Flesh And Blood (2 page)

‘Come on,’ he said, releasing her and stepping back. ‘Let’s go inside.’

♦

Katherine hadn’t known what to expect: a jumble of unwashed clothes and strewn socks, empty beer cans and unwashed pots? The house of the Seven Dwarfs before Snow White? A single man who’d gone to seed? But no, everything was folded and in place; her father’s morning cup and saucer, bowl and plate rested on the drainer, waiting to be put away. Of course, he would have made an effort against her coming: hoovered, straightened, dusted.

‘Tea or coffee? Not instant, beans, the proper stuff.’

Katherine shrugged off her anorak and draped it over the back of an easy chair. ‘You don’t drink coffee. You never even used to like the smell of it in the house.’

‘I can change, can’t I?’

She looked at him through lowered lashes. ‘Tea will be fine.’

‘PG Tips.’

‘Whatever.’

While her father busied himself in the kitchen, Katherine prowled. The furniture had come with the house, she supposed, the kind you saw piled high beneath signs advertising houses cleared. Curtains with a floral print, rush matting on the floor. A book case crammed with paperbacks. The heavy dining table ringed here and there and scored along one side. On the narrow mantelpiece a photograph in a plain black frame, herself at fourteen, not long before it had all come apart; in the grate below, a fire had been set ready, paper, wood and coal. No stereo, no TV. Upstairs, the door to her father’s room stood open: the quilt thrown back evenly across the bed, pillows bunched; on a small table stood a radio alarm, a lamp, an empty glass, a book.

‘Katherine. Tea’s ready.’

Dumping her rucksack on the single bed in the adjacent room, she went back down.

♦

It was just warm enough to sit in the small garden at the back, the breeze off the sea fresh but not biting. The late April sun still high but weak in the sky. At the garden edge a low stone wall led into a field where, heads down, black and white cattle mooched. Two magpies chattered raucously from the branches of a nearby tree.

‘So? How was your journey?’

‘Fine.’

‘Coach or train in the end?’

‘Neither.’

‘How come?’

‘I hitched.’

‘You what?’

Katherine sighed. ‘I hitched as far as Penzance and caught the bus from there.’

‘I sent you the fare.’

‘Here.’ Half out of her seat. ‘I’ll let you have it back.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What then?’

‘Hitching like that. It’s not safe. It’s unnecessary. It’s…’

‘Look. I’m safe. I’m here. See. All in one piece.’

‘You’re catching the train back. If I have to put you on it myself.’

‘All right.’

‘I mean it, Katherine.’

‘And I said, all right.’

But she was smiling, not sullen the way she might once have been.

‘How’s the tea?’ Elder asked.

Katherine shrugged. ‘Like tea?’

♦

They walked along the narrow track between the fields, past the farm buildings, to where the cliff jutted out over the sea.

‘So what on earth d’you do with yourself all day?’ She gestured widely with both arms. ‘Fish?’

‘Not exactly.’ Sometimes he drove across to Newlyn and watched the catch being landed, bought mackerel or sole and brought it home.

‘I’d go crazy. In a week.’

Elder smiled. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Dad, I’m not staying that long.’

‘I know.’ He had hoped she might stay longer.

‘There’s a party, Saturday. I want to get back.’

Elder indicated the direction the path took between two stands of rock. ‘If we head down there we can circle round, come back across the far field.’

‘Okay.’ For just a short way she took his hand.

♦

That evening they went for dinner to a pub between Trewellard and St Just. A dozen tables in the dining room off the main bar and most of them filled. Katherine had changed into a long denim skirt, and a T-shirt that fitted her more snugly than Elder felt comfortable with. He was wearing his usual blue jeans and faded cotton shirt, navy blue sweater folded now over the back of his chair. Elder ordered rack of lamb and watched, amused, as Katherine devoured a fillet steak without seeming to draw breath.

‘Not vegetarian this week, then?’

Grinning, she poked out her tongue.

Plates cleared away, they sat comfortably, talking of this and that, the hum of other conversations sealing them in.

