Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  Madelene could not reach him. Lost in her own grief, she was baffled by him. She herself had turned at once to her deep-rooted religion for comfort and expected him, logically, to do the same. When he did not, a wall of incomprehension came up between them.

  Once or twice Jane, who had also felt that wall, felt herself about to breach it. They would talk; the usual pointless and essential litanies of regret that follow any death and, most particularly, a violent one. They were too obvious to be ignored. Nothing could change the fact that Sam was at the wheel of the car in which his brother died. Nothing could change the guilty circumstance that Sam’s own, deliberate, self-interested change of venue for the party had been totally responsible for them being on that fatal road in the first place. Those were facts. They could talk around them, but not diminish them. When Jane, once too often, gently reminded him that Terry’s death had at least been painless, he flared into anger and shouted back.

  ‘He’s still dead, though, isn’t he?’

  She retreated to silence, working carefully at a piece of needlepoint that she had picked up only to keep her hands busy. She said, slowly, ‘Sam if you want to take it back to beginnings you have to take it right back to VE Day. If we hadn’t had a party then, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ he said without feeling.

  ‘All life is connected, Sam. All of it.’ He was silent again, staring out of the window at her car parked by the ornamental cherry at the edge of the lawn.

  ‘Would you like to see a priest?’ she said, not for the first time. She knew he wouldn’t get angry about that. But he just shook his head. Faith could not help him. It was lost somewhere, beyond the black circle of isolation into which nothing could break.

  He said, bitterly, ‘I was so damned proud of my driving.’

  ‘With reason,’ she responded at once, surprising him. ‘You’re good.’

  ‘Oh, very.’

  ‘The police constables said …’

  ‘I know what they said. And I told them. It was all my fault. I knew about that patch of grease. We’d seen the damned lorry that caused it. I knew about it.’

  ‘You forgot, Sam. Anyone could forget. Anyhow, what if Terry had hit that lorry in the afternoon,’ she stood up clutching the needlepoint to her chest, as if it were the idea she was pursuing. ‘Tell me that. What if he had …’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘He only just didn’t. You told me. Supposing he had, and it was you dead, do you think he’d suffer like this?’ Sam looked stunned. ‘Would you want him to?’ she demanded.

  He shook his head, looking confused, with the hard lines softening slightly in his face. He looked out of the window again at her Jaguar. Then he said, ‘Terry wouldn’t have hit it. He was a better driver than me. He always was.’

  Jane exploded in frustration, ‘Well, if he was so damn good why didn’t he damn well stay sober enough to drive you back?’ She froze in saying it. Neither of the twins had ever tolerated a word spoken against the other. They’d close ranks like iron. Sam stared at her, with the anger in his eyes the first real emotion she’d seen there in days. He raised a fist and for an astounding moment she thought he was going to strike her. But he slammed it instead into the wall with a bone-crunching sound that caused her physical pain, and he ran from the room.

  Half an hour later he came back. He was calm, and made no reference to what had been said. He said only, ‘Could I have your car keys, Jane? I’d like to go for a drive.’

  She looked up, stunned. She tried to meet his eyes, to read his intentions, but when for a moment she did catch his glance, she met nothing but the same dark, impenetrable wall. She nodded slowly, thinking, buying time. She could not refuse. He could well intend only to test his own shattered nerve and she must not prevent him or, worse, show lack of confidence. She stood, reaching for her handbag, withdrawing the Jaguar keys. She said, carefully casual, ‘Would you like me to go with you?’

  ‘No.’

  She handed him the keys. She had worked herself into a corner that demanded no other action. Trust obliged her. He took them, thanked her, and left the room. She stood at the window, watching the car disappear down the drive. He had lowered the hood though the sky was threatening rain. She had watched him do it, methodically, almost as if it were a necessary ritual. She had noticed, in watching, how thin he had grown in the handful of days since the party, and thought suddenly that, although he had sat at table with them for most meals, she could not recall seeing him eat. The Jaguar disappeared into the rhododendrons, reappeared, vanished into the beech wood and was gone. She stood yet staring after and whispering, ‘He must. He must.’

