All Bones and Lies (16 page)

Her warmth in no way spread itself across to the sofa. Marjorie gave him a couple of moments in which to feel particularly uncomfortable, then said, ‘It's Colin, isn't it?' adding in a tone he thought rather more in keeping with
an initial police interview, ‘Do please explain how Miss Riley is fortunate enough to end up with all these clothes she's so obviously been coveting.'

Miss Riley? Christ! Things must be terminal. The question was, had he himself become a brother since that disastrous evening in the Stemple Street gallery? Desperate for a hint as to how to explain himself, he swivelled round to Dilys. But her attention was still on the treasures he had brought. Clearly, he'd have to work out for himself if this grim stiffness on Miss Whatsit's part was simply part of her firm rebuttal of further social advances from someone lowlier in the bank, or early curtain-down on some previously burgeoning friendship during which she might well have picked up the fact that he was Dilys's brother.

‘Well, it was just a bit of a clear-out, really . . .' was all he ended up daring to mutter. At times like these, his sister's habitual failure even to make the first gesture towards fetching the drinks she so airily offered could prove a real blessing. ‘Well, I think I'll be off now.'

‘Back to the family?'

Now he was skewered. Was this some fanciful detail from a new Colin Dilys had invented? Or simply the assumption that he was the husband of a friend. (‘If you're driving past Dilys's, could you just drop off that bundle of clothes on the chair by the dresser?') How should he play it? Best – safer – not to lie outright. Perhaps some bland remark along the lines of some people thinking a clothes cupboard all the better for a regular weed-out would smack of that wifely shadow he usually found himself invoking only with shoddy workmen. (‘Well, personally,
of course, I probably wouldn't even have noticed it's not quite flush along the edge. But what it looks like won't be up to me . . .') Was this the moment to resurrect this pitiless imaginary judge of plumbing shortcuts and worktop surfaces out of true?

But Dilys put paid to that one. ‘Colin? A wife and kiddies? That'll be the day.'

It was dropped like the bombshell it was supposed to be: ‘Not according to Perdita Moran.'

It was that bloody ‘wife and child' he'd claimed, come back to haunt him! He waited for his sister's foot to freeze halfway to the Barolo shoe as, satisfied, Marjorie leaned back against the sofa. Even her prim knees seemed to relax a little, and her forbidding look mellowed to some smug, churchy version of ‘duty done'. She was happy now. Clearly his unheralded arrival had offered this stolid, disapproving woman the chance, in the guise of a bit of leaden, if supposedly innocent, humour, to unburden herself of the very nugget of information that had been making her so uncomfortable. ‘According to our colleague Perdita, your twin here is a bit of a dark horse.'

A brother, then. And even the same age. It wasn't clear if Dilys's snort signalled contempt for Perdita for betraying this particular secret, or scorn for the notion of Colin having secrets of his own. But Marjorie read it as indifference, and leaned forward earnestly. ‘No, Dilys, really. Do listen. It seems your brother has been keeping one or two really very important matters from those around him.'

Rude bloody woman, he thought, speaking as if he were dead or unconscious. And how dare his sister keep
paying more attention to a pair of shoes than to the idea that he might be leading a double life?

Marjorie tried again. ‘Dilys—'

His sister finally dragged her attention back from the ill-fitting Italian courts. ‘Oh, I think we all know how seriously to take anything Perdita tells us.'

Stung, Marjorie reverted to her churchy look. ‘I must say, your mother wasn't quite so quick to dismiss the idea.'

‘According to Perdita.'

‘No, no. It was your mother who said as much.'

Dilys was baffled. ‘You've never
met
my mother.'

Our
mother, Colin felt like butting in. Excuse me.
Our
mother.

Marjorie's colour rose. And though, all his life, Colin had tended to sympathize with anyone caught in the sights of his sister, on this particular occasion he found his heart stone. Marjorie deserved to feel uncomfortable. The priggish bag. Happy enough to embarrass him with her overdelicate insistence on passing on gossip in front of people rather than behind their backs. But this sensitivity clearly hadn't been matched by any equally fine impulse to lay bare a compromising little detail about her own life. Relief at ridding herself of a disquieting confidence was ebbing fast. Her cheeks burned through their powder glaze. ‘
Surely
I must have mentioned that I met your mother.'

