Streaking (27 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

What Canny had told Henri Meurdon was true. Stepping into his father's shoes really had committed him to a long wearing-in process that would not permit him to walk comfortably for some considerable time. He had a great deal of work still to do, not merely to familiarize himself with a complex set of new routines but to instill confidence in a host of collaborators. Taking the money out of the mill and the three banks had not assisted this enterprise, and putting it back the following morning, although it saved him a small fortune in interest payments, did not add credence to the supposition that he knew what he was about. The fact that his own safe was now empty, and the mill's slush fund more than twenty thousand down, was a further inconvenience requiring urgent attention. He set about making the necessary repairs with a will, and succeeded in making up the lost financial ground in less than a fortnight, but restoring the cracks in his image was a slower and more arduous task.

He had few interruptions. Lissa Lo didn't call, and Alice left the district to visit her in-laws and make arrangements for Martin Ellison's funeral in the Gloucestershire village of Cherington, where the psychologist had been born and raised.

Canny went to the funeral, where he was able to exchange a few words with Alice, much as she had been able to do with him at his father's funeral, but the first claim on her attention was that of her in-laws, and the promise he made to visit her in Leeds when she returned to await the trial of her husband's murderers was unattached to any firm date. He also went to the big party that Leeds United threw to celebrate Stevie Larkin's signing, and exchanged a few words with Stevie—but Stevie's attention was likewise claimed by his new idolaters, and the promises the two of them made to get together for a quiet evening were unlikely to materialize in the near future, given that the season was in full swing.

Lissa Lo didn't attend either function—disappointing Canny slightly, although there was not the slightest reason to expect her presence. He was able to keep approximate track of her movements by surreptitiously reading his mother's weekly magazines, but the model had retreated to the Olympian world from which she had briefly descended; he couldn't help wondering, and fearing, that he might have been relegated to the status of a cryptic note in her overflowing diary.

Three more weeks passed, during which Leeds United won twice in the premiership and drew once. Canny spent ten days out of the twenty-one in London, but he found it far more difficult to feel at home there than he had before his father's death. During his troubled teens he had been quite unable to imagine that he would ever feel more comfortable at Credesdale House than he did in Cambridge or the capital, but now that the title had alighted upon him like a confidential raven on his shoulder he found all kinds of unexpected corollaries arising in his mind and body alike.

He saw no flashes of dubious inspiration, nor did the world ever seem to grow more ominously dark than was explicable in terms of ordinary weather—in that respect, at least, his brain had become quiet and meek—but the absence of deconstructed moments was compensated by the slow reconstruction of his everyday life, which seemed to be urging him into an inexorable process of personal metamorphosis, whose ultimate result he could not yet foresee.

It was all illusion, of course; he told himself that a thousand times—but he was no longer sure of the exact extent to which illusion and reality overlapped, or in what strange ways they might exchange their roles in the souls of the unwary.

When he was at home, Canny spent a good deal of time in the library—not because he was studying but because it was the only place where he was fully insulated from his mother's questions and solicitations. Whenever the heavily-laden walls began to shrink in upon him like a prison he went for walks across the estate, sometimes into Cockayne but more often in the opposite direction. Sometimes he drove around the north of Leeds to Ilkley, so that he could walk from March Ghyll to Fewston Rest; occasionally he went further still, to Brown Bank Head and Pock Stones Moor. On Barden Fell he was able to rejoice in the bite of the wind that blew from the west, all the way from the Atlantic. It was, he knew, the kind of wind that carried people off who went unwisely on to Ilkley Moor without a hat, and turned them into food for worms before recycling their atoms into human flesh once more—but that prospect could not intimidate any true Yorkshireman, whether or not he had the devil's luck to shield him.

He dropped into the fish-and-chip shop in the village once a week, to say hello to Ellen and refuse Jack's last few offers to give him one more game for the village team before the season ended. Once it had ended, though, there was a residuum of subtle resentment in the way Jack would wrap his haddock—as if the new earl had let the side down by not lending it his unequivocal blessing. Promises to turn out in 2004 were blatantly inadequate compensation, even had they been sincere. He was careful not to be too obvious in asking after Alice.