  He drove quietly, even sedately to Driffield, and made his way through the town and out on to the Sledmere Road. He found that Jane’s therapy had worked; he was no longer nervous at all and he handled the car as well as he had ever done. The thought only touched him idly, as from a great distance. It did not really matter. Nothing really mattered.

  When he reached, and passed, Sledmere, he felt a tightening, a tensing into readiness about him that seemed to flow actually from the car itself, as if it were a racehorse turned towards the post after a warm-up canter down the stretch. He flexed his fingers, once, against the worn wood-rimmed wheel. The car began to pick up speed.

  Ahead he saw the tall stand of chestnuts that marked the site of the accident. He slowed, approaching them, and came nearly to a halt as he came abreast of them. The road had been, belatedly, scrubbed clean of the fishy scum on which he had skidded. There was a patch of oil on the roadside, and a battered-down section of hedge and brambles where the wrecked Jaguar had lain. His eyes went just once to the place on the verge where he had crouched in the night beside Terry. Then he looked straight ahead, eased off the clutch and floored the accelerator and the Jaguar gathered itself and leapt forward, roaring away with a skidding of rear tyres in the dust and a gravelly whine through second, third, and into top, so that he was doing sixty-five by the next bend, and seventy and then eighty on the straight without an ounce of deceleration for the bend ahead.

  He made it, with a horrible squeal of tyres and a lurch up on to the verge, and hardly paused before he was off after the next. A stone wall loomed, grew huge, skimmed by his rear wing, and he’d made another. No matter. There were plenty more. He floored the accelerator again. A farm gate flew by, and a voice, shouting. He was deaf. Ahead, a small family saloon loomed up and he had a glimpse of a terrified white face before he flashed by it with inches of clearance. Something tugged at his conscience but was defeated.

  He saw another bend, and begged the Jaguar for more speed. She gave it, but she fought back, cornering so beautifully, fighting for her own life perhaps, if not for his. Bewildered, he skidded out of the next bend and into the next straight. No matter. There was one ahead. A vision of it sat firmly on his mind. He had been heading for it since he left the door of Hardacres behind. He had been heading for it since he left the side of Terry’s grave. It was a true right angle, facing an eight-foot brick wall edging one of the many local estates. The wall had stood there for three hundred years, as solid as granite, and no doubt would stand another three hundred, when he and Jane’s Jaguar were both dust. ‘Sweetheart,’ he whispered to the beautiful silver-grey machine, ‘you’ll not make this.’

  He saw it ahead, at last. A long smooth straight, enough to get the Jaguar up to whatever impossible speeds she could undoubtedly do, and the brick wall a soft red blur, far away. He took one deep breath, tightened his hands on the wheel, but felt no need to tighten his resolve. He accelerated smoothly, feeling the wonderful surge of power as if the car was thrown forward from behind. He changed up into top, relishing, even then, the lovely smooth action. He felt reverent towards the car, preparing her for her end. His eyes flicked to the speedometer just as it touched the ton. Half the straight gone. Goodbye, sweetheart.

  And then she failed him. Like a lover wilting away from the moment of embrace, of her
perfection, she slipped from him, almost imperceptibly, then undoubtedly. She slowed, failed, the roar of the engine faded, thinned, and actually died. Suddenly he was coasting in silence and at such speed that even without power he nearly finished the straight. She came to a halt graciously at the inner edge of the bend, the brick wall a road’s width away, and as far as heaven’s gates.

  ‘What’s the matter, mate? Got problems?’ The voice came like a clap of thunder. He looked up, startled. He had no idea how long he had sat there, unmoving, in the stalled Jaguar. It could have been a minute, or an hour. He found his voice, sounding queer and distant after the roar of the engine and the tension of his absolute concentration.

  ‘Guess I have,’ he said, with the hopeless mundanity of the ordinary settling upon him without mercy.

  His rescuer proved to be one of those mechanically adept gentlemen who carry full toolboxes and handbooks and assorted spares with them everywhere. He was also chatty and friendly, and kept up a non-stop stream of diagnosis and comments as he got his elaborate gear out and settled down to work. Sam let him. Another time, in the other world of normality he had once, too, inhabited, he would have done all that himself. He knew engines and even had, at the moment, a fairly good idea what was wrong. He just couldn’t care enough to act, or even reveal his knowledge. He leaned, numbed, against the Jaguar’s wing, watching his helpful companion work.

