Moving Target (6 page)

Back in the living room over snifters of Courvoisier, Ali tried to get the evening back on a somewhat sounder footing. “So tell me about your restaurants,” she said to Charlie.

“There are three,” he said. “One’s up the street here on Sloane; one’s near Whitehall; the third is just off Covent Garden. I’m happy to say business is booming in all three. The catering business is in a warehouse district out near Heathrow, where the rents are lower.”

“It sounds as though you’re very successful,” Ali offered.

Charlie nodded. “I have to be,” he said. “I have a very demanding silent partner—my grandmother.”

“The one you were visiting in Hong Kong?”

“My parents left Hong Kong in the mid-eighties. They were worried about what would happen when Hong Kong went back to China. The truth is, nothing much happened. They thought they could come here and turn me into a perfect English schoolboy and gentleman. That didn’t work out very well, because from the time I cooked my first batch of
chow mein when I was eight, I knew that’s what I wanted to be: a cook; a chef. My parents kept trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. That didn’t work, either. When I had my gap year, they sent me back to China to see my grandmother. They thought she’d be able to shape me up, and they were right. She just didn’t do it the way they wanted. They wanted me to go to university. She paid my way to Cordon Bleu.

“That wasn’t at all what my parents expected. The first thing they did was disown me. The second thing that happened is that my grandmother disowned them. My parents didn’t expect that, either.”

“You know what they say,” Ali said. “Turnabout’s fair play.”

“Indeed. When I wanted to start my first restaurant at age twenty-six, my grandmother was the one who provided the capital. She’s also the one who made the purchase of these flats possible. She’s Jeffrey’s and my silent partner. After payroll and rent, she’s our biggest creditor. We pay her money every month. We’re also giving her the one thing she’s always wanted and didn’t think she’d ever live to see—her first great-grandchild.” He sent a fond glance in Jeffrey’s direction.

“I’m the contracts guy,” Jeffrey put in. “I chase after the accountants and the bankers and the lease agreements and keep track of the income and outgo. By mutual agreement, I don’t do any of the cooking. Eventually, we’ll have a nanny, but we’re thinking I’ll do the majority of the child care. I’ve worked out of an office in the past, but there’s an office downstairs now, and I should be able to use that.”

“Sounds great,” Ali said, hoping to sound supportive. The problem was, she remembered all too well how, when her son and daughter-in-law, Chris and Athena, were expecting, they had voiced similar intentions, anticipating that Chris would be able to stay home and do artwork while looking after what had turned out to be two babies. In their case, the services of a nanny had been required sooner than later.

Glancing in Leland’s direction, Ali could see that he was at the end of his endurance. “I hate to eat and run,” she said. “But it’s been a difficult day, and we have a long drive tomorrow. Would you mind calling a cab?”

“Not at all,” Charlie said. Whipping out his cell phone, he dialed the number from his contact list. While he gave directions, Jeffrey took another shot at trying to talk Ali out of driving to Bournemouth.

“They’re still predicting snow,” he objected. “Wouldn’t you be better off taking a train?”

“No,” Ali said. “I have experience driving in snow, and we’ll have a Land Rover. Besides,” she added with a smile, “from what you’ve told me about the aunties, if they’re too tough to handle, I don’t want to be stranded in Bournemouth without our having a way to get out of town under our own steam.”

“Now that you put it that way,” Jeffrey said, “driving yourself is probably the best idea.”

As the cabbie drove them back to the hotel, Leland fell into a somber mood.

“What’s wrong?” Ali asked.

He shook his head before he answered. “Parents,” he said quietly. “How can they be like that? I thought times had changed between then and now, but it turns out they haven’t, not really. My father chucked me out like so much trash because he couldn’t accept me for who I was. Charlie’s parents evidently don’t mind that he’s gay, but they dumped him because he wanted to be a chef instead of going to university. It makes no sense.”