“I think she's okay now,” Ellen told him, when a month had passed after Martin's funeral, during which Alice had not returned to Cockayne. “She was rocky for a bit, but she seemed to find her feet again all of a sudden. I only hope the trial doesn't set her off again. We're still waiting for a place to fall vacant in the village, but I'm not so sure she still wants it badly enough to force her way in ahead of the waiting list. Do you know who else was making enquiries? That Stevie Larkin. Dad thinks he's got no chance—says the elders won't make exceptions for a football player, no matter how much they think of him in Leeds—but Jack reckons they might make an exception, seeing as he's a friend of yours. Don't you, Jack?”

Jack, who was busy lowering a fresh bath of chips into the batter with clinical concentration, contented himself with a nod.

“He
is
a friend,” Canny confirmed, although he knew that Ellen was fishing for gossip. “I wouldn't ask the elders to make any exceptions on that account, though. It was probably only a whim. He'll likely want to buy a place of his own—somewhere big. Come to think of it, the House might be just the thing, if I were thinking of selling it.”

“You wouldn't!” The expression on Ellen's face was a thing to behold.

“I couldn't,” Canny reassured her. “It's what they call
entailed
—not really mine at all, although I've got a life interest in it. It belongs to the family; I can't sell it, and when I die, it has to go to my son no matter what. I'm obliged to have a son, you see, to make sure that there's someone it can go to.
Noblesse oblige
and all that.”

“Better be getting on with it then, hadn't you?” Ellen said, boldly—mainly to scandalize her husband, who was still standing guard over his chips like a mother goose keeping watch on her chicks. “You're not getting any younger. You missed out on all three of us by dragging your feet, but there must be someone out there who'll take you on.”

“It's okay,” Canny assured her. “Mummy and Bentley are both on the lookout. They spend hours poring over the social calendar, searching for coming-out parties in Beverley, Harrogate and Richmond. It's only a matter of time before they fix me up. It's such a comfort not to have to bother with all that oneself. Yorkshiremen don't do flirting, do they Jack?”

Jack maintained a proper silence in the face of that provocation.

“Our Marie's not spoken for yet,” Ellen said—but that was a step too far for her husband, who practically barged her out of the way as he raced to the side of the mushy peas simmering on the hotplate, apparently fearful that disaster might be about to overtake them. When Canny's order was ready it was Jack who packaged up the haddock and chips and handed them over, saying: “Don't know how long I'm going to be able to get proper fish, milord. All but extinct, they say. Quotas aren't working—but if you ask me, the Hull boys are the only ones observing the quotas. The Icelanders and Norwegians don't care, and there's boats coming all the way up from Spain to poach. Who'd have thought it? When you and I were lads, we thought the fish would last forever, didn't we?”

“Yes Jack,” Canny said, with a straight face. “I remember thinking exactly that, more than once. The Soviet Union will come apart, I used to think, and the Space Age will be over, but the haddock and the cod will endure forever. You can't rely on anything, these days—except cricket and taxes.”

When the next day's business in Leeds was done he drove through Shipley all the way to Keighley Moor, just for a change, but the wind was hardly blowing at all. The sky was grey, its leaden clouds reaching down to touch the summits of all the surrounding hills, so that he seemed to be surrounded by stubborn obscurity. When he drove back, he found a Lexus that he had never seen before blocking the entrance to the stable which normally held the Bentley. His mother took the unprecedented step of coming out to meet him.

“You've got visitors, Can,” she told him, in a voice that could have vitrified a wart.

“So I see,” Canny said, gently. “Even if I couldn't see, you didn't have to come out to warn me. That's Bentley's job.”

“No it isn't,” she said. “Not in this case. There's some warnings only I can give you, and that fact that I know you won't listen doesn't let me off the hook.”

