Riptide

by Lawton, John

  The Big Man tapped the side of his nose. One of those infuriating ask-no-questions-be-told-no-lies gestures he seemed to delight in using.

  ‘The petrol?’ Troy persisted.

  ‘Your family pooled their coupons to give you a smooth ride home. An invalid carriage fit for a king.’

  ‘How about an invalid carriage fit for an invalid?’ said Troy remembering how he had got the car up to 110 m.p.h. on the Great North Road one day in 1938.

  ‘Trust me,’ said the Big Man.

  Troy found himself in the back, next to Masha, his mother the best part of six feet away next to the Big Man, who sat behind the steering-wheel.

  Masha smiled almost sweetly at him. It was one of her great cons to be unpredictable and unreadable. Troy thought there might be a Just So story somewhere in which a deadly creature habitually smiles at its prey. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Let’s hear what?’

  ‘Whatever it is that you’re bursting to tell me. Whatever snatch of gossip is eating your soul at the moment.’

  ‘I don’t gossip.’

  ‘Fine. Have it your way. Bitch a little instead. You can bitch for Britain, after all.’

  Masha mused, lips gently parted, one hand idly conducting some invisible orchestra. ‘Well . . . Mummy’s raised the most enormous crop of leeks for the winter.’

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  ‘And with no keepers and no shoot the pheasants have bred like rabbits, so we have a positive plague. Cocks duelling at it all over the place. And, of course, more pheasants means more food for foxes so we have an army of little red—’

  ‘Masha, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘OK. OK.’ (Pause) ‘Speaking of cocks . . .’

  ‘Yeeees?’

  ‘My co-natal sibling would appear to be the object of a penetrating physiological enquiry.’

  The woman was talking bollocks. Then he realised: code. A code to exclude their mother, who might have nodded off or might be listening. Co-natal sibling? Her twin, Sasha. Penetrating physiological enquiry? Fucking. Sasha had a new lover.

  ‘Really,’ Troy said at last. ‘Who’s she shagging now?’

  ‘Freddie!’

  But his mother had not turned. Her ears had not pricked up at the prick. Troy concluded she had nodded off, ramrod straight, more upright asleep than she would ever manage waking. And the Big Man was in a happy world of his own, foot on the floor – flouting wartime wisdom – tearing along at over ninety, a tuneless tune humming on his lips. The outrage on Masha’s part Troy knew to be bluffery – the fond illusion the twins cherished that, whilst flinging caution to the winds themselves, they could somehow protect him from the very people they were. There were times their catalogue of conquests bored him, times, as now, with little else to echo in the idling mind, when it was better than nothing.

  ‘Anyone I know?’ he asked.

  ‘Nice young chap. RAF, actually. Based at Duxford. Shot up in a Hurricane. Not too bad, but too bad to fly, so he’s one of those chaps with lots of rings on his cuffs who pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest.’

  Troy revised his metaphor slightly – they had flung caution to the hurricanes, well, at least to a former Hurricane pilot. ‘You know,’ he said tentatively, ‘there’s something awfully familiar about that description. Didn’t you have a thing with a chap out at Duxford last September?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘How sort of ?’

  ‘Sort of yes.’

  ‘Sort of yes with a chap who got shot up in a Hurricane and now pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest?’

  ‘If you put it like that, yes.’

  ‘How else could I put it? What you’re saying is that you passed this Wotsisname—’

  ‘Giles Carver-Little, actually.’

  ‘Whatever. This English toff with too many names gets passed from one sister to the other like a brown-paper parcel.’

  ‘A brown-paper parcel? No. Not at all. More like some delicacy from Fortnum’s in a little white box all done up with a pinky silk ribbon and a gold-edged card saying, “To my darling sister, all my love Masha”.’

  Good God, it was rich. He had often wondered if there was anything of which these two were not capable.

  ‘I mean, if you found out about something jolly good wouldn’t you tip off a mate about it?’

  ‘Don’t make it sound like a tip for the Derby. What you’re telling me is that the two of you are willing to share lovers.’

  ‘Not literally, not any more. We haven’t done threesomes for a while. But yes. I mean. Bloody hell, why not?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit melodramatic? Everyone having everyone else?’

  ‘Not in the least. I simply let my sister in on a good thing. As for having everyone else . . . isn’t that just that Darwin chap – evolution, survival of the fittest and all that?’

  ‘Herbert Spencer,’ said Troy.

  Masha mused.

  ‘No. Can’t say I’ve had him. Don’t think I’ve ever had a Herbert, in fact. But you can’t really expect me to remember the lot now, can you? Friend of yours, is he?’

  ‘I meant,’ Troy persisted, with wasted logic, ‘that the survival of the fittest was said by Spencer not Darwin, and I cannot for one moment see how you can pass off what you get up to as the ascent of the species.’

  ‘Selective wotsit? Natural thingies?’ Masha ventured.

  ‘Shared shagging,’ Troy said.

  ‘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?’