Streaking (6 page)

Again, Canny waited out the pause.

“You're my son, Can. I don't know how other men feel about their sons, or other sons about their fathers, but it seems to me that nobody actually needs a streak like ours to mix up their motives and complicate their feelings. As far as I can see, it's normal. Other people have their rules just as we do, and benefit in their own ways from sticking to them even while they seethe with frustration. I want you to get it right, Can. I very nearly didn't, and maybe you'd say that I never did, as a husband or a parent, but either way, I want you to do better. I want you to succeed. That's why I'm telling you, as firmly as I can. not to test the system to destruction. You've had the luck all your life, and maybe it won't seem too different at first to be without it, for a couple of months or a couple of years—but in time, the cumulative effect of being without that house percentage will take its toll. Believe me, I know.

“To begin with, I dare say, a little common-or-garden bad luck might seem like a novelty. You'll be able to bear it easily enough—but over time, it'll wear you down. Oh, you'll always be able to look around at your friends and neighbors, and see most of them getting by perfectly well under the dominion of honest probability—but it's the ones who aren't that you need to study carefully. Look at the ones who lose more often than they win, not just at their predicaments but at their attitudes. You and I know that their misfortunes are just a matter of chance, and so do they—but that's not the way they feel. They feel victimized, Can. They feel tormented. They feel that fate has it in for them. Only a few of them get around to thinking, consciously, that they must have
deserved
the bad things that happen to them, but it doesn't matter whether they get that far or not, because it's just as bad thinking that they didn't deserve it as it is thinking that they did.”

Canny felt the expression on his own face setting hard as the words got through to him. Even his father it seemed, had drunk his fill of popular psychology. Even his father had worked out the elements of psychological probability. The old man's eyes were as dark and taut as they had ever been—no slackness or hollowness there!—and they were boring into him with all the fervor of a mind that desperately needed morphine to ease its distress but wasn't prepared to compromise, for the moment, between raw wakefulness and sugared dreaming.

“If it's like that for them, Can,” the old man went on, relentlessly, “imagine what it's going to be like for you. You'll be the thirty-second Earl, Can, at the tail end of a winning streak that's lasted
eight hundred years
. Imagine what it's going to feel like if things go wrong for
you
! Whatever you believe now about the necessity or otherwise of following the rules, you won't be able to forgive yourself if things go awry after you've decided to break them. Oh, you'll tell yourself that it's just a coincidence, not your fault at all...but you'll never be able to believe it. You've been favored by fate all your life, and for you the dominion of probability really would be victimization by neglect. For you, it really would be torment. Believe me, Can,
I know
. I came back; I saved myself—but I've been to the kind of Hell that's specially reserved for people of our kind, and I'm telling you that it's a place to stay out of if you can possibly avoid it, and that it's certainly not a place to spend your entire life.”

The sick man finally trailed off, and slumped back against the heaped-up pillows, exhausted and agonized. Canny knew what an effort it had cost him to say all that, and exactly what his father now needed to hear—but he also realized, belatedly, that there were certain things he could only say to his father, and that the opportunity to say them would soon be lost. On the Riviera it had seemed easy enough to be alone with his burden, his doubts and his questions—but now that he was home again, it suddenly seemed very much harder.

“Thanks, Daddy,” he said, sincerely. “I know you needed to say that, and I did need to hear it. You probably think I've never loved you as much as I could and should, because I always resented sharing my luck, blah de blah de blah, but we can cut that crap now. We're in the same boat. Your luck's running out, and so is mine. Maybe if I wasn't benefiting from my half of the partnership, that crab would never have got its claws into your guts. Who knows? We've both looked long and hard at the family tree, and we know that our kind of luck isn't the kind that guarantees long life. How could it be? Renewability implies death. If any father had ever outlived his son, the streak would have ended there and then, according to the rules. The death of the father, before or soon after the marriage of the son, is part of the pattern.”

It was his turn to pause, without fear of interruption.

“Cancer of the liver and pancreas isn't a pretty way to go,” he continued, “and it certainly isn't a painless way to go, but we have morphine now. Maybe that's an aspect of the Kilcannon luck—a gift of fate to ease our passage, which just happens to be useful to millions of others as well. Maybe all the progress of the last eight hundred years has been the spin-off of fate's partiality to the Earls of Credesdale, and a few others like us with whom we're careful never to meet up, let alone compete. So, we're in the same boat—my loss of luck may be temporary and repairable, while yours is permanent, but I can still look at you and see my own future. At seventy, or seventy-five, or maybe eighty, I'm going to be lying pretty much where you are, suffering the same ultimate indignity, feeling
victimized
as well as tormented, wondering whether I somehow deserved it. A pity, isn't it, that we can't find the first Earl's magic formula, to summon up the devil for a second time and renegotiate a few key clauses in the contract?”

