The Boat House

TWENTY-ONE

Ted was having trouble picking out a shirt; his sister had given him a couple of new ones last Christmas, but this was the first time that he'd really had to study them with regard to presentability. The one with the fine stripes looked slightly flashier, but he'd made a better ironing job of the plain one. In the end he decided on the stripes — after half an hour of wear, the ironing job wasn't going to matter anyway. Now he'd have to pick out a tie. He had two of those, as well… Ted reckoned that, like Pete McCarthy, he simply wasn't one of nature's tie wearers. He certainly hadn't done anything like this in ages. He'd once thought of asking one of the Venetz sisters out, but they were pretty well inseparable; a turndown didn't worry him so much as the prospect of being accepted by one and so giving offence to the other. And where would he have taken her? You could hardly take a woman to her own restaurant, but because of his limited social life he knew of nowhere better. And somehow, he couldn't imagine either of them coming around to the house for some beers and a pizza and a John Wayne movie on the video.

A problem.

So he'd let it go.

Besides, there was still the shadow of Nerys. He knew that it was a stupid notion and that she, of all people, wouldn't have wanted him to think this way, but he couldn't help it. Even though she'd been dead for so long it could sometimes seem that she was still with him, a presence in the next room, someone on the other side of a door who waited and listened but who never stepped through, except when he dreamed. He'd known her since they were both thirteen years old. All right, so he'd never feel that he was betraying her memory. But sometimes, her memory could be all that he needed.

He could hear the van outside. Wayne was home, and the two dogs were barking and scrambling to greet him. Ted stood there waiting with the shirt over his arm, waiting to hear the inevitable sequence completed before he went on; slam the van door, up the outside stairs to the flat over the workshop, another door to slam, and then LOUD MUSIC. Ted still couldn't work out how Wayne was able to cover the distance from the door to the CD player so fast. The glass in the windows was shaking even before the dust on the stairs had begun to settle.

Wayne wasn't Ted's only son. He had another, older boy, Shaun, but Shaun had taken himself to Australia at the age of eighteen and hadn't been home since. Ted got occasional letters, written in a rush and saying almost nothing. He had one photograph, from Shaun's wedding, and the photograph's arrival had been the first that he'd known about any of it. Shaun's last years at school had been difficult — he'd even taken a swing at a teacher at one point — and he'd earned a reputation for the motherless Hammond boys that Wayne had found himself sharing even though he'd done nothing to earn it.

Perhaps he'd come back, one day, at least for a visit. But he was making a life out there, and probably felt that there was no place here for him anymore. Ted would sometimes wonder if he hadn't made Pete into a kind of surrogate son to fill the hole that Shaun had left… it was impossible to say for sure, and nothing to be ashamed of anyway.

He hung his chosen shirt on the front of the wardrobe, and slid back the mirror door behind it to put the other away. He was planning on a shave and a slow, hot bath; he might even throw in some of that stuff that Wayne had bought him for his birthday, that came in a dubious looking novelty bottle shaped like a tiger's head. It was nearly two hours yet to the start of the party, he'd have plenty of time.

He had his son, he had his dogs, he had his friends. He had his memories.

He could hardly call himself lonely, could he?

Wayne had his own hot water supply, direct from the gas-fired geyser that also supplied the workshop below. When it was running, the geyser roared so loudly that the place felt like a rocket in the middle of a takeoff. He turned the music up a little louder, to cover it.

Barely more than half an hour before, he'd driven into the village on an errand for the Venetz sisters and although he saw almost no one along the way, he'd been able to sense a tension in the air; it was a faint background buzz like that of power lines in the rain. Even at this hour, bedroom curtains were drawn and lights were burning inside. Party night was big news, and people were starting early.

He didn't mind responding to a panic call at such a late hour, especially not when it meant transporting three microwave ovens up to the hall and so getting an advance peek at the preparations. Adele Venetz, the sister that Wayne always thought of as the quiet one, had been sitting at the big rolling-out table as he'd entered the restaurant kitchen. He'd rapped on the open door as he'd passed it, and said, "Who called for International Rescue?"

