Streaking (22 page)

The house stood up as steadily as it had for centuries, unassailably peaceful. The terror
had
been unreasoning—unless it had been a premonition of a disaster that three of them, having been forewarned, had contrived to avert.

Canny understood the psychology of that phenomenon too; no matter how hard his ancestors had tried to disbelieve that the terror associated with dark streaks was a symptom without a cause, they could never be sure of what
might
have happened if they hadn't handled themselves carefully. There was always a temptation to believe that the gift had allowed impending disaster to be avoided.

How lucky the Kilcannons were, to know of so many perils to which common men were oblivious!

There was no need for this
, Canny admonished himself, sternly.
You could have stayed where you were. We could all have talked it over like civilized people
.

He didn't know whether he dared to believe that, either.

When he came to the roadway he realized that he didn't know which way to turn to get to Frimley station. In the other direction, he guessed, the road would probably lead to Brookwood.

Did it matter much which way he turned? Probably not, he decided—so he picked a direction at random, feeling no particular need to depend on his unusual luck to make the right choice for him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

By the time Canny got off the underground at Bond Street it was eleven o'clock. He dropped into a Pizza Hut and placed an order for a large ham and mushroom; there was a slight delay on deliveries but they promised to get it to him by half past.

He walked back to the flat in something of a daze, not noticing until he had actually set foot on the bottom step that someone was sitting beside the door. It was Alice Ellison.

“I buzzed the guy upstairs and asked him to let me wait inside but he wouldn't,” Alice said, apologetically.

“How long have you been waiting?” he asked, as he opened the main door.

“Not long. A couple of hours.”

“Why didn't you call?”

“I did. The second time, I could hear your mobile ringing inside the flat, where you'd left it.”

Canny hadn't realized until she told him that he had been in so much of a hurry when Lo Chen's chauffeur had called that he hadn't picked up his phone from the side-table where he'd left it, beside the chair on whose back he'd draped the jacket he'd been wearing earlier in the day. Now, having opened the apartment door, he saw it lying there in full view, impossible to miss. “Damn,” he said. “Sorry. I didn't even know you were in London.”

“I wasn't. I drove down today.”

“To see me?” Canny was genuinely surprised, although he remembered telling her that she could. “I'm due back tomorrow—Mummy or Bentley could have told you that if you'd asked.”

“I did. They did. Not the point.”

“You were in that much of a hurry? Then I'm doubly sorry to have kept you waiting. Can I get you a drink? I've no food in, but I've ordered a large pizza—they should be delivering it in ten or twenty minutes.”

“Ham and mushroom?” she asked.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“You're a Yorkshireman. Yes, I will have a drink. Scotch, with soda if you have it. And ice, if you have that.”

“No problem,” he said, picking the scotch from the sideboard and hastening into the kitchen. “The fridge is fine, and well-stocked with essentials—it just doesn't have any food in it. I've been eating out. On business, mostly.”

“So why the pizza?” The question floated back from the living-room.

“Except tonight,” he said, as he pulled the ice tray out of the freezer and twisted it to release the blocks. “Tonight, I missed dinner entirely.”

He distributed six cubes of ice in two glasses, poured two generous helpings of whisky over the ice and added a splash of soda to one glass. By the time he'd carried them back through she had taken off her light raincoat—an unnecessary precaution, given that the weather down south had not yet shown any sign of turning autumnal—to expose a black silk blouse and a knee-length skirt.

“Sorry,” she said, as she took the proffered glass. “I'm in mourning.”

“I know,” he said. “You don't need to apologize.”

“You might want to withhold judgment on that. So was it a five o'clock that dragged on and on, or was it Lissa Lo imposing her diet on you?”

“Neither,” Canny told her, wryly. “It was Lissa Lo's mother trying to warn me off. She thinks that associating with me won't do Lissa's career prospects any good at all. I thought for a moment or two that she was going to have me bumped off, but she settled for giving me a good talking to. Did your parents give Martin a hard time when you first took him home?”

“Mum and Dad never gave anyone a hard time. They approved of Martin, just as they'd approved of Ellen's Jack and Lydia's Ken, albeit in a slightly more deferential fashion. They'd have approved of you, if Ellen had ever managed to get you into her knickers—even if there was no question of you ever condescending to make an honest woman of her.”

Canny took a sip of whisky. “Was she trying?” he asked.

