by CL Skelton
She grinned wryly. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’re our only moralist. The family Thomas Aquinas. How nice.’ She laughed and then said, ‘Still, not judging can also just amount to not caring.’ His eyes suddenly became guarded, in a way with which she was familiar, and she physically felt him slip out of contact into the depths of himself that nobody ever got near.
‘Don’t you start, please,’ he said. ‘I’ve really had enough of that from everybody. And it isn’t so, anyhow.’ His voice hardened and became slightly angry. ‘I just believe in leaving people to be themselves. Just leaving them alone.’
‘Like you’d like us to leave you alone,’ she said bluntly.
‘Emily.’
‘It can’t happen, Sam. You’re born into a family. There’s no way out, unless you lose them all like Heidi and Jan. And you wouldn’t swap with them, surely,’ she said and then paused and added drily, ‘or would you?’
‘Emily,’ he whispered. She looked sorry. ‘Now I have shocked you,’ she said.
‘Yes. You have.’
She brushed her hands down her floury apron, a little remorsefully, and went back to the table and began rolling and cutting her pastry. He sat quietly at the window-seat, looking out at the ducks sunning themselves by the pond. After a long silence she said briskly, ‘Anyhow, I didn’t bring you down here just to moan about my troubles.’ He still looked out of the window, and she wondered if she was going to have to leave this now. But he turned, and she said, ‘Noel’s had an offer.’
‘Already?’ he said, feeling suddenly chilled. He added cautiously, ‘A good offer?’
‘Every penny he was asking.’ Sam was silent. He was, or thought he was, prepared for it, but not quite so soon.
‘Well, that’s that then,’ he said flatly.
‘I suppose so. Would you like to know who it’s from?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh yes, you would,’ she said. He looked startled. She said, watching his face. ‘It’s from Mother. And Mike.’
He stared, not comprehending. ‘My grandmother?’ he whispered at last. Emily nodded, looking faintly satisfied.
‘But why for God’s sake? What do they … what does she possibly want with it?’
‘The same thing she’s always wanted all her life,’ Emily said mildly. ‘Revenge.’ Sam stood up and turned away from her, his arms, in the loose sleeves of the smock, wrapped around himself as if he was terribly cold. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said. He turned back to her, a complex of emotions crossing his face, the uppermost being confusion. ‘Surely no one spends that kind of money out of vengeance.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Emily said, still mildly. ‘People sell their souls for it, St Thomas.’
He walked about the room restlessly, ducking his head under the low central beam. He seemed unable to stand still. He said at last, ‘Has he accepted?’
Emily shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t tell me, likely, would he? But I don’t see why not. He should be delighted. He’ll be rich as Midas and he’ll be able to sit back and watch the fun. And it’s bound to be just super fun.’ She glared at him, and he knew she, like the rest of them, held him responsible.
His hands closed on the guttie’s knife in his pocket again, and he said abruptly, ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Thought you would,’ she said.
He was outside, climbing up into the cab of his lorry, when she came out. She had taken her apron off, to appear in the street, and her face was remorseful. She said, ‘I thought you might like to know they’re coming up to see the place tomorrow.’
‘I’ll be in London,’ he said.
She shrugged and turned away, angry again, but she stopped. ‘Look, Sam.’
‘I’m off, Emily,’ he said, starting the rough old diesel engine.
‘All right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to speak about that. It’s about Riccardo. And Ruth.’ He switched off the engine, softening to her visibly. She said, ‘Don’t be hard on them. I want them to be happy. I do. Really.’
He nodded. ‘He’ll make her a good husband, Emily,’ he said gently. ‘He’s generous and warm-hearted.’ He nodded towards the dilapidated inn, and grinned suddenly. ‘He’ll be able to keep her in the style to which she’s grown unaccustomed. He’s going to be a very rich man.’
Emily smiled. ‘Thanks to you,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘No. Thanks to his own hard work. I just gave him a break. I was to him what Erasmus Sykes was to me. That’s all. Nobody can do it all alone.’ She nodded wisely, and raised her hand in a wave of farewell.
‘Some of us keep trying, though,’ she shouted as he drove away.
