I limped down to her and climbed into her cockpit. I saw that Jimmy had bolted the portside chainplates into position, ready for the main and mizzen shrouds. I unlocked the cabin padlock and swung myself over the washboards. I lifted the companionway and found the gun still in its hiding place under the engine. If Mulder had been willing to search Mystique, I wondered, why not Sycorax?
I went topsides, but there was no sign of Jimmy. Nothing moved on the river except the small pits of rain. I had the tiredness of time zones, of being dragged by jets through the hours of sleep. I slapped Sycorax’s coachroof and told her we’d be off soon, that there was not much longer to stay on this river, only so long as it took to trap a coterie of the world’s wealthy people.
There was no beer on board Sycorax, nor anything to eat, so I trudged up to the house only to find that the housekeeper was out.
I knew where she kept a spare house key, so I let myself in and helped myself to beer, bread and cheese from the kitchen. I ate the meal in the big lounge from where I stared out at the rain falling on the river. A grockle barge chugged upstream and I saw the tourists’
faces pressed against the glass as they stared up at Bannister’s big house. Their guide would be telling them that this was where the famous Tony Bannister lived, but in a few weeks, I thought, the newspaper’s scandalous stories would bring yet more people to gape at the lavish house. I supposed the grockle barges must have done good business during my father’s trial.
The sound of the front door slamming echoed through the house.
I turned, expecting to hear the housekeeper go towards the kitchen, but instead it was Angela Westmacott who came into the lounge.
She stopped, apparently surprised at seeing me.
“Good afternoon,” I said politely.
“I thought you’d resigned,” she said acidly.
“I thought we might talk about it,” I said.
“Meaning you need the money?” She was carrying armfuls of shopping which she dropped on to a sofa before stripping off her wet raincoat. “So are you making the film or not?” she demanded.
“I thought we might as well finish it,” I said meekly. I’d planned to go this very afternoon, but, true to the promise I’d made to Micky Harding, I would stay.
“And how is your mother?” Angela asked tartly.
“She’s a tough old bird,” I said vaguely, and feeling somewhat ashamed at being taxed with the lie I’d recorded on the answering machine.
“Your mother sounded quite well when I spoke to her. She was rather surprised at first, but she did eventually say you were in Dallas, though not actually in the house right at that moment.” Angela’s voice was scathing. “I said I’d phone back, but she said I shouldn’t bother.”
“Mother’s like that. Especially when she’s dying.”
“You are a bastard, Nick Sandman. You are a bastard.” I felt immune to her insults because I was no longer in her power.
I had Micky’s newspaper behind me. I turned to watch rainwater trickling down the window. The clouds were almost touching the opposite hillside, which meant the moors would be fogged in. I prayed that Jill-Beth would come to England soon so that I could get the charade of entrapment done, and free myself of all these spoilt, obsessed and selfish people.
A sob startled me. I turned and, to my astonishment, I saw that Angela was crying. She stood at the far end of the long window and the tears were pouring down her face and her thin shoulders were shuddering. I stared, appalled and embarrassed, and she saw me looking at her and twisted angrily away. “All I want to do,” she said in between sobs, “is make a decent film. A good film.”
“You use funny methods to do it,” I said bitterly.
“But it’s like swimming in treacle!” She ignored my words.
“Everything I do, you hate. Everything I try, you oppose. Matthew hates me, the film crew hate me, you hate me!”
“That’s not true.”
She turned like a striking snake. “Medusa?” She waited for a response, but there was nothing I could say. She sniffed, then wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket. “Can’t you see what a good film it could be, Nick? Can’t you, for one moment, just think of that?”
“Good enough to blackmail me? No supplies till I do what you want? If I won’t do everything you want, just as you want it, you threaten to steal my boat!”
“For God’s sake! If I don’t force you, you’d do nothing!” She wailed it at me. She was still crying; her face twisted out of its beauty by her sobs. “You’re like a mule! The bloody film crew spend more time reading the Union regulations than they do filming, Matthew’s frightened of them, you’re so bloody casual, but I’m committed, Nick! I’ve taken the company’s money, their time, their crew, and I don’t even know whether I’m going to be able to finish the film! I don’t know where you are half the time!
And if I do find you, and want to talk to you, you look at me as if I’m dirt!” It was as if a great chain had snapped inside her. She hated to be seen thus, and she tried to shake the demeaning misery away, but she could not stop her sobs. She found her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes, but only succeeded in fumbling them across the carpet. She cursed, picked one up, and lit it. “I swore I’d give up bloody cigarettes,” she said, “but how can I with bastards like you around? And Tony.”
“What’s wrong with Bannister?”
“He’s frightened of you! That’s what’s wrong with him. He won’t tell you what’s expected of you, so I have to do it. Always me! He’s so God-damned bloody lazy and you’re so God-damned bloody obstructive, and I’m so bloody tired!” She shook with great racking sobs. “I’m so bloody tired.”
I limped towards her. “Is it such a good film?”
“Yes.” She wailed the word. “God damn you, you bloody man, but it is! It’s even an honest film, though you’re so full of shit that you won’t see it!”
“God damn me.” I trod on her spilt cigarettes. “But I didn’t know.” I put my hands on her shoulders, turned her, and held her against me. She did not resist. I took the burning cigarette from her fingers and flicked it into the swimming pool. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry, too.” She sobbed the words into my dirty sweater.
“Hell,” she said, “I didn’t want this to happen.” But she did not pull away from me.
“I did,” I said. From the very first I’d wanted it to happen, and now, on a rainy afternoon, and to confuse everything, it did.
It rained all afternoon, all evening. For all I knew or noticed, all night too.
We talked.
Angela told me about her childhood in the Midlands, about her Baptist minister father and oh-so-respectable mother, and about the redbrick university where she had marched to abolish nuclear weapons and save the whales and legalise marijuana. “It was all very normal,” she said wistfully.
“Did your father think so?”
“He was all for saving the whales.” She smiled. “Poor Daddy.”
“Poor?”
“He’d have liked me to have been a Sunday School teacher. Married by now, of course, with two children.” Instead she had met a glib and older man who claimed to run a summer radio station for English tourists in the Mediterranean.
She’d abandoned university in her last year, and flown south, only to find that the radio station had gone bankrupt. “He didn’t want me for that, anyway.”
“What did he want you for?”
She rolled her head to look at me. “What do you think?”
“Your retiring and gentle nature?”
She blew smoke at the ceiling. “He always said it was my legs.”