Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  Lissa congratulated Lady Credesdale on the internal decor, politely overlooking its manifest hideousness, and his mother graciously took credit for it, although it had mostly been in place before she arrived—save for such oddments as the occasional table and the magazine rack—and was maintained entirely by the servants.

  Lady Credesdale, in her turn, made banal and blatantly insincere comments on the exhausting nature of a model’s life, and Lissa assured her that the excitement alone was more than adequate compensation for the trouble, and that privacy was an overrated privilege.

  Canny watched the two of them bring their mutual dislike to full maturity with interest, marveling at the amazing rapidity with which their hostility matured. Occasionally, he stirred the pot with a casual remark about Lissa’s bodyguards or Mummy’s book group—but in the end he saved the situation by offering to take Lissa for a turn around the grounds. He was unsurprised, but delighted nevertheless, when the model accepted with enthusiasm.

  “You mustn’t mind Mummy,” Canny said, as Lissa contemplated the absurd neatness of the lawn and the mildly surreal quality of the topiary, turning her lovely face reflexively to catch the faint breath of the evening breeze. “She has exactly the kind of life she always wanted, and she feels guilty about not being able to enjoy it. She isn’t nearly as idle as she thinks she is, but she’s never been able to think of her commitments in the village as work. I’m going to devise a suitably-labeled executive position for her once I’m in charge of the empire, to see what she can do with some real authority. I think she might surprise herself.”

  “I’ll probably become envious of younger women myself as I get older,” Lissa said, lazily. “And I’ll probably dislike myself for my shallowness. Faces and breasts fall much faster than minds decline; it’s something we all have to live with, but nobody likes it—not in my line of work. Is your gardener really a Barbara Hepworth fan, or doesn’t he have the patience to carve the crenellations of the hedge into peacocks and rabbits?”

  “This is Yorkshire,” Canny told her. “Jebb doesn’t do twee. He doesn’t really do abstract expressionism either, but we’re all too frightened of his probable reaction to mention the phrase in connection with his endeavors. How do you like the gargoyles? They’re not authentic Gothic features, alas—just fashionable Victorian frippery—but they do have spectacularly ugly faces. The hellhound and the worm are supposed to be the best, but I rather like the one that looks exactly like the twenty-eighth earl.” He pointed out the relevant monstrosities as he spoke; they were still close to the north-western corner of the house, so they could see the side as well as the façade, although the walls still loomed over them in a satisfyingly intimidating fashion.

  Lissa didn’t make any comment about Canny’s use of the term “worm” where she would surely have used “dragon”, but she’d already demonstrated that her mastery of English extended as far as the appropriate use of the word “crenellations”, so he wasn’t in the least surprised.

  “Isn’t that one supposed to be the devil?” she queried, instead—speaking of the one that Canny had identified as an ancestor.

  “Yes it is,” he agreed, “but the twenty-eighth earl was definitely the model—you didn’t have to go past his portrait to get to the guest bathroom, but I’ll point it out later, Believe it or not, the ones on the stairs are the better-looking Kilcannons. I’m the exception, of course—I got my luck from Daddy and my looks from Mummy. I shudder to think how I might have turned out if it had been the other way around.”

  Thus far, Canny had navigated their stroll in such a way that the Great Skull was obscured—although she must have seen it as she drove towards the house—but once they had passed through the wooden gate in Jebb’s ornamental hedge the oddly-shaped rock formation on Cockayne Ridge was clearly in view, looming ominously over the grey slate roof and neatly framed by Credesdale House’s twin chimney stacks. It immediately became the obvious topic of conversation.

  “Who would have expected to find a death’s-head dominating the Land of Cockayne,” Lissa said. “Your ancestors must have been exceedingly unsuperstitious men, to build a mansion house in the shadow of something like that—or men whose superstition worked in peculiar ways. I suppose family curses must be routine in this part of the world.”

  “No family in Yorkshire is complete without one,” Canny assured her. “Isn’t it much the same in your part of the world?”

