John Wiltshire - [More Heat Than the Sun 07]

by Enduring Night [MLR MM] (epub)

  “No, honestly. Transparent. It’s actually reflected sunlight that makes it appear white.”

  “But what about dead ones? What if you skinned one and put the pelt in…a purple room? It would be a purple bear?”

  It was Miles’s turn to appear puzzled. “Did you actually do physics at school?”

  Ben was tempted to say he’d only just done school, but realised in time that he’d only be giving the boy more ammunition. “Bet you’ve never seen a polar bear.”

  Miles looked aggrieved at this but countered, “Have you?”

  Ben narrowed his eyes at the boy, and was considering lying, when Nikolas said nonchalantly, “I shot one once.”

  All eyes swivelled to him. Miles and Emilia were vociferously angry with him, Emilia as a defender of whales and all species other than boys, and Miles because heroes weren’t allowed to have dark sides.

  Nikolas went back to his newspaper, claiming if they didn’t want to hear the story then…A chorus of annoyance ensued, including Ben muttering testily, “I hope it shot back.”

  Nikolas appeared theatrically wounded. “What? I had no choice. It was stalking us. For weeks we…”

  Ben rolled his eyes and tuned out what he could tell was the start of an unlikely and unsuitably gory story, and went back to cooking breakfast, glad when Squeezy emerged so he had another adult to talk to. Squeezy listened to the conversation at the table for a moment, leaning on the counter. Nikolas was up to the part where he’d hidden from the bear under the polar ice in the frozen arctic sea, staring up at it through the translucence, as its blood-soaked muzzle had tried unsuccessfully to scent him.

  Squeezy seemed gloomy. Ben gave him a freshly cooked sausage to cheer him up.

  As he was munching it, Squeezy mumbled around a mouthful, “It’s all his fault, by the way. Wassock’s.”

  Nikolas was to blame for a lot of things, Ben knew, but narrowing them down was always a little tricky, so he gave a non-committal grunt and cracked some eggs into the pan.

  “All this fucking domestication. Kids.” Squeezy shuddered.

  Ben snorted. “Feeling the pinch?”

  Tim came out of the bedroom he shared with Squeezy, pulling on a sweater, and Squeezy’s expression changed, a smirk of delighted imprisonment creasing one corner of his mouth. Ben shook his head. It was one of Squeezy’s sweaters. They were wearing each other’s clothes. No coming back from that.

  One by one, the others wandered in for breakfast. Enid was the last to arrive, mainly because she took a long time to make it to the table with her walking frame. It was Nikolas’s present to her for Christmas. He’d said he’d be really upset if she didn’t use it, and being from the generation she was, good manners always outweighed personal preferences, and so she was finally able to get around the vast glass house with relative, if slow, ease. That he’d also given her the plans for a purpose-built, adapted bungalow he was going to have built in the grounds for her, so she and Miles would live with them, Miles’s future thereby being assured when she had passed on, had gone some way to make this Zimmer-frame gift very acceptable indeed. That he’d decorated it with tartan bows, Ben reckoned, had been the clincher.

  They made a noisy group around the table, drinking vast quantities of tea, and debating what to do for the day.

  Nikolas appeared to take no part in either the noise or the decision-making, quietly reading his quality newspaper, but somehow all suggestions were weighed and assessed and filtered through him until it was decided that they would go to the zoo, which is what Ben knew he’d wanted to do in the first place. Tim and Squeezy immediately begged off, saying they were going to a party, and Enid preferred not to put her new present to that much of a test.

  Molly’s grandparents opted out of the trip as well, Jennifer wanting to visit her friend in Exeter. Her absence always cheered Ben up a little. He felt intimidated around his daughter whenever Jennifer was present, always afraid he’d drop Molly, drown her, lose her to child traffickers, or some other mishap that her fragility and beauty seemed to invite. Consequently, he avoided holding her or playing with her when her grandparents were around.

  Now, he was free to take control of her, carrying her on his back. He marvelled how he had gone from carrying nearly two hundred pounds across mountains in Afghanistan to this feather-light creature, who, in many ways, weighed him down more. Once or twice in his past he’d had to shed his kit and run, fast and light. He couldn’t shed this burden. His daughter.

