Initially, when Miles had taken to the beach he had urged silence, counselled patience: ‘He’s a clever young man, Mrs Kelly, he will grow tired of the life.’ But now, going on for two years later, he had to admit that the situation was becoming serious. ‘It’s a terrible thing to see such cleverness going to waste. And he is such a charming and such a personable young man. I can understand you feeling distressed. Your friend Mr Dashwood, now, is he unable to persuade Miles to take life a little more seriously?’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Kelly grimly, ‘quite unable. The least likely, Father. As I told you, Miles feels very strongly that he should have given him a job in one of his companies, he is a rich man – and to be honest, I can’t quite see why he couldn’t. But now it’s become a matter of principle, and I don’t blame him one bit. But Miles won’t even see him, just walks out of the house. Mr Dashwood hasn’t been to see us for a while now, and quite frankly I’m relieved. I feel I can’t ask him for any more help, or even look him in the eye. It makes me feel just terrible to see that boy turn his back on him, after all he’s done, and it’s so out of character too, he’s a charmer is Miles, even though he is so idle. But you can take a horse to water, Father, as you yourself know, and then it’s up to the nag itself whether or not it takes a drink.’
‘Indeed,’ said Father Kennedy with a sigh, looking at his flock, who were so extremely eager most of them to take as many drinks as possible. ‘There is nothing you can do when a strong will is pitted against you. But the boy is young, Mrs Kelly, there is time.’
‘I don’t know that there is,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘Every day that passes he gets more settled, more happy with his life. And then it’s the drugs. Father, he smokes marijuana all the time. Sooner or later there’ll be trouble with the police, and you know he has a record already. And I’m so afraid he will turn to other stuff, to cocaine. He says some of the boys are taking it. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Can’t you threaten him with the police if he doesn’t stop?’
‘I’ve tried. He says I’d never do it. He might be right. I’d certainly find it hard.’
‘I think you should, Mrs Kelly. For his own sake, I think you have to do it.’
‘Father,’ said Mrs Kelly, ‘could you shop your own grandson?’
‘Mrs Kelly,’ said the old man, ‘these days I feel I could do anything to anyone, to save them from the dangers of these terrible things. And you’re right, it won’t stop at the joints. It will lead to the other stuff. And the police are tightening up their controls all the time. The boy will end up in jail. I would urge you very strongly to take the necessary steps. I will support you if you need me to.’
‘Thank you, Father. I’ll think about it.’
She did think about it, long and hard, and rejected, as Miles had known she would, any idea of shopping him to the police. Pride and embarrassment prevented her from bothering Hugo Dashwood. But she continued to worry at the problem night and day, like a hungry old dog with an overchewed bone. And in the end, she came up with a solution.
‘Miles, I think we should move.’
‘Granny Kelly, whatever for? Wherever to? You know I like it here. You know you like it here.’
‘I don’t like it that much, Miles. I’ve never made friends. I’ve never felt at home. Not really.’
‘You have me. I’m your friend.’
‘I know that, Miles, but you’d be mighty big-headed if you thought that was enough.’
He sighed, and smiled at her regretfully. ‘I guess you’re right. I’m sorry. But I really don’t want to move.’
‘I do. And maybe it’s my turn.’
‘Well, you could go and I could stay.’
‘No, Miles, I want you to come with me.’
‘Granny, I’m twenty-three. I can go – or stay – where I like.’ He was smiling, but there was an edge to his voice.
‘I know that, Miles. But I think you owe me something. Some loyalty. Some return.’
He was silent for a while. Then: ‘Well, maybe. Where did you think of going?’
‘The Bahamas.’
‘The Bahamas! Why there?’
‘I have an old friend there. In Nassau. I had a letter for her six months ago. She has a big house, it’s beautiful Miles, you’d like it. She lives alone, and she’s lonely. She suggested I went and stayed with her for a while. I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to leave you. But I think I will. For a week or so at least, just to see if I like it. I asked her how she’d feel about us moving there and she said she thought it would work out real fine.’
