As Easy as Murder

One

She’s a truly sad person, she who can harden her heart against the joyous sound of children at play!

. . but sometimes the incessant squeal of a swarm of the little buggers would grate on the nerves of the Blessed Virgin herself. Was there never a time, maybe from the years 3, to 6 or 7AD, when she didn’t turn on Him and yell, ‘For Christ’s sake, Jesus! Would you allow me five minutes of peace and quiet? Is that too much to ask?’

In Plaça Major, the centrepiece of the village of St Martí d’Empuriès, the enchanted Catalan village that I, Primavera Blackstone, Phillips as was, and my son Tom, have called our home for the last five years or so, the fourth Arrels del Vi. . the proper name of the annual wine fair. . was in the fullest swing. Since it moved a couple of those years ago from its original, smaller site, it’s become a magnet for family groups. Now Mum and Dad can bring the nippers along while they wander among the stalls and sample the best that Emporda can offer, knowing that they have room to play in front of the church, and my house, which is bang next door.

Until that evening I hadn’t really appreciated the fecundity of the current generation of young adult Catalans. The place was swarming with under-fives, all too young to have any sort of meaningful volume control, and the din was huge. Not only that; a quick bump count among the women in the crowd was enough to tell me that the breeding programme was still in place.

At any other time, I’d have been amused, probably even charmed, but that was not the best day of my life. I’d arrived home with Tom from a clothes-shopping trip to Girona. . for him, he’s ten and seemed to have been taking a growth hormone (now there’s an ironic analogy) behind my back; I’m not short, yet he’s up to my shoulder already, and solidly built with it. . to find that when we’d been out the post person had called, on her wee yellow scooter. I knew this because Ben Simmers, who created and runs the fair, had spotted a letter sticking out of the top of my mail box, and had rescued it, and three others, before anyone else could. Two of those others were bills. The third was a letter acknowledging my resignation from a part-time job I’d held for a couple of years. I’d been a sort of. . how best to describe myself?. . honorary consul, with a remit to promote Scottish interests and business on behalf of the Edinburgh government.

The role had involved lots of travel around Catalunya and beyond, throughout the rest of Spain. I’d enjoyed it for a while, but it had only been possible because I’d been able to employ a young woman called Catriona O’Riordan to look after the house, Tom, and Charlie, our amiable idiot Labrador retriever, during my weekly absences. When I was there she took it upon herself to run all three of us, and I was fine with that. Catriona was great; irreplaceable, as it turned out. When family circumstances forced her to go back to Britain, I’d looked apathetically for a successor, but none of the CVs that I was sent appealed to me, and so I decided, after not too much internal debate, that since being a full-time mum is what I’m best at, that’s what I should go back to doing.

The job had been useful at the beginning, though. Not because we needed the money. . we don’t, and we never will. . but because it took me out of myself, and out of St Martí at a time when, without it, I’d probably have spent too much of my time sitting around brooding.

About what? Not what, whom: a man, of course, the only one who’s ever come close to making me go all domestic, other than Tom’s dad. . although here I need to volunteer that my brief attempt at a conventional lifestyle with Oz Blackstone ended in disaster so acrimonious that our son was three and a half years old before his father even knew of his existence.

God, I can’t even tell this tale without getting myself sidetracked, all screwed up with angst and regret over my years with that guy. When they were over, irrevocably, as death tends to be, and I was able to consider them, and him, from a distance, I did some internet research that led me to a pretty unshakeable conclusion. When I looked at fifteen behavioural traits indicative of anti-social personality disorder, I found that my former husband ticked fourteen of those boxes. The experts say that particular condition is something you’re born with, but none of them ever knew my ex. The Oz Blackstone that I met was lovely, open, honest and brave, just as his son is growing up to be.

But things happened, and they transformed him.

I had a rival for his affections. She won out for a while, but then she was killed, murdered, and that, I am certain, triggered a change in him, and turned him into what he became, a classic sociopath.

And yet, I loved that Oz too. Having admitted that, I made myself go deeper and looked at myself in the same context, to be faced with another truth. There was a period in my life when, in my relationship with him if nowhere else, I was pretty similar myself.