  ‘Dirt in the carbs, probably,’ the man said, poking about. He took something off and blew through it. Sam barely watched. ‘Could be fuel lines,’ the man went on. ‘Bit of muck.’ Sam said nothing. The man looked at him queerly. ‘You all right, mate?’ Sam nodded, looking into space. After a while the man finished over the engine and came back to him, leaning over him, studying him carefully. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You want to try her now?’ Sam looked blank. ‘You want to start her up?’ the man said, now looking at Sam as if he doubted his sanity. Sam nodded, dully. He got back into the car and turned the key. The engine came alive, smoothly and beautifully. He listened to its low mutter, numbly.

  ‘Seems all right now,’ the man said, with evident satisfaction. He was clearly waiting for some appreciation.

  Sam looked at him with such emptiness in his eyes that the man looked away. Sam said, ‘Thank you,’ very softly and the man, encouraged by the first sign of civility he had met, smiled.

  ‘No trouble. Just a bit of dirt,’ he said. Sam nodded. The man asked, ‘Aren’t you going to put the top up?’ Sam looked around. It was raining lightly, but steadily. He had not noticed. The grey leather was beaded lightly with moisture. ‘Oh. Yes,’ he said, climbing out again. The man helped him, still glancing queerly at him from time to time. When the top was raised Sam climbed back behind the wheel, staring out briefly through the rain-streaked windscreen. He remembered again to say ‘Thank you’, and the man nodded. He was backing towards his own car, glad to get away. ‘Should be all right now,’ he called. ‘Just a bit of muck. You were just unlucky, that’s all.’

  Just unlucky. He put the car into gear, turned the corner by the brick wall and drove away. In his mirror he saw his rescuer driving off in the opposite direction into the rain. Sam drove another few hundred yards and then pulled into a lay-by at the side of the road and switched off the engine. The rain made a light pattering on the canvas top. He watched it stream down the windscreen over the stilled wipers, blurring his vision. Just unlucky.

  ‘Terry, you smug bastard,’ he cried, out loud. The loneliness broke apart, like a solid object, shattering, and the black circle that had encaptured him crumpled into light. He rested his forehead on his hands on the wooden wheel and, for the first time since Terry’s death, he wept.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The knock came again at the door. Again, Sam ignored it. He wondered distantly who it could be this time, but he lacked the energy to care. Earlier, it had been Ruth Barton. He had opened the door to her, angrily, because he thought Emily had sent her. He had left Hardacres and come back to his own flat in Bridlington, to be alone; but they would not leave him alone. But it turned out Ruth had come of her own volition, and he had been distantly touched by that, though he could not rouse himself from his lethargy to feel real emotion. Still, he had allowed her in. She had wanted to do something; clean the flat, or cook him a meal. He let her make coffee. She teetered on the edge of her chair while he drank it, mystified by the change in him, unnerved by grief, as the young often are, and he had gently sent her away.

  Then he had gone back to what he was doing before, which was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room, his stockinged feet resting on the arm, with a packet of Senior Service, and an overflowing ashtray on the floor beside him, into which he occasionally flicked ash, when he could be bothered. Otherwise he just let it fall on the floor. The flat was in chaos, which was not at all its usual state. Hitherto, Sam’s solitary home had owed more to his monastic past than to the bachelor years that had preceded it. It was almost always well scrubbed and clean and scrupulously neat. He cleaned it himself, having long held a private belief that each human .being in the world, regardless of sex or social status, ought to clean up after itself. He never liked clutter anyhow; his own mind, full of rapid, shifting thought, and will-o’-the-wisp inspiration, was clutter enough. His surroundings must always be simple, to balance it. He was no longer short of money, by any standard, but there was little sign of wealth about the flat. The furnishings were plain, sparse, and old. He didn’t like new things. The sitting-room contained, aside from the sofa and a chair, a large desk, usually surprisingly neat, and now buried in unsorted papers and unopened mail, a wall full of home-built bookcases, the television set that he had got to amuse the Barton kids, and very little else. The only valuable things in the room were his collection of antique paintings, seascapes in oils gleaned from local sources, and a good gramophone on which the Barton kids had played Bill Haley all last summer and which now played only Handel’s Messiah, over and over again.