And then he'd faltered.

Adele had looked up at him, not quickly but as quickly as she'd been able. She appeared to have been holding a makeshift icepack to the side of her head and a couple of the cubes had skidded out of reach and begun to melt, almost as if she'd been in too much of a hurry to stretch over for them. From what Wayne had been able to see of her left eye, it had looked as if it had a couple of drops of blood in it.

"Thanks, Wayne," she'd said, only a little unsteadily, and Wayne had been able to see that questions or even concerned enquiries were definitely not being encouraged. "I hope this won't hold you up too much."

"Don't worry about me," he'd said, but then he couldn't just leave it at that and so he'd added, "Will you be all right?"

She'd nodded, barely. "I just need to lie down for a while. Wayne, I'll be grateful if you don't mention this to anybody."

"Don't worry, total silence," Wayne had assured her and then he'd loaded the ovens into the van and left her to make her way upstairs, touching the wall as she went. And then, restraining himself from a farewell blast on the Dixie horn, he'd set out for Liston Hall.

With the first of the ovens he'd gone the long way through to the hall's kitchens, taking in the sights as he went. It seemed that the hallway itself was going to be the disco area, with a glitterball and nets of balloons overhead and several of those special-effects lights that would make the walls appear to be dripping with coloured slime. The doors through into two of the biggest reception rooms had been folded back, and a false wall between them opened to reveal what had once been the ballroom and which now, for one night, was a ballroom again. The whole setup had been quiet, almost deserted; there had been music playing, but that had been somewhere far off in the house. Probably Dizzy's gang, keeping out of the way in case the sight of others working made them feel weak.

The scene in the kitchens had been considerably more lively; as he'd shouldered his way through he'd come upon a spectacle of controlled panic with Angelica presiding. Mixers had been mixing, blenders had been blending, and Angelica had been pushing cloves into the biggest baked ham that Wayne had ever seen. The three local women that she'd brought in as help for the evening had been buzzing around behind her, greasing dishes and setting up trays and napkin-wrapping cutlery.

"Oh, Wayne," Angelica had said. "You're an angel. Did you speak to Adele?"

A moment's hesitation told her that he had, and that he'd seen. But all that he'd said was, "She'll be along in about an hour. Just a few things she has to do."

"You're a good boy, Wayne," Angelica had said, and they'd both known that she was meaning for more than just the errand.

"I'll even shake paws for a biscuit," Wayne had said.

Now, as he was waiting, he took a dispirited look around. As much as he could be aware of someone else's problems, his own were the ones that preoccupied him most. All right, so he had a flat, but it wasn't exactly the kind of place that Warren Beatty would have wanted to call home. Behind him in the bathroom stood a chipped old tub slowly filling with water that was the colour of weak tea; the bathroom walls had been replastered and roughened for tiling, but they didn't have any tiles. He'd tried posters, but they curled in the steam.

Straight ahead were his sleeping quarters, the lounge, the dining area, and kitchen. All of this sounded pretty impressive until you understood that they were combined in the one room. He'd folded his bed back into the sofa, but somehow the sheets always managed to peep out around the edges. The carpet was in two pieces that didn't match and the cooker was a tabletop model, non-functional except for the hotplate, rescued by Ted from an old Dolphin 20 on its way to being broken up. Wayne's going-out stuff, all hung over the back of his one upright chair, had the definite air of being from another world altogether.

As a seduction suite it had its shortcomings, he reflected as he unzipped his jeans, stepped out of them, and slung them onto the sofa with the rest of the day's rubbish. He was working at a distinct operational disadvantage, but he reckoned that this could be changed.

Odds could be altered. He was already making his plans.

In the constabulary house on the south side of Three Oaks Bay, Ross Aldridge was putting a new message onto the outgoing tape in his telephone answering machine. Loren was upstairs, engaged in that long getting-ready process that he'd never quite been able to fathom. He could hear her hairdryer, almost as hard on his nerves as a dentist's drill; it had ruined three attempts to get the message down already, but he didn't want to ask her to lay off for a while in case the uneasy peace was threatened yet again.

