Longshot. Part 16

She went without haste and returned with a Bordeaux-shaped bottle and a sensible corkscrew, both of which she handed over.

Tremayne said, as I liberated the Chateau Kirwan, 'Is that stuff any good?'

'Very,' I said, smelling the healthy cork.

'It's all grape-juice as far as I'm concerned. If you like the stuff, put it on the shopping list.'

'The shopping list,' Mackie explained, 'is a running affair pinned to the kitchen corkboard. Whoever does the shopping takes the list with him. Or her.'

Perkin, slouching in an armchair, said I might as well get used to the idea of doing the shopping myself, particularly if I liked eating.

'Tremayne takes Gareth to the supermarket sometimes,' he said, 'and that's about it. Or Dee-Dee goes, if there's no milk for the coffee three days running.' He looked from me to Mackie. 'I used to think it quite normal until I married a sensible housekeeper.'

Perkin, I thought, as he reaped a smile from his wife, was a great deal more relaxed than on the evening before, though the faint hostility he'd shown towards me was still there. Tremayne asked him his opinion of the verdict on Nolan and Perkin consulted his gla.s.s lengthily as if seeking illumination.

'I suppose,' he said finally, 'that I'm glad he isn't in jail.'

It was a pretty ambiguous statement after so much thought, but Mackie looked pleasantly relieved. Only she of the three, it was clear, cared much for Nolan the man. To father and son, having Nolan in jail would have been an inconvenience and an embarra.s.sment which they were happy to avoid.

Looking at the two of them, the differences were as powerful as the likenesses. If one discounted Tremayne's hair, which was grey where Perkin's was brown, and the thickness in Tremayne's neck and body that had come with age, then physically they were of one cloth; but where Tremayne radiated strength, Perkin was soggy; where Tremayne was a leader, Perkin retreated. Tremayne's love was for living horses, Perkin's was for pa.s.sive wood.

It came as a shock to me to wonder if Tremayne wanted his own achievements written in an inheritable book because Perkin's work would be valuable in two hundred years. Wondered if the strong father felt he had to equal his weaker son. I dismissed the idea as altogether too subtle and as anyway tactless in an employed biographer.

Gareth came home with his usual air of a life lived on the run and eyed me with disapproval as I sat in an armchair drinking wine.

'I thought you said-' he began, and stopped, shrugging, an onset of good manners vying with disappointment.

'I will,' I said.

'Oh, really? Now?'

I nodded.

'Good. Come on, then, I'll show you the freezers.'

'Let him alone,' Mackie said mildly. 'Let him finish his drink.'

Perkin reacted to this harmless remark with irritation. 'As he said he'd cook, let him do it.'

'Of course,' I said cheerfully, getting up. I glanced at Tremayne. 'All right with you?'

'You're all right with me until further notice,' he said, and Perkin didn't like that testimony of approval either, but Gareth did.

'You're home and dry with Dad,' he told me happily, steering me through the kitchen. 'What did you do to him?'

'Nothing.'

'What did you do to me?' he asked himself comically, and answered himself, 'Nothing. I guess that's it. You don't have to do anything, it's just the way you are. The freezers are through here, in the utility room. If you go straight on through the utility room you get to the garage. Through that door there.' He pointed ahead to a heavy-looking door furnished with business-like bolts. 'I keep my bike through there.'

There were two freezers, both upright, both with incredible contents.

'This one,' Gareth said, opening the door, 'is what Dad calls the peezer freezer.'

'Or the pizza frizza?' I suggested.

'Yes, that too.'

It was stacked with pizzas and nothing else, though only half full.

'We eat our way down to the bottom,' Gareth said reasonably, 'then fill up again every two or three months.'

'Sensible,' I commented.

'Most people think we're mad.'

He shut that freezer and opened the other, which proved to contain four packs of beef sandwiches, fifty to a pack. There were also about ten sliced loaves (for toast, Gareth explained), one large turkey (someone gave it to Tremayne for Christmas), pints galore of chocolate ripple ice-cream (Gareth liked it) and a whole lot of bags of ice-cubes for gins and tonic.

Was it for this, I surmised wildly, that I'd sold my soul?

'Well,' I said in amus.e.m.e.nt, 'what do we have in the larder?'

'What larder?'

'Cupboards, then.'

'You'd better look,' Gareth said, closing the second freezer's door. 'What are you going to make?'

I hadn't the faintest idea; but what Tremayne, Gareth and I ate not very much later was a hot pie made of beef extracted from twenty defrosted sandwiches and chopped small, then mixed with undiluted condensed mushroom soup (a find) and topped with an inch-thick layer of sandwich breadcrumbs fried crisp.

Gareth watched the simple cooking with fascination and I found myself telling him about the techniques I'd been taught of how to live off the countryside without benefit of shops.

Tried worms aren't bad,' I said.

'You're kidding me.'

'They're packed with protein. Birds thrive on them. And what's so different from eating snails?'

'Could you really live off the land? You yourself?'

'Yes, sure,' I said. 'But you can die of malnutrition eating just rabbits.'

'How do you know these things?'

'It's my business, really. My trade.' I told him about the six travel guides. 'The company used to send me to all those places to set up holiday expeditions for real rugged types. I had to learn how to get them out of all sorts of local trouble, especially if they struck disasters like losing all their equipment in raging torrents. I wrote the books and the customers weren't allowed to set off without them. Mind you, I always thought the book on how to survive would have been lost in the raging torrent with everything else, but maybe they would remember some of it, you never know.'

Gareth, helping make breadcrumbs in a blender, said a shade wistfully, 'How did you ever start on something like that?'

'My father was a camping nut. A naturalist. He worked in a bank, really, and still does, but every spare second he would head for the wilds, dragging me and my mother along. Actually I took it for granted, as just a fact of life. Then after college I found it was all pretty useful in the travel trade. So bingo.'