‘What was he like? Gordon?’
Hester, thoughts far from her late husband, drags herself back from her reveries. She gives the question due consideration. Gordon. She tries to conjure him. ‘Big man. Over six foot. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to him.’
‘Oh,’ says Lionel, conscious of his just-above-average height. He sits up a little straighter.
Hester laughs briefly at the memory. She hasn’t missed Lionel’s reaction. ‘It mattered so much more then. Not sure why.’ She recalls the years of adolescence, low heels or no heels according to her current boyfriend’s stature, her apologetic stoop, before she grew into her character and her height and ceased to care.
Lionel relaxes.
‘Kind man. Very kind. Would have made a wonderful father but . . . well.’ She wonders not for the first time whether that’s true. It’s become one of her tenets, trotted out routinely. She can’t remember now when she first said it: certainly not while Gordon was still alive. Perhaps it’s simply what she wants to believe, part of her personal mythology.
‘Where did you meet?’
‘Oh, uni. As everyone did in those days.’
Lionel shifts in his chair; he didn’t.
‘He was a rugger bugger.’ She registers Lionel’s surprise. ‘Oh no! Not one of those loud obnoxious ones—not a Bullingdon type. Dear Lord, what do you take me for?! No, more driven, training all the hours God sent. I used to trail round every weekend to watch him play.’
‘You?!’
‘I know. Hard to credit. Anyway, he got a decent enough degree, joined his father’s firm.’
Lionel raises a questioning eyebrow.
‘Stockbroker.’ She catches his expression. ‘Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. This was before the height of the Thatcher boom in the City. Gordon missed all that. Comfortable, yes, but not silly money. Anyway, he hated it. Cooped up in an office all day behind a desk. He decided he wanted to strike out on his own.’ She frowns at the memory. ‘His father was furious. Incandescent.’ The rows and recriminations, short-lived as they had been, had not been pleasant. She knew that initially Gordon’s parents had suspected she was egging him on; nothing could have been further from the truth.
‘What did he do? Gordon.’
A sort of embarrassment washes over Hester’s face. Even now she finds it absurd. ‘He . . . opened a shop.’
Lionel cannot mask his astonishment. He knows Hester made her career in local government, gathers she was quite a high-flyer; somehow he cannot reconcile that with a shopkeeper husband, especially one who, like her, had attended a prestigious university. ‘A shop?’
‘Uh-huh. Not what you were expecting, is it? Nor me. At the time. I thought he was completely barmy. I told him so in no uncertain terms. But he was so very unhappy and I was already making my way up the greasy public sector pole. I had a modest amount of money from our parents’ estate and we invested that in the business . . .’
‘What sort of shop was it?’
‘Sports equipment. And shops, not shop. Within a couple of years, he had three of them. A little empire. Fact is, he was a brilliant businessman. It suited him down to the ground. Talking to customers all day, demonstrating equipment, trade jollies—best thing he ever did. I was so proud of him.’ She realises, Gosh, I was, wasn’t I? So why did I never tell him that? ‘His father had to eat humble pie.’ Which, to his credit, he eventually had. Although he had to the end enjoyed his little dig: never ‘How’s business?’ when they visited, but ‘How’s trade?’ It drove them both to distraction. But Gordon’s first career had stood him in good stead; his knowledge of the stock market had helped him to build a very tidy portfolio in time.
‘Well!’ says Lionel, flummoxed. This wasn’t at all what he had pictured. ‘And so . . . were you sporty?’
‘Not really. Could play a half-decent game of tennis if required and I’m not a bad croquet player, but I’ve always preferred indoor pursuits, preferably cards. Mind you, Gordon played a mean hand of bridge himself.’
Lionel, aware of his shortcomings in that department, shrinks a little. This Gordon sounds quite a character. Quite a . . . paragon.
A breeze ripples the leaves of the bushes beside them as ribbons of cloud scud across the face of the moon. Shivering slightly, Hester pulls the neck of her cardigan tighter around her throat.
‘Want to go in?’
She lays a hand on his for a moment. ‘Not particularly. I’m fine. You?’