But it’s over, Primavera, it’s over, he’s dead. Forget the bad that he was, and concentrate on the good that he’s left behind him in our son.

Fine, with an effort of will, I do that and I come to the man who’s come closest to filling what others. . but not I, never I. . see as a gap in my life. There was a time two years ago, a brief moment when I thought that all things might have been possible. If Gerard Hernanz had asked me to, I might even have left St Martí for him. It would have been difficult for me to walk away from paradise, but I believe I’d have given it a try. So would Tom, I’m sure, because he liked the man too. He didn’t worship him in the way that he keeps his father’s memory alive in his heart, but if I’d put it to him he’d have followed my lead with only a little regret.

However, it didn’t come to that. Once again, unforeseeable events got in the way. Gerard lost someone very close to him, and he felt that he needed to go away to consider his future at length, to discover whether he was able to turn his back completely on a previous relationship, one that had been his career also: his priesthood within the Roman Catholic Church.

The fourth item in my Saturday post was his decision. I won’t burden you with the text of his letter. . I couldn’t anyway, even if I had a mind to, for it went through the shredder that same evening. . but what he told me was that while he wasn’t returning to his ministry, he wasn’t returning to me either. He’d spent two years teaching in a monastic school in Ireland. There, he said, he’d found the sort of peace that had eluded him all of his life. He had thought about coming back to St Martí, to build a life with Tom and me, but he had realised that it would involve challenges that might be beyond him and he was concerned about the damage that failure would do to all of us, and most of all to Tom, whose interests he placed above our own. And so, with the blessing of his abbot, he had decided to commit his life to his cloistered pupils.

It was after my second reading of his epistle that the noise below my balcony began to grate on me. I could do nothing about it, so I took the letter off to my bedroom, which has a secluded terrace overlooking the sea, and went through it another couple of times, looking for any sign that he might really be expecting me to respond, to fight my corner against the bloody Benedictines, to write back to him protesting, ‘Bollocks to that, get yourself back here.’

But there was none, I concluded. What he was telling me was unequivocal, with no sign at all of an uncertain man waiting to be persuaded. The more I studied what he was saying, the more my respect for him wore away. The way that I saw it, he was using my ten-year-old son as cover for the blatant lack of guts he was displaying, either in not taking a chance on life, or in not telling me he didn’t really fancy me. He’d come to know Tom well, and he must have appreciated that the real boy was a lot tougher than the one he was describing. Tom seemed to have dealt with his father’s early death and built on his spirit; in truth there had been moments when his strength had reinvigorated me. If we’d tried, and it didn’t work out between Gerard and me, the same thing would happen, I was sure. He’d give me a hug and we’d move on.

But what about me? What did I really want? Two years before, Gerard had asked me to give him space, and I’d done that. Eh? Pardon? Me? I frowned at the page, and asked myself a straight question, for the first time. Wouldn’t the real Primavera, if she’d wanted him badly enough, have gone to Ireland a long time before and laid it on the line for him? ‘Dinner’s in the oven, sunshine. Get your ass back home!’

Of course she would. So why hadn’t she? For make no mistake, that woman still exists.

I didn’t have to dig far for the answer to that. The bald truth was that even if Gerard Hernanz had never gone, if instead he’d stayed put in St Martí two years before, and I’d taken him into my home and into my bed, he’d always have been second best.

Inside, the real Primavera would still have dreamed that the dead might arise and walk once more, as she’d done herself in a manner of speaking, after a spell of hiding in mistaken fear.

Inside, she still does.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’

I turned in my basket chair. Tom was standing in the open doorway; still only a boy, a child, but with a look of adult concern in his eyes as he gazed down on me. ‘Of course,’ I replied lightly. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you promised you’d come out to the wine fair with me, remember. I sniff, you taste, that was the deal. You never forget a promise, so something must have upset you.’

He’s not a boy you can fob off. ‘I’ve had a letter,’ I told him. ‘From Ireland. From Gerard.’

‘And he’s not coming back.’ There was no question mark left hanging in the air.

‘No, he’s not. I’m sorry, Tom.’

