“I’m not a mind-reader, Mummy, except for the occasional flash of insight,” he said. “Most of the time, I can’t even imagine what people might be thinking. But whatever there was between us is gone know. Strange, isn’t it, how these things can evaporate in a moment, without the ghost of a reason?”
“It was all in your mind, Can,” his loving mother told him, seemingly making every effort to be kind in spite of the harshness of the judgment. “I’m surprised she accepted your invitation. If you want my opinion, I think she was hoping to get together with that footballer without the press finding out. Did you know that he’s playing for Leeds now? Of course you did—you went to the party, didn’t you? I think she was hoping to set up an assignation here, out of the reach of prying eyes. They probably planned it when they came to Daddy’s funeral.”
“That’s not how it was, Mummy.”
“You take after your father when it comes to women, Can,” the dowager Lady Credesdale went on, relentlessly. “He was always a fool for a pretty face. Do you think I never saw the look in his eye when he turned away from me to follow some silly bit of skirt with that moony expression? Do you think I didn’t understand that he always felt trapped?”
“He didn’t feel trapped by you, Mummy,” Canny told her, truthfully. “He felt trapped by the weight of tradition, the legacy of a thousand years of expectation and custom.”
“You don’t have to spare my feelings, Can,” she said. “For once, I’m not trying to spare yours. She didn’t want you, no matter how much you wanted her—and it wasn’t really her you wanted anyway. It was her image, what she stood for. But that’s no way to manage your life, Can. You can probably use the title as a hook to snare pretty girls, if that’s what you want, but what kind of pretty girls will you catch? It’s not the right way to do it, and there’d so much more to life than that. You have to see sense, Can—even if you can’t resist the temptation to look sideways for the rest of your life every time a bit of fluff drifts by, you have to be sensible. Not because it’s what Daddy would have wanted, but just because it is the sensible way to do things. She’s not our sort, Can—not because she’s Oriental, but because she’s not part of our world. You do see what I mean, don’t you?”
“I understand what you mean, Mummy,” Canny assured her. “I’m sure Daddy would be proud of you, if he could hear you—but you’re free of him now. You’re free of his expectations, his restrictions, his superstitions. I’m not—but you are. Think on that. You can be anything you want to be, now.”
“Don’t be silly, Canny,” she said, after a pause. “People can’t be anything they want to be. They can only be what nature made them. We’re what we are, you and I, and you need to accept that.”
“How about you, Bentley?” Canny asked, when the butler came out of the house to meet them as they moved towards the door. “Are you what nature made you?”
“Certainly, sir,” was the inevitable answer. There was nothing caricaturish in Bentley’s manner now; the spark of satire seemed to have vanished, for the moment, with the world that had inspired it—although it would doubtless reassert itself in time.
“Mummy reckons that Lissa Lo was only scouting the place out to see if it would make a convenient hideaway for meeting Stevie Larkin on the sly,” Canny told him. “Is that what the gossips are saying in the kitchen?”
“It’s not for me to speculate, sir,” Bentley observed, shrewdly.
“Well,” Canny said, “at least we had our one night stand. No one an take that away from us.” He didn’t know, in fact, whether that had been taken away from the realm of objective reality by fate’s hasty reshuffle, but he did know that Bentley was too discreet to confirm or deny any judgment he might have made—and that his mother would have made scrupulously certain that she had no information on the subject one way or another.
“Actually, sir,” Bentley said. “Mr. Larkin did phone. He didn’t mention Miss Lo, but he did mention the possibility of you and he meeting up. He seemed strangely anxious that you might not return the call, although I can’t imagine why. Perhaps he thinks that you still haven’t replaced your mobile phone—or perhaps you forgot to give him your new number.”
“I haven’t got around to circulating the new number,” Canny admitted. “I’ll ring him later to fix something up.”
“I hope he won’t be too disappointed to hear about Miss Lo’s accident,” Lady Credesdale put in.
“He’ll cope,” Canny assured her. “If any reporters should call, Bentley, you’d better deny that Lissa Lo was ever in the house. It doesn’t matter whether they believe you or not. We don’t know where she is, and we know nothing about any accident.”
“Yes sir.”
In the event the paparazzi never did come calling; Lissa and Lo Chen had covered their tracks so well that no discoverable evidence now remained that Lissa Lo had visited Credesdale House since the funeral of the thirty-first earl. Her image could still be found in back issues of Cosmopolitan and Hello! tucked away in the magazine-rack, but of her physical presence and eager vitality there was no trace whatsoever.
Lo Chen never phoned to report on her condition, nor did Lissa contact Canny herself. It was as if he had never met her.
By the time three days had passed, Canny actually began to wonder whether he had imagined the details of their brief affair—but he knew that the fantasy was too self-indulgent. He knew what had happened, and he knew everything that had happened, in the world that now was as well as the world that had been.
He had seen it in her eyes.
He wondered, too, whether he ought to reckon himself lucky that the universe in which he had lived the greater part of his life had chosen to conserve him and destroy her, preserving itself for his memory while obliterating itself from hers.