Lionel wishes he had thought to don a vest under his thin shirt but shakes his head; he doesn’t want to break the moment. ‘I wouldn’t want you getting cold.’
Hester’s hand, warm and dry, returns. ‘I’m not cold.’
Harriet cannot sleep. She knows she’s had at least one glass too many. She knows too that she is starting to obsess again about the future, her temporary equilibrium unsettled by Regina’s relentless probing. She’s tried a shower, a few pages of her novel, an old half-completed cryptic crossword she’d found crumpled at the bottom of her handbag, a hot chocolate from the sachet in her room (watery and over-sweet) and—her activity of last resort—writing a list of her worries. So far it reads:
Stephen (? Marion—Tues)
Mary
Move?
Hester
Lionel
She underlines Hester heavily, almost scoring the paper through, then for good measure rings the name, noting the irony that in so doing she has half crossed out the words above and below. For Hester is the key, the spider at the centre of a web over which Harriet feels she no longer has any control. A wave of powerlessness tinged with self-pity assails her once more, bringing in its wake a hot shaft of anger. For hadn’t it been Hester who first broached the idea of sharing a home? Hester who fixed on Pellington as the ideal location? Hester who had found The Laurels, chivvied Harriet into pooling their finances, laid down the ground rules for their co-habitation, assumed without discussion dominion of the kitchen and much else besides? She chooses to forget the many occasions when she herself had asserted her views and Hester had backed down without demur. It suits her for the present to lay at her sister’s door all responsibility for her turmoil, to blame Hester for Stephen’s dilemma, for her own potential homelessness, for upending what had promised to be a comfortable and secure retirement. And why? Because Hester is a back-stabbing, solipsistic snake-in-the-grass! Concealing that letter from Stephen all those weeks and jumping to wrongheaded and catastrophic conclusions! Carrying on with Lionel like a love-struck teenager! Pathetic! Harriet throws the pad and pen down on the covers, fired with righteous indignation. She won’t be a victim. She doesn’t have to dance to Hester’s tune—and she won’t.
She scrambles out of bed, throws on her dressing gown and hurries down the corridor towards the foyer. The light at the reception desk is still on.
‘Ah! Alfonso, sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if you’d be so kind . . .’
CHAPTER 34
It’s just past midnight.
Someone is hammering on Ben’s head. No, not on: inside his head. With a tiny pickaxe. Whoever is wielding it has found the most tender part of his cortex and is relentlessly swinging away at it, like a miner attacking a particularly inaccessible seam of coal. Ben forces his eyes open, finds that he is not trapped in a mine but has fetched up on a ship in the middle of a ferocious storm, pitching and yawing as the horizon dips and slews amid stomach-dropping plunges. He feels very, very unwell. Clawing his way upright he feels metal, sees a void immediately below him and vomits copiously into it.
Hedge is bored. He and Louisa have been snogging energetically for ten minutes now and his tongue is flagging. He pulls away; the suction broken, Louisa droops to one side and is instantly asleep, snoring lightly. One of his mates sniggers from the other side of the room and salutes his captain with a beer can. ‘Nice one, bro.’
Hedge slides his arm from beneath Louisa’s body, extracting his left hand from the inside of her jumpsuit, where he had been enthusi
astically kneading one breast, gently tips her onto the floor and stands, flexing his cramped limbs. This party is crap. The music’s crap—he hates heavy metal; which lamebrain put that on?—he’s got the munchies and the booze is running dangerously low. ‘Jez?’ he yells. ‘Where the fuck is he?’ It’s thanks to Jez they all pitched up here: he’s dangerously close to looking a right dickhead in front of his mates. He needs to sort something and soon. ‘Jez!’
‘In the garden,’ someone mumbles. ‘Asleep.’
‘Fucking great!’ snarls Hedge, flinging his empty can at the wall. It hits a shelf, falls over and the remaining few drops of beer trickle out, dribble across the glass and start to snake down the wall, blending none too prettily with the stems of the faded floral wallpaper. The can rolls to the edge of the shelf, teeters, rocking back and forth, but does not fall.
