The Continuity Girl Part 12

"No, Mother, I mean the man I remember from the park."

Irma shrugged, settled back into the sofa and closed her eyes. "It was such a long time ago, darling, I've no idea. There were so many men around then. To tell you the truth, it could have been anyone."

Meredith drained her gla.s.s and stared at her mother. Bones poked out of her dressing gown like concealed weapons. Meredith ran her tongue over her teeth and found they were sticky. She vowed to brush them for a full five minutes before bed, instead of the usual two.

12.

Meredith spent most of the train trip to Gloucester looking out the window at the mist-blurred fields while Mish snored in the seat beside her, slumping onto her shoulder with each sideways lurch of the car. The train was already forty minutes behind schedule. It kept stopping, inexplicably, for rests between stations. Meredith tried to imagine the possible reasons for a train to stop in the middle of the countryside and couldn't come up with any good ones apart from life-threatening technical problems. She worried about Barnaby, who was meeting them at the station.

Squirming in her seat, Meredith smoothed her new chocolate corduroys (bought at Selfridges the weekend before, specifically in antic.i.p.ation of the weekend) and adjusted the laces on her hiking boots to make sure the bows were evenly tied.

Ever since pulling out of Waterloo she had been considering, for the first time, the real ramifications of bringing up a child on her own, without a man. It was not the image of dest.i.tute single motherhood that troubled Meredith (she earned a decent wage and had saved up enough over the years to tide her over for a year, if not longer), but the issue of denying her child a father. It was the same thing her mother had done, after all. And while she had always convinced herself she didn't particularly care about not having a father (one crazy, ill-equipped parent was enough, thank you very much), the question of paternity had lately started to bother her. Not having had a male parent on-site introduced certain problems into the issue of rearing a child. She had been thinking more and more about genes. For instance, what if her father had a genetic deformity that had skipped her generation (or was only carried through the male line) and that would now affect her baby? How could she be sure that the father of her child didn't come from a family with a history of madness, premature baldness or some other inherited defect? Above all, though, Meredith had begun to consider the moral ramifications. It had all started this morning when Mish met her at the train station waving a copy of the Times. On the front page was a story about how there was a movement afoot to make British sperm donors untraceable, so that future sperm-bank recipients could have complete parental rights over their anonymously fathered children.

"Forget the s.e.x part," Mish had said, rolling up the paper and thwacking it against her hip. "You could just go for a blind donation. I hear they're mostly from hot med students."

Meredith had read the full article on the train and had been moved by a comment piece written by a fertility specialist. He argued the case that the fetus has a "right to know." As a grown-up fetus herself, one who had been denied the facts about her father (even as a child, she had never believed her mother's pool-party story), Meredith could understand where the specialist was coming from. At the same time, she remained unwavering in her determination to have a baby on her own. The trick was to find out as much as she could about her biological partner before conceiving. Then she would have something to tell her baby when it grew up. Who knows, maybe she and the father could even keep in touch. At least she could get a photograph of the donor, which was more than she herself had ever had.

Meredith considered Barnaby. He was tall (check), with a full head of hair (check) and no evidence of skin problems or acne scarring (that she could see, anyway). He seemed bright enough (though maybe it was just the accent), and, perhaps most important, he had the right smell. Clean but not too clean. There was something about the way he'd put his jacket over her shoulders and guided her back to her seat that night. For all his initial fumbling, he knew what to do when doing something mattered. Meredith liked a man who knew how to move. True, his teeth were a bit snaggled, but nothing a bit of North American orthodontics couldn't have fixed. Perhaps he drank a little too much, but that could be said about most people here. In short, he was promising. And Meredith was keen to kiss him again. That was a good sign.

The real question, of course (and the one Meredith had been studiously ignoring ever since she stepped on a transatlantic flight to seek her biological fortune), was whether Barnaby (or any other man, for that matter) would mind fathering a baby that was to be, in no uncertain terms, her baby. Above all, she wanted no interference-financial, emotional or otherwise-in her parenting project. She imagined an annual round of Christmas and birthday cards, perhaps with a bookstore gift certificate stuck inside, and maybe the odd visit (lunch on the day he happened to be pa.s.sing through town on business), but that was absolutely it. Anything else verged dangerously on a relationship.