  §§§

  They wandered around with no particular direction or aim, but knowing that Emilia and Miles wanted to see the big cats. They weren’t in cages; this was a world-respected zoo, and they’d attempted, as best they could in Devon, to recreate a natural environment for the lions and tigers. The main selling point for the visitors were the glass panels around certain points of the enclosures, which enabled them to stand only a few centimetres away from such majesty.

  Ben was watching the tiger. It was watching him. It seemed confused to be there. He knew how it felt.

  “Did you know—” Ben closed his eyes and prayed for strength “—that if you shaved a tiger, its stripes are on its skin too?”

  He considered Miles’s contention and parried, “How do they know? Who’s ever shaved a tiger?”

  Miles conceded this was better than Ben’s usual efforts in their interesting conversations and wandered off to find a member of staff to ask. Ben felt Nik’s presence at his side, and Molly was lifted out of her carrier. She was wearing a tiny little ski suit in ice white with a fur-lined hood, which Nikolas had bought her for Christmas. With her black curls and green eyes, she was incredibly striking. In Nikolas’s arms, her ice-white jacket against his black cashmere overcoat, the impression was startling. Nikolas kissed into Molly’s hair—something he always did with a small, challenging, wicked smile at Ben, as if daring him to be jealous.

  Apparently satisfied at something he saw in Ben’s lip curl of annoyance, Nikolas put Molly down on the ground and she leant against the glass that was separating the visitors from the tiger enclosure. Ben was fairly sure if it hadn’t been for the fascination of the huge cat staring at her, she’d have been off, attempting to run with her oddly puppet-like, dancing-leg gait to escape their control.

  Nikolas gave a quick glance around, ensured they were relatively unobserved, and tugged Ben a little closer by the lapel of his jacket. He wouldn’t kiss him, not in public, even in Devon where they were relatively safe from celebrity culture, but even this much was uncharacteristic. Nikolas pouted for a moment and began to speak.

  Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting hiss.

  The tiger launched itself at Molly Rose. The accelerated mass of five hundred pounds of muscle, fur, and claw slammed into the glass, one inch from her tiny body. Ben and Nikolas both flinched and averted their faces, an instinctive reaction of any human to such a ferocious attack, but then Nikolas recovered before Ben and scooped Molly up and pressed her to his coat, covering her, turning her away.

  Delayed by shock, muffled against Nikolas, Molly’s scream was nevertheless piercing and drew all eyes.

  Ben thought he’d heard a crack. Armoured as it was, he thought he’d heard the panel crack.

  Visitors who hadn’t actually been that close were laughing and taking photos of the tiger. Molly was still screaming, and Ben heard a few muttered comments about fathers and speculation about what she’d done to cause the animal to attack. He wanted to punch them and was glad when he felt a hand on his arm. It was usually him restraining Nikolas, but this was equally effective.

  Ben then realised Nikolas was only handing him the distraught baby—Nikolas didn’t do scenes. Ben took Molly and gave a small prayer of thanks when Babushka whisked her away from him and began to shush her in the secret language known only to midwives.

  Ben took his first breath for what seemed like a very long time. “What the fuck?”

  Nikolas raised his brows but for once didn’t pick Ben up for swearing
.

  “Did you know—?”

  “Miles! Not now!” Ben turned away and began to march to the nearest concession stand with a view to buying his daughter something—anything—to stop the screaming, to stop the thump, thump of his heart. Nikolas went with him, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, his amusement at Ben’s reaction both obvious and infuriating. Ben wanted to ask Nikolas what he should get, but instead chose the first thing he saw without stripes and fur, and at the laughter he knew was being suppressed behind his back, snapped, “What?”

  His hand was shaking. Drowned, dropped, kidnapped, and now eaten by a tiger. He was crap at this.

  Nikolas took the kaleidoscope Ben had bought, putting it to his eye with apparent interest. “Nothing. I was merely wondering what you were doing next week.”

  Ben snatched the toy back. “What I’m always doing. What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I thought I might go and see the Northern Lights. A romantic break in a luxury hotel would be rather sad on my own.”

