A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  Two pleasing things happened. A small group of men held what seemed to be a conference a few yards from the track, then came up and asked to speak to Miss Tarrant. They turned out to be some of those who had attacked the Lagonda, and wanted to absolve their guilt in ritual handshakes. Judy was absolutely delighted, clearly still feeling something of the same need. Chaste, film-starish kissing supplanted the handshakes. Tom wished he had a camera.

  A little later he heard a disturbance at one of the entrances where the barrows were being wheeled away. Wearily he began to climb down to see what the trouble might be, but Judy called ‘Oh, look!’ in a voice that made him go back and stand beside her in the cab. The men by the entrance were a dark mass against a wooden fence, made harder yet to distinguish by the contrast with a single pale streetlight beyond. Into the glow of this lamp, silhouetted above the fence, rose a shape, Mr. Tarrant teetering on the shoulders of the men. Erratic cheers broke out, admittedly mixed with the odd cat-call and boo. Mr. Tarrant raised a hand, waved, lost his balance and was lowered in an undignified manner to the ground.

  ‘I bet they never do that for Mummy,’ said Judy.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll get them to do it for you one day.’

  Tom drowsed, resting his head on his arms on the rim of the cab wall. He was conscious that on the whole he had done right, but that this was really through no virtue of his own. Exactly as, very occasionally in history, a just war gets itself fought and almost by accident one set of bishops can really tell the men going off to be slaughtered that they will die in a good cause—though neither bishops nor soldiers can at the time distinguish this from the innumerable other wars in which all such blessings have been meaningless—so Tom felt that, however blunderingly, he had been doing things that later on he might be able to remember without a sour taste in the mouth. Not all, of course, was bliss. Even a just war has its rapes and ruins. He was distressed for Kate, disturbed about what Bertie might do next, and certainly in no mood to believe that he had by more than a hairsbreadth diminished the ignorance and intransigence of either of the two forces he had been caught between. There was even an area of guilt, made no more comfortable by it not being concerned with anything he could have altered. His thoughts kept returning to Mr. Hutton. It was clear to him what had happened. Hutton had left Kate in order to be present at the ambush. He could make his way down through the woods and join Bertie’s party, hooded like them, lurk on the fringes waiting for any opportunity for trouble. He might have intended from the first that somebody should be hurt, or even killed, thus jerking the screw round another turn, increasing the bitterness and anger on both sides. Perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, he intended the victim to be Tom, the symbolic adversary who had added to all the crimes of luck—birth, education, ease, esteem—by stealing Kate’s love. Had Kate told him? He would have guessed, sensed . . . At any rate, when he heard Tom make his offer to Bertie, to name Ricardo, the logic of killing Tom would have clicked all into place, as smoothly as the sections of a fresh-cleaned shot-gun slot into their catches . . .

  ‘What do you think she’s telling them?’ whispered Judy, leaning against his side, a light area of warmth.

  Tom looked up. Almost all the men were gone now, and it was more light than dark, though still an hour or so before plain day. Well away from the track a dozen men were gathered round Kate. She was talking. Their attitudes were wary, tense, absorbed. One of them tried to break in, impatient and angry. Two others supported him, but were hushed with fierce gestures by the rest. Kate went on, talking quietly and calmly, but looking twenty years older than Tom had ever seen her. He guessed that this must be some inner and trusted group, the Hull Dock Nucleus, perhaps, to whom she was explaining why she had disobeyed orders given her by her Party superior, and who that superior actually was, and why he had done what he had.

  ‘She looks as if she was telling them about the end of the world,’ said Judy.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  14

  Biarritz, 6th June, 1929

  THEY ATE LANGOUSTES and peaches in what had been Bertie Panhard’s favourite quayside restaurant. Two of the old waiters were still there, and the fat woman with the wooden leg appeared with the old regularity at the kitchen door, stared at the customers with the same look of mad malice, and clumped away; but of course nobody remembered them. Judy wrote a postcard to Nanny and passed it across for Tom to add a few words to.

  ‘What do you mean, “This is our very ship!”?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, it might have been, Nanny won’t know, and Tots won’t even understand when she shows it to him.’

