It came as a shock to me to wonder if Tremayne wanted his own achievements written in an inheritable book because Perkin’s work would be valuable in two hundred years. Wondered if the strong father felt he had to equal his weaker son. I dismissed the idea as altogether too subtle and as anyway tactless in an employed biographer.
Gareth came home with his usual air of a life lived on the run and eyed me with disapproval as I sat in an armchair drinking wine.
‘I thought you said—’ he began, and stopped, shrugging, an onset of good manners vying with disappointment.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘Oh, really? Now?’
I nodded.
‘Good. Come on, then, I’ll show you the freezers.’
‘Let him alone,’ Mackie said mildly. ‘Let him finish his drink.’
Perkin reacted to this harmless remark with irritation. ‘As he said he’d cook, let him do it.’
‘Of course,’ I said cheerfully, getting up. I glanced at Tremayne. ‘All right with you?’
‘You’re all right with me until further notice,’ he said, and Perkin didn’t like that testimony of approval either, but Gareth did.
‘You’re home and dry with Dad,’ he told me happily, steering me through the kitchen. ‘What did you do to him?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did you do to me?’ he asked himself comically, and answered himself, ‘Nothing. I guess that’s it. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just the way you are. The freezers are through here, in the utility room. If you go straight on through the utility room you get to the garage. Through that door there.’ He pointed ahead to a heavy-looking door furnished with business-like bolts. ‘I keep my bike through there.’
There were two freezers, both upright, both with incredible contents.
‘This one,’ Gareth said, opening the door, ‘is what Dad calls the peezer freezer.’
‘Or the pizza frizza?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that too.’
It was stacked with pizzas and nothing else, though only half full.
‘We eat our way down to the bottom,’ Gareth said reasonably, ‘then fill up again every two or three months.’
‘Sensible,’ I commented.
‘Most people think we’re mad.’
He shut that freezer and opened the other, which proved to contain four packs of beef sandwiches, fifty to a pack. There were also about ten sliced loaves (for toast, Gareth explained), one large turkey (someone gave it to Tremayne for Christmas), pints galore of chocolate ripple ice-cream (Gareth liked it) and a whole lot of bags of ice-cubes for gins and tonic.
Was it for this, I surmised wildly, that I’d sold my soul?
‘Well,’ I said in amusement, ‘what do we have in the larder?’
‘What larder?’
‘Cupboards, then.’
‘You’d better look,’ Gareth said, closing the second freezer’s door. ‘What are you going to make?’
I hadn’t the faintest idea; but what Tremayne, Gareth and I ate not very much later was a hot pie made of beef extracted from twenty defrosted sandwiches and chopped small, then mixed with undiluted condensed mushroom soup (a find) and topped with an inch-thick layer of sandwich breadcrumbs fried crisp.
Gareth watched the simple cooking with fascination and I found myself telling him about the techniques I’d been taught of how to live off the countryside without benefit of shops.
‘Fried worms aren’t bad,’ I said.
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘They’re packed with protein. Birds thrive on them. And what’s so different from eating snails?’
‘Could you really live off the land? You yourself?’
‘Yes, sure,’ I said. ‘But you can die of malnutrition eating just rabbits.’
‘How do you know these things?’
‘It’s my business, really. My trade.’ I told him about the six travel guides. ‘The company used to send me to all those places to set up holiday expeditions for real rugged types. I had to learn how to get them out of all sorts of local trouble, especially if they struck disasters like losing all their equipment in raging torrents. I wrote the books and the customers weren’t allowed to set off without them. Mind you, I always thought the book on how to survive would have been lost in the raging torrent with everything else, but maybe they would remember some of it, you never know.’
Gareth, helping make breadcrumbs in a blender, said a shade wistfully, ‘How did you ever start on something like that?’
‘My father was a camping nut. A naturalist. He worked in a bank, really, and still does, but every spare second he would head for the wilds, dragging me and my mother along. Actually I took it for granted, as just a fact of life. Then after college I found it was all pretty useful in the travel trade. So bingo.’
‘Does he still go camping? Your father, I mean?’
‘No. My mother got arthritis and refused to go any more, and he didn’t have much fun without her. He’s worked in a bank in the Cayman Islands for three or four years now. It’s good for my mother’s health.’
Gareth asked simply, ‘Where are the Cayman Islands?’
‘In the Caribbean, south of Cuba, west of Jamaica.’
‘What do you want me to do with these breadcrumbs?’
‘Put them in the frying pan.’
‘Have you ever been to the Cayman Islands?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I went for Christmas. They sent me the fare as a present.’
‘You are lucky,’ Gareth said.
I paused from cutting up the beef. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, thinking about it. ‘Yes, I am. And grateful. And you’ve got a good father, too.’
He seemed extraordinarily pleased that I should say so, but it seemed to me, unconventional housekeeping or not, that Tremayne was making a good job of his younger son.
Notwithstanding Tremayne’s professed lack of interest in food he clearly enjoyed the pie, which three healthy appetites polished off to the last fried crumb. I got promoted instantly to resident chef, which suited me fine. Tomorrow I could do the shopping, Tremayne said, and without ado pulled out his wallet and gave me enough to feed the three of us for a month, though he said it was for a week. I protested it was too much and he kindly told me I had no idea how much things cost. I thought wryly that I knew how much things cost to the last anxious penny, but there was no point in arguing. I stowed the money away and asked them what they didn’t like.
‘Broccoli,’ Gareth said instantly. ‘Yuk.’
‘Lettuce,’ said Tremayne.
Gareth told his father about fried worms and asked me if I had any of the travel guides with me.
‘No, sorry, I didn’t think of bringing them.’
‘Couldn’t we possibly get some? I mean, I’d buy them with my pocket money. I’d like to keep them. Are they in the shops?’
‘Sometimes, but I could ask the travel company to send a set,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, do that,’ Tremayne said, ‘and I’ll pay for them. We’d all like to look at them, I expect.’
‘But Dad...’ Gareth protested.
‘All right,’ Tremayne said, ‘get two sets.’
I began to appreciate Tremayne’s simple way of solving problems and in the morning, after I’d driven him on the tractor up to the Downs to see the horses exercise, and after orange juice, coffee and toast, I phoned my friend in the travel agency and asked him to organise the books.
‘Today?’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, please,’ and he said he would Red-Star-parcel them by train, if I liked. I consulted Tremayne who thought it a good idea and told me to get them sent to Didcot station where I could go to pick them up when I went in to do the shopping.