I should have moved on straight after Jan’s death, but I didn’t. I was pretty numb at the time, so I stayed there, until it became home to Prim and me as we renewed our ruptured relationship, drifting eventually into our brief, rancorous and disastrous marriage.
When I did sell it, I had misgivings about the buyer; call me superstitious if you like, but if the fucking place was cursed, as I thought, I wasn’t sure if I should take the risk of passing it on to her.
But she had insisted, and when Susie Gantry digs in her heels it would take a pretty strong guy to deny her what she’s after. Besides, she offered me twenty-five per cent over valuation.
‘You cut it bloody fine!’ she exclaimed as she opened the door that fair Saturday morning, but she was smiling, big white teeth, tan and freckles, all framed by lustrous red hair.
She was right too. Although we’d spoken about business a couple of times. . I’m a non-executive director of her company. . and exchanged a few text messages I hadn’t seen Susie since January, eight months before. She’d been in fine shape then; she still was, only that shape was different. For all she was wearing a big white housecoat, you could tell she’d filled out a bit.
‘So it seems,’ I agreed as I stepped inside. ‘Have you been hanging on for me?’
‘Not quite,’ she answered, ‘but if you hadn’t turned up this weekend I was going to get in touch with you. Officially, I’m due a week on Wednesday, but when I saw my consultant last Tuesday, he was talking about inducing her a few days early.’
‘Her?’
‘That’s right, Pops. The heir to the Gantry empire’s going to be an heiress.’
I wasn’t sure how I felt about Susie G. When I’d first met her she’d been going out with my copper pal Mike Dylan, and her old man had been in his pomp as Lord Provost of Glasgow. Neither of them were around any more; Mike had succumbed to a terminal case of greed, and a policeman’s bullet, while Jack Gantry had succumbed to several men in white coats, who’d taken him away to a place in the country, with a very high fence topped off with razor wire.
After those misfortunes, Susie was left to rescue the family construction group from potential disaster, which she did with a skill that made a nonsense of Darwin and his theories. Not many people knew that Jack wasn’t her real father, and many of those who didn’t insisted that his business skills were in her blood. (The same sycophants passed over the fact that he was barking mad, and that by their logic Susie might have been too.)
The business was all she had, though; that apart, she had been a lonely wee lass when she’d turned up on my doorstep in Spain, on the very day that Prim had gone off to be with her sick mother. She didn’t stay lonely for long, mind you.
I learned a lot in those few days, most of it about myself; I won’t say that Susie made me a better person, but she sure as hell made me more honest with myself. Until then, I’d gone through life subconsciously pretending to be like my father, who is unquestionably the nicest man I’ve ever known. Macintosh Blackstone does not have an enemy in the world, and that’s the truth. . made all the more amazing by the fact that he’s a dentist.
The thing was that, as his son, I just assumed that everyone thought that the sun shone out of my arse as well. Everyone at school was my pal. . it didn’t occur to me for years that in a small town no one in their right mind would have wanted to fall out with the local dentist’s lad. . and afterwards I was everyone else’s. I was good old Oz, short for Osbert. . a laugh in itself. . the finest lad you’d meet in a day’s march. Okay, so my police career was so brief that afterwards I didn’t even talk about it. . well, we’re not all cut out for a disciplined service. Okay, so I was a bit of a one for the ladies. . well, we all sow our wild oats, don’t we. Okay, so I was laid back to the point of indolence. . well, we don’t want to work any harder than we have to, do we?
Then I met Primavera Phillips; my luck changed, my life changed, and somewhere along the line, Oz Blackstone emerged from the chrysalis as the man who had been evolving, someone who wasn’t nice all the time, but who stopped making excuses for his ruthlessness and his nastiness and who even enjoyed it on occasion.
I still think my Dad is the greatest man in the world; but I know now that he’s too hard an act for me to follow. (Actually I think the same thing may have dawned on my sister Ellie. Since she dumped her apathetic husband, she’s turned into a mid-thirties raver and she loves every minute of it.)
In time, I would probably have worked all that stuff out without Susie Gantry’s intervention, but I thank her for it nonetheless. She opened my eyes to me, and she opened them to Prim as well, to what she was really like, and what we were like as a couple.
As for what she taught me about herself. . let’s just say that if the Glimmer Twins had met her, they’d never have written ‘You can’t always get what you want’. On the other hand, when Steve Winwood wrote ‘While you see a chance, take it. .’
Susie saw me there, on my own in Spain, and she knew me. She was needing, she saw her chance, and she took it. Love had nothing to do with it. As she said often enough, ‘Susie doesn’t love.’ Just as well, I told myself; neither does Oz.
I liked her, though. I liked her frankness, and I liked her honesty. . plus, she was tremendous under the duvet.
She didn’t turn up in Spain with a game plan. . not one that involved banging me, anyway. If she had, the baby probably wouldn’t have been part of it. But when she happened, it just seemed right, somehow. It didn’t alarm either of us, and it didn’t add to our expectations of each other; we had sorted out our relationship by that time.
‘What are you going to call her?’ I asked, as I followed her into the big living space that I knew all too well.
‘What are we going to call her, you mean. She’s your daughter as well. Or do you want to keep that a secret, for Prim’s sake?’
‘There’s no need for that. We’re finished.’
‘You haven’t left her, have you?’ she gasped. I thought I caught an edge of concern in her voice, one that had little to do with Prim, and more with the prospect of me as a single man. ‘You said you were going to try to make it work.’
‘No I didn’t; I said I was going to go along with it at least until I’d finished the new movie with Miles. And no, I haven’t left her.’ I told her about Nicky Johnson and the Mexican lovenest.
‘Serves you right, I suppose,’ she said when I was finished, but with a smile.
‘No; it serves him right.’
‘That’s not fair; Prim’s not a bad girl. You treated her like shit on your shoe; that’s the truth of it.’
‘So did you. Fucking someone’s husband on his honeymoon is not the act of a friend.’
‘Ah, but I never said I liked her.’
I laughed. ‘So you’ll not be calling the baby Primavera, then.’
‘Hell, no. Actually, I was thinking about calling her Janet, maybe Jan for short. I really did like her. How would you feel about that?’
I wanted to pick her up and hug her, but I hung on to my cool. One of my new life rules is ‘Never get emotional’. It’s the same as being drunk; you tend to say things without a thought of the consequences. Right then I might just have asked Susie to marry me, and I couldn’t have been certain she’d have turned me down.
‘I’d feel fine,’ I told her. . a considerable understatement.
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ She smiled at me in a way she never had before. I think I realised in that moment that what we had between us was the closest we were going to get to total happiness for the rest of our lives.
‘So what do you want to do, now you’re here?’ she asked.
I scratched my chin. ‘Well, looking at the size of you, I suppose a shag’ll be out of the question.’