Hush Hush (12 page)

They ate in silence for a bit.
Conor held his elbows at tense angles, sawing through an overcooked
roast potato of the frozen rather than the peeled variety. If only he
could persuade Mrs Turner to live in permanently and become a
well-paid domestic slave. Hell, she’d been widowed for eight
years and lived on a tough estate, visited sporadically by her
foul-mouthed daughter-in-law. She might go for live-in servitude,
sleeping in the converted loft.

Shane gave up the ghost and
dropped a potato from his mouth onto his plate, still steaming and
whole.

‘Shane!’

‘It’s frigging
thermonuclear!’

‘I hope you’ll be on
your best behaviour for lunch with Angela.’

‘Aw, Dad, do I really have
to? Isn’t one ugly McGinlay enough at a time?’

‘But she’s looking
forward to it!’ lied Conor. Angela had sounded terrified at the
prospect over the phone.

‘She’s a widow,
right?’

Conor put down his cutlery.
‘
She’s not a
little old woman in black, if that’s what you’re
visualising. She’s attractive and vibrant.’

Shane sighed. That told him
nothing.
‘
What
colour’s her hair?’

‘Brown.’

‘And her eyes?’

‘Sort of bluey.’

‘What did her old man die
of?’

‘A heart attack. And don’t
go on about it when you meet her.’

Shane, who was generally too
sensible and sensitive to wilfully do such a thing, wound up Conor a
bit more by observing,
‘
You’ve
got to be careful, though, Dad. She could be a black widow after all,
marrying men for their money, then bumping them off.’

‘Lucky I’m not
arachnophobic,’ said Conor stoutly.
‘
And
her mum’s nice, too.’

Shane pulled a face a
contortionist would’ve patented.
‘
God,
so there’s an old battle-axe in the background? They’ve
probably cooked up the husband-poisoning scheme between them.’
He leant forward and pronged an unprotected fish finger off Conor’s
plate, intoning,
‘
Digitalis.’

‘Digi what?’

‘It’s a poison that’s
odourless, colourless and impossible to detect,’ revealed
Shane.
‘
When you
keel over, it looks just like a heart attack. It’s in all the
Agatha Christie books. They reckon that’s how the mafia bumped
off John Paul the First.’

Conor decided to stack their two
plates in an authoritative manner.
‘
If
you don’t fancy lunch here, we could go to the Fire Station.’

‘Great ‒ if I was
still ten!’

Conor glared.
‘
I
thought you loved the place.’

‘Move with the times, Dad.’
The Fire Station was a local restaurant with an obvious theme,
complete with fireman’s pole for bored kiddies to slide down.

His only hope in getting Conor to
notice the ageing process, Shane reckoned, was the magical advent of
his voice breaking. Now and then it hit a bass note when he least
expected it, but then rose almost immediately to an embarrassing
squeak, like a bad singer grappling with scales.

‘Tell you what, Dad.’
A wicked gleam leapt into Shane’s eye.
‘
You
reckon she’s a bit of a veggie, so why don’t I do my
tex-mex vegetarian chilli, like I did for the cookery exam? You
rustle up your customary burnt offerings for me and you.’

‘I don’t know.’
Conor, missing the wicked gleam, was tempted.

Grilled breakfasts and leathery
meat-and-two-veg were about his culinary limit. He wanted to give
Angela something better. And the cookery teacher had raved about
Shane’s tex-mex on open night. At the time, Conor had
considered it unmanly to enthuse back.

‘All right,’ he
finally nodded.
‘
If
you give me a list of ingredients, I’ll lay in provisions.’
He paused.
‘
Thanks,
son.’

‘Don’t
mention it,’ mumbled Shane. He was getting used to these
twinges of guilt.

Angela straightened up from Robert’s grave,
eyeing the white tulips she’d arranged, ad-hoc fashion, in the
pepperpot flower-holder thingy. On a bench nearby, Rachel sat with
blonde head bent, snipping stalks off a hardy species of geranium for
her grandparents’ grave, five rows behind Robert. Sadie,
meanwhile, was puffing noisily in the rarefied cemetery silence,
scrubbing bird mess off Fenton’s headstone with a J-cloth and
Cif.

Sadie had gone for granite, which
looked weather-beaten in the space of a year. Robert’s black
marble headstone still gleamed, rain or shine, the white lettering
picked out with the sharp definition of bones on a Hallowe’en
skeleton suit.

Angela wiped her hands on her
coat and stood back to admire her handiwork. The budded tulips
pointed upwards, tiny praying hands.

