TWENTY-NINE

Max coped very well, although I noticed Dad throwing the odd puzzled glance at her. During the course of the meal, we learned that Ada liked Starsky and Hutch but was not particularly enamoured of Survivors, that she sang in the choir at St Jude’s Church and that she had once auditioned for The Black and White Minstrel Show – we were left to assume that she hadn’t been successful, but didn’t like to ask. These were amongst what she told us, her garrulousness increasing as first the sherry, then the wine, ebbed. What she didn’t say, but what became obvious, was that she looked on my father as a trophy, one that she intended to display in a prominent position in her life. She had already paraded him around her workmates – ‘the girls’ – and around the congregation at St Jude’s, as well as (less successfully) around her family. She had plans, did Ada; big ones. Plans that involved my father’s money. She had found her sweetshop and was at the stage where she was still looking around, still trying to work out which particular item of confectionery to stuff between her ill-fitting dentures first. From Dad’s point of view, he was thoroughly enjoying being the centre of attention, even if that attention came from a circling leech. There was no one else to blame but me; I had always assumed that he was happy with his crackpot obsessions, his allotment and his photographs of Mum, and I had always assumed that because it suited me to. As I watched the two of them, I was struck by the fact that they were both after something, and that they each had what the other craved. Is that so bad, I got to wondering. Is that really so bad?

Then I thought that it probably was because, overcome with wine both fortified and unfortified, Ada looked around the dining room and said, ‘I’ve got such plans for this old place.’

There was a sudden silence in the room, one that she didn’t seem to appreciate. Dad was looking at his chilli con carne as if one of the kidney beans had started mouthing obscenities at him, and even Max, despite her distress, looked astounded. I asked him, ‘Did you manage to rescue the vegetables?’

‘Oh, yes . . . Yes. No harm done.’

Another pause, then Max tried, ‘How are your grandchildren, Ada?’

‘They’re absolutely fine, thank you, dear.’

‘Lance said that Joanna hasn’t been well.’

‘She was a bit out of sorts, yes.’ Her speech was never particularly clear, something I put down to a certain degree of looseness of the dentures, so that her teeth seemed to have something of a lag about them. Now that she was becoming noticeably sozzled, this lack of synchronization was becoming more pronounced, giving me an eerie feeling as she talked, as if a spirit were talking through her mouth. It didn’t help the clarity of her diction much either.

‘And David?’

‘He’s been very badly behaved of late,’ she confessed.

Dad added, ‘He’s been teasing his sister a lot.’

‘And he was truanting last term.’

‘Truanting?’ I said, without thinking.

Dad looked surprised, too. ‘I thought you said he’d been unwell,’ he said to his beloved.

She was taken aback. ‘Did I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

She looked at him, then shrugged and took another swig of wine. ‘He has been unwell . . . but he’s also been truanting.’ Dad’s expression showed his confusion but he didn’t press the point. In any case, Ada hadn’t finished. ‘He’s always been a wild lad. I blame his father.’

Max and I exchanged surprised glances; this was completely out of character. All the evidence theretofore had suggested that Ada viewed her son as something of a gift to the world; if she was going to blame anyone for the lapses of her grandchildren, I would have put hefty money on Tricia the daughter-in-law being held responsible. Dad, too, seemed baffled and, accordingly, the remark earned a perplexed silence; not that Ada was listening to anything other than her own thoughts. She said without obvious awareness of the atmosphere she had created, ‘I’ve never met him.’

More puzzlement. Max asked, ‘Who?’

She said through her wine, ‘David’s father.’

Dad sought some elucidation. ‘Isn’t Mike his father?’

‘Goodness gracious, no!’ She either thought the concept funny or disgusting; it was tricky to tell which because of her blood alcohol level. ‘Tricia was married before.’

‘You never told me,’ complained Dad.

‘You never asked,’ she replied waspishly.

‘So Michael is David’s stepfather?’ asked Max, presumably just to make sure that she had things straight now.

‘And Tricia is Joanna’s stepmother.’ She spoke as if she had suddenly found herself among the mentally challenged.

Dad opened his mouth, clearly of a mind to speak but something – presumably recent experience – held him back.

There was another pause in the conversation, although the sound of wine slurping over Ada’s top plate ensured that there was no silence.

‘And how is Mike?’ I enquired. ‘Fighting fit?’ I couldn’t stop some bitterness seeping into this question, although Ada was too far gone to notice.

‘He’s been working very hard. I’m quite worried about him.’

‘Perhaps he’s worried about losing a mother and forgetting he’s going to gain a stepfather.’ It suddenly occurred to me that maybe, like Ada, my tongue was becoming a little unregulated; I had had only one bottle of Toe-Curler, but maybe that was one too many and I decided not to drink any more.

