“Wonderful. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Have my seat,” I said. “I was just leaving.”
“Leaving to bring us some more coffees, of course. Michael takes one sugar, Stones.”
“Thanks a lot, old chap.”
Well, you can’t spin out the act of buying three cups of coffee for long when there isn’t even a queue at the counter. You can count your change a few times, but that gets boring after a bit. The sums aren’t big enough to be really interesting. I was sort of hoping Cavendish’s coffee would be cold by the time he got it, or he’d suddenly find he had to rush off to an urgent appointment with his tailor.
It’s not that I was jealous, you understand. But people like him have this strange effect on me. Basically, Cavendish was the walking symbol of a disease that society will never cure. Genetically, me and him are at opposite ends of a seesaw, and it seems to me like he’s the bigger boy who always has all the weight at his end. With people like this, I get the impulse to lighten their load a bit in any way I can. Childish, I know. But if you’ve ever sat in the air on the end of a seesaw opposite a great, grinning fat lad, you’ll know what I mean.
When I turned back to our table, I could see Lisa and Cavendish smirking at each other, and nodding. A warm bile rose into the back of my throat. I could taste the sourness of that damn coffee coming back again.
I picked a few condiments from the counter, then stopped off to smile at a couple of middle-aged biddies, all slacks and cashmere sweaters. They looked at me like a Yorkshire terrier bitch looks at a Great Dane. I like you, big boy, but you might hurt me. That was okay. I was only after their savouries.
“Do you mind if I borrow this?” I said, all charm, using my bold stare.
“That’s quite all right,” said one of the biddies. Another conquest, then.
I put the little jug of tartare sauce on my tray, then moved away to the next table where a family with two kids had been eating chips — or french fries as they’re called on Sundays.
“Have you finished with this?”
“Yes, mate.”
The tomato sauce went on the tray with the rest. A few steps further on, a bearded bloke in walking gear was tucking into a nice healthy salad.
“All right if I take that?”
“Be my guest.”
I’ve always liked proper mayonnaise. One that’s really runny and doesn’t need to be scraped out of the neck of a bottle with a knife. I put it on the tray and, as an afterthought, loosened the top of the vinegar bottle next to it. Ease of access — that’s the buzz phrase, isn’t it?
Now all I needed was some cream. Ah yes. I made a small detour to the old couple’s table, who saw me coming and were just leaving anyway. Now all the ingredients were at hand.
Lisa and Cavendish hadn’t even noticed I’d been away so long. They were grinning at each other like idiots, and I had the feeling something had been agreed while I was out of the way. That suited me. I hoped the proposal Cavendish had mentioned was marriage. I was even prepared to go to the wedding and cheer from the back, as long as I didn’t have to be best man and pretend I was his friend.
“Michael has offered me some part-time work,” said Lisa, barely looking at me as I hovered with the tray.
“Oh?”
“He wants me to trace any living relatives he has. Other descendants of Bess of Hardwick. He wants to organise a family gathering, perhaps a Cavendish society of some kind. Don’t you think that’s a terrific idea?”
“Utterly bleedin’ marvellous.”
A family gathering? It was the last thing I’d want with any of my relatives. Most of them wouldn’t be allowed out to attend it anyway. But people like Cavendish take a different attitude to family. It seems to matter. Well, of course it does — because that’s the way they’ve kept their wealth and property and privileges over all these centuries. That’s how they stay better than the rest of us, with their titles and public schools, and their poncy accents. They’re all passed down from father to son, like syphilis.
Presumably Michael Cavendish wasn’t interested in finding any relatives who happened to be poor, or were born on the wrong side of the blanket. He didn’t want to find himself meeting Alf and Mavis Cavendish of 16B Grime Street and their kids Darren and Tracey. My guess was that he hoped to find some rich ones who could do him a good turn, for the sake of the old bloodlines, don’t you know. And having Lisa involved would be a bonus. Well, good luck to him. I couldn’t give a toss what they got up to. Not a toss.
It was at this point that my hand slipped and the whole trayload of coffee, milk, sugar, tartare sauce, tomato ketchup, vinegar, mayonnaise and double cream went flying. If they’d all landed together on a plate in a nice pattern, I could have got an Egon Ronay commendation for it.
But you can never tell with liquids how far they’re going to travel when they spill. Sometimes they fly across the room in a huge splurge without you even trying. There were three cups of coffee on the tray that hadn’t been touched, so there was plenty to hit Cavendish’s shirt when they landed. The milk and vinegar followed pretty closely, and the other stuff made dramatic streaks and splashes of colour on top. Very modernist. Never mind Egon Ronay, give me the Turner Prize.
Cavendish sat there stunned for a minute. He was figuring out the correct etiquette for the situation. It probably doesn’t happen too often when the vicar comes for afternoon tea at a gentleman’s country residence. Then Lisa picked up a couple of paper napkins and began dabbing at his chest as if she was trying to stop the bleeding from a shotgun wound. I wish.
I suppose some folk would have said ‘sorry’ at this point. But I couldn’t remember how to pronounce it properly. That’s the result of a second-rate education, you see. Terrible. I can’t play croquet either.
Trust Lisa, though — she had to do it for me.
“I’m sorry about my brother,” she said, dabbing away. “He’s a bit uncouth.”
“It’s all right, really,” said Cavendish, though you could see it wasn’t. The look he gave me said that if Lisa hadn’t been there he would have called up the grooms and footmen and had me horsewhipped.
“That’s the trouble with family,” I said. “It isn’t always quite what you’d like it to be, is it?”
I walked out of the Buttery and through the courtyard into the Abbey gardens. Maybe I’d go and stare at the ducks on the lake for a bit. Maybe I’d climb up the tower and spit on the stone paving below to see how far it splashed. There are plenty of other ways to enjoy life, if you know how.
Naturally, we didn’t speak on the way home. I put some U2 on the cassette player to drown out the silence. It was The Joshua Tree, starting off with Where the streets have no name. It seemed quite appropriate as we reached Medensworth and turned into First Avenue.
Then I saw another figure I recognised. He was lurking at the corner of the street, like a bungling spy from a John le Carré novel, the one who gets horribly done in by the Russians. This bloke has a particularly crawly line in lurking. You can see him do it any Sunday at St Asaph’s, creeping round the people he wants to get in with, giving the evil eye to those he doesn’t.
It was bad enough having to get used to the cops watching me, and Craig’s boys as well — not to mention someone trying to wreck my business. And Cavendish had left a really sour taste in my mouth, worse even than the coffee. But this was the limit. Bleedin’ Welsh Border with his nose stuck out, sniffing the air, clocking my every move. One of these days I was going to do something that he’d find really interesting. Just watch me.
It was a big Mercedes van, fifty-five hundredweight — that’s five thousand five hundred kilos in foreign money. It was white, with a blue flash down the side that said ‘Inter Euro Transport’. The company claimed to have offices in London, Paris and Brussels.