Playing for the Ashes (25 page)

“What’s happened here?” She bent to the model. It was a ruin of handcut and hand-stained balsawood, Jimmy’s prized copy of the
Cutty Sark
. Months in the creation, it had been the pride of both father and son who’d spent hours and days at the kitchen table, designing, cutting, painting, gluing. “Oh no!” she cried softly. “Jim, I’m sorry. Did Stan—”

Jimmy sniggered. She looked up. The burning tobacco glowed and faded. She heard the smoke whistle out of his nose. “Stan didn’t,” he said. “Stan’s too busy wanking to think of cleaning house. This lot’s kid’s stuff anyways. Who bloody needs it?”

Jeannie looked to the bookcase beneath the window. On the floor lay the ruins of the
Golden Hind
. Next to it
Gipsy Moth IV
. Beyond,
Victory
was tromped into bits, mixed in with the pieces of a Viking warship and a Roman galley.

“But you and Dad,” Jeannie began uselessly. “Jimmy, you and Dad…”

“Yeah, Mum? Me ’n’ Dad what?”

How odd, she thought, that these scraps of wood, filaments of string, and squares of cloth could make her want to cry. Kenny’s death hadn’t done it. Seeing his naked corpse hadn’t done it. The popping lights and the questions from the journalists hadn’t done it. She’d been utterly without emotion when she’d told Stan and Sharon that their father was dead, but now with her gaze taking in the wreck of these ships, she felt as broken as the ruins of them scattered on the carpet.

“This’s what you had of him,” she said. “These ships. They’re you and Dad. These ships.”

“The bugger’s gone, i’n’t he? No point to keeping reminders round the place. You ought to start mucking out this dump yourself, Mum. Pictures, clothes, books. Old bats. His bike. Toss out the lot. Who needs it, anyway?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“You don’t reckon he collected keepsakes of us, do you?” Jimmy leaned forward, into the moonlight. He clasped his hands round his bony knees, flicking ash on the counterpane. “Wouldn’t want reminders of the wife and kiddies at a crucial moment, would he, our dad? They might get in the way. Pictures of our mugs on the bedside table. That’d upset his love life right enough. A lock of our hairs in a brooch pinned onto his cricket togs. That’d damn well upset his bleeding game. One-a Sharon’s bird drawings. One-a Stan’s pet bears.” The glow of his cigarette trembled like a
fir
efl y. “Or one-a your Dutch knickknacks that he used to poke fun at. How ’bout that stupid cow jug that pours out milk like it was being sick? He could use it in the morning with his cornflakes, couldn’t he? Only when he poured the milk and thought about you, he’d look up and see someone else sitting there instead. No.” He balanced on his elbow and stubbed out his cigarette on the side of a play skull that glowed in the dark. “He wouldn’t want bits and pieces of his old life mixed up with his new. No. Never. Not our dad. No way.”

From across the room, Jeannie could smell him. She wondered when it was that he had last washed. She could even smell his breath, foetid with the smoke of his cigarettes.

“He had pictures of you kids,” she said. “You remember how he came to collect them, don’t you? He put them in frames but the frames were wrong. Too big or too small. Mostly too big so Shar cut up paper to
fil
l in the empty part. You helped. You chose the ones of yourself that you wanted him to have.”

“Yeah? Well, I was a mutt then, wasn’t I? Snot nosed and smarmy. Hoping Dad’d want us back if I licked his shoes good enough. Perishing joke, that is. What a rotter. I’m glad—”

“I don’t believe that, Jim.”

“Why? What’s it to you, Mum?” His question was tense. He repeated it and added, “You sorry he’s gone?”

“He was in a bad patch. He was trying to work things out in his head.”

“Yeah. Aren’t we all? Only we don’t do our head working while we roger some slag, do we?”

She was glad for the dark. It hid and protected. But shadows worked both ways. While he couldn’t clearly see her and thus couldn’t know how his words were like nasty little
fis
h hooks digging into her cheeks, she couldn’t see him either, not the way a mother needs to see her son when there’s a question to be asked and just about everything in the mother’s life worth living rides on the answer he gives her.