He didn’t go to London, though, the following day. He drove to Hardacres instead. He wasn’t expected, but he knew it didn’t matter. Since Harry’s death and Madelene’s removal to the cottage, the place had become rather like a railway station, which people wandered into and out of, always on their way somewhere else. He stopped down the drive and climbed out of the cab of the lorry, standing and looking at the house in the soft early summer sun. They had been in snow and gales for the three weeks in Orkney, and the gentleness of the English countryside always came, at such times, as an unexpected gift. He stood looking at the house, wondering what it was going to be like when he could no longer come here.
He was wearing dungarees and the fisherman’s smock which he more or less lived in when he was working, which was all the time. He had spent the morning in a scrap-yard outside Whitby. He thrust his hands in his pockets and turned suddenly away from the house, and walked, head down, across the lawns, towards the summer-house and the ornamental pond. He wasn’t ready suddenly, to go within.
Helen Hardacre Brannigan, standing coolly at the window of the master bedroom which she had been carefully examining, saw him, and took him for a tradesman whom she dismissed with no thought. She had other things on her mind. One of them was Mike, who was still trying to talk her out of it, and whom she could not let out of her sight lest he try to talk Noel out of selling, as an alternative.
Also, he was inclined these days to be a simple embarrassment. Age had caught him at last, though he didn’t realize it, and in an oddly loving, motherly way, she felt bound to protect his foolish ego from himself.
‘Aw, come on, honey, haven’t you seen enough?’ he complained. ‘I mean, it’s not like the place were new to you.’ It wasn’t. She had known it well, so many years ago, and it wasn’t very different. Leave it to Harry, she thought, to keep everything forty years out of date. But she was enjoying this, savouring it. There wasn’t much Helen enjoyed any more. Money had long ago ceased to excite her. There were just so many things one could buy with it, without simply starting over again and buying the same things twice. She didn’t enjoy travel much; she was an old lady and liked having things in the same place, and not shifted around by alien staff in hotel bedrooms. Mike was manageable in New York, where they had a set ritual of restaurants, theatre, house-parties, and only the right people were ever present. She didn’t like surprises any more; pretty blondes placed at his elbow by some overgenerous host, or that extra martini slipped his way out of the perverse kindness that those not married to drunks can feel for them. Evenings alone together, conversely, were no great joy either. And evenings really alone, when, rarely, she allowed him out in selected company without her, were a terror. Memory, that solace of the contented old, drove her as a whipper-in drove hounds.
She’d begun to dream a lot, sometimes when she was not even properly asleep, but sitting in her chair and only dozing. All sorts of people came back, and most of them ‒ people from her past ‒ were naturally from England. Coming here was like coming to joust with a legion of ghosts. It was madness, perhaps, as Mike said, and yet Helen Brannigan had never run from anything in her life, not from the day she met Joe on the great liner, on which she herself was a stowaway, and bargained with sex to keep her crime secret. She’d met all life h
ead-on. So had Joe. She thought of him often, with almost kindness. He’d been a man at least, not a perpetual, now-ageing, flabby boy, like Mike. She looked round the room, slowly and thoughtfully, remembering Joe confronting his father here, one day. She had not even noticed that Mike had slipped away.
Mike found his way downstairs. He was looking for a drink and thought he knew where to find one. There’d always been booze in the library, where the men of the family always gathered. If he could just remember where the library was. He groped his way down corridors, peering in doors. He wanted that drink badly and his hands were shaking. When he found the library, he was so desperate he didn’t even stop to knock, but pushed the door open and strode right in, and was half-way to the Jacobean sideboard by the hearth, where he had spotted already a tantalus containing two filled decanters, when the girl spoke.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in a low, pretty and surprisingly mature voice. She sounded slightly surprised, and slightly proprietorial. ‘Can I help you?’