He was speaking metaphorically, of course. None of the last ten earls had believed in the literal truth of the family legend that credited the Kilcannon streak to a thirteenth-century pact with the devil. However the first earl had contrived to start the streak, it had been no formal agreement signed in blood—but that didn't mean that the metaphor wasn't sound.

“What's your point, Canny?” Lord Credesdale whispered, his voice as ragged as a well-worn dishcloth. He always switched from “Can” to “Canny” when he relaxed the sternness of his posture. He never called his son by his full name, any more than Canny ever addressed him as “Lord Credesdale”.

“My point,” Canny said, this time letting his sigh be heard, “is that I understand you better than you seem to think, Dad, and sympathize with you more than you seem to think. For what it's worth, I also need you more than you seem to think, and I'd really like to talk to you about the family secrets while I still can, and while you're still up to it. We're not only in the same boat, Daddy, we're the only ones in it. If we can't help one another, nobody can—and this isn't the kind of situation where we can draw lots to decide which of us gets to eat the other one—all that's been taken out of our hands. We are what we are, where and when we are. I want to try to make the best of that, and I need your help—more help than just one lousy lecture. I'm sorry that I ran away, Daddy, but I'm back now. I'm not going to run away again. Can I call please Bentley to give you a shot? I think you're suffering a little more than you need to, now—and I need you to sleep so that you can wake up a little stronger a few more times before you give up the ghost. Besides, I may have a little treat for you later, and you'll be better able to appreciate it if you take a nap first.”

Lord Credesdale looked up at him, breathing awkwardly. The old man tried to say yes, but in the end could only manage to nod his head. Then he tried to say something else, but only contrived to form the ghost of the word “keys”.

“It's okay, Daddy,” Canny said, as he got up to ring for Bentley. “I understand about the keys. We'll do it tonight, if that's what you want, after your surprise—or tomorrow, if you prefer. Either way, we'll talk again. We'll get things straightened out, for both our sakes. That's a promise.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Whether the photographer's generosity or Lissa Lo's manipulative talents deserved the credit, the model made it to Credesdale in plenty of time for dinner. She drove herself, unaccompanied, in a hire car she must have commandeered from someone at the shoot.

“Are you allowed to dump the minders?” Canny asked, when he went out to greet her, having had advance warning of her approach from the eagle-eyed Bentley.

“They don't pay me—I pay them,” she told him. “When I say
get lost
they vanish.”

Even though Canny had been careful to mention the possibility to all concerned, Lissa's arrival at Credesdale House made quite an impact.

“Your father will have a fit, Can,” said Lady Credesdale, as soon as Lissa had gone into the guest bathroom to freshen up. “She's
Oriental
.”

“According to
Hello!
, the
Sun
and Ellen Ormondroyd in the fish-and-chip shop she's one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, Mummy,” Canny pointed out. “She's rumored to be distantly related to the royal families of Persia, Bhutan
and
Siam—and don't tell me that two of those places don't exist any more, because we Kilcannons disapprove of almost everything that's happened in world history during the last thousand years, let alone the last hundred. Anyway, we all came from Africa in the beginning. The lady and I are just friends—not even
good
friends. We must have been in the same room half a dozen times, but until we happened to find ourselves at the same table last might I'd barely exchanged ten words with her. Technically speaking, we've never even been properly introduced. We're not an item; everybody knows that supermodels only date movie stars. And Daddy will love her—trust me on this.”

“Well, Can, you certainly ought to be thinking of becoming an item with somebody,” his mother retorted, changing tack as effortlessly as ever in the face of manifest criticism. “You know how paranoid Daddy is about
that
.”

“This is the twenty-first century, Mummy,” Canny told her, his voice falsely sweet. “These days, a chap can go through three or four barren marriages and still impregnate the nurse hired to wipe his arse. And I do wish you wouldn't call Daddy ‘Daddy'. When I do it, it's cute and accurate; when you do it, it's faintly obscene.”

“I don't know what happened to you, Canny,” Lady Credesdale complained. “You used to be so loving as a child.”

“Sorry, Mummy,” Canny said, repentantly. “I'm just a bit edgy. You know how it is.”