“Don't be silly, Mummy,” he said, still trying to keep the least trace of harshness out of his voice. “Did you mean the plural? Exactly how many visitors are there?”

“She brought her bodyguard with her this time—and a maid too. Can you imagine?”

“It's tradition, Mummy,” Canny said. “You ought to approve. In the good old days, when the entire aristocracy left London at the weekend to go to spiffing country-house parties, every young man took his manservant and every young lady her maid, Bodyguards were optional, mind. We've got plenty of room—it's no trouble.” Secretly, he was pleased. If Lissa had brought servants and luggage, that implied an intention to stay for more than a fleeting visit.

“She'll break your heart, Can,” Lady Credesdale was trying to keep a straight face, as befitted a dour Yorkshirewoman. but she couldn't help the dread showing through. “She's not our sort.”

“Perhaps she will,” Canny admitted. “But you're wrong about her not being our sort. She's more our sort than anyone I've ever met, or am ever likely to met. Anyway, I have to find out. There's no other way.”

When he got indoors, Bentley was hovering inside the door, waiting to intercept him in his turn. “The lady's in the library, sir,” he said. “I tried to explain....”

“That's all right,” Canny said. “I'm the one who left the door unlocked.”

Lissa Lo was not only in the library but in the inner sanctum, although Canny was certain that he hadn't left
that
door unlocked. This time, she was sitting
behind
the desk, in a chair that no one but a male Kilcannon had sat on since some lesser contemporary of Thomas Chippendale had carved and upholstered it. She had obviously told the truth about her lock-picking abilities.

“I expected a slightly warmer welcome,” she observed, when Canny paused in his stride, with the desk still between them. “Last time I was here there was a funeral on—I didn't realize that it was like this all the time. Perhaps I should have called. Turning up unexpectedly with the full set of paraphernalia is a trifle impolite.”

“How's your mother, Lissa?” he asked.

“Alive, if not exactly kicking,” Lissa assured him. “She's not so very old, chronologically speaking, but her attitudes are ancient. The trouble with growing old—even if it's all in the mind—is that people lose interest in the future and become bogged down in the past. All change comes to seem threatening, and even retaining things exactly as they are seems a poor second best to the impossible quest of returning to a nostalgia-tinted past. I'm sorry she tried to throw the fear of God into you—she tries it with me all the time, so I'm used to it, but she must have taken you by surprise. Did she get to you?”

“No, she didn't,” Canny said. “But I did get to myself, a little. I'm sorry about the cold welcome you got from Mummy and Bentley. They think you're some kind of
femme fatale
. They're right, of course, in a way—and they can't help resenting your influence over me. They've grown old too, and can't help seeing the future as a mass of ominous threats backed by the inevitability of death. It's understandable, if not entirely forgivable.”

“They're only parents and servants, after all,” Lissa said, dismissively. “Deconstructed any good moments lately?”

“I'm afraid not. I've glimpsed a few shadows, but my gift does seem to have become quiet, just as Daddy always said it would. I can't really complain about the way my luck's running, though. I'm not ahead of the game, but I'm not far behind it either. Perhaps the last few weeks have been one of these intervals when one needs fortune's prejudice just to stave off disaster.”

“I've heard tell about those—but only from mother, of course. Well, things are looking up for you now. I'm sorry to have deprived you of my radiant presence for so long, but I really have had to move heaven and earth to cut the time as short as I have. You have no idea how hard I've had to work to create a year-long gap in my schedule, or even to make sure that no one will come looking for me for the next two weeks...not that they'd find me if they did, unless your crabby mother and her loyal servants start blabbing.”

“They won't,” Canny assured her. “Discretion is a way of life here. Do you think that two weeks will be a long enough gap, to begin with?”

“Long enough to destroy the world, I suppose, if we bring down your black lightning—or blast my illusion of Maya into the stuff of shattered dreams. Long enough, by the same token, to bring something special into the world for which the future will be eternally grateful. I love standing at the crossroads, knowing that whichever road I take will lead to a better place, don't you?”