All Bones and Lies (21 page)

So was it said as comfort or as warning? ‘I think you're nearly at the end.'

The last few layers of tissue fluttered down. She blinked. ‘Oh, Colin!' His heart swelled as her thin hands shook. He cupped his own strong palms beneath, for fear she'd drop the small glass world.

‘Is it Good King Whosit?'

‘Wenceslas.'

She shook the snowflakes into blizzard to watch them swirl. He would have given half a world to read her mind. Should he tell her that Dilys had chosen it? Better not take the risk. ‘I thought you'd like him.'

‘He's a treat and a half. Look at him, striding along with his beard like a rhododendron!'

Taking advantage of her distraction, he took her gently by the elbows and prised her stiff bones up from the wicker seat. ‘Why are you sitting in here, anyway?'

‘I'm hiding from that doolally young pest who flings her mascara on with a tablespoon.'

‘Perdita? Has she been round again?'

‘Only crooning through my letter box! “Remember what I was saying, Mrs Riley? About selling the house? Well, we're working a little differently now. So here's my new number, if you'd like to call.”' Scrabbling around in a pocket, she drew out a business card on which Tor
Bank's number had been blackened out, and another written over it. His mother's venom lent her imitation a verisimilitude that poor Mel's of Alexi had lacked. ‘“Oh, and if you're there, Mrs Riley, happy birthday!”' The pursed lips tightened. ‘I tell you, if that young lady comes battering on my door again, I won't be leaving her hair with so much fight in it. How come the nosy baggage knows it's my birthday anyway?'

Oh, he could guess. From one last peek at a policy she guessed was void last time she'd had to clear a desk? But this was no day to worry his mother with talk of a property vulture. He stood there, steeped in pity. All of his life he'd hated these frantic spasms of dislike for all things unexpected and unplanned. But now, still bathed in that peculiar sense of seeing his mother for the first time as someone utterly removed, almost a stranger, he saw her horror of spontaneity for what it always must have been: the terror of a damaged soul at even the slightest slippage in control.

Knowing her lifelong loathing of uninvited visitors would draw the fire from any limp response of his, he steered her away from the threat he saw looming. ‘I expect it was her mother who sent her round – maybe even with a present.'

‘I'll send her back to Dolly with another – a necklace made from her own teeth.'

And might yet, Colin reckoned, unless he stepped in smartish. For that percentage-grubbing little witch was bound to be back. What had his sister said when she'd been prophesying Perdita's banishment to one of the departments in Tor Bank where she'd be less likely to
offend? ‘No fat commissions there!' If Perdita would have felt hard done by in drab old Home Loans or Arrears, think how determined she'd be to cash in one last time on all that determined, sweet-talking, bouquet-thrusting groundwork, before sliding in a sulk into the depths of the Tor Pit.

But it was shameful. Shameful! And gave the lie to all that tosh about old people getting only what they deserved. Maybe, about emotional matters, that was true. Everyone said it, after all: ‘Be careful what you give a child, for, in the end, you'll get it back.' But that was
feelings
. This was different. This was
behaviour
. And how you treated people was a choice. It was outrageous to sneak up to try to take advantage of someone like Mother, whose powers were failing. It was like coshing someone in a wheelchair, or tripping the blind, or taking bets from the simple.

It was despicable.
Despicable
.

‘I'm going to get you a proper working answerphone. And fix you up with one of those outside mirrors, so you can see who's coming up the path.'

‘You? Mr Ten Thumbs? No, thank you. I prefer my walls standing.'

Again he wondered at his own tranquillity. Instead of trawling round for some excuse to rush from the kitchen, hurry to the woodshed, take Flossie down the backs, he simply dug into his huge box of shopping to pull out supper.

‘Do you want fish or chicken? I bought both.'

‘The way I feel, I'd just as soon throw up as eat.'

Should he heat neither? Or both? Conundrums that
would have put him in a tizzy yesterday left him unruffled. ‘I'll do both.'

‘Oh, make yourself at home! Then I'll come round to your house and mess your oven in return.'

‘You'd be most welcome.'