Actually, Canny knew that his mother hadn't the slightest idea how it was. She had to know, of course, that there was a family secret, but she had long ago given up hoping to be let in on it. She was of the old school of Yorkshire womanhood, and she could accept that kind of thing. Sometimes, Canny wished that she hadn't been so accommodating, or that his father had taken a more relaxed attitude to that particular rule. He hadn't yet made up his mind what to hope for or expect from his own future wife, but he hoped that she might at least be curious about the skeletons lined up in the Credesdale cupboard. He had no idea what the results of blabbing might be, but he'd certainly seen what
not
sharing the big secret could do to a family's internal dynamics, and he wasn't sure that he could subsume that kind of strain under the heading of things to be done
just in case
.

Mercifully, Lissa didn't come back into the drawing-room until his mother had had time to turn her frown upside-down, but Canny still had to weather the storm of Lady Credesdale's unspoken disappointment as the three of them continued the conversation along conventional lines.

Lissa congratulated Lady Credesdale on the internal decor, politely overlooking its manifest hideousness, and his mother graciously took credit for it, although it had mostly been in place before she arrived—save for such oddments as the occasional table and the magazine rack—and was maintained entirely by the servants.

Lady Credesdale, in her turn, made banal and blatantly insincere comments on the exhausting nature of a model's life, and Lissa assured her that the excitement alone was more than adequate compensation for the trouble, and that privacy was an overrated privilege.

Canny watched the two of them bring their mutual dislike to full maturity with interest, marveling at the amazing rapidity with which their hostility matured. Occasionally, he stirred the pot with a casual remark about Lissa's bodyguards or Mummy's book group—but in the end he saved the situation by offering to take Lissa for a turn around the grounds. He was unsurprised, but delighted nevertheless, when the model accepted with enthusiasm.

“You mustn't mind Mummy,” Canny said, as Lissa contemplated the absurd neatness of the lawn and the mildly surreal quality of the topiary, turning her lovely face reflexively to catch the faint breath of the evening breeze. “She has exactly the kind of life she always wanted, and she feels guilty about not being able to enjoy it. She isn't nearly as idle as she thinks she is, but she's never been able to think of her commitments in the village as work. I'm going to devise a suitably-labeled executive position for her once I'm in charge of the empire, to see what she can do with some real authority. I think she might surprise herself.”

“I'll probably become envious of younger women myself as I get older,” Lissa said, lazily. “And I'll probably dislike myself for my shallowness. Faces and breasts fall much faster than minds decline; it's something we all have to live with, but nobody likes it—not in my line of work. Is your gardener really a Barbara Hepworth fan, or doesn't he have the patience to carve the crenellations of the hedge into peacocks and rabbits?”

“This is Yorkshire,” Canny told her. “Jebb doesn't do
twee
. He doesn't really do abstract expressionism either, but we're all too frightened of his probable reaction to mention the phrase in connection with his endeavors. How do you like the gargoyles? They're not authentic Gothic features, alas—just fashionable Victorian frippery—but they do have spectacularly ugly faces. The hellhound and the worm are supposed to be the best, but I rather like the one that looks exactly like the twenty-eighth earl.” He pointed out the relevant monstrosities as he spoke; they were still close to the north-western corner of the house, so they could see the side as well as the façade, although the walls still loomed over them in a satisfyingly intimidating fashion.

Lissa didn't make any comment about Canny's use of the term “worm” where she would surely have used “dragon”, but she'd already demonstrated that her mastery of English extended as far as the appropriate use of the word “crenellations”, so he wasn't in the least surprised.

“Isn't that one supposed to be the devil?” she queried, instead—speaking of the one that Canny had identified as an ancestor.

“Yes it is,” he agreed, “but the twenty-eighth earl was definitely the model—you didn't have to go past his portrait to get to the guest bathroom, but I'll point it out later, Believe it or not, the ones on the stairs are the better-looking Kilcannons. I'm the exception, of course—I got my luck from Daddy and my looks from Mummy. I shudder to think how I might have turned out if it had been the other way around.”

Thus far, Canny had navigated their stroll in such a way that the Great Skull was obscured—although she must have seen it as she drove towards the house—but once they had passed through the wooden gate in Jebb's ornamental hedge the oddly-shaped rock formation on Cockayne Ridge was clearly in view, looming ominously over the grey slate roof and neatly framed by Credesdale House's twin chimney stacks. It immediately became the obvious topic of conversation.

“Who would have expected to find a death's-head dominating the Land of Cockayne,” Lissa said. “Your ancestors must have been exceedingly unsuperstitious men, to build a mansion house in the shadow of something like that—or men whose superstition worked in peculiar ways. I suppose family curses must be routine in this part of the world.”

“No family in Yorkshire is complete without one,” Canny assured her. “Isn't it much the same in your part of the world?”

