A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(99)

In the house, he found his father nodding in his chair with pages of the Guernsey Press scattered like overlarge playing cards round him on the floor. Frank realised as he saw the paper that he hadn’t told Mrs. Petit to keep it from his father, so he had an uneasy few moments as he gathered the pages up and scanned them for a mention of Guy’s death. He breathed more easily when he saw there was none today. Tomorrow would be different with coverage of the funeral. For today, he was safe.

He went on to the kitchen where he put the newspaper back into order and set about making their tea. On her final visit to Graham, Mrs. Petit had thoughtfully brought a pie along with her, and she’d affixed a jaunty label to its tin. Chicken & leek, enjoy! was written on a from-Betty’skitchen card woven through the plastic tines of a miniature pitchfork upended and driven through the crust. This would do nicely, Frank thought. He filled the kettle and rooted out the tea tin. He spooned English Breakfast into the pot. He was setting the plates and the cutlery on the table mats when his father stirred in the sitting room. Frank heard him give an awakening snort first, followed by the startled gasp of someone who hadn’t intended to fall asleep.

“Time’s it?” Graham Ouseley called out. “That you, Frank?”

Frank went to the door. He saw that his father’s chin was wet and that a string of saliva had followed a groove from his mouth to form a stalactite of phlegm on his jaw.

“Getting our tea,” he said.

“How long you been home?”

“A few minutes. You were asleep. I didn’t like to wake you. How’d you get on with Mrs. Petit?”

“She helped me to the toilet. I don’t like women in the toilet with me, Frank.” Graham plucked at the blanket that was covering his knees.

“Where you been all these hours? What time’s it gone?”

Frank looked at the old alarm clock on the cooker. He was surprised to see it was after four. “Let me ring Mrs. Petit so she doesn’t think she’s meant to pop round any longer,” he said. After he’d done that, he went back to answer his father’s question, only to find him nodding off again. The blanket had slipped, so Frank adjusted it, tucking it in round Graham’s spindly legs and easing back the old man’s chair to keep his head from flopping onto his bony chest. With a handkerchief, he wiped his father’s chin and removed the stringy saliva from his jaw. Old age, he thought, was a real bugger. Once a man’s three-score-and-ten was exceeded, he was on the slippery slope to complete incapacity.

He got their tea ready: high tea in the old manner of labourers. He heated the pie and sliced wedges from it. He put out a salad and buttered the bread. When the food was laid out and the tea was brewed, he went to fetch Graham and brought him into the kitchen. He could have served him on a tray in his chair, but he wanted them to be face-to-face for the conversation that they needed to have. Face-to-face implied man-to-man: two men speaking, not a father and his son.

Graham ate the chicken-and-leek pie appreciatively, the affront at having been taken to the toilet by Mrs. Petit forgotten in the pleasure of her cooking. He even had a second helping, a rare occurrence for a man who normally consumed less food than an adolescent girl.

Frank decided to allow him to enjoy the meal before he broke the news. So they dined mostly in silence, with Frank meditating on the best approach into their conversation and Graham commenting only sporadically on the food, mostly on the gravy, which was the best he’d had, he declared, since Frank’s mum passed on. That was how he always referred to Grace Ouseley’s drowning. The tragedy at the reservoir—Graham and Grace thrashing in the water and only one of them emerging alive—had been lost to time.

The food spurred Graham’s thoughts from his wife to wartime and specifically to the Red Cross parcels the islanders had at long last received when the lack of supplies on Guernsey had reduced the populace to parsnip coffee and sugar beet syrup. From Canada had come an unthinkable largesse, Graham informed his son: chocolate biscuits, my lad, and didn’t they go a treat with real tea? sardines and milk powder, tins of salmon and prunes and ham and corned beef. Ah, it was a fine, fine day when the Red Cross parcels proved to the people of Guernsey that, small though the island was, it was not forgotten by the rest of the world.

“An’ we needed to see that, we did,” Graham declared. “The Jerrys might’ve wanted us to think their bloody sod of a Führer was going to walk on water and multiply the loaves once the world was his, but we’d’ve died, Frankie, before he passed as much as a sausage in our direction.”

A smear of gravy was on Graham’s chin, and Frank leaned forward and wiped it off. He said, “Those times were tough.”

“But people don’t know it like they ought, do they? Oh, they think of the Jews and the gypsies, they do. They think of places like Holland and France. And the Blitz. Bloody hell, how they think of the Blitz, which the noble English—those very same English whose bloody king abandoned us to the Jerrys, mind you, with a farewell-for-now-and-I-know-you’ll-geton-with-the-enemy-lads-and-lasses...” Graham had a gobbet of chicken pie on his fork and he held it shakily in the air, where it hung suspended like an example of those German bombers and just as likely to drop its load.

Frank leaned forward again and gently guided the fork to his father’s mouth. Graham accepted the chicken, chewing and talking at once. “They still live it, those English, Frank. London gets bombed and the world is meant never to forget it for fifteen seconds, while here...? Hell. We may’s well’ve just been minor inconvenienced, for all the memories the world has of what happened. Never you mind the port getting bombed—