"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

4.

Two days after the funeral, when Simon judged himself to be of sound mind and capable of clear thinking, he wrote to the medical school and said that he wouldn't be attending as a student in the autumn. Medicine wasn't for him. What career might eventually suit him, he didn't know. Nor, at that particular time, did he care. He kept the telephone disconnected in case Kester-Evans bothered him (time enough to tell him later when he felt strong enough to defend his action), and as there was no point in going back to school he cut the badge off his blazer and put it in the bin.
His next positive action was to buy a car. He had been given a modest little hatchback on his seventeenth birthday just over a year ago. His father's choice for him. Not a good one. He needed something fast. Until the Will was proved, or whatever the legal term was, he couldn't sell the family's second car - the Volvo - and add it to whatever he got for the hatchback, which wouldn't be much. Or he thought he couldn't. He knew he was due to inherit everything, but perhaps not immediately, so instead of purchasing a beautiful red B.M.W. coupe he made do with a second-hand, souped-up Lotus Eclat with a hefty mileage and pocketed enough on the trade-in of the hatchback to buy some suitable gear. Clothes had never interested him, but you
couldn't drive that sort of car in boarding school clobber. And he was tired of sweatshirts and jeans. The lovat green suede jacket and matching cords he eventually chose might have better suited the B.M.W. A wrong choice pondered over took his mind off pain and was therapeutic. A couple of highly patterned jerseys, bright and cheerful, put colour in his cheeks and suited any kind of car. Happy for a while with the sort of trivia that puts death into perspective - a long way off for the healthy young - he roamed around Bristol, ate a highly spiced meal at an Indian restaurant, went to look at the Great Britain, down at the Docks and was called 'Sweetie' by a pretty little tart at the dockside. She didn't invite him to go home with her. He wondered if he would have if she had. The woman with the long dark hair lingered along the edges of his mind. She had come and gone like a dream. He only half believed in her.
A week later she came back.
Rhoda's approach this time was more carefully thought out. Simon mustn't be alarmed. She needed his co-operation and, for as long as possible, his goodwill.
He was hosing down his new car in the drive when she arrived. His back was to her and she watched him spraying the water under the wheel arches, dislodging cow muck. For a moment, and for the first time, she saw a physical resemblance to his father. The shoulder muscles, the way he flicked his wrists. When he was older, thickened out, the resemblance might become more obvious. She blanked the thought. Stay objective. He is a means to an end. Don't let memories colour anything. She said hello. And stepped smartly out of the way when he turned, startled, still hosing, and almost soaked her shoes.
He dropped the hose and water snaked across the gravel and ran into a bed of thick white alyssum, making the air pungent with the smell of flowers and wet manure. The sun shone brilliantly.
He went to turn off the tap and pressed his damp hands against his burning cheeks before returning to her. Bloody hell, why did he blush so much? When would he stop?
She said hello again - and added "Simon". And smiled her winning, transforming smile. "Last time I was here," she went on smoothly, "we didn't have much opportunity to talk. I'm not at all sure I told you my name. It's Rhoda. Rhoda Osborne."
He nearly said how do you do, but that would have been too ridiculous. This woman had seen him naked - well, maybe not quite, he wasn't sure - and had put him to bed. He mumbled something about being sorry.
"Whatever for?"
"I'd been drinking."
"And why not?"
"Even so ..."
"It's all right."
She went over and admired the car, giving him time to compose himself. "A nippy little job. Yours?" "Yes. A 521 twin-cam."
She made an approving noise. "Sounds good. I don't know what it means. No, don't tell me, I still wouldn't know. Pretty fast?"
"Yes. Not much chance to speed around here, though."
"But overtakes well?"
"Well enough." And you've smoothed me down enough. I think I've stopped blushing. I was wearing my father's pyjamas. Christ! And now I want to laugh. Oh, God, I mustn't.
He grinned suddenly and once again she saw his father in him. And couldn't smile back.
"Look," she said gently, "do you think we could go inside and talk awhile?"
He had been using the back entrance and she followed him directly into the kitchen which had reverted to its original state. Didn't he ever wash up? His father had been tidy. And what had possessed him to connect his father's answering machine to the telephone? Peter's rich, deep voice saying calmly that he was away at the moment, but would be back soon, and please to leave a message, had sent shock waves through her. Followed by anger. And then amusement. What kind of son had the Bradshaws spawned? Someone wickedly insensitive? Or had he merely forgotten to wipe the tape?