He shrugged his shoulders, in a Scottish way rather than his usual Catalan. (Linguistic shrugging is complex; it has to be seen to be understood.) ‘I’m not,’ he declared, firmly; then he paused. ‘Well, I’m sorry for you, Mum, if that’s what you wanted. But not for myself. I don’t need. .’

His years and his vocabulary weren’t yet at the point where he was able to articulate the concept that while he might have liked Gerard as a man, he had no room for him in his life as an added authority figure, but that’s what he meant.

The letter hadn’t brought the merest hint of mistiness to my eyes, but that did. Before he saw it and misunderstood, I jumped to my feet, beaming. ‘And neither do I,’ I declared. I slung an arm round his shoulders, something that I’m able to do these days without bending at all. ‘Come on, kid. Time for you to do some serious sniffing.’

We strolled out into the square, leaving Charlie on guard duty in the garden, and joined the crowds. The kids were making more din than ever, but I didn’t mind any more. In any event their parents, after a few tastings, were beginning to drown them out. I bought a ticket, exchanged a tear-off for a tapas from La Terrassa d’Empúries, our newest restaurant, and began to explore the exhibitors’ tables. Unlike too many other fairs of its type, only the best is on offer at Arrels del Vi. It’s become a showcase for the growers of the Emporda comerc, and they’re keen to show the world how good they are.

Miles, my brother-in-law, dabbles in the wine business, like many rich Aussies. Some time before he’d acquired a winery, a bodega, near Cadaques, and he’d been nagging me for a while to become involved as a director, since he lives in California and can’t be hands-on himself. With the government job off my hands, I had told him that I’d do it, so my tour around the stalls wasn’t entirely for fun. I knew many of the wines that were on offer so I concentrated on those I didn’t, looking to compare them with our range and to see where it might be deficient.

I’d just taken a sip of a very nice white, one hundred per cent garnaxa grape, and let Tom have a noseful, when a hand fell on my shoulder.

‘I knew I’d find you here, gal.’

‘Hello, Shirley,’ said Tom, before I’d had a chance to turn around, but I’d known who it was anyway. Very few people are allowed such familiarity.

‘And hello to you, young man. God, but you’re growing fast. I’ll bet you’re pissed off with people telling you that.’

He was, but he was too polite to agree with her, plus, he liked her. Shirley Gash, my best lady pal in L’Escala, the town of which St Martí d’Empuriès is a slightly detached suburb, is one of the most likeable people I know. She’s had tragedy in her life, more than I’ve had, the sort that would have destroyed a lesser woman, but she’s overcome it, as far as the world can see. She’s tall, blonde, buxom but elegant with it, and she looks after herself so carefully that people who meet her for the first time don’t have a clue about her age. I’m privy to the secret, and that’s what it shall remain.

‘Hey,’ I greeted her. ‘Where have you been and what the hell have you been up to?’ She’d been away from her big house on the far side of L’Escala for a few weeks. Her departure had coincided with one of my away trips, and I’d known nothing about it till she was gone.

Before she could tell me, my gaze fell on a man, standing slightly behind her, but not so far that he was in the Duke of Edinburgh position. One look, and I didn’t need an answer any more. I knew the ‘what’, if not the ‘where’. He was at the upper end of middle-aged, as dark as Shirley is fair, solidly built but not gone to fat, dressed, immaculately, in slacks, white shirt and gold-buttoned blazer, looking as if he’d just stepped off a very large yacht. All it would have taken was an apricot scarf, and Carly Simon might have been singing about him.

Or might it have been someone else’s song? Not ‘You’re So Vain?’, rather ‘Just a Gigolo’? I fixed on my smile but focused a little harder: no, I reckoned I was being suspicious without a reason. His eyes were soft, warm, and there was a degree of uncertainty in them. I’ve seen quite a few professional Romeos in my time, and in each of them there was the look of the shark.

‘This is Patterson,’ Shirley announced. ‘Patterson, with two “t”s and never Pat, Cowling. We’ve been on a getting acquainted trip, now he’s come to stay for a while, and maybe even for longer than that.’

I extended a hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Patterson.’ He shook it as gently as if I’d been the Queen of Spain. His fingers were thick, like sausages, but soft, like those of a lawyer or a banker. If he had come off a yacht, he’d been on the bridge, captain rather than crew.