“Not all the time. At fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, maybe—albeit sporadically, given that you were away at school most of the time. At fourteen she hadn't started to care, and after she turned eighteen she'd had to give up, partly because you never seemed to come home again after you went to Cambridge but mainly because she was nursing Marie. Then she married Jack. Had you honestly forgotten? I know you weren't home much, being caught up in the social whirl of Ampleforth and all that, and probably had other offers even in the village, but Ellen was never as subtle as some and she always reckoned that she had a chance—of a night to remember, that is, not anything serious. She always reckoned that you wanted to, but were too afraid of what your Dad might do if he found out you'd been fucking the commoners.”

“Dad would have been blazing mad if he'd ever caught me at it,” Canny agreed. “It wouldn't have mattered who with—Ellen wouldn't have been any less in his eyes than a royal princess. A man of principle, my Daddy. So yes, I kept to my best behavior while I was home and sowed my precious few wild oats elsewhere. And no, I hadn't really forgotten—I'd just got into the habit of setting it aside, and remembering our encounters in happier and more innocent times. Not that it sounded so innocent when you blurted it out in front of your Mum.”

“I told you—she wouldn't disapprove. Not that she's got fewer principles than your Dad, you understand—just that they're slightly different.”

Canny observed, slightly to his surprise, that Alice's glass was empty. “Do you want another?” he asked.

“Please. So, did Mama Supermodel get through to you? Are you going to stop stalking her daughter?”

“That's a bit personal, isn't it?” he asked, before setting his own glass down and taking hers back into the kitchen.

“I thought we were allowed to ask one another questions like that,” she said, raising her voice slightly to make herself audible. “Insults and all. I thought we had a deal. If I'd wanted bullshit, I could have stayed with Mum and Dad in Cockayne.”

“Sorry,” he said, as he broke out more ice. “I guess it's been a trying evening. I forgot I was doubling for the universe's whipping boy. You want to kick me in the balls, maybe? Spit in my face and put a curse on me?” He finished off with a squirt of soda.

The doorbell sounded as soon as he got back into the other room.

“I'll steal half your pizza,” she said. “I haven't eaten either.”

Canny collected the pizza and paid the delivery boy, adding a three pound tip even though the youth had only had to drive his bike a couple of hundred yards.

“That's okay,” Canny said. “If I'd been here when you arrived there'd have been time to take you out for a proper meal. You need a plate, or can we eat straight out of the box?”

“Might as well save on the washing up,” she said. “Mind you, now you're a lord you really ought to give up eating haddock and chips out of the paper and pizza out of the box.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed. “That was a no to spitting in my face, then? And the rest?”

“I wouldn't take a train all the way from Leeds to King's Cross and a tube to Baker Street just to spit in your face, Canny,” Alice said. “I hope you don't think that I'm stalking you.”

“Nobody's stalking anybody, Alice. I said I'd be here if you needed someone to talk to, and I'm sorry it took me two hours to turn up. Bond Street's a fraction closer, by the way, and it's a nicer walk.”

“It's not as easy to get to from King's Cross,” she pointed out. “And I didn't really come to talk.”

“Oh? Why did you come?”

“Well, you probably haven't noticed this, but my mood's been all over the place recently—angry one minute, weepy the next. I'm a little bit out of control, and I just can't seem to get a grip.”

“No,” he said, amiably, “I hadn't noticed. So you came down on a whim, is that it?”

“Sort of. Actually, I came down expecting the whim to pass, just like all the rest. I thought it would have gone by the time the train got to King's Cross, so that I could just catch the next train back. Then I thought it would be gone by the time I got here. Then I thought it would be gone by the time
you
got here. But it wasn't. Isn't.”

“Oh,” he said. “Could you elaborate slightly—I'm not following you.”

“Sure. You probably don't know this, since your own dear departed was your father, but when you lose a husband grief tends to move through several different phases, one of which is the lustful phase—which can be very embarrassing, if you happen to be staying with your Mum and Dad in a village where everybody knows everybody else and your sister runs the local fish shop, even if the pangs don't last for very long. So I asked myself whether there was anywhere else I could go where I stood a fair to middling chance of passing through the mood and out the other side without undue distress—or, if it happened to last the distance, getting someone to fuck my brains out. You just sprang to mind.”

Canny choked on a slice of pizza, and found himself quite unable to reply.