Dil's tone was glacial. ‘No. You never did.'

‘Really? Well, it was very briefly. After that gallery opening. We ended up sharing the back seat of the car when Perdita picked up her mother from Canasta Club.'
Paddling away from her own guilt, she steered the conversation back towards Colin's by turning to tell him, ‘Do you know, your mother believes you're capable of keeping secrets from your own reflection.'

At least she'd finally had the courtesy to draw him into this assassination of his own character. He was about to speak when Dilys overrode him. ‘Of course she doesn't think that. Mother's simply out to make mischief. Or pass the time cashing in on some of Perdita's.'

‘That's not a very nice thing to say about your own mother.'

Colin waited for Dilys to point out that it was nowhere near as unpleasant as what Marjorie had just been saying about him. But Dilys didn't bother. ‘Mother isn't very nice.'

‘Personally, I found her charming.'

‘Then she must have been clutching a fistful of winnings.'

Again Colin sensed in Marjorie that sudden upsurge of confidence that stemmed from feeling righteous. ‘But what a horrid shock! To learn from the daughter of a friend that your own son's been hiding a wife and child.'

His sister burst out laughing. ‘Colin? A wife and child?'

‘No, really, Dilys. It isn't funny. To find out from a young woman who's simply offered you a lift home that you've been a grandmother for some time!'

‘A
grandmother
? Do me a favour! Colin here couldn't blow a kiss over a hedge at a blind girl, let alone sneak away and get married. The whole idea's ridiculous. Utter tosh.'

Should he, he wondered, standing there scraping his feet on the fringe of the carpet, be trying to feel
gratitude
towards this brash sister of his for being so cast-iron certain she couldn't be hearing anything but nonsense? How could she be so sure he hadn't changed? Maybe in childhood he had been capable only of ‘Colling it up' when he took to deception. But people's lives could alter. Look at Mel. Nobody ends up on the high trapeze after a six-week course. She must have trained for years and years to get on that poster. She'd made air her resting place, kept danger as her closest friend and thrilled a thousand upturned faces twice a day. She'd had a job that weaved her fragile, intimate, celestial magic into the bread and butter on her table.

Then she'd stepped down to earth to live the drabbest life he could imagine. But had he disbelieved her, half an hour ago, when she'd spun round for him? No, he had not. He'd known the truth of it: people could change. So he was furious with his sister, whose confidence that he was just the same old Colin she'd always known felt, not like supportiveness, but like contempt. How could she be so bloody sure he couldn't possibly have got a life?

And that was when it first fell on him like a shaft of light: how much he wanted one. Not just that feeble, drippy wish that he were different. He'd had that all his life. But something tougher, something more like cussedness, that even he might think could power him off his tracks into the sort of extraordinary derailment his sister had dismissed out of hand. At least his mother had been good enough to imply he was capable of telling whoppers. She hadn't meant it charitably, he was sure. God alone
knew what she had meant. (Possibly she hadn't meant anything at all, except not to let that toe-rag Perdita feel that she was one up on her for one single moment.) She clearly couldn't have believed a word of it, or she'd have remembered to crucify him on his next visit. But he was grateful to her all the same. It was a vote of confidence – of a sort. And there was something so pathetic about the way he was living now – through a life no one cared about. If he fell in one of Turner's illegally overfilled slurry pits and drowned tomorrow, who'd cry their eyes out? Who would crow?

No one would even miss him.

Except his mother.

‘I'm off now,' he told Dilys. ‘Round to Holly House. Any messages?'

Did revelation bring some firm new tone? It seemed so, for clearly his sister was startled. And that in itself brought one advantage in that, even making for the door no more hastily than usual, he still found himself safely out in the hall before she could manage to bring out a crack along the lines of, ‘Late for the wife?', or, ‘Congratulations to Granny!'

His mother opened the door in a cloudburst of tissue paper. ‘You took your time. I was about to give up on you and go round myself.'

