Breaking Light (37 page)

Jim of Blackaton smiled. ‘Sit down, please.' He gestured to the seat next to him. ‘What can I get you?'

‘I'm fine, thank you; I was just on my way home.'

‘Very wise … But, tell me, where
is
“home” these days? My sources tell me that you have been living rather frugally lately. Student life is not so flush, is it?'

Gabriel blushed, but did not reply.

‘There's no shame in it, lad, no shame at all; we all have to rough it at times, don't we, Billy?'

‘Yeah, that's right; we do,' the lieutenant replied, cheerfully.

‘And now you have come looking for your brother – to get a bit of help, eh? Is that it? No?'

‘No. Michael can't help me. I came to take him away from … all this. From you.'

Blackaton laughed. ‘Did you hear that, Billy? He's come to take Fluffy away from us.'

‘Oh,
dear
,' Billy tutted. ‘We can't have that, can we?'

‘No,' Jim of Blackaton said, the smile gone from his face, ‘we most certainly cannot, and you listen to me, pal –' he leant forward and stared into Gabriel's eyes, the mischief suddenly replaced by grit – ‘if you want to help your brother, you'd better work for it; do you hear me?'

Gabriel swallowed and, without meaning to do it, he pressed his finger against his upper lip. ‘What kind of work, Jim?'

‘Oh, a bit of this and that, lad,' Jim said, benevolently. ‘Just a bit of this and that. Ain't that right, Billy?'

‘Sure is, boss. A bit of this and that is all we're asking for.'

Gabriel felt a fevered rush inside his head. He realised he was caught. Closing his eyes, he tried to bring things into some kind of order, attempting to make sense of his situation. He looked up. Jim of Blackaton was studying him with those sly, cold eyes.

‘Well, then?'

He took a deep breath and plunged. ‘No, Blackaton; I'd never work for you – or for your echoing sidekick here –' he inclined his head towards Billy, his eyes fixed on Blackaton. ‘Your business stinks. I'll get Oakstone back for my … my family's sake and I'll do everything I can to help Michael out of this shit hole,' he said in a level voice, his heart pounding.

Jim of Blackaton looked away.

‘Oooh, Bunny-boy's stirring,' Billy mocked. But Jim remained silent; he only shifted slightly in his seat, the way a gambler might tense when a new hand is dealt. He took a drag from his cigar. Some ashes fell on to his trouser leg.

‘And how exactly do you propose to do this?' Billy asked, sarcastically.

‘Wait and see,' Gabriel answered, quite calmly now, smiling to himself as Rey's voice surfaced somewhere in his mind. ‘You just wait and see.'

‘What the hell's that supposed to mean?'

Something in the way Billy's eyes flickered as he said this made Gabriel laugh.

‘What's so bloody funny?'

‘You're just
so
deluded, Billy, you know that?'

‘What the fuck—?'

‘Shut up, Billy,' Jim of Blackaton said, brushing the ashes from his trousers without looking up.

Gabriel got to his feet. For a moment, he thought he might have to steady himself against the table. But he didn't. He stood up straight.

‘Hey, Gabriel?' Blackaton had never said his name before.

‘Yes?'

‘You make sure you don't stand in my way,' he said through his teeth. ‘You fucking make sure.'

Gabriel left them, without looking back, and walked into the night.

*

‘After that episode, I was quite determined,' Mr Askew told Mrs Ludgate, as he stood up and crossed the room to turn on the main light. ‘I just knew that I had to get Oakstone back, for Michael's sake – and for Mrs Bradley's and even Mother's. It was like … like a way of reuniting the whole family. That's what I
realised as I was sitting there, thinking it all through the following morning in St James's Park.'

The sudden brightness blinded them both for a moment. She looked away, embarrassed, hiding her face, but he had stopped noticing. As he sat back in his armchair again, he might have smiled to himself, a bit smug now, as he remembered Jim of Blackaton spilling the ashes on his trousers.

‘Their house of cards was bound to come down eventually – I didn't have to do very much. It was clearly rotten. They were getting quite fraught around that time. There had even been a couple of murders of rival club owners – covered up, of course, but the police were getting irked, just the same.'