‘Likewise,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been waiting for this meeting for a while now. You’re Shirley’s number one topic of conversation. It’s easy to see why.’

Brownie points, Patterson, I thought. That could have made him sound like a smoothie too, but it didn’t, just a friendly, open guy. I frowned at my pal. ‘Oh yeah? And what’s she been saying about me?’

‘That you’re the best friend she has. That you’re the unofficial mayor of this place. That you’re a sort of roving ambassador for HMG. She’s told me everything about you and yet nothing, nothing about what you were or what you did before you came here.’ He paused, and grinned at Tom, who looked back at him, deadpan, as if he was still weighing him up, which he was. ‘Oh yes, she says your son’s a bit of a character as well.’

‘I’ll take all those, save the roving ambassador part; I’ve chucked that. And yes, he is; the loveliest boy in the world, until someone upsets his mum.’ I turned back to Shirley. ‘Are you just here to show Patterson off, or have you come for the fair as well?’

She waved their tickets at me. ‘What do you think?’

They joined us on a leisurely tour. We didn’t visit every producer. . there was no need, since the event was only in its first day and the weekend weather was set fair. . but I made sure that we stopped at Miles’s bodega’s table. The representative there knew who I was, but I didn’t let Shirley in on the connection until she’d tasted, and pronounced the red that she tried, ‘excellent’.

‘This is the one?’ she exclaimed, when I’d told her. ‘The place your famous brother-in-law bought a couple of years ago? I’d forgotten about that until now.’ She peered at the bottle. ‘You wouldn’t know from the label.’

‘Miles doesn’t take a high profile in any of his sideline businesses,’ I explained. ‘They have to succeed through the quality of the product, not because of his name.’

‘What is his name?’ Patterson asked. ‘His other one, that is.’

‘Grayson.’

His thick eyebrows rose. ‘Miles Grayson? That Miles Grayson? The movie director?’

‘That’s him. He’s married to my kid sister.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ He paused, making a mental connection. ‘And your second name’s Blackstone. Does that mean that Oz Blackstone, the actor, was-’

I cut him off. ‘Yes. I was married to him for a while. He was Tom’s dad.’ Indeed he hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that Shirley had told him nothing about my past. I felt my son stand just a little taller beside me, and sensed the squaring of his shoulders. We don’t discuss his father very often, and his name means nothing to his school and village contemporaries, but he is intensely proud of him. The only Oz that he ever knew was loving, generous and caring, and it’s my firm intention that he will never hear of the other one.

Patterson had the good sense to realise that I was going to say no more about the subject, and the good taste not to follow it up. I headed him off anyway, by spotting an empty table outside Esculapi, and securing it with a wave to Salvador, the front of house man. (There’s no point being the unofficial mayor of anywhere unless you make it work for you from time to time.)

There was a football match on telly that night, so I let Tom order a takeaway; I could see the house from the table, so I had no worries about letting him go home on his own. To be honest, I was quite pleased; it gave me more freedom to interrogate Mr Patterson Cowling, and for that matter Mrs Shirley Gash.

I started on her as soon as the wine arrived. ‘So, woman, explain yourself,’ I challenged.

‘How did this new liaison come about?’

‘It was Tom’s doing,’ she replied.

‘Tom!’ I repeated. ‘You turn up with a new bloke and you’re blaming my ten year old?’

‘Ten going on eighteen, Primavera.’

‘Maybe so, but still. . More,’ I told her. ‘I need more.’

‘Well, one day last autumn, when the two of you came up to the house and you were in the pool. .’ She broke off. ‘She likes my pool, Patterson. Puts it to good use every chance she gets.’ I’m too brown to go pink or I might have; we both knew what she meant, and with whom I’d gone swimming. A warning shot across my bows, I wondered, lest I spill too many beans? ‘. . I got him to show me how to use Google. You know I’m crap on the internet. I got him to search for dating sites.’

I’m rarely surprised by anything these days, but I gasped. ‘You what. .’

