All Bones and Lies (3 page)

‘It costs,' he reminded her.

Hastily, she hung up. ‘I'll get the number from Dolly later.'

‘You ought to think twice before switching companies,' he warned, adding spitefully, ‘Especially at your age.'

She made a face and asked, ‘Did you get all the shopping?' clearly hoping for the chance to console herself either with criticism of any substitutions he might have made, or with scorn at his failures. Stung, he said, ‘Yes,' and scowled.

‘Something wrong?'

‘No.'

‘You look like the man sent to empty the bath with a teaspoon.'

‘I'm all right.'

And then, of course, it was open season on him. Astonishing how expressive a face could be that could hold two weeks' rain in its wrinkles. ‘Oh, yes.
You're
all right,' the look said. ‘
You're
not hobbled half to death with a bad leg, and nothing and no one to amuse you except some mardy visitor who slips out of the room each chance he gets.'

And it was true. He wasn't making any effort to entertain her. She must have been at least as bored as this back in the days when he and Dilys were tiny, and she was sharing out their fuzzy-felt shapes, and praising their wooden block towers, and itching to snatch the pastry cutters away from their fingers to make the tarts better and faster. She might not have been all that pleasant through their childhood. (The sunny temperament was foreign to her. A closed book.) But she was
there.
She hadn't hopped it off to the south of France with a lover, like Val's mum, or got herself some hot-shot, high-flying career like those women forever nattering about nannies on the telly. Or even simply vanished (which must have been a bit of a temptation, given the way she always spoke of their father).

Fair's fair. She'd put in the years. So if it fell to him to offer her a soothing game of gin rummy . . .

‘Want to play cards?'

She still looked sour. ‘Why? Is it so very tiresome, having to spend a bit of time with an old lady once in a blue moon?'

‘Once in a blue
moon
?'

She backtracked, in her way. ‘I'll give you this, you come a lot more often than your sister.'

‘Well, thanks for nothing.'

She shrugged. ‘Oh, if it's
gratitude
you're after . . .'

And that was him, wrong-footed totally. ‘I'll just check that Floss isn't stuck in the kitchen.'

‘Yes, slip off again. I know you're bored rigid. It's been written all over your face from the moment you got here.'

He picked up the tray. If she hadn't peevishly turned her face away she would have seen the creamy thick envelope – ‘Be Properly Insured' – slip from beside her cushion into the folds of the newspaper tucked between the cups and the milk jug. He wasn't going to mention it. Let her thrash about looking for it, then fret at the thought that he might be downstairs already ploughing his way through its contents.

‘I won't be long.'

‘Don't hurry back on my account. I'm used to sitting alone for hours.'

Christ! he begged, shutting the door behind him. Please don't let me
ever
grow old. Don't let me
ever
act this way in front of my own children. Then, cheered beyond measure by the realization that he'd never have any, he went down to the kitchen and read the paper from start to finish before slipping back to the woodshed to put one spell on her, and another, for good measure, on her favourite hydrangea.

‘FRAMPTON COMMERCIAL?' DILYS
shrugged. ‘Nothing wrong with them. They've been going for years. Part of the Stanger chain.'

‘Is that good?'

‘Solid.' She tipped the steaming pasta into the colander. ‘What's all this got to do with you, anyhow?'

‘I'm just interested.'

‘In Mother's house insurance? Why?'

‘It worries me. I think she might have reached the stage where she starts making mistakes.'

His sister rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, don't you worry about her. She's always been cute as mischief about money.'

‘Always has been. Might not be any more.'

She reached across him for the grater. ‘What does it matter? She'll probably leave it to some cat home, anyway.'

‘It matters that it's insured properly. You can't just walk away from a place like Holly House. If it burns down, it'll have to be rebuilt strictly to specification.'

‘Colin, you sound exactly like your
job
.'

‘What's wrong with that?' he said, filled with the
daring that came from knowing his sister wasn't in a fighting mood. Only despondency could have propelled Dilys into the kitchen, just as only bad blood with Perdita could have prompted the decision to invite him in the first place.

