Deception on His Mind (13 page)

Damn the coloureds, Agatha thought. If not for them and their surly demands that everyone in Balford lick their backsides because one of their kind had probably got a comeuppance he'd richly asked for. … If not for them, Balford-le-Nez would be one step closer to becoming the seaside resort it once had been and was meant to be. And
what
had the Pakis been howling about? What had they destroyed
her
meeting time before the town council to beat their skinny chests about?

“It's a civil liberties question to them,” Theo had said at dinner, and blast the idiot if he didn't look as though he agreed with the bloody barrel of them.

“Perhaps you wouldn't mind explaining that to me,” Agatha had requested of her grandson. Her words were icy. She noted the look of instant discomfort they seemed to arouse in Theo. His heart bled too readily for Agatha's liking. His belief in fair play, the equality of man, and justice given to all on demand were certainly not attributes he'd inherited from her. She knew what he meant by the phrase “a civil liberties question,” but she wanted to coerce him into saying it. She wanted this because she wanted a fight. She was looking for an all-out, hands-down pitched battle, and if she couldn't manage one as she was now—trapped inside a body that threatened to fail her at any moment—then she'd settle for verbal fisticuffs. A good row was better than nothing.

Theo wouldn't rise to the challenge, though. And upon reflection Agatha had to admit that this refusal to take her on could actually be interpreted as a positive sign. He needed to toughen up if he was to man the helm of Shaw Enterprises after her death. Perhaps his skin was already thickening.

“The Asians don't trust the police,” he said. “They don't believe they're getting equal treatment. They want to keep the town focused on the investigation in order to put pressure on the CID.”

“It seems to me that if they desire to be treated equally—which I can only assume means that they wish to be treated like their English counterparts—then they might consider acting for once like their English counterparts.”

“There've been plenty of demonstrations that the whites have organised over the years,” Theo said. “The poll tax riots, the blood sports protests, the movement against—”

“I'm not speaking about demonstrations,” she cut in. “I'm speaking about being treated English when they decide to start acting English. And dressing English. And worshipping English. And bringing up their children English. If an individual decides to immigrate to another country, he should not expect the country to cater to his whimsies, Theodore. And if I'd been in your place at the council meeting, you may depend upon it: I'd have said just that.”

Her grandson folded his napkin precisely and laid it perpendicular to the table edge as Agatha had taught him. “I've little doubt of that, Gran,” he said wryly. “And you would've waded right into the riot afterwards and beaten in a few heads with your stick.” He pushed back his chair and came to hers. He laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed her forehead.

Agatha gruffly pushed him away. “Stop your nonsense. And Mary Ellis has yet to bring in the cheese.”

“None for me tonight.” Theo headed towards the doorway. “I'll fetch the display from the car.”

Which he had done, and she stood before it now. Balford-le-Nez of the present was depicted in all its decrepitude on the centre easel: the abandoned buildings along the seafront with boarded windows and wooden architraves shedding their paint like sunburned skin; the moribund High Street where every year another shop closed its doors a final time; the grubby indoor swimming pool whose stink of mildew and woodrot couldn't possibly be captured by a camera's lens. And like the easel displaying Balford of the past, among these pictures of Balford now was a photo of the pier, which Agatha had purchased, which Agatha had renovated, which Agatha Shaw had restored and rejuvenated, breathing life like a god into her personal Adam, making the pleasure pier an unspoken promise to the sea town where Agatha had spent her life.

That life and its impending close would have been given some meaning by Balford of the future: hotels refurbished, businesses lured to the sea by the guarantee of low ground rents and landlords committed to redevelopment and restoration, buildings gentrified, parks replanted—and
big
parks, not plots of grass the size of an envelope which
some
people dedicated to Asian mothers with utterly unpronounceable names—and attractions added along the seafront. There were plans for a leisure centre, for a renovated indoor swimming pool, for tennis and squash courts, for a new cricket pitch. This was what Balford-le-Nez could be, and it was to this end that Agatha Shaw was striving, seeking a slip of immortality.

