Chapter Seven
Laurie
spent that weekend sleepwalking, locked in an open-eyed dream. The
walls of the Mayfair house rose around him just as they always had,
but they felt transparent to him—or as if he was, as if he had
slipped between dimensions and could, if he wished, just walk
through them. He came down to family breakfasts on Saturday and
Sunday, went through as much of his weekend routine as would keep
him under the radar—corrections from the week’s tutorials, the
cinema with Clara—and other than that, retreated to his aerie to
turn over memories and be alone with his own altered
state.
He did
not just have a lover. When Laurie had thought about it at all, he
had assumed there would be some kind of routine—a girlfriend, and
then after maybe a couple of years, he would feel so unimaginably
different that he would want to marry. This was what he had
observed from the young men of his acquaintance. He had not
envisaged finding someone he was fairly sure he loved before he’d
laid a hand on him and now, after a couple of weeks, could not bear
the thought of living without.
The odd
thing was that, for all these large dramatic truths, he was calm.
He’d spent the past two weeks in a blaze of anxiety, afraid that
Sasha would never come back, that every time he saw him out the
stairwell door would be the last. He wasn’t sure what was so
different now. The encampment could move on and vanish; Sasha could
be swept up in a raid, deported overnight. The difference was
Laurie’s new conviction that they would find one another, no matter
what happened. They had stumbled back across the heath, exhausted,
arms wrapped around each other’s waists. Just outside the
encampment, Sasha had stopped him and kissed him so yearningly that
Laurie could still feel the burning impress of his mouth. Laurie
felt as if he’d know now if anything became of Sasha, as if he
would be able to walk to him, like a fire in the dark, from any
distance.
Two long shifts at the car wash would keep Sasha busy all
weekend, and anyway, they had agreed it was best not to try to see
one another outside their established routine, at least until
Laurie found his way out of his father’s labyrinth. That was
Sasha’s benign way of putting the thumbscrews on him. The last
thing he had said to him, as they had parted at the bus stop.
“Get out of there, and we can be
together.” It ought to be the best
incentive in the world. Their carefully staged meetings in
Sanderson’s tutorial group would hardly allow for any more of the
exchanges they had made on the twilight heath, and unless Laurie
made a special effort, he could think of little else than that. He
burned for the chance to do it again—not clumsily this time, but
powerfully, slowly, showing Sasha what a good lover he could be.
Imagined having a place where they could lie together undisturbed,
their own door locked behind them.
So what was holding him back? Clara, came the usual answer. My
mother. But these old safety belts were getting worn and useless to
him. Sasha was right—he was doing no real job of protecting them by
lurking here. Laurie had even gone so far as to look at the adverts
for staff in the Stage. But even the lowliest of these seemed to require years more
experience than he had, and the salaries were tiny.
Laurie,
if he allowed himself to admit it, was for the first time thinking
about who he was—or who he would be, once the old man was gone. Sir
William was way too young and hale, and his wealth too much a
source of discomfort as well as support to Laurie, for his son ever
to have seriously considered what he would inherit. Now, though,
despairingly weighing up his skills against the realities of
independent life, Laurie found himself indulging the odd fantasy.
He’d sell this old house—his mother had never liked it—and he’d set
her and Clara up in a seaside chateau in the Languedoc, where her
family came from. It would be warm and sunny all day long, and he
and Sasha would visit them—Sasha, well fed and strong, living
safely with him in their beautiful Bloomsbury penthouse; Sasha,
whom poverty could never touch again. Maybe everything would be all
right anyway. Sir William was not the monster he could seem to be.
Laurie remembered when he had been a kind father. Perhaps he could
talk to him. Perhaps when he saw Laurie was in love, that nothing
could change him, he would relent.
Sitting
back from his desk in the attic room, Laurie grinned. Okay, that
was a wilder fantasy than the Languedoc chateau. But he still did
not despair of finding some escape route between that and the
plunge into the dark he’d have to take alone. No, the old man was
not a monster. Not—what was the word Mama Luna had used? Not mulo.
Not, for God’s sake, death.