  He turned the card over. Sure enough a perfectly plausible cruise-ship bulked among the yachts and fishing-boats. The already slightly faded sepias of the photograph—unsold from last season, probably, and so having endured more than its share of sunlight—did no kind of justice to the blaze and glitter of the harbour. He turned the card back and wrote his message. She took and read it.

  ‘What do you mean, ‘‘Kiss Tots on the soles of his feet for me.”? Tom! What’ll Mrs. Billows think? You know she reads all the postcards and tells the whole village.’

  ‘It’s a perfectly respectable place to kiss a baby. They appreciate it.’

  ‘You mean you would appreciate it if Nanny were to kiss you on the soles of your feet. I knew we should have got somebody three times as old.’

  ‘My Nanny was. She had a moustache and smelt of boiled cabbage. That’s why I think it can do Tots nothing but good to have a Nanny who’s roughly the same shape as a normal woman—especially when you aren’t there to put the right ideas into his mind.’

  ‘I don’t feel quite normal yet,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve had two helpings of langoustes.’

  ‘Don’t be a pig. What shall we do this afternoon?’

  ‘Um. Take a taxi up into the hills and watch the sunset?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  Her tone was flat. The brooch he had given her when Tots was born caught a quick dapple of sunlight where the vine above them shifted a leaf in the breeze off the harbour. At first he had been irked by not being able to find one which represented a particular species, but by now he was used to this product of the jeweller’s fantasy, actually liked it and thought of it as a species all on its own, Vanessa Judyana, the ultimate rarity.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘I feel very yes and no . . .’

  ‘Have we got any spare money?’

  (By the marriage settlement her allowance from her parents exactly matched his Treasury salary, but she always insisted on paying it straight into his account.)

  ‘A bit,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s lose it.’

  ‘Right oh.’

  The Casino had so far modernised itself in the past three years that it now boasted a set of tables for Blackjack, which Judy chose to play. Tom, in no mood even for that level of decision-making, stuck to Chemmy. After a couple of hours they met to drink the Casino’s version of tea—a lukewarm yellow wash tasting faintly of lemon—and compare luck. Tom had won two hundred francs and Judy was eighty down. Despite his mild good fortune Tom was bored, but tried to keep his voice neutral when he asked whether she wanted to go on. She tilted her head sideways and simply nodded, but her eyes were glistening. He recognised the symptoms of one of those violent gusts of impulse which occasionally blew through her, and which she never tried to resist, but gave way to with complete and almost mystical trust. He was glad now that she would need to come to him for fresh funds, though it would be tragic to spoil this longed-for and so far blissful holiday with a row over money.

  Tom lost his winnings quite quickly, won a bit, lost that, and went on down till he reached his modest limit. He strolled off to see whether Judy was ready to leave. Spectators had begun to gather round her table. She had a fair-sized pile of chips in front of her. She looked up, as if sensing his presence, smiled, and signalled with her head for him to come round and watch. He went and stood behi
nd her. She seemed not to notice him any more, but played on, taking strange risks, completely ignoring the odds, drawing a card when there was barely a chance of making her number or refusing chances which anyone else would have taken. Usually she bet to the limit, but when the dealer suggested she might like to move to the high-stake table she shook her head. Three times she hit a losing streak, and Tom ached to drag her away, but the bad luck didn’t last and she began to win again. Then, in the middle of an apparently invincible run she stood up, tipped the dealer with a five hundred franc note, gathered up her chips and left the table. She had won twelve thousand three hundred francs.

  They walked along the quay towards the ship, he still tingling with the vicarious drama, but she quiet with that almost shocked sobriety that comes when you know that the luck-god has inhabited your body for a while and then left you without his parting curse.

  ‘You could buy yourself a new Lagonda,’ he said.

  ‘No . . . I don’t think so. You realise it happened because we didn’t go up into the hills?’

  ‘In a negative sort of way, I suppose so.’

  ‘In a positive way, darling. I’ve never told you . . . I’m not sure I really ought to now . . . but you gave me this, didn’t you, so I think you probably know . . .’

  Her hand rose to her neck-line, bright pink fingernails long and oval on the blue of the brooch.

