to Riley’s ear. ‘Books send me to sleep. Anyway it’s the hols now.’ Without noticing, he repositioned himself so he could see Riley’s face in the rearview mirror.
Riley eyed him, and attempted to put to one side how very much he would have loved to have had this boy’s educational opportunities.
‘Work bores me to sobs,’ Tom said.
Riley’s mouth twisted a little.
‘It’s a waste of money,’ Tom tried.
‘Peter doesn’t have very much else to spend his money on,’ murmured Riley.
At the mention of his father, Tom glanced at him, his worn and pale face, his thin hair, and grew a little mulish. ‘He could buy me a decent pair of goggles,’ he said. ‘Or a motorbike. I could learn to dive. Or fly! Something useful. There are spear fishers in Italy who live in the sea. I could go and live with them.’
‘You must go back to school,’ said Riley.
‘Why?’
‘To make Nadine happy,’ said Riley, at which Tom gave him a mock-evil look and said, ‘That’s below the belt, old man. Totally below the belt.’
‘Like that blow you gave that poor senior,’ Riley pointed out.
‘Different!’ cried Tom.
‘Why?’ asked Riley.
‘That was self-defence!’ Realising he was on slippery ground, he amended it to, ‘I was defending my family honour.’
Riley blinked at him fondly, in the rearview mirror. Tom started laughing.
Riley said, ‘What if – all right – you crash your bi-plane on to a Greek island, while on a diving trip to discover Atlantis. A ferocious peasant with a huge moustache and an ancient blunderbuss approaches you. Would you rather know some Greek, or not?’
‘I wouldn’t crash,’ Tom said. ‘But say I have allowed some second-rate chap to pilot me, and we go belly up, how ancient is the ferocious peasant? Because we only do ancient Greek.’
‘If you speak to him in the tongue of his ancestors, of the wine-dark sea and rosy-fingered dawn, is he more or less likely to shoot you?’
‘More!’ said Tom.
‘Then you reduce me to emotional blackmail,’ Riley said. ‘I would have liked the education you are having. I need you to continue, so that you can come home and teach me all that I don’t know.’
‘Totally unfair,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll work as hard as you like but school is wasted on me.’
‘Ordinary bribery then,’ said Riley. ‘Goggles?’
‘Motorbike!’ said Tom.
‘So you’re open to negotiation. Good. We can ask Nadine to find the only school left in the country which hasn’t yet chucked you out. I dare say she’s still got the list.’
‘BSA!’ said Tom.
‘Possible motorbike, when you go to university, if your father agrees.’
‘University!’ the boy yelped, in new despondency.
‘Would you not rather design your own aeroplane?’
‘I don’t want to be an engineer!’
‘Do you want to spend your life at a disadvantage to other men?’
‘Well you haven’t!’ Tom cried. ‘And you didn’t go to university!’
Riley smiled his crooked smile. ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he said, and only then did Tom realise what he had said. But the car went over a pot-hole, and Peter woke, and didn’t even say, ‘Did I miss anything?’, just started staring out of the window, his mouth slightly pursed. Tom fell silent. After a while he enquired what was for dinner. Riley didn’t know.
Home was not Peter’s house, the elegant and pastoral Locke Hill, near Sidcup, where Tom had spent some months before his mother’s death. Nor was it the grand cottage of his grandmother, Julia’s mother Jane Orris, to which Tom had been snatched during the war. (Mrs Orris was the kind of relative with whom you would have tea if you had to, and whose voice on the telephone filled you with gloom.) No, home now, was in London: Nadine’s father’s comfortable and fadedly glamorous Georgian house on Bayswater Road, which had somehow become, over the years, Nadine and Riley’s comfortable and fadedly glamorous Georgian house on Bayswater Road, in which Nadine’s father lived with them.
Kitty was there in the hall, her arms folded across her smock. ‘Welcome home I don’t think,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? It’s not holidays for boys yet.’
‘It’s holidays for me!’ Tom said, in his most annoying voice. ‘Now go away.’ He checked the foreign stamps Nadine had put to one side for him in the hall – several Italian ones, excellent – and in passing greeted Kitty with a casual clout about the head. Last time they had seen each other, as he had left for school, he had by a mere slip of the tongue called Riley ‘Daddy’, whereupon Kitty had kicked him and bared her teeth, making hissing noises. Not that it mattered in the slightest to him what she thought. But order had to be maintained.
Nadine was coming down the stairs, ink-stained, messy-haired and surprised from her studio in the attic, though she can’t be that surprised, Tom thought. She’d be cross, but Tom knew she wouldn’t be for long. She was concerned, but Tom didn’t concern himself with that; that was what women were for.
Kitty started scampering around Nadine’s skirts, saying ‘Tom’s been sacked again, he’s such a bad boy—’
‘Be quiet, darling,’ Nadine said, and Tom, while vaguely sheepish, could read on her oh-so-readable face that no, this was not the day on which Nadine would cease to find him irresistible.
‘Sorry Mums,’ he said, and tried to say ‘It was a duel of honour—’ but Nadine had interrupted him, saying ‘You will be, when no school will have you and you pass no exams and find no employment and you’ll be bored stiff all your life and your children will starve.’
He could see Kitty behind her, a ‘My children won’t starve’ smirk on her face.
‘I said sorry,’ he grumbled, at which point Dr Aunt Rose, a female relative of the better sort – not a moping romantic, nor a massively tweed-bosomed bossyboots, but a drily amused person who if you asked civilly would show you the contents of her leather medical bag (scalpel, opium, syringes) – appeared from the drawing room and gave him a not unsympathetic look. Suddenly his face felt treacherously insecure, so he barged past them all, heading for the stairs.
In the hall behind him Rose embraced Peter, clapping him on the back as if particularly glad to see him. Grandpa came out to see what the fuss was, patted Tom vaguely as he passed, and mooched off again. And there was Riley, lugging Tom’s bag, and calling him to come back out and help with the trunk.
