The Crow Road (41 page)

Dad drained his glass and put it down on the glass-topped table between us. ‘Feel sorry for yourself because your friend’s dead if you want, Prentice,’ he said, suddenly calm and sober. ‘But don’t try to dignify it with what’s supposed to be metaphysical angst; it’s also known as superstitious shit, and you weren’t brought up to speak that language.’

‘Well, thanks for the fucking censorship, dad!’ I yelled. I jumped up and slammed my own glass down. The table top cracked; a single big flaw crossed, deep and green and not quite straight, like a dull ribbon of silk somehow suddenly embedded in the thick glass, from one edge of the table to the other, almost underneath our tumblers.

Dad stared at it then snorted, chuckling. ‘Hey, yeah! A symbol.’ He shook his head, glum, muttering as he sat back: ‘Hate the fuckers.’

I hesitated, looking at the cracked glass, instinct - or training - telling me to apologise, but then did what I’d intended to do, and set about storming out of the room.

‘Just fuck off, dad,’ I said before I slammed the door.

He looked up, pursed his lips and nodded, as though I’d asked him to remember and put the lights out before he went to bed. ‘Yup; okay.’ He waved one hand. ‘Night.’

I lay in bed seething, thinking of all the smart things I should have said, until I fell into a troubled sleep. I woke early and left before anybody else was up, driving my hangover back to Glasgow and shouting at caravans that got in my way, and that was the last meaningful, full and frank exchange of views with my dad that I ever had.

‘I wish he hadn’t died right now,’ I said. I didn’t look at Lewis. I was still looking at Jimmy Turrock, asleep against the wheel of his council digger. ‘I wish I could - I wish we could have started talking again.’ One of the two flies exploring the cotton landscape of Jimmy’s shirt suddenly buzzed up to his forehead. His snoring hesitated, then went on. ‘It was so stupid.’ I shook my head. ‘I was so stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Lewis said after a bit. ‘Well, that’s just the way it is, Prentice. You weren’t to know.’ I heard Lewis sigh. ‘There was something I wish I’d told him, too. Could have said, over the phone, end of last week.’

I looked at Lewis. ‘Oh yeah?’

Lewis looked awkward. He crossed his arms and sucked at his bottom lip. He glanced at me. ‘Were you really that ... you know; keen on Verity? I mean; are you?’

I kicked my heels against the sides of the grave, checked out a couple of tree roots we’d have to tackle before we could dig much deeper. I shrugged. ‘Ah, it was just infatuation, I suppose. I mean, you know, I’ll always like her, but... all that stuff at New Year ... that was ... well, partly the drink, but ... mostly just sibling rivalry; sibling jealousy,’ I said. We both grinned. He still looked awkward. This time, instead of sucking his bottom lip, he bit his top one.

I knew, just like that.

‘You are getting married,’ I said, gulping.

Lewis looked at me with wide eyes. - ‘She’s
pregnant?’
I spluttered, contralto.

Lewis’s mouth was hanging open. He shut it quickly. He wiped his face with the hanky; his eyebrows and eyes registered surprise.

‘Um, both,’ he said. ‘Almost certainly.’ He wrung the hanky out over the hole, but it didn’t drip (still, though, we would leave a fair amount of sweat in our father’s grave).

Lewis nodded and his smile was flickering, uncertain. I hadn’t seen him look so unsure of himself since the time when he was sixteen and I
almost
had him convinced the Boxer Rebellion had been about underpants.

‘Fooof,’ I said.

Seemed as appropriate as anything. I stared over at Jimmy Turrock, blinking.

Lewis was making a clicking noise with his mouth. He cleared his throat. ‘Wasn’t exactly planned, to tell the truth, but... well; I mean, we both, you know; want it, so ... And, well, you know how I feel about marriage and all that stuff, but ... Fuck it, it just keeps things simple.’

He sounded almost apologetic.

I shook my head and, turning to him with a big smile, I said, ‘You total bastard.’ I put my hands on my hips. He looked concerned, but I guess my grin must have looked sincere. ‘You total, complete and utter bastard; I hate you,’ I told him. ‘But I hope you’re disgustingly happy.’ I hesitated, just a little, then I hugged him. ‘Obscenely happy,’ I said. Probably have cried but I was pretty cried out by that stage.

