Cold Fusion (16 page)

“I get colds and flu really easily, that’s all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have sent you out into the snow.”

“I’m ashamed to be so weak. I can’t lie down—I’ve got to go and fetch my shovel. I left it on the ground.”

“Oh, bugger the shovel.”

“No. You should respect your tools, even humble ones. I have to get it.”

I stopped trying to lift him to his feet. “All right, all right. If I go and fetch the sodding shovel, will you lie down?”

He looked at me as if he wasn’t prepared to give me any promises, but I was learning better than to lock horns with him over one of his odd sticking points. Nothing would get done around here until one of us went to fetch that shovel. I sighed, chucked another couple of logs into the stove and went stamping out back into the yard.

No wonder he was tired. He’d made amazing, machinelike progress with his digging, clearing twice the route I could have done in the time. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t weak. He’d left the shovel jammed bolt upright into a drift. I frowned at the marks beside it. It looked as though he’d fallen. My skin prickled with alarm. With an effort I dislodged the shovel and carried it back down the path.

Huge piles of cumulus were rolling in from the west, their bellies shimmering with unshed snow. The struggling sun threw rainbows through them, then turned into a pale wafer cutout of itself and disappeared. Viv’s little Corsa was half buried in the circle of rowans and birch. We wouldn’t be driving out of here anytime soon. If he was really sick, I’d have to throw caution to the winds and call for a medical airlift, if I could find a signal. If there was still enough charge on my phone…

Shit, what had I got myself into up here? I jogged back down the slope, shovel in hand so I could show Viv the evidence, the first flakes of the new blizzard stinging my face. I ducked indoors, glad to get out of the wind. “Here. I’ve brought your bloody shovel. You’d better be…”

He wasn’t in the kitchen. That didn’t leave me with much searching to do, and I set the shovel down and ran into the bedroom. I stopped dead. Viv was on his hands and knees by the window, putting together all my discarded bits of plywood into a tidy pile. Before I could open my mouth, he got up, pushed gently past me and strode over to the sofa, which I’d failed to place in an exact parallel with the line of the hearth. He took one end and hefted it effortlessly into place. That much accomplished, he headed for the corner where I’d dropped my armfuls of wood, crouched beside the pile and began to set the pieces upright.

I’d made quite a mess of the place in my comings and goings. He would be at it all day. “Viv, for God’s sake.”

He glanced up at me. “What?”

“You don’t need to do all this stuff. Does it matter if a few things are out of place?”

“You said you understood.” He paused to set the longest piece of kindling on the far side of what would be an elaborate pattern in order of descent. “You said you wouldn’t mind putting my shower things back where you found them, if it—if it made me happy.”

“I know. And I would, but it’s crazy, when you’re exhausted like this. You’re just gonna wear yourself out more. Pack it in.”

“Why?” he demanded passionately. He lurched upright, letting the piece of kindling he’d been holding drop to the tiles. “What harm am I doing? This is how I am, and—there’s nothing wrong with it, Mallory. If I could cure anything about me, it wouldn’t be this.”

I swallowed. If those were tears in his eyes, I thought I would try to drop through the stone flags and vanish in the glacial mud of Glencathadh Valley. “I didn’t say it was wrong.”

“My patterns please me. I see beauty and order in them, and then when they’re finished I can rest. Not before.”

“Well, postpone it. Just this one time, for me.”

I didn’t think it would work. He stared at me, and I felt his attention pass into my bones like frosty sunlight. He was weighing up my reasons for asking, sending the results back to his brain’s weird high command to see if he could comply. Whether he got the green light or weakness simply overcame him, I didn’t know—he subsided abruptly onto the sofa, burying his face in his hands.

“Jesus, Viv,” I said, grabbing the sleeping bag he’d rolled up. I unzipped it and shook it out. He didn’t move or protest when I wrapped it around his shoulders. “Take it easy, okay?”

“I want to be useful. I want to stay here.”

His voice was muffled, unsteady. Gingerly I sat down beside him. “Staying here’s not open to question, unless Aunt Lil’s got a helicopter stashed in the garage. And you are useful. I’ve never seen such nice digging.”