Reminded, and hearing footsteps overhead, he nodded upwards. ‘Will she be joining us?' Dilys made a face but didn't answer, so he set for three, leaving the cutlery for the third place lying so casually that,
in extremis,
it could be taken for a pile of miscounted extras he'd forgotten to pick up and return to the kitchen. Dilys dumped the salad bowl equidistant from all three chairs. Was that a clue? Trawling for evidence, he asked, ‘How are her alterations going, anyway? Is that decrepit little workman of hers anywhere near finishing?'

‘He's on the last bedroom, so she can move back tomorrow.' His sister suffered one of her very brief tussles with discretion. ‘And I must say, I won't be sorry. If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who are prepared to exhaust themselves and others simply to save a few pennies.'

The door swung open. There stood Perdita, a pillar of ice. ‘Excuse me?'

You had to hand it to Dilys. For quick wits, only Mother could beat her. ‘Colin and I were just discussing how much fuss Norah's making over this rise in her insurance premiums.'

Perdita's eyes rolled. ‘Oh, God! Not her again. All you two ever seem to talk about is your mother.'

Was it really true? Last time he'd called by, hoping he'd summon the courage to wriggle out of some
bank-sponsored event to which Dilys had just sent him a spare invitation, his sister had been regaling Perdita with tales of how, to frighten Colin out of bed-wetting, Mother had painted his name on a trunk and kept starting to pack it, telling him he'd be taking it with him to the orphanage.

Perdita's response had been startling. Turning to Colin, she'd asked him sharply, ‘And what about your father? How come he didn't slap your mother hard, and tell you it was all nonsense? Or was he just a wuss, like you?'

Colin sat silent, all too aware he might have been a little more successful in finding her response offensive, rather than disquieting, if it had not raised such a clear echo of Val on the same sofa: ‘There's no such thing as one bad parent in a marriage, Colin. They always come in pairs. The bad one. And the other bad one, who just sits quietly and lets it happen.'

Unnerving, even to recall. And, now he came to think of it, only an hour later, at the grim event itself (‘New Portraits for a New Age'), Dilys had slid all too quickly from the general subject of portraiture into her memories of their school photos on the landing: ‘You were all right, Col. She just walked past yours without even looking. But every time she went past mine she shook her head and made this little clucking noise. Don't you remember? Half disbelief and half contempt. Imagine! Twenty times a day! No wonder I can barely stand to look in a mirror!'

So he could see how Perdita could end up accusing the two of them of spending their entire waking lives carping on about their mother. But Dilys clearly wasn't going to give an inch.

‘On the contrary,' she countered. ‘Up till that moment
we were actually discussing' – she barely faltered – ‘Colin's work.'

‘Really?' Out of spite, Perdita turned her quite evident disbelief onto the weaker witness. ‘Go on, then, Colin. Don't let me interrupt.'

Oh, God. Back came that terror from childhood that, if he let her down, Dilys would slap him. Spitting words out at all in such a poisonous atmosphere was tricky enough. To lie was beyond him. He would have to tell them something about his week.

‘I went to listen to a singing house.'

Even Dilys had trouble pretending she was halfway through hearing this one. And Perdita was startled fresh out of peevishness. ‘A singing house? What on earth's that?'

‘We have a lot of them,' said Colin. ‘They cause a good deal of trouble. We're forever being called out.'

‘To houses that
sing
?'

‘Well, hum, really,' he admitted. ‘But it usually sounds far more like singing, so that's what we call it. It can drive people mad.'

Perdita was making a pretty fast comeback on the spite front. ‘Must do, if they're prepared to call out people like you.'

He knew it was curiosity, rather than a favour returned, that made Dilys break in and rescue him. ‘Where does it come from, this singing? Is it power lines?'

‘Sometimes there aren't any. And it's nothing inside. We can spend hours traipsing round with fancy monitoring equipment, following cables and drains. But nothing fits. The house just keeps on singing.'

‘So what happens?'

‘The owners go mad. Or move.'

