Page 39 of Happily Ever After
‘Maybe, but even the non-fiction has been ironed into a narrative, hasn’t it? Otherwise it’s just random events.Lifeis random events. Books have to have some kind of arc and if only life followed that pattern it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? If we all knew we had a purpose, or an end goal. A final chapter.’
I looked at him. There was a kind of amusement on his face, but it was a dark amusement of the sort you get from reading Poe under the bedclothes. ‘You think about things way too much,’ I said.
He sighed now. ‘Yeah. Flora always said that about me too. But there’s not much to do around here except think and readGardeners’ World.I could talk about buddleia propagation if you’d prefer.’
‘Maybe talking about gardening would be more comfortable,’ I said. ‘I’ve got about forty thousand books still to get through, and your opinion of them is beginning to make me want to throw them all out of that window instead.’
So we drank our tea and talked about gardening for the next hour or so. I actually knew more about plants than I thought I did – thanks to my Wiccan period when I’d read everything on herbs I could find, and I’d remembered quite a lot from our previous tour of the gardens – and it was only when the windows started to darken that Jay stood up. ‘Look, I’d better go. Things to get on with. Those trees won’t prune themselves, you know.’ He took half a careful step towards me. ‘Come over to mine, next Sunday,’ he said. ‘We could have lunch.’
‘Do you promise not to wear the onesie?’
He was already halfway over the window sill on his way out, collecting up the muddy newspapers behind him as he went, like a children’s game. ‘The onesie, along with my willy, will not be in evidence.’
‘You aren’t going to let me forget that, are you?’ I stood with my arms on the ledge, watching him drop down onto the garden below.
‘Nope. Neither, I suspect, will Mrs Compton. I don’t think she wants you to marry Master Hugo, so watch out for botulism and poisonous frogs in your bed.’
‘In this house,’ I said, as he waved a hand in farewell, ‘that’s almost a permanent state of alert.’
In the twilight, I could almost believe even Oswald smiled at that.
17
PEQUOD – MOBY DICK, HERMAN MELVILLE
I redoubled my searching efforts, mostly visibly and mostly to reassure Lady Tanith that I wasn’t just sitting in the library twiddling my thumbs and drinking tea. I cleared all the shelves I hadn’t made my way through already, piling books randomly around the floor in teetering heaps, moved all the furniture, rolled up the carpet and generally made the place look as though I were leaving no stone unturned.
Therewereno stones to turn. I pressed, pulled and twisted every jutting moulding and shelf edging, to reveal an enormous lack of secret passages, priest holes or hiding places of any description. Oswald’s giant expression now looked to be disappointment tinged with relief. Anything this well-hidden wasn’tmeantto be found, surely. I knew Lady Tanith wanted to publish the diaries, together with reprints of Oswald’s novels and poems, ‘for the students of the future, who will, no doubt, regard him as the genius he was.’ But maybe the diaries were less of an insight into his working methods, and more of a record of his sexual exploits? Lady Tanith may have been his muse, but perhaps he had been less interested in listing the ways she inspired his creative juices and more in noting the various, and no doubt ambitious, ways she inspired all his other juices?
But my efforts reassured Lady Tanith to the extent that she allowed me to have a small gas-fired heater in the library. The room was so big that the heater didn’t do much more than take the edge off the cold, but by sitting almost right up against it to fill in the spreadsheet, I could at least keep my fingers mobile.
When Sunday rolled around, I put on some clean jeans and set out for Jay’s house on the green. The sun had cracked the clouds today, giving rise to a deceptively mild day as though summer were coming, rather than going. The grass was greener, the flowers were perky and scenting the air, and there were a few people moving about in the village. The carpenter whom I had come across around Templewood was painting a window frame and two ladies I recognised as part of Mrs Compton’s coven of cleaning helpers were sitting on a bench chatting. A man walking a dog raised a hand in greeting, and two small children, poking the ground with sticks, stopped their prodding for a moment to stare at me as I walked up to Jay’s front door and knocked. I didn’t examine the idea that everything looked better because I was going to be seeing Jay; it seemed superfluous.
‘He in’t in, miss,’ the larger of the children offered. ‘He had to go down to trains, yesterday.’
Oh bugger.
‘Aye. His mum were taken badly,’ the smaller child said. ‘But he left you a note.’
‘Shurrup, stupid, note might not be for ’er.’
‘’Tis so! Cos, cos he told me, right. He told me a lady were coming and to make sure she saw the note. So it’s you who’s stupid, Marcus Dalby!’
The two of them set to what looked to be a pleasurable and often repeated scrap, while I fished out the note from where it had been jammed under the doorknocker.
Andi,
So sorry to have to call off our lunch, but my mum has broken her arm in the middle of preparations for a London landscaping event, so I’m heading home to give Dad a hand for a few days, to make sure all the basics are covered. Hopefully we can reschedule once I’m back.
Take care, don’t work too hard and don’t eat anything that looks like paté, I haven’t seen Mr Compton around in a while and Mrs C has got a really effective mincer and one hell of a temper. Catch you later.
Jay x
Despite my disappointment, I found I was laughing. Jay had thought of me to the extent of leaving a note, which was good. I pushed it into my pocket and headed back, past the still-fighting boys, through the churchyard, past Oswald’s phallic memorial and into the gardens of Templewood Hall.
Hugo and his mother had gone out to lunch. I’d watched them drive away before I’d left, grateful that I didn’t have to explain where I was going to either of them. Not that Hugo would have minded, he seemed to quite like Jay whenever he spoke about him, but Lady Tanith seemed to think that I should be sealed into the library and not released until I’d found those bloody diaries.
The house was empty when I got back. It evenfeltempty. Mrs Compton also had Sundays off, ‘unless it’s an Oswald Day,’ Hugo had remarked, so there was no ghastly presence stalking the corridors with pithy, insulting one-liners to aim at my head. It was just me and The Master.
