Twice Shy

I functioned on two cylinders throughout the next day and in the evening Jonathan rang, as he sometimes did, keeping a long-distance finger on little brother's pulse. He had never grown out of the in loco parentis habit and nor, to be honest, did I want him to. Jonathan, six thousand miles away, was still my anchor, my most trusted friend.

A pity about Sarah, of course. I would have seen more of Jonathan if I could have got on better with Sarah. She irritated me like an allergy rash with her bossiness and her sarcasm, and I'd never been able to please her. I'd thought at one time that their marriage was on the way to the cemetery and I hadn't grieved much, but somehow or other they'd retreated from the brink. She certainly seemed softer with Jonathan nowadays, but when I was around the old acid rose still in her voice, and I never stayed long in their house. Never staying long in one place was in fact, according to her, one of my least excusable faults. I ought to buckle down, she said, and get a proper job.

She was looking splendid these days, slender as a girl and tawny with the sun. Many, I supposed, seeing the fair hair, the good bones, the still tight jawline, the grace of movement, would have envied Jonathan his young-at-forty-five wife. And all, as far as I knew, without the plastic surgeon's knife.

'How's Sarah?' I said automatically. I'd been asking after her religiously most of my life, and not caring a jot. The truce she and I maintained for Jonathan's sake was fragile; a matter of social form, of empty politeness, of unfelt smiles, of asking after health.

'She's fine,' he said. 'Just fine.' His voice after all these years had taken on a faint inflection and many of the idioms of his adopted country. 'She sends you her best.'

'Thanks.'

'And you?' he said.

'Well enough considering some nutter hit me on the head.'

'What nutter?'

'Some guy who came here and lay in wait, and took a bash at me.'

'Are you all right?'

'Yeah. No worse than a racing fall.'

'Who was he?' he asked.

'No idea. He asked for directions from the pub, but he'd got the wrong man. Maybe he asked for Terry… it sounds much the same. Anyway, he blasted off when he found he'd made a slight error, so that's that.'

'And no harm done?' he asked insistently.

'Not to me, but you should see my radio.'

'What?'

'When he found I was the wrong guy, he took it out on my radio. I wasn't awake, mind you, at that point. But when I came round, there it was, smashed.'

There was a silence on the other end, and I said, 'Jonathan? Are you still there?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Did you see the man? What did he look like?'

I told him: fortyish, greyish, yellowish. 'Like a bull,' I said.

'Did he say anything?'

'Something about me not being who he expected, and fuck it.'

'How did you hear him if you were knocked out?'

I explained. 'But all that's left is a sore spot for the hair brush,' I said, 'so don't give it another thought.'

We talked about this and that for the rest of our customary six minutes, and at the end he said, 'Will you be in tomorrow night?'

'Yes, I should think so.'

'I might call you back,' he said.

'OK.' I didn't bother to ask him why. He had a habit of not answering straightforward questions with straightforward answers if it didn't suit him, and his noncommittal announcement told me that this was one of those times.

We said amicable goodbyes and Cassie and I went to bed and renewed our normal occupation.

'Do you think we'll ever be tired of it?' she said.

'Ask me when we're eighty.'

'Eighty is impossible,' she said, and indeed it seemed so to us both.

Cassie went to Cambridge every day in her little yellow car to spend eight hours behind a building society desk discussing mortgages. Cassie's mind was full of terms like with-profits endowment and early redemption charges, and I thought it remarkable, sometimes, that she'd never suggested a twenty-five year millstone round my own neck.

I'd once before tried living with someone: nearly a year with a cuddly blonde who wanted marriage and nestlings. I'd felt stifled and gone off to South America and behaved abominably, according to her parents. But Cassie wasn't like that: if she wanted the same things she didn't say so, and maybe she realised, as I did, that I always came back to England, that the homing instinct was fairly strong. One day, I thought, one distant day… and maybe with Cassie… I might, just perhaps, and with all options open, buy a house.

One could always sell it again, after all.

Jonathan did telephone again the following evening, and came straight to the point.

'Do you,' he said, 'remember that summer when Peter Keithly got killed in his boat?'

'Of course, I do. One doesn't actually forget one's own brother being tangled up in a murder.'

'It's fourteen years ago,' he said doubtfully.

'Things that happen when you're fifteen stay sharp in your mind for ever.'

'I guess you're right. Anyway, you know who I mean by Angelo Gilbert.'

'The bumper-off,' I said.

'As you say. I think the man who hit you on the head may be Angelo Gilbert.'

A great one, my brother, for punching the air out. On a distinctly short breath I said, 'You sound very calm about it.' But then of course he would. He was always calm. In the scariest crisis it would be Jonathan who spoke and acted as if nothing unusual was happening. He'd carried me out of a fire once as a small child and I'd thought that somehow nothing was the matter, nothing was really wrong with the flames and the roaring and crashing all around us, because he'd looked down at me and smiled.

'I checked up,' he said. 'Angelo Gilbert got out of prison seventeen days ago, on parole.'

'Out-'

'It would take him a while to orientate himself and to find you. I mean, if it was him, he would have thought you were me.'

I sorted my way through that and said, 'What makes you think it was him?'

'Your radio, really. He seemed to enjoy destroying things like that. Televisions. Stereos. And he'd be forty now, and his father reminded me of a bull. What you said took me right back.'

'Good grief.'

'Yes.'

'You really think it was him?'

'I'm afraid it's possible.'

'Well,' I said, 'now that he knows he got the wrong guy, maybe he won't bother me again.'

'Monsters don't go away if you don't look at them.'

'What?'

'He may come back.'

'Thanks very much.'

'William, take it seriously. Angelo was dangerous in his twenties and it sounds as if he still is. He never did get the computer programs he killed for, and he didn't get them because of me. So take care.'

'It might not have been him.'

'Act as if it was.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'So long, Professor.' The wryness in my voice must have been plain to him.

'Keep off horses,' he said.

I put the receiver down ruefully. Horses, to him, meant extreme risk.

'What's the matter?' Cassie said. 'What did he say?'

'It's all a very long story.'

Tell it.'

I told it on and off over the next few hours, remembering things in pieces and not always in the other they'd happened, much as Jonathan had told it to me all those years ago. Before going off to Canada to shoot he had collected me straight from school at the end of that summer term and we'd gone to Cornwall, just the two of us, for a few days' sailing. We'd had great holidays there two or three times before, but that year it blew a gale and poured with rain continuously, and to amuse me while we sat and stared through the dripping yacht club windows waiting for the improvement which never came, he'd told me about Mrs O'Rorke and Ted Pitts and the Gilberts, and how he'd stuck magnets in the cassettes. I'd been so fascinated that I hadn't minded missing the sailing.

I wasn't sure that I'd been shown every alley of the labyrinth; my quiet schoolmasterly brother had been reticent in patches and I'd always guessed that it was because probably in some way he'd used his guns. He never would let me touch them, and the only thing I ever knew him to be scared of was having his precious firearms certificate taken away.