Streaking (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

On the following morning, not long after breakfast, Canny and his mother were reading the
Sunday Times
in the living-room when Bentley told him that Alice Ellison was asking to see him.

“Show her in,” Canny said.

His mother offered Alice her condolences and conventional assurances of support, which Alice accepted gratefully—but when Alice said “I've brought you the book, Canny,” Lady Credesdale took the hint and left the room.

It was on the tip of Canny's tongue to say “What book?” but then he remembered.

“You didn't...,” he began—but Alice was already thrusting the typescript at him.

“The bit about you is just a set of notes,” Alice said. “Martin hadn't really had a chance to get started on it.”

Canny felt a sudden thrill of alarm, and looked at the typescript more attentively. The head sheet bore the title
The Legendry of Luck
. He scanned the contents page, then began riffling through it. There were only a hundred pages of actual text, but there were a further thirty pages of printed notes, all of them heavily annotated in blue ink. He found the page to which Alice had referred without much difficulty—it was headed “Kilcannon family”—and ran his eyes swiftly over it. He still had sufficient presence of mind to say “Sit down, please” and Alice eased herself down on to the sofa, perching on the edge as if she wanted to be ready for a quick getaway if Canny turned nasty.

Canny resumed his own chair, and replaced the page relating to the Kilcannons in the stack of A4 pages. He noted that the chapter of which they were to have been a part already had a title. All the chapter-titles on the contents page were taken from popular expressions; there was one on “Lady Luck”, one called “Fortune Favours Fools”, one on “Lucky Numbers”, and even one on “Lucky Streaks”. The chapter which was to have featured the Kilcannons was, however, “The Luck of the Devil”.

“Where did he get this stuff about us?” Canny asked, slightly bewildered by the unexpected turn of events.

“From me, of course,” Alice said. “He hadn't had the chance to talk to everyone else—not even Mum and Dad, let alone the anthropologist's traditional ideal informant, the oldest inhabitant. Look Canny—I wanted to say that I'm really sorry.”

“About what?” Canny said, mystified by the change of tack.

“About all the things I said yesterday. That lord of the manor crack, the patronizing bastard remark—all of it. I treated you like some kind of adversary, when all you were trying to do was help. I was upset, angry...I shouldn't have taken it out on you. That was silly, as well as wrong. It really was good of you to help—and Ellen told me that it really was your idea, and that she never even thought of asking you to fetch me. I'm really sorry.”

“No problem,” Canny said, dismissively. “I was babbling like an insensitive idiot myself, because I was too embarrassed by the situation to keep my mouth shut. Can I assume from this that you and Martin wanted to move to Cockayne because you
both
wanted to do research into my family history?”

Alice seemed to be startled by the question, or perhaps by the earnest tone in which he'd phrased it. “It wasn't our main reason,” she said. “As I told you, we wanted to start a family. I thought Cockayne was the right place to do it. My project was just an excuse, really—something I could put to the village elders. When I thought about it, I realized that it really would be an interesting bit of history to write up and that I really might be able to get access to some interesting sources here at the house, but it wasn't a priority. Martin only put you into his book because you seemed to fit—when I told him about all the local legends about the Kilcannon luck, he was delighted. He really was looking forward to talking to you, though—in fact, he nearly told you when we talked after the funeral, but I cut him off. I got embarrassed about having told him all those stories, and you not knowing that I'd done it. He did want to follow it up, but only as an example of his grand theory. It would make a nice case study, he said—as you've probably guessed, this was supposed to be a more popular book than the others, appealing to general readers as well as academics. He needed anecdotal material—anything you could give him by way of interesting documentation—but it wouldn't have been any big deal. It wouldn't have been
prying
, and he certainly wouldn't have published anything without your approval. He couldn't believe his luck when you told him you were interested in his subject—I think he wanted to bounce some ideas off you.”

