To the Hilt Read online

  “Al, don’t go.”

  “Will you lend me the fare?”

  He said, “Yes, but ...”

  “Thanks, Jed.” I fished a piece of charcoal stick out of my shirt pocket and opened the sketchbook I still carried. “I’ll draw them. It’ll be better than just describing them.”

  He watched me start and with a touch of awkwardness said, “Were they looking for anything special?”

  I glanced across at him with half a smile. “One of them kept saying, ‘Where is it?’ ”

  Anxiously he said, “Did you tell them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If you’d told them, they might have stopped hitting you.”

  “And they might have made sure I was dead, before they left.”

  I drew the four men in a row, face-on: knees, boots, glasses, air of threat.

  “Anyway,” I said, “they didn’t say what were looking for. They just said, ‘Where is it?’ so it might have been anything. They might have been fishing for anything I valued. For what I valued most, if you see what I mean?”

  He nodded.

  I went on, “They didn’t call me by name. They’ll know it now, because it was all over things in the jeep.” I finished the composite sketch and turned to a clean page. “Do you remember those hikers who preyed on holidaymakers last year in the Lake District? They robbed trailers, mobile homes.”

  “The police caught them,” Jed agreed, nodding. “But those hikers didn’t beat people and throw them down mountains.”

  “Might be the same sort of thing, though. I mean, just opportunist theft.”

  I drew the head of the “Where is it?” man, as I remembered him the most clearly. I drew him without glasses.

  “This is their leader,” I explained, shading planes into the bony face. “I’m not good at voices and accents, but I’d say his was sloppy southeast England. Same with them all.”

  “Hard men?”

  “They’d all done time in a boxing gym, I’d say. Short arm jabs, like at a punch bag.” I swallowed. “Out of my league.”

  “Al...”

  “I felt an utter fool.”

  “That’s illogical. No one could fight four at once.”

  “Fight? I couldn’t even connect.” I broke off, remembering. “I scratched one of their faces... He was the one who crashed his head against mine.” I turned to a fresh page in the sketchpad and drew again, and his face came out with a clawed cheek, eyes glaring through round glasses and a viciousness that leaped off the paper.

  “You’d know him again,” Jed said with awe.

  “I’d know them all.”

  I gave him the sketchpad. He looked from drawing to drawing, troubled and kind.

  “Come home with Flora and me,” he repeated. “You look bad.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be all right by tomorrow.”

  “The next day is always the worst.”

  “You’re a laugh a minute.”

  After a while he sighed heavily, went into the station and returned with tickets.

  “I got you a sleeper for tonight, and an open return for whenever you come back. Ten-oh-one from here, arrives at Euston at seven forty-three in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Jed.”

  He gave me cash from his pockets. “Phone me tomorrow evening.”

  I nodded.

  He said, “They’ve put the heater on in the waiting room here.”

  I shook his hand gratefully and waved him away home to his comfortable Flora.

  chapter 2

  Best to forget that night. The face that looked back from an oblong of mirror as the train clattered over the points on the approach to Euston was, I realized, going to appeal to my mother’s fastidious standards even less than usual. The black eye was developing inexorably, my chin bristled, and even I could see that a comb would be a good idea.

  I righted what I could with the help of Jed’s cash and a pharmacy in the terminus but my mama predictably eyed me up and down with a pursed mouth before dispensing a minimum hug on her doorstep.

  “Really, Alexander,” she said. “Haven’t you any clothes free of paint?”

  “Few.”

  “You look thin. You look... Well, you’d better come in.”

  I followed her into the prim polished hallway of the architectural gem she and Ivan inhabited in the semicircle of Park Crescent, by Regent’s Park.

  As usual she herself looked neat, pretty, feminine and disciplined, with short shining dark hair, and a hand-span waist, and as usual I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but didn’t, because she found such emotion excessive.

  I’d grown tall, like my father, and had been taught by him from birth to look after the delicately-boned sweet-natured center of his devotion, to care for her and serve her and to consider it not a duty but a delight. I remembered a childhood of gusty laughter from him and small pleased smiles from her, and he’d lived long enough for me to sense their joint bewilderment that the boy they’d carefully furnished with a good education and Highland skills like shooting, fishing and stalking was showing alarming signs of nonconformity.

  At sixteen, I’d said one day, “Dad... I don’t want to go to university.” (Heresy.) “I want to paint.”

  “A good hobby, Al,” he’d said, frowning. He’d praised for years the ease with which I could draw, but never taken it seriously. He never did, to the day he died.

  “I’m just telling you, Dad.”

  “Yes, Al.”

  He hadn’t minded my liking for being alone. In Britain the word “loner” flew none of the danger signals it did over in the United States, where the desirability of being “one of a team” was indoctrinated from preschool. “Loners” there, I’d discovered, were people who went off their heads. So maybe I was off mine... but anything else felt wrong.

  “How’s Ivan?” I asked my mother.

  “Would you like coffee?” she said.

  “Coffee, eggs, toast... anything.”

  I followed her down to the basement kitchen, where I cooked and ate a breakfast that worked a change for the better.

