Streaking. Brian Stableford
that it’s just a coincidence, not your fault at all...but you’ll never be able to believe it. You’ve been favored by fate all your life, and for you the dominion of probability really would be victimization by neglect. For you, it really would be torment. Believe me, Can, I know. I came back; I saved myself—but I’ve been to the kind of Hell that’s specially reserved for people of our kind, and I’m telling you that it’s a place to stay out of if you can possibly avoid it, and that it’s certainly not a place to spend your entire life.”
The sick man finally trailed off, and slumped back against the heaped-up pillows, exhausted and agonized. Canny knew what an effort it had cost him to say all that, and exactly what his father now needed to hear—but he also realized, belatedly, that there were certain things he could only say to his father, and that the opportunity to say them would soon be lost. On the Riviera it had seemed easy enough to be alone with his burden, his doubts and his questions—but now that he was home again, it suddenly seemed very much harder.
“Thanks, Daddy,” he said, sincerely. “I know you needed to say that, and I did need to hear it. You probably think I’ve never loved you as much as I could and should, because I always resented sharing my luck, blah de blah de blah, but we can cut that crap now. We’re in the same boat. Your luck’s running out, and so is mine. Maybe if I wasn’t benefiting from my half of the partnership, that crab would never have got its claws into your guts. Who knows? We’ve both looked long and hard at the family tree, and we know that our kind of luck isn’t the kind that guarantees long life. How could it be? Renewability implies death. If any father had ever outlived his son, the streak would have ended there and then, according to the rules. The death of the father, before or soon after the marriage of the son, is part of the pattern.”
It was his turn to pause, without fear of interruption.
“Cancer of the liver and pancreas isn’t a pretty way to go,” he continued, “and it certainly isn’t a painless way to go, but we have morphine now. Maybe that’s an aspect of the Kilcannon luck—a gift of fate to ease our passage, which just happens to be useful to millions of others as well. Maybe all the progress of the last eight hundred years has been the spin-off of fate’s partiality to the Earls of Credesdale, and a few others like us with whom we’re careful never to meet up, let alone compete. So, we’re in the same boat—my loss of luck may be temporary and repairable, while yours is permanent, but I can still look at you and see my own future. At seventy, or seventy-five, or maybe eighty, I’m going to be lying pretty much where you are, suffering the same ultimate indignity, feeling victimized as well as tormented, wondering whether I somehow deserved it. A pity, isn’t it, that we can’t find the first Earl’s magic formula, to summon up the devil for a second time and renegotiate a few key clauses in the contract?”
He was speaking metaphorically, of course. None of the last ten earls had believed in the literal truth of the family legend that credited the Kilcannon streak to a thirteenth-century pact with the devil. However the first earl had contrived to start the streak, it had been no formal agreement signed in blood—but that didn’t mean that the metaphor wasn’t sound.
“What’s your point, Canny?” Lord Credesdale whispered, his voice as ragged as a well-worn dishcloth. He always switched from “Can” to “Canny” when he relaxed the sternness of his posture. He never called his son by his full name, any more than Canny ever addressed him as “Lord Credesdale”.
“My point,” Canny said, this time letting his sigh be heard, “is that I understand you better than you seem to think, Dad, and sympathize with you more than you seem to think. For what it’s worth, I also need you more than you seem to think, and I’d really like to talk to you about the family secrets while I still can, and while you’re still up to it. We’re not only in the same boat, Daddy, we’re the only ones in it. If we can’t help one another, nobody can—and this isn’t the kind of situation where we can draw lots to decide which of us gets to eat the other one—all that’s been taken out of our hands. We are what we are, where and when we are. I want to try to make the best of that, and I need your help—more help than just one lousy lecture. I’m sorry that I ran away, Daddy, but I’m back now. I’m not going to run away again. Can I call please Bentley to give you a shot? I think you’re suffering a little more than you need to, now—and I need you to sleep so that you can wake up a little stronger a few more times before you give up the ghost. Besides, I may have a little treat for you later, and you’ll be better able to appreciate it if you take a nap first.”
Lord Credesdale looked up at him, breathing awkwardly. The old man tried to say yes, but in the end could only manage to nod his head. Then he tried to say something else, but only contrived to form the ghost of the word “keys”.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” Canny said, as he got up to ring for Bentley. “I understand about the keys. We’ll do it tonight, if that’s what you want, after your surprise—or tomorrow, if you prefer. Either way, we’ll talk again. We’ll get things straightened out, for both our sakes. That’s a promise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Whether the photographer’s generosity or Lissa Lo’s manipulative talents deserved the credit, the model made it to Credesdale in plenty of time for dinner. She drove herself, unaccompanied, in a hire car she must have commandeered from someone at the shoot.
“Are you allowed to dump the minders?” Canny asked, when he went out to greet her, having had advance warning of her approach from the eagle-eyed Bentley.
“They don’t pay me—I pay them,” she told him. “When I say get lost they vanish.”
Even though Canny had been careful to mention the possibility to all concerned, Lissa’s arrival at Credesdale House made quite an impact.
“Your father will have a fit, Can,” said Lady Credesdale, as soon as Lissa had gone into the guest bathroom to freshen up. “She’s Oriental.”
“According to Hello!, the Sun and Ellen Ormondroyd in the fish-and-chip shop she’s one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, Mummy,” Canny pointed out. “She’s rumored to be distantly related to the royal families of Persia, Bhutan and Siam—and don’t tell me that two of those places don’t exist any more, because we Kilcannons disapprove of almost everything that’s happened in world history during the last thousand years, let alone the last hundred. Anyway, we all came from Africa in the beginning. The lady and I are just friends—not even good friends. We must have been in the same room half a dozen times, but until we happened to find ourselves at the same table last might I’d barely exchanged ten words with her. Technically speaking, we’ve never even been properly introduced. We’re not an item; everybody knows that supermodels only date movie stars. And Daddy will love her—trust me on this.”
“Well, Can, you certainly ought to be thinking of becoming an item with somebody,” his mother retorted, changing tack as effortlessly as ever in the face of manifest criticism. “You know how paranoid Daddy is about that.”
“This is the twenty-first century, Mummy,” Canny told her, his voice falsely sweet. “These days, a chap can go through three or four barren marriages and still impregnate the nurse hired to wipe his arse. And I do wish you wouldn’t call Daddy ‘Daddy’. When I do it, it’s cute and accurate; when you do it, it’s faintly obscene.”
“I don’t know what happened to you, Canny,” Lady Credesdale complained. “You used to be so loving as a child.”
“Sorry, Mummy,” Canny said, repentantly. “I’m just a bit edgy. You know how it is.”
Actually, Canny knew that his mother hadn’t the slightest idea how it was. She had to know, of course, that there was a family secret, but she had long ago given up hoping to be let in on it. She was of the old school of Yorkshire womanhood, and she could accept that kind of thing. Sometimes, Canny wished that she hadn’t been so accommodating, or that his father had taken a more relaxed attitude to that particular rule. He hadn’t yet made up his mind what to hope for or expect from his own future wife, but he hoped that she might at least be curious about the skeletons lined up in the Credesdale cupboard. He had no idea what