Let's Kill Uncle (14 page)

‘MacNab?’ Christie shrugged vaguely. ‘In the city. He doesn’t live with us.’

‘MacNab? Why do you call him MacNab? Why don’t you call him Daddy, like other kids with fathers do?’

Christie hooted with derision, and instead of answering only shoved another sandwich in her mouth.

‘What’s he like?’

Christie thought for a minute, then, ‘He doesn’t count. Pass me the bottle.’

Barnaby did, and sat surveying her as if he had just seen her for the first time.

‘Doesn’t he love you?’ His voice was gentle.

‘Of course he does. He’s my father, isn’t he?’

‘Well,’ Barnaby persisted, ‘do you love him?’

Christie looked at him with wonder. The thought had never occurred to her before.

‘Yes, I guess I do,’ she said. She shrugged again. ‘Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I don’t know why I should love him, he’s never done anything for me or my mother. Like she says, he’s a drunk, and he hasn’t drawn a sober breath for fifteen years.’

Barnaby was shocked.

‘You shouldn’t talk about your father that way.’

‘Well, that’s what my mother says, and she ought to know. What would happen to the child if she didn’t work like a slave? Does he think shoes for the child grow in beer parlours?’

‘What child?’ asked Barnaby.

‘Me, of course. That’s what my mother says and she’s right. My mother is always right.’

‘Don’t you wish he lived with you?’

‘Certainly not!’ Christie was appalled. ‘The only time I see him is when he turns up on my birthday and at Christmas, with presents. Drunk.’

‘Nice presents?’

Christie reflected for a minute. ‘Yes, I guess so. But like my mother says, I wouldn’t have a stitch on my back if we had to rely on him. Two days a year she says he thinks he can buy the child’s affection with expensive gifts. She wouldn’t so much as have shoes on her feet, and who’s to pay for her education? That’s me she’s talking about.’

Barnaby was fascinated with the thought that people actually had two live parents.

‘Tell me about your mother later,’ he said. ‘Tell me more about MacNab now.’

‘Well, he sings when he’s drunk and sits me on his knee.’

‘What does he sing?’

‘Oh, ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain,’ and ‘Abdul Debulbul Ameer’ and ‘When the Work’s All Done Next Fall, Mother.’ My mother gets mad when he sings that. She says winter, spring, summer or fall, no one will ever catch that man working.’

‘I don’t like your mother,’ mumbled Barnaby.

‘Barnaby Gaunt!’ Christie was horrified that her saintly mother should be criticised. ‘Don’t you say a word against my mother. She works so hard for me. And I’m going to go to university. She says so. Then, if I ever get stuck marrying a drunk like MacNab, I won’t have to work in hospitals. I’ll be a teacher and able to go back teaching. My mother says so.’

‘I still don’t like her. I kind of like MacNab, though. Give me another sandwich and tell me more.’

‘They’re all gone. Let’s start on the tarts. No more to tell. That’s all. He’s always promising he’ll quit drinking. Going on the wagon, and straightening out. My mother says that man will straighten out when a snake does, and nobody ever stopped drinking in a beer parlour.’

She sighed and looked at Barnaby quizzically, then continued.

‘He’s kind of nice, though. He never gets mad about anything. My mother does because she’s got to work so hard. When MacNab does work, he’s a longshoreman and he makes good money. My mother says we could of had a lovely home and money in the bank and she’d be twenty years younger if he weren’t a drunk.’

‘What’s he look like?’

‘Like me. My mother says it’s sort of a pity, but she’d rather I looked like him than was like him. I’m just like her in everything else. She says so.’

Barnaby took a swig of raspberry vinegar and sat staring over the quiet, daisy-strewn meadow.

‘Christie,’ he said finally, ‘why don’t they get a divorce if they don’t live together, then maybe your mother could marry again, and you could have a real family, with both a mother and father, like other kids.’

Christie pondered gravely before replying.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘they can’t get a divorce. My mother says that the one thing she can say for MacNab is he’s never looked at another woman since the day she married him. She could have him put in jail for not supporting the child, that’s me, but she says the disgrace isn’t worth it, and he wouldn’t earn any more money in jail than out. She says at the rate he’s going he’ll end up there anyhow, and no one is going to say she helped put her child’s father behind bars.’