Canny felt slightly numb. The Kilcannons had always hidden their secret in plain view; they had always joked about their luck, always admitting to it in a jocular fashion. That was one custom he'd followed almost unthinkingly—but times changed. Henri Meurdon had used a computer to analyze his betting patterns. Lissa Lo had seen the streak that had accompanied the wrench of probability that had made his last bet on zero a winner. And Martin Ellison, respected scholar in the field of psychological probability, had married one of the Proffitt girls, who had a rich fund of listener-friendly folklore concerning the Lucky Kilcannons. Suddenly, hiding in plain view looked like a strategy past its sell-by date. People were getting close—perhaps too close—to an awareness of exactly how lucky the Kilcannons really had been.

Martin Ellison had been desperately unlucky to be killed in such a futile fashion—but now Canny had to tell himself, sternly, that it couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the Kilcannon streak. Since his father had died, the streak had become dormant, inoperative, impotent.

Or had it?

Wasn't his luck tangled up, now, with Lissa Lo's streak? Wasn't he seriously considering the possibility of taking that entanglement to a new level? Hadn't he already ventured into uncharted waters, unprecedented situations? If his interaction with Lissa Lo was
already
making things freaky, what would happen if and when...?

He became aware that Alice was staring at him. “Are you all right, Canny?” she said. “I honestly didn't think you'd mind. If I'd thought it would upset you, I wouldn't have mentioned it, let alone brought the damned book to show you...but I thought you'd be interested. You said....”

“I am interested,” Canny said, trying to sound soothing. “Sorry, Alice, it just...took me a little aback, I suppose.”

“You don't
really
have a deal with the devil, do you?” she said, heroically trying to make a joke of it.

“Of course we do,” he told her, automatically. “We have to sacrifice a virgin every full moon to keep the family fortunes rolling in.”

“I'm no good to you, then,” Alice said. “I guess all three of us were lucky to survive the cull, for we're safe enough now. Marie too, if appearances can be trusted.”

Canny shook his head, dazedly. “I shouldn't have said that. I don't know why I did. Daddy's dead, and Martin...and I'm making jokes about sacrificing virgins. It just slipped out. Sorry.”

“I fed you the line,” she pointed out, “and I ran with the joke. I'm the one to blame. I came here to say sorry for letting my mouth run way with me yesterday, and off it goes again. It was the same at your Dad's funeral. You must think I'm terrible—a typical third child, no self-control at all. The brat of the family, just as you said.”

“No, it's okay,” Canny said. “There's only one of me, so I don't have any excuse. I'm a self-made brat—always have been. I'm trying to give it up, but...well, I guess I'll just have to try a little harder.”

“Me too,” she said. “Doesn't go with the widow's weeds, does it? Do you know what I wish?”

“No.”

“I wish Martin and I hadn't fucked around with all the family planning, all the waiting until we were in the right place to bring up a child. Because now...we won't ever have one, will we? We tried to control the future, to organize it...and it spat in our faces. Is that a sort of Oedipus Effect? I can't even ask him any more, can I? Who's going to answer all my questions now? My Mum? My big sister? Not the same, is it? Not the same at all.”

“No, it's not,” Canny said, ruefully. “I had a whole lifetime to ask Daddy questions—questions that needed to be asked—and I never got around to making a start till he was on his deathbed. Now, there's no one who can tell me the answers. He'd have been wrong about almost everything, of course—he always was—but that's not the point, is it? They'd have been
his
answers, and now they're lost forever. I thought I was alone before, but now I really
am
alone. I've got Mummy, of course, and Bentley...but as you say, it's really not the same.”

Half a minute passed in awkward silence before Alice took on the responsibility of changing the subject. “Your friends are all over the papers,” she said, flicking a negligent forefinger at the
Sunday Times
. “The tabloids, anyway. They reckon that Stevie Larkin's agent's trying to make a deal with an English club to bring him home, so the thing with Lissa Lo's even more newsy than it would be otherwise. Photos taken at your Dad's funeral are all over the place, even now, but they've sort of airbrushed the funeral out so as to conceal the fact that the pictures aren't fresh—no gravestones, no mourners...just the happy couple, at an anonymous
social function
.”

