“Quite sure, thank you. I’ll be driving later.”
“Oh, right.”
There was a silence between them. Grant Roxby was having difficulty hiding displeasure at this interruption to his Sunday afternoon. But he managed to dredge up a bit more conversation. “Are you a therapist like Jude then, Carole?”
“Good heavens, no.”
The vehemence with which she spoke gave him hope. Perhaps she was on his side after all. “When I was growing up,” he said, “the first port of call wasn’t a therapist or a counsellor or a psychologist. If you’d got a problem, you sorted it out for yourself.”
“That’s how I was brought up too,” Carole agreed.
“Built up self-reliance, that approach.” He gestured round the splendour of Pelling House. “I wouldn’t have all this if I’d gone running for help every time I hit a problem in my professional life – or in my private life, come to that. God helps those who help themselves.”
Carole nodded. She’d forgiven Grant his rudeness now. He was talking an awful lot of good sense.
“So I don’t think God’s likely to do a lot for my son.”
“Oh?”
“Harry couldn’t help himself in an unmanned sweet shop.”
“Ah.”
Harry’s bedroom contained everything thought essential by a privileged teenager in the early twenty-first century – television, CD and minidisk players, computer, DVD player, mobile phone. All the equipment looked brand-new, as though it had been bought at the time of the move to Pelling House – perhaps even as some kind of bribe or compensation for moving the boy away from his friends to Fedborough.
To Jude’s mind the room looked distressingly tidy for a fifteen-year-old’s. Not that Harry looked that old. “He’s rather a young fifteen,” Kim had confided as they went up the stairs.
He was hunched in front of a computer game, his whole body a stiff line of resentment. He didn’t look round when his mother knocked and entered. Though he had been told Jude was coming and couldn’t do anything to stop that happening, he was damned if he was going to be cooperative.
“Harry. Harry, don’t be rude! You have a guest.”
“No, Mum. You have a guest. I wouldn’t invite anyone down to this scummy place. Nobody I know’d want to come.”
“That is not the point, Harry. There is a guest in your room and I will not have you behaving – ”
“It’s all right, Kim.” Jude had been frequently struck by the way parents attracted to alternative lifestyles tended to be extremely traditional and proscriptive with their children. “Harry,” she went on, “I just wanted to talk to you about…you know, what you found in the cellar. It must have been a terrible shock for you.”
“I wouldn’t have found it if we hadn’t moved to this piss-awful place!”
“Harry! How dare you use language like that?”
“Why? Dad uses it all the time.”
“That is not the point.”
“I’d have thought it was exactly the point. When Daddoes something, it’s all fine and wonderful. When I do exactly the same thing, it’s crap.”
“Harry! You just – ”
“Kim. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to Harry on his own.”
“Well, I’m not sure if – ”
“You asked me to do this. I think I should be allowed to choose the way I do it.”
The calmness with which the words were spoken did nothing to diminish their power. Kim Roxby’s head bowed acceptance. “I’ll be downstairs if you…” She trailed out, closing the door behind her.
A long silence reigned in the room. The boy, determined to make no concession to Jude’s presence, stabbed at the controls of his computer game.
“All right,” she said, “so you hate Fedborough.”
“Wouldn’t anyone? It’s the arsehole of the world.”
“And you’re just passing through?” The line was an old one, but he couldn’t have given her a more perfect cue for it.
A moment was required for the joke to register, but then Harry couldn’t help himself from giggling. He turned towards her. The spots on his face were new and shiny, the kind that would reappear almost immediately after being squeezed away.
Jude felt deep sympathy for the awfulness of adolescence, but that didn’t stop her from pressing home her advantage. “No surprise you hate being transplanted down here. No one likes being taken away from their friends.”
“No.” A moment of potential empathy came and went. “If you’re about to tell me all the benefits of living in Fedborough, forget it.”
“I’m not. I wouldn’t like to live here.”
He was thrown. “I thought you did live here.”
“No. I’m in Fethering. Down on the coast.”
“Oh. Well, it’s not that different. Still not London.”
“True.”
“Anyway, I’m sure it’s fine for old people, people who’ve retired down here, but I haven’t got to that stage of my life.”
“No. At your age you should be having a good time.”
“What chance have I got of that in a dump like this?”
“Presumably your parents knew you weren’t keen on the idea before you came?”
“I kept telling them. Whether they took it in or not is another matter. When Dad gets a bee in his bonnet about something, he does it, regardless of what anyone else thinks on the subject. And Mum…well, she just agrees with him all the time. Anything for a quiet life.”
Jude was impressed by how shrewdly the boy had assessed his parents’ relationship. “Putting the fact that you’re stuck in Fedborough on one side for a moment…”
“How can I put it on one side? I’m aware of it every minute of the day. There’s nowhere to go down here, nothing to do.”
“But – ”
“Don’t start talking to me about all the wonderful scenery around, and the walks I can go on, because who wants to go on a bloody walk? And I’m not into ponies like the girls are. Animals are just boring. And I don’t care that Dad’s buying a bloody sailing boat! You’ll never catch me on that thing!”
“I wasn’t going to say any of that, Harry. I was going to say that presumably you can still keep in touch with your London friends.”
“How?”
She pointed to his mobile phone. “That. Or you can email them.”
“Yes,” he admitted truculently. “I could.”
Suddenly Jude saw it all. Harry Roxby’s problems didn’t begin with the move to Fedborough. He hadn’t had many friends in London either. He was suffering that terrible teenage sense of isolation. Geographical isolation only compounded a pain that was already there.
But she was too canny to say anything to him about her realization. Instead, she abruptly changed the subject.
“Let’s talk about when we last met, Harry. When you found the torso in the cellar…”
All colour drained from the boy’s face.
Fourteen
Downstairs, Grant Roxby and Carole Seddon were getting on much better than had initially seemed likely. Their mutual contempt for the excesses of healing and psychiatry had bonded them. She’d even, in spite of the car, accepted his second offer of a glass of wine.
Kim had cleared the lunch things around them. Grant made no offer to help, increasing the impression that he ruled his household in a rather traditional manner. The two girls were off having riding lessons. Being younger, they had been attracted more quickly than Harry to the charms of country life.
Carole had no difficulty in bringing the conversation round to the Felling House torso. “Must be a relief for you to be allowed back into your own house.”
“Yes. The police were surprisingly sensitive, caused as little disruption as they could, but even so…” He chuckled. “Mind you, what happened may have speeded up our assimilation into Fedborough society. Everybody in the town knows exactly who we are now, and they all feel like they’ve got carte blanche to come up and talk to us in the street.”