Played!

by JL Merrow

  Ah. The parcel. Having said he’d made the trip to post it, Tristan might look a trifle odd walking home with it still in his possession. Con, were he to see Tristan, might conceivably wonder about that. And Amanda would definitely wonder why her birthday present was so bloody late if he didn’t get the wretched thing posted, well, post haste. Damn it. Tristan turned to retrace his steps.

  Only to find that Mother and Darlings #1 and #2 were still in determined occupation of the bridge. Noticing Tristan’s approach, Mother glared.

  Tristan crumbled. “I’ll, ah, I’ll just go around the long way, then.”

  The queue at the village post office having grown exponentially during Tristan’s failed attempt at stalking his lover-elect, it was almost half an hour later when he finally walked his weary way back up the High Street, heading towards Valley Crescent and a soothing cup of tea. God, he could almost taste the tannin already.

  Maybe it was the association of ideas, but Tristan found himself idly glancing at the lower of the two cafés as he passed—only to see Con sitting at a table with a smartly dressed elderly man.

  Was that Alf? Laughter bubbled up inside Tristan. He’d been jealous of a geriatric. And true, the old man was dressed up as if for a date, but somehow Tristan couldn’t quite stretch his credulity far enough to believe Con had suddenly acquired a superannuated sugar daddy. He wondered what the true story between them was.

  And then he thought, damn wondering, and opened the café door.

  Con looked up and smiled at him. “All right, Tristan?” Then he frowned. “Has it seriously taken you all this time to get that parcel sorted?”

  “I stopped on the bridge,” Tristan said smoothly, pulling out a chair to join them at their table. “To admire the qua—the ducks.” He coughed. “I take it this nattily dressed gentleman would be Alf?”

  “Oh—yeah, sorry. Alf, this is Tristan. He’s Mrs. Geary’s grandson—well, sort of. Lives in her house now. Um. Did you know old Mrs. Geary?”

  “Only to say good morning to.” Alf gave Tristan a long and searching look. “You’re, ah, friends with Con here, are you?”

  Tristan strongly suspected Alf already knew the answer to that question. “Absolutely,” he said with his smile set to medium charm. “Con’s told me a little about you, but…”

  “Alf Smith. I live up on the Hill. I was at school with Con’s grandad during the War,” he added, the sharp look in his eyes disappearing as his thoughts lost themselves in memory. Then his gaze snapped back into focus. “But I’ll leave you two young people to it now. Time I was heading back home.” Leaning on the table, he heaved himself to his feet.

  Tristan rose hastily. “Please, not on my account,” he said, feeling genuinely bad he’d allowed his curiosity to interrupt Con and Alf’s tête-à-tête. “It was terribly rude of me to invite myself to join you. Perhaps I could get you another cup of tea? Some…” he darted a glance at the counter. “Rock cakes, or scones, or whatever those rather lumpen things are supposed to be?”

  Alf’s gaze, when he bestowed it upon Tristan once more, was definitely kindlier than it had been. “No, no. I’ve done what I came down to the village to do, even if it didn’t… Well, never mind. They do say you can’t go back, after all.” Clearly these cryptic murmurings meant something to him, as his eyes turned misty. “Why don’t you get Con something, hmm? That young man needs feeding up.”

  He shuffled off, impervious to Con’s attempts to be allowed to walk the old man home or give him a ride in his van. Con sat down again, a little awkwardness in his mien.

  It was nothing to how Tristan felt. “If I say I’m sorry, can we assume I just mean for interrupting you and leave it at that?”

  Con frowned. “What else have you gotta be sorry for?”

  “I think your antediluvian friend Alf may be under the impression our friendship is more than just platonic.” Fiddling with a packet of sugar, Tristan did his utmost not to make it apparent just how closely he was studying Con’s reaction to what he’d just said.

  To Tristan’s surprise, Con reddened. “Nah. ’S my fault. He was just asking me if I had a girlfriend. I mean, I didn’t exactly tell him I was gay. Just, you know, that I wasn’t into girls.”