“I don’t want to be nothing. I don’t want to disappear. Not yet.”

That had been his nightmare back at Spindrift, hadn’t it?
Dissolving, fading out.
“I’ll make sure you don’t, okay?”

“How can you do that?”

“I’ll sit over there and watch. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. But if you show the least signs of vanishing, I promise I’ll wake you up.”

That seemed to be enough for him. He nodded, kicked his boots off—tucked them neatly under the sofa, of course—and lay down, huddling the sleeping bag around him. The readiness with which he took me at my word laid my duty upon me like a rucksack full of fine bone china. He wasn’t a man who would bear a broken promise.

Then, what kind of man would? What had Alfred said to me about him—that he wasn’t like other people, though it wouldn’t hurt if other people were a bit more like him? I’d come to think of friendship, family ties and promises as so much counterfeit dross. My father had begun that process of corrosion in my heart, and Alan had finished the job, turning the last of my gold to rust. Vivian—with his oddities, brief flashes of humanity and instant, unquestioning trust—had made me think again. In a different world, where I’d been single and had met him in a bar, by now he’d have made me start to reassess what I thought I knew about love.

That was all academic. I just had to be sure to keep my promises to him. I thought about all my unfinished work outside, and gave it up for now. I hadn’t promised not to touch him, though, so I bent the rules on that a bit and went to crouch by the sofa. His breathing had settled into the rhythm of worn-out sleep. I eased out one bony wrist from the tangle of his limbs—he’d curled up, as far as the confines of the sofa would allow—and rested my fingertips on his pulse. It seemed fine, for all I knew to the contrary. He moaned and gave a kind of deep purring sound as I drew his woolly cap and fringe back far enough to feel for a fever on his brow. His skin was cool against my palm, although I could almost pick up the glittering, ceaseless activity of his dreaming mind. I listened to the coming and going of air in his lungs. No snuffles or wheezing. I didn’t buy what he’d said about easily catching flu.

Well, he was embarrassed by what he saw as his physical shortcomings. If a whole life spent bending over microscopes and textbooks really had undermined his beautiful framework, maybe he needed the cover story. I was willing to accept it. I could also see why he might like a change. I repressed a chuckle—we’d found a hell of a holiday cottage for his sabbatical. The wind was moaning like a lost soul outside, the blizzard blotting out daylight into a premature dusk. He seemed to like it, though. I resolved not to nag him anymore about saving the world with cold fusion.

I retreated to my chair by the stove. It was almost warm enough in the room now to contemplate taking off my jacket. Not quite. I settled for unzipping it. The inner pocket was heavy and full. Carefully I extracted the contents and looked at them in the firelight.

A blue enamel seashell, and a folded-up wad of scrawled notes. I turned the shell over and over, making it gleam turquoise and gold. My throat clenched, and tears prickled into my eyes. Spindrift had been nothing, just a handful of lost hippies, a few walls made bright with sea creatures and clay shells, but there had been nowhere else like it in the world.

My notes were chaos, a magic that had only worked in the Spindrift penumbra. I flattened them out on my lap, trying to recall the processes that had been churning through my head. I listened to Viv’s breathing. The sound of it merged with the whisper of the fire, and I could hear the sea again, the turn and rush, turn and rush of the Atlantic along the Kerra shore. The salt-stung sharpness of my vision made one word leap out at me as if outlined in hot metal, then another. Blindly I dug through my other pockets until I found a pen. I’d only used one side of the paper in my haste to get the disconnected fragments down. I turned over the top sheet and ran my hand down the blank page.

Chapter Eleven

“Mallory? You should probably eat at some point.”

I glanced up, smiling vaguely. Viv was on his feet again. He looked much better too. That was good. “Okay. I’ll go open us some tins in a minute.”