Mike looked to the voice. The girl was sitting at the large desk that filled the area before the tall windows. He realized that she must logically be Vanessa and Rodney Gray’s daughter, Mary, but was surprised to see her so grown up. Faintly he remembered her as the little child whom he had met on that Festival year visit with Helen. She looked about sixteen, he thought, but British children of the public school variety were deceptive. Mike, long accustomed to checking out young ladies with the age of consent in mind, was not usually deceived. He remembered when she was born, late in the war. She couldn’t be more than twelve, he acknowledged, with faint disappointment.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he said, in his best paternal voice. She looked a little uncomfortable, sitting there before her schoolbooks which were spread out on the desk. She drew her feet together in a modest gesture of tightened security. He noticed she was wearing knee-socks and that, above, the small band of visible leg below her short, plain schoolgirl skirt, was bare. He saw her fidget, and realized he had been staring. ‘Just getting myself a drink,’ he muttered, crossing to the decanters.
‘There are glasses in the sideboard,’ she said politely, accustomed no doubt to family friends helping themselves. Then she said, ‘You’re Mr Brannigan, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, sweetheart,’ he said, surprised at her adult tone again, and her awareness, ‘that’s me.’ He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t, dropping her head to her books again. She began to write in a notebook. He poured himself a large whisky, added soda from the siphon by the tantalus, and stole another look, while she wrote.
She was slim and graceful, and developed already. He loved the way they began, so literally like budding flowers, everything so hard and firm yet, just a step from childhood. She wore a neatly buttoned blouse and a cardigan with her plain grey skirt, which would have been stodgy on an American girl but which suited her, somehow. Her hair was very black and straight, cut at chin length, and her eyes, he had noticed at once, were deep blue-green and very large and expressive. He wished she’d look up so he’d see them again.
The drink went down too fast. He poured another. The girl glanced up at the movement, but glanced down again at once, conscious of her good manners. Mike settled uneasily on the arm of a sofa, trying to make the next drink last. He half-wished Helen would hurry up, and half-wished she’d not. She was a long time. The girl worked away at her schoolbooks, oblivious apparently of Mike, who found himself on his third whisky and soda and suddenly conscious of the heat of the room, in which a fire had been lit, perhaps better to show off its qualities to the prospective buyers. The family solicitor, Appleby, was obviously astounded that anyone had so quickly met Noel’s outlandish price, and was making the best of things. He needn’t have tried so hard, Mike knew. No one, but no one, was going to talk Helen out of this. He had tried hard enough, himself.
‘Whatcha going to do?’ he asked the girl, suddenly. She looked up, perhaps startled at being spoken to, perhaps also startled at the blurring of his words, which had rather surprised him. It didn’t seem to take much, these days. Three Scotches and he was in a thick haze. He must be getting old, like Helen kept saying. The thought angered him in a sad, frustrated way. It was ironic. He was so used to Helen being the one who was old, he hadn’t realized it could happen to himself as well.
‘Do when?’ she said, meeting his eyes with her own, clear and candid.
‘You know. When you grow up,’ he waved a hand in the air, uncertain of why he’d asked the question, except that it was the sort of paternal question adults were supposed to ask of schoolchildren. And it was a lot better than the other question in the back of his mind, which was something more like, ‘Can I touch that strip of bare leg, please?’
‘I’m going to read law,’ she said with confidence. ‘At Cambridge. If I make it.’
‘Oh, you’ll make it, honey,’ Mike muttered boozily. She blinked and did not answer. It was when she bent her head to her books again, exposing the soft feathery down on the back of her neck, as the cropped hair swung forward, that he found he couldn’t sit still. He got up from the arm of the sofa and wandered around the room, glass in hand, in concentric circles that closed on the desk. Then quite suddenly he settled his bulk on the edge of its broad surface, just brushing the edge of her Latin text. She looked up, surprised, her eyes clouding at the intrusion into her private space. ‘My God, you’re a winner,’ he mumbled. And then, without his really directing it, but by an old familiar instinct of its own, his hand came out across the desk, and trailed down the side of her cheek. Her face came up as if he had struck it.
‘What?’ she said aloud, confused and unhappy, as if the gesture had been somehow a misunderstanding.
‘Now, it’s all right, sweetheart,’ he muttered. ‘It’s just me. You know me.’ He fumbled to pat her hair. She leapt up from the desk, suddenly frightened, and he jumped after her so she wouldn’t start shouting, and grabbed her clumsily and apologetically about the waist. She froze. Her eyes became very adult and aware, and considerably angry.
