‘I’ll blame you every mile of the way.’
‘If it helps,’ she said.
No, but thinking about her might. ‘I’ll survive,’ he assured her. Probably. ‘But I have no idea how long I’ll be.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You take care of Mrs Webb. I can sort out some transport for myself. There’s a bus to Swindon and I can catch a train from there. Don’t give it a second thought. It’s not a problem. Piece of cake—’
Her mouth was running away with her as she tried to hide her disappointment. It should have been an ego boost but all he wanted was to reach down the phone and hold her. Helpless, he waited until she began to repeat herself, finally ground to a halt, before he said, ‘I’m taking her in Gary’s car. I’ll leave the Landie keys under a flowerpot in the porch for you.’
‘Oh.’
‘That’s it?’ he asked. ‘You’re finally lost for words?’
‘No. I was just thinking that if you’re bringing Gary’s car back, I might as well stay here and wait for you.’
‘It’ll be late.’
‘We might have to stay the night,’ she agreed.
Not in a million years... ‘I’ve got a better idea. Let’s meet halfway at your place. We can have that picnic you promised me.’
‘Oh? And what will you bring to the party?’
‘A bottle of something chilled and a packet of three?’ he offered.
‘Three? That’s a bit ambitious, isn’t it?’
‘One for yesterday, one for this morning, one for fun?’ he suggested.
Her laugh was rich and warm. ‘Talk, talk, talk...’ she said, and ended the call.
He was grinning when he looked up and saw Mary watching him.
‘My suitcase is on the bed,’ she said primly. Then, as he passed her, she put her hand on his arm. ‘It was the motorbike, Darius. That’s why he told you about your Dad. Gary never cared about any of the other stuff you had, but that motorbike...’
‘I know...’
It was Gary, with a battered old machine that he was renovating, who’d taught him to ride on the estate roads, so when he’d come down and found a brand-new silver motorbike waiting for him on his seventeenth birthday, the first thing he’d done was fire it up and drive it down to show him.
Cock-of-the-walk full of himself, too immature to understand how the one who’d always been the leader might feel when he saw him astride a machine so far out of his own reach. The understanding, in that split second, of the reality of their friendship; how, from that moment on, every step would take them further apart. For him there would be sixth form, university, the eventual ownership of this estate. For Gary, who’d left school at sixteen with no qualifications, there would be only a life of manual labour on little more than the minimum wage. And he’d used the only weapon he had to put himself back on top.
‘He didn’t do anything wrong. He told the truth, what he knew of it, that’s all.’
‘He was a stiff, proud man, your grandfather. He broke your grandmother’s heart, barring your father from the house while he stayed with your mother. The poor lady was never the same after. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to love you, Darius, just that she’d lost so much that she couldn’t bear the risk.’