Time passed. Another sheet of notepaper filled itself up, line after line, with only the barest input from my conscious brain. Once the sheet was full, I let it slither to the floor to join the others in the heap at my feet. A draught from the banshee gale outside stirred the papers around. One of them crept towards the stove. I didn’t mind. The point seemed to be that the words were outside me. I no longer had whale song, fjords and the death of brave sailors wrestling for room in my head. Broken metal flowers carved their way out through my pen and ceased slicing up the inside of my skull.

Beautiful long-fingered hands appeared on the edge of my field of vision, gathering up the sheets. I grunted my thanks and ploughed on. Two pages later, a plate of neatly aligned sausages and asparagus spears floated diffidently into sight. I’d reached a place where Spindrift earth met the cold fires in Viv’s lab, and I stopped, a pang of hunger surprising me. “Oh, wow. You cooked.”

“I opened tins and heated things up. You’re writing.”

I laid down my pen. Our mutual awkwardness, the hole we fell into when trying for small talk, suddenly struck me as endearing, an effort at goodwill. “I’m not sure if you could call it that.”

“I don’t want to disturb you.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve reached a suitable break in my performance.”

He took up a seat opposite me. He too had his plate of tinned delights. “I
can
cook, though,” he said thoughtfully. “I missed a term of school, and Mrs. Macready—our housekeeper, Alfred’s wife—showed me how. Once I understood that it was a scientific process, I had no trouble with it at all.”

“Why did you miss so much school? Weren’t you well?”

He shrugged. In these quiet waters, there was nothing to impede conversation, confidences, if their time had come to be made. “A little bit too healthy, in fact. My Asperger’s has never disabled me. I’ve always been functional enough to stay in mainstream education. I’ve just been…conspicuously different.”

He didn’t have to say any more. I knew what happened to conspicuously different kids in North Kerra secondary, and I didn’t suppose it was one bit better on the playing fields of England. “Other little aristocrats gave you a hard time, did they?”

“More of an incomprehensible one. I didn’t understand what they thought was wrong with me, so I didn’t know how to put it right for them. How to change.”

“Well, fuck ’em. I’m glad you didn’t.”

His smile blazed briefly. “Thank you, Mallory. I know you don’t remember much about rescuing me from the little thugs at North Kerra school, but you did adjust my perspective. I was even less inclined to alter my behaviour and my outlook when I went back.”

“Wait. You missed your term after you’d been to school with us at Kerra?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, great. Because I’d sent you back so stiff-necked and stroppy you got the shit beaten out of you worse than before.”

“Oh, no. It was never physical. We were all much too civilised and well brought up for that.”

I grimaced. “That’s not quite what I asked, Viv.”

“No. It would have happened anyway.”

He sounded so calm. His dignity now was absolute, inviolable. I hadn’t been bullied in school, and I wished I had half his composure. “Aren’t you angry about it, though?”

“Norman Mailer says in
Harlot’s Ghost
that it’s humiliating to be obliged to humiliate another man. I suppose the boys at my school felt in some way obliged. That they in their turn were humiliated.”

I tried this opinion on for size. I liked it a lot—the idea that brutish behaviour was its own intrinsic punishment. I tried to make it fit my dad, who perhaps had also felt obliged. Nope, couldn’t do it. He was still just a git, and I still wanted to kill him. “You’re a better man than I am. Whatever the reasons, I’m sorry you had a bad time.”

“When it became bad enough, I got to spend a winter in the kitchen with Mrs. Macready. Do you like fresh bread, Mallory?”

“I’m not sure. Fresh from the oven, you mean?”

“Or the wood-burning stove, yes.”

“I never had the chance to find out. Sliced Mighty White was more our household style.”

“I’ll make you some. There’s flour and dried yeast in the cellar.”

“You can make bread too?”

“As well as mastering cold fusion and falling apart at service stations. My talents are limitless.” He watched me in evident satisfaction as he broke me out of my concerns for his rotten childhood and made me laugh. “Bread is a chemical process too. It’s easy.”

I’d heard it took spirit, but he wasn’t lacking in that. Here on his own hearth-side—however temporary—he was alight with it. “How on earth did you find time to read Norman Mailer, in the midst of all this?”