‘Let me go,’ she ordered. But his rebellious hands were doing their old familiar things. They’d stopped consulting his head years ago. She suddenly became not just angry, but terrified, and shouted, ‘Let go of me. Help, someone, please.’ Embarrassment and refinement kept her voice down, but then she panicked and suddenly shrieked, in a child’s voice, ‘Daddy! Daddy, where are you?’ and struggled to get away.
Mike tripped over the desk-chair, lost his grip and fell heavily to one knee. The chair went over with a crash, and she broke free and ran for the door. But as she reached it, it was flung open and an angry masculine voice demanded, ‘What’s going on in here?’
She met him at the door, and his anger seemed directed at her. She shrank back. She was, and had always been, afraid of him. But she needed his protection. She forced herself to go and stand beside him, where he stood glaring at Mike. ‘Get my Daddy, please, Sam,’ she said.
Sam saw the girl, frightened, embarrassed, indignant, the way young girls are when their new vulnerability is shown to them. He saw Mike. He saw the overturned chair, the scattered schoolbooks on the desk, the spilled whisky glass on the floor. What had happened in the room could not have been more obvious to him if someone had stood in a corner and read aloud a resumé.
‘It’s all right,’ Mike was muttering, waving an apologetic hand over the disorder in the room, ‘it’s just me. You remember me, Sam, don’t you? Mike. Mike Brannigan …’ he extended his hand convivially. ‘Didn’t know you were around.’ He stood weaving, uncertain of the expression on Sam’s face, reading it as a lack of recognition. ‘I’m Helen’s husband,’ he said baldly. ‘Your grandmother’s … hey Jesus Christ, what are you doing?’
Sam could not have told him. He didn’t know what he was doing. The room had become suddenly a blurry, unreal place in which he was aware only of Mike’s face, inexplicably terrified, mouthing words he seemed not able to hear. Dimly he heard the child shrieki
ng again behind him, and heard voices shouting. But nothing meant anything, only Mike, retreating across the room until he was cornered, with widening eyes, in the ell of two walls of books. He was conscious of his own hand on Mike’s shirt collar, and of shaking the burly man so vehemently that his jowly face shook in folds around his terrified moving mouth. Even his own voice sounded distant, saying, ‘Not in my house, you filthy bastard, not in my house.’
Then suddenly Mike’s eyes reflected a vast desperate relief as he looked for a moment over Sam’s shoulder and, suddenly also, the shouts and sounds that were distant were imminently upon him, voices clamouring, directed at him, illogically, not at Mike Brannigan, as if he, himself, were the trespasser.
Rodney was there somewhere saying repeatedly, ‘Good God, Sam. Good God,’ in his short, stuttery way and Appleby the solicitor was pawing uselessly at the arm by which he held Mike, spluttering prissily inane requests that he stop. But it was Noel, little tough Noel, who was incredibly strong, who physically wrenched him off Mike and shouted in a voice that finally reached him, ‘For the love of Christ, man, what are you doing?’
The blur faded; he saw Mike clearly, sweating and terrified, pinned against the bookcases; he saw the cluster of worried frantic family, even Vanessa valiantly braying, ‘She’s all right Sam. You don’t have to …’ And then, for the first time, he saw, too, the guttie’s knife in his hand, held inches from Mike Brannigan’s throat.
Slowly, numbly, he lowered his hand, feeling Noel’s arm come over his with a kind of firm authority as he did so. Everyone was still talking, except Noel, who was just watching him with his head tilted sideways in his squinting, quizzical way. Sam looked down into Mike Brannigan’s face, the astonishment in his own eyes meeting the fading terror in Mike’s. Noel said, ‘Go and sit down, Sam.’ He did, slowly, ignoring the baffled questions of Vanessa and Rodney and the solicitor. He sat on the sofa in front of the fire and laid the guttie’s knife on the inlaid Indian table before it. The family clustered round, still clamouring, while Noel, doing the only sensible thing among them, took a not-unwilling Mike by the elbow and propelled him out of the room, out of the house, and to his waiting car, before Sam changed his mind.