Reaching over, Ali laid a comforting hand on the back of Leland’s bony wrist. “I agree,” she said. “It makes no sense to me, either, but I can tell you this. In both cases, it’s the parents’ loss.”

A
li’s first thought was that she’d try reading once she got back to her room, but the moment she was out of her shoes and dress and into her jammies, she disabused herself of that notion. The nap she’d had before dinner hadn’t done enough to counteract her jet lag, to say nothing of the cocktails and wine. She fell into bed and slept straight through until morning, rising just in time to dress and go down to the buffet for breakfast before their car was due to be delivered at ten.

Leland was in the dining room, sipping coffee when she arrived.

“I suppose you’re already packed,” she said.

He nodded. “I left my bag with the bellman.”

Ali grabbed a bite of breakfast and then hurried back to her room to finish her own packing. By the time the Land Rover showed up at ten on the dot, she and Leland were checked out and ready to go. The GPS in the rental car said the trip down the A3 from London southwest to Bournemouth would take two hours and one minute. Maybe on a regular day, but not on a day when the drive was punctuated by intermittent snow showers followed by what came close to whiteout conditions. Grateful for the extra traction in the four-wheel-drive Land Rover, Ali kept both hands on the wheel. Occasionally, she glanced in Leland’s
direction. “You don’t look like you’re having much fun at the moment,” she offered.

“I’m not,” he admitted with a shake of his head. “I can’t imagine that the rest of my family will be nearly as welcoming or as understanding as Jeffrey and Charlie were. It’s going to be a disaster.”

“No, it won’t,” Ali countered. “It doesn’t matter if they are welcoming or not. That’s why I’m here—to have your back. If they prove too difficult or too obnoxious, we shake the dust off our heels and decamp for somewhere better.” She paused. “I realize you’ve never told me the whole story. I can certainly understand why, and you don’t have to tell me now, if you don’t want to. But I’m here to help, Leland. It might give me more of an insight if I knew some of the details.”

“All of it?” he asked, peering at her sideways.

Ali slowed and turned the wipers on high as they plowed into yet another swirling mass of snow. “All of it,” she replied.

Leland sighed. For several long moments he was silent. “I knew I was different from other boys from a very early age, although I spent years of my life trying to convince myself otherwise. Langston and Lawrence teased me relentlessly, calling me names I’d rather not remember. Langston, Jeffrey’s grandfather, was always the ringleader. He’d turn over in his grave if he knew he had a pouf for a grandson.”

“It’s probably just as well he doesn’t,” Ali said.

That garnered the faintest of smiles from Leland, but it disappeared as quickly as it appeared. “That was one of the reasons I joined the Royal Marines. Lawrence and Langston both tried to get in and didn’t make it. I not only got in, I served with honor. While I was there—including the whole time I was in that hellhole called Korea—I never said or did anything that would have dishonored my family or my fellow marines. You believe me when I say that, right?”

“Of course,” Ali replied.

“The problem is, when I came home from the war, I was the same person I had always been. My brothers were the same, too. They ragged
on me constantly. Never in front of our parents, always behind their backs.”

Leland fell silent as if struggling to find a way to go on. Ali was tempted to interject something, but ultimately she waited him out.

“Then I met someone,” he said at last. “It isn’t like now, when you can go out to a gay club and meet other people who are in the same situation. His name was Thomas. He was a teacher—a new teacher—at a nearby preparatory school, Kembry Park Academy. During the midsummer holidays, I went to the cricket grounds in Bournemouth to watch a match, and there he was, out on the field. From the time I was little, Langston always said I ran like a girl. Some rough fellows in the Royal Marines said the same thing, but since I could run faster than any of them, what they said didn’t bother me the way it did when Langston said it.

“So there was this one young batsman out there playing—a handsome lad about my age—who seemed to run the same way I did, and he was fast. After the match was over, I ran into him in a pub. I raised a glass to him and said, ‘Hey, you run like a girl.’ He looked like he was getting ready to punch me. Then I said, ‘So do I,’ and we both laughed. That was it. As I said, his name was Thomas—Thomas Blackfield. Never a Tom; always a Thomas.”