  “Ivan?” I said.

  She looked away as if refusing to hear the question and asked instead, “What’s the matter with your eye?”

  “I walked into... well, it doesn’t matter. Tell me about Ivan.”

  “I er ...” She looked uncharacteristically uncertain. “His doctors say he should slowly be resuming his normal activities...”

  “But?” I said, as she stopped.

  “But he won’t.”

  After a pause I said, “Well... tell me.”

  There was then this subtle thing between us: that shadowy moment when the generations shift and the child becomes the parent. And perhaps it was happening to us at an earlier age than in most families because of my long training in care of her, a training that had been in abeyance since she’d married Ivan, but which now resurfaced naturally and with redoubled force across her kitchen table.

  I said, “James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby George Dupree...”

  She laughed, and went on, “Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.”

  I nodded. “James James said to his mother, ‘Mother,’ he said, said he, ‘You must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.’ ”

  “Oh, Alexander. ” A whole lifetime of restraint quivered in her voice, but the dammed-up feelings didn’t break.

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  A pause. Then she said, “He’s so depressed.”

  “Er... clinically depressed?”

  “I don’t know what that means. But I don’t know how to deal with it. He lies in bed most of the time. He won’t get dressed. He hardly eats. I want him to go back into the Clinic but he won’t do that either, he says he doesn’t like it there, and Dr. Robbiston doesn’t seem to be able to prescribe anything that will pull him out of it.”

  “Well... has he a good reason for being depressed? Is his heart in a bad s
tate?”

  “They said there wasn’t any need for bypasses or a pacemaker. They used one of those balloon things on one of his arteries, that’s all. And he has to take pills, of course.”

  “Is he afraid he’s going to die?”

  My mother wrinkled her smooth forehead. “He just tells me not to worry.”

  “Shall I... um ... go up and say hello?”

  She glanced at the big kitchen clock, high on the wall above an enormous cooker. Five to nine.

  “His nurse is with him now,” she said. “A male nurse. He doesn’t really need a nurse, but he won’t let him go. Wilfred—the nurse—and I don’t like him, he’s too obsequious—he sleeps on our top floor here in those old attics, and Ivan has had an intercom installed so that he can call him if he has chest pains in the night.”

  “And does he have chest pains in the night?”

  My mother said with perplexity, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But he did, of course, when he had the attack. He woke up with it at four in the morning, but at the time he thought it was only bad indigestion.”

  “Did he wake you?”

  She shook her head. She and Ivan had always slept in adjoining but separate bedrooms. Not from absence of love; they simply preferred it.

  She said, “I went in to say good morning to him and give him the papers, as I always do, and he was sweating and pressing his chest with his fist.”

  “You should have got a message to me at once,” I said. “Jed would have driven over with it. You shouldn’t have had to deal with all this by yourself.”

  “Patsy came ...”

  Patsy was Ivan’s daughter. Sly eyes. Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself. Ivan’s assurances got nowhere: and Patsy’s feelings for me, as my mother’s potential heir, would have curdled sulfuric acid. I always smiled at her sweetly.

  “What did Patsy do?” I asked.

  “Ivan was in the Clinic when she came here. She used the telephone.” My mother stopped for effect.

  “Who did she want?” I prompted helpfully.

  Amusement glimmered in my mother’s dark eyes. “She telephoned Oliver Grantchester.”

  Oliver Grantchester was Ivan’s lawyer.

  “How blatant was she?” I asked.

  “Oh, straight to the jugular, darling.” Patsy called everyone darling. She would murder, I surmised, with a “Sorry, darling” while she slid the stiletto into the heart. “She told Oliver,” smiled my mother, “that if Ivan tried to change his will, she would contest it.”

  “And she meant you to hear.”

  “If she hadn’t wanted me to, she could have called him from anywhere else. And naturally she was sugar candy all over the Clinic. The loving daughter. She’s good at it.”

  “And she said there was no need for you to bring me all the way from Scotland while she was there to look after things?”

  “Oh dear... you know how positive she is ...”

  “A tidal wave.”

  Civility was a curse, I often thought. Patsy needed someone to be brusquely rude about the way she bullied everyone with saccharine; but if ever openly crossed she could produce so intense an expression of “poor little me”—dom that potential critics found themselves comforting her instead. Patsy at thirty-four had a husband, three children, two dogs and a nanny all anxiously twitching to please her.

  “And of course,” my mother said, “there’s some sort of serious trouble at the brewery, and also I think he’s worried about the Cup.”

  “What cup?”

  “The King Alfred Cup, what else?”

  I frowned. “Do you mean the race?” The King Alfred Gold Cup, sponsored by Ivan’s brewery as a great advertisement for King Alfred Gold beer, was a splendid two-mile steeplechase run every October, a regular part now of the racing year.

  “The race, or the Cup itself,” my mother said. “I’m not sure.”

  At that inconclusive point the kitchen was abruptly invaded by two large middle-aged ladies who heavily plodded down the outside iron steps from road level to basement and let themselves in with familiarity.

