a certain grotesque charm,” Canny agreed, negligently, “but I wouldn’t want to live here full time. I’ve always regarded the London flat as home. I suppose I won’t actually need it, now that Tony’s abolished my right to sit in the Lords, but I’m certainly not about to give it up. Daddy was one of the most dedicated of the absentee hereditaries, although he could always be relied on to turn out for any vote to relax restrictions on gambling, but even he made abundant use of the flat while I was too young to stake my claim to it.”
Lissa smiled, rather mechanically. Canny wondered whether he could think of a joke that would produce a stronger reaction, but thought it unlikely. In his experience, supermodels had even bigger stocks of hilariously filthy jokes than Hollywood producers. Traveling the world still had certain advantages over waiting in lordly fashion for the world to come to you.
From the top of the ridge they had a perfect view of the Crede meandering down the dale to the village—whose Yorkshire stone seemed rather funereal, caked as it still was in the ancient grime of the Industrial Revolution. The village elders had been discussing the possibility of a general clean-up for a generation and more, but whenever the words “Hebden Bridge” were mentioned, enough lips curled contemptuously to have the motion shelved. Personally, Canny thought that it was the proximity of the motorway that had spoiled Hebden Bridge, not the sandblasters, but he’d always stayed out of the debate. He was privately glad, though, that the ridge and the Great Skull had shielded Credesdale House from the worst effects of the soot and the acid rain that had given the walls of the contoured terraces their distinctive color—3-B black instead of 3-H grey—and their unevenly pitted texture.
“I’ll show you the village, if you like,” Canny said, as they set off down the slope again, having found the air on the ridge only slightly less enervating than the somnolent atmosphere of the dale.
“Is there time?” Lissa countered, strongly implying that there couldn’t be.
“We wouldn’t be able to walk down there and back before dinner,” Canny admitted. “Another time, then. It may look a bit grim, but there are home-owners in Leeds who would kill for the opportunity to be mere tenants in Cockayne. The county council occasionally tries to reduce the elders’ privileges, but the family has a lot more influence there than one democratically-elected representative, so we’re clinging like limpets to our eccentricities. Some outsiders call Credesdale the last bastion of degenerate feudalism, others the last flourish of Victorian philanthropy, but the villagers like to think of themselves as ultra-patriots of the one true fatherland—Yorkshire, that is—and last-ditch defenders of an endangered way of life. We’re all insane, of course—but we’re Yorkshire mad, not common-or-garden mad. Daddy should have woken up again by the time we’ve had dinner, by the way. He’ll be thoroughly morphinated, but more-or-less compos mentis. Would you like to meet him? Don’t feel obliged—he’s not at his best, by any means.”
“I’d like that,” she said. The shoes she was wearing weren’t designed for walking up and down grassy slopes whose paths were rough-hewn and strewn with rabbit-droppings, but she moved with an unearthly grace, almost as though she were flowing. The turbidly creeping waters of the Crede came off a very poor second best. It was enough to make Canny catch his breath, and fix his eyes upon her back until he grew dizzy.
Canny felt unprecedentedly awkward. He knew that it would be a dire conversational error to bring up the awkwardness that had developed before they stepped out into the evening air, but the compulsion to babble had come upon him again and he was temporarily bereft of appropriate subject-matter. “Better to be formally introduced to a dying man than try to do girl talk with Mummy,” he said, in a stupidly mock-jocular fashion. He regretted it as soon as the words had spilled out of his mouth.
“That’s not it,” Lissa assured him. “I really would be interested to meet your father—if he doesn’t mind.”
“I’m sure he’ll be delighted,” Canny murmured, wondering exactly how far her interest and curiosity might extend, if he gave it scope to operate freely. “If my guess is right, a visit from one of the most beautiful women in the world is exactly the kind of thing that might give his morphine dreams the perfect lift—and I’m a very good guesser.” They had reached the gate again now, and he overtook her swiftly so that he could unlatch it and hold it open while she passed through.
“So am I,” Lissa said, as Bentley emerged from the house to summon them to the table with all the imperious obsequiousness one could expect of an authentic English butler with a passionate interest in bad Hollywood representations of authentic English butlers.
CHAPTER NINE
Canny was uncomfortably aware that the food was no better than moderate, but he took refuge in the thought that Lissa probably wasn’t going to eat much anyway. The mediocrity was only to be expected, given the short notice and the fact that the village shops managed their stocks much more economically than any town-based supermarket. On the other hand, the ’73 Pomerol was one of the best the cellar had to offer, and Canny took due note of the appreciative way that Lissa sipped it. After consuming two glasses she refused the sweet Bordeaux—and, of course, the dessert it was supposed to accompany. She also declined to partake of the brandy. Although she’d made her way through a perfectly adequate portion of the main course, Canny was glad to observe that she didn’t visit the bathroom in order to throw it up again.
Fortunately, Canny’s mother was perfectly well-behaved during dinner, and never once mentioned her gnawing fear that Canny might be gay—which she usually confided to all his female acquaintances, in the faint hope that one of them might have contradictory evidence and a willingness to share it. She called him “Canavan” once or twice, apparently spoiled for choice between her own preferred diminutive and his, but he didn’t mind that.
“You know that Daddy wants to give you the library keys tonight, don’t you, Can?” Lady Credesdale said to Canny, when he and Lissa Lo stood up together to go up to his father’s room. “He thinks it might be his last chance to do a formal handover, although Doctor Hale keeps telling him that he might live for another month.”
“He might, no matter how big a liar the old quack is,” Canny said. “He’s always been tough—too tough for his own good, perhaps. I’ll take the keys with all due solemnity, but I’ll let him take a look at Lissa first. He’ll enjoy that, and we might as well share what we can, while we can.”
Lissa Lo smiled at that too, but her motives were still profoundly unclear to Canny. Her body moved in interesting ways as she preceded Canny up the staircase, pausing more than once to study the portraits hung on the left-hand wall. He’d told the truth when he’d said that they were the best of the bunch, although that had more to do with the talents of the painters than the features of the sitters. The spectacular awfulness of the ones that had been retired to shadowed corridors on the third floor couldn’t possibly have been entirely due to the ugliness of the subjects.
“Did they ever smile, or did they simply feel an obligation to glower at their painters by way of intimidation?” Lissa asked.
“They certainly didn’t think of sitting for a portrait as any kind of fashion shoot,” Canny replied. “It was a matter of duty, to be faced in the same purposeful way as checking the accounts and sleeping with their wives. I’m different, of course—too much television, Mummy says.”
The model made no comment, but Canny could imagine what she was thinking as she scanned the faces of his ancestors. The Kilcannon luck had never extended far in the direction of good looks. Canny was, indeed, the cream of the crop in that regard. Not for the first time, Canny cursed the reflexive flicker of mad optimism which said that there might be something in this encounter for his long-suppressed hormones, as the hostile stares of his forefathers told himself to pull himself together. Wile he was in the presence so many ugly Kilcannons, he didn’t dare believe that someone as beautiful as Lissa Lo might be seriously interested in his body. It seemed far more likely that she was here on some kind of quasi-anthropological field-trip, like a Brave New Worlder visiting the Savage Reservation.
Lord Credesdale looked terrible, and he wasn’t entirely coherent at first, but Canny had been right about