What Time Devours (33 page)

There was a bang from below.

Thomas winced, and the wobble nearly killed him. He stilled himself, then looked down. He was right over the front door. The steward had just come out through it and slammed it shut. If Thomas fell now, he’d land right on him.

He froze. Then, gripped by an urgent thought, he looked down the drive for the steward’s car. If it was facing the house, the steward would turn toward the turret to get in and Thomas would be caught.

There was a dark blue Jaguar parked nose first against the front wall of the house.

Knowing he had only seconds before the steward would see him from the driver’s seat, Thomas moved quickly—recklessly—along the edge. He launched himself onto the steeply raked slates and scrabbled up without looking back. As he reached the apex of the roof where the cluster of chimneys were and slung one leg over, a fragment of stone, dislodged by his crawling, skittered down the roof, bounced off the gutter, and pinged off the windshield of the car below.

Thomas threw himself over the top and hugged the slates, shrinking down behind the first brick chimneystack with its clay-colored smoke pot. But he was not the first to take refuge up there today. With a great croaking squall, a crow rose up, flapping madly, its black beak and talons scything the air, its whirling feathers in Thomas’s face as it took off.

Thomas shrank away, face into his chest in case the bird came at him. Below, the steward looked from the stone that had clicked off his windshield, up to where the crow wheeled overhead, and shouted “Get out of it!”

Then, with Thomas crouched gargoyle-like above him, he was in the Jag and driving away.

CHAPTER 68

It took Thomas no more than two minutes to scout out his best way down, which turned out to be the kitchen chimney. It was a stepped brick affair that ran down the side of the wall and was handily flanked by a cast-iron downspout. He flattened his entire body against the roof and crawled over the slates till he got there, then clambered carefully down. Compared to his apelike fooling about on the turret ledge, his final descent was child’s play.

He recovered the bolt cutters and trudged back over the fields to the castle parking lot, picking the moss and cobweb off his clothes as he clambered into the rental car. He was hot and sweaty and covered with dust and grit. He hadn’t noticed it till now, but his palms and fingers stung from the way he had gripped the metal and stone of the tower. He had scrapes on his arms and bruises on his knees from his final clamber over the roof, but he was down, safe and undetected. The ground felt good beneath his feet.

He checked his watch. He needed to get ready to meet Kumi at the airport.

The landlady of the Castle Lodge hotel met him in the hall as he was coming in. Her eyes slid slowly over his grimy clothes and smeared face, and Thomas made some vague brushing gesture that made no difference whatsoever.

“You have a visitor,” she said. “In the sitting room. In future you might want to make sure you’re around when people come calling. She’s been here almost an hour.”

“Sorry,” said Thomas. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

“And yet here she is,” said the landlady. It was a reproof, though Thomas wasn’t sure what for. She turned to go. “Will you be wanting tea?”

“I’m not sure,” said Thomas. “Depends who’s come to see me.”

“Your wife,” said Kumi, from the sitting room doorway. “My plane from Japan got in early. I made the morning connection from Gatwick . . .”

Thomas went to her, enfolding her in a crushing bear hug and hiding his face in her hair.

“Yes, Mrs. Hughes,” Kumi managed. “Tea would be very nice.”

 

“I’m sorry I told you not to come,” she said. “You couldn’t have helped and I was—you know—angry and confused.”

“Of course,” said Thomas. “You had been diagnosed with—I mean—you were sick and . . .”

“Cancer,” she said. “You have to be able to say it.”

Thomas nodded, but said nothing.

“Anyway,” she said, “I just had to tough it out alone for a bit. Sorry. It was stupid. And selfish.”

“That’s crazy,” he answered. “And I wouldn’t have been any use anyway. Too—I don’t know—anxious.”

“Still,” she said, “it would have been nice to have you there. But you know me, Tom: self-sufficient to a fault.”

“So where are we?” he said.

