“Let’s not bore Harriet with talk of old friends,” he interrupted — evidently, she wasn’t supposed to introduce their past into his present.
Chastened, Tooly sipped her wine. “You two have lived here a while?” she asked, since Venn had evaded the question earlier.
“Do we even live here?” Harriet asked Venn. “Technically, I suppose. But we seem always to be elsewhere, don’t we, darling. Disgraceful to say, but we’re here largely because of taxes. The Irish, mysteriously, charge hardly any of them.”
“That’ll change,” he said.
“Yes, with the market things and so on. Turns out it’s frighteningly easy to become an Irish resident, or to claim you’re one. My husband is an absolute master at that sort of wheeze, aren’t you. We still spend a fair bit of time in London. And I love Tokyo. My parents have a place in Scotland, where the whole Beenblossom clan descends like some sort of pestilence this time of year. Which is why we’re hiding out here. All right,” she said, rising and handing the baby to Venn. “You cooked, darling, so I clean up. Those are the rules. Begone, both of you. Reminisce boringly — I insist.”
Venn and Tooly retired to the library. He placed his daughter on the carpet, where the infant practiced crawling, flopping intermittently onto her belly, gaze fixed on her father. The four dogs slept, each in a different corner of the room. From an antique-globe bar, he extracted a Cognac decanter and two snifters. Books lined the walls, each volume identically bound in Bordeaux leather, silver letters imprinted on the spine, gold paint on the page edges. Classics, poetry, essays. They didn’t have the smell of reading books; they were furniture. She knelt beside the baby, who looked glassily around. “I’d like a one-piece outfit like yours. Most convenient,” she told the child, then turned to Venn. “Shouldn’t she be sleeping now?”
“Lots of life left for that. Everything is too interesting to sleep if you’ve not been alive a year.”
The child goggled open-mouthed at her father, oblivious of anything else in the room.
“You’re surprisingly credible as the family man, Venn,” she remarked. “I’d be a disaster as a mother — I couldn’t trust myself to look after a brood. Don’t even know how to hold one of these properly.” She leaned over to try, then thought better of it, took another sip of Cognac, finding herself more uncomfortable with each remark. “Mind if I help myself to another drop?”
“You drink fast these days.”
She poured, but refrained from sipping for a minute. She sat on the oxblood sofa, he on its twin opposite, a glass coffee table between them, stacked with Country Life magazines. “I saw my parents recently,” she said. (How peculiar to use that phrase, “my parents,” in reference to Paul and Sarah.) She recounted what Paul had said about sending money to Sarah for years, and that Humphrey had remembered this, too. But what had Sarah spent it on?
“Well,” he answered. “On me.”
“What?”
“The woman, you may recall, was a bit stuck on me. The only way she figured to keep her hooks in was monthly funding,” he said. “Your father made those payments directly into Sarah’s account, but she refused to just wire it nicely along. Insisted on handing it over in person — her way of clinging on. Meant I had to tell her every place I moved. And when she turned up I put on a good show — just enough rejection to keep her interested.”
Tooly paused, trying to absorb this. But something didn’t fit. “You took me everywhere you went. Why didn’t you guys just plant me somewhere, then? The checks were coming in anyway.”
“Plant you where? If you started sobbing in a corner somewhere, then sooner or later someone telephones Daddy. Better to make you merry and compliant. And there was Humph to keep you busy.”
“Was he earning off me, too?”
“No, no. Humph was an unpaid volunteer. I told you, a sad and lonely man. And everything was fine until you went and turned twenty-one, at which point your father rudely stopped paying. Though the whole thing was a bit tired by then. Humph was terrified,” he recalled, laughing, “that I might take you with me once the money stopped, that I’d do something awful with you. You remember how I tied your shoelaces that day?”
“Of course.”
“Couldn’t have you running after me and making a scene on the Upper West Side, could I.”
“I know you’re trying to get a reaction from me.”
“Well, of course. What else do people talk for?”
“You weren’t just keeping me sweet. I was your friend.”
“You were my salary. And, since you had to be around, I put you to use. Now and then, you came in handy. Though never nearly as handy as you thought.”
“But you weren’t living off me,” she insisted. “You had all that other work.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Like in Barcelona, you were helping that guy with his factory. Those Romanian gangsters were hassling him, and you fixed it. Right?”
“What an imagination!”
“You told me that.”
“Like I said, what an imagination. My Barcelona businessman was just another citizen, a little excitable, a little greedy. If he wanted to believe I was a one-man Mafia, who was I to disappoint him?”
“But I saw you dealing with tons of scary guys.”
“I met a few over the years. That’s not to say I was mixed up with them. Thugs are not famously strong in the forward-planning department — why would I tie my fate to sediment like them? Maybe certain souls have mistaken me for a magician, the man who’ll get around the rules, fix the competition, grant them all the power they never deserved. And maybe some gave me funds in the fantasy. All that ever produced, little duck, was a timely reason for me to find my next town.”
“But I thought … Venn, I waited years to do something with you.”
“What were we going to do together? Your dot-com with those hapless college kids?”
“You’re the one who encouraged me to figure out something with them. Wasn’t that the point, for me to find us opportunities?”
“I sent you into people’s houses, Tooly, like one sends a child to collect pretty shells on the beach: to get the kid out of your hair. You weren’t about to come back with anything useful. Actually, you probably should’ve stuck with the lawyer. You’d be comfortable now.”
“I needed to hook up with someone to get anywhere in life? I’m that useless, you think?”
“Well, how would you say you’re faring now?”
“I know you’re just giving me a hard time, Venn. But I want you to know that I paid attention to what you said. All that stuff. About managing without other people. I’m that way now. We really are similar.”
“Couldn’t be more different. I only said that because it kept you in love with me.”
“Come on — this coldhearted thing isn’t convincing me.”
“Really? What am I doing wrong?” he asked, winking.
“What you’re doing wrong is that I remember. I remember how you spent your own money to fly me and Humph along whenever you moved. How you paid for whatever apartment we were in. You weren’t living off me. You completely took care of me. For years.”
“That was Humph. I never paid for one of your flights, your food, your rent. You only assumed it was me, and I saw no need to say otherwise.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To make himself necessary. Otherwise, babysitting was a job anyone could’ve done.”
“But after New York,” she protested, “you kept supporting me.”
“How? I haven’t seen you in years.”
“My passport,” she answered, meaning the bank card he’d secreted there, and the account that had served as her safety net for years, and with which she’d bought World’s End.