Lisa's voice would have interested her. The focus was on Lisa. She was here to collect evidence - of what, she wasn't sure. A pattern would form. As yet the strands were nebulous, like a shadowy web building slowly in a dark recess.
Simon asked her if she would like a cup of tea - or a gin and tonic - or something?
"If the 'or something' could be coffee - black - then yes, please. And I don't mind if it's instant."
He opened one of the kitchen cupboards. "There's a percolator somewhere."
"Don't bother. It's quicker out of a jar."
"My mother ..." he began, stopped. What he had begun to say about his mother wasn't important. One of the few good things she could do was to make good coffee. And one of the many bad things he could do was to make trite conversation, if he didn't watch himself. And fumble and mumble and drop the spoon.
And ...
And why the hell was she here?
His gaucherie warmed her towards him. She had known other boys in their late teens, smooth young sophisticates, self-assured, level-headed sixth formers about to embark on university life. Young men she'd never refer to as kids. But then the genes were different. And the environment, in Simon's case, bizarre. "I didn't mean to call on you unannounced," she said, "but there seemed to be something wrong with my phone."
He blushed, deeply embarrassed but grateful for the lie. As a way of fobbing off Kester-Evans it had seemed amusing. It wasn't, of course, it was appalling.
He tried to explain. "I disconnected the phone, but someone sent a telephone engineer around ... and then ... well, I ... you see, I get bothered by people who think I can't manage and want to come and help, and then Kester-Evans ... my headmaster ... wants me back at school ... and he's the one I particularly don't want to talk to ... and, well, that's it, I mean ..." He returned to the coffee making, his blush slowly subsiding. "Please do sit down." It was stiff. Very polite. She sat at the kitchen table where Maybridge had sat not so long ago. Maybridge would have given him good counselling. Rhoda should have given him the same, plus the return ticket to school. Instead, she accepted the coffee and asked for sugar. "Brown for preference."
"I haven't any."
"It doesn't matter. White will do."
They sat in a silence that wasn't companionable. He was aware that she was studying him and drank his coffee, which he hadn't wanted, in hot nervous gulps.
"People," she said soothingly, "don't matter a lot. I mean outsiders. They're not important enough to worry you. Ignore them. Tell them to piss off." She grinned, "Sorry, awfully rude?"
He grinned back. Relaxed. "Probably not rude enough. I'll tell them I'm rabid." He added: "Actually, I have changed the tape. Just repeated what my father said."
She shrugged. Pity. She would have liked to hear Peter's voice again.
"I've chucked in my place at medical school," he told her.
"For a good reason?" "I never wanted to go." "I can't think of a better." "My father wanted it for me." Oh no, laddie, she thought, he didn't. On the few occasions your father mentioned you he said you were battling your way through a survival course, and God knew he hoped you'd be happy at the end of it. Whatever you did.
"Your father wanted you to be happy." It was spoken on impulse, because it needed to be said.
He remembered that she had spoken his father's name that night when she had sat on his bed. "You knew my father?"
"Yes." She didn't look at him but glanced up at the shelf of dark blue pottery jugs and plates arranged for effect over the work-top. Lisa's feminine touch. "I'm really here to talk about your mother."
He froze a little. Withdrew. She noticed. This wasn't going to be easy. The well-rehearsed cover story had to be good.
That it was a witch's brew of fact and fiction, based partly on the diaries she had read, he wasn't to know. It was plausible. She was a freelance journalist, she told him. (True.) When Lisa's book on nineteenth-century illustrators had been published some while ago she had been introduced to her at a publisher's party. (False.) The book had been well received, but by a limited readership. (True.) The editor of one of the Sundays had suggested to her that an article on Lisa's artistic and literary ability would be of interest, particularly now, and had invited her to write it. (False.)
"1 would like to agree, Simon. But not without your permission. I would write it very sensitively. Let you see it at every stage. Your father had been a public figure most of his life but she was very much in the background. She deserved more acknowledgment than she had. Looking at it commercially, there would be renewed interest in her book. It would sell more. Good for you financially." She paused. A wrong move? Money, she sensed, wouldn't woo him. Try again. Soften it. "I would write nothing hurtful. Nothing derogatory. I'd just try to give her her rightful place-up front in the art world. A kind of memorial to a woman who was brilliant but never had the accolade she deserved." She hesitated, feeling for the right words. "People like Lisa aren't easy to know. Artists and writers are difficult people. Self-absorbed to some extent. Incapable sometimes of showing their feelings. They can be misjudged, even by their own families. It takes one to know one. I felt I knew her in that brief time we met, She said she found it difficult to express affection - that she worked out her emotions mostly on canvas."