‘For you and her maybe. Not me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Granny Kelly, you know why not. I like it here. There’s no surf in the Bahamas. I wouldn’t know what to do.’
‘You could get a job.’
‘I could not get a job. I don’t want to get a job.’
‘Miles, have you never wondered what we really live on?’
‘Well, you have some money, from my mom’s insurance – my dad’s, rather. And the house. And I bring in enough for food.’
‘Yes, that’s true. But if I chose to withdraw it from you I could. And you’d get pretty hungry and uncomfortable pretty fast.’
He went over to her and kissed her. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me. You wouldn’t want me to be hungry and uncomfortable.’
‘I just might. I’m pretty tired of being uncomfortable myself. I don’t really like this climate that much. And I’m lonely, like I said.’
Miles sighed. ‘I’m sorry you’re lonely. It was really bad of me not to realize. I’ll try to come home more.’
‘Miles, I don’t want you to come home more. I want friends of my own. Now I think we could have a good life in Nassau. It’s a great city. I’ve been reading about it. There would be opportunities for you.’
‘I don’t want opportunities.’
‘I know that, Miles. But I want them for you. Think about it. Please.’
‘All right, Granny. I’ll think.’
Thinking was cheap.
Partly out of a sense of guilt about his grandmother’s loneliness, partly out of a wish to make her think he was indeed giving consideration to her plan, Miles stayed home next day and dug the garden. The surf was virtually flat anyway. Towards evening he took the truck and drove it down to the beach to see his friends and say he’d be along next day. The beach was swarming with police. He drove home again thoughtfully.
Later that night two officers from the Los Angeles drug squad called at the house. Miles went to the door.
‘Evening, sir,’ said one of them, a thickset, bullnecked man with shifty, darting black eyes. ‘Are you on your own here?’
‘Good evening, Sergeant. No, I’m not. My grandmother’s here. She lives with me.’
‘Could we come in?’
‘Why?’
‘We have reason to believe you may have drugs on the premises.’
‘Now what leads you to that line of reasoning, officer?’
‘Those guys on the beach. Your friends.’
‘Some friends,’ said Miles lightly. ‘Do you have a warrant?’
‘We certainly do.’
‘OK. You’d better come in.’
Mrs Kelly appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Miles, what is it?’
‘These gentlemen feel we may have drugs in the house, Granny. Do you have a stack anywhere? I certainly don’t.’
‘This is not a laughing matter, sir,’ said the sergeant with a look of such menace that even Miles felt a heaving shudder somewhere in the region of his bowels. ‘You do have a police record, Wilburn, you were convicted and fined over a drug offence, as I am sure you will remember, and your friends did lead us to believe, quite strongly, that you have drugs in your house.’
‘OK,’ said Miles. ‘Go ahead. You won’t find anything.’
They started in his room, and wrecked it; they ripped open pillows, quilts, curtains; they tore out draw
ers, tipped out cupboards, threw books, clothes, tapes, records on to the floor. They moved into the bathroom, emptied the linen closet, the dirty-clothes basket, tipped the entire contents of the medicine cupboard into a plastic bag.
Mrs Kelly, who had been watching half frightened until then, looked at them fiercely. ‘You just watch what you’re doing with that. There’s things in there I need. All the time.’
‘Are there now, ma’am? And what kind of things would that be?’
‘My laxatives,’ said Mrs Kelly firmly. ‘Doctor Forsythe will have a great deal to say to you if I get bunged up again now. Nearly two weeks I went last time, and it was real bad, agony I was in, had to have an enema to shift it and I’m telling you I shall tell him you’re personally responsible if it happens again. Which it will,’ she added darkly.
The sergeant looked at her, and reluctantly opened the plastic bag again.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now perhaps you’d be kind enough to help me sort them out as you’ve muddled everything up so badly. There’s a packet of suppositories as well, which I also have to have with me all the time, so you can keep an eye open for them too.’
Miles hurriedly left the room.