‘Single people sites, mature singles, you know,’ she continued, nowhere even close to being abashed. ‘We found one that I thought looked respectable and he showed me how to find the form. He didn’t fill it in for me, Primavera, honest: I did that myself.’

‘Bloody hell! Why didn’t you just ask him to get you a plastic chair and a parasol and pick you out a nice spot at the roadside with the other working girls?’

She beamed. ‘Because I wanted quality, not quantity. I sent it off, then I forgot all about it, for a couple of months, until I had a reply from this one here. Not directly, through the agency; they sent me his entry and a message form if I wanted to get in touch with him. I decided that I did, and he replied, and I replied to him and then we exchanged email addresses. Oh, and photos: I had to ask Tom how to work my scanner. I hadn’t a clue about that either. After a while we spoke on the phone. . it was all very gradual, you understand. About three months ago we decided to meet. I flew over to London and we had dinner. A month after that Patterson flew to Barcelona and we did it again. . just dinner, mind,’ she added quickly. ‘Finally we decided to go on holiday together.’

I looked her in the eye. ‘Separate rooms?’

‘Not by that stage. Come on, love,’ she chuckled. ‘At my age? How much quality shaggin’ time have I got left? But we split the bill,’ she added, ‘fifty-fifty.’

‘I did offer to pick up the whole tab,’ Patterson volunteered, quietly.

She nodded. ‘True, but if I’d let him do that,’ she explained, ‘I might have wound up feeling like one of those roadside girls.’

‘To some people that might be not a lot different from putting your name on a website.’

‘Sure,’ she snorted, ‘to the same people who read the small ads for hookers and their services in the Barcelona papers.’

‘Hey, I’m not judging you,’ I insisted. ‘Obviously it’s worked out for you both. It strikes me as just a bit risky, though.’

‘True,’ Patterson conceded: then he smiled, ‘but I’ve survived.’

‘So far,’ Shirley laughed.

I studied them. They seemed truly relaxed in each other’s company, no question of that, and I still hadn’t detected the faintest whiff of bullshit from him, not that he’d had much to say up to then. I waited until our meals had been served before I switched my interrogation to him.

‘So, Mr Cowling,’ I began, ‘what’s your tale?’

The smile left his face. ‘Widowed, like Shirley,’ he replied. ‘I suppose that makes three of us.’

‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘I’m not the official widow. She lives in Monaco with their two kids. I’m the divorcee, the second Mrs Blackstone.’

‘The second?’

‘Yes, but that’s a long story. Summarised, he dumped me to marry number one, she died young, and I picked up the pieces for a while.’

‘Then why do I get the impression that you feel like a widow?’

He was a sharp one, was Patterson. He’d hit on something that I’d never really articulated for myself, and he was right. Oz and I might have been divorced, but we were never really apart. I suppose we were a little like Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner in that movie where they played a married couple, both hit people, each with a contract on the other. Mutually self-destructive, but never out of love.

I felt my throat constrict, and took an easy escape route. ‘Perhaps it’s because I still see him across the breakfast table every morning,’ I told him, ‘when I look at our son.’

I was forced to admire the way that he had turned my attempted interrogation back on myself, but he wasn’t going to get away with it. ‘How many Mrs Cowlings have there been?’ I continued.

‘Just the one. Jennifer. She died seventeen years ago; brain tumour, very sad. She was only thirty-seven.’

‘I’m sorry. Do you have any kids?’

‘Two daughters, both flown the coop; I have two grandchildren now.’

‘You’ll fit into L’Escala very well in that case. The place is overflowing with Brit grandparents.’ I glanced towards the church where the unofficial crèche was still as lively as before. ‘And Catalans, for that matter,’ I added. ‘Was there much of an age difference between you?’

The grin returned. ‘I’m going to take that as a compliment. The very fact that you’re asking means you imagine I could still be in my fifties. Jen was eleven years younger than me. I’ve just turned sixty-five.’

‘And retired?’

‘Yup. That was one of the reasons for my foray into the partnership site. I’ve always been pretty busy since. . since it happened, initially as a working single parent, more recently as, just a worker, I suppose. I had no time for a personal life and no inclination to pursue one, to be honest.’

‘What shook you loose?’