  Tristan sighed. “And that’s what passes for subtlety on planet Constantine? You might as have waved a little rainbow flag and jumped up on a Pride float in a sparkly thong. Why the interest in your love life, in any case? Was the old man after some vicarious thrills?”

  “Nah, it just sort of came up.”

  Tristan smirked.

  Con gave him a hard stare belied by just the hint of a twinkle, and continued. “Well, we just went to see an old girlfriend of his. Didn’t go too well.” Con stared down at the dregs of his tea—Tristan might have assumed he was searching for some meaning in the leaves, had it not been made with a bag that had been thoughtfully left in the mug.

  “Let me get you another of those,” Tristan said, having been reminded of his own thirst. He waved a hand in the direction of the counter, adding a winning smile. “Waitress? We want the finest teas available to humanity.” He prudently decided not to add we want them here, and we want them now.

  The middle-aged, middle-sized woman behind the counter gazed at him stolidly. Perhaps she wasn’t a fan of 1960s-set cult classic films, or people who quoted them. “We got Yorkshire Gold or English Breakfast.”

  “Yorkshire Gold’s fine again, thanks,” Con said, sounding a little harassed for some reason.

  “Oh, and some of your…cakes, are they? Apparently, my friend requires feeding up.” Tristan turned back to Con. “Although, honestly, if we feed you up any farther, you’ll be a danger to low-flying aircraft.”

  “You’re supposed to order at the counter, you know,” Con muttered.

  “Why? She heard me perfectly well from here. And I was planning to leave a tip.”

  Con shook his head. “My gran always used to say good manners don’t cost nothing.”

  Tristan ignored both Con and the pricking of his conscience as it reminded him Nanna Geary had used to say that exact same thing. Although with rather better grammar. “So go on, tell me about Alf’s date and why you went along. You know, when you put on your card ‘all jobs considered’, you really did mean all jobs, didn’t you? Although I can’t imagine you get too many calls to be a chaperone to the aged. Is that why it didn’t go well? Alf seems remarkably well preserved for someone of school age during ‘the War’—I assume he meant the Second World War, not the First—but at risk of making you conceited, the comparison between the two of you isn’t all that favourable to him.”

  Con smiled. “Glad to hear you think so. No, he, well, he said she—the lady we went to see—used to know my grandad. Used to live with him, actually, her being the vicar’s daughter. So I was hoping she might be able to tell me stuff about him. But she didn’t wanna know. It was a bit weird, really.”

  Tristan sniffed the air. “Hm, I scent a scandal. They lived together, you say?”

  “Yeah, but my grandad was thirteen at most, and she was even younger.”

  “It’s not totally beyond the bounds of possibility…”

  “Yeah, but if my grandad was getting up to stuff with a ten-year-old, I don’t wanna know.”

  “What I’d like to know is what your grandad was doing in the village in the first place. I thought you said didn’t come from around here?”

  “Oh—yeah, I used to live in Bedford. But my grandad was evacuated out here in the war.”

  Tristan leaned forward to carry on the interrogation, then moved back hastily as the waitress appeared with a tray. She dumped it on the table between them with a surly clatter of crockery.

  “So kind,” Tristan murmured, beaming at her.

  “That’ll be eight pounds twenty,” was her only reply.

  Tristan took out a ten pound note. “Keep the ch
ange,” he said to see if that would move her granite features to a smile.

  It didn’t. She merely snatched it and left.

  “Some people are such hard work,” he murmured once she was safely behind the counter once more.

  He didn’t quite catch what Con said, as it was all but drowned out by the ear-splitting scrape of a chair leg as their charming hostess tidied up, but it sounded an awful lot like “you’re telling me.”

  Tristan took a sip of his tea. It was hot and strong, and he’d definitely had worse. Even the rock cakes, on closer inspection, didn’t appear so bad. He broke off a corner of one of them. “So, your infant grandfather, evacuated to Shamwell. Any particular reason, or was it simply the nearest available country village?”

