Lex remained silent for a moment, making a show of hesitating, of thinking it over before standing up and instructing Lucius to follow him to the kitchen.
Lex had never had any interest whatsoever in the law. He had applied for the student scholarship programme back at the farm because of its notoriously heavy workload. They plied you with textbooks and assignments and, later on, they set you up with internships at law firms. Being bogged down in precedents and case law gave Lex a viable excuse for not helping his brother to care for his grandfather. That was the crux of it. It took a special kind of person to care for a sufferer of the soulless wake. It took a selfless, patient, gentle kind of person and Lex simply did not have it in him.
‘I have to go and help Zachary with the new drayfus,’ Lucius said, sticking his head into Lex’s bedroom one day. ‘Can you feed Gramps for me?’
Lex winced. Can you feed him for me? As if he was a child who couldn’t do anything for himself. Considering the circumstances, the analogy was an apt one but still Lex felt angry when he heard people talk that way. Not angry at Lucius as such… just angry.
‘Can’t you see I’m studying?’ he snapped, gesturing to the open textbook.
Lucius gave him a black look. ‘He’s waiting. I’ve got him settled down in his chair. It’s vegetable soup and bread today. Be generous with the butter when you do the bread and if there are any crusts then give them to him, they’re his favourite. And make sure the soup isn’t too hot because he might burn his mouth and-’
‘I think I can manage it, thanks!’ Lex snapped.
‘All right,’ Lucius said with a shrug.
Lex turned his attention back to his textbook once his brother had gone, intending just to finish the paragraph he had been on. Then he decided to finish the page. He might as well finish the chapter. There was nothing terribly depressing about automatic resulting trusts, and they delayed the inevitable moment when he would have to go out and deal with his grandfather. Lex subscribed to the ostrich philosophy — if you buried your head in the sand deeply enough and pretended that a horrible situation was not really happening, you could almost convince yourself that it really wasn’t, and that took the edge off a little.
Unfortunately, Alistair Trent was hungry and had become bored with waiting. When he went into the kitchen to find Lucius, he somehow managed to knock the soup off the stove and burnt himself quite badly. Lex heard the noise from his room and rushed straight out to the kitchen, but it was already too late. He tried to calm his grandfather, implored him to hold his arms under the cold running water but it was no good and it was not until Lucius came and took over that the situation ceased to escalate. And then a little later there had been the most blazing row between Lex and his brother.
‘I ask you to do one tiny thing for me!’ Lucius raved. ‘And look what happens!’
‘You treat him like a child!’ Lex accused. ‘You can’t deny it!’
‘Of course I don’t deny it! To all intents and purposes he is a child!’
‘How dare you say that!’
‘You know it’s true,’ Lucius said, trying to be conciliatory. ‘Do you think I’m enjoying this?’
‘Yes!’ Lex snapped. ‘I think you’re enjoying it very much! You always were jealous of my relationship with him! You always wished that you could be as close to him as I was, only you never could because you just weren’t interesting enough for him! And now whenever he wants something he goes straight to you like a child; how gratifying that must be for you!’
Lucius never had been very good at confrontation. He would always cave in rather than prolong the argument, which only irritated Lex all the more. Why couldn’t he have some backbone for once?
‘All right, Lex,’ Lucius had said quietly. ‘Fine. I won’t ask any more favours of you, all right? Just go ahead and concentrate on your studies.’
‘I’ll hold you to that!’ Lex replied, quite determined that no makeshift reverse psychology was ever going to work on him.
Then, one evening, something happened and Lex snapped. He just couldn’t take it any more. So, after everyone had finally gone back to bed, he packed a bag and left, without saying goodbye and without looking back.
‘What about Zachary?’ Lucius asked, breaking in on Lex’s thoughts. He stood clutching the ferret to his chest as he gazed fearfully round the huge kitchen.
‘What about him?’ Lex asked.
‘He’s hungry, too.’
Lex sighed and waved his arm to encompass the room. ‘Help yourselves.’
There was a large metal table in the centre and a pantry that curved round two of the walls, stuffed from top to bottom with food, not all of which looked like it was supposed to be for humans.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Lex said, turning towards the door. ‘I need to figure out how to get this hat off.’
‘You’re not leaving us, are you?’ Lucius asked in alarm.
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll never find my way back without you!’
Lex sighed and sat down at the table.
‘Thank you,’ Lucius said.
Lex bit back the cruel retort. Why was he thanking him? Why did he always have to be so polite? It wasn’t as if Lex was going out of his way to accommodate him. Lex hated genuine politeness. Calculated politeness could serve a purpose sometimes but real, genuine politeness… that was something for hypocrites. Lex sat back and watched as Lucius fetched some food from the pantry for himself and then found a saucer and poured milk into it for Zachary.
‘No ferrets on the table,’ Lex said lazily.
‘You know he’s not a ferret,’ Lucius said with a touch of impatience.
‘No ferrets on the table,’ Lex repeated. ‘It’s my ship, I make the rules.’
‘It’s not your ship,’ Lucius sighed, picking Zachary up and putting him on the floor. ‘What happened to you, Lex? What happened to all your fine ideals about being a lawyer one day? You could have been wealthy and comfortable and respected. What could possibly have persuaded you to throw all that away?’
Lex shrugged. ‘It wasn’t exciting enough,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand. I never really wanted to be a lawyer.’
He had never truly had any fine ideals either. Very few people really did. There were almost always dark, gritty, secret motivators lurking behind the glossy golden surface. Lucius did not understand this.
‘I think it’s terrible,’ he said stiffly, picking at a cold slice of ham.
‘I know you do. That’s why my life will be extraordinary and exciting and bigger than I am. Whilst your life will be tedious and meaningless and flat. I’m making the best of what I’ve got. You’re just drifting meaninglessly through. It’s such a waste.’
‘Well, we can’t all be adventurers,’ Lucius said coldly. ‘Someone has to do the drudge work. Anyway, it’s kind of hard to have this discussion with you whilst you’re sitting there with that ridiculous hat stuck to your head. You look like an idiot. And you’ve put all of us at risk by wearing it.’
‘What can I say? I do like my hats,’ Lex drawled. ‘But I had better do something about this one. Take your ferret, we’re leaving. You can finish eating that on the bridge where Schmidt can babysit you.’
‘I wish you’d stop referring to Zachary as a ferret,’ Lucius sighed, carefully picking up the little weasel with both hands. ‘You might hurt his feelings.’
‘We wouldn’t want that,’ Lex murmured, eyeing the ferret with what some might have described as a murderous glint in his eye.
The sneeze was sudden and violent and seemed to catch even Lucius by surprise. Since his hands were both occupied holding the ferret, he was unable to cover his mouth. This was exceedingly unfortunate for Lex since it resulted in a spray of spit landing on his upper arm. This in itself would not have been overly problematic — nothing a bar of soap and a bit of scrubbing couldn’t have solved. But the real killer of it was that, amidst the spit, was one small insect with rather a lot of legs and long feelers on its head. Lex yelled in pure horror when he saw the thing and started waving his arm about desperately in an attempt to shake it off. But the bug knew exactly what to do and within moments it had crawled up Lex’s neck, across his face and, despite his efforts to knock it off, had disappeared straight up one of his nostrils.
