Sandy turned herself slightly, and Wayne suddenly discovered that he was sitting there with his sleeve strategy in tatters and most of her right breast in his hand. She wasn't wearing a bra. He didn't know what to do next. Sandy, leaning with her head on his shoulder, carried on as if nothing was untoward.

  "She doesn't actually say anything against you," she explained. "She'd just be happier if you were a drip with glasses and lots of qualifications, that's all. I mean, I'd like to make her happy, but there are limits."

  "Yeah," Wayne said, still feeling somewhat stunned and very lightheaded. "Yeah, I suppose there are."

  She looked down at his hand, which was tense and unmoving.

  She said, "Are we doing anything here, or what?"

  Inside and on the dance floor, Pete and Diane suddenly found that people were drifting back and the music was getting loud again. It was a sure sign that Dizzy's fraternisation period was over. Conversation had now become difficult, and Diane still hadn't given Pete a definite answer to his question.

  Nor did she feel quite ready to; and now she leaned close to his ear, and raised her voice.

  "Give me some time," she said. "I'd better go and see how it went."

  Pete nodded and moved off to look for some more of Bob Ivie's jungle juice, and Diane eased her way through into the ballroom. She was already starting to feel battered by the increased level of the sound, and it was a relief to get out into the lower buzz and the cooler lights. The buffet tables were now open, and most people in here were either crowded around them or else standing in line with plates; she could see the two Venetz sisters and their fill-in staff working the tables, carving, serving, and fetching. They seemed to be doing a good job. Diane started to scan for one of the agency girls, but then one of the agency girls found her.

  It was the blue-eyed blonde, the one that she'd spoken to earlier. Diane said, "Are we a success, or what?"

  "The men all like him, and the women all love him. But there could be a problem."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Mister Liston's gone back upstairs, and he's taken a lady with him. The lady didn't come alone, and I'm not sure whether we ought to be doing anything about it."

  Diane felt her heart beginning to sink. Of a number of possibilities, one shone out more bright and unpleasant than any of the others."

  "Oh, hell," she said. "Not the policeman's wife. He was going to behave himself tonight!"

  "No, not her. It's the foreign woman with an accent I couldn't place. She's with the man I just saw you talking to."

  "Really?" This was something else… and while it might not exactly be welcome, the results would certainly be interesting. "Well," Diane said, "in theory, we're in the clear."

  "Oh?"

  "They came together, but they're not a couple."

  "Is that what he was telling you?" There was a certain cynicism in the agency girl's eyes, but Diane wasn't somebody who'd just climbed down off the backwoods
bus.

  She said, "That's what he was telling me. Now we'll find out how much truth there is in it. Don't worry about it."

  The agency girl moved on. Most of her work would be over by now; Dizzy was out of the way, and the party was running under its own momentum. It would probably carry on like this for at least another hour, and then the first of the departures would begin; the ones with an early start in the morning, the ones with teenaged babysitters, the ones who rarely went out anyway… an hour after that they'd be down to the hard core, and an hour after that it would just be a case of guiding out those last drunks who were too far gone to find the door.

  She wondered what Dizzy and Alina Peterson were doing, right now. Others besides the agency girl must have seen them leaving together; she wondered how long it would take for the news to reach Pete.

  And what, she couldn't help wondering, would happen then?

  TWENTY-THREE

  The reason for Dizzy's locking of the door behind them became apparent within a minute, when Alina heard a hesitant tap on the other side followed by a young woman's voice calling Dizzy's name. Dizzy shook his head and put a finger to his lips, calling on her for silence; so Alina waited, and after a while the young woman gave up and went away. Alina relaxed a little. Dizzy hadn't even been tense.

  He took her through to show her the four roomed suite that was his private living space within Liston Hall. The lounge was as big and as bare as a dance studio, with three evenly spaced sets of french windows on one side that could be opened out onto the unlit stone terrace; the floor was of deeply polished boards with no carpet, the furniture was mostly plain white leather, and at the focus stood a hi-fi system which looked like a stolen chunk of a space shuttle.

  Alina turned to Liston. He was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, waiting. His little-boy mask had slipped by a fraction, a sure sign of the energies that had been taken from him in the past hour, and someone else was looking out — someone much harder, more calculating.

  She said, "If it's what you want to hear, I'm impressed."

  "I'm glad something impresses you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nothing." He seemed to rouse himself, and as he stepped away from the wall his mask was back in place. "You're just not what I'm used to. How do you think I did?"

  "How do I think you did what?"

  "My public relations act. I'm under threat of death from Bob and Tony if I don't carry it off." He led the way across the room to one of the white sofas, and dropped onto it gratefully without waiting for her.

  She said, "I saw them earlier. Do they work for you?"

  "Kind of. They're friends from way back, they look after me. It's generally agreed that I need looking after. I always seem to get into trouble on my own. My mother always reckoned I'd end up either in prison or in parliament."

  Alina perched herself on the far end of the three seater.

  "You don't look like a troublemaker to me," she said.

  "I don't make trouble, it just follows me around like some dog in the street." he gave her a sideways, half serious look. "This is a warning, you realise."

  "And is there anything else I ought to know about you?"

  "Oh, I'm feckless, shiftless, untrustworthy… I'm also very, very devious."

  "So I can see. Why did you ask me up here?"

  "Why did you come?"

  There was silence for a moment as they held each other's eyes, broken only by the faint sound of dance music from down below.

  Finally, Alina said, "You made me curious."

