Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (12 page)

“Did you say you weren’t a clot? You could have fooled me! Sure you know now where you live?” The drowsy head nodded; the grin had a curious but happy shyness. “And what time the tide comes in? All right, then, you sleep it off. If you want anything we’ll be around.” He rose, rolled Paddy over in the bed, and smacked the slight hummock of his rump under the clothes. “Good-night, son!”

“Good-night, Dad!”

All the years they’d been saying exactly the same words, and they’d never meant so much before!

Phil kissed the spot where the blonde hair grew to a slight point on the smooth forehead, and was following Tim from the room when a small, self-conscious voice behind her said: “Mummy!”

The tone of it tugged her back to him in a hurry. He hadn’t said it without thought, it had a ceremonial solemnity. She stooped over him, and he pushed away the bedclothes suddenly and reached up his arms for her, burrowing his face thankfully into the hollow of her neck.

“Just making sure,” he said in a muffled whisper. “You
are
, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, Patrick Rossall, and don’t you dare forget it.”

She gathered up his clothes when she left the room. The flannels would have to go straight to the cleaners. She sat down on the rug beside Tim, and extracted from the pockets, smiling over them with a ridiculous tenderness because they were small projections of Paddy’s personality, one exceedingly grubby handkerchief, sticky with sea-water, a ball pen down to its last inch, the end chewed, two or three foreign stamps, a used bus ticket, one dilapidated toffee, and a few coins, which she stacked carefully on the arm of Tim’s chair.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” said Tim, ears pricked for any sound from upstairs.

“Yes, he’s all right.” Her smile was heavy, maternal and assured. “Don’t worry about Paddy. Tim, I’m glad! I’m glad she told him. It’s a once-only. He knows now.”

“He’s a nice kid,” said Tim. He took up the little pile of coins to play with, because they were Paddy’s. “Look, a brand-new halfpenny.” He looked again, and froze. “It isn’t, though! What is it? Phil, look! It isn’t copper. It looks like gold!”

She dropped the crumpled, dirty flannels, and held out her hand curiously for the coin. It lay demurely in her palm, showing a thick-necked female profile, with a curled lock of hair draped over one plump shoulder.

“Tim, it must be a guinea! Or a half-guinea—-but it’s too big, isn’t it?
A
NNA
D
EI
G
RATIA
. And
V
IGO
underneath her portrait. What does that mean? There’s a date on the other side, 1703.
R
EG.
M
AG
.
B
R.
F
R.
et
H
IB
.” She looked up at Tim over her spread palm, open-mouthed. “Tim, where on earth did our Paddy get a Queen Anne guinea?”

PHIL LOOKED IN at Paddy’s door as soon as she was up on Saturday morning. The early sunlight came in softened and dimmed through the drawn curtains, and the boy lay curled comfortably, with cheek and nose burrowed into his pillow, fast asleep. She looked at him with her love like a warm, golden weight in her, and was drawing back silently when a faint movement in the shadows of one corner arrested her.

Simon was sitting in a chintz-covered chair, drawn back where the light could not reach him. He was looking at her by the time she saw him; but she knew very well that until that moment he had been watching Paddy’s sleep. He looked as if he had been there half the night. Maybe he had. He had his own key, and she hadn’t heard him come in.

Only a few days ago she would have stiffened in jealousy and suspicion, willing him away, and stared her orders unmistakably. Now she stood looking at him thoughtfully and calmly, and in her heart she was sorry for him. It was the first time she had ever achieved that. This morning she was sorry for everybody who wasn’t herself or Tim, and hadn’t got a son like Paddy; and sorriest of all for Simon Towne, who had had one and lacked the sense to hang on to him while he had him. She smiled, meeting his tired and illusionless eyes. He got up very quietly, as though she had warned him off, and followed her out of the room and down the stairs.

“I’ll grind the coffee,” he offered, following her into the kitchen. He was handier about the house than Tim, and quieter. She supposed widowers of long experience—nearly fifteen years now—easily might be. She began preparing breakfast. Even the solid blue and white crockery looked new, as if to-day everything began afresh. But not for Simon.

Not because she had the better of him, and knew it, but because he was a figure so much more appealing now that he was shaken and vulnerable and fit for sympathy, she had never liked him so much before. But you couldn’t alter Simon, or teach him anything, just by liking him better. He would have to learn the hard way.

“Have you been to bed?” she asked, slicing bread.

“No. I brought the Land-Rover down with Paddy’s bike aboard, and then fetched the car and went for a long ride. Then I came home and lay down for a bit, and had a bath. I hope I didn’t disturb you when I came in?”

“No, I didn’t hear you. How long have you been guarding Paddy’s sleep?” She didn’t sound either suspicious or resentful; he found that surprising, and for some reason it pricked a spring of resentment in him.

“I don’t know. A couple of hours or so. I enjoy looking at him. Do you mind?”