  “Superstition works in peculiar ways there, too,” she agreed, “and no family is complete without its...unfortunately, Mandarin and English don’t run parallel in that respect. There isn’t a word in English that encapsulates our notion of such things. Curse gives the wrong impression.”

  “You’re Chinese, then?” he asked, delicately.

  “Not according to my passport,” she said. “In my part of the world, though, nations come and go in much the same way that conquerors used to come and go. Mandarin always endures and thrives regardless. It’s the language of wisdom and bureaucracy, the precious relic of the oldest empire of all.”

  “The language of wisdom and bureaucracy?” he echoed. “You wouldn’t find many people in the West who’d yoke those two concepts together.”

  They were strolling up the hill now, and Lissa paused to look back at the house. From this angle, it had always seemed to Canny to be direly reminiscent of a set from a particularly corny Hammer horror film, but the model made no comment as he dutifully pointed out its worst features.

  “Tacky Victorian mock-Gothic has its virtues, of course,” Canny observed, angling his languid hand so cleverly that it took in the ornamental portico and the flying buttresses at the same time. “It passes for quaint nowadays, and the house must have been even uglier before, to judge by the surviving walls. Great-great-grandfather’s diaries always refer to the replacement of the patched-up Tudor pile that preceded it as ‘the Restoration’, although he must have known perfectly well that the Goths who conquered Rome never got as far as Britain. At least no one ever thought of replacing that beautifully coarse Yorkshire stone with red brick. The family’s even older than the title, if legend can be believed—the records claim that the land was ours long before the first Earl was ushered into the Upper House—but any house that was here in the fifth century can’t have been much grander than a wooden shell. Given that the Romans must have been perceived as the enemy, its occupants presumably took pride in the absence of a bathroom.”

  “It is beautiful, in its own way.” Lissa’s own ancestors, he supposed, must have lived in a great many exotic palaces if the assurances of Hello! could be trusted. Considering that she’d spent all day posing in what Daddy would have called “posh frocks”, in front of the grand facade at Harewood, the model’s generous approval of his own humble abode seemed to Canny to be a substantial compliment. He didn’t have the feeling that he was being teased. Whatever Lissa Lo’s agenda was, it wasn’t anything obvious—but if she had been attracted by the fact that he was an unusually lucky man, she wasn’t going to be able to cut herself a permanent slice, if the rules could be believed. If the rules could be believed, his own luck was about to take a turn for the worse, and no matter how seductive she decided to be she wasn’t the right person to help him renew it.

  If the rules could be believed.

  Now that he was with Lissa Lo instead of his father, the force of that if had returned to its full and proper magnitude. In any case, what greater luck could there be in the world of the twentieth century, for a virile young man like himself, than to get together with Lissa Lo for as long as she was prepared to indulge him...if, that is, she were prepared to indulge him at all.

  Even if she were, he reminded himself, the questions would remain, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. How much of the supposed precedent set out in the diaries was mere legend, lies and special pleading? And even if it were true, how much time was available to him for pleasurable dalliance before he settled down?

  “The place does have a certain grotesque
charm,” Canny agreed, negligently, “but I wouldn’t want to live here full time. I’ve always regarded the London flat as home. I suppose I won’t actually need it, now that Tony’s abolished my right to sit in the Lords, but I’m certainly not about to give it up. Daddy was one of the most dedicated of the absentee hereditaries, although he could always be relied on to turn out for any vote to relax restrictions on gambling, but even he made abundant use of the flat while I was too young to stake my claim to it.”

  Lissa smiled, rather mechanically. Canny wondered whether he could think of a joke that would produce a stronger reaction, but thought it unlikely. In his experience, supermodels had even bigger stocks of hilariously filthy jokes than Hollywood producers. Traveling the world still had certain advantages over waiting in lordly fashion for the world to come to you.