But it was a small triumph, and one she paid dearly for, for they went through her room too, taking her mattress up, her curtains down, rummaging through her underwear drawers, tipping her jewellery box out on the bed. They cleared the kitchen too, every drawer, every cupboard, and then turned their attention to the living room, taking up every cushion on every chair, and turning out her beloved china collection from the corner cupboard on to the floor with a reckless, deliberate carelessness. When they had finished, and gone through every box and case and old jar in the garage too, taken the seats out of the car, the saddle off Miles’ bike, they looked at the two of them with an expression of odd suppressed anger.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything. We might come back. Would you like us to clear up for you a bit now?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘I wouldn’t fancy your clearing up. Just go.’
She was stiff-backed and tight-lipped until the car had vanished down the hill; then she suddenly collapsed on to one of the cushionless chairs, her eyes frightened and full of tears.
‘Granny Kelly, don’t,’ said Miles, taking her in his arms. ‘I’m so sorry. So terribly sorry.’
‘But Miles, did you have any? Where had you put it?’
‘Yeah, I had some hash. I put it down the toilet. That was all, though. They were looking for coke, but they’d have been really pleased to find the grass. It would have done them for now . . .’
‘When did you do that? Why?’
‘This afternoon. I saw them on the beach. I thought they might come.’
‘Oh, Miles.’
‘The bastards,’ he said, in a sick quiet anger, ‘the bastards.’
‘They are, Miles, the police. They are pigs.’
‘I don’t mean the cops. I mean my friends. My friends, shopping me. How could they do that to me? After all we’ve been to one another? How could they?’
‘I don’t know, Miles.’
‘You see. Everyone lets you down in the end. Lets me down, anyway.’
He looked down at her and kissed her wrinkled, sunburnt old forehead. ‘Except you. What a performance, Granny. You were great. You made it almost worth it.’
‘Not quite, though.’
‘No.’ He was silent for a while, looking at the mess. Thinking.
‘Maybe,’ he said slowly, ‘maybe we should think seriously about going to Nassau.’
Nassau didn’t suit Miles. He felt lonely, bored, hemmed in. He couldn’t believe he could have been stupid enough to agree to come. He spent most of his days wandering through the back streets and the markets, wondering how he could escape back to California. It didn’t seem on the face of it terribly easy.
They had left quite quickly, and very quietly. Only Father Kennedy had been informed of their destination, and that in the vaguest possible terms. Mrs Kelly had not sold the house or even put it on the market, simply put anything under covers and locked it up; she said she didn’t feel it was really hers to sell, and that one day maybe she might want to go back. Miles had said that now he was over twenty-one wasn’t it his, but she said no, Mr Dashwood had bought it for her, it was in her name, and there was no way she was letting Miles get his idle hands on it.
‘And besides,’ she said tartly, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to taint yourself with anything provided by Mr Dashwood, Miles Wilburn.’
Miles had shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’
He had never gone back to the beach; he couldn’t. The betrayal went deeper than that of friend by friend; it was brotherhood by brotherhood, the brutal denial of a whole, lovely, lifestyle. He could not believe that the fellowship, and what seemed to him the inherent goodness of life on the beach, could have been hacked to death in five brutal minutes by a load of cops, and that a dozen or so close brothers under the sunburnt skin could sell him down the river for nothing more than the half-baked promise of a more lenient sentence, a lower fine. He felt more than hurt; he was sickened. He had lost faith, trust; he didn’t know where to go or what to do. And Nassau, suddenly, had seemed as good as anywhere – from a distance.
Flying in late one November afternoon, stepping out of the plane into the warm windy air, looking at the black faces everywhere, hearing their sing-song voices, discovering immediately a way of life that made California seem urgent and aggressive, he had felt briefly intrigued and charmed. Mrs Kelly’s friend, Marcia Galbraith, had sent her car for them, driven by Little Ed, her chauffeur; Little Ed was six foot five tall and going on as wide; the name had been bestowed upon him by his father, Big Ed, who had been driver to Marcia’s father until he died at the age of eighty-three. Little Ed was now sixty-seven. He took them on a brief tour of Old Nassau before delivering them to Mrs Galbraith’s mansion; Miles and Mrs Kelly, looking out at the grand, colonial-style white and pink houses, the policemen in their banana-republic white uniforms with their pith helmets and gold braid, the tourists driven about in the open horse carriages, felt they had come to a new and romantic country and smiled happily at one another.
