Davey thought of these things because of his Aunt Hannah. Compared with her, of course, they were still youthful! Over the past twenty months, since her steady decline from health and her finally quitting his late uncle’s house and moving into the nursing home, she had attained her ninety-sixth birthday. And when she was being particularly gloomy in her scrawled letters—which was most of the time—he would write back and tell her they were both waiting to see her telegram from the queen when she made one hundred.
A deer sauntered across the lawn toward the clump of arbutus that screened them from the view of the Strait of Georgia. Davey moved closer to the window to watch. The deer was beautiful in its shyness and gliding motion yet appeared to lack any concern at the proximity of the weathered frame house at the edge of the forest. By its antlers, he could see it was a stag, and for some reason— maybe because it seemed more greyish than most of them around there—he thought it might be an old boy. But it wasn’t limping and certainly held its head proudly high.
That brought him back to Aunt Hannah’s last visit, and her incessant litany of aches and pains. It was a schedule relieved only by elaborate complaints about her neighbours in the village of Pentudy, whom she had learned to detest since the days of World War II when his Uncle Wesley had taken her home as a late-in-life bride with a face as plain as her smart London clothes were incongruous in that isolated Cornish village. Or so a judgemental twelve-year-old Davey had glumly observed of a newcomer—come, surely, to disturb their close-knit family life.
He didn’t know how much Cornish memory lane he would have indulged in then and there, the deer now a white throat patch and a reddish buff coat creating an incredible camouflage from such a short distance, but at that moment Ken walked in to give Davey a playful punch in the back and ask if he wanted him to call a travel agent to see what airline had the better deal. Davey was instantly back in the immediate world before he could swivel round and answer yes. He was often embarrassed by his Cornish daydreams.
Ken’s eyes brightened. He so loved it when Davey even verged on spontaneity. So much of the time his partner was distracted and either didn’t answer Ken at all, or claimed the next day he’d never heard his query or comment. With an ardent mea culpa, Davey now flung himself into Ken’s world of handling the challenges and chores of life as if for him, like the retired lawyer, it was also second nature.
Davey told him he’d go the very next day, after he called the Breakers (the old folks’ home had notified him of his aunt’s decease), suggested the following Saturday afternoon would be the earliest he could attend Hannah’s obsequies, and asked them to duly inform the undertakers and anyone else they considered necessary.
He then so flung himself into the alien role of efficient being, à la Ken, that he was packed by noon and had reserved dinner for two at a small restaurant near Madeira Park, which Ken had recently discovered and in which he delighted. In fact, they both loved the restaurant’s attempts to graft a French cuisine to the best of such local fare as the mushrooms and mussels, a special salad concocted from the establishment’s own garden-grown vegetables and, of course, the abundant salmon and herring from the rivermouth waters on which La Périchole perched.
Before their sortie up the winding road to tackle gastronomic pleasantries and the kind of conversation they’d developed over the years for such sporadic à deux dinners in special places, Davey made a spate of phone calls to England and also, for the hell of it, to friends in both Paris and Vienna. He was even tempted to call George in Moscow, who was trying to construct a banking system along American lines. But Ken caught him searching for their friend’s address and number and persuaded him that calling George merely to announce he couldn’t see the man as he was only going to Cornwall to bury an ancient aunt wasn’t only unnecessary but a gross waste of time and money. Common sense, as always, reigned with Ken.
The dinner was bliss. Well, almost so. Before the end the subject of Aunt Hannah arose again and, not for the first time, Ken mildly rebuked his partner for being so excessively harsh in judging her. Davey parried by asserting how incredibly she had nursed grievances over his conduct, way back as a child, when admittedly he had sometimes mocked her behind her back. Ken also insisted that the slapdash and self-indulgent Davey was far too exigent over someone who, after all, had been only a frail old lady without benefit of education and the kind of love they enjoyed with each other.
Davey saw there was a truth in the rebuke but that didn’t necessarily improve his disposition. Typically they avoided any kind of outright rupture, but enough sense of discord adhered to them to assure an uncharacteristic silence on the drive home and through the familiar choreography leading to bed. They didn’t forget to kiss each other good-night before plumping pillows and turning back to back, but this time there was no chirpy little comment about the congenial La Périchole and the pleasure of each other’s company.
There, in the darkness, Davey shivered to the sense of that omission, but it hung as a disturbing presence about him the following morning when travelling at some thirty thousand feet and didn’t dispel until the bustle of Heathrow and the subsequent challenge of London, Cousin Alyson, and her two ebullient offspring.
TWO
Alyson wasn’t there when Davey arrived that afternoon at his cousin’s house in Ladbroke Grove, but her two teenage children were only too much in evidence. He was disposed to ascribe his antipathy toward them to recent jet lag, but the truth was he had never cared much for either the few times he’d encountered them in the past. The conversation with them that now ensued while he impatiently awaited the return of their mother from shopping in the Portobello Road did nothing to increase his affection. To the contrary…
“It’s Uncle Davey!” Hester said, her voice seeming flat with disappointment as she shouted the news back down the dark hallway to where her brother, Quentin, presumably lurked.
Davey managed a smile. “You can forget the uncle bit—like I said last time. Apart from it being inaccurate, you’re both far too grown up now.”
“I don’t want to forget,” she replied with a stubborn tilt of her witch’s chin. “Where’s Uncle Ken. Didn’t he come, too?”
Once more Davey was relieved he’d rejected Alyson’s invitation to stay with them and had booked into the Gresham as usual.
“Ken is busy. Besides, your Great-Aunt Hannah was often rather mean to him whenever she visited us. He hardly owes her! You’re more family, come to that, but I gather from your mother that none of you intend to come down to Tintagel for the funeral.” He sighed. “By the way, can I come in?”
Hester had the grace to nod, and he found himself following her clean-curved, fifteen-year-old ass in its too-tight, faded jeans as she squeezed more successfully than he past the two bicycles stacked against the walls. The mildly unpleasant smell was of fish.
“Quent is in the breakfast room where he’s grooming his shitty dog. Mum said to make tea if you got here first, so we’ll join him there.”
“Neither of you at school then?” Davey asked, still addressing her posterior as he followed her to the deeper recesses of the gloomy house. “Taking time off for me? Should I be flattered?”
“It’s a holiday, idiot! You forgotten all about English holidays out there?”
He strove for flippancy to match hers. “What’s the point of trying to remember what you people seem to change every year? I thought these days you just went in for long weekends and, in any case, were always copying the Americans.” Then quickly, in the hope it was before she could get her nasty little teeth into that, he followed up with: “So what are we celebrating? Martin Luther King Day?”
“Funeee! As a matter of fact, it’s Michaelmas Day. Now that means it’s the twenty-ninth of September, and I have a hunch, dear Uncle Davey, that you must think it’s January ’cause, if I’m not mistaken, your murdered black leader is celebrated during that month.”
He resisted the temptation to point out she was referring