‘Really,' said Perdita. ‘Who would have thought that being an Environmental Health Officer could be so exciting?'

She hadn't even bothered to pretend it wasn't sarcasm. But, still, he was too cowardly not to respond. ‘Mostly it isn't,' he admitted. ‘Mostly it's just smells, noise and germs.'

She looked down her thin nose at him rather as if he personally embodied this unsavoury trinity, and, not for the first time, Colin found himself wondering just how it was that his sister, who, scathing and insensitive as she was, had never been malicious, could spend so much time in the company of such disagreeable people. Was it some mere continuation of that perverse principle of boyfriend recruitment whereby, if the young man concerned didn't annoy Mother mightily, he held no charms for Dilys? Now, it was women friends she picked up with a passion, and dropped just as quickly. He'd never thought that it was sexual. He didn't even think she ‘swung both ways'. He just thought that she hadn't changed since she was four and terrorized the playgroup. ‘Today, only people with yellow ribbons are allowed in the sandpit. And that's just Tessa and
me
.' Did his sister get lonely between her great enthusiasms? He suspected not. Rather, that the one thing the two of them had both inherited from Mother was that they were happier – well, less on edge, at least – in their own company. He was straightforward about it. And Dilys had this strange, exhausting – not to say downright unpleasant – way of disguising her preference to
herself and to others. For, of course, if you're continually in the habit of dumping friends, after a bit you're bound to find that all that's still available is the dregs. Of all the companions his sister had chewed up and spat out over the years, the only truly kind one – indeed, the only one with any heart at all – had been dear Val, now spotted only as an occasional flash of friendly headlights and a brief backwards wave in his blemished rear-view mirror.

Never mind, he consoled himself. At least she's on her way out. Gone tomorrow. He sat down with relief where Dilys ordered him, and forked his way through his
Tortolini Portoli
with his head down, eyes darting to the clock as things got worse. To him, it was obvious Perdita was hoping to stage some last dramatic clash, larded with brilliantly wrought valedictory insults and (now the last bedroom was safely finished) crowned with a massive door slam. Presumably gratitude for things like a fortnight's free bed and board was not really her style, and she, too, would prefer to head for the clean break that marked the end of almost all his sister's friendships. But it was equally clear that Dilys, an experienced combatant herself, was out to thwart her. Time and again Perdita steered the conversation into dangerous waters. And time and again a look of bland distraction crossed his sister's face as she affected not to listen, then rose to go back into the kitchen, returning with one or another of a seemingly endless parade of bottles and jars, and a more neutral topic.

But even Dilys couldn't pretend anyone took capers with coffee. So she sat glowering over her spinney of condiments as Perdita moved in sideways on yet another attack.

‘About these visits to your mother, Colin . . .'

‘Yes?' he said warily.

‘How often do you go? Every night, is it?'

He tried the sort of careless little laugh that means, ‘Oh, really! Nothing like that.' But it came out as a half-witted splutter.

‘Every two or three days?'

He took a deep breath. Oh, how he hated being forced to lie. ‘Nowhere near that much.'

‘But once a week, at least?'

Inside his head, he heard an urbane man admit with dignity, ‘Yes, now I come to think, it probably does tend to average out at once a week or so, given the shopping.' Over the table, his stab at this pretence was barely audible. ‘I suppose so.'

Perdita said gaily to Dilys, ‘You told me he went practically every day!'

Dilys ignored her, and Colin sat tight, knowing full well which side it was safer to stay on.

‘But Dilys
never
visits?'

Silence. Dilys was watching Perdita watching her. Colin dived in. ‘That's different.' His stomach churned. He'd realized he'd be paying heavily for this impromptu lunch. Pasta had never agreed with him. But he hadn't guessed it would mean playing the rabbit in the snare. ‘That's very different. I haven't broken off with Mother.'

‘But you could, easily. Dilys says she's just as rude and horrible to you.'

He made a face. He could have said, ‘Oh, that's just her quaint way of remembering you're family.' But it was obvious where Perdita was headed. Wiser to keep quiet.