He wondered at his use of the word
we
as soon as he said it. It sounded wrong, flippant, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m lucky that they caught it so early,” she said, and for a moment there was a haunted look in her eyes, a wild terror that peeped through and then went back under. Thomas saw it and recognized it. “It was just luck, really,” she continued. “They have me on these hormone-suppressant drugs and I’ll start radiation on Monday when I get back. No chemo, we think.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s good, Tom. It means things are going well. The chemo is what makes you really sick, so I’m glad I don’t have to do that, but my oncologist is sure we don’t need it right now. They’ll reassess after the radiation in about six weeks. They removed a couple of lymph nodes during the surgery, to be on the safe side, and I have to wear this sleeve thing on the plane; something to do with embolism. I didn’t completely understand all of it. That’s what having you there would have been good for. There’s so much information. I’m not sure I processed all of it.”

She was starting to race, her voice rising in pitch, volume, and speed.

“And they have me all marked up for the radiation. Little stickers and magic marker lines. I look like a nautical chart. They said they wanted to tattoo me, but I said no. They said that if I am really careful about how I wash, so that I don’t erase the lines or lose the little sticky . . . things . . . then it should be okay, but I have to be mapped for the radiation, and I don’t really know what it will be like, but they say there can be some burning and it’s just all so much to take in . . .”

He held her again then, gripping as tightly as he had to the stone of Daniella Blackstone’s turret, holding on as if he might fall or—worse—as if
she
might.

 

They lay on his bed all afternoon. She asked him if he wanted to see the scar under the dressing, and he said yes because he guessed she wanted him to see it, so he stared at it as if he were really looking and said it didn’t look so bad, though his knuckles were white where he gripped the bed frame.

He asked her if she wanted to go out. Drive into Stratford and have a pint in the Dirty Duck, maybe meet up with Taylor Bradley.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Good, I think. Has a tenure-track position at some little college in Ohio. Still staging plays. Still struggling to get much written and less published, but he has a job.”

“He’s not married, right?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No one serious, I don’t think. He hasn’t mentioned anyone,” said Thomas. “But it’s been a long time. We’ve lost touch over the last ten years.”

“That long?”

“That long,” said Thomas. For a moment he said nothing, then added, “We’ve wasted so much time.”

“Plenty more to come,” she said.

He gave her a desperate, questioning look, and she stared him down till he nodded.

“You remember when Taylor did that show?” she said. “What was it called?”

“
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
,” said Thomas, laughing. “Maybe the stupidest play I’ve ever seen.”

“Funny though,” she said. “In parts.”

“In parts,” he agreed.

“You want to get something to eat?” she said.

“You aren’t going to make sushi?”

“I thought we’d work on my karate.”

“I think I’ll pass,” he said.

“I had been wondering about dropping that class—what with being
too aggressive
and all—and I’ll have to take a break from it for a while what with . . . everything . . . but now I think I’ll keep it up.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If I’m going to be spending any time around you, I’ll probably need it,” she said. “Just try not to get shot till I have my black belt, okay?”

“Okay.”

They couldn’t make love without condoms—because of the hormone treatment and upcoming radiation, which would be lethal to a pregnancy—and Thomas didn’t have any. He couldn’t imagine going looking for any, particularly after that talk of doomed pregnancies, and neither of them felt the need for that kind of intimacy anyway.

A part of him was glad when they decided to just lie there, because he felt the scar of her surgery like a knife in his own groin, and there was a voice in his head that was shrieking with anger against her body. Having sex would be like saying it was all okay, this love wrapped in flesh and bone. But it wasn’t okay. Because flesh failed. Always, inevitably, it failed, and so he resolved to hate it.

She read his thoughts, or seemed to, and smiled at him with her sad, worried eyes, and kissed away his tears, till he felt guilty about making it about him, even as he knew that somehow made it easier.

 

They drove into Kenilworth at her insistence and had dinner at a tandoori restaurant, where they split two big bottles of Kingfisher and gorged themselves on popadoms and paratha with mango chutney so that by the time their main courses arrived, they were full. They boxed up their chicken and naan to take back to the hotel, even though they had no fridge.