‘My younger daughter, Ivy. She’s quite a lot like you, frank and forthright. She sat me down about a year ago and told me that with two kids to raise, her life plan did not include time as a carer for her father in his dotage, so I should get out and find myself some appropriate companionship. Then she showed me how to do it, pretty much like young Tom did for Shirley.’

‘And your older daughter? What did she think?’

‘Fleur has always delegated paternal management, as she puts it, to Ivy. The fact is, she doesn’t have much choice. She’s in the army. Major Cowling, in fact.’

I sensed, or perhaps I only imagined, a sudden tension in him. ‘Active?’ I inquired.

He winced ‘Very. She’s a surgeon, in the field. Bloody awful job. I told her not to join, but she was adamant. I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know how any of them do it, her people or the boys they patch up.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, she’s a heroine.’ Then I tried to put myself in his shoes. ‘That said, if Tom ever announces that he wants to join the armed forces, here or in Britain, I’ll. .’

‘What?’ he asked. ‘What will you do?’

‘Lock him in his room, possibly. But more likely I’ll go all weepy Mum and beg him not to risk breaking my heart.’

‘Is it likely that he will?’

Good question; I had to take a few moments to consider it. ‘At this moment, I’d say no,’ I decided, aloud. ‘He goes to martial arts classes, but as a discipline, not to encourage aggression, or even to work it off. His teacher’s very strong on pacifism and he’s being brought up by me to believe in the sanctity of life. Somehow I don’t see him with an assault rifle in his hand, or launching a missile.’

‘There’s always bomb disposal,’ Shirley chipped in.

‘Fuck!’ I barked at her. ‘Don’t even think that. I’ve seen The Hurt Locker, thank you very much. I take it you weren’t in the army, Patterson.’

He laughed. ‘Me? No, boring old civil servant, me. I spent most of my career in a suit in Whitehall.’

‘Mmm. A mandarin, no less. I’ve met a couple of them.’

‘Nothing so exotic.’

‘Senior, though.’

‘Eventually.’

‘Were you one of those who earn more than the Prime Minister?’ All of a sudden he seemed a little fidgety. ‘You were,’ I exclaimed, ‘weren’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But most of us would argue that the Prime Minister isn’t paid nearly enough. It’s reasonable to suggest that the people who run the country are worth more than footballers. .’

‘Or silly birds with artificially big tits who’re famous for being famous,’ Shirley added. ‘Every time I log on to AOL and see the shit on the “Welcome” page, it makes me want to throw my computer out the bloody window, and my breakfast after it.’ She paused. ‘You’re right, love,’ she added. ‘MPs shouldn’t have to fiddle their expenses.’

‘My dear,’ he said, quietly. ‘As long as there are expenses, people will always fiddle them. . apart from civil servants, of course.’

‘What was your department, Patterson?’ I asked.

‘I moved around. But I spent most of my career in the Foreign Office. It was balls-aching boring stuff, most of it. You’ll appreciate that, given the job you’ve been doing.’

I shook my head. ‘Actually I enjoyed mine, while it lasted. The expenses were crap, though,’ I added.

‘So why give up?’

I leaned back in my chair and took a long, leisurely look around the square, with its cafe restaurants, full of happy people, then sideways towards the crowds under the tents of Arrels Del Vi, and finally at the ancient church, and at our house.

‘I understand,’ he murmured.

‘It’s very quiet in the winter, mind,’ I pointed out. ‘But Miles’s wine business should keep me occupied. That and writing.’

Shirley stared at me. ‘Writing?’ she repeated. ‘When did you become a writer?’

‘As soon as I handed in my resignation from my job,’ I told her. ‘That’s one of the things I plan to do.’

‘What the f. . are you going to write about?’ Then her mouth fell open. ‘Here, you’re not going to do a biography of Oz, are you?’

I whistled. ‘No danger. And I will block anyone who tries. No, I’ll possibly write about. . about this place, and about the things that have happened since we settled here. Dunno yet. I’ve still got to work it all out in my head.’

‘How about children’s books, with Tom the boy detective?’ Patterson suggested.