‘Hey, man, good shot!’ One of his mates, glad of the distraction, lumbers to his feet and staggers over to Hedge, adopting the stance of a darts player, and lobs his own can at the shelf. His, though, is half-full: the liquid arcs out as it flies, sketching a dark stain across the floor. The boy whoops as his projectile, still heavy with some beer, hits Hedge’s and sends both of them clattering to the floor.
‘Fuck off,’ shouts Hedge good-naturedly, snatching up another discarded can from the floor and, as if playing boules, delicately aims it at the shelf. It lands with a dink, skids across the surface, ricochets off the wall and drops to the floor. His companion, now armed with two cans, crows with derision and flings his weapons in quick succession at the bottom shelf, lodging one firmly in the corner where the two walls meet. It’s going to be harder to dislodge this.
Hedge rises to the challenge. ‘Game on!’ he yells, his battle cry penetrating the sodden brains of the rest of the team, who one by one rouse themselves from their various positions under and astride assorted girls or morosely sitting unpartnered on the stairs and rush to answer the call.
Brick, nineteen stone of muscle and fat, returning from the upstairs bathroom and too impatient to weave his way down through the knot of bodies on the stairs, decides to take a short cut, swinging his huge bulk over the banister at the top to drop down into the hallway. The Laurels’ banisters were designed to facilitate the stately descent of modest gentlefolk, not to act as a vaulting horse for an ungainly prop forward; with a crack as loud as a gunshot, the aged wood, dried out by years of central heating, fractures neatly at the newel post. The spindles, freed from restraint and unable to sustain the torsion, snap like flower heads under a scythe and flop drunkenly over to hang precariously above the hall. Brick’s brain, or as much of it as is still functioning, registers the hazardous nature of their position. He reaches up and neatly finishes the demolition job by snapping them off completely to a roar of approval and admiration from his teammates, now clustered around Hedge, each one with an armful of missiles, as they listen to the rules of the impromptu game he has just invented.
‘One point for a direct hit. Two points for any part of the anatomy you knock off. Three points for an arm and five points for the head. Only one throw per go.’
The competitors as one squint at the probable distance, angle and velocity required to score points. The bone china shepherdess, her sanctuary at the back of the very top shelf a sanctuary no more, stares back with a provocative smirk, her fate sealed.
Ben has nothing more to bring up. He has spewed and retched himself into exhaustion, expelling every last drop of lager and vodka, every scrap of food and, buried among the steamy, stinking mess, most of Louisa’s little white pill. The sour smell of vomit hangs over the kitchen, no matter how long he runs the tap, until in desperation he squirts the entire washing-up liquid bottle down the plughole and the sharp tang of lemon fills the air instead. Dark shapes float outside the window; once or twice he hears the unmistakable sound of someone else voiding the contents of their stomach in the garden. He tries hard to suppress the thought of what will be revealed when the morning comes. All he wants to do now is crawl into bed. He can’t begin to imagine how he is going to make it back to Daria’s, once he’s turfed everyone out and locked up the—
There is a sudden eruption of noise from the front of the house: cheers, laughter, yells. If it weren’t for the fact that they’d removed every scrap of furniture from downstairs and locked all the bedrooms, he’d swear that what he could hear now, accompanied by renewed yelling, was the splintering of wood. But the only wood left is the doors. Oh, fuck, no . . .
Ben gropes his way unsteadily across the sticky floor to the kitchen door and yanks it open. A fug of beer, sweat and cheap perfumes and aftershaves hits him. Followed by something rather more concrete as Brick flings one of the spindles airily over his shoulder and fetches Ben a painful clout on the arm. He is so appalled by the scene of devastation that meets his eyes that he doesn’t even cry out. He simply blinks, hoping, praying, this is a mirage, a terrible, gut-wrenching nightmare from which he will wake any second. Please, someone tell him that isn’t a vast ragged gap where the banister once stood? Please tell him people—his mates among them—aren’t gleefully yanking the remaining spindles, like rotten teeth, out of their housing?
