Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [65]
Kneeling — the roof was close to his head now — he peered out. For an absurd moment he felt like a character from an adventure story. The powder boy looking out through the gun port of a man-o’-war. The young hero finding his way out of a dark labyrinth of caves. Then far more thrilling possibilities occurred to him.
He was looking between two pines at the bare undulating fields. There were the roofs of Bratton Manor again. The combine harvesters were out of sight beyond a swell of the land, but he could tell where they were from their dust cloud. So how did they get there? Bratton Manor Farm was farther over to the right, invisible from where he was. But the machines must have come to the fields from there.
And if they could, so could Frankie.
The phone rang at three forty, almost stopping his heart.
“Seven this evening,” she said, very quietly.
He was so sickened by relief that he almost forgot the short speech he’d practiced.
“Go to the farm, Frankie, then up into the fields where your dad’s combines are working. Thas eastwuds, toward the Gunston road, okay? Look for a group of big pine trees and a barn. You can’t miss it. About a mile and half. It’s called Franklins.”
He waited.
She said, “I don’t . . .”
Then she was speaking more loudly. “I don’t know, I’m afraid. Yes, I’ll tell him you called. Thank you. Good-bye.”
Click.
His hand was shaking as he put the receiver down.
It had been the longest phone conversation they’d ever had. He prayed they hadn’t blown it.
Frankie loitered in the hallway until she was fairly sure that the coast was clear. Then she slipped into the morning room. The big collage of aerial photographs was now liberally marked with blue rectangles, arrows, and dates. She tracked her finger from the manor toward the Gunston road. Her nail passed through several groups of trees and meandering hedges, but she knew that the landscape didn’t look like that anymore. She tried to repicture it, to wipe those details out. She reached the road and tracked south a little way until she came to a clump of trees shaped a bit like an arrowhead aimed at the manor, at her. She studied it closely, biting her lip. Yes, those might well be pines. And was that a roof?
It seemed to her that the thump of her heart might be audible.
Her parents were going out tonight.
She would have time.
Okay.
She went to the door, then glanced back. There was a pack of Three Castles cigarettes on her father’s desk. She hesitated, then went and picked it up and shook it. It sounded sort of half empty. She stuffed it into her skirt pocket.
Clem and Frankie leaned on their elbows, their shoulders touching. Outside the small window, the sky above the horizon was a deep amber. Thin streamers of cloud the same color as their cigarette smoke.
“I’m really sorry. Daddy suddenly announced that he was going to London for a business meeting. I thought, Great. Then Mummy decided that we would go, too, and do some shopping. I tried to get out of it, honestly. I couldn’t call you before we left. You must have been worried sick.”
Below them, Marron snuffled and stamped his feet.
“Yeah, I was. I thought you’d . . . You know.”
She turned her face to his.
“What? Gone off you?”
They kissed, tongue slithering over tongue, cigarettes held away.
“So what did you do? In London.”
“I told you. Shopping.”
“What, for three days? What did you buy?”
She shrugged.
“You know. Clothes and so forth.”
He felt there was something she wasn’t telling him. He didn’t want to know what it was. But he couldn’t keep the sulk from his face. She saw it and plucked the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out on the floor, then did the same with her own. She rolled on top of him, pressing down on him, kissing