He blinked several times, but nothing altered. They were under a shelter on the bank of the Thames, whose night-time reflections were rendered impressionist by steady rain. From the dazzle ship’s bar drifted a murmur of voices, and an unidentifiable tune. And here was Frank Harkness, who’d run some mysterious commune in the heart of France; who’d raised boys like Patrice, like Bertrand, and sent them out to be killers.
He had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.
Natasha’s words, floating back to him the way those reflections floated on the water.
She was very beautiful, and very cross, the time I saw her, and they have big argument, big row, and Frank tells everyone to leave. And when we come back, she is gone.
His mother had never stayed with anyone long. Even her eventual marriage, which had elevated her into comfortable respectability, hadn’t gone the distance, her husband having succumbed to a dicky heart within three years of their union.
The distance she’d come, the respectability she’d assumed: all of that was summed up in her use of the phrase
“How can you
He could almost see his words, so effortfully did they struggle into the air. And then crash to the ground, unable to reach the end of their sentence.
“We should go inside,” Frank said. With a tilt of the head, he indicated the bar behind them; the comfort room on the dazzle ship. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“. . . How can you possibly be my father?”
“Seriously? We need to have this conversation?” Frank shook his head. “I gathered you were a late starter, but—”
River grabbed him by the lapels and shook him, but it was clear that Frank was allowing himself to be shook. To be shaken. There was a solidity to his frame, something like a tree trunk—you could push on it all day and night, but there was no way you were toppling it without serious tools.
“That’s better,” Frank said. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to pass out. But this is better. You’re strong. You’ll do.”
“You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not. If you thought I was, it’s the first thing you’d have said.”
River let him go. “That’s just mind games. That’s bullshit. You can’t
But already it felt like knowledge he’d been deliberately resisting till now. Already it felt like he was the last to know.
“We met, we fell in love, she became pregnant. Your grandfather didn’t approve, do I need to tell you that?”
The O.B. and his mother, and the rift that had driven them apart. For years he’d watched on the sidelines, with neither party giving anything away.
“He drove a wedge between us. What did she tell you about me?”
“Nothing. She told me nothing. She never speaks of you.”
“Well, you have to hand it to the old man. When he drives a wedge, it stays driven.”
This time a police car did flash past, though flash was not the word. It slowed, rather, while its occupants gave them the once-over, before negotiating the chicane the roadworks had assembled. There was other traffic too, none of it important.
“Why did he do that?”
“Drive us apart?”
“Yes. Why would he do that, especially if—if me. If she was pregnant. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he didn’t like the thought of having a Yank for a son-in-law. Or he was worried I’d take his precious daughter way over the big blue sea.”
“No.”
“No he didn’t find her precious, or—”
“No, you’re lying. None of that’s anywhere near the truth.”
He was thinking of all those years, all those conversations. All the times his grandfather had asked “whether he’d heard from his mother”: never using “Isobel,” as if this would presume on a deeper acquaintance . . . He had missed her terribly for all of River’s life, without ever admitting it out loud. And the reasons he was being offered here were nowhere near enough to account for that.
Frank said, “Okay, there was a little more to it. Your grandfather—he was a great one for making deals.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“There were certain things I needed. A project I had to get off the ground. If I kept away from Isobel, your grandfather would . . . smooth the way. Allow certain things to become possible.”
“Les Arbres,” River said.
“How much do you know about that?”
It might have been an enquiry at a dinner party.
“You ran some kind of commune there,” River said. “And burned it to the ground the same day you sent your boy out to kill my grandfather.” He ran a hand through his hair, and it came away sopping wet. “Which smells like cover-up to me. This project of yours went badly wrong, didn’t it?”
“There’ve been mistakes,” Frank said. “I’d be the first to admit that. But nothing we can’t get right next time.”
“And you tried to bury it by killing my
“And I’m sorry. That was the wrong approach. I get that now.”