Silence.

He gave it another try.

When the message was finished and checked, he went upstairs. Neither he nor Loren liked the house, much; it had been built not too long after the war, and with its small windows and pebbledash it had none of the atmosphere of the 'place in the country' that they'd been hoping for — if anything, it looked more like the married quarters for lower RAF ranks to be found around old and run down airfields. He'd had ideas about them buying somewhere of their own, but so far they'd had to stay as ideas.

Loren was sitting in a slip before the dressing table mirror. Her hair was pinned back, and she was shaking a blob of some kind of cream onto a ball of cotton wool.

She said, "I only hope they can leave you alone for one night."

"They'll all be there," he said. "Nearly everyone got invited."

"Not everyone." She started to work the cream into the skin around her eyes, staring straight ahead at her reflection as she did it. "Some of them around here wouldn't think twice about dragging you away for no reason."

"Well, if anything turns up, you can stay."

"Oh, thanks a lot," she said drily.

Aldridge made no sign or sound as he went through to the airing cupboard to get himself a fresh towel. These were old grounds, and he didn't want to go over them yet again. He was wondering if there would be many at the party likely to recognise him out of uniform. As he moved back down the short landing toward the bathroom, Loren's raised voice came to him again.

She said, "I'm going to enjoy myself tonight, Ross. I'm not going to let anything spoil it."

He stopped in the bedroom doorway. "Yeah. Rub shoulders with the local laird."

"He'll probably just show his face and then disappear."

But he could read her too well, and he could see that she was hoping for something more. She was looking for something memorable, probably for the first time in two years, and he didn't want to deny her that.

He said, "Whichever way, it should be a good party. And it's not a night for trouble."

There were no sounds of any kind coming from Alina's bedroom, and hadn't been for more than an hour. Pete listened in the hallway for a few seconds, and then he knocked on her door. After a moment he knocked again, harder, and he heard her say Come in.

He opened the door, but he didn't step all the way through. Alina was over on the far side of the room, sitting at her table with the lamp angled to spill across the pages of the scrapbook that lay open in front of her. The rest of the room was in near darkness. She didn't seem to be looking at the album, at least not anymore; she didn't seem to have made a start at getting ready, either.

Pete said, "You can go ahead and use the shower as soon as you like."

She looked up at him, and smiled thinly. "You first."

"There's only enough for one. You know what the heater's like."

"But what will you do?"

"I've got every pan in the place filled up and on the cooker. I'll manage. You wearing your new dress?"

"Yes," she said. Again, that smile… as if she was barely managing to conceal some kind of pain.

Pete said, "Is everything all right?"

She looked at the book first, and then at him. Her eyes were bleak, reflections of a landscape where nobody walked. "I don't think I'm winning, Peter," she admitted.

"Winning what?"

"My own little battle. The fight to stay."

She was serious. Pete crossed the room and crouched beside her chair. "You're doing fine," he insisted. "You've found a place you like, you've found people you like… you're working and you're not even paying any tax. That's some people's idea of paradise."

"It's not what I mean."

"Do you mean the official part?" Pete said. "What have you heard?"

"Not that, either," she said, and she tapped the side of her head with a forefinger. "I mean, in here. This is where I'm losing it. It's like there's two of me — one who knows what she wants, and the other who tells her what she can have. And she's a lot stronger than I ever thought she could be."

Alina was looking totally lost; Pete yielded to an impulse for once, and put his arm around her shoulders. She felt small, and as frail as a bird. Wearily, she let herself rest against him.

He said, "I didn't realise you felt this low. I thought you were really happy at the way things were working out."

"One of me is," she said.

He gave her shoulders a squeeze. "Hey, come on," he said. "Brighten up. Get yourself ready, and we'll see how they enjoy themselves in the Big House."

It wasn't much, but it seemed to work; or at least, it was a start.

"Do my best, chief," she said with a smile. And as Pete was standing, she reached over and closed the scrapbook.