  From the top of the ridge they had a perfect view of the Crede meandering down the dale to the village—whose Yorkshire stone seemed rather funereal, caked as it still was in the ancient grime of the Industrial Revolution. The village elders had been discussing the possibility of a general clean-up for a generation and more, but whenever the words “Hebden Bridge” were mentioned, enough lips curled contemptuously to have the motion shelved. Personally, Canny thought that it was the proximity of the motorway that had spoiled Hebden Bridge, not the sandblasters, but he’d always stayed out of the debate. He was privately glad, though, that the ridge and the Great Skull had shielded Credesdale House from the worst effects of the soot and the acid rain that had given the walls of the contoured terraces their distinctive color—3-B black instead of 3-H grey—and their unevenly pitted texture.

  “I’ll show you the village, if you like,” Canny said, as they set off down the slope again, having found the air on the ridge only slightly less enervating than the somnolent atmosphere of the dale.

  “Is there time?” Lissa countered, strongly implying that there couldn’t be.

  “We wouldn’t be able to walk down there and back before dinner,” Canny admitted. “Another time, then. It may look a bit grim, but there are home-owners in Leeds who would kill for the opportunity to be mere tenants in Cockayne. The county council occasionally tries to reduce the elders’ privileges, but the family has a lot more influence there than one democratically-elected representative, so we’re clinging like limpets to our eccentricities. Some outsiders call Credesdale the last bastion of degenerate feudalism, others the last flourish of Victorian philanthropy, but the villagers like to think of themselves as ultra-patriots of the one true fatherland—Yorkshire, that is—and last-ditch defenders of an endangered way of life. We’re all insane, of course—but we’re Yorkshire mad, not common-or-garden mad. Daddy should have woken up again by the time we’ve had dinner, by the way. He’ll be thoroughly morphinated, but more-or-less compos mentis. Would you like to meet him? Don’t feel obliged—he’s not at his best, by any means.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. The shoes she was wearing weren’t designed for walking up and down grassy slopes whose paths were rough-hewn and strewn with rabbit-droppings, but she moved with an unearthly grace, almost as though she were flowing. The turbidly creeping waters of the Crede came off a very poor second best. It was enough to make Canny catch his breath, and fix his eyes upon her back until he grew dizzy.

  Canny felt unprecedentedly awkward. He knew that it would be a dire conversational error to bring up the awkwardness that had developed before they stepped out into the evening air, but the compulsion to babble had come upon him again and he was temporarily bereft of appropriate subject-matter. “Better to be formally introduced to a dying man than try to do girl talk with Mummy,” he said, in a stupidly mock-jocular fashion. He regretted it as soon as the words had spilled out of his mouth.

  “That’s not it,” Lissa assured him. “I really would be interested to meet your father—if he doesn’t mind.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” Canny murmured, wondering exactly how far her interest and curiosity might extend, if he gave it scope to operate freely. “If my guess is right, a visit from one of the most beautiful women in the world is exactly the kind of thing that might give his morphine dreams the perfect lift—and I’m a very good guesser.” They had reached the gate again now, and he overtook her swiftly so that he could unlatch it and hold it open while she passed through.

  “So am I,” Lissa said, as Bentley emerged from the house to summon them to the table with all the imperious obsequiousness one could expect of an authentic English butler with a passionate interest in bad Hollywood representations of authentic English butlers.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Canny was uncomfortably aware that the food was no better than moderate, but he took refuge in the thought that Lissa probably wasn’t going to eat much anyway. The mediocrity was only to be expected, given the short notice and the fact that the village shops managed their stocks much more economically than any town-based supermarket. On the other hand, the ’73 Pomerol was one of the best the cellar had to offer, and Canny took due note of the appreciative way that Lissa sipped it. After consuming two glasses she refused the sweet Bordeaux—and, of course, the dessert it was supposed to accompany. She also declined to partake of the brandy. Although she’d made her way through a perfectly adequate portion of the main course, Canny was glad to observe that she didn’t visit the bathroom in order to throw it up again.

  Fortunately, Canny’s mother was perfectly well-behaved during dinner, and never once mentioned her gnawing fear that Canny might be gay—which she usually confided to all his female acquaintances, in the faint hope that one of them might have contradictory evidence and a willingness to share it. She called him “Canavan” once or twice, apparently spoiled for choice between her own preferred diminutive and his, but he didn’t mind that.

