Death Comes for the Fat Man

2

But it wasn’t really the end.

The following sunny Sunday Pascoe and Rosie and Tig had gone for a walk to a favorite spot by the river where Tig could swim, Rosie could paddle, and Pascoe could lie in a green shade and think thoughts of whatever color he pleased. Ellie had excused herself on the grounds of a woman’s work never being done.

This was true, but the work in question was not in fact the implied mountain of ironing, it was work on her novel, which had reached a sticky patch.

Not admitting this was of course just silly. In regard to her literary ambitions, Peter had never been anything but a source of support, admiration, and praise. Yet, until she could wave a very large royalty check at their bank balance, she couldn’t avoid this absurd sense of guilt at the inroads into her family life made by the creative impulse.

She switched on the computer and as always checked for e-mail.

There was a small backlog which she dealt with swiftly. Peter had a couple also, one from Cap Marvell. After a moment’s thought, she brought it up.

Cap embraced all new forms of technology and their idiom with a fervor which brought out the mad Luddite in Dalziel. As Ellie picked her way through the message she felt in some sympathy with the Fat Man. If this is what she did to her e-mails, God knows what her text messaging looked like!

Hi! Wnt to see Ktbg at Sndytn ystrdy-rmmbrd ur intrst in E Hodge as I ws lvng-Ktty v trd by thn-sd shd thnk abt it-gt e frm her tdy whch Im frwdng-A mkng gd prgss-tlks of cming hme-dr sys nt 4 a cpl wks at lst-thn cnvlsce smwhre lke Sndytn whre wrks nt on hs drstp! Luv 2El nd Rsi nd Tg Cap

Ellie turned to the forwarded message and was relieved to find that Dame Kitty had not followed her old pupil down the path of mangled language. To her, e-mail was simply a faster way of sending a letter.

The Avalon Nursing Home

Sandytown

East Yorkshire

Dear Amanda,

Thank you for your visit of yesterday. Buried in this necropolis, it is always pleasant to receive news from the world of the living, despite the fact that, as you doubtless observed, I find even the vicarious sharing of a life like yours quite exhausting.

I am sorry I was too fatigued by the end of your visit to deal with your inquiry about Edie Hodge but I woke up this morning feeling much refreshed and all the details of Edie’s adventure came flooding back.

The story that it was I myself who caught them in the potting shed is in fact untrue. The truth is, as so often, both likelier and stranger.

It was in fact Jacob, the boy’s father, who came across them. You might have thought that his concern would have been to keep things quiet for fear of the possible consequences for his son, but his reaction was as Old Testament as his name. The way he saw it, his son was not the seducer but the seduced, led astray and defiled by a Daughter of Satan!

While not able to go along with this completely, knowing Edie as I did left me with the suspicion that it was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other. At least after that onslaught from Jacob, dealing with Matt Hodge was relatively easy. Initially of course he was very angry indeed, such anger being the natural emotion of a good Catholic parent who feels that his child’s welfare has been neglected by those paid to take care of it. But though he was a doting father, he was by no means blindly so, and I do not doubt he was well aware of Edie’s proclivities. Indeed after his initial anger, I wondered whether he did not see this case of in flagrante as an opportunity to re-establish some control over his wayward child.

So the withdrawal of Edie from St. Dot’s was a decision reached amicably on both sides. Jacob dispatched his son to fresh woods and pastures new, and I kept an excellent gardener!

Once the dust had settled, I must confess I was much more surprised by Edith’s rapid return to a state of grace than by her fall from it. I suspect her marriage to Alexander Kewley was a case of her father striking a deal while the iron was hot! The nature of the heat is a matter of speculation, of course. I have no firm facts though the circumstantial evidence does come close to being a trout in the milk. When I was left holding the baby at the Founder’s Day reception (much to the amusement, I do not doubt, of all you girls), I was able to examine the infant at close quarters. And my reaction was, if this is a Kewley, I’m the Queen Mother! The hasty marriage, its speedy outcome, the change in the Kewley fortunes and the Kewley name were all explained, or at least explicable!

But I have always been an addict of detective fiction, so perhaps I only saw what an overheated imagination inclined me to see, though the giving of her lost love’s name to the baby does seem indicative. Of course, when I read all these years later in the newspapers of the poor boy’s sad fate, such speculation seemed irrelevant, almost indecent. Poor Edith. That her pursuit of pleasure, and her father’s pursuit of respectability, should have brought them to this ambush! Indeed, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

But I am very pleased to hear that the wanton gods have not put paid to your Andy. May his improvement continue. He sounds an interesting man. Perhaps I may meet him someday? By way of hint let me remind you that the Avalon complex is not simply a place where old tuskers like myself come to die. The old house is used for convalescence, and its inmates have been seen to leave on their own two feet.

Whatever you decide, do keep in touch, if only to remind me that our speculative astronomers are right and there definitely is life out there!

Yours affectionately, Kittie Bagnold

P.S. I almost forgot. You asked about the background of the gardener. He was a Pole who came here as a child in 1945 when his family decided that after five years under the Nazis they deserved more than a communist future. He grew up, married a Yorkshire girl, and they produced that remarkably dishy young boy (yes, even in the staff room we remarked on such things!) who caused all the trouble.

The father was called Jakub, which we turned to Jacob, the boy Lukasz, which we turned to Luke, and their family name was Komorowski.

Ellie sat quite still for several minutes. She thought of many things, of truth and deception, of justice and revenge, of human savagery and human rights, of principle and pragmatism, of conscience and consequence. She thought of parents and children and how you lived through them and sometimes suffered through them too. She thought of fathers and sons, of pride and hope, of hope shattered and pride deformed. She thought of fathers and daughters, of Peter and Rosie, of them both waving good-bye as they left with Tig, of Peter looking almost young and fit enough to be the girl’s elder brother rather than her father. She thought of him lounging by the river, watching Rosie and Tig competing madly to see which of them could return home the wettest and muddiest. She thought of the troubled weeks after the Mill Street explosion, and she thought of the placid days since their visit to see Dalziel and she thought of Peter’s joy at the prospect of the fat old sod’s eventual complete recovery.

The time might be out of joint but it was someone else’s turn to put it right.

Somehow the imagined world of her novel, in which her characters moved in a tangled mesh of conflicting loyalties and moral choices, was no longer a place she wanted to be just now.

She pressed Delete and went downstairs to do some ironing.