‘Man.’ He breathed into my shoulder. ‘I didn’t know how you’d take it.’

‘In the neck,’ I said, pushing him away. ‘Told mum?’

‘Wanted to wait till after the funeral. Mind you, I was going to wait till then to tell you, too, so maybe Verity’s spilling the beans right now.’

‘So when’s the big event?’

‘Which one?’ Lewis smiled; embarrassed, I do believe. He shrugged. ‘We thought October, and the sprog thinks March.’

I let out a long, shuddering sigh, head feeling a bit swimmy. ‘Marriage, eh?’ I said, shaking my head again. I looked him down and up, hoisted one brow. ‘Think you’ll take to it?’

Lewis grinned. ‘Like a lemming to water.’

I laughed. Eventually I laughed so loudly I woke Jimmy Turrock, who looked at me - sitting on the edge of my father’s grave on the day of his burial, guffawing away fit to wake the living - with undisguised horror.

Like a lemming to water. Lewis knew as well as I did the maligned little buggers are perfectly good swimmers.

 
 
 
James arrived back about mid-day. He was ... well, pretty distressed, and all the fragile defences mum, Lewis and I had been constructing for the past few days - Lewis and I joking, mum staying quiet and keeping busy - crumbled. James seemed to blame dad, blame us; blame everybody. He was ugly with anger and he was like a racing outboard in the calm little pond we’d been trying to create; the house felt hellish and we all started snapping at each other. Outside, at the back of the garden, we could hear the council digger, excavating the rest of the hole. The engine revved up and down; it sounded like a machine snoring. James wished us all dead and ran up to his room and slammed the door. It was a relief to get back out to the grave and help Jimmy Turrock apply the finishing touches.

Then it was time to get showered and changed and wait for the hearse and the mourners. The funeral was suitably grim, despite the sunshine and the warm breeze. The words Lewis said over the grave sounded awkward and forced. Mum looked white as paper. James stood, mouth twisted, furious; he stalked off the instant the coffin touched the bottom of the grave. I threw some earth down onto the pale wood of the lid, putting back a little of what I’d helped dig out.

But it passed, and the people who came - a good hundred or more - were kind. We were busy in the house afterwards, feeding and watering them, and then that passed too.

 
 
 
My big brother and his intended asked me to be their best man the day after dad’s funeral. I’d slept, fitfully, on the idea, but finally said yes. It had already been agreed between the two families that the wedding would be held at Lochgair. Lewis and Verity stayed another day after that, then left to go back to London so that Lewis could resume his gigs. He was almost ashamed when I saw him next, when he confessed that nobody thought his delivery had altered a bit; he was just the same on stage after dad’s death as he had been before. The only thing he changed was that he stopped telling the joke about the uncle that dies in an avalanche on a dry ski-slope.

I told him not to worry about it; you had to be a different person on stage. The person he was up there would only change if he told a story about dad dying. Maybe a routine based on the idea of an atheist getting struck by lightning while climbing a church tower would be therapeutic for him, one day.

Lewis had the decency to be appalled at the idea.

Mum and I went through dad’s papers, and were able, after Ashley’s tuition, to work the computer and access the information it held.

Dad’s will, which had been written at the time of Grandma Margot’s death, had turned up in the strongbox hidden under the study floorboards. The strongbox had been no big secret; we all knew about it. It was just something to make any burglar’s job more difficult. Mum had already seen the will when she had opened the strongbox the morning after dad’s death, in the company of one of her friends from the village. She had only looked at the first paragraph, which confirmed that dad wanted to be buried in the grounds of the house. She’d been too upset to look at any more of it, and had put the will back under the floor.

So we opened the strongbox again, divided the papers, took a desk each, and looked at what we had. Mum had given the pile with the will in it to me. I read it first, and my heart sank after I’d scanned quickly through it and got to the end.

‘Oh no,’ I said.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked from the main desk in front of the window.

‘It’s the will,’ I said, turning it over, looking at the last part again, looking over the page but still failing to find what I was looking for. ‘It hasn’t been witnessed or anything.’

