The best place for Jed during all of this, she'd decided, would be with his minder; she'd worked out a special weekend rate with Mrs Neary some time ago and had been working on her conscience ever since. It felt too much as if she was shunting him off for her own convenience, even though she knew that it was the only sane and sensible thing to do. She'd explained that he'd be staying away for the two nights, which he'd never done before; she only hoped she'd explained it well enough. Just before seven she left Jed to pick out some toys and books to be taking with him — and it's got to be a portable amount, she warned — and went to check that she wouldn't be needed for a while.
Liston and company were out on the lawn behind the house, where an old fashioned wrought iron table and some matching chairs had been set for them in the evening sunlight. There were the long shadows of wine bottles and glasses across the table, some of the bottles already empty.
"Mineral water for the invalid," she heard someone say as they handed Dizzy a glass, and she saw Dizzy give a wry smile.
"I suppose that's me," he said.
He was in his late thirties, and he had the look of a well worn schoolboy. His face was young, but the mileage showing on it was high. Nevertheless, for all that he'd been around there was definitely something that was attractive and appealing about him; only his eyes gave him away, because they could turn cold and introspective while those around him were whooping it up. Dizzy knew the exact value of the people he kept, which was why he'd given the estate management job to Diane and not to one of his regular hangers on.
"Your lawn's a bit overgrown, Dizzy," one of Dizzy's Women said, looking critically at the grass around her feet.
"You can cut it for me after the party," he told her, which everybody took to be a big joke.
Summer in the country, was the toast echoing in Diane's ears as she went back inside; and she shuddered, and wondered if she could think up something really cutting to say the first time one of them tried to treat her like a servant.
Jed had made his selection; three toys stood out on their own in the middle of the floor, these being the ones that he reckoned he could do without.
Diane settled down, and started patiently to negotiate.
In the end she got him down to his Micronauts, his plastic airport, and a bag of Dinky cars. For books he had two by Maurice Sendak, the Skeleton one, and a well worn Pinocchio using pictures from the film. She put everything into a carrier and took this out to the car with his overnight case, and then she came back to get him into his shoes and his coat. And then, because she didn't want to be saying goodbye to him any sooner than she had to, she took him for a wander through the main part of the hall to see how the preparations were going.
The lights had been rigged but not yet tested, and cabling still lay everywhere. Signs for the cloakrooms and toilets were already in place, and two posts and a rope had been set at the top of the stairs to keep visitors out of the private apartments.
It all seemed kind of strange to Diane. The way she'd always known it, when you decided to throw a party, you threw a party; you pushed back the furniture, you got all the food together yourself, you invited close friends who knew each other and for a while you let them invade your most private and personal space. And then when it was all over, you threw open the windows and you vacuumed, and as likely as not while you were doing this you'd find someone left asleep behind the sofa. Not like this, people hired in to do everything. Dizzy might be well-off, but Diane knew from the estate accounts that he wasn't rolling-in-it rich. The estate and the house might both be high value assets, but the conditions of his inheritance forced him to keep both intact and he got little currency out of them beyond the woodland leases and the shooting rights.
No, the fact of it was, Diane and her employer might easily have been two different species for the way that they looked at the world. This wasn't going to be a party. It was to be a local public relations exercise, bought and paid for — nothing more.
In the middle of the hall Diane said, "Well, Jed, what do you think?" And Jed took another look around and made a face that suggested mild indifference lying over mild disapproval.
Diane knew exactly what he meant.
"Yeah," she said. "I'll be glad when it's all over, too."
And then together they walked out to the Toyota.
TWENTY
That night, after Alina had gone out, Pete decided to find out exactly where she went.
She couldn't have gone too far. She'd been out ten minutes, fifteen at the most. And wherever she might wander, she always set out in the same direction.
The path down to the lake shore was steep and difficult, and several times he almost fell. Roots tripped him and rocks made him slip, and in places the path was so soft-edged that it simply dropped away from under him in the darkness. And yet this was a descent that she made barefoot. Pete could only guess that she must move with the grace of a gazelle.
A breeze was coming in from the water, stirring the branches overhead and sending a low, unearthly moan through the woodland.
And as Pete emerged by the rocky edge of the water, he saw her.
She was fairly easy to make out against the glitter on the lake. She looked almost as if she was standing on the surface itself, although Pete knew that there were rocks and shallows and that the effect was no more than illusion. Her head was bowed, she was leaning forward.
And, as he could now hear, she was singing softly to the water.
It was strange music, full of strange sounds that he knew he couldn't hope to understand. She was keeping her voice low, much as one might while singing a lullaby to the one wakeful soul in a house full of sleeping children. He felt his skin tingle, he felt the fine hair all along his spine react as if a low current had been run through him.
She reached down and, for a moment, Pete was half expecting some response; a stag, perhaps, breaking the surface of the lake and climbing out to her, water streaming from its flanks as it came to her hand. She stood there like a dark messiah with some unseen flock before her, and Pete couldn't help but begin to assemble shapes out of the grainy darkness and to give them solidity and movement.
But nothing moved, and nothing save the breeze disturbed the calm of the water. And then she straightened, and the illusion faded.
She spoke.
"Don't ever follow me again, Peter," she said, totally unexpectedly; she hadn't even looked his way, and he felt as if he'd been caught in a searchlight's beam in the middle of some guilty act. Everything that he'd had in mind to say to her was suddenly gone from his head, his mind as blank as a new wall and his belly full of sudden, inexplicable dread.
She turned to him now. She was a silhouette against the moonlight that sparkled on the lake.
"It's not an easy path," she said. "You could fall."
There were a hundred things that he knew he ought to say.
But he simply said, "I know."
"Go back, now, Peter. Please."
He wanted to ask her what she thought she was doing.
But instead he turned, and slowly started to make his way back up toward the house.
PART FOUR
“Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die”
TWENTY-ONE
Ted was having trouble picking out a shirt; his sister had given him a couple of new ones last Christmas, but this was the first time that he'd really had to study them with regard to presentability. The one with the fine stripes looked slightly flashier, but he'd made a better ironing job of the plain one. In the end he decided on the stripes — after half an hour of wear, the ironing job wasn't going to matter anyway. Now he'd have to pick out a tie. He had two of those, as well… Ted reckoned that, like Pete McCarthy, he simply wasn't one of nature's tie wearers. He certainly hadn't done anything like this in ages. He'd once thought of asking one of the Venetz sisters out, but they were pretty well inseparable; a turndown didn't worry him so much as the prospect of being accepted by one and so giving offence to the other. And where would he have taken her? You could hardly take a woman to her own restaurant, but because of his limited social life he knew of nowhere better. And somehow, he couldn't imagine either of them coming around to the house for some beers and a pizza and a John Wayne movie on the video.