‘Like Dad?’
‘Not in that way. I didn’t mean by dying. Nobody stays in one place for ever; our circumstances change, and we move on, from place to place.’
He frowned. On screen someone scored, but he barely seemed to notice. ‘I don’t ever want to leave St Martí,’ he murmured.
‘You say that now, but you will. One day you’ll go to university. Even if it’s no further away than Girona, it’ll take you out of here and into a bigger circle. One day you’ll have a career.’
‘Maybe I’ll start a restaurant here, like Cisco.’
‘I don’t think Cisco and the rest would be very pleased to have you as competition. And anyway, I don’t see an opening in St Martí, ever. No spare premises.’
He considered that for a while. ‘Then maybe I’ll make wine; I could go and work for Uncle Miles. That’s not very far away; I could work there and live here.’
‘And put someone else out of a job? It’s not a very big bodega, Tom, and most of the people there will still be around when you’re old enough to be starting a career. Anyway, the last I heard you wanted to be a cop, like Alex Guinart.’
‘Yes,’ he conceded, tentatively.
‘Then you could wind up anywhere in Catalunya, somewhere you couldn’t commute from.’
He frowned up at me. ‘You’re not going to move on yourself, Mum, are you?’
He touched my heart yet again. ‘No, my darling,’ I promised him. ‘I have done plenty of that in my life, but finally I’ve arrived where I want to be.’
‘You lived here before, didn’t you? With Dad?’
That wasn’t something we’d ever discussed. I’d told him, years before, when I’d brought him to live in St Martí, but he hadn’t pressed me about it; until now.
‘Yes,’ I replied, then waited for the follow-up that I knew would come.
‘And yet you moved away then,’ he pointed out, a little anxiously.
‘I was younger then, and sillier. I wasn’t ready to settle here, and neither was your dad. There were things he had to get out of his system.’
‘Did he?’
‘Honestly? I don’t think he ever did.’
‘Sometimes I wonder, Mum,’ he murmured, pensively. ‘If he hadn’t died, would he still be in Monaco with Susie Mum and Janet and wee Jonathan, or would he be here with us?’
I ponder the same question myself, often, for all that I try to avoid it. I’m no nearer knowing the answer, and I wasn’t going there with Tom, so I settled for a vague, general bullshit response. ‘I’m sure he’d have found time for everybody, love.’ Heaven knows, I thought, he shared himself around when he was alive. I’ve often wondered what happened between him and that girl from Singapore, the one who showed up just in time to stop him getting on board the plane on which I came so close to meeting my Maker.
He sighed. ‘It’s not fair, Mum,’ he said, with a hard edge to his voice that startled me. I’d never heard it before. ‘Why did he have to go and die?’
‘He didn’t plan it, Tom. Don’t blame him.’
‘I’m not blaming him,’ he snapped, pulling himself upright on the sofa. ‘I asked Gerard once, if God’s so good, why did he let it happen? He said that God operates on a different level, and that as people, we have to take the rough with the smooth.’
‘What did you say to that?’ I asked, knowing that he couldn’t have been any more than eight when the conversation took place.
‘I told him that if God was only a sort of Presidente del Gobierno in the sky, then he wasn’t much good to ordinary people.’
Gerard had told me once that Tom didn’t believe in the Man Upstairs. If he’d been encouraged to see Him as a celestial prime minister, it was pretty clear why. Nobody believes in those people.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘leaving God out of the discussion and going back to your dad, the truth is that none of us knows what each day will bring. Some things we can change, if we want to. Others, we can’t. If we’re bitter about them, the more we will hurt. And when I see you in pain. . I feel it too.’
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he exclaimed.
‘No, no. Don’t be. We all go through these things in life. I still miss your grandma, and I always will. It’s a part of being, and I suppose when you’re very young, it’s not something that’s easy to understand. You’ve reached the age when you do. Now you have to learn to accept it. You have to learn. .’
He glanced at me. ‘. . that shit happens?’
My mouth fell open. I snapped it shut. ‘Where did you learn that expression?’
‘Grandpa Blackstone.’
‘That figures!’ I snorted. ‘When?’
‘I asked him the same thing, why Dad had to die. That was all he said.’
And that was pure Mac Blackstone, I had to concede. Oz’s father is not a man to tiptoe around his feelings. ‘Succinct, but spot on, kid. Life is about accepting that, and putting it in perspective. You know what the word “grief” means in English?’ Tom’s multilingual, naturally, given his Scottish parentage, and the fact that he’s spent most of his life in Monaco and Spain. He has a lot of words inside his head, but I don’t assume that at his age he understands all of them.
‘I think so. It’s what you feel when you’re very sad, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Well, there’s a saying: “Grief is the price we pay for love”. I find it beautiful. I hope you will too, and that you’ll try very hard to accept it, and to believe that it’s a price worth paying. If you do, then however sad you are when someone dies, it will never overcome you, because you will appreciate what you’ve had from that person and know that nothing can take those good memories away.’
He was gazing at me. ‘D’you understand?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘It’s much the same as “shit happens”, only not so rude.’
Two
Deep discussion over, Tom went to bed with The Fellowship of the Ring. . he’s taking a break from Harry Potter. I read Gerard’s letter one more time, ran it through the shredder, wrote him off as a memory, and saw off the rest of Saturday with a coffee on our first-floor terrace, overlooking the square. The day died slowly; there were quite a few stragglers from Arrels del Vi, and the restaurants were busy until almost midnight. But eventually, the village turned in and so did I.
Tom and I spent the first part of Sunday with Charlie on the only beach in our area that allows dogs in the summer months. It allows nudists too, although going naked is not obligatory. (No, I don’t! When I feel like getting all my kit off, I do it in the privacy of my terrace.) We had a late lunch at Vaive, our favourite xiringuita (that’s beach bar to you), then wandered back home, so that we could be showered and reasonably dressed in time for the last session of the fair.
Business around the stalls was even more brisk than it had been the day before, and there were even more pre-schools playing in front of the church. But I was in a sunnier mood so that was fine. The salesman from Miles’s winery tried to quiz me about the owner’s view of his performance, but I gave him no more than an encouraging smile. I wanted to speak to my brother-in-law, to make things as official as they were going to be before I started to act on his behalf.
Tom and I knew most of the people there so we spent a happy couple of hours schmoozing the crowd, me sipping, him sniffing. Shirley and her new beau were in evidence again, getting full value for their tickets.
Before we’d left for the beach I’d done one thing. My time in the ambassadorial thing had given me a few contacts in the Foreign Office. I called the best of them, a man named John Dale, on his mobile, and ran the name Patterson Cowling past him. His response had been immediate. ‘Never heard of him. One of ours, you say?’
‘I don’t, he does. He told me he spent most of his career in your set-up. Fairly senior at the end, but I couldn’t wheedle any more out of him.’
‘Is he giving you cause for concern?’
‘No, but if my eventful life has taught me anything it’s never to take anyone at face value. My friend’s involved with him, so if there’s anything she should know. .’