  Ben felt his whole body droop for a moment. He wanted to lean against Nikolas, suck up his essence, his strength. He closed his eyes. “This is harder than I’d thought it would be.”

  Nikolas huffed. “Since our house has been full of children, I’ve been harder than I ever wish to be.”

  A tingle of lust and anticipation trickled down Ben’s spine. He gave Nikolas a quick, penetrating glance. “Well, now that you mention it, sir, I’m not doing anything next week.”

  “Excellent. Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen, would you like to accompany me on a polar night experience?”

  “Can you guarantee it’s only the two of us?”

  “Oh, I think once I mention the tiger incident, Jennifer will agree Molly should return home, don’t you? Even though St Albans is…not what it once was.”

  For one moment, Nikolas mimicked Jennifer Armstrong’s cut-glass English vowels, and the imitation was so perfect Ben spluttered. Nikolas smirked and plucked the kaleidoscope from Ben once more.

  He suddenly added privately in Ben’s ear, “I cannot imagine what we will do to pass a week in perpetual darkness, can you?”

  Ben looked puzzled. “Watch TV?”

  Nikolas snorted and began to walk back to their small family group.

  Ben offered helpfully, “Read? I could finally get around to Peter’s book.” Nikolas handed Molly her new toy as Ben added, “Catch up on our sleep?”

  He was still making useful suggestions when they got home, none of which Nikolas took up, as he’d worked out his own plan in the car and claimed he needed to make a start on it that night. As he said, practice for when it was dark all day.

  Ben reckoned Nikolas didn’t need practise.

  He was a natural.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was one distinct advantage of their new family lifestyle, Ben reflected, as they cruised at thirty thousand feet above the North Sea heading for Longyearbyen and the Svalbard airport—they could up and leave at very short notice and have plenty of volunteers to assist Radulf with house-sitting duty.

  Squeezy and Tim were only too happy to be left on their own in their friends’ twenty million pound house, even if it came with a slightly incontinent, blind wolfhound.

  As Squeezy was Radulf’s favourite person after Ben and Nikolas, the one he’d put the most training into, he was always more than happy to have him left in his care. Babushka and Enid being in the house, too, while theirs were being built in the grounds, only ensured that the two men were safe from Emilia and Miles, one who had a tendency to plague them to death with very interesting questions and one who thought they’d be tolerable when they grew up.

  Ben and Nikolas packed and left them all to it.

  Ben actually felt a sense of physical weight dropping off him as they boarded the plane. He grinned, staring down at the retreating ground as they took off.

  Nikolas nudged him, not ostensibly looking at him. “I hope you brought your orange ski suit.”

  Ben huffed. “The one that nearly got us killed in New Zealand?”

  “It’s minus sixteen on Spitsbergen today. Please don’t visit any libraries.”

  Ben chuckled and leant back in his seat. Sometimes it did seem as if their lives had been unduly burdened with calamity. Who knew? Perhaps everyone’s lives resembled theirs.

  Nikolas added wryly, “I must remember to write and thank Peter.”

  “For my Christmas present?”

  “No, for my boyfriend. I think he’s back.”

  Ben turned to Nik, as astonished to hear himself openly termed so, as for the implication that he’d been…absent. Nikolas shrugged, sensing the scrutiny, although he carried on reading his book.

  Recently, Ben had found it very hard to talk to Nikolas about how he felt. He found it difficult to admit how constrained and constricted everything made him feel, because in doing so he’d inevitably have to touch on Molly Rose, on being a father…and, of course, Nikolas was no longer one of those…

  Once again a shiver of horror rippled down Ben’s spine as he recalled the moment on the moors when Nikolas had killed his own son. Ben wasn’t religious by any means, but there was something almost Biblical in the wrongness of this. Even dying as he’d been, thinking his life with Nikolas was effectively over, Ben wouldn’t have wanted Nikolas to sacrifice his son to save him had he been given the choice. The shudder of dread came every time Ben remembered that day, because he feared some atonement might be required, some balancing of the scales. Fate. He’d always believed in fate, if not in God, and fate had a way of calling you to account just as easily as a righteous god.

