Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [127]
We ate lunch, and then Donny wanted to try the canoes. Flo protested that the sun was too hot, but he offered her one of his long shirts, and that (along with a wide straw hat from the house) mollified her. They paddled, they swam, I joined them and sat out, and then it was somehow evening, and the happy melancholy of physical repletion coupled with too much sun settled over us. We had a drink, and dinner, and played billiards in the front room until the worst of the mosquitoes had been driven off by the citronella.
Around ten o'clock Donny proposed another swim. Flo and I begged off, but he was set on it, and strode down the lawn into the darkness. After a minute, we heard a splash, then the rhythmic sounds of arm strokes.
“Do you suppose he went in fully dressed?” I asked Flo. He was by no means drunk, so I wasn't worried about his safety, but I was curious.
“No, there'll be a line of clothing down the lawn come morning,” she told me.
The sound of his strokes faded and grew dim, then nonexistent. “He seems a strong swimmer,” I said dubiously.
“Gosh, you don't need to worry about Donny—for two bits he'd swim across the Golden Gate. You'd never know he had scarlet fever when he was a kid, would you?”
“It doesn't seem to have affected him.”
“It did, though. He tried to join up in '17, but they wouldn't have him. A dicky heart. That's when he came out here—he was too wild about it to stay at home where all his friends had joined up, had to get away. Bit sensitive about it, you know?”
“I won't say anything.”
“Crazy, really, he's strong as an ox. Hell, they even took my father, who was old.”
“Yes, your mother told me he'd been killed in the war.”
“Bet she said he was her husband, too.” I heard her chair creak and protest as she sat up suddenly, then heard the sound of her cigarette case opening. In a minute, the flare of a match lit her face.
“Do you mean to say they weren't married?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh, they were married, just not by then. They divorced when I was tiny, maybe five, but she never tells anyone that, like it's something shameful. He used to come around and ask Mummy for money, after she inherited Granddad's packet, but we never saw much of him in between. You know, once upon a time he was great friends with your father.”
“He was?”
“I think they went to school together, or maybe university, I don't know. In fact, I was thinking today that my daddy probably helped yours build this place. I remember him telling me stories about living in the woods, building a log cabin and fighting off the bears.”
“More likely raccoons,” I murmured, considerably distracted by the revelation.
“I always thought it was just talk, but looking back, I have to say that most of his stories had some kind of truth behind them. More illustrations than inventions, you know? And I know the two of them were pals, 'way back when, long before our mothers were.”
“But what happened? Or have I just forgotten him?” Yet another gaping hole in my memories?
“You probably never knew him. Your father didn't see much of him after they both got married. Things change, I guess. And I know your mother didn't like Dad—I haven't a clue why, but Mummy let it slip one time, when she was mad at him. ‘Judith was right,' she said. ‘He's not to be trusted.'”
“My mother didn't trust him?”
“Maybe because he was part of your old man's wild youth. That's what happens, isn't it, when people tie the knot? They put nooses around each other's neck and pull them tight? Tell them they can't see their old friends, can't go out and be wild, have to have babies and a white picket fence?”
“Not always,” I said distractedly. “But what—”
But Flo had worked the conversation around