Page 82 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
17
A Slave to Love
Dante – known … as an eccentric man in the nature of an Old File, who used to put leaves round his head, and sit upon a stool for some unaccountable purpose …
Charles Dickens:Little Dorrit
By ‘File’, read ‘cunning man’ in Dickens-speak: Dante the Devious. He’d laid himself open to me by showing me his notebooks, and I’d told him things about Pa that it had taken me yearsto get round to telling Orla (andnevertold Max). Why? How did that come about?
And how could we be so intimate with each other’s nightmares, yet still seem to be circling in some ritual fight? And did I have time to puzzle over these and other mysteries when I’d got another world, other characters, waiting for me?
Went incommunicado for three days, not answering the door, the phone, or checkingthe answering machine, while I galloped up the home straight withLover, Come Back to Me.
It was much easier to face the characters in my novel than deal with the complications that seemed to be piling up in my life like spillikins: pull one out of the heap and they all fell down.
Some time around midnight on day three I wrote the very last line, then climbed wearily into bed to the accompanimentof Birdsong’s raucous cries and fell into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.
What seemed like only five minutes later I was jarred awake by the sound of bellowing, and since it went on and on like a lost Minotaur I eventually staggered downstairs to the front door.
‘Ahoy there, Sis!’ Jamie foghorned through the letterbox. ‘Rise and shine! Yo, dude, the sun’s hot and the surf’s high!’
WhenI opened the door he toppled forward on to a nice soft mountain of mail, probably because his rather fleshy lips were jammed in the letterbox: a stocky man with rumpled sandy hair, guileless baby-blue eyes like Jane’s, and a pink and healthy complexion.
Just as well you can’t see his liver.
He hauled himself to his feet as I closed the door, looking at my Chinese slippers in a slightly puzzledway as he did so. ‘Could have sworn those were pink, Sis.’
‘No, you must have changed your mind, Jamie,’ I said kindly. ‘Perhaps you remembered that green was my favourite colour?’
‘Must have done!’ He gave me a bear hug and a smacking kiss on the cheek: Jamie is affectionate but quite exhausting, due to all that terrible heartiness.
‘Jane’s not here, is she?’ he asked anxiously now, swivellinghis blue eyes about like a nervous horse. ‘Only if she is, I’m off. I can tell the parents I didn’t have time to call in.’
‘Relax, Jane’s not here. She’s in London – I think.’
‘Oh? Suppose she’s with old George and Phily? Good, good – they can’t expect me to take her up to Scotland with me if she’s not here!’
I left him in the kitchen with a pile of toast and a pot of tea while I went to shower,dress, and get into my right mind:such as it was. I was beyond exhausted, and into dream-like trance, but it was a happy and satisfied weariness.
Meanwhile, Jamie had been amusing himself by listening to my accumulation of phone messages, but had now got to Pa’s latest rant. Judging by the tail end I caught it seemed to be even more demented than the last.
After that, Jamie said he was in twominds whether to continue his journey home. ‘What exactly has Jane done, Cass? And why is it your fault?’
‘Everything’s my fault,’ I reminded him, rewinding the tape and listening to a couple of loving messages from Max, who was perversely bombarding me with them now that it was too late.
He didn’t once mention Kyra the Confessor or even golf.
I deleted him, and then Jane’s voice said breathily:‘I’m here at last. I felt a total dog arriving all muddy and in such a mess, but Phily’s been an angel and loaned me all her things.’
‘Let’s hope she paid for them, then,’ I muttered, and Jamie looked baffled.
‘Are you there, Cass my dear? Saturday, 10 a.m. on the dot at the King’s Arms,’ said a new voice. ‘All slaves to be there an hour earlier.’
‘Crank?’ asked Jamie.
‘Charles – the vicar.Don’t ask.’
Jamie looked like he’d caught me out in something very dubious indeed (maybe a kinky nuns’ and vicars’ party?) that maybe his little sister shouldn’t really be doing, but obediently said nothing.