  “Well, actually, he was born here. See, the vicar of St Saviour’s found him in the churchyard—when he was a baby, I mean, he’d been abandoned—”

  “Sounds fishy to me.”

  “—and named him after a gravestone. Then he got sent to a kids’ home over in Bedford. And when the bombing started, the vicar offered to have him back here to stay. I s’pose he felt like Grandad was his responsibility, or maybe just ’cos his parents must have been from the parish.”

  “Or possibly he just felt guilty for landing him with such a morbid choice of name.”

  Con grinned. “Yeah, s’pose it was a bit. It’s still there—the gravestone, I mean. Wanna see it?”

  Tristan was surprised to find he very much did want to. “After we’ve finished our tea and cakes, yes. These are actually rather good.”

  “Yeah? Go for it, then.” Con pushed the plate over to Tristan’s side of the table. “If I have anything now, I won’t eat my lunch.”

  “Your loss,” Tristan said, digging in greedily. “You can tell me how you ended up back here,” he added with his mouth full, just about managing not to spray Con with crumbs.

  Nanna Geary would not have approved, he reflected guiltily, and took a smaller bite next time.

  Con shrugged. “I just dropped by one day I was in the area, you know, to see the grave and that, and really liked the village. Then when Gran died and I was thinking of moving out of Bedford, I just thought why not?”

  “Well, I can think of a few reasons why not,” Tristan pointed out, gesturing with his rock cake. “You had to leave the area you’d grown up in, all your friends, your clients if you were in the same line of work, and it must be a lot more expensive to live here.” Hm, when he put it like that, Tristan started to wonder if he could scent a scandal here too.

  Con looked down at his tea. “Yeah, well… There was this bloke. Mo. Sort of wanted to go somewhere I didn’t have to see him all the time.”

  Tristan put down his rock cake, not entirely certain he was hungry any longer. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing!” Con’s eyes were wide. Perhaps Tristan’s tone had been a little sharp. “It’s just, we were together and we broke up, that was all.”

  “Oh. Well, he sounds like a complete idiot in any case.”

  “I haven’t told you anything about him except his name.” Con’s gaze had significantly narrowed. “Oi, has Hev been saying stuff to you?”

  “Noooo… Is there,” Tristan asked delicately, “stuff to say?”

  “No.” Con’s cheeks were red again, and Tristan decided to leave well alone.

  Well, for now, at any rate. He stood. “Time for us to talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs? If you’re ready, that is.”

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Con said, scrambling to his feet and almost knocking his chair over in the process.

  The distance to the churchyard was only a few feet as the crow flies, since the café backed onto its boundary. Not being crows, Con and Tristan had to walk a rather longer route around the buildings of the High Street to reach the northernmost gate. Technically the lych gate was nearer, but that seemed available for the use of the living only when accompanied by a corpse.

  Tristan felt his usual sense of vague unease as they stepped inside the pale—not that he expected the vicar to come rampaging out and persecute him personally for daring to set foot inside; in fact, when he’d been to friends’ weddings and christenings (their children’s, not their own) he’d at times been given an exaggerated welcome by the incumbent once his Jewish identity became known. But still, the Church of England was more than this quaint little stone building surrounded by graves (and, one had to assume corpses) in varying states of decay. It was an institution; it was the Establishment, to which Tristan’s kind traditionally did not belong. And it was a symbol, in a way, of centuries of persecution and pogrom.

  “You all right?” Con asked, peering down at him with an expression of concern.

  Tristan forced a laugh. “Just being morbid.”

  “Yeah? You’ve come to the right place, then.”

  This time the laugh came naturally. “Quite right.” Tristan shook his head free of such gloomy thoughts. “So where are we headed?”

  “Round the back of the church. See that house through the trees? That’s the vicarage. The vicar was on his way into the church to get ready for morning service when he found my grandad.”

