Death of a Sunday Writer (17 page)

On the third evening she suggested they stop by an allnight supermarket to pick up some groceries, but he said they would just rot, and she realised that she would have
to abandon any nesting instinct she might have. Johnny's flat was, for him, a comfortable place to sleep, to read, to make love, and to watch televison. In the morning he made himself a cup of tea, and then ate breakfast at the track. For the second time in her life, the first time as an adult, Lucy was in love. “No,” she said. “That is...”

“Not gay,” Nina nodded. “What about The Trog?”

“Ben was important for helping me to shuck off Geoffrey. Could we drop it now?”

“Sure.” Nina, startled by the rebuff, but ever courteous, found her money again. “As far as this woman you're following is concerned, stay out in the open. There are hidden depths in you, my lady, but you still look like an innocent in some lights. Why don't I come with you?” she ended suddenly.

“I don't need a baby-sitter. But I'm not offended. I think I'm right, too.”

“It would be fun. Think about it. No one expects to be followed by two people. If I come with you, no one would dream we were detectives. I'll dress up a bit, and you wear that nice new suit and get your hair done and we'll look like two ladies from Detroit, in for a day's shopping.”

“I just got my hair done.”

“So you did. It's beautiful, too. I was just making a point.”

Lucy was not convinced. I'll dye the bloody lot red, she thought. She saw the sense of Nina's suggestion. “All right. I'll pick you up. Where do you live?”

“Oh, no. I'll meet you there. I know that street. It's opposite a little mall. I'll tell you what. Park your car. We'll use mine. I have a white Ford, a Taurus. You said you have a picture of her?”

Lucy dug it out of her purse, and Nina stared at it. Lucy said, “It would help more if it were full face, and she never wears those clothes so it's not much use. But then, my guess is that she didn't know he was taking it. He must have taken it indoors when she wasn't looking. Probably agoraphobic about cameras, too.”

“Could be. Ten to eight, then.”

Lucy returned to her office wondering, not for the first time, why Nina didn't want her to know where she lived, or anything else about her private life. How, for example, could she afford a Taurus? And Lucy remembered that the leather suit was “a present.” Was she kept? A rich boy-friend? Somebody's mistress? A high-class call girl? At forty-seven? Not that Lucy cared, she told herself. Whoever it was, he wasn't very demanding, apparently, for whenever Lucy needed her, Nina always seemed to be free. She decided that a trog was the most likely answer, a rich Toronto trog.

Lucy told herself she had to get used to the idea that Toronto people, cosmopolitans like Nina, did not always allow you access to their past. In Longborough, you knew everything about everybody, except, of course, the domestic secrets, but in Toronto people came to you with a background full of gaps. It was entirely possible that Nina's job in the agency was no more than a cover for some other more lucrative (and dangerous) activity, money laundering, perhaps, whatever that meant. Perhaps she was a bookie's drop, too, but in that case it would have to be a more up-market drop than her cousin had been. It was also possible, of course, that Nina lived with a hideous bell-ringer...

The phone broke into her dream. It was Nina. For once she was too busy to come with Lucy that night. “But do me a favour, Lucy. Do not go near her until I'm there, okay?”

Lucy agreed, wondering how many more people would try to look after her.

As they drove slowly west on St. Clair, Lucy guessed that the woman was heading for the Italian district that she had heard about. That was fine by Lucy, for whatever sidewalk café the woman chose, Lucy would be able to find one nearby. It was a nice night for a cappucino.

Then the woman turned south on Spadina, crossing Bloor Street, and Lucy feared the worst, that she was a baseball fan. It would be impossible to watch for her among the twenty thousand Blue Jay fans in the Dome. But then the woman headed for the CN Tower and Lucy relaxed. She had wondered if the woman would attempt such a test for an agoraphobic, climbing the tallest structure in the Commonwealth. To reach the top you had to travel in a glass elevator on the outside of the building. Lucy's own fear of heights was such that she had no intention of following her, but she had already worked out that all she had to do was wait at the bottom of the beanstalk, as it were — there was only one way down. She had even prepared herself for this with an old paper back copy
of
The Mask of Demetrios
she had found in the fifty-cent bin of a Queen Street bookseller. The fact that she had read it twice already made it easier to keep one eye on the tower.

