The Blue Last

flowerbeds; he was very good that way, but sometimes you had to watch him. Mr. Murphy didn’t like dogs much, anyway.

“Christmas is in only three days.”

She was picking at a stitch on Richard’s blue trousers. She had cut off some of the excess material and sewn up the sides, which now fanned out and were still too big. Her needlework was not very good. “I sewed this. Do you like it?” She turned Richard slowly around so that his outfit could be viewed front to back.

“It’s a lot better than that old nightgown. But couldn’t you have used blue thread instead of white?”

Gemma looked doubtful. “Maybe.” She added, “But I couldn’t find any.” She hadn’t looked.

“It’s nice.”

“He needs new clothes for Christmas. He needs a mac.”

“Uh-huh.”

Gem went on picking at the thread. “Do you think about your mother?” Her voice seemed to shrink.

Benny was surprised. “Sometimes.”

She raised her eyes from the trousers and looked right at him.

It’s awful to have somebody know you’re lying, Benny thought. “Okay, like a lot of the time.” Now his own voice sounded strange; it sounded hollow.

“I would too if I could remember mine. I don’t know even what she looked like.”

Benny thought a moment. “Like you. Think of you, only older. You know who you look like? Like Maisie’s mother. Remember? You showed me her picture once.”

Gemma frowned. “That makes me look like Maisie. I don’t want to.”

Benny didn’t either. He shook his head. “No, no. Her mother. Mr. Tynedale’s daughter is who you look like. Maisie doesn’t really look like her even if she’s got that dark hair and stuff. Like her face isn’t the same shape. Maisie’s mother’s is heart shaped. So is yours. It’s like a little heart.”

Gemma put Richard down and felt her face all around. “I don’t think so.”

“Gem, you can’t feel heart shaped. Just look in a mirror.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked into Richard’s face for a moment and then said, “I don’t believe in Father Christmas anymore. Of course, I used to.”

This irritated Benny. “Well, how long ago was ‘used to’? I mean, it couldn’t be very, could it? You’re only nine.”

“I’m nearly ten. I’m as good as ten right now.”

“How long ago was it, then? When you believed in Father Christmas?”

“A long time. When I used to be five.”

This really irked Benny no end. He didn’t believe in him anymore but he was so much older than she. He’d been looking forward to talking to her about Father Christmas-the kinds of things he got up to and the dwarfs and all. Actually, he’d been looking forward to feeling superior. That was one of the nice things about little kids being around, the way you could feel superior to them. “That’s not much time for believing. I mean, you wouldn’t even have thought much about Father Christmas until you were four, say. So if you stopped at age five-well, it was hardly worth it, believing. You might as well just have gone ahead and disbelieved.” Benny did not know what this fuddled need for accuracy was. Was it because the subject of his mum had arisen and talking about her made him cold and anxious? Yet the need to talk about her was as strong as the fear of talking.

The way she had lived and died was to him courageous, but to another would be contemptible, which is how the ones under Waterloo Bridge were thought of by other people. Benny had gone out with his mother most days. When one day they had collected scarcely enough for Sparky’s dog food, Benny leaned against his mother and cried. “We got nothing, nothing, nothing.” And she had answered, “Neither does God.” And he had said, “But He doesn’t have a dog.” His mum laughed.

But that’s the way she always was, not hopeful that things would change, for she knew they wouldn’t, yet not seeming to care that much. He remembered a Selfridges bag walking past them (for they were sitting on the pavement) with three white boxes Benny could see over its rim. His mother said, “She’s just bought three new pairs of shoes. Those boxes are shoe boxes. Now you know what’ll happen to them? They’ll spend their lives in her closet. She’ll wear them a few times and then they’ll sit amongst the other shoes and she’ll buy more.”

She actually didn’t seem to mind having to beg. It made him furious to think of this, for she had deserved so much better, and in Dublin they’d had so much better.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gem in a worried way. “You look mad.”

“I’m not.” But he was. He turned to her and asked, “Do you mind not having anything?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

Benny swept his arm out to encircle the house and the grounds. “I mean all this of the Tynedales. Does it bother you none of this is yours? Not even a little bit is yours?”

Gem’s face, to his horror, began to crumple.

“I’m sorry, Gem. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

Gem wailed and clamped Richard to her chest.

Benny put his arm around her, genuinely remorseful that because he didn’t have anything, he didn’t want her to, either, nor did he understand any of this. “I’m really sorry.”

She went on wailing.

“Stop that.”

She stopped; she stopped as though she’d never started and went back to inspecting Richard’s trousers.

Now Benny was really irritated. “How’d you do that?” For her wailing had certainly been a convincing example of brokenheartedness.

“Do what?” She was humming now and wiping at Richard’s shirt from where she’d cried on it.

“You were just crying and yelling to beat the band.”

“I know I was. I was sad.”

“Well, obviously, but-” Exasperated, Benny thought, What’s the use?

Melrose considered the shrub.

Why Murphy couldn’t just leave it alone he didn’t know. The shrub looked okay to him, boxed as it was inside its yew hedge. There was a whole line of shrubs within hedges, a box parterre he believed it was called. So it was a trifle scraggly and needed a bit of shaping-like one of Polly Praed’s mysteries-still, the shrub presented itself to the world as fairly in line with the others.

“That shrub there,” Murphy had said, “that shrub’s got desuetude written all over it.” Melrose was glad that Murphy had gone for the day.

He heard a car rev up and looked behind him to see Kitty Riordin in her little VW making a turn in the gravel drive. She rolled down the window and called to him. “Ambrose! When you’ve finished here, would you just give my bit of garden a weeding? Thank you!” She threw up her arm in a wave good-bye and rolled off. It was her day for shopping in Oxford Street and Piccadilly.

Kitty Riordin was a person who ran to schedules, all of her appointments, rendezvous and pleasure hunting neatly written in on her calendar, boxed like the shrubs inside squares he was examining now for a cosmetic fix.

Melrose studied the ball of shrub and decided to have a cigarette as he looked off at the cottage.

Forty-four

Keeper’s Cottage sat about a hundred yards from the Lodge and had been, presumably, a caretaker’s lodge. It was sheltered from view by several large tulip trees and a magnificent larch. In front of the little cottage was a remnant of garden, one clearly not tended by Angus Murphy, nor would it be by Melrose. Now, in winter, it was a haven for cold stalks, brittle-looking stems and sodden leaves.

He went around to the back and tried the window Gemma had told him about. He raised it easily and dropped