  “You know that Daddy wants to give you the library keys tonight, don’t you, Can?” Lady Credesdale said to Canny, when he and Lissa Lo stood up together to go up to his father’s room. “He thinks it might be his last chance to do a formal handover, although Doctor Hale keeps telling him that he might live for another month.”

  “He might, no matter how big a liar the old quack is,” Canny said. “He’s always been tough—too tough for his own good, perhaps. I’ll take the keys with all due solemnity, but I’ll let him take a look at Lissa first. He’ll enjoy that, and we might as well share what we can, while we can.”

  Lissa Lo smiled at that too, but her motives were still profoundly unclear to Canny. Her body moved in interesting ways as she preceded Canny up the staircase, pausing more than once to study the portraits hung on the left-hand wall. He’d told the truth when he’d said that they were the best of the bunch, although that had more to do with the talents of the painters than the features of the sitters. The spectacular awfulness of the ones that had been retired to shadowed corridors on the third floor couldn’t possibly have been entirely due to the ugliness of the subjects.

  “Did they ever smile, or did they simply feel an obligation to glower at their painters by way of intimidation?” Lissa asked.

  “They certainly didn’t think of sitting for a portrait as any kind of fashion shoot,” Canny replied. “It was a matter of duty, to be faced in the same purposeful way as checking the accounts and sleeping with their wives. I’m different, of course—too much television, Mummy says.”

  The model made no comment, but Canny could imagine what she was thinking as she scanned the faces of his ancestors. The Kilcannon luck had never extended far in the direction of good looks. Canny was, indeed, the cream of the crop in that regard. Not for the first time, Canny cursed the reflexive flicker of mad optimism which said that there might be something in this encounter for his long-suppressed hormones, as the hostile stares of his forefathers told himself to pull himself together. Wile he was in the presence so many ugly Kilcannons, he didn’t dare believe that someone as beautiful as Lissa Lo might be seriously interested in his body. It seemed far more likely that she was here on some kind of qu
asi-anthropological field-trip, like a Brave New Worlder visiting the Savage Reservation.

  Lord Credesdale looked terrible, and he wasn’t entirely coherent at first, but Canny had been right about the sight of Lissa Lo giving him a lift. He rallied, in spite of the depressive effect of the morphine—and once his tongue was loose, he began to string sentences together with reasonable fluency. After half an hour of aesthetic appreciation and idle chitchat, though, the thirty-first Earl asked the model, very politely, whether he could have a few moments alone with his son and heir.

  “I won’t keep him long,” the old man promised. “Family matter—might not have another chance.

  “I can’t believe that,” Lissa said. “A mind as strong and capable as yours isn’t about to lose its grip just yet. But of course you must have a moment with Canny. I’ll wait downstairs for a while. I promised to be in my hotel in York by eleven, because I need to catch up with my sleep before taking the long haul out to Venezuela, but I won’t go without saying goodbye unless I have to.”

  It was the first time that she had spoken Canny’s nickname; Canny was profoundly glad that she hadn’t called him “Can” or “Canavan” in spite of hearing both from his mother’s lips.

  “Thanks, Lissa,” Canny said. In the circumstances, her promise to wait seemed to him an extraordinarily generous offer.

  Lissa closed the door behind her, very neatly.

  “You know what these are, don’t you?” said the dying man, drawing the keys out from beneath his pillow, where Bentley must have placed them.

  Canny knew that it wasn’t a good time to say “Of course I do”, let alone “Get on with it”. It wasn’t as if he’d never been in the library before, although he’d never been in any hurry to take up the burden of scholarship on which his father had always urged him to make an early start. He could have picked up the keys from their resting-place any time he liked, rules or no rules. The formal passing was purely symbolic—just another little ceremony, insufficiently burdensome ever to have been put to the proof—but Canny made no objection. He said his lines dutifully, trying not to sound weary—although his lack of sleep the previous night would certainly have given him an excuse.