‘How’s the running?’

‘Okay.’

‘Spring training?’

‘Something like that.’

Katherine had begun running seriously when she was around ten and it had been Elder who had first encouraged her, run with her, been her coach. The first time she had represented her club at two hundred metres she had finished third, the youngest in her event.

‘First meeting must be soon?’

‘County Championships, middle of the month.’

‘And you’re doing what? The two hundred and the three?’

Katherine shook her head. ‘Just the three.’

‘How come?’

‘I can win that.’

Elder laughed.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You think I’m big-headed, don’t you? Conceited.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘No,’ Elder said again. ‘Self-confident, that’s what I’d call you. Self-assured.’

She looked at him then. ‘Maybe I’ve had to be.’

Catching the waiter’s eye, Elder signalled for the bill. Katherine was twisting a silver ring around the little finger of her left hand.

‘How’s your mother?’

‘Ask her.’

‘I’m asking you.’

Slipping her mobile from her bag, she set it on the table before him. ‘Ask her yourself.’

He scarcely glanced at the bill when it came, passed across his credit card, lifted his sweater from the chair. Katherine dropped the phone, unused, back from sight.

♦

Small stones crunched and turned beneath the car wheels as he drove slowly down the track. The upstairs light in the cottage had been left burning.

‘I’m pretty tired,’ Katherine said once they were inside. ‘I think I might go straight to bed.’

‘Okay, sure. Do you want anything? Some tea or…’

‘No, thanks. I’ll be fine.’

Reaching up, her lips brushed his cheek. ‘Good-night, Dad.’

‘Good-night.’

He poured Jameson’s into a glass and carried it outside. The shapes of cattle nudged each other across the dark and, as he moved, something scuttled close along the wall’s base. Here and there, pinpricks of light blinked back from the black mass of sea. Perhaps tonight, with Katherine in the house, the dream would let him rest in peace.

From her room across the landing, Katherine heard her father’s scream.

When she pushed open his door, he was half-sitting, half-leaning, slick in his own sweat.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Just a dream.’

♦

Wrapped in silence, they sat across from one another in the downstairs room. Katherine had made tea and they drank it sweet and strong and, in Elder’s case, laced with whiskey. The hour hand of the clock meandered towards four. In not so very long it would be light or something close. When she’d asked him about the dream, all he had done was shake his head.

Katherine set down her tea and went back upstairs, returning with a disposable lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Elder hadn’t even known she smoked.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m giving it up.’ And when Elder didn’t respond, ‘It’s not the first time, is it?’

He shook his head.

‘How long?’

‘Long enough.’

Six months after he had moved here the dreams had started, sporadically at first, once or twice a week, no more; always variations on a theme, the cats, the stairs. Usually he would wake before the final stage, the final steps, the shape upon the bed. And then, as winter bit, they came thick and fast until he was loath to go to bed and sat up instead, listening to the radio, the image of his own face, tired and drained, staring back at him from the window glass. He went to the doctor, took pills, visited a therapist and in the cloistered comfort of her upstairs room uncovered an early incident with half-wild cats when he was still a child. He didn’t go back.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Katherine asked.

Another shake of the head.

‘It might help.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But Dad, you can’t…’

‘Can’t what?’

She didn’t know, or if she did she didn’t say.

He could smell the perspiration where it had dried on him and dreaded that she could smell it too, that and the residue of fear.

Katherine stubbed out her cigarette and rose to her feet. ‘Come on, let’s take a walk.’

‘No, I don’t think…’ Elder started, and then, ‘Yes, sure. All right.’

Where the sky braced the sea, a narrow ring of orange showed beneath black and purple cloud. Violet light. The slow beat of waves against the foot of the cliffs, their rise and fall. Dampness on the fields and in the air. The first bird call of the day.

‘Being on your own,’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t suppose that helps.’