What a privilege that was, if only he could ignore the pain!
The despotic Imperium of actuality had refused to produce any kind of child by means of their ill-starred union, but its blind, unreasoning, utterly confused reflex had let him live while she died. If there had been an element of competition in their collaboration, he had won, in spite of all the odds stacked against him. Even Lo Chen had been convinced, when she handed down her deceptive warning, that Lissa might hold the upper hand—but she had not reckoned with the Kilcannon luck, which had held in spite of its alleged dormancy, just as it had when Stevie had been kidnapped.
Unless, of course, it was Lissa’s luck that had protected him, as she had sworn that it would, while his was impotent to intervene. Or perhaps—a much more extravagant unlikelihood—it had been the luck of his own nascent miracle-son, in spite of the fact that his existence had been so infinitesimally brief.
If, as Canny had quoted only recently—from Sophocles, he now remembered—the best thing was not to be born at all, and after that to die young, perhaps the child had been the luckiest of all the Kilcannons. Perhaps he had reached out from the ephemeral moment of his almost-existence to let his father know that. At the same time, the child might have protected his mother from the knowledge that she had not, after all, been favored by the luck of the chromosomal draw. Perhaps the child had been more powerful than either he or Lissa had been able to imagine—and perhaps his awesome prescience had informed him that, although existence was a thing to be avoided, blissful ignorance ought sometimes to be reserved for those who needed it.
But that, of course, was asking why again, and there was no why. It was all just a matter of chance, of quantitative probability, with no qualitative dimension at all. It was all horribly unfair, but the cosmic balance knew nothing of fairness; it was not that sort of balance.
On the fourth day he met up with Stevie Larkin for a meal in a restaurant in Leeds. They were together for five hours, during which time Lissa Lo’s name wasn’t mentioned once. They talked about exchange-rates, Italy, guns, football, organized crime, friendship and fish and chips. It was a welcome, if temporary, relief.
By the time Canny secluded himself in the librar
y at Credesdale on the following day, however, he had relegated Stevie to the status of a mere revenant—an illusion of reconstitution, who had not the means to know that he was just a copy, and not a real thing at all. It was possible to convince himself, for a moment or two, that his own Lissa Lo had never actually existed at all—except as a hallucinatory element of his curse—but each such momentary success only served to increase the darkness of the returned conviction that blasted the truth into his reluctant brain time and time again.
The inescapable truth was that Lissa had not only existed in the flesh, but that she had been the finest thing the old world—the true world—had contained...until he had broken the rules, precipitating her destruction, and the destruction of all the children he and she might have had.
What a power he had to spoil, to diminish, to subvert, to impoverish!
What an expert he was at interference, at prevention, at annihilation!
Lucky Canny Kilcannon!
Lucky Killer Kilcannon, possessed of the power to blast universes apart, inflicting scars upon them that could never be fully healed.
Did he dare to hope, he wondered as he turned the pages of the ancient diaries, that there was another universe somewhere in the infinite manifold of potential universes, existing in parallel to this one, in which Lissa had not changed but that he had forgotten that he had ever loved her?
No, he didn’t. He couldn’t.
Once, he might have dared, but not now. He knew better. He had been cured of that kind of daring. He would have to find another if he were to live as a man and not a slave of chance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As soon as Canny heard from the ever-reliable Bentley that Alice Ellison was back in Cockayne again to visit her parents he walked down to the village and knocked on the door of the Proffitt house. This time, Mrs Proffitt didn’t seem in the least surprised to see him.
“She’s gone to see our Ellen at the fish shop,” she said.
“Of course,” Canny said, nodding his head. “I should have looked in on my way past, shouldn’t I?”
Jack Ormondroyd was alone behind the counter, the shop having only just opened for the evening shift. He shouted for Ellen and Alice to come out as soon as he saw Canny walk in.
“Hello, Canny,” said Ellen. “Haddock and chips, is it? Bit early for you.”
“Actually,” Canny aid, “I was looking for Alice. There’s something up at the house that I need her to take a look at.”
Ellen raised a quizzical eyebrow but Jack’s face remained deliberately set. Alice also seemed surprised by the baldness of the declaration, and her expression was tinged by suspicion—as if she feared that he might be about to let something slip about her excursion to London.
“You want to hear the latest about the trial?” She said, although it must have sounded just as unlikely to her as it did to everybody else. The trial of her husband’s murderers was still more than a month away, and there would be no news until it actually started.
“That too, of course,” he said, “and to find out how you are. I thought you might ring. I left a message on your answer-phone three or four days ago.”
“Sorry,” she said, as she ducked under the counter. “Been a bit distracted. I won’t be long, El.”
Once they were out on the street, she said “Is this wise? Everyone will see us.”
“So what,” Canny said. “I won’t say we’ve nothing to hide, but I don’t see that hiding it commits us to avoid speaking to one another for the rest of our lives. We made promises, remember? I’d be there if you needed me, and you’d be there if I needed you.”
She seemed surprised by the implication. “Why?” she said. “What’s happened to you? Nothing that our Ellen’s heard about.”
