Precious Time by Erica James Read Free Book Online Page B

available to him, he would be able to say what he needed to say then get out. Direct and to the point, that’s what he had to be. Above all else he must not flinch at his father’s response, which would, of course, be of the ballistic variety. Many times he had witnessed, and been on the receiving end of, one of his father’s furious dressing downs, and on this occasion he was preparing himself to be stripped to the bone.
    In his mind he had every line of the conversation already figured out, with every vindictive word his father would throw at him.
    For starters he would be accused of being devious and too big for his boots, not to say conniving. Next he would be told he was the messenger of his cowardly brother, and that he was weak and too stupid to make a proper life for himself. It wouldn’t be the same if that old line wasn’t given an airing. Jonah was quite used to the torrent of scorn that was regularly poured on his teaching career.
    ‘It’s only those who can’t get a proper job who teach,’ his father had said, when Jonah had graduated from university and announced that he was applying for a year’s teacher training course.
    He didn’t discuss it further with Gabriel, and certainly he didn’t look to him for financial support. He paid his own way through college by working shifts in a meat-processing factory and as a consequence hadn’t been able to look a meat and potato pie in the eye since.
    That had been thirteen years ago, and still Gabriel hadn’t forgiven Jonah for settling for such a ‘second-rate’ career.
    Jonah always felt a chill run through him when he came home to Mermaid House. A knot of anxiety formed in the pit of his stomach, with the desire to make his visit as short as possible. He tried to kid himself that it was the bleakness of the house and its remote situation that made him feel like this, but he knew it wasn’t. It was the memories.
    Mermaid House was of an unusual, almost whimsical design, with a tower, four wings and a central cobbled courtyard. It was built of locally quarried stone that had turned depressingly dark and dreary with the passing of time. Now, as Jonah drove through the wide stone archway, the rumble of his car engine was amplified: it bounced off the walls and came back at him louder than it normally did. It confirmed what he had suspected earlier that morning when he had driven to work, that his exhaust was blowing.
    He parked next to his father’s mud-splattered Land Rover in front of what had always been known, rather ostentatiously, as the banqueting hall: it boasted original timbers, trusses and a massive fireplace.
    Getting out of his car, he noticed that the tax disc on the Land Rover had expired and that the tread on one of the tyres looked borderline legal.
    He crossed the courtyard and found the back door unlocked. He knocked cursorily, let himself in and nearly took a flyer over a pair of old boots lying on the floor. He pushed them to one side, called to his father, and walked through to the rest of the house. He passed the laundry room, noting the piles of unwashed clothes, bedding and towels in front of the washing-machine, and kept going, past the gun room, until he came to the kitchen.
    These days, the mess seldom shocked him; it shocked him more that he had grown used to the conditions in which Gabriel was prepared to live. There was the unappetising smell of gone-off fish and he located the source of this as an empty tin of pilchards in tomato source on the draining-board. He went to throw it in the swing-bin but found that it was full to the brim. It was indicative of the scale of the problems at Mermaid House. No job was ever in isolation. There was always a knock-on effect. To change a light bulb, you had to find the stepladder, and to find the stepladder you had to find the key to the cellar, and the key was anywhere but where it should be on the row of hooks in the kitchen.
    It hadn’t always been like this. When Val had been in