‘Your mother— ’

‘My mother is
always
right. She’s Highland Scotch, not like MacNab, he’s only a Canadian. She says her family never forget a friend or forgive an enemy. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Come on. Let’s go.’

She sprang to her feet and began prancing through the meadow, leaving Barnaby to pack up the baskets.

‘You come back and help!’

But Christie only laughed teasingly and ran away.

Looking like a brace of timid and very clean angels, Barnaby and Christie knocked on Lady Syddyns’s front door.

The old woman, dressed now in a yellow silk tea gown, with a string of amber beads swinging from her neck to her hips, opened the door almost immediately.

‘Come in, children, come in. I’m very pleased to see you.’

Her withered, diamond-laden old hands caressed their shining heads as she drew them in.

‘And how is Mrs Brooks?’ she asked Barnaby.

‘Pretty good,’ he replied, ‘but her heart bothers her sometimes.’

‘Glad to hear it, glad to hear it,’ she said, and then remembered to switch on her hearing aid. ‘Well, I hope you’re both really hungry.’

Although the children had been in her hall, they had never seen her drawing room.

They stepped back four generations when they entered it, and looked about them in wonder.

Christie had spent all the years she remembered in that clinically colourless apartment, while Barnaby’s life had been lived in starkly efficient boarding schools and starkly modern hotels.

This room was as nostalgic and lovely as an old Victorian valentine and the children turned beaming faces to Lady Syddyns.

‘Oh, it’s so pretty,’ sighed Christie.

Barnaby sniffed the air like a young, curious animal, for a potpourri of roses and beeswax drifted about him. He smiled.

‘It smells nice here,’ he said politely.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Lady Syddyns. ‘I’ll show you around later. Now sit down while I prepare tea.’

The children, realising it would be rude to appear too anxious to see the gun collection, seated themselves shyly on the edges of two chintz-covered sofas before the white marble fireplace.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ whispered Christie, when the old lady had left them.

Barnaby nodded.

They stared at the rug, a pale, silky Oriental carpet which shone as though woven on a fairy loom.

‘Look,’ said Barnaby, pointing, ‘a piano.’

Standing before the French doors, the piano was about three feet high, square, and almost as big as a pool table.

Made of gleaming lemonwood, it stood on massive, carven legs.

The French doors were open, and from the terrace a large hairy hand which had pushed the drapes aside, disappeared.

‘I never saw one like that before. Look at all the elephants on top,’ said Christie. She arose and stared at them curiously, a herd, carved from ebony and with ivory toenails and tusks. The largest was two feet high and his companions marshalled down to one half the size of Christie’s thumbnail.

Delighted, the children gazed about the room which was filled with curios and antiques.

‘You know,’ said Christie, ‘when I’ve got my million dollars, I’m going to have a house like this.’

She looked at Barnaby with affection. ‘I’ll have you over for tea,’ she added magnanimously, ‘and you can eat all the cake you want.’

From his gilt frame over the fireplace, Major-General Sir Adrian Syddyns, K.B., O.B.E., gazed icily down at them.

‘Look, I wonder who that is?’

‘It must be Sir Adrian,’ whispered Barnaby. ‘That’s a Bengal Lancer’s uniform he’s wearing, and Mr Brooks said he got to be a knight killing innocent blacks in India.’

During his retirement on the Island, Sir Adrian had not been beloved by the other Islanders.

He had been a young man, and an exceedingly handsome one, when the portrait was painted, and the children stood spellbound by that overbold, hawk-nosed visage.

The sculptured lips had an arrogant sneer, and it was easy to imagine that Sir Adrian had not endeared himself to twice-born, haughty Brahman princes or self-indulgent Mogul Maharajas.

‘I don’t like him,’ whispered Barnaby, staring at the portrait.

‘Me either.’

They gazed rudely back. Stubborn, bullet-headed, yellow-haired Barnaby, only three generations removed from stolid Yorkshire plowmen, could be as uncompromising as Sir Adrian.

Christie drew her mouth into the smallest possible mean little purse and deliberately turned her back on Sir Adrian.

She may have been the daughter of an ineffectual alcoholic, but on the distaff side a host of ragged, unforgiving Highland chieftains, no novices at arrogance themselves, whispered insistently that she was as good, if not better than any Sassenach soldier.

Lady Syddyns, bearing a large silver tray, returned. She glanced up at the portrait.