She was listening to this with a withdrawn expression, eyes downcast.

‘But, somehow, I think he realised that evening,' he continued, ‘that I'd testify against him when the time came. I had nothing to lose, you see. I could no longer be scared into silence. For some reason, this dawned on him in the club that night.'

‘Were you never scared for your life?'

‘My life … no. I suppose I never thought … It's impossible to imagine those things.'

She nodded slowly. ‘I never knew what he was doing up in London. I suppose that makes me an even bigger fool …'

He leant over and patted her hand. She twitched, but let it happen.

‘What I needed was proof of an actual crime,' he continued. ‘But where was I going to get that?'

They were both silent for a moment, before he asked, 'One thing I've never understood is why Blackaton wanted Oakstone so badly.'

Mrs Ludgate grimaced and shook her head. ‘It's hard to tell …' She hesitated. ‘Perhaps he had a silly dream of another life too.' But, from somewhere in the depth of her mind's dark well, a memory surfaced, so faint and insubstantial that it might have been myth, of a spring day, early on, in those very first months when they had walked, arm in arm, in the sun, through the bright village. She had made them stop, briefly, by a low wall, peering through a screen of trees and bushes at the house that was Oakstone. She had teased him, laughing, saying that this was where she wanted to live one day – not with her parents-in-law on the moor, in that filth. He had laughed, too, and there had been happiness in his face – real happiness. She furrowed her brow now at the memory.
Vanity
. Where would such happiness have fitted in her life? What a fool she had been.

‘Mrs Ludgate, are you all right? I haven't made you sad, talking like this about your husband? You must forgive me; I didn't mean to be so insensitive.'

She tried to smile, but managed only a wince. How could other people stand it, this helpless staggering into marriage, hoping to escape themselves by putting their trust in another person? She struggled to contain her feelings. ‘Not to worry, Professor; I'm as perky as a pin,' she said, cheerfully.

‘Oh – that's a relief,' he said with a laugh. ‘I would never hold it against you that you married a bleeding bastard!'

‘I should bloody well hope not.' Mrs Ludgate chuckled, feeling that dry ripple, like the tearing of old sheets, spreading from her breast towards her throat, so that, in the end, she could not help but let fall a sob.

Mr Askew stirred and looked up at her. ‘Sorry, did you say something? I wasn't listening.'

‘Humph!' she managed, grimacing again through her desolation.

He looked at her closely, sensing that something was wrong. ‘Have you no sense of – of – of –' he stumbled – ‘no feeling of – of anger towards me for what I have done – processing against him through the courts, that is?' He wasn't proud of what he had done, hunting like a bloodhound for intelligence and putting the case together, slowly, painstakingly. At first, he had only been able to gather evidence for tiny misdemeanours, but over time they added up until he had enough to make a case.

Mrs Ludgate ignored his question; it seemed too banal, under the circumstances; she only looked at him with a kind of sadness and asked, ‘What happened to Michael? Did you manage to save him?'

‘I …' He faltered, looking around the room, as if for a gesture of support and understanding, but the walls that stared back at him were numb, the furniture frozen. He looked suddenly old, dulled and defenceless. ‘I was too late,' he whispered at the floor. ‘He was beyond saving.'

‘What happened?' she asked, breathlessly.

‘An overdose –' he looked at her straight – ‘self-orchestrated … only weeks after I met him that last time.'

‘He died?'

He didn't answer. They could not have been torn apart so brutally if they had not been so closely entwined.

‘So all this,' she gasped, ‘all your … plotting, Jim's money, our fields – to get Oakstone back – all was in vain?'

He nodded his head slowly.

‘Then you're as great a loser as I am.'

He looked up at her in surprise, gaunt with shadowed eyes.

‘All things to all men and nothing to yourself.' She laughed, but sadly.

‘I suppose you're right, yes.'

‘Your own brother …' she said with a gentleness he hadn't heard in her before. ‘Was there any other family?'

‘Yes,' he remembered now, only too well. ‘Yes, there was Mother, of course. In fact, it was she who gave me the evidence I needed to begin the search.'