“No, I’m glad. I enjoy looking at him, too.” She came from the pantry with a bowl of eggs balanced on one hand, a jug of milk in the other. Simon left his grinding to take the eggs from her, and being so near, leaned impulsively and kissed her cheek, without apology or explanation. Phil smiled at him. “It’s all right, Simon. I know what happened to you, when you were afraid Paddy was gone for good. But do you know what happened to him? A fifteen-year-old bubble burst, my dear, and we’re none of us ever going to be the same again. Miss Rachel got annoyed because Paddy was cheeky to her, and because she thought he didn’t appreciate his good home as he ought. So she told him he only enjoyed it on sufferance. He knows now that he—” She couldn’t say: “He isn’t ours.” because it wouldn’t be true; it would be more monstrously untrue now than it had ever been before. “He knows we adopted him. That’s what happened to Paddy.”

Simon put the eggs down very carefully on the kitchen table, and straightened up to turn upon her the gravest face, and the least concerned for the effect it might be producing upon the outside world, that she had ever seen him wear. After a long moment of quietness he asked in a voice that was avoiding strain with some care “Did she tell him he was really mine?”

Phil smiled. He hadn’t chosen the words as a challenge or a claim, in a sense he hadn’t consciously chosen them at all, but they still indicated his implicit belief in their truth. “No, she didn’t. But she told me she could have. After all this time, why
did
you tell her?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I suppose I simply wanted
somebody
to know, just so that I could talk about him and be understood. Preferably somebody who’d feel sorry for me, to tell the whole truth. But I never meant this to happen, Phil. I suppose it’s because of what I told her that she had this thing in her mind, a stick all ready to beat him with when he offended her. I’m sorry! I never thought of anything like that.”

“I know, I’m not blaming you.”

“But since he knows so much—I don’t know that I’d feel there was anything now to stop me from telling him the rest.” He turned on the gas ring and put on the kettle with steady and leisurely movements. A fine spark of intent had kindled deep in his eyes, and that meant mischief. The faintest hint of the usual bold quirk twitched at the corner of his mouth, and again his face had a wayward acquisitiveness about it. Tamsin’s hackles had risen at sight of that debonair and much-admired face with which he pursued his dearest objectives, but it hadn’t taught him anything.

“You won’t have to bother,” said Phil. “I’ll tell him myself.”

“You?” He was surprised into a genuine laugh.

“I haven’t much alternative now, have I? You must know very well that the first thing he’s going to ask me, when he gets round to thinking about it seriously, is: Who am I? Of course I shall tell him.”

She turned and looked at him sharply, and saw exactly what she had expected to see, the sleek glow of triumph and speculation and hope warming his face into golden confidence. She closed the oven door with a crisp slam.

“Look, Simon, wake up, while there’s time. It isn’t going to do you any good, you know.”

“Isn’t it? Phil, you’re positively inviting me to see what I can do. Aren’t you afraid I’ll sneak him away from under your nose even now? Don’t you think I could?”

“I know you couldn’t,” she said steadily. “I don’t think you’d even try, if I begged you not to. But I’m not begging you—am I? I don’t have to, Simon, that’s why. You couldn’t get him away from us now whatever you did, fair or foul. You’ve had a long innings, charming the birds from the trees, and getting golden apples to fall into your lap whenever you smiled. You can’t realise, can you, that it isn’t going to last for ever? The high days are over, Simon, middle age is only just round another corner or two. You’d better start settling for what you can get, because the long holiday’s running out fast. And whatever you do, you won’t get Paddy.”

For a moment it seemed to her that his brightness had grown sharp and brittle, and his eyes were staring at something he would rather not have seen. Then they took heart and danced again.

“What will you bet me?” he said with soft deliberation.

Remembering the long years of friendship through which Tim had followed him around patiently, picking up the things Simon dropped and putting together the things Simon broke, she wondered for a moment if her motives were as pure as she would have liked. But if it was vengeful pleasure that was prompting her to invite him to his downfall, why was this moment so sad, so strangely the shadowy reverse of the serenity and joy that made this morning a portent and a prodigy? And why should she feel so much closer and kinder to him than she had ever felt before?

“I should be betting you Paddy, shouldn’t I?” she said, gently and quietly. “What more do you want?”

Paddy opened his eyes and stretched delightedly, and then remembered why everything felt and looked different to-day. Not necessarily better or worse, not yet; just different. And as if in answer to a call which had certainly never been uttered except, perhaps, in his mind, Phil was suddenly there in the room, bringing him a clean pair of slacks and a shirt from the airing cupboard.

“Good morning, mudlark! How do you feel this morning?”

He felt strange; larger than usual, more responsible, and more subdued. Big with all the things he had to think about. But beyond all question, he felt good. Good, in a state of well-being; and good, virtuous.

“I feel fine. Is it really that time? And I’ve got to go to the police station, haven’t I?” He sat up, solemn-faced, remembering.

“Mummy!” The sudden charged softness of his voice warned her what was coming, but he was longer about framing it than she had expected, and the end-product, when it emerged, was a revelation.

“Mummy,
who was I
?”