“Midnight snack, maybe,” said Kumi.

“Maybe,” Thomas said, taking her hand.

 

Back in his room, they watched soccer on TV, then moved between championship darts, some oppressively serious world news, and an inane game show. Thomas supplied ironic commentary because it made her laugh, and whenever he started drifting back toward her health, she shushed him pleasantly.

“Let’s just watch,” she said.

Then he would nod, too emphatically, and push it all from his mind as best he could, which usually meant merely not talking about it. She held his hand, and rested her head against his shoulder, and they lay there till it began to get light and Thomas realized that she had fallen asleep.

After breakfast they went walking through the castle ruins, talking about what she called his “case.” Thomas went over everything he knew and suspected, and she listened and nodded, occasionally asking questions to show she was paying attention.

“When it’s all done,” she said. “Perhaps you could come to see me in Tokyo.”

“I’ll come back with you right now . . . ,” he began.

“No,” she said, flat. “You have something to do here. It’s important. You aren’t responsible for David Escolme’s death, whatever you think, but if you can help bring his killer to justice, that’s a good thing. And you have to find that play.”

“I could come to the airport and see if there’s a seat on the plane . . .”

“I’ll be back at work, Tom,” she said. “The radiation only takes about twenty minutes a day and I’m scheduled to do it before I go to the office. If you came out now you’d be sitting in my tiny apartment ministering to me—unnecessarily—and going crazy. In two days you’d be ranting about Japanese politics, protectionism, xenophobia, and the denial of World War Two atrocities. In the end, I’d have to kill you.”

He smiled.

“And besides,” she added, “you want to find that play.”

“It’s not the play that’s important . . .”

“Sure it is, Tom,” she said. “From the moment you first mentioned it, I could hear it in your voice. If the play is out there, you want to be the one to find it. I don’t blame you. It would be a great thing to do.”

“It seems sort of stupid now.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. I love to see you excited about something, especially now. And the world needs all the comedy it can get.”

“Even Shakespearean comedy?”

“Especially that,” she said. “Especially now. So.”

After that she packed her single bag and Thomas drove her to the railway station.

“Soon,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Don’t come to the platform,” she said. “That’s just too hard. I’m going to go now. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“I’ll see you soon,” he said, again. “And we won’t waste any more time apart.”

“It’ll be okay, Tom,” she said. “They say that if you’re going to get cancer these days, breast cancer is the one to get.”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “You really won the lottery on that one.”

She laughed then, a real laugh.

“Bye, Tom,” she said.

After she had gone, and he was negotiating the tight Kenilworth streets with their maddening one-way system, he switched on the radio to drown out his own thoughts. Paul Simon was singing about taking two bodies and twirling them into one, hearts and bones binding together. Inseparable.

The words of the song—the anguished, joyous, tragic, almost Shakespearean phrase—bounced around in Thomas’s head so that he had to pull over and sit with his head down, until he could see to drive.

CHAPTER 69

Thomas had been planning to enter the Shakespeare Institute through the French windows at the back, but he was lucky, for once. A senior scholar was exiting just as he crossed the street. Thomas called to him to hold the door and dashed over.

He had been inside no more then twenty seconds when she arrived, bearing down on him like an elderly vulture in pince-nez and a floral print dress. Mrs. Covington, local historian and guardian of the institute’s hallowed halls. For a moment he pretended he hadn’t seen her and studied a sign-up sheet for a minibus trip to the neighboring Warwick Castle. Among the names of the conference delegates on the list were Katrina Barker and Randall Dagenhart.

“May I help . . . ?” Mrs. Covington began. “Ah,” she concluded, recognizing him.

“Hi,” said Thomas, inadequately.

“The American gentleman who suggested that I did not wish to share the
mysteries of literary scholarship with the great unwashed
.”