But she couldn’t ask it, so she asked another. “What’re you trying to say?”

“I knew. All ’bout Dad. All ’bout blondiefrom-a-bottle. All ’bout the great soul searching Dad was supposably doing while he humped her like a goat. Finding himself. What a two-faced turd.”

“What he did with—” Jeannie couldn’t say the name, not to her son. Affirming what he’d said by putting more into words was too much to ask of herself at the moment. She steadied herself by putting her hands into the pockets of her housecoat. Her right hand found a wadded tissue, her left a comb with missing teeth. “That had nothing to do with you, Jimmy. That was me and Dad. He loved you like always. Shar and Stan as well.”

“Which is why we went on the river like he promised, right, Mum? We hired that cabin cruiser like he always said and sailed up the Thames. Saw the locks. Saw the swans. Stopped at Hampton Court and ran in the maze. Even waved at the Queen who was standing on the bridge in Windsor, just waiting for us to cruise by and doff our hats.”

“He meant to take you on the river. You mustn’t think he’d forgotten.”

“And Henley Regatta. We saw that as well, didn’t we? All tarted up in our dress-up clothes. With a hamper crammed with our favourite eats. Chips for Stan. Cocoa Pops for Shar. McDonald’s for me. And when we were through, we went on the big birthday treat— Greek islands, the boat, just me and Dad.”

“Jim, he needed to settle his mind. We’d been together since we was kids, Dad and me. He needed time to know if he wanted to go on. But to go on with me, with
me
, not with you. With you kids nothing was changed for Dad.”

“Oh right, Mum. Nothing. And wouldn’t she of been chuffed to have us lot hanging ’bout. There’d be Stan wanking in her spare room at the weekends and Shar pinning up bird pictures on her wallpaper and me getting motor grease on her rugs. She would of been dead keen to have us as step-kids. ’S matter of fact, I can’t think she didn’t tell Dad to bugger off till he guaranteed she’d get us as part of the bargain.” He kicked off his Doc Martens. They hit the floor with a thud. He plumped up his pillow and leaned against the bed’s headboard where he put his face into deepest shadow. “She must be in a real state right now, blondie-from-a-bottle. What you think, Mum? Dad’s been chopped and that’s too bad, isn’t it, ’cause she can’t have it off with him whenever she’d like. But the worst of the worst is that she don’t get
us
as her step-kids now. And I bet she’s real cut up ’bout that.” He snickered quietly.

The sound sent a quiver the length of Jeannie’s spine. Her left fingers sought the comb in her pocket and sank into the spaces where the teeth were missing. “Jimmy,” she said, “I got something to ask you.”

“Ask away, Mum. Ask anything. But I haven’t rogered her, if that’s what you want to know. Dad wasn’t a bloke to share the goods.”

“You knew who she was.”

“Maybe I did.”

Her right hand grasped the tissue. She began to ball it into pellets in her pocket. She didn’t want to know the answer because she knew it already. Still she asked the question. “When he cancelled the boat trip, what did he tell you? Jim, tell me. What did he say?”

Jimmy’s hand slithered out of the shadows. It reached for something next to the play skull.

A flare followed a sound like
ssst
, and he was holding a lit match next to his pallid face. He kept his eyes on hers as the match burnt down. When the flame licked his fingers, he didn’t wince. Nor did he answer.

Lynley finally found a spot in Sumner Place. Parking karma, Sergeant Havers would have called it. He wasn’t so sure. He’d spent ten minutes cruising up and down the Fulham Road, circling South Kensington Station, and getting more acquainted than he would ever have dreamed possible with the restored Michelin building at Brompton Cross. He was about to give up and go home when he made a final pass into Sumner Place just in time to see an antique Morgan vacating a spot not twenty yards from where he was heading: Onslow Square.

The early morning was fine, dew-cool silence interrupted by the occasional
whoosh
of a vehicle on Old Brompton Road. He walked down Sumner Place, crossed near a small chapel at the bottom of the street, and made his way into Onslow Square.