Barnaby met them at the train wearing a yellow mackintosh and matching boots, and looking, Meredith thought, exactly like an overgrown Christopher Robin. He kissed both Meredith and Mish lightly on their right cheeks and insisted on carrying their bags to his car, an ancient Austin Mini so encrusted with rust it was hard to tell the decay from the original ruddy paint job.

"Your train was only forty-five minutes late," he said, cramming their things into the nonexistent trunk. "That's early for British rail."

Meredith smiled. Mish rubbed her face, still grumpy from sleep.

"So sorry, but I'm afraid you'll have to sit on top of each other in the front, as the backseat is full of dead things."

Meredith laughed and then saw, through the grimy back window, that it was true. On the backseat lay a tarpaulin with a pile of limp furry bodies, mostly rabbits, squirrels and a couple of small birds.

"Ghastly of me. So sorry. I'm afraid I didn't even notice they were there until after I'd arrived here at the station. I was planning to take them over to the publican the day before yesterday-he makes the most fantastic game pie-but I completely forgot, and now I suppose I'll have to bury them. But then the dogs will only dig them up, so that won't work either. Perhaps when we get back to the house you could help me put them down the garburator."

Mish made a gagging sound.

"I'm only kidding, of course. I don't have a garburator." Barnaby smiled. "I hope you won't hold it against me."

"We couldn't care less," Meredith lied. "We're from Canada. We grew up trapping our own food and living in ice huts."

"How fascinating," said Barnaby, getting into the driver's side.

Meredith couldn't tell if he thought she had been joking or not. His mind seemed to be somewhere else. Without discussion, Mish took the seat and Meredith perched as gracefully as she could on her friend's bony lap. Mish poked her angrily the entire way, and Meredith was feeling irritable and sore by the time they pulled into the gates at Hawkpen Manor.

The village of Stow-on-the-Wold was located in the damp heart of the Cotswolds, just down the road from Shipston-on-Stour and halfway between Morton-in-Marsh and Bourton-on-the-Water. Hawkpen Manor was a fifteen-minute drive west of Stow, along a winding series of country roads with towering cedar hedges that rose up impenetrably on either side of the road. The estate itself was composed of several hundred acres of uncultivated moorland. On the eastern border, about half a mile in from the road, sprawled the main house.

As they rounded the bend and it came into view, Meredith felt as though the air had been squashed out of her. A stadium heap of golden Cotswold brick, the house reclined across the lawn like a sleeping lion. A shameless grin beamed out from its bow-windowed front facade.

"You actually live there?"

"Oh, no," said Barnaby, keeping his eyes on the road in front of him. "My brother and his wife do. I'm down the road in one of the cottages in behind."

There was a confused silence.

"Second-son syndrome, you see."

"So your older brother got the house," said Meredith.

"And the t.i.tle, and the land. And I got the aviary-otherwise known as the unpolished jewel in the Shakespeare crown." Barnaby winked. "He lets me live in the cottage, but technically speaking, Nigel is my landlord. Law of the land. We've been invited there for dinner tonight, by the way."

Barnaby Shakespeare lived in Pear Cottage, a shabby outbuilding to the south. He pulled the car onto a gra.s.sy knoll beside a little yellow-brick cottage with a moss-shingled roof. They climbed out of the car, and Mish and Meredith wandered inside while Barnaby unloaded the trunk.

For a minute or two they were alone in the cottage. Mish looked around the main room, making goofy faces over the dilapidated furnishings and dirty dishes, while Meredith sniffed the air.

"I think we should go," Mish said in a flat, robotic tone.

Meredith started. "Why?"

Without taking her eyes off her friend, Mish pointed at the butcher's block. On the block was a blood-splattered meat cleaver and four black-and-yellow king cans of Double Diamond-one standing, three squashed.

"So what?" Meredith shrugged.

"So what if he's a serial killer is what," Mish hissed. "Think about it. All the signs are here. Lives alone. Socially isolated. Has a predilection for murdering small animals-"

"He just happens to have outside interests, okay? It's called a hobby. Which is more than I can say for you."