But within ten pages the woman came down and they were off again, going east along the lakeshore. It was a beautiful evening for driving along the shore of Lake Ontario; Lucy guessed that they would continue until the woman recovered from being exposed to all the space at the top of the tower, but they stopped at the foot of Bay Street where she bought a ticket for the island ferry. Now Lucy wondered if she was going to have a problem. Cruising on Lake Ontario on a summer night is a pleasant thing to do, too, and sometimes one of the ferries that serves the islands is hired by a group for a party. They chug around the harbour, a band on the top deck and a bar below, lending a touch of magic to the night, both for the passengers and those enjoying the benches along the shore. And on weekends the ferries are packed with families spending the day on Centre Island, one of the most agreeable excursions that Toronto has to offer. But, in the evenings, the ferries depart empty from the mainland and bring back the people who have taken a day off, and it would be impossible for Lucy to keep out of sight on the way over. On the other hand, the ferry ride was only the equivalent of the elevator to the top of the tower. There was no other way the woman could return.

Lucy bought a cup of coffee and found an empty seat where she could continue reading her Ambler novel. As each ferry returned she moved into the shadows to watch the passengers come through the gate; an hour later, the woman returned, looking about her in anxious fashion, obviously eager to return to the crowded city.

They drove slowly up Yonge Street, through the hectic street scene below Bloor into the placid lower reaches of middle class Toronto. It was ten-thirty. Another hundred and fifty bucks.

That week the racing moved to Fort Erie, and none of Comstock's horses was entered, so he was free. He picked Lucy up on Saturday afternoon and drove them up to his farm at Uxbridge. As they turned off the county road on to his land and followed the gravel strip up to the farmhouse, she noted how the function of the farm had changed. What must have once been fields of crops were now paddocks enclosed in those white fences that shouted of horses. The horses themselves, four or five that she could see, ran away as they approached them and gathered on a small rise at a safe distance to watch the car.

The house was a hundred year-old brick building of no distinction, but when they drove round to the back she saw that a big room with a picture window had been added, giving a view over the hills and fields to the west. As they stopped, a small compact-looking man in his late thirties, dressed in blue jeans and ankle boots, but wearing a tie, came out of the side door to greet them. “This is Lucy Brenner,” Johnny said. “And this is Dennis, Dennis Logan. He looks after the place. Here's Mary, Dennis's wife.”

Everyone shook hands. Mary said, “I was just after stocking up your fridge. You're right on time. Come, now. I'll show you in, Lucy, while they have their talk. Bring your bag.”

Lucy told herself to tread carefully. She had to figure out the Logans' status so as not to offend anyone or behave clumsily. Were they servants? If so, this was a
new experience for her. She had never come across any in Kingston or Longborough.

Mary led her upstairs to a bedroom at the back of the house. “You can unpack in a minute,” she said, and Lucy put her bag on the bed. “The bathroom's right over there,” Mary continued, nodding towards the hall. “Ours is on the other side of the house. Oh, look, I assumed you were sleeping together. There is another litle room — if you want it?”

Lucy moved to the window with her back to Mary, blushing as lightly as she could. “No! No. Yes, this is fine.” She turned and looked around the roon. There was a large double bed, high off the floor, an old but valuable looking chest of drawers, a chintz-covered armchair, night-tables with reading lamps. The room was so simply furnished that a chamber pot under the bed seemed possible. Lucy moved over to the chest of drawers, then paused, not sure of her rights.

“The top drawer is empty,” Mary said. “I'll leave you now. Come down when you're ready.”

A woman's voice called to them from downstairs. Mary shouted a hello from the landing and ran down to meet the caller, as Lucy realised her purse was still in the car and began to follow her down. She stopped on the top of the stairs long enough to hear Mary say to the newcomer, “He just arrived. I was just showing his latest their room. Yes, wait and meet her.” Lucy continued down, coughing noisily, and Mary introduced her to the neighbour, a Mrs. Wiggins-of-the-Cabbage-Patch who was apparently delivering the week's eggs.