Mum came over and stood behind me. She took the four hand-written sheets from me, frowning. Her skin was pale and her eyes looked dark. She wore black jeans and a dark blue shirt and her hair was tied back with a piece of blue ribbon. She handed the will back to me. ‘I think it’s all right,’ she said slowly. She nodded. ‘I’ll call Blawke to make sure. He’ll need to look at it anyway.’ She nodded again, walked back to sit in her seat and started reading through the papers she had in front of her. Then she looked up at me. ‘You phone him, would you?’

‘All right,’ I said and watched her bend to the papers again. She appeared to read for a few moments; I almost wanted to laugh, she seemed so unconcerned. She looked up again after a few seconds and just sat there, looking out through the open velvet curtains at the back lawn.

She sat like that for a full two minutes, unmoving, face unreadable. I smiled; I wanted to weep, to laugh. Eventually I said softly, ‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’ She turned to me, a hesitant smile on her thin face.

I held the will up from where it lay on the desk. ‘This is dad’s will.’ I managed a smile. ‘Don’t you want to know what it says?’

She looked confused, then embarrassed, and put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, of course. Yes. What does it say? Let’s see.’

I pulled my seat over alongside hers.

 
 
 
The good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.

‘Yes,’ the lawyer Blawke said, reading the will as he sat in the front lounge. ‘Well, I can’t see anything wrong with it.’ He looked unhappy. ‘Unarguably his writing ...’

He studied it again.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, finally. ‘I actually warned him against doing this, some time ago, but he seems to have got away with it.’ The heron-like lawyer seemed sad that the will was litigation-proof. He smiled weakly, and mum offered to re-fill his whisky glass.

The will - expressed with a brevity and a lack of ambiguity the best lawyers would have been proud of, and the rest alarmed at - left the house, grounds and so on to mum, along with a two-fifths share in both the residue of dad’s savings and any money made after his death. Lewis, James and I had one-fifth shares each. There were specified amounts to an almost archetypal spread of right-on causes: CND, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Ten grand each. Ten grand! I was initially stunned, fleetingly annoyed, then ashamed, and later vaguely impressed. Mum just sighed, like she’d been expecting something like that.

I confess to having experienced a sensation of relief on discovering I had not been written out of dad’s will; I wouldn’t have blamed him. I think and hope that that feeling was engendered more by a desire to feel I’d still been loved - despite everything - than by avarice. I didn’t think there would be all that much to go round after those donations, anyway.

Dad’s agent, his accountant and the lawyer Blawke worked it out between them (though I checked their figures later). The good lawyer summoned us all to his office a fortnight after dad’s death. Only James wouldn’t come. Lewis flew up specially.

It had all, indeed, been just about as simple as it had looked. Blawke told us the sums involved and I was pleasantly surprised. The donations to right-onnery seemed much more in proportion now; I can only claim that I had spent (what at least seemed like) so long living on bread and cottage cheese and fish suppers in Glasgow - measuring my money in pennies and reluctantly-parted-with pounds - that I had an excuse for not being able to imagine that the thirty K dad had salved his conscience with when he’d written the will had actually been quite a small part of the modest fortune he’d built up over the years.

Dad had left over a quarter of a million pounds, after the government had taken its cut.

My share came to well over forty thousand smackeroos. The likelihood was that for the next few years at least, I’d bank about fifteen grand per annum, which might or might not tail off, abruptly or gradually, depending on how well dad’s stories held up against the tests of time ... not to mention the likes of Thomas the Tank Engine, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and whatever other delights the future of the children’s fiction market held.

Anyway, suddenly I was, if not quite within range of the mountains of Rich, certainly well into the foothills of Comfortable. It entirely made up for the discovery, a few days earlier, that the estimate I had made of my chances of passing my final exams had been considerably more accurate than any of the conclusions I had drawn in the course of them. I had distinguished myself by failing, a result the department prided itself on happening only rarely.

My initial reaction had been to cut my losses on the honours front and see if I could take an MA instead; a re-sit would mean a whole extra year at university. But that sentiment had only lasted for a day. In the turmoil of feelings and fortunes dad’s death had produced, the prospect of another year’s study, with the framework and time scale that would provide - especially if I applied myself, as I thought I would now be able to - seemed suddenly a relief rather than a chore.