She'd lost her parents during the Blitz. She'd lost her husband at thirty-eight. She'd lost three of her children to careers round the globe and the fourth in a car crash at the hands of his limp-willed Scandinavian wife. Early on she'd come to know that the wise woman kept her expectations humble and her dreams to herself, but in these final years of her life she'd found herself growing as weary of submission to the will of the Almighty as she would have grown weary of fighting that will. So she'd taken up her final cause like a warrior, and she was fully determined to see this battle through to the end.

Nothing was going to stop this project, least of all the death of some foreigner she didn't know. But she needed Theo to be her right hand. She needed Theo quick-witted and strong. She wanted him impenetrable and invincible, and the last thing her plans for Balford had required of him was his tacit agreement to their derailment.

She clutched her three-pronged stick in a grip so tight that it made her arm tremble. She concentrated the way her physical therapist had told her that she would now have to concentrate in order to walk. It was an unspeakable cruelty to have to tell each leg what to do before it would do it. She who once had ridden, played tennis, golfed, fished, and boated was reduced to saying, “First left, then right. Now left, then right,” just to get to the library door. Her teeth ground on the words. If she'd had the temperament to be a dog owner, had possessed a faithful and affectionate Corgi, and had been equal to the effort required, she would have kicked the animal in sheer frustration.

She found Theo in the old morning room. He'd long ago converted it to his lair, equipping it with television, stereo, books, comfortable old furniture, and a personal computer on which he communicated with the world's social misfits who happened to share his particular passion: amateur palaeontology. Agatha thought of it as an adult's excuse to grub round in the mud. But to Theo it was an avocation that he pursued with a dedication that most men used when pursuing pudenda. Day or night mattered little to Theo: When he had a free hour, off he would stride in the direction of the Nez, where the eroding cliffs had been disgorging dubious treasures for as long as the sea had been gnawing at the land.

He wasn't at the computer that night. Nor was he using his magnifying glass to study a misshapen bit of stone—”This is actually a rhino tooth, Gran,” he'd say patiently—culled from the cliffs. Rather, he was speaking into the telephone in a low hushed voice, rushing sentences that Agatha couldn't distinguish into the ear of someone who clearly didn't want to hear.

She caught the words, “Please.
Please.
Listen to me,” before he looked towards the door and, seeing her, replaced the receiver in its cradle as if no one were on the other end of the line.

She studied him. The night was nearly as torrid as the day had been, and since this room was on the west side of the house, it had taken the worst of the day's heat the longest. So there was at least one reason why Theo's face was flushed and why his fair skin was damp and oily looking. But the other reason, she supposed, was sitting somewhere holding a dead telephone receiver in a damp palm, doubtlessly wondering why “Listen to me” had ended rather than extended a conversation.

The windows were open, but the room was insufferable. Even the walls looked as if they wanted to sweat right through their old William Morris paper. The clutter of magazines, newspapers, books, and most of all the clutter of stones—”No, Gran, they only
look
like stones. They're actually bones and teeth, and here, look for yourself, this's part of a mammoth tusk,” Theo would say—made the room even more unbearable, as if they raised its temperature another ten degrees. And, despite her grandson's care to clean them, they imbued the air with a disturbingly fecund smell of earth.

Theo moved from the telephone to the broad oak table. This was finely sheened with dust because he wouldn't allow Mary Ellis to apply a rag to its surface and disarrange the fossils he'd assembled there in cubicled wooden trays. There was an old balloon-backed chair in front of the table, and he took this and swung it round to face her.

She understood that he was making a place for her, well within her reach. This realisation made her feel like pinching the lobes of his ears until he wailed. She wasn't ready for the grave despite its having been dug, and she could do without the tender gestures revealing that others anticipated her imminent demise. She chose to stand.

“And the end result?” she demanded as if there had been no break in their conversation.

His eyebrows drew together. He used the back of his curled index finger to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. His glance went to the telephone, then back to her.