All the lights save one were out in Helen’s flat. She’d kept a lamp burning in the drawing room, just inside the small balcony that overlooked the square. He smiled when he saw it. Helen knew him better than he knew himself.

He went inside, climbed the stairs, let himself into the flat. She’d been reading before she had fallen asleep, he saw, because a book was open on the bedcovers, face down. He picked it up, tried and failed to read the title in the room’s near darkness, set it on the bedside table, and used her gold bracelet to mark the page. He studied her.

She lay on her side, right hand beneath her cheek, lashes dark against her skin. Her lips were pursed, as if her dreams required concentration. A swirl of her hair curved from her ear to the corner of her mouth and when he brushed it off her face, she stirred but didn’t wake. He smiled at this. She was the soundest sleeper he had ever known.

“Someone could break in, cart off all your belongings, and you’d never know,” he’d said to her in complete exasperation when her sleep of the dead confronted his endless toss and turn of the quick. “For God’s sake, Helen, there’s something damned unhealthy about it. You don’t fall asleep so much as lose consciousness. I think you ought to see a specialist about the problem.”

She laughed and patted his cheek. “It’s the benefit of having a completely uncluttered conscience, Tommy.”

“Damn little good that’ll do you if the building goes up in flames some night. You’d even sleep through the smoke alarm, wouldn’t you?”

“Probably. What a ghastly thought.” She looked momentarily sombre, then brightened with, “Ah. But you wouldn’t, would you? Which does suggest that I ought to consider keeping you around.”

“And do you?”

“What?”

“Consider it.”

“More than you think.”

“So?”

“So we ought to have dinner. I’ve some perfectly lovely chicken. New potatoes.
Haricots verts. A Pinot grigio
to swill.”

“You’ve cooked dinner?” This was a change, indeed. Sweet vision of domesticity, he thought.

“I?” Helen laughed. “Heavens, Tommy, none of it’s
cooked
. Oh, I looked and looked through a book at Simon’s. Deborah even pointed out one or two recipes that didn’t appear likely to tax my limited culinary talents. But it all seemed so complicated.”

“It’s only chicken.”

“Yes, but the recipe asked me to dredge it. To
dredge
, for heaven’s sake. Isn’t that what they do in the fens? Aren’t they always dredging the canals or something? How on earth does one go about doing that to a chicken?”

“Your imagination didn’t tell you?”

“I don’t even want to repeat what my imagination suggested about dredging. Your appetite would be forever destroyed.”

“Which might not be a bad idea if I have expectations of eating anytime soon.”

“You’re disappointed. I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry, darling. I’m utterly useless. Can’t cook. Can’t sew. Can’t play the piano. No talent for sketching. Can’t carry a tune.”

“You’re not auditioning for a role in a Jane Austen novel.”

“Fall asleep at the symphony. Have nothing intelligent to say about Shakespeare or Pinter or Shaw. Thought Simone de Beauvoir was something to drink. Why do you put up with me?”

That was the question, all right. He had no answer.

“We’re a pair, Helen,” he said quietly into her sleep. “We’re alpha and omega. We’re positive and negative. We’re a match made in heaven.”

He took the small jewel box from his jacket pocket and set it on top of the novel on the bedside table. Because, after all, tonight was the night. Make the moment completely memorable, he’d thought. Make it shout
romance
. Do it with roses, candles, caviar, champagne. Have background music. Seal it with a kiss.

Only the last option was available to him. He sat on the edge of the bed and touched his lips to her cheek. She stirred, frowning. She turned onto her back. He kissed her mouth.

“Coming to bed?” she murmured, her eyes still closed.

“How do you know it’s me? Or is that an invitation you’d extend to anyone who showed up in your bedroom at two in the morning?”

She smiled. “Only if he shows promise.”

“I see.”

She opened her eyes. Dark like her hair, in contrast with her skin, they made her look like the night. She was shadows and moonlight. “How was it?” she asked softly.