Ada looked at me sharply while Dad did a bit of glaring. His beloved said in a starch-stiff voice, ‘Mike’s very happy about the wedding.’

Dad added quickly, ‘Ada says it was just a bit of a shock to him.’

Another one of those silences ensued. Max enquired, ‘Have you set the date yet?’

Dad looked at Ada, a clear sign of the way the relationship worked. She said, ‘Not exactly. I was thinking next month, though.’

If she had been thinking that, it was patent that my father hadn’t; no way, no how, not never. He looked as if he had just been bitten in the nether regions and, you know, perhaps he had (in a metaphorical sense). ‘Were you?’ he asked faintly. I could see that it was an effort to hang on to his cutlery.

We made our goodbyes at about ten thirty and I walked Max to her car; this was the first occasion I had to resume our earlier conversation. ‘How are you?

She was intensely thoughtful for a moment. ‘You say that Albert Stewart isn’t well?’

We were holding hands and I pulled her to a stop, then looked around to make sure that there was no possibility we were going to be overheard while I broke one of the big rules, the one about medical confidence. ‘Mentally, he’s in a bad way. He’s epileptic and insomniac, disturbed by his military experiences.’

‘I see.’

‘And I didn’t tell you that.’

She nodded. ‘No, of course not.’

We walked on. As we reached her car, I asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

She paused in the act of opening her door. ‘I ought to tell the police about the note.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, but I hope I succeeded in conveying my doubts about doing just that.

‘It won’t bring back Twinkle, though, will it?’

‘Nothing can do that.’

She considered some more. ‘There doesn’t seem much point, then.’

I admit that I was relieved. I bent down to kiss her but as we pulled apart she said softly, ‘There he is again.’

She was looking over my shoulder; when I turned, there was no one there. ‘There who is again?’

‘Just some chap I think I saw earlier. I came out of the surgery, and as I went to my car I saw this man in the shadows across the road. I couldn’t think of a good reason why he should be just standing there, so I went across to ask him what he wanted.’

I all but staggered. Max was, generally speaking, a good inducer of staggering on my part. ‘Are you sure that was a good idea?’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘What did he do?’

‘He walked away before I got there.’

‘And you’ve just seen him again?’

‘Just for a moment. At least I think it was the same man.’

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that was probably only second to that felt by Captain Smith just after his ship had been introduced to its first and last iceberg. ‘What did he look like?’

Her answer did little in the cause of settling my collywobbles. ‘Um . . . Fairly tall with long, straggly looking ginger hair. He was dressed in denim.’

I closed my eyes in despair. Tristan. I had thought it such a good idea to go and confront him, yet all I had done was draw his attention to Max. She looked at me. ‘Was that Tristan?’

I stretched a smile that felt like a knife wound across my face. ‘Yes.’

She understood. ‘He’s watching me.’

‘Looks like it.’

Ever ready to look on the bright side, she suggested, ‘Perhaps he’s just trying to scare me. I think he’s the kind of man who enjoys frightening people, from what you said.’ I wasn’t going to argue with that, and said nothing. She appeared to come to a decision about Tristan. ‘People like that back off when they’re confronted. After all, that’s what he did this evening.’

‘Max, this isn’t the playground. Tristan Charlton isn’t a school bully and we’re not in Tom Brown’s School Days. Tristan’s just your average, run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic, with an obsession about his dead sister, and an unpleasant habit of parking his not inconsiderable intellect whilst he uses his not inconsiderable muscles. He won’t respond to you standing up to him because it’s not that he’s trying to scare you; he’s just plotting how to hurt you.’

She was about to argue, but, having taken a long breath to calm myself, I said, ‘I think you should come back to my house. It’s not safe for you to be on your own.’

‘Don’t be silly . . .’

‘Max, Tristan Charlton is quite literally certifiable, and he’s got a track record of hurting my girlfriends. Just do as you’re told, for once.’

‘But we’ve got two cars.’

‘That’s easily dealt with. We’ll drive in your car to your place, pick up some clothes, then come back here and go in convoy to my house.’

‘There’s no need for all that. I’ll pop home on my own . . .’

‘No! No way.’

I think I got through to her and she reluctantly agreed. I got in the passenger seat of her car and we pulled away from the kerb. ‘And if you should see him again, please don’t approach him. Get to a phone and call me.’ A thought occurred. ‘Or Sergeant Abelson.’

‘Why should I call her?’

‘She said that she’d do her best to deal with Tristan.’

Max looked less than impressed with this reassurance.