The red-rimmed eyes inspected him for signs of sarcasm. After all, how many years was it since curiosity about his life had last assailed her with sufficient force to cause her to visit? Was it to the flat before this one? Or the one before that? But suddenly what Dilys had maintained for years was simply another sign of her indifference now seemed an important, even, perhaps, a necessary bulwark against insecurity: the desperate need of someone fragile, someone vulnerable, to stay, poised for battle, on the ground she knew best.

And she was vulnerable indeed now. Perdita would soon be back, out to intimidate her into selling up with talk of hideous rebuilding or repair costs, and policies rendered instantly void by one small fraudulent response.

All stuff heard first at Dilys's table.

And from his lips.

‘How about a little salad, then, Mother?'

‘No, not for me.'

‘Well, perhaps some soup . . .?'

He inched towards the larder. Yes, there on the shelf behind the jars of beetroot gathering dust lay the spare key he'd begged for a score of times on the grounds of his convenience and, more recently, her safety. He might have spread the chicken's entrails on the table top, so strong his hunch the moment was auspicious, the time had come. With the sense of a Rubicon resolutely crossed – no fuss,
no guilt, not even any doubt – he picked the old key off the sticky shelf and dropped it in his pocket, content to trust to luck that he could get a copy cut and sneak it back before she noticed. Safer than asking again, in case, sensing the way the seesaw of their lives had finally, irrecoverably, risen on his side, she petulantly shifted it to some other hiding place where he couldn't even find it.

Still steeped in calm, he emerged from between the shelves holding a bag of ancient pasta. ‘Macaroni cheese?'

She didn't even hear. Shaking the dome into another fierce storm, she'd jammed her sunken face as close to the glass as Tam had earlier. What could it be about these self-sufficient little blizzard worlds that they should have the power to send all who peered into them into a trance? Some, like Tam, simply dreaming; some, like his mother, seeing worlds they'd been denied from twists of temperament; and some, like Mel, gazing at dreams they'd worn as close as cotton to the skin, and only had to shelve because some precious little accident of fate had—

Mel!

He must get back to her as soon as possible! Tell her that he'd been wrong, and she must, after all, leave Tam with him to go and kick sense any way she could into this tiresome Alexi. Surely if she showed up, free of the sweet encumbrance whose birth had done so much to prick the man's pride, he'd have to crack. Tam could be slid in later. What was important was getting Mel back to the circus. All very well to come to this new, charitable understanding of his own mother. But how could he live with himself, how could he watch his mother sink, still so unsatisfied, towards her death, if he could not forget that,
through his craven shrinking from responsibility, he'd been a part of letting someone else fetch up on that sour path to pinched lips and a bitter life, where the sole pleasure came from taking revenge on yourself and everyone round you for what life had denied you.

Now it was his turn not to be even listening. ‘Sorry?'

‘I said, perhaps the tiniest sliver of chicken, then. I might just force it down. Since it's my birthday.' She sniffed. ‘So long as it's not one of those nasty Fifine's Fancy Truffle Maribou Whatsits.'

He'd learned that lesson. ‘No, no. It's just plain frozen chicken from Betta-Shoppa.'

And if he hadn't already moved on from worrying about her life to worrying about two others almost equally dear, he might have heard, over and above his own impatient assurances, a warning louder than the oven's ping.

ALL THE CALLS
came in at once: Arif from accounts, mystified at receiving a personal cheque from Colin for some two-year-old gas fire; Val, phoning from Priding General to say she'd just spotted his mother's name on a list of Emergency Admissions; and Shirley, ringing up from Reception. ‘I have someone waiting for you here.'

‘Who?'

‘I'm afraid she's refusing to give her name.'

That sounded ominous. Could it be the ubiquitous Mrs Moloney? ‘What does she look like?'

‘Striking. She has the most astonishing eyes – though I have to say her hair is a bit of a bird's nest.'

Perdita!