While he was coughing, Alice went on. “It did occur to me on the way down that as you were being chased by Lissa Lo with a view to her bearing your love-child, you might be a trifle uninterested in a short-arsed widow with crooked teeth, but I said to myself, what the hell? if he says no he says no, and—who knows?—maybe he'll be so steamed up by Lissa Lo being difficult that he'll welcome the opportunity. Least I could do, if so. No strings, of course. We can go home tomorrow, by our separate ways, and forget that it ever happened. Your Mummy will never know—and, more to the point, neither will mine.”

Canny took a swig of whisky to help clear his windpipe, but it only seemed to make things worse. Alice didn't get up, as any normal person would have done, to thump him on the back or pretend to know how to do the Heimlich maneuver. She just continued nibbling at a slice of pizza, swallowing very carefully.

“I think what you're trying to say, given that you're not one for cursing,” she said, “is
Jesus, Alice!
I seem to be getting that a lot lately, even though my favorite WPC gave me an excuse not to go to church on Sunday. They've caught the murderers, by the way. Thirteen and fourteen years old. Scrawny, too. Didn't even have a drug habit. Stealing for fun rather than profit, followed by sheer blind panic and a lucky swipe with the crowbar. Utter stupidity, not to mention futility. I have to confess that I feel slightly ignominious, but my feelings do seem to have got slightly on top of me. How about you?”

“I'm okay,” Canny finally contrived to splutter.

“No, I mean, how about you getting on top of me? Am I on, or not? A simple one word answer will suffice—I don't need an explanation, let alone counseling.”

Canny coughed again, at great length, but it was more to cover up the absence of a one-word answer than to save his life.

“I'll take that as a no, then,” she said. “Well, Ellen would be pleased, if she were ever to find out—which she won't. It dents a girl's confidence, you know, to practically offer herself to a randy teenager, with no strings attached, and get no response. It's the sort of thing that can end up with getting hitched to a fish and chip shop. Maybe I should have tried then, and saved myself the embarrassment of trying now, but you never know how things will turn out, do you? You just never know.”

“Alice...,” Canny began, weakly—but he didn't know how to carry on.

“Precious few,” she echoed, thoughtfully. “You sowed your
precious few
wild oats elsewhere, setting Ellen aside, and Heaven knows how many others. But you
were
interested—it's not as if you were queer. So what was it, Canny? Were you really that afraid of your father?”

“Actually, yes,” Canny said, glad to be back on safer ground. “He was a stickler for the family rules, and we had rather a lot of them.”

“And you still do,” she observed. “The hell you copped from Lissa's mother is nothing to what Daddy would have said if he'd known about your supermodel pash.”

“He met her,” Canny said, quietly. “I told him everything, before he died. But you're right—if he'd been younger, stronger, fitter...he'd have given me hell, and then some. As it was—with no axe to grind on his own behalf, he contented himself with giving me advice. All well-intentioned, of course...I wish I could say that he didn't understand, but the real problem is that he understood only too well. He even understood the generation gap.” He risked another small mouthful of pizza, and made certain that he chewed it thoroughly before washing it down with whisky.

“You really are hung up on her, aren't you?” Alice said, with more disgust than amazement in her voice. “The Barbie-doll exterior is all it takes—just that and a beckoning finger, no matter how condescending. You really are hooked.”

“Not the way you think,” Canny retorted, sharply. “I'm sorry, Alice, but you
don't
understand.”

“So explain it to me. We seem to have all night, and if you're not going to fuck me you might as well talk to me. I reckon I'm in credit now so far as insults are concerned, but it's okay—just think of me as the universe. Poke me with a sharp stick or spit on me if you've nothing else on offer.”

“I can't,” he said, baldly.

“Oh, come on Canny—impotence doesn't stretch all the way to your tongue. You mean it's against the rules. Well, fuck the rules if you won't fuck me. Tell me how it is, between you and the most beautiful woman in the world. Explain to me exactly how you came to be more interested in her mind than her body.”

“I can't,” he said, again, helplessly. He meant it. He wasn't trying to be difficult. He really didn't think that there was any way he could explain it to her. Not for the first time, he realized almost immediately that he had underestimated her.

“It's the Kilcannon luck, isn't it?” she said. “You have to pretend to be a monk to keep it flowing, is that the way it goes? Your Daddy would have hit the roof if he'd known you were spreading it around because he'd have thought you were imperiling the
real
family treasure.”