Her heart gave a leap of joy and triumph. She thought: Poor Simon! She laid Paddy’s clean clothes on a chair, and came and sat down on the edge of his bed. Flushed and bemused from long sleep, he faced her earnestly and trustingly, and waited for an answer. It mattered, just to the private thinking he had to do about himself; but it couldn’t affect what they had between them now.

“You know,” he said, “what I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Your mother was a very nice girl, a good friend of ours, Paddy. She was only twenty-one when she died, from some illness that came on after you were born. And her husband—your father—You know him, Paddy. You know him very well, and he’s very fond of you. You know him as Uncle Simon.”

He didn’t exclaim, his face didn’t show surprise, or consternation, or relief, or pleasure, or anything else but the same charged gravity. He accepted it, and sat digesting it.

“His wife died,” said Phil, “and left you on his hands. He was just beginning to be well-known then, and he had a contract for his first big tour. He couldn’t take a baby with him. And I’d lost one only a few months before, and the doctors said I couldn’t have another. So you mustn’t blame him too much. He loved his wife very much, and he was wretched about losing her, and wanted to get away. It wasn’t just fear of losing his big opportunity.”

Since she had invited this single combat, she felt obliged to conduct it scrupulously; and besides, one should never allow a child to contemplate the possibility that he may have failed to make himself loved. But was this a child facing her? The fluffy crest and slender neck and unformed forehead said yes; the grave eyes and something in the set of the face suggested that this juvenile image was already a little out of date.

“It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you,” said Phil firmly. But he didn’t, she thought honestly; he wasn’t a person to whom babies were quite human beings at all, and he isn’t alone in that, it’s something he couldn’t help. “Well, you’ve got to know him pretty well, this visit. He hasn’t shown any want of affection, has he?”

Paddy received the revelation in silence, and continued to ponder with an almost forbidding concentration.

“O.K., Mummy, I see. Thanks for telling me. Now we’re all straight.” He slid his legs out of bed. “I’d better get a move on, or Mr. Hewitt will be sending an escort for me. But I don’t know that I’m going to be much use to him, am I? I mean, my little trek isn’t going to tell him who knocked old Trethuan on the head and tossed him in the sea, is it?”

“That reminds me,” said Phil, glad of the distraction. “Do you know what I found in your pocket last night?” She brought the little gold com, and displayed it triumphantly in her palm.

“Oh, that!” he said, rather disappointingly. And then, as his eyes took in the design and the colour of it, which seemed to be totally unfamiliar: “Gosh, is
that
what it turned out to be? But it looks really something.” He took it and turned it about curiously, examining it with astonished delight.”What is it? Do you know?”

“You’re a fine one!” said Phil, amused. “First you say ‘Oh, that!’ Then you start goggling at it as if you’d never seen it before.”

“But, silly,” he said, laughing, “I never have seen it before. It was pitch dark in there, I told you, that’s why I had to give up and turn back in the end. I’ve
felt
it before, though.”

“You found it in this passage in the cave?”

“Yes, way along it as far as I went. I fell over a bit of rock and went down on my hands, and this thing was sticking in my palm. Well, I could tell it was a coin, but all I thought was, somebody else exploring must have had a hole in his pocket, and I was a shilling up. It looks like
gold
,” said Paddy disbelievingly. “Could it be?”

“I think it could, you know. Guineas and half-guineas were minted in gold, and this seems to be a Queen Anne guinea. You could show it to somebody at the museum, to make sure.”

“You mean it’s really worth a guinea?” His eyes were wide with visions of wealth, and had lost for a moment their look of solemn preoccupation.

“More, I should imagine, if it’s genuine, and I can’t think of a reason why it shouldn’t be. But it might be treasure trove, technically, we should have to find out about that.”

“I thought there’d be a catch in it.” He grinned at her cheerfully enough, still having at least the thrill of discovery. “But there might be more of them, did you think of that? Smugglers might have hidden them somewhere there.” She could feel him suddenly planning, and checking, and contemplating a barrier he might have to get round before he could proceed. Moments of crisis boil up so abruptly out of nowhere. “Mummy!”

The careful, gentle, tentative voice nerved itself, moving in on her. Here it comes, Phil, she thought, and whatever you do there mustn’t be any hesitation.

“Mummy, you don’t mind if I go back there and take another look? With a torch, of course, this time.”

It was a stiff fence for both of them. Knowing he’d frightened her half to death once, and she’d hardly had time yet to get over it, terrified of being babied, but aware that it might be hard for her to give him his head to frighten her in the same way again, he couldn’t quite manage the right easy tone. But that was something she mustn’t let him realise she had noticed.

“No, of course I don’t mind, darling. Take Daddy’s big torch, there’s a new battery in it. Don’t want to risk getting left in the dark again. Do I get a commission, if the hoard turns out to be legally yours?”

After a brief, blank instant of astonished relief and admiration, shaken to the heart at finding himself trusted without even a caution, he said gruffly: “You bet you do! We’ll go halves.”