“I'm not the least interested in your love life, Theodore. You'll learn soon enough that it's an oxymoron. I pray nightly that you develop the presence of mind not to be led by either your nose or your penis. Otherwise, what you do on your free time is between you and whoever shares the momentary joy of experiencing the mingling of your bodily fluids. Although in this heat, why anyone would even think of intercourse—”

“Gran.” Theo's face was flaming.

My God, Agatha thought. He's twenty-six years old with the sexual maturity of a teenager. She could only imagine with a shudder what it was like to be on the receiving end of his earnest grappling. At least his grandfather—for all his faults, one of which happened to be dropping dead at the age of forty-two—had known how to take a woman and be done with it. A quarter of an hour was all Lewis had ever needed, and on the nights when she was extremely lucky, he managed the act in less than ten minutes. She considered sexual intercourse a medicinal requirement of marriage: One kept the juices flowing in every part of the body if one wished for health.

“What did they promise us, Theo?” she asked. “You pressed for another special council meeting, of course.”

“Actually, I …” He remained standing as she did. But he reached for one of his precious fossils and turned it over in his hand.

“You did have the presence of mind to demand another meeting, didn't you, Theo? You didn't let those coloureds take command and do nothing about it, did you?”

His look of discomfort was the answer.

She said, “My God.” He was so like his brainless mother.

Despite herself, Agatha needed to sit. She lowered her body onto the seat of the balloon-backed chair and sat as she had been taught to sit in girlhood, ramrod straight. She said, “What on earth is the matter with you, Theodore Michael? And sit down, please. I don't want a stiff neck to mark this encounter.”

He pulled an old armchair round to face her. It was covered in faded corduroy, upon its seat a frog-shaped stain the origin of which Agatha didn't care to speculate upon. “It wasn't the time,” he said.

“It wasn't … what?” She'd heard him perfectly, but she'd found long ago that the key to bending others to her will was to force them to examine their own with such diligence that they ended up rejecting whatever idea they'd begun with, in favour of hers.

“It wasn't the time, Gran.” Theo sat. He leaned towards her, bare arms resting on his fawn, linen-draped legs. He had a way of making wrinkles look like
haute couture.
She didn't think such a sense of fashion was seemly in a man. “The council had their hands full with keeping a lid on Muhannad Malik. Which they failed to do, as things turned out.”

“It wasn't his meeting.”

“And with the issue being a man's death and the Asians’ concerns about how it was being handled by the police—”

“Their concerns. Their
concerns/’
Agatha mocked.

“Gran, it wasn't the time. I couldn't make demands in the middle of chaos. Especially demands about redevelopment.”

She thumped her stick on the carpet. “Why not?”

“Because it seemed to me that getting to the bottom of the Nez killing was more pressing an issue than the funding of the renovation of the Pier End Hotel.” He help up his hand. “No, wait a moment, Gran. Don't interrupt. I know this project is important to you. It's important to me as well. And it's important to the community. But you've got to see that there's hardly a point in infusing money into Balford if there isn't going to be a community left.”

“You certainly can't be suggesting that the Asians have the power or even the temerity to destroy this town. They'd be cutting their own throats.”

“I'm suggesting that unless the community is a place where future visitors don't have to be afraid of being accosted by someone with a grudge against the colour of their skin, any money we pour into redevelopment is money we might as well send up in flames.”

He was surprising her. For a moment Agatha saw the shadow of his grandfather in him. Lewis would have thought exactly the same way.

“Hmph,” she sniffed.

“You see I'm right, don't you.” He phrased it not as a question, she noted, but as a statement, which was like Lewis as well. “I'll give it a few days, let the tension pass, and organise another meeting then. It's for the best. You'll see.” He glanced at a carriage clock on the mantelpiece and got to his feet. “And now it's time you were in bed. I'll fetch Mary Ellis.”

“I shall ask for Mary Ellis when I'm ready, Theodore. Stop treating me like—”

“No arguments.” He went to the door.

She spoke before he could open it. “You're going out, then?”