  They ambled over to a weathered stone that still stood straight and proud, unlike many of its fellows which lay like broken teeth around it. “You know, looking at all those fallen stones it strikes me a grave isn’t the safest of places to leave a baby. What if the stone had happened to topple while the poor thing lay there?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be here with me now, for a start. Anyway, this is it. William Izzard, born 1789, died 1838.” Con grinned. “Think he’s up there somewhere, thinking oi, who’s this bastard who’s gone and stolen my name?”

  “Hm, not sure, but you might want to stand away from the headstone to be on the safe side.”

  They’d parted after that, Con pleading work which, it being a weekday, Tristan supposed wasn’t totally unreasonable. He wished, though, he’d had more time to pry out the story of Con’s foundling forebear. And just why would Alf’s inamorata refuse to talk about old Bill?

  Hm. She was the vicar’s daughter during the war. Back at home now, Tristan opened up his laptop. St Saviour’s Church, Shamwell proved to have a very informative, if rather badly laid-out, website which readily yielded the name of the wartime vicar, a Reverend Thomas Wellbeck, along with far greater detail about the church bells than anyone could conceivably want to know. No details of his children were forthcoming, alas.

  However…she still lived in the village—in the centre, no less, as she’d been within doddering distance from the café for old Alf—and was probably old-fashioned enough to have her telephone number listed in the phone book. Tristan quickly searched the “people” pages for Wellbeck, crossing his fingers the lady was still a spinster of this parish.

  Success! M. Wellbeck, flat number twelve, Six Elms. Well, if it wasn’t her, it must be a brother and hence, a route to the woman herself. Tristan sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the table in satisfaction.

  He hadn’t got a clue what he was actually going to do with this information, but nevertheless, he was rather pleased he’d got it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Quality of Mercy

  Con wasn’t sure how he felt about going round to Tristan’s for rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. He’d…well, to be honest, he’d missed Tristan. Hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, not since that thing with Alf and Miss Wellbeck went a bit pear-shaped. It’d been…all right, it’d been a bit weird, to start with, that day, but it’d got a lot better. Showing Tristan Grandad’s grave—well, not his actual grave, the one he’d been found on—had been… Sod it. The only word he could think of was nice.

  He’d never really told anyone about all that stuff before. Gran had been a bit funny about people knowing her husband had been born out of wedlock, even though Con’s birth certificate
had Father: Unknown written on it and no one had seemed to care much about that. Half the kids in his class at school, if they even had dads, they weren’t the ones they’d started out with. Then again, back in the 1930s, or even in the 1950s, that sort of thing had mattered, hadn’t it?

  Con would bet his van Tristan knew his family tree right back to the Norman Conquest. Which they were probably on the winning side of. Con could just see Tristan as some French nob, looking down his nose at Con’s peasant ancestors.

  Except… Tristan’s family were Jewish, weren’t they? Con’s knowledge of history wasn’t great, but he had a pretty good idea the Nazis weren’t the first lot to treat Jewish people like shit.

  Con had pulled out his laptop and typed jews in the middle ages into the search bar (well, close enough—it had known what he’d meant, anyhow), and he’d managed to find a website that wasn’t too hard to read when he made the text a bit bigger. Enough to get the gist of it, anyway, which to be honest was more than enough. It wasn’t exactly cheerful reading. Jewish history seemed to consist mostly of lending money to kings and that sort, then getting chucked out of the country when the king didn’t want to pay them back. Apparently Christians weren’t supposed to lend money to people. Con hadn’t known that, although come to think of it Gran had been fond of saying “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” He’d thought that was just, well, a saying.

  And when they weren’t being chucked out of their homes, Jews were getting blamed for everything that went wrong, like plagues and fires and bad weather and stuff, and having to leave the country off their own bat so they didn’t just get murdered in their beds.

  There were some medieval pictures on the website, showing the Christians as straight-backed, handsome, clean-cut men, while the Jews were all hunched over with cartoon big noses, looking sneaky and sly and like they deserved to have their heads cut off, which was what was generally happening or about to happen in the pictures.