Longshot

He drove without speaking the rest of the way.

Fiona and Harry were with Mackie and Gareth in the family room. Perkin’s absence was to me almost a shock, so accustomed had I become to his being there. Mackie looked pale but in charge of things, greeting me with a sisterly kiss.

‘Hi,’ Gareth said, very cool.

‘Hi yourself.’

‘I’ve got the day off from school.’

‘Great.’

Harry said, ‘How are you feeling?’ and Fiona put her arms carefully round me and let her scent drift in my senses.

Harry said his Aunt Erica sent good wishes, his eyes ironic.

I asked Harry how his leg was. All on the surface and polite.

Mackie brought cups of tea for everyone; a very English balm in troubles. I remembered the way Harry had laced the coffee after the ditch, and would have preferred that, on the whole.

It was a month yesterday, I thought, that I came here.

A month in the country...

Harry said, ‘Has anyone found out who shot at you?’

He was asking a simple unloaded question, not like Tremayne. I gave him a simple answer, the one that eventually became officially accepted.

‘Doone is considering it was a child playing out a fantasy,’ I said. ‘Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians. That sort of thing. No hope of ever really knowing.’

‘Awful,’ Mackie said, remembering.

I looked at her with affection and Tremayne patted my shoulder and told them I would be staying on as arranged to write his book.

They all seemed pleased, as if I belonged; but I knew I would leave them again before summer, would walk out of the brightly-lit play, and go back to the shadows and solitude of fiction. It was a compulsion I’d starved for, and even if I never went hungry again I would feel that compulsion for ever. I couldn’t understand it or analyse it, but it was there.

After a while I left the family room and wandered through the great central hall and on into the far side of the house, into Perkin’s workroom.

It smelled aromatically and only of wood. Tools lay neatly as always. The glue-pot was cold on the stove. Everything had been cleaned and tidied and there were no stains on the polished floor to show where his life had pumped out.

I felt no hatred for him. I thought instead of the extinction of his soaring talent. Thought of consequences and seduction. What’s done is done, Tremayne would say, but one couldn’t wipe out an enveloping feeling of pathetic waste.

A copy of Return Safe from the Wilderness lay on a workbench, and I picked it up idly and looked through it.

Traps. Bows and arrows. All the familiar ideas.

I flipped the pages resignedly and they fell open as if from use at the diagram in the first-aid section showing the pressure points for stopping arterial bleeding. I stared blankly at the carefully drawn and accurate illustration of exactly where the main arteries could be found nearest the surface in the arms and wrists... and in the legs.

Dear God, I thought numbly. I taught him that too.