  “Morning, Lady Westering,” they said. A double act. Sisters, perhaps. They looked from my mother to me expectantly, awaiting an explanation, I thought, as much as an introduction. My gentle mother could be far too easily intimidated.

  I stood and said mildly, “I am Lady Westering’s son. And you are?”

  My mother told me, “Edna and Lois. Edna cooks for us. Lois cleans.”

  Edna and Lois gave me stares in which disapproval sheltered sketchily behind a need to keep their jobs. Disapproval ? I wondered if Patsy had been at work.

  Edna looked with a critical eye at the evidence of my cooking, an infringement of her domain. Too bad. She would have to get used to it. My father and I had historically always done the family meals because we’d liked it that way. It had started with my mother breaking a wrist: by the time it was mended, feeding the three of us had forever changed hands; and as I’d understood very early the chemistry of cooking, good food had always seemed easy.

  My mother and Ivan had from the beginning employed a cook, though Edna—and also Lois—were new since my last visit.

  I said to my mother, “Wilfred notwithstanding, I’ll go up now and see Ivan. I expect I’ll find you upstairs in your living room.”

  Edna and Lois hovered visibly between allegiances. I gave them my most cheerful noncombative smile, and found my mother following me gratefully up the stairs to the main floor, quiet now but grandly formal with dining room and drawing room for entertaining.

  “Don’t tell me,” I teased her, once we were out of earshot of the kitchen. “Patsy employed them.”

  She didn’t deny it. “They’re very efficient.”

  “How long have they worked here?”

  “A week.”

  She came with me up to the next floor, where she and Ivan each had a bedroom, bathroom and personal day-room, in his case a study-cum-office, in hers the refuge they used most, a comfortable pink and green matter of fat armchairs and television.

  “Lois cleans very well,” my mother sighed as we went in there. “But she will move things. It’s almost as if she moves them deliberately, just to prove to me that she’s dusted.”

  She shifted two vases back to their old familiar position of one at each end of the mantelshelf. Silver candlesticks were returned to flank the clock.

  “Just tell her not to,” I said, but I knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t like to upset people: the opposite of Patsy.

  I went along to see Ivan, who was sitting palely in his study while noises from his bedroom next door suggested bed making and the tidying of bottles.

  Ivan wore a crimson woollen robe and brown leather slippers and showed no surprise at my presence.

  “Vivienne said you were coming,” he said neutrally. Vivienne was Mother.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, sitting in a chair opposite him and realizing with misgiving that he looked older, grayer and a good deal thinner than he had been on my last visit in the spring. Then, I’d been on my way to America with my mind full of the commercial part of my life. He had made, I now remembered, an unexpected invitation for my advice, and I had been too preoccupied, too impatient and too full of doubt of his sincerity to listen properly to what he’d wanted. It had been something to do with his horses, his steeplechasers in training at Lambourn, and I’d had other reasons than press of business to avoid going there.

  I repeated my question, “How are you feeling?”

  He asked merely, “Why don’t you cut your hair?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Curls are girlish.”

  He himself had the short-cut shape that went with the businessman personality: with the baronetcy and membership of the Jockey Club. I knew him to be fair-minded and well respected, a middling man who had inherited a modest title and a large brewery and had done his best by both.
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br />   I’d often flippantly asked him, “How’s the beer, then?” but on that morning it seemed inappropriate. I said instead, “Is there anything I can do for you?” and regretted it before the last words were out of my mouth. Not Lamboum, I thought. Anything else.

  But “Look after your mother,” was what he said first.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I mean... after I’ve gone.” His voice was quiet and accepting.

  “You’re going to live.”

  He surveyed me with the usual lack of enthusiasm and said dryly, “You’ve had a word with God, have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You wouldn’t be so bad, Alexander, if you would come down off your mountain and rejoin the human race.”

  He had offered, when he’d married my mother, to take me into the brewery and teach me the business, and at eighteen, with chaotic visions of riotous colors intoxicating my inner eye, I’d learned the first great lesson of harmonious stepson-ship, how to say no without giving offense.

  I wasn’t ungrateful and I didn’t dislike him: we were just entirely different. As far as one could see, he and my mother were quietly happy together and there was nothing wrong with his care of her.

  He said, “Have you seen your uncle Robert during the last few days?”

  “No.”

  My uncle Robert was the earl—“Himself.” He came to Scotland every year in August and stayed north for the shooting and fishing and the Highland Games. He sent for me every year to visit him, but although I knew from Jed that he was now in residence, I hadn’t so far been summoned.

  Ivan pursed his lips. “I thought he might have wanted to see you.”

  “Anytime soon, I expect.”

  “I’ve asked him ...” He broke off, then continued, “He’ll tell you himself.”

  I felt no curiosity. Himself and Ivan had known each other for upwards of twenty years, drawn together by a fondness for owning racehorses. They still had their steeplechasers trained in the same yard in Lamboum.

  Himself had approved of the match between Ivan and the widow of his much-loved youngest brother. He’d stood beside me at the wedding ceremony and told me to go to him if I ever needed help; and considering that he had five children of his own and half a clan of other nephews and nieces, I’d felt comforted in the loss of my father and in a deep way secure.