"I have outside interests."

"Such as?"

"Such as..." Mish searched, twirling a piece of hair between her thumb and forefinger. "Shopping."

"That so doesn't count."

"Skiing."

"One trip to Whistler with an ex-boyfriend six winters ago? Come on."

Mish looked at the ceiling and bit her lip. "I read."

"Being able to read is different from actually reading."

Mish opened her mouth.

"And magazines don't count."

She closed it.

"Well, I give him points for the family spread," said Mish. "I just wish you were dating his brother instead."

"Mish, could you please not-"

Barnaby walked in carrying their bags and a few paper grocery bags and caught Meredith mid-hiss.

"Am I interrupting?" he asked, setting down their duffel bags and the groceries and removing a can of beer.

"Of course not," Mish chirped.

Meredith shot her a poison look.

"We were just saying what a lovely place you have here. When exactly was it built?"

"The main cottage was constructed in the mid-seventeen hundreds, and then the kitchen and bathroom were added on about a century later. I'm afraid it's rather a mess." He reached down and tried to push a bit of polyester stuffing back into a slash in the sofa cushion, but it kept popping out the other side. Finally he gave up and walked over to the stove.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

Mish and Meredith accepted, and once they had drunk it, Barnaby showed them to their separate rooms.

When she was alone, Meredith lay down on her thin army-issue cot and looked around. The room was bare but bright, and spa.r.s.ely furnished in the way she had always imagined a room in a Swiss sanatorium would be. Apart from the bed, the only furniture was a rickety wooden dresser and an oval-shaped mirror, gla.s.s permanently fogged with age. On top of the dresser was a curious thing: a yellowed bone inside a gla.s.s jar with a cork in the top.

There was a soft knock.

"Yes?" Meredith said without moving from the bed.

Barnaby pushed open the door. He'd changed his jacket for a muddy brown oilskin, and a leather sack hung from his hip in a Robin Hoodish manner. Seeing Meredith on the bed, he began to stutter.

"I-I was wondering if-that is, if you're not already-" He paused and quickly rubbed a hand over his face. "Perhaps you'd rather just nap. So sorry to have bothered you." He began to withdraw from the doorway and pull the door shut.

Meredith laughed and called him back.

"Wait a minute," she said. He let the door open a crack, so that now only his head was poking through.

"What's that?" She pointed to the bone in the jar.

"It's a ham bone."

"Why are you keeping a ham bone in a jar on the dresser of your guest bedroom?"

"It's more than a ham bone. It's a family heirloom. My grandfather found it on the front lawn during the war. It was dropped by a German bomber with a note attached mocking the 'starving English.'"

"How awful! Were they starving at the time? Your family?"

"Hardly. But they did have orphans sleeping on the tennis courts and an infirmary set up in one of the barns."

"That's nice of your grandfather."

"I suppose it was the least he could do." Barnaby shrugged. "Listen, I know your friend is having a nap, but I was just going out to see the birds, and seeing as you're awake I thought perhaps you'd..."

Meredith hopped off the bed. As she did, a shiny black nose pushed itself between Barnaby's legs and into the room.

"Portia, rude girl, get back." He squeezed the s.p.a.ce between his legs shut and the dog snuffled back into the hall.

"I'd love to meet the birds. And your dog. Hey, pooch."

Barnaby stepped aside to reveal a squat black Lab with gray whiskers around her muzzle. The dog waddled into the room, wagging her tail so hard it made her entire body curl up one way and then the other like a sausage squirming in a frying pan.

"Portia's my flying retriever. More of a beggar than a retriever really, but she likes a walk, so I take her along."

"Would you take me?" Meredith dug her fingernails into the spot just above Portia's tail where dogs most love to be scratched. "I'm a talented fetcher and I take direction very well."

Barnaby nodded, beaming.

