It was true what he had said about being glad to be alive. Equally true that, for a great deal of the time, he now experienced pain and fright. But the moment was long gone when he could have walked away. No question now of weighing distress against satisfaction and trying to decide if the game was worth the candle.
Dante had got it right. And von Aschenbach. Look, lust after, love and worship youth and beauty. Just don’t touch. But what about the ‘strife below the hipbones’, as he had somewhere read the sexual urge memorably described. It seemed to Val the more frequently his longing for Jax was satisfied, the more powerful it became. Tonight, sitting awkwardly in the untidy sitting room of the Old Rectory asking after Lawrence’s wife, Val had felt he was on fire.
Jax and Lionel sat facing him on a sofa that was splashed with red stains. Jax was drinking Coke, his tongue darting in and out of the glass like a fish. Each time he reached out for his glass, the dragonfly tattoo passed through a fall of light from a standard lamp and sprang to iridescent life. Lionel sat as in a waking dream: calm, smiling and looking at nothing and no one in particular.
Val did not stay long. He couldn’t bear having Jax within arm’s reach and not be able to touch him. The boy’s blazing blue eyes shone with sexual invitation. The flickering tongue, nothing but a sensual wind-up, was already driving Val mad. He prayed that Jax would offer to see him to the door, perhaps even come outside for a moment and stand close to him in the darkness. But Jax did not move. Just waved an ironical goodbye, lifting his glass.
Val had no illusions about what his life would be like when the boy moved in. Though his love for Jax was immensely powerful it was also powerless. He would give and give until it hurt. Until not only his bank balance but his heart was bled white. Jax would take, physically, emotionally and fiscally, as much as he liked for as long as it suited him. Then he would be off. He would not grow to love Mozart or Palestrina. Nor would he ever be persuaded to read a grown-up newspaper, let alone Austen or Balzac. Such Pygmalion longings Val now recognised as hopelessly foolish. Yet they were not ignoble and he could not laugh at them as he could easily have done had they been held by someone else.
This bleak clairvoyance, showing no ray of light or comfort at all, did not unduly depress Val. He liked the thought that he was prepared for anything and believed he would be able to cope when the end came even though the thought filled him with despair.
There was no one to talk to about all this. Val had several good friends, straight as well as gay, but there was not one who could possibly understand. Bruno, yes, perhaps, but he was now a cloud of dust blowing across the Quantocks where they had loved to walk. And Val, who, scattering the ashes, had thought he would die any minute, torn apart by utter loneliness, now spent every waking moment of his life longing for someone else.
He got up stiffly - Louise was quiet at last - and rubbed the muscles of his calves. He had woken that morning with a blinding headache and had not cycled either on the road or on the runners in the garage, the first time he had missed for months and his legs knew about it.
The halogen light came on in the Rectory garden. The tortoiseshell cat from the Red Lion sauntered across the grass then stopped and crouched, quite motionless. Val was on the point of turning away when he noticed the blue door was only half visible. A tall wedge of dark shadow stood in for the missing section. The door was standing open.
His heart exploding with sudden joy, Val ran out of the house across the moonlit road and up the narrow carpeted stairs. Into the darkest moments of his life.
Chapter Eleven
Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby stirred his chopped banana and muesli. Gave a moody sigh. Put his spoon down.
‘Is there any more coffee?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said Joyce, directing her attention to the empty cafetière. ‘And I’m not making any more. You drink far too much of that stuff as it is. Have you cut down at work?’
‘Yes.’
‘You promised.’
‘Yes.’ Barnaby pushed his bowl aside. ‘For heaven’s sake.’
‘What was the matter last night?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He had had fragmentary dreams, vivid little cuttings and snippets all relating to what was overwhelmingly on his mind but juxtaposed in ridiculous combinations that made not the slightest sense. Valentine Fainlight cycling furiously on Ferne Basset village green but never moving from the spot, with Vivienne Calthrop hovering just above the ground behind him like a sequinned barrage balloon. Louise Fainlight in a wetsuit made of crocodile skin, fishing with a billhook in the weeds of a fast-flowing river and catching it on the frame of an old pushchair. Ann Lawrence, young and beautiful, wearing a flowered dress, climbing into an open red car. Straightaway a transparent canopy festooned with tubes and jars fell over her and the car turned into a hospital bed. Lionel Lawrence, in a room like yet unlike Carlotta’s, threw ornaments and books around and tore up posters while Tanya, this time an angel in truth with huge feathered wings, perched on top of a bookshelf and shoved two fingers at him, grinning.
Finally there was Jackson floating up from Barnaby’s subconscious in the shape of a monstrous rocking sailor doll. It was laughing, a clockwork cackle, and the more it was pushed, the more it laughed and bounced back. Beaten and thumped and pushed and beaten, the mechanical laughter became louder and louder, finally distorting into one long scream. This was when Barnaby awoke and knew it was himself that screamed.
Joyce reached out across the table and took his hand. ‘You’ll have to let go of this, Tom.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You always say—’
‘I know what I always say. This one’s different.’
‘You’re like that man with the whale.’
‘That’s right.’ Barnaby managed a bitter smile. ‘Call me Ahab.’
‘It’ll break sooner or later.’
‘Yes.’
‘Try and—’
‘Joycey, I’m sorry. I’m going to be late.’
If anything, he was twenty minutes early. Joyce followed her husband into the hall, helped him on with his overcoat. Took down a scarf.
‘I don’t want that.’
‘Just take it with you. It’s really chilly. There’s mist in the garden.’
She watched him get into the car from the hall window. Heard the aggressive revving and the engine picking up speed, too early and too fast, as he drove off. Then the telephone called her away.
Something terrible had happened to Val. Louise was so used to her brother getting up first that, on waking to a silent house, she simply assumed he was away doing his daily twenty-mile run.
She flung on some warm trousers and a jersey, made some tea and took it outside. Barnaby had found the garden at Fainlights too rigidly austere for his taste. But it was precisely this constrained formality that appealed to Louise. Edges were straight, low barriers of yew were precisely angled, shrubs were shaped into unmoving elegance by skilful clipping, the dark water in the pool remained unruffled. Even overlaid as it was now by the rattle and roar of the approaching Causton and District Council’s refuse collection lorry, the scene was very peaceful.
Louise wandered idly around, drinking her tea, stopping to admire a delightful sculpture of a hare and stroking its ears, rubbing a scented leaf between her fingers. Coming to the back wall, she noticed the key was missing from the garden door. It was a large iron key, always turned in the lock against intruders but never removed, Val’s theory being that anyone who could gain access to the thing would be in the garden already and if Louise started keeping it in a safe place it would soon get lost.