The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper(60)

Nathan shrugged but came inside.

“Go through. Please. Make yourself at home.”

“Your house is a bit like ours.” Nathan walked into the sitting room. He sank into the sofa and swung his legs over the arm. “It’s the same layout, except Mum likes loud colors, obviously.” He rolled his eyes. “Yours is kind of all neutral and calm.”

“Really? It’s looking kind of old-fashioned to me.”

Nathan shrugged. “Looks fine.”

Again there was a strange silence, as if they were both waiting for the other to speak, or as they realized that they actually had nothing to say. “I’ll put the kettle on,” Arthur said.

He bustled out and made a pot of tea in the kitchen and then added a saucer of cookies to the tray. When he carried it through he found Nathan was studying his photographs on the mantelpiece. There were a couple of the kids when they were toddlers and a family shot taken on Lucy’s eighteenth, when they had hired the local community hall and Vera from the post office turned up even though she hadn’t been invited.

“Did you find Fran?ois De Chauffant?” Nathan asked.

“Yes. I visited his house.” He set the tea tray down. “It was the address you gave me.”

“A big white mansiony thing?”

“That’s the one.”

Nathan clicked his tongue and sat back down. “That’s pretty cool, you know, visiting a living legend. Was his house, like, lined with loads of books? Did he swan around in a velvet dressing gown while smoking those thin cigar things? I bet he had a girlfriend and she was only twenty-one or something.”

Arthur thought about the wizened old man who sat alone in the attic. However, he didn’t want to shatter Nathan’s illusions. “It was a most enlightening visit,” he said. “Yes, he had lots of books. He was rather, er, busy so I only stayed a short while.”

“Did you get his autograph?”

“No. I didn’t. But I did get a book of his poetry.”

“Cool. Can I take a look?”

Arthur then remembered when he’d last seen it, glowing orange under a streetlamp on a bench in London. “I’m afraid that I promptly lost it.”

“Oh.” Nathan looked down. His bangs flopped over his face.

Arthur poured the tea and held a cup out. “I was actually going to call on your help.”

“Yeah?”

“I once overheard Vera in the post office talking about something called Bookface. Apparently you can look people’s names up, to try and find them.” Or stalk them, in the case of Vera, who was trying to locate an ex from her school days. “I need to find another person.”

“You mean Facebook?”

“Oh, do I? Facebook, then. What does it do?”

“Like the biddy at the post office says, you can look people up and ‘friend’ them online, post statuses, upload pics and stuff.”

This was like a foreign language but Arthur nodded as if he understood.

“It was, like, sick once but now everyone is so over it, unless you’re ancient. All the thirty-pluses use it.”

“I’m trying to find a Sonny Yardley. Could you use your computer skills to help me?”

Nathan slurped his tea noisily. “I’ll look tonight for you. My phone is playing up. Do you know that everyone who has an iPhone drops it? Mine went down the bog this morning. Do you have any more on this Sonny? How old?”

“Around my age.”

“Jurassic period, ha, ha.”

“Definitely prehistoric.”

“Leave it with me.”

They drank their tea and Nathan ate all the cookies. “So you can’t find your mum,” Arthur said.

“No. She’s probably in the village, looking out for her lost causes.”

“She’s a very kind lady, your mum.”

“I know.” He hesitated with his mouth open, and then gave a toss of his head. “I wonder sometimes why she wants me to go to a university so far away. I mean, I suppose I’m an awkward git sometimes, but...you know, it’s like she wants to get rid of me.”

“I think she’s just looking at the best place for you, what is best for you.”

“I did think she might want me to go to a uni close by, so I could live at home with her, but...” He shrugged.

“Have you told her that?”

“Nah. She’s got it in her head that I’m going to university and that it should be to study a proper subject. So I can get a good job when I leave, blah, blah, so I get on the housing ladder, blah, blah. I have no idea what I am going to do with an English degree. I mean, I can speak English so what is the point of learning about it?”

“Well,” Arthur said, aware that he probably wasn’t best placed to give advice to an eighteen-year-old. “What do you want to study, then?”

Nathan shook his head. “If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you wouldn’t. Because my mum won’t listen to me, either.”

Arthur thought of sitting with Lucy in the garden when he had promised to listen, how it had been the catalyst to start building bridges and becoming a family again.

“I’m a good listener,” he said. “I have all day.”