The old
servant’s bell over the bedroom door pinged faintly. Laurie got up,
stretching. That was a summons Mrs. Gibson sometimes shyly availed
herself of when Laurie was wanted downstairs and she was too busy
to run up and find him. She hadn’t liked the sense of role
reversal, but Laurie had told her to go ahead whenever it was
convenient. Usually it meant dinner was ready, or someone had come
to call for him. Laurie sighed. He was far from in the mood for the
formal and lugubrious Sunday evening meal that Sir William insisted
on, but until he got himself a job as a minimum-wage props handler
or runner, there was no help for it. Anyway, tomorrow was Monday,
and Sasha would be here; Laurie thought he could get through almost
any amount of overcooked vegetables with that light on his
horizon.
He took
the stairs down from the attic four at a time, warmed by memories.
God, they had been a hard lot to crack, that Romani mob around Mama
Luna’s fire. They’d looked at him as if he had just crawled from
under a rock with an immigration officer’s badge in his hand.
Laurie had supposed being admitted to the camp was one thing, but
the old woman’s invitation to join in their spiced-broth supper had
raised some hackles. He’d been allowed to eat in relative peace,
cross-legged on the ground at Sasha’s side, but then, out of the
tense silence that had followed, a missile had suddenly flown at
him, striking his upper arm.
A
leather juggler’s ball.
Laurie
had plucked the second one out of the air without even looking.
Sasha had started to his feet, growling an imprecation in Roma, but
Laurie knew there was only one way to return such fire, and had
tossed the second ball high in the air, retrieved the first one
from the ground before it could fall, and added an empty bean tin
into the equation. He’d casually thrown all three in a tall arc
above his audience’s head. Plenty of call for juggler’s tricks in
his seasonal pantomime stint, and a good way of amusing himself
during long waits backstage. He’d chucked out a few good ones and
then fired both balls back into the darkness, in the exact
direction from which they’d come. A yelp, and a rasping cackle from
the old woman, and after that they had left him alone. Later one of
them had struck up a song, rocking himself and patting his knee in
time, in a language Laurie did not think was Romani, sounding more
like Irish Gaelic with odd scraps of reversed-sounding English
thrown in. Anyway, by the second verse, he’d caught the sounds if
not the meaning, and Sasha had turned to him smiling as he’d joined
in with the others at the chorus.
He could hear the strange, chanting melody yet. Lost in his
thoughts, Laurie crossed the great hallway, trying to recall the
words. Shelta, it
had been, Sash told him afterward, a language of wanderers, of
Romani blown as far afield as America.
The
dining room was brightly lit, but there were no signs of supper.
The table’s polished surface was blank. Around it, sitting bolt
upright in the uncomfortable chairs, were arrayed an unexpected
group of people. His mother, out of her usual place of dignity at
the far end, huddled in a seat she seemed to have chosen at random,
with Clara on her lap. Hannah beside her, looking terrified. In the
master’s seat at the top, his father—with, incongruously, the tutor
Sanderson sitting at his right hand.
For one
second Laurie allowed himself the fantasy that his father had
decided to relax the habits of a lifetime and invite the staff to
dinner. Then he came to a halt. “Hello, Sandy,” he said levelly.
“Are we making you work Sundays now?”
Sanderson, already the yellow of curdling milk, went a shade
paler. He was pressed so far back in his chair that Laurie wondered
if the old man was holding a gun on him underneath the table. Not
that it was necessary. The dead-eyed look, the huge passive bulk,
would do. “L-Laurence,” he stammered. “You’ll have to forgive me.
I…”
“I do,” Laurie interrupted him, smiling. “I shouldn’t have
asked you to keep a secret. It was my fault.”
“No!” It was a desperate, high-pitched wail. Laurie, spinning
around, saw Clara scrambling off her mother’s lap. Her face was a
mask of grief. “No, it was my fault! I told about the gypsy prince.
I just forgot!”
Laurie
took three strides toward her. He put down his arms and scooped her
up, feeling her scrabble like a monkey to get hold of him.
“Listen,” he said to her, calmly as he could across her sobs.
“Nothing that happens here is your fault. Okay? Can you put that in
your head and keep it there? Nothing.”
He
looked about him. So far the old man had neither spoken nor
stirred. Well, that storm would break soon—and before it did,
Laurie had some damage control to perform. From a long way out, he
wondered why he wasn’t afraid. Shock, he supposed. His heart was
thudding steadily under his left collarbone. He could see its
vibrations faintly shaking Clara’s hair. He also knew he hadn’t
really come back to earth since his encounter with Sasha on the
heath. He was still out there, if he closed his eyes for one second
and let this questionable reality slide.