‘To do what? Remind him of recent variations of the Nuisance and Noise Abatement Order of 1985, whilst taking care to make no actual misrepresentations of his legal entitlement to fair use and benefit?'

‘No. Stuff this up his windchimes.'

He took her flurry of tissue in return for the neat wad of newspapers under his own arm. ‘Here. Why don't you go upstairs and start on these?'

‘Don't bother bringing anything but a cup of weak tea. I've completely lost my appetite.'

Clocking the order, he went round the side of the house to stuff the tissue paper safely in the dustbin before going next door to do his imitation of a council warning. But once in sight of the windchimes, his mother's plan struck him as one of genius. He took his time, crouching behind the still mysteriously burgeoning hydrangea while he tore tissue paper into strips. Then, pulling her precious Chilean flame flower's support stick out of the ground, he leaned across the wooden slatted dividing fence and, making as little noise as possible, poked paper up as far as it would go inside each dangling metal tube. After, even when rattled together, the chimes barely pinged; and, thinking to celebrate with a few stolen minutes with Suzie in the woodshed, he was about to creep off further down the path when up shot a window and out poked a head he had known since his childhood.

‘Are you the dustbins?'

‘Yes,' he said, furious at not being recognized after forty years, but judging it safer, in the circumstances.

‘Right,' said the livid face. ‘Well, tell that mad old bat to put her lids on properly.'

‘I will,' said Colin. Realizing it might raise even this singularly unneighbourly eyebrow if one of Priding's cleansing operatives were blatantly to make off in the wrong direction down the path, he abandoned his hopes of a few moments' carefree poolside frolicking, and, after
a quick gnaw at the support stick so he could lay the blame for the flame flower's collapse onto Flossie, went back to the kitchen to make a snack his mother would enjoy refusing and some tea she could criticize.

He found her knee-deep in obituaries. ‘The world goes none the lamer for this old bugger, that's for sure.'

All his attention was on stepping over Floss without dropping the tea tray. He asked the first question to spring to mind. ‘So who was that, then?'

‘George Henry Besterton.'

‘Oh, I know him.'

His mother's disbelief was evident. He flushed as he put down the tray. But on reflection he reckoned that, not only did he have every right to take a leaf out of her own book and make use of the facilities in the nearby Chapel of Rest, but his snippet of gossip might actually prove as welcome as his news of the weeds in Mrs Deary's grass seed. So, as he sat down, he pressed on with his explanation. ‘It's just that I happened to be in the funeral parlour when he was—'

What was the word for it? Surely not ‘on display'. Could it possibly be ‘resting'?

She hadn't waited for him to finish speaking anyway.

‘Well, you won't have had to beat your way through the crowds to toss roses on his coffin, that's for sure. That man would boil potatoes in a widow's tears.'

And, having rendered his news flash otiose at a stroke, his mother went on to reel off all George Henry Besterton's sins, public and private, during which disquisition it became obvious that civic corruption and personal venery had had to spend their time vying for
attention, in between culpable poisonings of Chaffer's factory employees.

‘They put all
that
in the obituary?'

‘Don't be a twerp. They claim he was a fine, upstanding member of the community, beloved by all.'

He had a vision of the weeping wraith. ‘I met his widow.'

‘Well, that's a pleasure you won't have again.' Rooting through her heap of discarded
Priding Heralds
, she showed him another obituary.

‘Florence May Besterton?' For a moment he was thrown by her habit of going through the papers in reverse. And then he realized. ‘What? She's died
since
?'

His mother pointed to the headline staring from the paper beneath.
BROKEN
-
HEARTED WIDOW TAKES POISON
. She sniffed. ‘Broken-hearted, my fanny! More likely a fit of pique at realizing she won't get to trough at any more civic banquets at Joe Taxpayer's expense.'

‘Come on, Mum! Poison!'

‘Nonsense! I expect the frail sap just stood too near the old bugger's factory without her veil.'

He felt obliged to defend the gentle bag of bones whose hand touched his. ‘She looked' – it was the only word – ‘
bereft
.'