  Liston smiled, as a Grand Master might at an adept chess move from a lesser rated opponent. "That'll do as a beginning," he said. "Look, I'm supposed to go down and do another five minutes of charm and chat with the ladies in the kitchen now they've done their stuff. Will you stay around?"

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm asking you to."

  "What if I'm with somebody?"

  "Are you?"

  He waited, but Alina didn't reply. She kept her gaze even.

  "It's your choice," he went on. "I honestly won't be long. You can pick out some music and crack open a decent bottle. Can't join you in that, I'm afraid, but don't trust the stuff downstairs."

  She seemed to sharpen, and to look at him now with sudden suspicion. "Why not?"

  "I know the way Bob works. I wouldn't put it past him to be slipping something into the juice when nobody's looking. Guaranteed way of loosening off everybody's self-control. Problem is, take one too many and you'll start to see hair growing out of the walls. What do you say?"

  "I'll think it over," Alina said, and she got to her feet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the course of the last few moments, and Liston couldn't say for certain what it was. She said, "Can I get some fresh air?"

  "Try the terrace," Liston said. "You can get a good view of the moonlight on the lake, if you go in for that sort of thing. See you later?"

  "Perhaps," Alina said.

  She was already crossing the room to the nearest of the french windows, moving with an urgency that she didn't seem prepared to explain.

  "Your choice," Liston reminded her as she stepped out into the air. Maybe she's a control freak, he was thinking, getting into an unreasonable flap just because she might have taken something that could unclench her a little; but then if he'd kept his mouth shut, she'd never even have known.

  A control freak might be interesting to play around with, he was thinking, especially in his weakened condition — get her so far along, and then she'd almost certainly want to do all the work.

  But she didn't even look back.

  "What was that?" Wayne said; but Sandy, it seemed, hadn't heard anything.

  "What was what?"

  "I heard a door," he said, glancing up into the darkness in the direction of the stone parapet. Sandy pulled her dress back up over her shoulders, just in case, and the two of them sat as still as they could and listened.

  There was no sound other than that of the distance-filtered disco music, but the mood of solitude had been broken. As he zipped Sandy up, Wayne said, "You want to go somewhere else?"

  "If you mean that crummy flat of yours, no."

  "That's not what I had in mind."

  "Not to your dad's house, either."

  "No, better than that. And really private."

  "Where?"

  "It's a surprise. Satisfaction guaranteed."

  Sandy considered for a moment. Wayne knew how finicky she could be about place and mood, but this plan was one which had all objections beaten before they could even be raised.

  Finally, she said, "How far?"

  "A short walk in the woods, a warm summer night," (he was embroidering a little here — the night was warm enough, but it was hardly summer yet) "moonlight on the water, what more could you want?"

  Sandy looked critically at her shoes, and hiccupped. "A taxi," she said.

  "Well… I could run ahead and get the van."

  "Oh, great," she said, and she hitched up her dress so that she could get to her feet; there was simply no elegant way of doing it. "Come on, I can probably use a walk anyway. Something in this stuff's starting to mess up my head."

  The 'stuff' in question was Bob Ivie's Hawaiian special; between them they'd managed almost to empty the bowl that Wayne had sneaked out. Wayne had halfway believed in his own account of the innocence of its contents, but now he wasn't so sure. It didn't taste of anything much, and it didn't hit particularly hard, but then he didn't exactly feel steady on his feet as he came to stand, either.

  Sandy was already picking her way through the garden towards the front of the house.

  Leaving the punchbowl lying there for the clearup people to find in the morning, Wayne followed her.

  Above them on the balcony terrace, Alina Petrovna stood a little way back from the parapet. She looked at the moon, the lake, and the dark forest beyond, but she saw only defeat.

  She might have known that all of
her efforts would end like this; it was simply a truth that she hadn't been wanting to face. She'd been avoiding it for so long, but she had no choice about facing it now. She moved to the parapet, and paused with her hand on the stonework. Wayne and Sandy were gone. It wasn't too late. She could ignore the call. She could turn around and go back inside, smile, lose herself amongst strangers again.

  She closed her eyes for a second and touched the small space of forehead between her brows. But the pressure didn't help, and nor did the night air, nor any of the great machinery of circumstance that had, without her realising it, been combining against her to produce this moment.

  Again, she looked at the moon.

  And then, with a dancer's grace, she cleared the parapet.

  She landed with barely a sound.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Pete was beginning to think that the party had taken on an unpleasant edge. The noises had become louder, the lights were brighter and sharper, and the people around him seemed to be turning into over expansive parodies of their true selves. For Pete it was almost like being a teenager again, going to see 2001 on magic mushrooms. They'd tasted like shit but they'd sure done the stuff; everybody else had been whining about the story while Pete had been lying there with his tongue hanging out. Tonight, only a few minutes earlier, he'd been following handwritten signs down a service passageway to the toilets when, for one brief half-second, he'd seen a local councillor emerging through the doorway with the head of a pig on his shoulders. It was barely more than a flash impression and the man was turning and the light wasn't at all good; and besides, he pretty much resembled a pig anyway, so the effect was probably no more than a moment's mistake. But after that Pete had sworn that he'd touch nothing stronger than tapwater for the rest of the evening, and so far he'd been sticking to it.

  He couldn't see Alina anywhere around. He supposed that she had to be somewhere and he reminded himself that they weren't supposed to be together so what did it matter, but still he kept catching himself scanning the crowd for her. Plenty of known faces nodded back at him, but none of them was hers.