When Lucy had collected her purse and spent enough time in the bedroom to have done whatever visitors were expected to do — take a nap? take a bath?
change her clothes? (but she had travelled in her L.L. Bean look, which seemed right for four o'clock in the country) — and went down to the living room.

“Cuppa?” Mary asked, from the couch. Lucy nodded, and Mary poured out the tea and held the cup up for Mary.

Not servants, then. Servants in ‘Upstairs, Downstairs' didn't serve sitting down.

Lucy sat in one of the chairs and drank her tea and looked out the picture window at rural Ontario. It was a gorgeous scene: the farm was almost entirely given over to meadows, surrounded by the equally green fields of Johnny's neighbours, varied slightly by the occasional field of golden stubble.

“What do they grow?” Lucy asked. She was determined not to make remarks about how pretty it all was at this stage, but to generate a response.

“Mostly their own hay for their children's ponies. These are all hobby farms owned by rich stockbrokers who need a tax loss. Beautiful view, isn't it? Shows you what God could do if he had the money. I read that somewhere.” Her tone was easy, rendering the hobby-farmers risible and unthreatening.

“Except for Johnny.”

“Except for Johnny what?”

“You said they were all owned by stockbrokers. Except for Johnny.”

“Well, he's not one any more, but he made his pile on Bay Street, you know, before he took this up. You can't make the kind of living he enjoys training horses.”

Tuck that away, Lucy thought. Don't push it. She nodded. “I like your living room,” she said, changing the subject to indicate either her total lack of interest or her full
awareness of the secret of Johnny Comstock's fortune.

“This is Johnny's. Didn't he explain? Let me show you round. It'll be easier.” She led them through a side door. “See here. This little pantry. This is Johnny's kitchen. He just put it in a couple of years ago, when he started using the place the way he does now. Now across the hall here is our living room, mine and Dennis's. Walk down this passage and you come to...this.” She opened a door on to a kitchen like an advertisement in an English magazine aimed at rich rustics. As well as the quarry-tiled floor, the polished pine tables, the marble kitchen counters, and the rows of herbs on the window-sills, the kitchen was surrounded on three sides by casement windows open now to let in the scent of Comstock's own new-mown hay, and beyond lay a beautifully-cobbled yard set with an apple tree on one side and what looked like a Japanese garden on the other.

“I just finished making the garden,” Mary said. “Do you think it's all right, here in Canada?”

The emergence of this mild doubt, the appeal to Lucy's taste or superior Canadianness, or whatever, eliminated any distance between them. Lucy had long come to terms with the fact that as well as being unable, really, to cook (not counting the steaks and stews that Geoffrey had expected), or knit, or sew, she had no aptitude for interior decoration whatever — although she liked polished floors, firelight, rugs on bare floors, and pictures with people and buildings in them, and she was maturing, she knew, having recently gone off pewter, so she had not looked critically at the scene before her. Now, she tried and it still looked as agreeable. “I think it looks marvellous,” she said, that and no more because she knew that she could blunder trying to comment on
the garden. It looked Japanese, but it could well be the newest outdoor decor from Taiwan, not yet seen in Longborough, but available in a kit from Ikea.

Mary led her around the outside of the house, pointing out the flowers, which were grown for cutting, and the vegetable patch, and they came back to the living room. “So there you are,” Mary said. “Like it? Oh, look.” She pointed through the window at the car disappearing along the road. “They've gone to see a man about a horse. Let's have a drink. Come back in the kitchen. I've got some tonic cold.”

When they were settled on stools with their gin-and-tonics, Mary said, “First of all, this all belongs to Johnny. My husband works for him, manages the horses and what's left of the farm. We're from Ireland, did you notice?” She laughed. “When Johnny bought this place to keep the horses not in training, he needed someone to run it, and word was passed and Dennis flew over and got the job. It suits him perfectly. I won't tell you his background, but it's what he's trained for. But the money went out of his family and Dennis was about to become a brewery representative, a traveller in light ale, no less.”