  So he couldn’t tell Nikolas of his doubts and fears about being a father, how he was selfish and not ready for the commitment. How he felt trapped by the responsibility, the inability for the first time in his life to simply pick up a bag and go, anywhere, everywhere, a free spirit. Now, he was ensnared. How could you say that to a man who had killed his son? Who had cut the very tether—fatherhood—that Ben felt imprisoned him?

  Ben couldn’t say it, and the silence between them on this subject grew like nasty little air pockets of turbulence making the journey rough, inducing the occasional queasy sickness.

  Ben knew Nikolas wasn’t one to mention suffering or pain either. He would make a huge fuss about a non-existent splinter, a sprained finger would have him lying awake at night complaining he’d never play the piano again, but snapping his son’s neck would not be spoken of. Ben wondered if Nikolas ever dreamed of Steven. It seemed worse somehow that he’d been a son—an almost identical copy of Nikolas and his brother. Nikolas had destroyed a living replica of himself.

  He was curious whether Nikolas speculated on how complicit Steven had been in the attacks on them. Did Nikolas wonder whether his son had known who he was from the beginning? Perhaps he hoped that Anatoly, after seeing Nikolas for what he was, told the boy and poisoned him from that point on.

  Ben knew the answers to these things, but he had not discussed them with Nikolas. Two could play the game of deception for the greater good. Nikolas had kept him from the darkness for years—rightly or wrongly, but always for the best of reasons as Nikolas had seen them. Ben was now returning this favour. He’d carry the burden of Steven now, not Nikolas. Nikolas had done enough. Ben was retiring him.

  Ben had got all the information he’d wanted from the old man before he’d died. Anatoly had been tough, but he’d still been a man, and all men, in Ben’s experience, talked with enough encouragement.

  Ben shifted in his seat, watching as the coast, a vague line visible through the clouds, passed beneath them. How much was his growing sense of confinement and unhappiness due to the events in London with Anatoly? The things he had done to the old man. The pleasure he had taken in those terrible acts…

  A leopard cannot change its spots, of course, and Anatoly Aronofsky had shown his true colours many years before. But he’d also carried the power of martyred innocence, self-righteous fury at the lies G
eneral Aleksey Primakov had told to have him imprisoned. But who would have cared that he’d sodomised a ten-year-old boy? They hadn’t bothered much when it had been happening. Nikolas had fabricated evidence of fraud. They had respected money and that had put Anatoly away. And, innocent, Anatoly had burned with hatred. Ben could only guess at how easy it must have been to convince Steven that Aleksey was the source of all his woes. “That’s why you can settle to nothing—you never had a father figure. That’s why your mother died—she’d been caught up in your father’s deceits. That’s why you’re so poor—even though your father is a billionaire…That’s why he’s rejected you his whole life—your father is mad. Your father is bad. Your father is gay…”

  What would Nikolas do, though, if he knew Steven had been little more than a naive pawn of the old man’s twisted bitterness against Aleksey Primakov? If he told Nikolas that Steven had come to their door that first night believing his mother had just died of cancer, and that he had an uncle living in London who had been his father’s twin.

  What really scared Ben was trying to decide if Nikolas would have done exactly the same had he believed Steven entirely innocent…if Steven had merely been with them that day on the moors…Nikolas desperately trying to reach Ben and prevent him from being sucked under…

  Ben took a deep, sharp breath. He felt Nikolas give him a quick penetrating glance.

  Ben knew he wasn’t unduly burdened by insight or deep thinking. Nikolas made sure he knew this, if he didn’t suspect it already. But it suddenly occurred to him that his sense of suffocating, being dragged down and trapped, had a very obvious provenance.

  So, he carried all this dead weight by himself very willingly, for if it weighed him down, it left Nikolas lighter. If he could, he would give Nikolas wings so he could soar. Carrying a few bags for him until the time came when all burdens could be shed was the least he could do.

  Ben looked out of the tiny cabin window at the darkness that surrounded them, the emptiness, the nothingness, and shivered at this thought—the end of all things.