Arms And The Women by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill [Hill, Reginald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1999-07-15T07:00:00+00:00

iii

the pavilion by the sea

‘Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman,’ chanted Feenie Macallum in time with each impact as the Land Rover bounced over the field.

She kept up the mantra even when she reached the relative smoothness of the road, increasing the tempo as the vehicle hit the potholed gravel drive sweeping up to Gunnery House and bringing it to a climax as she drove through the doorway of a ramshackle barn.

‘I hope,’ said Kelly Cornelius, lying in the rear, ‘you’re not referring to me.’

‘Of course not. That Aldermann woman turning up like that.’

‘I thought you said it was her cottage?’

‘What’s ownership got to do with anything? Am I supposed to tell the sea I own this place? You stay here till I see what I can sort out.’

‘Here?’

‘There are worse places. As you should know.’

‘Yes, I know, but I’m terrified of rats.’

‘And there are worse things than rats. But have no fear. Most seem to have left. With the wisdom of their kind, they like to keep two steps ahead of the ocean. So just stay still.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘My dear, I am getting too old for this. Bud’ zticha!’

Which was belt up! in Czech, but she didn’t need to translate. The tone did it all for her.

Every language has its strengths, and access to so many gave Feenie Macallum a very wide choice of mots justes.

When she was eight years old, for example, she could tell her father to go to hell in six different languages, none of them English.

He’d had to hire a governess to teach her the language of her native country.

She had hated him, willing herself to believe that her mother was dying because she had come back to Gunnery, rather than that she had come back to Gunnery to die. But her mother’s last words to her had been an instruction (in what language she couldn’t recall) to love her father. And when the night before the funeral she had stolen into the room where the body lay and found Macallum weeping by the open coffin, obedience to this dying wish had seemed after all to be a possibility.

She had held his hand at the graveside, and that night when a loneliness more piercing than a Carpathian frost had gripped her heart, she had slipped out of bed and stolen into her father’s room in search of warmth and comfort.

He was, she discovered, in no position to offer them. Indeed, as later (much later) reflection suggested to her, he was perhaps in search of them himself. But no such plea in mitigation rose in her mind as she watched him thrusting himself into the arched and eager body of the governess athwart the great double bed.

This set the pattern of their future relationship; reconciliations and armistices all ending sooner or later in new outbreaks of war.

The governess departed, to be replaced by a male tutor who presented a different kind of sexual problem. The arm around her shoulder as he sat by her side to help with her work could be put down to pedagogic familiarity.

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