‘Mmm. His grandmother did that; she was quite successful too. But that might give him too high a profile, and I don’t think I want to draw attention to him. Maybe I’ll write a cookbook instead. Anybody with a shilling for the gas meter seems to be doing one of those these days.’

Actually, although a village portrait was on my agenda, I knew very well what I was going to write about. I was planning to undertake a biography of my father, one of life’s great eccentrics, a quiet, creative Scotsman who’s managed to keep much of the twentieth century at bay, and all of the twenty-first. I even had a title: The Man Who Makes Monsters. (He creates wonderful, hand-carved, chess sets, populated by creatures weirder than any you’ll see in a video game.)

We moved past the cross-examination stage, and on to general chat, although I was left with the nagging feeling that I was losing my touch, and that Patterson had got more out of me than I had from him. However I was impressed that he hadn’t asked me anything about Miles and Dawn, even after he’d learned of the relationship, and very little about Oz. I have an automatic antipathy to people who meet me and quiz me about them, but he didn’t fall into that trap. Okay, they were famous, but he seemed to be interested in me for what I was, not for my link to them.

One thing I did learn was that he had revived Shirley’s interest in golf. He asked me for a rundown on the courses in the region and I was able to help him. Tom and I are members at Platja de Pals, the oldest course on the Costa Brava. He’s been hitting balls since he was five; he shows promise, not only in my eyes but in those of his Grandpa Mac, who’s no slouch himself. The game’s big in the Blackstone family, as it happens. Oz was a low handicapper, and of course there’s … but I’ll get to him, in due course.

‘I’ll take you both along next week,’ I offered. ‘We can’t start too early, because I’ve got to get Tom off to school, but it isn’t desperately hot during the day just now.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Patterson, ‘but I’ve got plans for next week. There’s a European Tour event, the Catalan Masters, at the PGA course at Girona, wherever that is, and Shirley and I are planning to go along. The pros will be practising from Monday, I’m assuming. We were going to take a look at them before it gets too busy. Fancy joining us?’

I doubted if it would ever get too busy, since golf is still very much a minority sport in Spain, but it sounded like a nice day out. ‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Who knows, I might pick up some tips.’

‘Or even a nice young golfer,’ Shirley suggested, with that gleam in her eye.

‘At my age, love,’ I pointed out, ‘if I was on the prowl for talent, I’d be eyeing up the senior tour. I’ll be older than most of next week’s field.’

‘Nobody’s going to believe that without seeing the date on your passport.’ Shirley is damn good for a girl’s morale; it’s one of the things I’ve always liked about her.

Once we had finished eating, I left them to carry on exploring the fair and went back home, to rejoin my son. The game was approaching a climax, but he seemed to have only one eye on it. I took a couple of Fanta drinks from the fridge, handed one to him and sprawled on the sofa. He jumped up from his usual place on the floor beside Charlie, and came to join me, pressing against me, his head on my shoulder.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘I thought you might have been sad about Gerard.’

I ruffled his hair. ‘I stopped being sad about Gerard a long time ago; that’s if I ever was. If he’d wanted to be with us as part of our family, he wouldn’t have taken two years to consider it. He could have stayed but he didn’t.’

‘So we forget him?’

‘No, let’s not do that,’ I decreed, firmly. ‘It was nice to have known him for a while. You’ll find that, love. People come into your life, and then they go out again.’

‘Like Dad?’

‘Not in that way. I didn’t mean by dying. Nobody stays in one place for ever; our circumstances change, and we move on, from place to place.’

He frowned. On screen someone scored, but he barely seemed to notice. ‘I don’t ever want to leave St Martí,’ he murmured.

‘You say that now, but you will. One day you’ll go to university. Even if it’s no further away than Girona, it’ll take you out of here and into a bigger circle. One day you’ll have a career.’

‘Maybe I’ll start a restaurant here, like Cisco.’

‘I don’t think Cisco and the rest would be very pleased to have you as competition. And anyway, I don’t see an opening in St Martí, ever. No spare premises.’

He considered that for a while. ‘Then maybe I’ll make wine; I could go and work for Uncle Miles. That’s not very far away; I could work there and live here.’