But first things first. His heart already thumping, he phoned the hospital, only to find that, at the first mention of a ‘suspect chicken supper', blood charged between his ears with such a surf-like roar that he took in little more than that food poisoning in someone his mother's age was a serious matter, and in all likelihood she'd be in hospital for several days. Should he avenge himself on Betta-Shoppa by dropping the details of their freezer
department's malefactions straight in the tray marked ‘forced to decide to prosecute'? Or face his own guilt? How many unmarked boxes in the back of a van could one man muddle? Offered the quite unprecedented chance to do away with half of the villains round Chatterton Court without the trouble or expense of trial, he had instead managed to poison only his poor old mother – oh, and of course, if there'd been leftovers, poor Flossie as well. (He'd have to put that high up on his morning's list – check Holly House for corpses.) Sweating, he dug in his pockets for a tissue, and ended up scattering a shower of paper scraps studded with Clarrie's laborious handwriting on the floor round his desk.

He picked them up and inspected them one by one. ‘Phone Mr H.' ‘That Mr H. rang.' ‘Mr H.
again
.'

Taking it as a sign, he sat and stared.

Then, like a miner knocked half insensible as the supports around him began to topple, he found himself dragging his weakened, battered self towards the only chink of light that he could see by picking up the phone book and turning to the Hs.

Tammy was sitting on the desk, helping Shirley sort out the mess in her handbag.

‘I'm glad you're here. I run a switchboard, not a crèche.'

Alerted, Tam raised her head, and, spotting Colin, peremptorily stretched out her arms. Obediently, he scooped her into his own. ‘So where's her mum, then? In the Ladies'?'

‘Gone.'

‘Gone?'

Shirley handed him the key to the lock he'd insisted on changing himself, the day some passing drunk fetched up sprawled on Mel's carpet. ‘She said she was sorry to dash off, but you knew all about it, and it turned out the train left earlier than expected.'

Slyboots! Small wonder that she hadn't been there earlier, when he went knocking.

‘So she just dumped Tam and ran?'

Colin surveyed his options. If he asked Clarrie to babysit, she'd have him in front of an industrial tribunal faster than you could say ‘inappropriate request'. If he took Tam with him to hospital, he would quite possibly be adding a heart attack to the inflictions he'd already unleashed on his mother. And, now that his council insisted, for safety reasons, that each ‘child care facility' provided a countersigned list of ‘parent-approved emancipators', he couldn't even dump her at nursery for fear they wouldn't give her back at the end of the morning.

Perhaps the hospital had a crèche. Or Val! If she was still round there, perhaps he could—

A wagging finger fetched his attention back. ‘So, young lady! Tam's the name you were hiding, is it?'

He owed Shirley a touch of civility. She must have held the fort for a good twenty minutes while he made his phone calls. ‘Her name's Tamina, really.' He gave her chubby legs a little squeeze. ‘She's Miss Tamina Poppy Gould.'

‘Really?' Shirley looked startled. ‘Then we had someone in here yesterday, trying to find her.'

‘Find Tam?'

‘Tamina Poppy Gould. Not a name you'd forget, is it?
He was a courier with one of those envelopes. I don't think he'd realized that we mostly go by street addresses. In the end I just lent him my phone book and he spent half an hour copying down Goulds.' Clearly the topic of surnames had set Shirley's mind working, for now she turned to ask, with studied innocence, ‘So where are you off to now, Tamina? Up to the office with Daddy?'

It was a smart trick but it didn't work.

‘
Not
Daddy.
Col
.'

He bore her off on his shoulders, taking the service lift to avoid any gauntlet of comment or query. His list was getting longer by the minute. What was it now? First, track down Perdita's little man to see if he could take advantage of Mel's being away to whip into her flat and brighten it up a bit. Then buy the child a car seat. Take her with him to do a quick dead dog check at Holly House. (How would one tell?) Cake somewhere other than the Little Bakery. Then off to the hospital via Bellamy's children's knickerwear department, since it was obvious that Mel had had even less time for the niceties than usual, and from the rather disquieting odour clinging around his collar, had clearly left him – the agent for her revivified hopes of a glittering future – not only with no choice in the matter of babysitting, but also, manifestly, with an unbathed child.

It was as if his sister took no interest at all.

‘Any day,' he was telling her. ‘But after eleven. Before that they're all busy with doctors and stuff.'