‘I wasn’t on my own last night. You were just across the landing.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

There had been a woman – in her thirties, bustling, attractive, a waitress in a café at Sennen Cove. Elder had talked to her at intervals for months before finally asking her out: the cinema in Penzance, dinner in a restaurant where the food was mediocre and the music over-loud. In the end she could no longer take his silences, the parts of his life from which he kept her closed out. ‘If I’m going to be by myself,’ she said, ‘I’d just as well be on my own.’

He had seen her once or twice since, laughing on the arm of a fisherman with white hair and weathered cheeks. Happy, or so it had seemed.

‘You could always advertise, you know.’ A smile played on Katherine’s face. ‘Fiftyish ex-policeman seeks female companion. Photo appreciated. Handcuffs a speciality.’

Elder laughed. ‘Thanks very much. Think it’s come to that, do you?’

Stopping in her tracks, she studied him, the lines of his face, the fading blue of his eyes. ‘Probably not.’

Back at the cottage, he stripped off his clothes, slid back into his bed and slept until a little after nine, waking then to the sound of the radio playing, the smell of coffee and hot buttered toast.

♦

For the rest of Katherine’s visit the dream was not mentioned, nor did it return. Together they visited the Tate Gallery at St Ives, Elder more impressed by the building itself, the way its largely glass front followed the curve of the bay, than by the works of art it housed. At Cape Cornwall they clambered to the highest point and watched the seals, sleek amid the waves. Three hours being tossed in a small fishing boat yielded one skinny mackerel and a pair of crabs. They tramped the fields to Zennor, the coast path west and east; ate pasties, cod and chips, cream teas. In Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture Garden, they sat on white chairs, eyes shaded against the brightness of the sun, and when a small cat, grey and white, jumped on to Elder’s lap, instead of pushing it away he let it settle, tail curled, one paw shielding its eyes.

On Katherine’s last night, Elder took her to the Porthminster Beach Café and after dinner they walked on the sand.

‘What’s it like at home?’ Elder asked. Aside from a man walking his dog, and a youth in a wet suit desperate to catch that last wave, they had the beach to themselves.

‘All right, I suppose.’

‘Martyn,’ Elder said, ‘he’s all right with you?’

‘He’s fine.’

Martyn Miles owned a clothes shop on London’s King’s Road, another in Kensington, and a chain of hair salons named Cut and Dried with branches in London and Bath, Cheltenham, Derby and Nottingham. When Elder and Joanne, seven years married, had moved from Lincolnshire to London, Joanne had worked as a stylist in one of Martyn Miles’s salons. After a year, with Elder having difficulty finding his feet in the Met and the relationship going through a bad patch, Joanne and Martyn had a brief affair. When it was out in the open, Elder and Joanne took stock, faced a few home truths, dug in. Elder suggested she change jobs, find a new boss, but Joanne disagreed. ‘I need to see him every day and know I don’t want him any more. Not turn my back and never know for sure.’

Eight years down the line, Katherine on the point of starting secondary school, Joanne was offered the chance to manage a new salon Miles was opening in Nottingham. They moved again. Settled in. Katherine was happy in her new school. Elder had slipped into the Major Crime Unit with relative ease. Sometimes you never saw it coming until it was too late.

‘I’ve been seeing him again. Martyn. I’m sorry, Frank, I…’

‘Seeing him?’

‘Yes, I…’

‘Sleeping with him?’

‘Yes. Frank, I’m sorry, I…’

‘How long?’

‘Frank…’

‘How long have you been seeing him?’

‘Frank, please…’

Elder’s whiskey spilled across the back of his hand, the tops of his thighs. ‘How fucking long?’

‘Oh, Frank… Frank…’ Joanne in tears now, her breath uneven, her face wiped clear of colour. ‘We never really stopped.’

♦

He and Katherine had the beach to themselves now, the soft sound of the tide slowly starting to turn.

‘Another coffee before we head back?’ Elder asked.

‘I’d better not. I’ve got an early start.’

By the time they arrived back at the cottage, the sky was grey shading into black. For some minutes they stood outside, silent, looking up at the stars. Katherine’s rucksack was already packed and leaning against the foot of the stairs.