Inside the Galbraith mansion, hidden behind high walls near the centre of the town, Mrs Galbraith waited for them, with afternoon tea.
It came served in a silver tea set and brought in by Little Ed’s wife, Larissa. They sat in the shabbily grand drawing room filled with ornate furniture and painted cabinets, gilt chairs, overlooking a cool, shady garden, all palm leaves and extravagantly flowering shrubs, fluttering with small, brilliant birds, and drank china tea and nibbled wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches; later Marcia Galbraith showed them their rooms, equally shabby, equally grand, both with verandas set with rocking chairs, looking over the garden; they had big high beds, with posts and tapestries, horribly lumpy, piled with old, worn, chintz quilts; the walls were hung with portraits of Galbraith ancestors, and above their heads whirring fans with whirling arms shot the hot air round and round the room. The whole place had a strange, dreamlike quality; Miles felt as if he was watching a film or reading a book, and half expected it all to vanish and to find himself safely back in the house on Montego Canyon. Dinner would be at seven, said Marcia, no need to dress tonight, as they were tired; Miles went out for a walk and found himself near the water, looking at the high bridge over to Paradise Island and the modern, skyscraping buildings, and wondered what he would find to do here, to pass his days.
Dinner, served by Larissa, four courses, each separated from the last by a ritual with finger bowls and glasses of iced water to clear their palates, was tedious and endless; Marcia, who proved to be a little more than slightly senile, reminisced about her days in the last war when the Windsors had been resident at Government House, and she and her husband St George Galbraith had been frequent guests, and she had helped the Duchess – ‘So charming, so very very kind’ – with her Red Cross work. Miles and Mrs Kelly
went early to bed.
But over the days that followed, Mrs Kelly settled down, settled in, began with astonishing speed to pick up her old friend’s affectations, lethargic accent, ladylike ways. She bossed Larissa about, took up petit point, and went out shopping and exchanged her rather sexless, shapeless clothes for some girlishly flowing skirts and lacy blouses. She also managed to persuade Little Ed that some hens would be a useful addition to the household and could be kept at the bottom of the exotic garden.
‘I feel,’ she said happily to Miles, rocking a little too vigorously for a true lady, on her veranda after lunch one day, ‘that I have come home.’
Miles kissed her hand, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances, and smiled down at her. ‘Good,’ he said.
After a few days, wretched with inactivity, he crossed the bridge and spent the day on Paradise Island. He sat on the silvery white beach and looked at the sea, so much greener than its Californian counterpart, so still, so dull, it seemed to him; he looked at the hotels, stacked one upon each other, with no breathing space between, he studied the people, the tourists, who looked mostly so rich and so old, and thought he had never been so lonely, or so unhappy. Later, he found there was more to like; but that day he was in despair.
Miles had never been bored. When he had been a small boy he had had his skate board and his bike, and the beach; when he had been grown up he had had his surf board and the beach; those things had filled his days, and he had never asked more of life. Now suddenly there were these long, achingly dull hours to fill. There were things that intrigued him, but they cost money, and he had none. He would have liked to ride the water bikes that skimmed across the greeny blue water like so many triumphant flying fish, but the hire fee was sixty dollars an hour. He was fascinated by the flashy gambling halls in places like the Nassau Beach Hotel, so big you could hardly see from one side across to the other, where you could fling pocketfuls of change into the fruit machines, or sit down to a serious game of craps, or play the roulette wheel – but he never won, and the little money he took there was gone in minutes. He liked the look of the younger women he saw sometimes, driving their stretch limos in and out of the hotels, and the hyper-smart Ocean Club, rich, sleek, glossy, not unlike the ladies who shopped on Rodeo Drive, and yet somehow in some strange way different, more restless-looking, less American, bored, sybaritic. They would always notice him, often smile, as he passed, but he could see no future in them, except maybe a highly risky one, and he had had enough of danger for now.
Old Sins Page 52
