over a year or two ago, some family gathering. Sir Adrian’s birthday, was it? If memory served, that had gone about as well as the other gatherings at the manor house. It was well known in the village that their most famous resident could be “difficult.”
“He was seventy this year. Sometime in April, I think.”
Jim registered the vagueness, rightly aligning it in his mind with indifference, pretended or otherwise. Straightening a few bar towels unnecessarily, for Jim ran a spotless establishment (his lady wife saw to that), he said casually, “Artists can be difficult, can’t they?”
“I should know. I’m surrounded by them all the time.”
“Oh, aye. Still in the theatre, are you?”
Albert winced. To have to be asked whether one was still in the theatre was a lethal blow to any actor’s ego.
“I’m starting rehearsals for
“Bit late for dinner, isn’t it? Eight?” was Jim’s only comment. “Generally we finish serving ’round here at seven, except for stragglers who’ve lost their way into Cambridge.”
Albert grinned in spite of himself. He was still having a little trouble getting Jim’s face entirely into focus.
“Quite sensible, too. My father certainly would agree with you. I suppose that’s why this execrable family dinner of his is planned for seven tomorrow night. Did you know he was planning to get married?”
“Oh, aye, Watters was in here last week. He said he hadn’t met the bride-to-be, although he had the idea she was likely younger than Sir Adrian. He didn’t seem to know much else about what was going on. It all seemed to have come on sudden-like,” said Jim, as if he were discussing a flu epidemic.
“Good old Watters. ‘Younger.’ There’s an understatement for you. I’d say if you put her age around a third of my father’s you wouldn’t be far off.”
Jim found from somewhere behind the bar a filthy rag that had escaped his wife’s notice and proceeded to smear the highly polished surface of the bar with it. Outside, he could hear the wind kicking up to an unholy howl, the pub sign swinging madly on its hinges. Business would be slow tonight.
“It takes men like that sometimes, you know. Mind,” and here he lowered his voice, glancing around as if there were someone other than the cat to overhear. “Mind, if the missus were to pop off I might be tempted to give a younger woman a try-who’s there among us doesn’t have our daydreams, eh?” He paused, remembering just in time that Albert’s orientation was rumored to be in the other direction, and that his daydreams, presumably, were likewise directed the other way. Jim Tanner’s mind, broad enough to encompass most of the variety of the human condition (“You see it all in my line of work,” was his oft-repeated motto), still skittered away from wandering into any of the specifics of what might constitute Albert’s daydreams. Recovering himself, he went on, “But I think on the whole a more mature woman’s what a man my age needs. The missus when she were young were handful enough-a strong-minded lass, she were.” He paused, paying mental tribute to the red-headed virago that was the Mrs. Tanner of forty years ago. “Not sure I could live through that twice, not at my age. You follow?”
“Oh, I follow all right. You mean he’s set to make a gigantic fool of himself.” For the first time, anger seeped through the alcoholic haze that had kept Albert barely tamped down all day. “And a fool of his family, while he’s at it.” He attempted to slam his fist on the bar and missed. The impetus from the swing nearly pulled him off the barstool.
Registering the change in climate, Jim decided that Albert’s next beer would be one of those nonalcoholic pissbrews he kept on tap for just such occasions. When they were as drunk as young Albert here they didn’t even notice the difference.
“You do realize what this does to us, his children?”
“Oh, aye, emotionally like-”
“Emotionally be buggered.” Albert had known Jim most of his life and saw no need to pretend the Beauclerk- Fisk family laundry couldn’t stand an airing like anyone else’s, even had discretion ever been a part of his nature- which it had never been. Furthermore, a lifetime of theatre training, while rewarding him poorly in a financial sense, had encouraged a natural tendency to speak from the heart, regardless of the consequences.
“What I want to know is what he’s going to do with the will this time,” he continued now. “He’s owned and disowned most of us several dozen times over the years-I don’t think even Ruthven, the mercenary little shit, has any idea what Father is worth or how much, if anything, is liable to be Ruthven’s cut. And with this wedding… well, you do see, don’t you? We don’t any of us even know who this woman is.”
Jim, who at his death would probably be worth no more than 5,000 pounds once the Inland Revenue got through raping his widow, still could appreciate the similarities. Where there was money at stake, even piddling amounts, the heirs were sure to behave badly. Why, when Mrs. Cottle up the way had died last year her two daughters had had a regular knock-down drag-out in her front garden over some trinket the old lady’d probably bought at Torquay for ten pence back in the 1930s. Jim, whose reading was largely confined to racing forms, had no idea what a famous writer like Sir Adrian might have raked in over the years; he only knew the mansion itself was probably worth a few million. And if some stranger were to come along and grab the whole lot now that the old man was approaching his twilight years… yes, Jim could see where this could lead to a right mess in any family. ’Specially this one.
“Sarah thinks-”
Just then, the wind caught the door, blowing it open with a crash. Its squat medieval frame was filled to capacity by a large form in black. Both Jim and the cat jumped; the cat was not seen again for many hours. As Jim told his regulars later, it looked like nothing so much as a witch blown in on the rising storm. Had he had either Albert’s theatrical background or his level of alcohol, he would have thought the entire cast of the witches’ scene in Macbeth had come crowding through the door at once.
“I recognized the car,” announced the apparition, unwrapping itself from a dripping black anorak.
“Sarah!”
Albert stumbled off the barstool, again righting himself just in time. He threw his arms around his sister as far as they could reach. Jim thought he looked like a drowning man clutching a rubber dinghy.
“I see you had the same thought I did,” said Sarah, gently disengaging herself. “No way am I going up to that madhouse without fortification. Jim!”
Sarah had two volumes, inaudible and bellowing. Her voice now rang out across the room, as if to be heard over a thronging crowd at the bar.
“How are you? Let’s see the wine list.”
Jim, who had two wines to his name, both plonk varietals in boxes from which he refilled the two bottles he kept behind the bar for appearances, was momentarily at a loss. Sarah, who shared her father’s passion for only the finest when it came to drink, sensed the problem and sighed. “Just bring me a red, then.”
She and Albert moved to a table in the corner near the fire.
“I decided I had to come,” she announced, looking around as if she’d somehow found herself in the wrong pub by accident. An antique scythe hung from the rafters just over her head, she noticed, and shifted her position a foot or so to the right.
Jim brought their drinks to the table and then discreetly disappeared toward the back.
“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of not being here,” said Albert.
“More or less my thinking, too.” Sarah was in a rare belligerent phase, thought Albert. She seemed all her life to have careened between knuckling under to their father and doing things designed to annoy him. Her weight-a bone, so to speak, of contention the whole time she was growing up-was one of those things. She was a pretty girl, Albert recognized, and had been heartbreakingly beautiful as a child, but by wearing no makeup and swathing herself in dark drapery she made sure no one would suspect. She gazed at him now out of blue eyes in a round face framed by a too-short brown fringe she clearly had cut herself, now plastered to her forehead in zigzag fashion by wind and rain.
“Has it occurred to you,” she continued, “that he’s done this deliberately? I mean, what else could get us out here in a howling gale like this?” She paused to wipe the fringe off her face, so that now it pointed skyward. “I’ve heard from Ruthven and George- they’re both coming, Ruthven with Lillian in tow, naturally. George is bringing a