“Superstition works in peculiar ways there, too,” she agreed, “and no family is complete without its...unfortunately, Mandarin and English don't run parallel in that respect. There isn't a word in English that encapsulates our notion of such things.
Curse
gives the wrong impression.”

“You're Chinese, then?” he asked, delicately.

“Not according to my passport,” she said. “In my part of the world, though, nations come and go in much the same way that conquerors used to come and go. Mandarin always endures and thrives regardless. It's the language of wisdom and bureaucracy, the precious relic of the oldest empire of all.”

“The language of wisdom and bureaucracy?” he echoed. “You wouldn't find many people in the West who'd yoke those two concepts together.”

They were strolling up the hill now, and Lissa paused to look back at the house. From this angle, it had always seemed to Canny to be direly reminiscent of a set from a particularly corny Hammer horror film, but the model made no comment as he dutifully pointed out its worst features.

“Tacky Victorian mock-Gothic has its virtues, of course,” Canny observed, angling his languid hand so cleverly that it took in the ornamental portico and the flying buttresses at the same time. “It passes for quaint nowadays, and the house must have been even uglier before, to judge by the surviving walls. Great-great-grandfather's diaries always refer to the replacement of the patched-up Tudor pile that preceded it as ‘the Restoration', although he must have known perfectly well that the Goths who conquered Rome never got as far as Britain. At least no one ever thought of replacing that beautifully coarse Yorkshire stone with red brick. The family's even older than the title, if legend can be believed—the records claim that the land was ours long before the first Earl was ushered into the Upper House—but any house that was here in the fifth century can't have been much grander than a wooden shell. Given that the Romans must have been perceived as the enemy, its occupants presumably took pride in the absence of a bathroom.”

“It
is
beautiful, in its own way.” Lissa's own ancestors, he supposed, must have lived in a great many exotic palaces if the assurances of
Hello!
could be trusted. Considering that she'd spent all day posing in what Daddy would have called “posh frocks”, in front of the grand facade at Harewood, the model's generous approval of his own humble abode seemed to Canny to be a substantial compliment. He didn't have the feeling that he was being teased. Whatever Lissa Lo's agenda was, it wasn't anything obvious—but if she had been attracted by the fact that he was an unusually lucky man, she wasn't going to be able to cut herself a permanent slice, if the rules could be believed. If the rules could be believed, his own luck was about to take a turn for the worse, and no matter how seductive she decided to be she wasn't the right person to help him renew it.

If
the rules could be believed.

Now that he was with Lissa Lo instead of his father, the force of that
if
had returned to its full and proper magnitude. In any case, what greater luck could there be in the world of the twentieth century, for a virile young man like himself, than to get together with Lissa Lo for as long as she was prepared to indulge him...
if
, that is, she were prepared to indulge him at all.

Even if she were, he reminded himself, the questions would remain, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. How much of the supposed precedent set out in the diaries was mere legend, lies and special pleading? And even if it were true, how much time was available to him for pleasurable dalliance before he settled down?

“The place does have a certain grotesque charm,” Canny agreed, negligently, “but I wouldn't want to live here full time. I've always regarded the London flat as
home
. I suppose I won't actually need it, now that Tony's abolished my right to sit in the Lords, but I'm certainly not about to give it up. Daddy was one of the most dedicated of the absentee hereditaries, although he could always be relied on to turn out for any vote to relax restrictions on gambling, but even he made abundant use of the flat while I was too young to stake my claim to it.”

Lissa smiled, rather mechanically. Canny wondered whether he could think of a joke that would produce a stronger reaction, but thought it unlikely. In his experience, supermodels had even bigger stocks of hilariously filthy jokes than Hollywood producers. Traveling the world still had certain advantages over waiting in lordly fashion for the world to come to you.

From the top of the ridge they had a perfect view of the Crede meandering down the dale to the village—whose Yorkshire stone seemed rather funereal, caked as it still was in the ancient grime of the Industrial Revolution. The village elders had been discussing the possibility of a general clean-up for a generation and more, but whenever the words “Hebden Bridge” were mentioned, enough lips curled contemptuously to have the motion shelved. Personally, Canny thought that it was the proximity of the motorway that had spoiled Hebden Bridge, not the sandblasters, but he'd always stayed out of the debate. He was privately glad, though, that the ridge and the Great Skull had shielded Credesdale House from the worst effects of the soot and the acid rain that had given the walls of the contoured terraces their distinctive color—3-B black instead of 3-H grey—and their unevenly pitted texture.

“I'll show you the village, if you like,” Canny said, as they set off down the slope again, having found the air on the ridge only slightly less enervating than the somnolent atmosphere of the dale.