The Scotsman picked me up and put me back in the chair and told me to pull myself together and be a man.
‘You’ve only lost a wee bit of skin,’ he said sternly.
I began to laugh weakly, which didn’t go down well, either. He was a joyless fellow. He compressed his mouth until the warts quivered when I shook my head to his enquiries and would not tell him what had happened to me. But he bound me up again comfortably enough and gave me some pain-killing pills which turned out to be very effective; and when he had gone I got into Joanna’s bed and sank thankfully into oblivion.
Joanna worked at her painting most of the next day and when I surfaced finally at about four o’clock in the afternoon, she was singing quietly at her easel. Not the angular, spiky songs she specialised in, but a gaelic ballad in a minor key, soft and sad. I lay and listened with my eyes shut because I knew she would stop if she found me awake. Her voice was true, even at a level not much above a whisper, the result of well-exercised vocal cords and terrific breath control. A proper Finn, she is, I thought wryly. Nothing done by halves.
She came to the end of the ballad, and afterwards began another. ‘I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me. I know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry. Some say he’s black, but I say he’s bonny...’ She stopped abruptly and said quietly but forcefully, ‘Damn, damn and blast.’ I heard her throw down her palette and brushes and go into the kitchen.
After a minute I sat up in bed and called to her, ‘Joanna.’
‘Yes?’ she shouted, without reappearing.
‘I’m starving,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ She gave a laugh which ended in a choke, and called, ‘All right. I’ll cook.’
And cook she did; fried chicken with sweet corn and pineapple and bacon. While the preliminary smells wafted tantalisingly out of the kitchen I got up and put my clothes on, and stripped her bed. There were clean sheets in the drawer beneath, and I made it up again fresh and neat for her to get into.
She carried a tray of plates and cutlery in from the kitchen and saw the bundle of dirty sheets and the smooth bed.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The sofa isn’t good for you,’ I said. ‘You obviously haven’t slept well... and your eyes are red.’
‘That isn’t...’ she began, and thought better of it.
‘It isn’t lack of sleep?’ I finished.
She shook her head. ‘Let’s eat.’
‘Then what’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Nothing. Nothing. Shut up and eat.’
I did as I was told. I was hungry.
She watched me finish every morsel. ‘You’re feeling better,’ she stated.
‘Oh, yes. Much. Thanks to you.’
‘And you are not sleeping here tonight?’
‘No.’
‘You can try the sofa,’ she said mildly. ‘You might as well find out what I have endured for your sake.’ I didn’t answer at once, and she added compulsively, ‘I’d like you to stay, Rob. Stay.’
I looked at her carefully. Was there the slightest chance. I wondered, that her gentle songs and her tears in the kitchen and now her reluctance to have me leave meant that she was at last finding the fact of our cousinship more troublesome than she was prepared for? I had always known that if she ever did come to love me as I wanted and also was not able to abandon her rigid prejudice against our blood relationship, it would very likely break her up. If that was what was happening to her, it was definitely not the time to walk out.
‘All right,’ I said smiling. ‘Thank you. I’ll stay. On the sofa.’
She became suddenly animated and talkative, and told me in great detail how the race and the interview afterwards had appeared on television. Her voice was quick and light. ‘At the beginning of the programme he said he thought your name was a mistake on the number boards, because he had heard you weren’t there, and I began to worry that you had broken down on the way and hadn’t got there after all. But of course you had... and afterwards you looked like life-long buddies standing there with his arm round your shoulders and you smiling at him as if the sun shone out of his eyes. How did you manage it? But he was trying to needle you, wasn’t he? It seemed like it to me, but then that was perhaps because I knew...’ She stopped in mid-flow, and in an entirely different, sober tone of voice she said. ‘What are you going to do about him?’
I told her. It took some time.
She was shaken. ‘You can’t,’ she said.
I smiled at her, but didn’t answer.
She shivered. ‘He didn’t know what he was up against, when he picked on you.’
‘Will you help?’ I asked. Her help was essential.
‘Won’t you change your mind and go to the police?’ she said seriously.
‘No.’
‘But what you are planning... it’s cruel.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘And complicated, and a lot of work, and expensive.’
‘Yes. Will you make that one telephone call for me?’
She sighed and said, ‘You don’t think you’ll relent, once everything has stopped hurting?’
‘I’m quite certain,’ I said.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, standing up and collecting the dirty dishes. She wouldn’t let me help her wash up, so I went over to the easel to see what she had been working at all day: and I was vaguely disturbed to find it was a portrait of my mother sitting at her piano.
I was still looking at the picture when she came back.
‘It’s not very good, I’m afraid,’ she said, standing beside me. ‘Something seems to have gone wrong with the perspective of the piano.’
‘Does Mother know you’re doing it?’ I asked.
‘Oh no,’ she said.
‘When did you start it?’
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ she said.
There was a pause. Then I said, ‘It won’t do you any good to try to convince yourself your feelings for me are maternal.’
She jerked in surprise.
‘I don’t want mothering,’ I said. ‘I want a wife.’
‘I can’t...’ she said, with a tight throat.
I turned away from the picture, feeling that I had pressed her too far, too soon. Joanna abruptly picked up a turpentine-soaked rag and scrubbed at the still wet oils, wiping out all her work.
‘You see too much,’ she said. ‘More than I understood myself.’
I grinned at her and after a moment, with an effort, she smiled back. She wiped her fingers on the rag, and hung it on the easel.
‘I’ll make that telephone call,’ she said. ‘You can go ahead with... with what you plan to do.’
On the following morning, Monday, I hired a drive-yourself car and went to see Grant Oldfield.
The hard overnight frost, which had caused the day’s racing to be cancelled, had covered the hedges and trees with sparkling rime, and I enjoyed the journey even though I expected a reception at the end of it as cold as the day.
I stopped outside the gate, walked up the short path through the desolate garden, and rang the bell.
It had only just struck me that the brass bell push was brightly polished when the door opened and a neat dark-haired young woman in a green wool dress looked at me enquiringly.
‘I came...’ I said. ‘I wanted to see... er... I wonder if you could tell me where I can find Grant Oldfield?’
‘Indoors,’ she said. ‘He lives here; I’m his wife. Just a minute, and I’ll get him. What name shall I say?’
‘Rob Finn,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said in surprise; and she smiled warmly. ‘Do come in. Grant will be so pleased to see you.’