Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (49 page)

‘Quite,’ said his sister. ‘I mean. Wouldn’t you?’

Troy said nothing. Yet again the woman had gone beyond the bounds of what he knew.

They rode awhile in silence. Troy had no wish to feed whatever bizarrely amoral trend of thought might be lurking deeper in the pit that was his sister’s psyche. They had crossed into
Hertfordshire ten minutes ago. Home, after all, was not far away. It just seemed that way and had for a while – but as the car passed through the gateposts of Mimram (the gates having gone to
make Spitfires in 1940), rounded the curving, crisply brown winter beeches at the head of the drive and the house sprang into view, Troy lost mental sight and sound of his sister. His childhood
home. The rotting pile his father had bought in 1910 and had never quite finished restoring. An English country seat crossed with a Russian
dacha
. It was like a Mexican blanket, thought
Troy, ragged at one corner where the artist had left loose threads and thus allowed his soul’s escape from his art. His father had escaped into death, and Troy’s own words to the Big
Man came back to him in all their crassness – if he could get him alone he’d tell him so. ‘You might as well live’ seemed so inadequate in the face of all that Mimram now
dragged out of him.

He turned to Masha, said, ‘Home.’ And thought that perhaps his inflexion had not been as intended for she said, ‘Where did you think we were going?’