‘That’s Sir Adrian, my late husband.’

She put the tray on an inlaid table, then held out her hands to the children.

‘While the tea is steeping, I’ll show you some of the things Sir Adrian and I collected. We lived in India for many years.’

The tour included endless tales of Government House balls and hill stations, of Simla and Poona, of Afghan warriors and the indefatigable Sir Adrian.

The children smiled politely at the carved sandalwood chests. They played reverently with the ostrich plumes and fan which had been Lady Syddyns’s when she was presented at the court of Queen Victoria. They feigned interest in brass jars, lacquered trays and jade chessmen.

The stories would have been fascinating at any other time, for the children could almost feel the heat from fierce Bengal skies as they exchanged secret and dismal glances. The unsolved problem of the gun still loomed before them.

Only when Lady Syddyns finally led them into the hall and pointed to a sword hanging on the wall did they prick up their ears like a pair of fox cubs.

‘His dress sword, the very one you saw in the portrait.’

She lifted it down and let the children handle it. It was, Barnaby decided regretfully, far too heavy for him to wield on Uncle.

Six more steps and they were in the library, their eyes sparkling and their fingers itching, for here before them were leopard skins, spears, assegais, bows, arrows. And guns, guns, guns!

Elephant guns, tiger guns, big guns, little guns, slender guns, fat double-barrelled guns, antique flintlock guns, guns dating from the Crimean War, the Afghan wars, the Sudanese wars and the Boer War. There were handmade guns from the Khyber hills, chased with silver; there were hunting guns with carved stocks and dueling pistols with ivory handles.

‘Oh, Lady Syddyns,’ cried Barnaby with delight, ‘they’re beautiful!’

Then a sobering thought struck him.

‘Have you got bullets for them?’ he asked with a disarming smile.

‘Oh, my goodness, no,’ said Lady Syddyns. ‘I’d be afraid to have a loaded gun in the house, my dear. What if it went off ? Besides, these guns are all so old that they haven’t made bullets to fit them for years and years and years.’

Barnaby hid his despair. He was an intelligent boy with a mechanical mind, and he knew that every different-sized gun fired a different-sized bullet, and they couldn’t be interchanged. And there were
no
bullets for
any
of these lovely guns.

‘You’re hungry,’ declared Lady Syddyns, noticing their resigned expressions, and she dragged them back to the drawing room.

The children looked with awe at the huge silver tray and the Crown Derby tea service. A plate was heaped with cucumber sandwiches, the bread paper-thin, and the crusts cut off.

The crustless bread struck Christie as the height of elegance.

The old lady looked at the serious little girl.

‘Would you like to pour?’

‘Could I?’ Christie bounced up and down on the edge of the sofa with excitement.

Smiling, the old woman pointed to the tray. ‘I would be delighted if you would. Barnaby, you may hand the sandwiches.’ Christie laid a silver apostle spoon beside each of the eggshell china cups, and with the air of a duchess, poured.

‘Milk and sugar, Lady Syddyns?’

‘One lump, please.’

Christie had trouble with the sugar tongs but finally managed and graciously handed Lady Syddyns her tea.

‘Milk and sugar, Barnaby?’

Barnaby looked puzzled.

‘You know I take both.’

Christie gave him a furious look and unceremoniously dumped his accustomed four lumps in with her fingers.

Barnaby passed the cucumber sandwiches.

‘Take two,’ he said to Lady Syddyns. She did.

Christie began refilling the teacups, and, although there was no breeze, the drapes stirred slightly.

Suddenly the magnificent china teapot, so beautifully coloured with blue and gold and maroon, slipped from her fingers and smashed to a hundred pieces on the silver tray.

The pupils of Christie’s eyes were enormous and the muscles of her jaw and mouth quivered.

The old lady looked at her in alarm.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t worry because you have broken the teapot, it isn’t important. As a matter of fact, I have far more teapots than I need.’

She sat next to Christie and placed her arm about the child’s trembling shoulders.

Christie sat silent and motionless.

‘Now, now,’ said Lady Syddyns, ‘I’m an old woman and soon I’ll be going and I can’t take my teapot with me.’

She stood up.

‘I’m going to make fresh tea and I shall be back in a minute.’

When she had gone, Barnaby thrust out his truculent lower lip.