booths along the far wall were occupied by couples or two or three men. Four televisions were installed high up on the wall, all four tuned to the same channel which, at that moment, was showing a murderous fight between two huge ice hockey players, during a match, which rapidly escalated until all the players became involved in the brawl and the referee lost his balance and sprawled on his back on the ice.
‘So,’ Marianne Auphan put the beer down on the bar, ‘we can stay here until the last dog is hung, or we can go to my place on Veterans Drive.’
‘The last dog?’
‘Until they stop serving, but that’s not until two a.m. My apartment’s just twenty minutes’ slow drive away.’ She sipped her beer. ‘Well, it’s what we’ve both been thinking since we met, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Thomson Ventnor replied in a shaking voice. ‘It is what we’ve been thinking, already.’
George Hennessey found himself drifting off to a pleasant sleep when the noise jolted him into waking watchfulness. It had, he thought, been a pleasant evening. As was his normal practice, he had returned home to his house on Thirsk Road in Easingwold to be met by an excited Oscar. He had then taken a mug of steaming hot tea into the back garden and, whilst standing on the patio, sipping it, had told his late wife of his day, knowing that she was hearing him, listening to every word. Later he had eaten a simple but wholesome meal of pork chops and as his meal settled, had read a readable yet scholarly account of the Russian convoys during the Second World War. The author was, he found, able to evoke the freezing conditions and the mountainous seas and Hennessey learned that a near miss of a high explosive shell during the Second World War could still sink a ship by ‘springing’ its plates. Later, his meal settled, he had taken Oscar for his customary evening walk and had then walked alone into Easingwold for a pint of brown and mild, just one, before last orders were called. Later still he was about to succumb to a well-earned sleep when he heard the noise.
It was the sound of a motorbike being driven at speed along Thirsk Road, possibly, he believed, by a young man who thinks ‘it’ can’t happen to him, or in these days of endless leisure possibly, Hennessey pondered, by a ‘grey biker’ who might see only frailty and senility ahead of him and so was careless of other road users, prepared to take the risk that ‘it’ might very well happen. In either case, the sound transported Hennessey back to the Greenwich of his boyhood when ‘it’ had happened to his elder brother. He recalled how Graham had lavished loving care on his silver Triumph, of how Graham would take him for a ride on Sunday mornings out from Greenwich, across the river at Tower Bridge, back across Westminster Bridge, round Blackheath Park and home. Then there was that horrible, horrible fateful night when he, abed, heard Graham kick his machine into life and listened as he drove away down Trafalgar Road, straining his ears to catch the last decibel of sound. Then there were the other sounds: ships on the river, the Irish drunk walking up Colomb Street, beneath his window, reciting his Hail Marys. Then, then. . that knock on the door, that distinct police officer’s knock, tap, tap. . tap. . the hushed voices, followed by his mother’s wail and his father coming to his room, fighting tears, to tell him that Graham had ‘ridden to heaven’, to ‘save a place for us’.
Then there was the funeral. The first summer funeral of Hennessey’s life and he saw how alien, how incongruous it was to conduct the ceremony of the hole and the stone when flowers are in full bloom and butterflies and bees are in the air; then there was the inadvertently insensitive playing of ‘Greensleeves’ from the ice-cream van, unseen, but close by. Two decades later he was to have the same feelings as he scattered his wife’s ashes in the garden at the rear of his house, also on a summer’s day. His father, by contrast, had had the fortunate good grace to die in the winter of the year and Hennessy thought it so fitting, so very fitting that the coffin was lowered into rock hard soil amid a snow flurry.
Hennessey had lived with the gap in his life where an elder brother should have been and always for him was the question, what manner of man would he have been? At the time he died, Graham had worried, if not alarmed, his parents by announcing his plan to leave his safe job at the bank and go to art college and there to specialize in photography so as to become a photographer. George Hennessey was certain that for his brother it would not be the sleazy world of the fashion photographer or the sniping world of the paparazzi but rather, for Graham, it would be the noble world of photo journalism, where a single image can alter a world opinion. He would have married, George Hennessey believed, successfully, he would have been a good father and a good uncle to his nephew Charles. He would have been a brother George Hennessey would have loved and would have been proud of. . all the might haves, and all the would haves, and all the could haves, and all the never will knows all taken from him because of a patch of oil on Trafalgar Road all those years ago. The thoughts. . the demons then, that night, kept whirring and whirling around Hennessey’s mind, torturing him, until the beginning of the dawn chorus, when sleep mercifully rescued him.
FIVE
Monday, March thirtieth, 09.15 hours
Park Gate Christian Retirement Community was a new build development at the south-east side of Barrie, close to the beginning of flat, open country, a single track railway line and local amenities, yet offered easy access to the modest city centre should any resident wish to travel in to downtown Barrie. At the entrance was a tree, the trunk of which had been carved with human-like faces evoking a totem pole of native Canadian culture. Yellich parked his car in the small car park close to the main entrance and reported to the reception desk. He saw small shops, a hairdresser, a communal hall for meetings and church services, and a dining hall. All was clean and fresh and new and, he thought, it was also comfortable and homely. The warm mannered receptionist directed him to a tunnel from the main block to the residential block. ‘Very useful in winter,’ she explained, ‘but convenient at any time.’
At the end of the tunnel — which was about two hundred feet long, Yellich guessed, and, intriguingly for a first time passenger, bent in the middle — he took the stairs up to the ground floor and then easily located the flat he sought. He pressed the doorbell. The door was opened by a tall, silver-haired woman who beamed her welcome, ‘Mr Yellich, from England?’
‘Yes, madam.’ Yellich took off his hat.
‘Reception buzzed me right now, letting me know you had arrived. . real good of them. Do come in. A visitor from England. . my. .’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ Yellich entered the small but neat and cosy flat with views towards the woodland at the rear of the complex. ‘It’s good of you to receive me at such short notice and so early.’ He saw a small kitchen cum dining room, a sitting room, a toilet/shower and a bedroom. All an elderly person could want or need, and especially one within a self-contained supervised community of similarly aged persons. It was, he thought, not unlike a university hall of residence except for those at the other end of adulthood. He was well able to envisage similar complexes opening in the UK especially given Britain’s ageing population. ‘It’s very good of you to see me,’ he repeated.
‘No worries, it gets me up and I am now free for the rest of the day.’
‘Well, thanks, anyway.’ Yellich smelled the scent of air freshener.
‘Please, do take a seat. We seniors do so value visitors, even those on business. We see each other, and our relatives visit, but a new face is so welcome. . and from overseas. I take communal supper. I will have something to say at the table this evening.’
‘Communal supper?’
‘Yes, it’s my choice. We can prepare all our meals if we wish or have all our meals in the dining room and anything in between. I don’t eat much breakfast or lunch and so I prepare those meals in here in my little apartment but have booked in for the evening meal each day and that practise gets me out as well as keeping me in touch with the other seniors. Coffee? Tea?’
‘Tea for me, please.’
‘I ought to have known. . you English and your tea.’ She smiled and went into her kitchen.
Moments later when Yellich and the lady upon whom he was calling each sat holding a cup of tea served in good china cups upon matching saucers, Yellich asked, ‘Can I confirm that you are Rebecca James?’
‘Yes, I am. Born to adversity James. That is I.’
‘Adversity?’
