S. K. Tremayne - The Fire Child

It is a gruelling schedule, but weekly, long-distance commuting is the only way David can sustain his lucrative career in London law and retain a family life at Carnhallow, which he is utterly determined to do. Because the Kerthens have lived in Carnhallow for a thousand years.

Jamie is silent. It takes us twenty-five muted minutes to drive the tortuous miles. At last we arrive at sunlit Carnhallow and my stepson drags himself from the Mini, tugging his sports bag. Again I feel the need to talk. Keep trying. Eventually the bond will form. So I babble as I rummage for my keys, Maybe you could tell me about your football match, my team was Millwall – that’s where I grew up, they were never very good – Then I hesitate. Jamie is frowning.

‘What’s the matter, Jamie?’

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’

The key slots, I push the great door open. But Jamie is staring at me in that same bewildered, disbelieving way. As if I am an eerie figure from a picture book, come inexplicably to life.

‘Actually, there is something.’

‘What, Jamie?’

‘I had a really weird dream last night.’

I nod, and try another smile.

‘You did?’

‘Yes. It was about you. You were …’

He tails off. But I mustn’t let this go. Dreams are important, especially childhood dreams. They are subconscious anxieties surfacing. I remember the dreams I had as a child. Dreams of escape, dreams of desperate flight from danger.

‘Jamie. What was it, what was in the dream?’

He shifts his stance, uncomfortably. Like someone caught lying.

But this clearly isn’t a lie.

‘It was horrible. The dream. You were in the dream, and, and,’ he hesitates, then shakes his head, looking down at the flagstones of the doorway. ‘And there was all blood on your hands. Blood. And a hare. There was hare, an animal, and blood, and it was all over you. All of it. Blood. Blood all over there. Shaking and choking.’

He looks up again. His face is tensed with emotion. But it isn’t tears. It looks more like anger, even hatred. I don’t know what to say. And I don’t have a chance to say it. Without another word he disappears, into the house. And I am left here standing in the great doorway of Carnhallow. Totally perplexed.

I can hear the brutal sea in the distance, kicking at the rocks beneath Morvellan, slowly knocking down the cliffs and the mines. Like an atrocity that will never stop.

Lunchtime

‘Verdejo, sir?’

David Kerthen nodded at the waiter. Why not drink? It was Friday lunchtime, and he was already en route home, for once ending work early, instead of at ten in the evening. So today he could drink. By the time the plane landed at Newquay he would have sobered up. There was barely any chance of being caught by the police on the A30 anyway. The Cornish police could often be spectacularly inept.

The drink might, also, allow him to forget. Last night, for the third night in a row, he’d dreamt of Carnhallow. This time he’d dreamt of Nina wandering the rooms, alone, and naked.

She used to do that a lot: walk naked about the house. She found it erotic, as he found it erotic: the contrast of her pale skin with the monastic stone or the Azeri rugs.

Sipping his Verdejo, David remembered the night they came back from their honeymoon. She’d stripped and they’d danced: she was naked and he was in his suit and the champagne was ferociously cold. They’d rolled back the carpets in the New Hall to make the dancing easier, he had put an arm around her slender waist, one hand clasped in another. And then she’d slipped from that grasp, running away from him, shadowed and arousing, disappearing into the darker corridors, a blur of youthful nudity.

The memories killed him. Their early happiness had been overgenerous. The sex was always too compulsive. It still gave him bad dreams, charged with a tragic desire or a child-like neediness, followed by regret.

He checked his watch: 1.30. Oliver was late. Their table was half empty, yet the dark, plutocratic Japanese restaurant was conspicuously full.

Unbuttoning his suit jacket, David looked around, taking the mood of Mayfair, checking the oil of London. The wealth of modern London was gamey: the city was marbled with success. You could smell the opulence, and it wasn’t always nice. But it was heady, and it was necessary. Because David was a beneficiary of London’s commercial triumph. As a fashionable QC he got a regular table at Nobu, a sleek office in the serene Georgian streets of Marylebone and, best of all, a half-million-pound salary, with which he could restore Carnhallow.

But they certainly made him work for it. The hours were grim. How long could he keep it up? Ten years? Fifteen?

Right now he needed more alcohol. So he sipped the Verdejo, alone.

David didn’t like being alone at lunch. It reminded him of the days after Nina’s fall. The dismal, solitary meals in the old Dining Room, with his mother self-exiled to her granny flat, refusing to talk. David winced internally as he recalled the eagerness with which he had returned to work after the funeral. Leaving his mother and the housekeeper to look after Jamie in the week. He had, in effect, run away. Because he simply couldn’t face the way all the different emotions had combined into a symphony of remorse. London had been his escape.

Draining the wine glass, David gestured for a refill. As he did, he noticed Oliver, striding to the table.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a meeting that dragged. At least we are fashionably late?’

‘Yep, a week after they lost their Michelin star.’

Oliver smiled, pulled out a seat. ‘It doesn’t, ah, seem to have affected business much.’

‘Have a glass, you look as if you need it.’

‘I do, I do. Sss! Why did I join the civil service? I thought I would be serving the country, but it turns out I am serving a cabal of halfwits. Politicians . Can we have the black cod?’

The waiter was attending, fingers poised over tablet.

David knew the menu by heart. ‘Inaniwa pasta with lobster, bluefin tuna tataki. And that cabbage thing, with miso.’

The waiter nodded.

Oliver said, ‘We really have been friends for too long. You know exactly what I want. Like a bloody wife.’ He raised a glass, ceremonially.

David was happy to join in, to toast their friendship. Oliver was the only friend he still kept from Westminster School, and he treasured the sheer longevity of their relationship. They’d been so close for so long they now shared a form of private language. Like one of those obscure languages spoken by two people in New Guinea. If one of them died, an entire tongue would be lost, with all its secret histories, its metaphors and memories.

The third member of their trio was already dead. Edmund. Another lawyer. Gay. The three of them had formed a gang at school. A trio of conspirators.

So here they were, twenty-three years later, sharing their ancient schoolyard jokes. And talking about Rachel.

‘It’s just that,’ Oliver sat back, his round face slightly flushed from the toil of eating a three-hundred-pound lunch. ‘Well, I didn’t expect it to get so far, so fast.’

‘But you got us together.’

‘Well, I know I introduced you, yes. And I also knew that you’d like her.’

‘And how did you know that?’

‘She’s smart. She’s petite. She’s very ornamental.’ Oliver dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘I think God designed her for you.’

‘So why the surprise?’