‘Ah?'

‘She even talked about you, that time … I remember it now.' He wished he could remember more clearly; the young woman that Mrs Ludgate had been was still a rather pale reflection. But he smiled at her, encouragingly, as he thought about that visit to his mother, many years ago.

*

Most summer afternoons, the path that traced along the backs of the cottage gardens was left forgotten. It might just as well have been a track broken by deer, flitting through the woods at dawn, looking for water. The smells were secret and musky. It was clear that it was not frequently used. As a boy, he had sometimes been afraid of this undergrowth and the things that spurted out of it: stinging nettles, coils of barbed wire or the angry lids of rusting cans. Back then, the path had been outside the boundary of his enclosed world. But on that occasion when he came back, on that clammy summer afternoon, he had stood alone, looking back into the long, narrow garden, which had been brimming with enamel light.

He had left his office at the college in London that morning, abandoning his students, with no precise idea of where he was
heading. He had woken early out of a dream of childhood, confused and tangled. What had made him come through the woods rather than walking down the lane? What was he doing here, skulking at the bottom of his mother's garden? The vegetable patch, which had provided the potatoes, cabbage, carrots, broad beans and peas in those early years after the war, was gone and, in its place, a small lawn had been planted, surrounded by neat flower beds. Tiny yellow roses climbed a trellis, which had been raised against the next-door garden. A wisteria twined over the top of the back door. From where he was standing, the pendulous flowers looked like water that had been arrested in its fall. It must have been there when he was a child, its scent waving through the curtains of his opened bedroom window on a day like this.

But it was no use thinking about that now, as he could no longer avoid the solitary figure, resting on the bench with the sun on her face. Under the bench, in the paving cracks, tiny purple flowers struggled. He had been standing there, not watching her, for quite some time and the sun had moved one notch, so that her feet were now in shade – her sensible shoes, the suede scuffed on the toes. She wore navy slacks in a cotton fabric and a mauve cardigan was draped over her shoulders. Her hands were spread on her knees, as if she was just about to stand up. But she wasn't; the hands were limp and unattended. The flesh of her face, under the greying perm, looked thinner than he remembered, as if it was slowly drying into bones. Her eyes were closed and she might have been asleep.

Gabriel shifted on his feet so that a small animal stirred in the undergrowth. Have we all grown older, quite suddenly? he wondered. Those of us who are still alive. He realised that he
had been expecting some kind of prelude, like the beginning of autumn, which is softly scarved against the chill of winter.

‘Hello? Is there somebody there?' Her voice was the same, only softer – it belonged to a much younger woman.

He hesitated and felt suddenly ridiculous, knowing that he would have to push through the shrubs to meet her – which he did, stepping into the light.

‘Mother … it's me. Hello, Mum.'

The look of alarm on her face was quickly replaced by surprise and something else, which he could not quite read, but which might have been fear.

‘Gabriel?' She stood up at last and he realised that she was about to embrace him. He had not been prepared for that, and yet he was the one advancing towards her out of the shrubbery, so that their bodies met – it could not be avoided – there, in full sun. He could not tell who decided to let go first but, when they stood apart, he swayed. He swayed and had to stand with his legs apart to steady himself. Mother was studying him carefully. He met her eyes and saw that she was blushing.

‘If I had known you were coming,' she was saying, ‘I would have been better prepared. I look a fright. What you must think …' She talked on, but he couldn't take it all in. He was dizzy with a surge of muddled emotions, which he couldn't express.

‘Come –' her hand on his arm – ‘let's sit down. I'll put the kettle on. Or would you like something stronger? Some sherry, perhaps?'

‘Tea is fine, thank you.'

She stood back to look at him, almost shyly. ‘You have grown since I saw you last. When was it? Five years ago? Six? Look at you. Aren't you handsome!'

There was an awkward silence.

He sat down on the bench with his hands spread over his knees, just as she had done a moment earlier, only his hands were gripping harder, trying to hold on to a solid part of himself. He breathed in deeply the sweetness of the wisteria and felt becalmed, like a ship after a storm, or was it before? Some tiny flies were moving about his head, but he let them be.