“When I was far too young. My father let me loose in his library. In my early teens I discovered science texts, though, and I’ve read little else since. I feel as if I’ve missed…” He set his plate down, laced his fingers together and leaned forward to look at me. “I feel I’ve missed so much.”

“Well, you’re on your holidays now. You’ll have time.”

“Yes.” His grasp tightened, his knuckles whitening, as if he was taking firm hold of that idea. “Yes, I will. Can I start by reading your aunt’s books? There’s a couple of boxes of them left down in the cellar.”

“Of course you can. Although God knows what they are.”

“I don’t really care. I’ll go and fetch them, and you can get back to your poem.”

“No, I’ll come and help.”

“I can manage to carry a box. I’m sorry about my performance earlier. I really was just tired.”

“Okay, but there’s still loads of stuff I have to do.”

“It’s getting dark. I don’t think we should tackle any more outside.”

I listened to the gale, which sounded as if it was trying the croft’s foundations for any point of weakness. The whole house shook slightly, a tiny animal twitch, at the blows of its dark wings. I wanted to carry on writing. I felt as if I’d woken up too early, and Viv had found me wandering half-dressed around the kitchen and told me it was okay, I could go back to bed. It was that kind of calling. The bed would still be warm, my interrupted dreams waiting. Nevertheless I hesitated.

He shook his head, came over and took my plate from me. Then he gathered up my sheets and pen and put them into my lap. “Everything else can wait,” he said softly, leaving his hand on my knee for a fraction of a second longer than he needed to, sending a warm quiver up through my thigh. “As you say, we have time.”

* * * * *

We were like an old married couple by the fireside that evening. Viv spread his books out on the kitchen table, and I sat writing. We’d shared a lot in our short time together—fire, anger, spectacular misunderstandings. Now we began to share long silences. It was awkward at first. I lingered in the shallows of my words, wondering if I should talk to him, make the occasional comment to keep us both near surface. I felt there were oceans between us, depths like the Marianas, if we were both to let go.

But he sat quietly, taking up one book then another. He was speed-reading, I guessed, running the edge of his hand down the pages, no more than fifteen seconds on each. Probably that was one of the arsenal of skills he’d deployed in order to reach his mid-twenties as a world-changing genius. His eidetic mind would absorb and retain the lot. I smiled, allowing myself to float a little way offshore. I wondered what he had there. Mills & Boon? 1950s recipes for Bird’s Eye trifle and Angel Delight? The rhythm with which he turned the pages was as soothing as his breathing had been while he slept, and I cast off.

I wrote and wrote. My ballpoint gave out and before I could register frustration, a beautiful Sheaffer fountain pen was in my hand, shimmering in shades of peacock blue and green. In my normal state of mind I’d have protested the fate of such a thing in my calloused fisherman’s fist, but I was too busy—I had my next line, and the next, and I let Viv go back to his seat without a word. Across the hours, across the unseen snow-streaked sky, I wrote the whole tale of Norway, of Spindrift and Glencathadh Valley, not my own small journey through these places but the dynamic stretch of each to each, the earth that underlaid them and the great connecting sky. I sent my searchlight down into the roots of all these things. I found a way to call them by right names. At midnight my watch gave a beep, and I sat back exhausted, feeling purged and wafer-thin, as if the firelight might shine through me like a sheet of notepaper frantically scrawled on both sides.

Viv looked up from his reading. “Did you finish it?”

“I’m not even sure what it is. I think it might have finished me.”

“But is it a good time to talk to you?”

I chuckled. “I’m not William Blake. You could have talked to me any time.”

“No, not when you’re writing. I won’t ever disturb you while you’re doing that. Your aunt has a copy of
The Dark is Rising
here.”

“Oh, she kept that? She bought it for me at a charity shop and ordered me to read it. I loved it.”

“Yes, me too. She left a note in it for you. I read as far as your name, then I put it aside.”

Maybe I’d fallen asleep by the fire and was dreaming all this. Aunt Lil’s death had been the slam of a door on my childhood, an impassable barricade. I got up. Viv was holding out to me a faded paperback book. A sheet of notepaper was sticking out from between the pages.