Instinctively, Angela felt
guilty. She was trying to appease Robert, buying him off with a
votive offering, so he’d leave her alone to get to know Conor.
It was two weeks since the London picnic. Tomorrow, she was going to
Conor’s for lunch.

‘Hey!’ called Sadie.
‘Y
ou’re
standing on an Eva Shanley’s grave.’

‘Am I? Sorry,’ said
Angela to the unknown Eva Shanley. She joined Rachel on the bench,
treading carefully.
‘
Mum,
what was Owen like at fourteen?’

Sadie looked thoughtful.
‘
Much
as he is now, middle-aged and serious. He never gave me and your dad
a moment’s trouble, which was worrying in itself. I should’ve
realised he was just biding his time to skip off and reinvent
himself. Is this about Conor’s son?’

‘Yes,’ admitted
Angela frankly.
‘
Should
I bring him a present? Or should it be a general
thanks-for-having-me-to-lunch gift, like a bottle of wine?’

Sadie pondered.
‘
You
could always slip the lad a
tenner
as you’re leaving. He probably gets cards full of
money
from his aunties and puts them towards things you’d never dream
of buying for him.’

‘Good idea,’
brightened Angela.
‘
And
a bottle of Blue Nun for politeness.’

‘A shame the kid’ll
be there at all, cramping both your styles,’ murmured Rachel,
slinging a cat among the pigeons.
‘
I
mean, there you’ll be, in his house, with a master bedroom
going begging upstairs, wine sloshing round your pleasantly numbed
faculties and limbs, the Catholic guilt on temporary hold.’

‘Sssh!’ Throwing a
look at Sadie, Angela slid down next to her and hissed,
‘
No
references to physical contact, if you please. Um ‒ you don’t
think that’s why he’s invited me to lunch
en famille
,
do you? In case I pounce on him across the salad bowl?’

Rachel laughed smuttily.
‘
You
‒ pounce? I know he hasn’t known you long, Ange, but he
must have the measure of you as far as pouncing goes.’

‘What’s that supposed
to mean?’ muttered Angela, knowing exactly what it meant. Her
womanly wiles, such as they’d ever been, hadn’t exactly
been honed by sixteen years of comfortable marriage to a man who’d
still fancied her in winter flannel nighties.

‘I think the son’s
presence is significant,’ backtracked Rachel.
‘
It’s
like being invited to tea to meet your beau’s parents.’

‘But he’s not my
beau!’ spluttered Angela.
‘
And
he dropped it too casually into the invitation ‒ oh, by the
way, you’ll probably get to meet the child prodigy ‒ in
fact, the more I think of it, the more it comes across as a way of
keeping me at arm’s length.’

Sadie puffed up to join them,
suspicious of the muttering.
‘
Now,
if I were you, Angela, I’d find out a bit more about the wife.’

‘Ex-wife.’

‘Has she gone for good?’
mused Sadie.
‘
Is she
likely to reappear on the scene?’

‘Why she did a runner,’
prompted Rachel.
‘
And
has he got a cellarful of ex-wives, like Bluebeard?’

‘Enough already! How am I
supposed to subtly extract all this key info?’

‘Who said anything about
subtlety?’ snorted Rachel, snipping stalks with gusto.
‘
Just
ask him straight out what happened to his marriage. It’s not as
if you’ve anything to hide. Your spouse didn’t leave by
choice.’

Angela stood up.
‘
I
find these ‒ unwholesome wonderings distasteful in this
setting.’

‘Just remember’ ‒
and here Rachel wagged a finger ‒
‘
don’t
do anything daft, like really fall for him, until you know about the
wife.’

‘Ex-wife!’ snapped
Angela.

‘I still can’t help
liking him, for a divorced man,’ revealed Sadie, apropos of
nothing.
‘
Though God
knows where you’d marry. The church can’t give its
blessing.’

‘Slow down, Ma! You can’t
help liking him because he’s shown an interest in me, without
being a multiple bigamist or on the run from Broadmoor. As far as we
know. Isn’t that the bottom line?’

Sadie turned away, twisting the
J-cloth through shaking fingers.
‘
Lowest
form of wit, Angela.’

‘Sorry!’
winced Angela, assailed by a rush of guilt, filial tenderness and
roaring resentment of her mother. The joints of Sadie’s fingers
looked swollen, and not just from the cold. It was the arthritis
kicking in, Angela knew. But when she’d offered to clean
Fenton’s headstone, Sadie had feigned deafness and scrubbed at
the granite with renewed zeal. She was determined to play the martyr.

