In return, he received a quizzical look; a head tilted to one side in a way that River himself had. “Did something happen today?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You seem . . . confused.”
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
Once, he had sat in the Prime Minister’s office while First Desk briefed her on unexpected troop movements on the East German border, a brief later agreed to have had a calming effect on the PM in particular, on policy in general, during Westminster’s jumpiest week since October ’62. And which, very much to the point, had been written by Cartwright himself—he, David Cartwright, had taken a planing tool to history; had smoothed away a rough edge, and ensured that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people continued on their serene course instead of being capsized by the possibility of war. And that was just one day in his life. One day in a long life, crammed with incident: what made today so special? No lives had been ruptured, no navies sunk. He’d walked to the shops in his pyjama trousers, that was all. It could have happened to anyone.
“It’s cold in here.”
“I’m all right.”
“You should have the heating on.”
Heat dulls the senses, keeps you unwary.
The young man who was calling himself River walked into the kitchen, acting like he owned the place. He cast a professional eye over the surfaces, checking for signs of neglect—unwashed crockery, crops of mould. He’d be a long time looking. Rose Cartwright had run a tight ship, and her widowed husband did the same.
“Have you eaten, Grandfather?”
“Yes.”
He’d eaten cake. A cup of tea and a slice of cake, as prepared by the Alice woman. This man would know that already, of course. He’d have been fully briefed.
“Would you like me to run you a bath?”
“When have I ever needed you to do that?”
“Grandad, you look cold to the bone. And there’s no fire lit. How long have you been sitting without the heating on? I’ll run you a bath so you can warm yourself up, and then I’ll light a fire.”
“River never . . . ”
He lost his thread.
“I’m River.”
“Have you spoken to your mother lately?”
“She’s fine. She sends her love.”
She never does that, the O.B. thought.
“Why does your voice sound strange?”
“Slight cold, nothing to worry about. I’m not contagious. Now let’s get upstairs.”
And this was not his grandson. Not the River he had first met in the garden; a scruffy-haired boy, T-shirted and unhappy. Isobel was already motoring down the lane with her latest unsuitable beau: that was the last they’d see of her for two years.
He’d been on his knees, with a trowel. He could remember their conversation as if it had been yesterday:
We all make mistakes, River. Made a couple myself, and some have hurt other people. They’re the ones you shouldn’t get over. The ones you’re meant to learn from.
He had always treated River as an equal, never condescended to him.
Am I going to live here now?
Yes. Can’t think what else to do with you.
It turned out it was as easy as that to allow someone into your life.
River Cartwright had been bone of his bone, the warm glow of his heart, since the boy was seven. And would they dare send an imposter to his home if the real River was at liberty, or even alive?
“Grandfather?”
“. . . What?”
“Shall I run you a bath?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, why not do that.”
“Good. I think that would be best.”
“You go on up,” David Cartwright told this stranger. “I just need to fetch something from the study.”
Because he was not as defenceless as they seemed to think.
A mobile phone vibrating on a hard surface sounds like a fart. That this was not an unusual sound in Jackson Lamb’s bedroom, or indeed his vicinity, might have been why it failed to rouse him immediately: his surfacing was a slow, painful experience, like that of a whale being tugged to shore. When at last he emerged, tarred and feathered by sleep, the phone escaped his grasp like a sliver of soap, forcing him to lean over the side of the bed and fumble about on the floor.
Mission accomplished, he answered with a single word: “Fuck?”
Twenty seconds later he said, “Fuck,” and disconnected.
For a while after that he lay in the dark, which stank like a wrestling ring. The room’s torpor suggested he’d turned the heating on at some point, and forgotten to turn it off at another. He wore boxers, one sock and a tie, which was inexorably knotted at the point it became impossible to loop over his head, and well short of that at which he’d be able to wriggle the rest of his body through it. Still, at least he’d made some attempt to get undressed: life was on an upward curve. Or had been, until the phone call.
He said “Fuck” again, and hauled himself out of bed.
Breakfast was two pints of tapwater and four Nurofen. Shaving was out of the question, but he released himself from yesterday’s tie with the kitchen scissors and found a fresh suit, which meant one that had been in his actual wardrobe, if not on a hanger. Locating his shoes was another ten minutes’ work. In the end, the missing one turned up outside his front door, though when he tried to wedge his foot inside, it seemed to have shrunk overnight. Closer examination revealed a sock still in occupation. Scrunching this into a ball, he crammed it into a pocket; then, shod at last, though in unlaced shoes, clomped out to his car, wiped the mouse droppings from the driver’s seat, and set off for Kent.
The streets weren’t exactly deserted—it was a little after two—but were threadbare enough that he could drive on auto-pilot. On the fringes of the capital streetlights became more sporadic, then gave way to darkened roads whose rises and dips were sketched in by oncoming traffic. Lamb smoked as he drove, and each time he reached the filter he wound the window down and flicked the butt into the night, where it spat orange sparks into cold damp air.
Bright glittering beads at rabbit level observed his passage. Just once the car rucked, and wheels mashed fur and bone into ten yards of tarmac. The expression on Lamb’s face didn’t change, even as his cigarette shed a worm of ash into his lap.
He parked on a verge, where his tyres would leave treadmarks in the grass, and sat for a while without moving. The car’s heater had rendered the air thick and rubberised, but this had more established odours to compete with, like cigarette smoke, and the half-portion of chow mein which had slipped under the passenger seat an aeon ago, and would now require a high-powered vacuum cleaner or a certified zoologist to remove. Lamb himself wasn’t odour-free, come to that. He plugged another cigarette into his mouth without lighting it. Rubbing the corners of his eyes with his thumb and ring finger instead, he revived the images of other cars’ headlights, which looped briefly across the inside of his eyelids before spinning away into nothing.
It was a starless night, thick black cloud wrapping the sky, and the streetlamps were wreathed in mist, the hedgerows heavy with collected rain. The houses here were large and detached, each walled or fenced off from its neighbour; islanded by lawn and flowerbed, and anchored to the earth by the weight of a century or so. Their gateposts were chipped or crumbling, their driveways as rutted as farmyards’, and their hallways would be stuffed with Labradors and wellingtons, with overcoats handed down from father to son—a tightness masquerading as tradition, unless it was the other way round—because it was old money, in all its shabby glory, that owned villages like this. There’d be poorer elements, their function to mow lawns and repair boilers, but the foxes here would be red and bushy, the squirrels fat and cheeky, unlike their nicotine-addicted counterparts in London parks and alleys, while the human inhabitants would be bluff, smug, and brimming with the confidence born of inherited wealth. Lamb took care to slam the door when he hauled himself out into the cold. There was little point in discretion. He could already see upstairs curtains twitching in the nearest house.