The Boat House (16 page)

And what, she couldn't help wondering, would happen then?

TWENTY-THREE

The reason for Dizzy's locking of the door behind them became apparent within a minute, when Alina heard a hesitant tap on the other side followed by a young woman's voice calling Dizzy's name. Dizzy shook his head and put a finger to his lips, calling on her for silence; so Alina waited, and after a while the young woman gave up and went away. Alina relaxed a little. Dizzy hadn't even been tense.

He took her through to show her the four roomed suite that was his private living space within Liston Hall. The lounge was as big and as bare as a dance studio, with three evenly spaced sets of french windows on one side that could be opened out onto the unlit stone terrace; the floor was of deeply polished boards with no carpet, the furniture was mostly plain white leather, and at the focus stood a hi-fi system which looked like a stolen chunk of a space shuttle.

Alina turned to Liston. He was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, waiting. His little-boy mask had slipped by a fraction, a sure sign of the energies that had been taken from him in the past hour, and someone else was looking out - someone much harder, more calculating.

She said, "If it's what you want to hear, I'm impressed."

"I'm glad something impresses you."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing." He seemed to rouse himself, and as he stepped away from the wall his mask was back in place. "You're just not what I'm used to. How do you think I did?"

"How do I think you did what?"

"My public relations act. I'm under threat of death from Bob and Tony if I don't carry it off." He led the way across the room to one of the white sofas, and dropped onto it gratefully without waiting for her.

She said, "I saw them earlier. Do they work for you?"

"Kind of. They're friends from way back, they look after me. It's generally agreed that I need looking after. I always seem to get into trouble on my own. My mother always reckoned I'd end up either in prison or in parliament."

Alina perched herself on the far end of the three seater.

"You don't look like a troublemaker to me," she said.

"I don't
make
trouble, it just follows me around like some dog in the street." he gave her a sideways, half serious look. "This is a warning, you realise."

"And is there anything else I ought to know about you?"

"Oh, I'm feckless, shiftless, untrustworthy… I'm also very, very devious."

"So I can see. Why did you ask me up here?"

"Why did you come?"

There was silence for a moment as they held each other's eyes, broken only by the faint sound of dance music from down below.

Finally, Alina said, "You made me curious."

Liston smiled, as a Grand Master might at an adept chess move from a lesser rated opponent. "That'll do as a beginning," he said. "Look, I'm supposed to go down and do another five minutes of charm and chat with the ladies in the kitchen now they've done their stuff. Will you stay around?"

"Why?"

"Because I'm asking you to."

"What if I'm with somebody?"

"Are you?"

He waited, but Alina didn't reply. She kept her gaze even.

"It's your choice," he went on. "I honestly won't be long. You can pick out some music and crack open a decent bottle. Can't join you in that, I'm afraid, but don't trust the stuff downstairs."

She seemed to sharpen, and to look at him now with sudden suspicion. "Why not?"

"I know the way Bob works. I wouldn't put it past him to be slipping something into the juice when nobody's looking. Guaranteed way of loosening off everybody's self-control. Problem is, take one too many and you'll start to see hair growing out of the walls. What do you say?"

"I'll think it over," Alina said, and she got to her feet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the course of the last few moments, and Liston couldn't say for certain what it was. She said, "Can I get some fresh air?"

"Try the terrace," Liston said. "You can get a good view of the moonlight on the lake, if you go in for that sort of thing. See you later?"

"Perhaps," Alina said.

She was already crossing the room to the nearest of the french windows, moving with an urgency that she didn't seem prepared to explain.

"Your choice," Liston reminded her as she stepped out into the air. Maybe she's a control freak, he was thinking, getting into an unreasonable flap just because she might have taken something that could unclench her a little; but then if he'd kept his mouth shut, she'd never even have known.

A control freak might be interesting to play around with, he was thinking, especially in his weakened condition - get her so far along, and then she'd almost certainly want to do all the work.