A little later, they were outside on the path. Barnaby reached out and took Meredith's hand. She had been in the middle of explaining to him the plot of the film she was working on and had just gotten to the part where the spinster pathologist is ravished by the inspector on the morgue table. Meredith lost track of what she was saying and trailed off, embarra.s.sed. Barnaby stopped walking. They were standing just outside the aviary, so close Meredith could hear cooing from the pen. Rain was spitting and the wind was blowing, and Barnaby reached over to push Meredith's hair out of her eyes. He was leaning down to kiss her when there was a noise from inside the pen that sounded to Meredith like a burping contest. Brack! Brack!

Barnaby laughed. He took her arm and guided her over to the first pen in the aviary, where two of the meanest-looking birds she had ever seen sat on wooden perches. Whatever dispute they had been having a moment before they now abandoned, united in dark suspicion.

"Vultures always fight when they mate," said Barnaby, unlocking the door of the pen with a key he drew out of his battered leather hip bag. He reached in and pulled out a large handful of dead mice and dropped the tiny bodies into an empty margarine container on the floor in the corner. The birds watched him with canny interest. Meredith found it hard to swallow.

"But I thought your birds were for hunting," Meredith said. "Don't vultures just eat dead things?"

"They are mainly scavengers, yes. But they're still lovely birds to breed and train. Falconry isn't only a blood sport, you know." He drew two slivers of steak out of his pouch and fed one to each of the vultures, who took their treats with greedy gulps. "Many people think of them as unpleasant, but they're actually rather beautiful once you get to know them." Barnaby reached out and stroked their blue-black feathers. "This is the female, Martha. And the male is George." Their heads were covered with matching bonnets of gray down, which gave them the appearance of stern pilgrims. They eyed first Barnaby and then Meredith, and then glanced at each other, nodding their hooked beaks and gathering their shawls around them.

In the next cage was an enormous bird Barnaby introduced as Waverly, a European eagle owl. Pale flotsam covered his body-as though he'd just flown through a cloud of ash-apparently part of the bird's annual molting process. He had a queer, knowing face that rose from his body in a hump, and he swiveled it all the way around to observe his visitors with insomniac eyes. Meredith made a clucking sound like the kind she had heard people produce when trying to soothe horses, and the owl widened his eyes and gave his wings a restrained half-flap that blew her bangs off her forehead. She raised her hand toward him and Waverly cracked his beak and hissed, wagging a grumpy black tongue.

"Don't mind him," said Barnaby, running a finger along the chicken wire and eliciting an emphatic hoot from the owl. "Waverly's been in a bad mood ever since I retired him from breeding last season."

"Too old?"

"No, no," Barnaby chuckled gently, keeping his eyes on the bird. "Too rough. Poor devil fractured the neck of his last pen-mate. Eagle owls are the largest of all British owls, and Waverly here is quite powerful when he gets excited. Don't quite know your own strength, do you, old boy."

Meredith pushed her hands into her coat pockets and walked farther down the aviary.

In the corner pen at the end of the row was the peregrine. A bra.s.s plate screwed into the base of the cage bore the name HARRIET. Harriet seemed extremely serious and dressed up, like someone about to attend an important business dinner. Her chest was white and the feathers swept up, decorating her throat. Meredith admired her in silence.

"Falco peregrinus minor," said Barnaby, unlatching the cage door and stepping inside.

The hawk swooped from her perch with a swift double-flap and landed upon his gauntlet. She dug one claw into the leather and stamped with the other to steady herself. There was a magical tinkling sound when she moved. It came from the jingle bell attached to her fine yellow ankle by a leather strap, and from another bell sewn into her tail feathers. Glancing coolly at Meredith, the female smoothed her feathers back into place with a haughty backward shoulder roll, in profile, and looked at her master with a single black eye.

"Meredith, I would like you to meet Miss Harriet Helena Horatio Shakespeare the Fourth, Lady of Pear Cottage, and thus far anyway, the single all-consuming love of my life."

He reached into his falconer's pouch, pulled out a dead chick and offered it to the peregrine. Harriet snapped off the fuzzy yellow head, pulling out several thin, spaghetti-like strands of tendons along with it, and then swallowed the rest of the body, bones and all, in three jerking gulps. Barnaby explained that her stomach would sort out all the bones and feathers from the flesh and a few hours later regurgitate a pellet containing all the undigestible materials. The idea was to get down as much food as she could before her compet.i.tors stole it.