‘And put someone else out of a job? It’s not a very big bodega, Tom, and most of the people there will still be around when you’re old enough to be starting a career. Anyway, the last I heard you wanted to be a cop, like Alex Guinart.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded, tentatively.

‘Then you could wind up anywhere in Catalunya, somewhere you couldn’t commute from.’

He frowned up at me. ‘You’re not going to move on yourself, Mum, are you?’

He touched my heart yet again. ‘No, my darling,’ I promised him. ‘I have done plenty of that in my life, but finally I’ve arrived where I want to be.’

‘You lived here before, didn’t you? With Dad?’

That wasn’t something we’d ever discussed. I’d told him, years before, when I’d brought him to live in St Martí, but he hadn’t pressed me about it; until now.

‘Yes,’ I replied, then waited for the follow-up that I knew would come.

‘And yet you moved away then,’ he pointed out, a little anxiously.

‘I was younger then, and sillier. I wasn’t ready to settle here, and neither was your dad. There were things he had to get out of his system.’

‘Did he?’

‘Honestly? I don’t think he ever did.’

‘Sometimes I wonder, Mum,’ he murmured, pensively. ‘If he hadn’t died, would he still be in Monaco with Susie Mum and Janet and wee Jonathan, or would he be here with us?’

I ponder the same question myself, often, for all that I try to avoid it. I’m no nearer knowing the answer, and I wasn’t going there with Tom, so I settled for a vague, general bullshit response. ‘I’m sure he’d have found time for everybody, love.’ Heaven knows, I thought, he shared himself around when he was alive. I’ve often wondered what happened between him and that girl from Singapore, the one who showed up just in time to stop him getting on board the plane on which I came so close to meeting my Maker.

He sighed. ‘It’s not fair, Mum,’ he said, with a hard edge to his voice that startled me. I’d never heard it before. ‘Why did he have to go and die?’

‘He didn’t plan it, Tom. Don’t blame him.’

‘I’m not blaming him,’ he snapped, pulling himself upright on the sofa. ‘I asked Gerard once, if God’s so good, why did he let it happen? He said that God operates on a different level, and that as people, we have to take the rough with the smooth.’

‘What did you say to that?’ I asked, knowing that he couldn’t have been any more than eight when the conversation took place.

‘I told him that if God was only a sort of Presidente del Gobierno in the sky, then he wasn’t much good to ordinary people.’

Gerard had told me once that Tom didn’t believe in the Man Upstairs. If he’d been encouraged to see Him as a celestial prime minister, it was pretty clear why. Nobody believes in those people.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘leaving God out of the discussion and going back to your dad, the truth is that none of us knows what each day will bring. Some things we can change, if we want to. Others, we can’t. If we’re bitter about them, the more we will hurt. And when I see you in pain. . I feel it too.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he exclaimed.

‘No, no. Don’t be. We all go through these things in life. I still miss your grandma, and I always will. It’s a part of being, and I suppose when you’re very young, it’s not something that’s easy to understand. You’ve reached the age when you do. Now you have to learn to accept it. You have to learn. .’

He glanced at me. ‘. . that shit happens?’

My mouth fell open. I snapped it shut. ‘Where did you learn that expression?’

‘Grandpa Blackstone.’

‘That figures!’ I snorted. ‘When?’

‘I asked him the same thing, why Dad had to die. That was all he said.’

And that was pure Mac Blackstone, I had to concede. Oz’s father is not a man to tiptoe around his feelings. ‘Succinct, but spot on, kid. Life is about accepting that, and putting it in perspective. You know what the word “grief” means in English?’ Tom’s multilingual, naturally, given his Scottish parentage, and the fact that he’s spent most of his life in Monaco and Spain. He has a lot of words inside his head, but I don’t assume that at his age he understands all of them.

‘I think so. It’s what you feel when you’re very sad, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Well, there’s a saying: “Grief is the price we pay for love”. I find it beautiful. I hope you will too, and that you’ll try very hard to accept it, and to believe that it’s a price worth paying. If you do, then however sad you are when someone dies, it will never overcome you, because you will appreciate what you’ve had from that person and know that nothing can take those good memories away.’

He was gazing at me. ‘D’you understand?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘It’s much the same as “shit happens”, only not so rude.’