But she didn't even look back.

"What was that?" Wayne said; but Sandy, it seemed, hadn't heard anything.

"What was what?"

"I heard a door," he said, glancing up into the darkness in the direction of the stone parapet. Sandy pulled her dress back up over her shoulders, just in case, and the two of them sat as still as they could and listened.

There was no sound other than that of the distance-filtered disco music, but the mood of solitude had been broken. As he zipped Sandy up, Wayne said, "You want to go somewhere else?"

"If you mean that crummy flat of yours, no."

"That's not what I had in mind."

"Not to your dad's house, either."

"No, better than that. And really private."

"Where?"

"It's a surprise. Satisfaction guaranteed."

Sandy considered for a moment. Wayne knew how finicky she could be about place and mood, but this plan was one which had all objections beaten before they could even be raised.

Finally, she said, "How far?"

"A short walk in the woods, a warm summer night," (he was embroidering a little here - the night was warm enough, but it was hardly summer yet) "moonlight on the water, what more could you want?"

Sandy looked critically at her shoes, and hiccupped. "A taxi," she said.

"Well… I could run ahead and get the van."

"Oh, great," she said, and she hitched up her dress so that she could get to her feet; there was simply no elegant way of doing it. "Come on, I can probably use a walk anyway. Something in this stuff's starting to mess up my head."

The 'stuff' in question was Bob Ivie's Hawaiian special; between them they'd managed almost to empty the bowl that Wayne had sneaked out. Wayne had halfway believed in his own account of the innocence of its contents, but now he wasn't so sure. It didn't taste of anything much, and it didn't hit particularly hard, but then he didn't exactly feel steady on his feet as he came to stand, either.

Sandy was already picking her way through the garden towards the front of the house.

Leaving the punchbowl lying there for the clearup people to find in the morning, Wayne followed her.

Above them on the balcony terrace, Alina Petrovna stood a little way back from the parapet. She looked at the moon, the lake, and the dark forest beyond, but she saw only defeat.

She might have known that all of her efforts would end like this; it was simply a truth that she hadn't been wanting to face. She'd been avoiding it for so long, but she had no choice about facing it now. She moved to the parapet, and paused with her hand on the stonework. Wayne and Sandy were gone. It wasn't too late. She could ignore the call. She could turn around and go back inside, smile, lose herself amongst strangers again.

She closed her eyes for a second and touched the small space of forehead between her brows. But the pressure didn't help, and nor did the night air, nor any of the great machinery of circumstance that had, without her realising it, been combining against her to produce this moment.

Again, she looked at the moon.

And then, with a dancer's grace, she cleared the parapet.

She landed with barely a sound.

TWENTY-FOUR

Pete was beginning to think that the party had taken on an unpleasant edge. The noises had become louder, the lights were brighter and sharper, and the people around him seemed to be turning into over expansive parodies of their true selves. For Pete it was almost like being a teenager again, going to see
2001
on magic mushrooms. They'd tasted like shit but they'd sure done the stuff; everybody else had been whining about the story while Pete had been lying there with his tongue hanging out. Tonight, only a few minutes earlier, he'd been following handwritten signs down a service passageway to the toilets when, for one brief half-second, he'd seen a local councillor emerging through the doorway with the head of a pig on his shoulders. It was barely more than a flash impression and the man was turning and the light wasn't at all good; and besides, he pretty much resembled a pig anyway, so the effect was probably no more than a moment's mistake. But after that Pete had sworn that he'd touch nothing stronger than tapwater for the rest of the evening, and so far he'd been sticking to it.

He couldn't see Alina anywhere around. He supposed that she had to be somewhere and he reminded himself that they weren't supposed to be together so what did it matter, but still he kept catching himself scanning the crowd for her. Plenty of known faces nodded back at him, but none of them was hers.

He stopped by a book-lined alcove to remove his tie completely and to get some air. The books were behind glass, and the reflection that stared back at him showed the face of a stranger. He'd no reason to be anxious, and no right to it either.