“I can't say I'm sorry,” Canny said.

“About what?”

Something in her tone made him look at her sharply. “About the fact that they've left out the funeral,” he said. “What else?”

“Even when the pictures were fresh and you were in them too,” she observed, “not one of the pieces I read mentioned that they didn't leave together. You said they weren't an item, didn't you?”

“I don't think they are” Canny said, mildly. “If the papers can't get any new shots to update the story, that rather suggests that they're not, doesn't it? Does it matter?”

“Not in the least,” she said. “But Ellen says that Lissa Lo didn't leave the house till
much
later than everyone else. You were on your own when you came into the chip shop, of course—but you did seem a little strange. I thought at the time that you looked the way you did because you'd just buried your Dad—but you'd just said goodbye to Lissa Lo, hadn't you?”

“Jesus, Alice,” Canny complained.

“I thought we were confiding in one another,” she said, disingenuously, “and not bothering overmuch about being insensitive. Actually, though, I am being sensitive. I figured that if you'd just been dumped by a supermodel as well as burying your Dad, I might be a more useful confidante than your mother or you butler—just as you might be more use to me than Mum or Ellen.”

Canny wondered whether Alice had some sort of agenda in mind, or whether she was babbling to cover up her own feelings. He decided that the latter was more probable.

“I'm not sure this is the sort of conversation people are supposed to have at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning while they're stone cold sober,” Canny said. “Would it be any business of yours if I did have some sort of relationship with Lissa Lo—unlikely as that might seem?”

“You're probably right,” Alice admitted. “And no, it wouldn't. I just thought you'd like to know what kind of gossip's buzzing around the town. Not our Ellen, mind—she's telling everyone that you're a not a playboy at all, and that you and Lissa Lo are just good friends.”

“Thank her for that,” Canny said. “Tell her that Stevie Larkin and I are just good friends too, and that I've no idea who's likely to buy him. On second thoughts, tell them all that he's a cert to join Leeds United. It's not true, but it might help stop them speculating about the reasons why Lissa Lo left the funeral so late.”

“There is a rumor, apparently, about the three of you—Lissa Lo, Stevie Larkin and you, that is—bringing off some kind of betting cup in Monte Carlo. Nearly half a million Euros, it's said.”

“Shit,” Canny muttered. “I told you yesterday—I was mugged the moment I got back to my hotel. It was forty-seven thousand, not four hundred and seventy thousand. Lissa and Stevie won less than half as much. It wasn't exactly a coincidence—they bet the number because I did—but it wasn't any kind of
coup
. This is how those stupid stories about the Kilcannon luck get started—and blown out of all proportion. It's just silly folklore, Alice—you know that.”

“Yes,” she said, humbly. “I know. Sorry—I should have kept quiet about it. I just thought you might like to know what's being said. I'm being selfish, I suppose. If I go back home—to Mum's, I mean—there's no way at all I can avoid my own problems, and church would be even worse. If I let them drag me to eleven o'clock mass, every eye in the place will be on me and Father Quimper's bound to ask them all to pray for me. I just thought it might help if I could talk about you for a bit. More
misery loves company
than
a problem shared
, I'm afraid. You said I could, remember? I thought you'd understand—far better than anyone else, at any rate, because of your Dad. I'll stop it now.”

“I did say you could and I do understand,” Canny said. “You don't have to stop. Straightforward insults are easier to take, though—the sort you used to hurl at me when you were thirteen.”

“Witty remarks,” she reminded him. “I just wanted to be the court jester. The position's still unfilled, I suppose.”

“You obviously don't know Bentley,” Canny said. “He does the best impression of an English butler I've ever seen. He'll make a fortune in Hollywood if they ever find out about him. Mummy and he are probably thinking of working up a double act, now that Daddy's dead, but they're keeping it a secret from me so I won't feel left out.”