  Half-filled coffee cups, overfilled ashtrays, and an assortment of books, papers and articles of clothing were littered about wherever he had happened to drop them. The whole was only faintly visible, anyhow, since there were no lights on in the room and the curtains were drawn, as they had been for days. Here and there a stray band of strong summer sunshine crept through to light the dust, where he had failed to close the curtains fully when he had tugged them shut on the day he had arrived. Outside, the sound of children shouting and the endless calling of seagulls obliged him to remember it was summer, in a holiday town, and the world was bent on pleasure.

  The knock came a third time, harder and more persistent. Sam stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. The knocking turned to a sudden impatient hammering. ‘Sam. You in there?’ It was Mick Raddley’s voice, and belligerent, because he knew very well Sam was there and ignoring him. Sam gave up. ‘It’s open,’ he said.

  The door swung open cautiously, and Mick, bent over like a grumpy bull, plodded into the room. He looked around disbelievingly at the chaos and said only, ‘Good morning. It’s three in the afternoon.’

  ‘What do you want, Mick?’ Sam said. He hadn’t moved from the sofa, and continued smoking with his eyes shut, as if by not looking at Mick he could make him not be there.

  Mick looked sourly at him, but said only, ‘Jan called. He says he telephoned four times but he couldn’t get through.’ Mick’s eyes went to the desk and the telephone, with the receiver off the hook. He grunted. ‘I see why. He gave up and rang the pub and they sent round for me. Seems at t’moment the main line of communication between t’ directors of Hardacre Salvage is the barmaid at the Ship’s Wheel.’

  ‘What does he want?’ Sam said, his voice flat.

  ‘He needs an answer,’ Mick said, suddenly vehement.

  ‘Tell him to make his own decisions,’ Sam said, and then snapped angrily, ‘can’t any of you ever think for yourselves?’

  Mick was unpert
urbed.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘We can. ’Cept in the past whenever we’ve done anything without consulting Your Royal Highness there’s been bluidy hell to pay.’ Sam said nothing. It was true. Mick pursued, ‘And Riccardo needs a signature on that lease.’ Mick plodded across the room, and lifted up a couple of the myriad dirty cups and carted them through to the kitchen. ‘What a shithouse,’ he said.

  ‘Tell him to sign it himself,’ Sam said, still from the sofa in the living-room. Mick put the kettle on the cooker before he plodded back through and answered, ‘It’s the managing director they want. Happen you don’t remember, but that’s you.’ He lifted a couple of books and set them back on shelves and began collecting used ashtrays and herding them on to one table.

  There was another silence from Sam, and then he said, ‘Tell him to sign my name to it.’

  Mick stood for a moment by his stack of ashtrays. Then he lumbered across the room and sat down on the edge of the sofa, roughly shoving Sam’s feet out of the way. He said, ‘Now I’m just a working man, an’ all, an’ not that genned up on these things, but something still tells me that’s not the best advice in the world.’

  There was another long silence and Sam said, ‘Mick, go away. I want to be alone.’

  ‘Oh, aye? I’d never uv guessed.’

  ‘I’m selling out, Mick,’ Sam said then, more gently. ‘It can all go to hell for all I care.’ Mick took out his pipe and tobacco and, slowly withdrawing a flat slice of Navy Cut, began shredding it into the bowl of the pipe.

  ‘Is that so?’ he said, without emotion. Then he glanced across at Sam who was finishing his cigarette and lighting another without looking at either it, or Mick, and he said, ‘Why’s that?’ Sam did look at him then, surprised. The question hardly needed answering. When he didn’t answer, Mick said, still in the same, pleasant conversational tone, ‘Because your brother’s dead?’ He looked right at Sam when he said it, which Sam appreciated. Mick was the only person other than Jane who would meet his eyes when Terry was mentioned. ‘I don’t rightly see the connection,’ said Mick.