So stop it,
he told his reflection.

"Ross Aldridge," Ted Hammond announced breathlessly, triumphantly, as he appeared at Pete's side. He was flushed, happy, and in his shirtsleeves.

Pete said, "Who?"

"Name of the local copper that I couldn't remember. He just left. If it's the host you're looking for, he's long gone, too."

"It's tough at the top."

"Well, it isn't so great here at the bottom, most of the time. Do me a favour?"

"What kind of a favour?"

"Dance with one of the Venetz sisters for me."

"Which one?"

"Doesn't matter, but we have to ask both because you can't split them up, see?"

Pete took his jacket off, and hung it on one of the bookcase doorknobs. There was a cloakroom somewhere, but this would do as well. He said, "Okay. But if either one of them gets frisky, you're on your own."

"Deal," Ted Hammond said, and they set off to see if the sisters had joined the party yet.

Sandy was a few months younger than Wayne, but unlike Wayne she'd stayed on at school. Her mother had ideas about her going to university, but Sandy knew her limitations; she planned on a two year course at a catering college, and had diplomatically said nothing about it yet. Wayne, in her mother's view, was more than just an ordinary valley kid; he was a walking symbol of everything that she didn't want for her daughter.

It was a big weight for him to be carrying, but there didn't seem to be a lot that he could do about it. He stayed out of the way as much as he could, and Sandy mentioned him as infrequently as possible.

The one thing that she didn't do was to give him up.

He was walking just ahead of her now, checking out the trail in the darkness. It was mostly soft grass and woodchips here, and she'd stepped out of her shoes and was now carrying them, walking barefoot.

Wayne said, "Feeling any better?" He was referring to the slight dizziness she'd experienced when they'd first come into the moonshadow of the trees.

"Yeah," she said. "A bit. Must have been all those flowers. I'm sensitive to flowers."

"Is that right?"

"And perfume. There's only certain perfumes I can wear."

"Better make me a list for Christmas," Wayne said, and he gave her his hand to help her out onto the lakeside track. She stopped for a moment, and put her shoes back on for walking on the hard tarmac. She was curious as to where they were going, but so far Wayne had refused to say; as far as she knew, this was just one of the estate roads and it led nowhere.

Sandy said, "We'd better not be heading for your place, even if you've been doing it up. Oil and stuff affect me worse than anything."

"It'd take us an hour to get there. This is really close." His shadow touched her lightly on the nose. "You're not going to believe your eyes."

Their destination, Sandy discovered a few minutes later, was the Liston Hall boathouse.

He took out the keys that he'd brought from the office back home, and opened the door. He went in ahead of her and tried the lights; they flickered once, but he seemed to know what to do because he went inside and Sandy heard him thump something, and then all the lights came on. As she stood waiting, she felt again that wave of dizziness that bordered close to nausea, and she put a hand against the rough wall of the boathouse to steady herself. As Wayne returned, she quickly took her hand away; she wasn't going to tell him about this, not if she could help it.

He beckoned her in, and took her to the rail to look over. What she saw under the lights was a boat, a big one in too small a space.

"We're handling the brokerage on it," Wayne explained. "Wait until you see inside."

She had to be careful on the stairway down to the quay, because it was steep and the treads were so narrow. Wayne helped her aboard and then darted ahead, switching on all the lights and then dimming some of them to create an impression of instant welcome. When they reached the after stateroom, he left her prodding the waterbed as he fiddled with the stereo to get some low-level background music. He asked her what she thought.

"It's just like something in a film," she said.

He stood behind her and unhooked her dress; a shrug of her shoulders, and it fell easily to the floor. She shivered a little as its touch ran over her. The room seemed to give a lurch, but she ignored it. She stepped out of the dress and then turned and sat on the bed, rather heavily; smiling at Wayne to show that she was okay, she kicked off her shoes one at a time.