Poor Viv. I believed absolutely that he hadn’t glanced beyond my name, but it must have cost him. Now that it had been piqued, his curiosity about his fellow earthlings was intense.

“It’s okay,” I said, sitting down beside him. “You can read it.”

“Are you sure?” He tucked a strand of hair back off his brow, his eyes glowing. “I did want to. But isn’t this something private, something I shouldn’t want to stare at, like—?”

“Oh, God, Viv. Do me a huge favour and never complete that sentence.”

“All right.”

“Thank you. Probably it’s just some list of gardening chores she forgot to give me.” I opened it out. Her handwriting was as large and clear as I recalled. The letters had an odd little shake in them, an unsteadiness.
To my nephew, Kier Mallory. This was your favourite book, so I’m leaving you a message in here. The inside of a book ought to be safe from your unlettered sot of a father.

I looked up to find Vivian watching me in concern. He really was getting his head around this whole empathy thing, but there was no need. “It’s all right. That’s as kind a word as she ever said about my dad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, she knew him, and a Mallory’s a Mallory. She was cut from the same cloth. And so am I.”

“No.”

“Yes, Viv. It’s when I start to forget that—when I think I can drink what I want, throw my weight around however I like—that I get myself into trouble.”

“What else does she say? I find I’m scared to look after all.”

“She says,
I’m getting what they call frail, and I doubt I’ll see you again. This house is yours, no matter what your father tells you. McTaggart Solicitors in Aviemore knows all about it. Now, I’m not one for care homes as you know, so I’ll shortly be dealing with things for myself. I’m sorry to leave such a mess. I had a grand young man one time who would have stayed and helped me, but I foolishly let him go.
” That was the end of the note. I sat staring down at it. Who could possibly have found her and helped her out here? Maybe one of the lads from the ski resort had passed by on his commute, or a farmhand from…

“Mallory.” Viv was looking at me, his telepathic powers clearly at full strength. I felt as if he were shining a searchlight round inside my head. “If I pop a coin into that furrow between your eyebrows, will it make your brains work?”

It was such an extraordinary thing for him to say. A choked gurgle of laughter rose in my throat. “Cheeky sod. What do you mean?”

“You’re trying to work out who helped your aunt. She means you.”

“Oh.” I read the last sentence of the note again. “She let
me
go. I’m the…I’m the grand young man.”

“That’s right. I thought you were meant to be the one translating the world to me.”

I put a hand to my mouth. A lump of anger that had sat on my heart for more than a decade had just dissolved, and I hardly knew what to do with the new space inside. She’d wanted to keep me. She said—it was there in writing for me—that she’d been foolish not to. That was all I’d ever wanted to hear.

“What do you think she meant about dealing with things for herself?” I asked unsteadily. “Since
you’re
translating tonight.”

“I’d say she planned to end her life.” Viv looked up anxiously to see if he’d put his foot in it again, but I was getting used to his peculiar brand of straight talk. “Then maybe she died of the cold here before she could do anything about it.”

“Maybe. That’s pretty horrible, but she’d still have seen it as a better option than compulsory bingo and bedpans down in Pitlochry.” I waved an airy gesture around the bleak, damp-streaked kitchen. “What do you think of my inheritance?”

If ever there was going to be a moment where he met my eyes and said,
It’s better than mine
, and explained to me why the father who’d loved him had cut him loose without a bean, this was it. His flame-bronzed gaze was open, serene. But he looked around in his turn, and said only, “I think it’s a good one.”

So did I. Already it had given me a refuge, a place to hide Viv away out of harm’s reach. I thought what it would be like always to have such a place, a foothold on serious earth. Viv could fly from here, launch himself into all his potential endeavours. Then if the open skies were unkind to him, he would have a place to return. We both would.

“I think it’s a good one too.” A huge yawn surprised me. “Oh, God. Sorry. I’ve worn myself out.”

“I remember when I was first setting up my experiments, writing the equations I’d need to carry them out and monitor the results. That kind of sustained mental effort hits you like a drug when you stop. Why don’t you get some sleep?”