Page 27 of The Impossible Fortune
Ron doesn’t know what happened last night, and what might happen next, but he knows one thing. He feels weak. Is this how it is from here on? Should he just accept it? To the family he looked after for so many years – as provider, protector, barbecue chef, turkey carver and chief rabble rouser – he’s now the old man on the comfy chair in the corner? That’s where they are?
He looks at Jason and Kendrick, and he thinks aboutSuzi. Why is she not here? What is she having to ‘arrange’? Why is Kenny not at school?
Danny Lloyd is a very dangerous man, always has been, and Suzi was a fool to marry him. But Suzi’s mum was a fool to marry Ron, so no one was in a position to judge. Ron already knows this story isn’t over, and they haven’t heard the last of Danny Lloyd. But whatever fight there is to come, Ron is scared that he might not have the heart for it.
‘You want to stay here for a couple of days, Kenny?’ Ron asks.
‘Can I?’
‘It’s your home too,’ says Ron. ‘You stay here as long as you want.’
‘That might be nice, Dad,’ says Jason. ‘Just over the weekend.’
Ron nods at his son. ‘Whatever you need. You’re a good kid, Jason, don’t think I don’t know it.’
‘Learned from the best,’ says Jason.
‘And I might still have a few tricks up my sleeve,’ says Ron. ‘If you need me.’
Jason nods. ‘Another cuppa?’
‘I’d kill for one,’ says Ron, and lays his head back down. Does he really still have tricks up his sleeve? He supposes he’ll find out soon enough.
Ron’s phone buzzes. A message from Joyce. Probably just waking up, the poor thing, needs someone to bring her round soup and painkillers.
Ron, it’s Joyce, but you know that, because my name will have come up, I find this thing so fiddly, don’t you? Elizabeth and I have been inFairhaven this morning and we just broke into an office and, anyway, someone might be dead. Nick Silver? The vomiter? Also Bogdan has had a haircut. I can tell you all this when I see you. Why does texting take so long? Can you come and meet us on Hampton Road in Fairhaven? You know, the one with all the houses.
Okay, so she hasn’t just woken up. And the best man might be dead? And Elizabeth’s been into Fairhaven? Jason comes back in with the tea.
‘Can I get you anything else, Dad? Soup? Painkillers?’
Ron pushes himself up from the sofa. ‘Things to do, Jase, can’t just lie on my arse all day. You boys can stay here if you like? Go see the llamas?’
‘Grandad, you’re the best,’ says Kendrick, springing up.
Ron smiles to himself. His head is splitting, his knees are aching, his constitution is clearly weaker than Pauline’s and Joyce’s, but he’s still alive. He’s alive, he’s loved, and there may be trouble ahead on Hampton Road. Bring it on.
‘The Death Star will still be here when you get back,’ says Kendrick.
‘The Death Star’s always here,’ says Ron. ‘The trick is learning to live with it.’
‘Where you off to, Dad?’ says Jason.
‘As always these days,’ says Ron, standing tall and proud, ‘exactly where I’m told.’
16
Elizabeth appears, crawling on all fours, from undergrowth. She stands and steps back onto the pavement. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s not that one.’
Joyce has caught glimpses of Hampton Road from the minibus window, but it’s fun to see it on foot. The houses are private, and all set back from the road. Every time you pass a security gate, you can peek over and see a thatched roof or a turret through the trees. When the security gates are too high, Elizabeth scurries off into the bushes to find a better view. They are looking for the house in the photographs Nick Silver sent to Elizabeth.
So far, no luck, but it is, nonetheless, a lot of fun.
Joanna has recently introduced Joyce to Rightmove. It’s a website where you can see houses for sale. You click on them and they let you look inside! Thousands of strangers’ houses! Twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pictures. You can see their sofas, their kitchen cabinets, where they’ve put their woodenLIVE, LAUGH, LOVEsigns, what they’ve done with their gardens and so on. And this site is free! Joyce doesn’t believe in all progress, self-service checkouts, for example, but she is certainly happy that somebody invented Rightmove.
Joyce can spend hours on it now. She was watching a detective drama set in Devon the other day, and she likedthe look of the town that the grizzled, alcoholic detective lived in, and thought perhaps she might like to live there too. So she Googled the programme and found out it was set in a place called Budleigh Salterton. Bingo, put Budleigh Salterton into the Rightmove search box, and you have a good hour’s worth of entertainment – both imagining a new life for yourself and judging other people’s interior design choices. A nice three-bed apartment on the front for £475,000. You could certainly imagine sitting on the balcony with a glass of wine, but, really, £475,000 with that lino on the bathroom floor?
In the old days, when she was a Rightmove rookie, Joyce looked only at the properties she could hypothetically afford, but Joanna had put her right, and now that Joyce has no upper price limit the whole world has opened up to her. They have houses on there for ten million if you look in the right place. Those houses are all either estates with fifty acres of land and enormous marble-and-gold entrance halls or they are four-bed flats in the middle of London. Rightmove teaches you an awful lot about the world, and also a lot about people’s taste in curtains.