“Nothing that your Ellen could have heard about,” Canny said. “But there’s more to the world than passes for gossip in the local chippy.”
Alice looked swiftly from side to side, but they were already outside the village boundary, and there was no one within earshot. Now that the county was back on Greenwich Mean Time, evening came early; the dusk was already closing in on them
“Does this have owt to do with Lissa Lo?” Alice guessed, reverting just for a moment to a way of speaking she’d polished away during the last decade.
“Yes,” he said.
“She let you down?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Not gently?”
“No, not gently.”
“Right.” She thought about that for a few moments, and then said: “Some people might think you’ve got a fucking nerve, Canny Kilcannon, coming crying to me because some supermodel you’ve been mooning over has kicked you into touch. What am I supposed to be—the fucking consolation prize?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that. As I said in the shop, there’s something at the house that I need to show you.” He wasn’t absolutely sure whether or not he was lying about the matter of her being the consolation prize, but they were both living in a world where he had never had a chance of establishing a fruitful relationship with Lissa Lo.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see. But I did want to talk to you, and I was surprised when you didn’t call back. Doesn’t run away, our Alice—that’s what Ellen said. You’re the one person I can talk to with some slight show of honesty, and I needed that. You have come home, though—I’m grateful for that.”
Alice didn’t bother to assert, angrily or otherwise, that her only reason for returning to Cockayne was to see her mother, father, sister and niece. “Well then,” she said, as they made their way along the Crede beneath a sky patched with cloud, “tell me about Lissa Lo—with some slight show of honesty.”
“She was here last week—but I don’t think Ellen found out about it.”
“She didn’t mention it—and she would have, if she’d known. What happened?”
“She had a slight fall on the Ridge. She wasn’t hurt, but she was shaken up a bit. Martin would probably have judged that she had a flash—a slight nEurophysiological shock, due to a hereditary condition.”
“Whereas you think she had a premonition?”
“No. Nothing so simple. But it did change things. It changed all sorts of things. Her mother had to come and take her way. She’ll be back at work in no time, I dare say. But it changed things.”
“So you keep saying. What is it you want, Canny? If it’s a replay of that night of passion, I guess I owe you that...although it might have been more convenient if you’d come over to Leeds.”
“For something that you claimed was no big deal,” he observed, “I believe you’re letting that prey on your mind a little.”
“No I’m not,” she lied.
“I wanted to tell you that you were right,” he said, as they arrived at the gate of Credesdale House.
“About what?”
“About everything. Everything you said about the Kilcannon lucky streak—about what I might take as evidence to convince me that it was real, including the flashes of apparent light in my brain. It was all true.”
“I know that. You gave it all away—a lousy performance, for a man with your reputation as a poker player.”
“But it wasn’t the whole truth.”
“Well, I gathered you probably thought that too. And at the end of the day, why not? You’re an earl, and you probably have assets worth several million pounds, including a mill that’s moved with the times more cleverly than most, and a whole fucking village to play lord of the manor in. I can see why you might think that the Kilcannon luck is real. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it.”
“I nearly got shot the day I brought you back to Leeds from London,” he said. “I went to pay a million Euros ransom to the people who robbed me in Monte, but it was a trap—they wanted to kill me as well as taking the money. I walked out without a scratch, and most of the million was back in the bank first thing.”
“Ellen should really have heard about that,” was
Alice’s immediate response to this news. “She must be getting sloppy in her old age—either that or you’re becoming a world-class secret-keeper. What ransom? Who were you supposed to be ransoming?”
“Stevie Larkin. Nobody knows about it, and we’d both appreciate it if you kept quiet about it. If they dig up the three bodies, they’ll probably find little bits of my mobile phone embedded in one of them, along with several bullets. I didn’t kill them, and Stevie could testify to that, but the people who did kill them don’t appreciate publicity.”
“So what the fuck are you telling me for?” she demanded, as he let them into the house.
“I thought we’d settled that. I can talk to you. You can talk to me. We don’t worry about being insensitive. We just help one another along.”
“Where to?” was her counter to that. Her timing was accidental, but no less neat in consequence; they had just reached the library door. Canny opened it, and ushered her in. Then he opened the second door, and the third. He could tell that she was impressed by all three rooms.
“Cool,” she observed. “Very cozy—especially if you’re a world-class secret-keeper.” Then she took note of the fact that there were two chairs in the inner sanctum, one on either side of the table. “Is that where Lissa Lo sat?” she demanded.
“Twice,” the confirmed, scrupulously. “The last time, she sat in my chair.” Having said that, he sat down in the chair at which he’d just pointed. She took the other, meekly enough.
Canny pointed to the open cupboard. “Those,” he said, “are the Kilcannon family diaries. They go all the way back to the mid-eighteenth century. They contain as complete a record as was then recoverable of the Kilcannon family legends, stretching all the way back to the Middle Ages. I asked Bentley to order me some dynamite today, by the way.”
The abrupt change of subject took her by surprise, as it had been intended to do. “Dynamite?” she echoed. “Why?”
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