‘Stop! Stop! What the fuck—’ he tries to shout, but the words, feeble as a baby’s, are lost in the cacophony of shouts and drunken applause. It is as though everyone has lost their reason, infected with a primeval urge for destruction, each fresh breakage greeted with atavistic roars of encouragement. And there, in the centre of the maelstrom, arm aloft, hollering and stamping in triumph, is Hedge, a headless, limbless figurine in his fist. His cronies begin an inept parody of a Maori war dance, circling their captain in a surging mass of sweating menace, their bellows drowning out all but the bass beats of the music. Hedge hurls his trophy into the fireplace, smashing it to smithereens.
The vibrations shake the old house to its foundations, pulsing through the floorboards, penetrating even the sleepers’ unconsciousness; dizzy heads are lifted, uncoordinated limbs try to hoist their owners’ bodies upright. Louisa, her jumpsuit splodged in a Jackson Pollock of beer stains, sits up groggily, then crawls through the forest of legs to begin mountaineering up Hedge’s heedless body. As her arms finally loop themselves around his neck and she gazes up at Hedge in drunken adoration, Ben, watching in horrified disbelief, his dreams in tatters, his aunts’ house being trashed before his eyes, beseeches any gods that might be witnesses to grant him instant oblivion, if not death.
He covers his eyes. All around him, before him, above him, the horror continues unabated. Behind his eyelids flit images of all the people he has betrayed: his parents, infuriating but well-meaning; his aunts, forbidding but unfailingly kind; Daria, so naive and trusting; innocent Milo; Artem—
A huge roar of fury explodes close by, overtopping the tumult. It slams through the house with stunning force, like a cannon fired into the midst of battle, disorienting the combatants and freezing them in mid-frenzy.
Ben’s eyes spring open on a miracle. There, framed in light from the porch, filling the doorway from edge to edge, stands an avenging angel. Or rather angels, three of them, in descending order of height. As the shapes coalesce into definition, Ben sees first Artem, then Finbar, and finally Nats. All three seem to be staring straight at him with expressions of appalled disgust that cut him to the heart. Then they charge into action.
Collars are seized, bodies flung like rag dolls out of the front door to sprawl on the path as Artem and his companions advance relentlessly through the fray. One look at their merciless expressions and resistance melts away, people scurrying as fast as their rubbery legs will carry them out of the house, stumbling and trampling over still-prone bodies, bottles, cans and bits of wood, intent only on escape. Even rugby players quail before Artem’s vastness and his rage; all, that is, except Hedge and Brick, who, scornful of their teammates’ craven retreat, decide to make a stand.
Ben and the few stragglers still making their exit look on with mesmerised horror as the two b
eefy rugby players crouch down as for a scrum and begin circling their opponents, spitting defiance. They are almost as tall and broad as Artem, and Brick is undoubtedly heavier; beside Artem, Finbar looks suddenly frail and vulnerable. The element of surprise that initially carried them through the house, sweeping all before them, has now dissipated: this has become a straight fight. And in Ben’s opinion, drunk though Hedge and Brick may be, an unfair one.
In a moment, the atmosphere has changed from one of mayhem and confusion to concentrated malice. Hedge’s lip is curled in derision as his gaze rakes over the old man. Brick, with a similar sneer, is sizing up Artem. Ben stands helpless, mind racing with panic. His foot nudges one of the spindles littering the floor. Of course! He bends to pick it up, but before he can grasp it, it is snatched away. A streak of colour flashes past, darts between Artem and Finbar and launches itself into the air with a bone-chilling cry of menace.
There is a split second of silence and then, before everyone’s astonished gaze, Hedge and Brick simultaneously drop like felled trees to the floor, where they lie clutching their groins, writhing and groaning in agony, as Nats, back on solid ground, stands over them, one foot on Hedge’s neck, the spindle pressed threateningly against Brick’s.
Her two victims initially stare up at her with a mixture of uncomprehending shock and then, as they take in the size and gender of their enemy, chagrin. She stares back impassively, then gestures towards the front door with her weapon. ‘Now fuck off, the pair of you, or else.’
They need no second bidding. Crawling at first, then levering themselves into a crouch on the doorjamb, they shuffle out of the house, trying desperately to muffle their moans, their only consolation that most witnesses to their humiliation have long since melted into the night.
Love, Lies and Linguine Page 21