The Forgotten Hours(79)
“Yo, Grumpy,” David said, and they did a complicated fist bump and then hugged, slapping each other on the back. They loved playing up the kid slang for fun. “You look rad.”
“Yes, well. Could do with a bit of a spit and polish,” Grumpy answered.
“You always look dashing,” Katie said. Though his face was animated, it sagged at the edges like melting wax, his heavy eyebrows drooping in the middle as though pressed down by two invisible thumbs. His hair was gloriously thick and near black, neatly parted to one side. “How are you feeling? Any better?”
“Rotten,” he said. “But then I’m well into my tenth decade, so who’s complaining?”
They sat around his little table, and he filled them in on the various simmering feuds going on in the nursing home. For a mathematician and an engineer, he was an excellent storyteller. David turned on the electric kettle, and they drank some Tetley’s, using Gram’s wafer-thin china cups with the gold edges and watching the birds peck at the privet hedges outside.
As they talked, Katie managed to inhabit multiple places at once: she was in the room with her grandfather, absorbing the smell of wool and the faint tang of privet, while also being in her apartment with Zev and then her father. She was still trying to make sense of it. All along she had made the assumption that Zev was too different from the man she had imagined for herself for the two of them to actually stay together. Across that gallery that night she’d caught sight of him again, she remembered thinking, So what if it’s just for fun? The pull she felt didn’t have to have a reason other than being a physical imperative. But that had changed. The abandon wasn’t just a fleeting revelation—it permanently loosened something inside her. And having her father react to him in that awkward, prickly way made her understand that she would have to claim Zev, assert her right to love whomever she chose.
Securing a van and a wheelchair from the nursing home, David and Katie took Grumpy to the British Museum. In all the years they had visited their mother’s family in England, they’d never missed a trip to the museum, hours-long strolls through echoing halls, legs buzzing with fatigue. They always headed straight for the Assyrian rooms, with their winged-lion sculptures and carved stone panels. Grumpy had flown a Vickers Wellington bomber when he was twenty-one years old and a member of the RAF during the war. They’d engaged in battle at Habbaniya, eventually ending up on the outskirts of Baghdad (where he’d been mildly injured by an even younger soldier who was a member of his own regiment). He loved to regale his grandchildren with stories about his haplessness.
They made their way slowly through the Nimrud rooms until they landed in Room 9, Nineveh, with its human-headed winged bulls. After a short but alarming coughing fit, Grumpy motioned for them to stop, and Katie and David took a seat on a bench while he rested. They had begun talking about the chain of command in the British military when David said, “You know Dad got out of prison, right? Did Katie tell you already?”
“Whoa,” Katie said, “talk about a non sequitur.”
A flush mottled the skin of her grandfather’s neck and crept up toward his jawline. “Well. The military operates in a hierarchical manner; its leaders demand respect and loyalty. And they deserve it. We gave our lives readily for those we admired. They were trusted. They were men of their word.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying Dad isn’t?” Katie asked, her eyes locked on his face. There was a fluttering of something unpleasant in her chest—doubt or the desire to defend?
Grumpy lifted his thick glasses up, balancing them near his perfect hairline, and rubbed at his eyes. His head swiveled decisively toward the display to their left, a fragment of an enormous stone slab with an image of a vessel on it and multiple oars. We have to talk about your father, John had written in letters from prison to her mother. “Did something happen between the two of you?” Katie continued.
Grumpy made a snorting noise. His big eyes were harder now. “Your father was what we call a runner. He ran away from his problems. Never one to admit his weaknesses. That man, I have never in my life met a man so capable of avoiding reality.”
“Yeah, well, he sure didn’t manage to run away from all his problems,” David said, shifting his weight uneasily.
“Why do you think he was always finding yet another new and exciting career opportunity? That foolish business idea in the early years, then what? Commercial banking and—what was it in the end—day trading? Or the other way around—I don’t remember. Could barely make a living for himself, let alone keep you all afloat.”
Katie realized she had never really thought much about her father’s profession, except to notice that the money—whatever money it was they’d had coming in, previously—had dried up after the conviction. She remembered the business card she’d unearthed, with her mother’s handwriting on it and a London address. It had struck her as unusual because of the name, the obvious foreignness. “Grumpy, so, remember that thing I asked you about a while back, some guy called Montenegro? Do you know who that is? I found an old card when I was tidying up at the cabin.”
Her grandfather stiffened visibly, and when he tried to adjust his glasses, his fingers were as ineffective as putty. “Montefiore,” he said. “If you must know, he was a private investigator. Hugo, the son of a friend from Cambridge, he arranged it for me. He’d lived in the States for a while, knew the system.”