‘
Let me
take your coat,’ said Conor as she stepped over the threshold.

‘Th-thanks.’ Angela
twisted out of it, an idiot smile clamped to her face.
‘
Ooh,
your house is lovely!’

Despite the cringe-making note of
cliché, it was true. Angela was awe-struck. 23 Pacelli Close,
Loxton, had looked an imposing detached house from the outside,
flanked by other four-bedroomed detached houses, and surrounded by
luxuriant but pruned trees, always a sign of middle-class affluence.

But the inside was something
else. A gleaming wooden floor, carefully littered with pastel rugs,
swept up to a spiralling wooden staircase. Through a door to the
left, she glimpsed a cream velvet sofa cradling gold-tasselled
cushions, and beyond that, a pair of french windows, hung with
amazing, ruched curtains. The sort you had to unswag every five
seconds and dust ‒ or so she suspected. It was like something
out of
Homes & Interiors
. No wonder his
‘
daily’
was often a live-in
‘
weekly’.

‘This is Shane,’
announced Conor, while she gawped.

She turned a few degrees, with a
smile not so much clamped in place as held by invisible fixative. A
figure shuffled down the stairs, extending a hand.

‘How do you do?’
mumbled Shane.

Angela gawped again, before
muttering,
‘
Pleased
to meet you!’ and pumping his hand over-enthusiastically.

He wasn’t what she’d
expected. Conor’s son was a skinny stick-insect of a child with
a prominent Adam’s apple, sticking-up mousy hair and a pair of
pebbly glasses. He had nothing ‒ not an iota ‒ of his
father’s stocky masculinity, red hair or green eyes ‒ nor
any discernible prospect of succeeding to such attributes. Angela
could only presume that Shane had been hit with the ugly stick via
Kate’s genetic input. She was ashamed to find this suspicion
comforting.

‘Goodness!’ said
Angela lamely.
‘
You
don’t look like your dad. I mean, you’re clearly going to
be ‒ taller.’

Shane shrugged and tugged up a
sock that couldn’t get a purchase on his skinny leg. He’s
probably a nice, sensitive, introverted kid, thought Angela, ashamed
of judging by appearances. He probably collects insects in jam jars ‒
and empties them down the back of his father’s fancy-women’s
necks, a cynical inner voice surmised. Could it have been Robert’s?

‘Lunch is all ready,’
announced Conor, guiding them both across the polished floor.
‘
Easy
journey here, Angela?’

‘Oh yes. Ten minutes on the
train, like you predicted.’

‘I’d have been more
than happy to pick you up at the station.’

‘Oh, but I enjoyed the
walk. Loxton is blessed with such leafy ‒ boulevards.’

She was perspiring as they
reached the kitchen. He seemed very eager to stuff lunch down her
neck, without the preliminaries of an aperitif or a guided tour.
Already, she and Conor were playing mannered roles. Here in his home,
where he should’ve been at his most natural, he’d become
a hostly automaton. She missed the little she knew of him so far ‒
his grunting, scratchy inability to chat her up or ooze slick patter.

The kitchen made her gawp again.

Utensils gleamed from hooks on a
terracotta-tiled wall. A pine dresser heaved with ‒ presumably
original ‒ Delft. The huge pine table in the centre was set
with pale blue plates, matching linen napkins, and a blue plumbago
trailing from a blue-and-white marbled vase.
‘
Gosh,
how colour-coordinated,’ she gasped, seeing Conor in yet
another new light. He didn’t exactly need a woman’s touch
about the place. Unless.

‘Did your cleaning lady set
the table?’ she asked with innocent bluntness.

His mouth curled good-humouredly.
‘
Shane’s
touch, mostly. He’s also been slaving away over a hot oven,
preparing a vegetarian chilli for you. Not too hot, of course. Wine
before you eat?’

‘Oh, I brought some.’
Angela thrust a paper-wrapped bottle at him, relieved that she’d
plumped for a respectable Chilean red instead of the Blue Nun. She
should’ve guessed from the four-wheel drive that Conor was
worth a bob or two. Not that it made any difference to her ‒ or
to him, she guessed. He clearly didn’t go in for designer togs,
haute cuisine or name-dropping at the golf club. Today, he wore a
navy T-shirt over baggy chinos. His brown arms were sprinkled with a
fine down of red-gold hair, like the fuzz on a newly-hatched chick.