  ‘That afternoon,’ she said. ‘The butterflies on the hill . . . whenever things are bad, f’rinstance when Tots was being born and it hurt so much . . . I take that afternoon out and look at it. I’ve still got it. I’ll never let it go.’

  She dropped her hand and felt for his. They walked on, slowly, through the dusk that smelt of motors, and sea-weed, and fresh-cooked food.

  ‘Say it,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘And the night?’

  ‘It’s part of the afternoon, somehow. And so’s the next day, even, when you were gone and I had to be bright as a beastly begonia because I wasn’t going to let Bertie guess how much I minded—that’s part of it too.’

  ‘I spent that day in trains, going further and further away.’

  ‘I felt you going, every single kilometer. What I’m trying to say is . . . I wish I could talk like your friend Kate . . . Look, nothing’s ever the same. If we’d gone up there we couldn’t have helped wanting it to be the same, and it would be changed. And that’s right. I want things to change. I want to be part of the change, to accept it, to swim in it. That’s what’s so marvelous about being alive now!’

  ‘Not stunning?’

  She remembered the reference at once and laughed.

  ‘That was that year’s word,’ she said.

  She began to run, still holding his hand, pulling him towards the boat.

  About the Author

  Peter Dickinson OBE was born in Zambia within earshot of the Victoria Falls and educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. After graduation, he joined the staff of the British humor magazine Punch, where he worked for seventeen years, leaving as Assistant Editor. At forty he began a career as a mystery writer. His first two books were awarded the British Crime Writers Association’s Golden Dagger Award, and each succeeding book has been published to wide acclaim. Among his mysteries are Hindsight, The Last Houseparty, The Poison Oracle, Death of a Unicorn, The Lively Dead, and King and Joker. He is also the author of many well-received books for children, including Eva, Earth and Air, and The Seventh Raven. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.

  More Peter Dickinson

  — available as paperbacks and ebooks —

  from Small Beer Press

  DEATH OF A UNICORN

  Peter Dickinson is my own chosen demigod in the pantheon of crime fiction.”—Laurie R. King

  “Everything here is exactly right.”—The New Yorker

  THE POISON ORACLE

  “A complex dazzler with an extra gene of anthropological authenticity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Includes a conversation on the book between Peter Dickinson and Sara Paretsky.

  EARTH AND AIR:

  TALES OF ELEMENTAL CREATURES

  “Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal, Best Fiction of 2012

  EMMA TUPPER’S DIARY

  “Loch Ness’s claims pale beside the super-exciting discovery made by Emma . . . Expert mystification, the tender conscience and burning courage of the young, tantalising details, make this a compelling tall story.”—Sunday Times

  THE SEVENTH RAVEN

  Phoenix Award Winner

  “This steady, sober hostage story is not quite a thriller . . . but anyone . . . can be engaged by the argument and enveloped in Dickinson’s carefully textured citadel.”—Kirkus Reviews

  Also Available from Small Beer Press

  “Henry Sullivan, book dealer & bibliophile, has his life thrown into turmoil when his Beacon Hill landlady dies and a former lover is found murdered. A debut novel by the owner of Boston’s beloved Victor Hugo Bookshop.”—Massachusetts Book Awards “Must-Read Book”

  “A hell of a tale. A murder and the trail to catching him leads through the world of book collectors (Bookhounds) and the things they love. Fans of Dunning will enjoy this.”—Crimespree Magazine

  paper · $16 · 9781931520256 | ebook · 9781931520867

  Also Available from Small Beer Press

  Shirley Jackson Award winner · Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best Books of the Year · io9 Best SF&F Books of the Year · Story Prize Notable Book · Tiptree Award Honor List · Philip K. Dick Award finalist

  “Each tale is a beautifully written character study. . . . McHugh’s great talent is in reminding us that the future could never be weirder — or sadder — than what lurks in the human psyche. This is definitely one of the best works of science fiction you’ll read this year, or any thereafter.”—Annalee Newitz, NPR

  paper · $16 · 9781931520294 | ebook · $9.95 · 9781931520355

  SMALL BEER PRESS

  All our books and ebooks are available from your local bookshop as well as the other usual options.

  Our DRM-free ebooks are also available from our indie press ebooksite: www.weightlessbooks.com

  Thanks for reading!

  www.smallbeerpress.com