Wistfulness had come into Leland’s voice. Silence enveloped the car as the Land Rover moved slowly through the snow. As close as they were to the sea, Ali understood that this had to be a powerful storm. Even with all the traffic, snow was accumulating on the highway. As long as people didn’t drive too fast for the conditions, everything would be fine.

She was about to prod Leland to continue, but Leland resumed his tale without further urging. “Thomas and I were both young and inexperienced. We didn’t want to rush into anything, and with his position as a teacher at stake, it was important that we be discreet. It was summer. We spent a good deal of time just walking and talking, getting
to know each other. Late in August we were down in the gardens by the promenade. We were looking for a little privacy when we literally stumbled over Langston and his then girlfriend, Frances, Jeffrey’s grandmother. Let’s just say we found them in a rather compromising position. Langston was furious. He told me that if I breathed a word of what I had seen, he would tell our parents what he called the ‘truth’ about me. He also threatened to go to the school authorities and tell them about Thomas.

“I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize Thomas’s livelihood, so I did the only thing I could think of. I shagged off to London. With the help of an American soldier, a marine whose life I had saved, I managed to emigrate to the U.S., where I found employment with Anna Lee Ashcroft.” He paused and shrugged. “The rest you know.”

Ali did know the rest, not all of it, but a good deal. She was aware of Leland’s failed romance with a judge from Prescott. It had been a long-term relationship begun while the judge’s wife faded into the lost world of Alzheimer’s. Leland’s hopes of establishing something more permanent had been dashed when, after the wife’s death, the judge’s children had nixed any kind of involvement between their father and Leland Brooks. As for the heartache with Thomas that predated the judge? Although Ali hadn’t known the details, she had guessed most of it.

They were much closer to Bournemouth now. The snow had lightened to mere flurries, the road was reasonably clear, and traffic had sped up.

“You never saw your parents again?” Ali ventured at last.

“No,” Leland replied. “After I got to the States, I contacted Langston to let him know where I was and to inquire after our parents’ health. He told me that our father had died after a fall and that our mother had returned to Cheltenham. He said that when Father discovered the reason for my abrupt departure, he had disowned me for bringing such dishonor on our family and had written me out of his will. Somehow I had expected better of my father, but there you are. Langston also said that our mother was so ashamed by my behavior that she never wanted
to hear from me again. I simply abided by her wishes. It wasn’t until I began corresponding with Jeffrey that I learned she had died of a stroke sometime in the late sixties.

“And now here I am, the grand old man of the family, where it evidently no longer matters if I’m gay, but where Charles can be cast aside by his parents for following his dream of wanting to be a chef and own restaurants. It makes no sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Ali agreed. “Whatever became of Thomas?”

“I have no idea,” Leland replied. “I never made any effort to contact him again. As I said, back in those days, any hint of that kind of scandal could well have cost him his position. For all I know, he may have died in the AIDS epidemic in the eighties. I lost a lot of friends back then. I did go online and Google the Kembry Park Academy. Turns out it closed years ago. Now there’s an industrial park where the school used to be.”

The snow had stopped completely by the time they passed Southampton. As the GPS began issuing clipped orders for exiting the freeway and entering Bournemouth, a few bits of pale blue sky appeared in the gloom. Ali noticed that Leland was sitting forward in his seat, searching for familiar landmarks, and she caught the fleeting smile on his lips when he first glimpsed the sea. Yes, this long-delayed homecoming was difficult for him, but there was no disguising the pleasure in his sightseeing commentary as Ali negotiated the three roundabouts that put them on the B3066, also known as Bath Road, toward West Cliff Road. When they reached the hotel, she was more than happy to turn the keys to the Land Rover over to the valet and let someone else put it in the car park.