by John Harvey
It fascinated him, he who’d scarce picked up a book in two score years or more, the way the tale would draw you out of yourself, pull you in.
Evenings, some evenings, he played the radio loud, anxious for the sound of voices. Knowing there was no need to answer back.
From just beyond the last cottage, he watched now as Katherine stepped into view around the last curve in the lane.
She was wearing light walking boots, socks folded back over pale green tights, a cord skirt in a darker shade, knee-length, a borrowed anorak, several sizes too large, unzipped. When she saw Elder and ran the last dozen yards towards him, her hair, brown and slightly curled, streamed out behind much as her mother’s would once have done.
‘Dad!’
‘Kate.’
He had wondered about this, some awkwardness or hesitation after what, six months? More. The previous summer, it had been, back in Nottinghamshire, and brief. But no, she hugged him and he felt, beneath the layers that she wore, the relative smallness of her bones. Her face, below his, pushed high against his chest, and slowly, with closed eyes, he pressed his own face down against the top of her head, remembering the smell of her hair when she had been two or three or four.
‘Come on,’ he said, releasing her and stepping back. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Katherine hadn’t known what to expect: a jumble of unwashed clothes and strewn socks, empty beer cans and unwashed pots? The house of the Seven Dwarfs before Snow White? A single man who’d gone to seed? But no, everything was folded and in place; her father’s morning cup and saucer, bowl and plate rested on the drainer, waiting to be put away. Of course, he would have made an effort against her coming: hoovered, straightened, dusted.
‘Tea or coffee? Not instant, beans, the proper stuff.’
Katherine shrugged off her anorak and draped it over the back of an easy chair. ‘You don’t drink coffee. You never even used to like the smell of it in the house.’
‘I can change, can’t I?’
She looked at him through lowered lashes. ‘Tea will be fine.’
‘PG Tips.’
‘Whatever.’
While her father busied himself in the kitchen, Katherine prowled. The furniture had come with the house, she supposed, the kind you saw piled high beneath signs advertising houses cleared. Curtains with a floral print, rush matting on the floor. A book case crammed with paperbacks. The heavy dining table ringed here and there and scored along one side. On the narrow mantelpiece a photograph in a plain black frame, herself at fourteen, not long before it had all come apart; in the grate below, a fire had been set ready, paper, wood and coal. No stereo, no TV. Upstairs, the door to her father’s room stood open: the quilt thrown back evenly across the bed, pillows bunched; on a small table stood a radio alarm, a lamp, an empty glass, a book.
‘Katherine. Tea’s ready.’
Dumping her rucksack on the single bed in the adjacent room, she went back down.
It was just warm enough to sit in the small garden at the back, the breeze off the sea fresh but not biting. The late April sun still high but weak in the sky. At the garden edge a low stone wall led into a field where, heads down, black and white cattle mooched. Two magpies chattered raucously from the branches of a nearby tree.
‘So? How was your journey?’
‘Fine.’
‘Coach or train in the end?’
‘Neither.’
‘How come?’
‘I hitched.’
‘You what?’
Katherine sighed. ‘I hitched as far as Penzance and caught the bus from there.’
‘I sent you the fare.’
‘Here.’ Half out of her seat. ‘I’ll let you have it back.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘What then?’
‘Hitching like that. It’s not safe. It’s unnecessary. It’s …’
‘Look. I’m safe. I’m here. See. All in one piece.’
‘You’re catching the train back. If I have to put you on it myself.’
‘All right.’
‘I mean it, Katherine.’
‘And I said, all right.’
But she was smiling, not sullen the way she might once have been.
‘How’s the tea?’ Elder asked.
Katherine shrugged. ‘Like tea?’
They walked along the narrow track between the fields, past the farm buildings, to where the cliff jutted out over the sea.
‘So what on earth d’you do with yourself all day?’ She gestured widely with both arms. ‘Fish?’
‘Not exactly.’ Sometimes he drove across to Newlyn and watched the catch being landed, bought mackerel or sole and brought it home.
‘I’d go crazy. In a week.’
Elder smiled. ‘We’ll see.’
‘Dad, I’m not staying that long.’
‘I know.’ He had hoped she might stay longer.
‘There’s a party, Saturday. I want to get back.’
Elder indicated the direction the path took between two stands of rock. ‘If we head down there we can circle round, come back across the far field.’
‘Okay.’ For just a short way she took his hand.
That evening they went for dinner to a pub between Trewellard and St Just. A dozen tables in the dining room off the main bar and most of them filled. Katherine had changed into a long denim skirt, and a T-shirt that fitted her more snugly than Elder felt comfortable with. He was wearing his usual blue jeans and faded cotton shirt, navy blue sweater folded now over the back of his chair. Elder ordered rack of lamb and watched, amused, as Katherine devoured a fillet steak without seeming to draw breath.
‘Not vegetarian this week, then?’
Grinning, she poked out her tongue.
Plates cleared away, they sat comfortably, talking of this and that, the hum of other conversations sealing them in.
‘How’s the running?’
‘Okay.’
‘Spring training?’
‘Something like that.’
Katherine had begun running seriously when she was around ten and it had been Elder who had first encouraged her, run with her, been her coach. The first time she had represented her club at two hundred metres she had finished third, the youngest in her event.
‘First meeting must be soon?’
‘County Championships, middle of the month.’
‘And you’re doing what? The two hundred and the three?’
Katherine shook her head. ‘Just the three.’
‘How come?’
‘I can win that.’
Elder laughed.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You think I’m big-headed, don’t you? Conceited.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘No,’ Elder said again. ‘Self-confident, that’s what I’d call you. Self-assured.’
She looked at him then. ‘Maybe I’ve had to be.’
Catching the waiter’s eye, Elder signalled for the bill. Katherine was twisting a silver ring around the little finger of her left hand.
‘How’s your mother?’
‘Ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
Slipping her mobile from her bag, she set it on the table before him. ‘Ask her yourself.’
He scarcely glanced at the bill when it came, passed across his credit card, lifted his sweater from the chair. Katherine dropped the phone, unused, back from sight.
Small stones crunched and turned beneath the car wheels as he drove slowly down the track. The upstairs light in the cottage had been left burning.
‘I’m pretty tired,’ Katherine said once they were inside. ‘I think I might go straight to bed.’
‘Okay, sure. Do you want anything? Some tea or …’
‘No, thanks. I’ll be fine.’
Reaching up, her lips brushed his cheek. ‘Good-night, Dad.’
‘Good-night.’
He poured Jameson’s into a glass a
nd carried it outside. The shapes of cattle nudged each other across the dark and, as he moved, something scuttled close along the wall’s base. Here and there, pinpricks of light blinked back from the black mass of sea. Perhaps tonight, with Katherine in the house, the dream would let him rest in peace.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473555730
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2018
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Copyright © John Harvey 2018
Extract from Flesh & Blood copyright © John Harvey 2004
Cover photography: Silas Manhood/Getty Images
John Harvey has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the epigraph, from Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Copyright © Graham Greene 1958. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.
First published by William Heinemann in 2018
William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781785151804
