“Sure,” Barbara said.
He went to the kitchen which lay just beyond a dining nook. A hatch had been crafted into one of the walls, and he spoke through this casually as he dumped a measure of coffee beans into a grinder. “I'll be south of the river, which won't be as convenient for getting to the West End. But it's a house, not a flat. And it has a decent garden and, more important, it's freehold. And it's mine.” He canted his head and grinned in her direction. “Sorry. I'm rather excited. Thirty-three and I've finally got a mortgage. Who knows? It'll probably be marriage next. I like it strong. The coffee, that is. 'S that okay with you?”
Strong was fine by her, Barbara told him. The more caffeine the better, as far as she was concerned. Idly, she flipped through one of the stacks of framed photos near to her chair as she waited. Most of them depicted the same familiar individual posing through the years alongside a score of even more familiar theatrical faces.
“This your dad?” Barbara called out conversationally—albeit unnecessarily—over the gravely roar of the coffee grinder.
King-Ryder glanced through the hatch and saw what she was doing. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. That's my dad.”
The two men looked very little alike. Matthew had been blessed with all the physical advantages that nature had denied his father. While father had been short and froglike of face with the exophthalmic eyes of a thyroid patient, the jowls of a ban viveur, and the facial warts of a fairy-tale villain, son had been blessed with greater stature, with an aristocratic nose, and with the sort of skin, eyes, and mouth that women would pay plastic surgeons handsomely to possess.
“You didn't look much alike,” Barbara said. “You and your dad.”
From the kitchen Matthew shot her a regretful smile. “No. He wasn't much to look at, was he? And he knew it, unfortunately. Took a lot of bullying when he was a boy. I think that's why he kept going after new women through the years: to prove something to himself.”
“Too bad about his death. I was sorry to hear … well, you know.” Barbara felt uncomfortable. What did one say about a suicide, after all?
Matthew nodded but made no reply. He went back to his coffee making, and Barbara went back to the pictures. She saw that only one of them featured father and son together: an ancient school photo in which a small Matthew stood with a trophy in his hand and an enraptured smile like a blaze on his face while his father held a rolled-up programme of some kind and frowned with an inner preoccupation. Matthew was proudly clad in athletics kit, a leather strap diagonally bisecting his torso in the fashion of a soldier from World War I. David was clad in his own version of uniform, a business suit that spoke of a score of important meetings he was missing.
“He doesn't look too happy in this shot,” Barbara noted, removing the picture from the stack and studying it.
“Oh. That. Sports day at school. Dad really hated it. He was about as athletic as an ox. But Mum was good at pushing the guilt buttons when she could get him on the phone, so he generally showed up. But he didn't much like it. And he was good at letting one know when he didn't much like doing what he was doing. Typical artist, he was.”
“That must have hurt.”
“Not really. They were divorced by then—my parents—so my sister and I took what we could get of his time.”
“Where is she now?”
“Isadora? She does costume design. For the RSC mostly.”
“You've both followed in his footsteps, then.”
“Isadora more than me. Like Dad, she's on the creative end. I'm just a numbers cruncher.” He returned to the sitting room, bearing an old tin tray on which he'd placed mugs of coffee, a jug of milk, and some sugar cubes on a saucer. He balanced this on top of a stack of magazines that sat on an ottoman and went on to explain that he had been his late father's business manager and agent. He negotiated contracts, tracked royalty money from the numerous productions of his father's work all round the globe, sold rights to future productions of the plays, and kept his fingers on the pulse of expenditures when the company mounted a new pop opera in London.
“So your work doesn't end with your father's death.”
“No. Because his work—the music itself, that is—doesn't actually end, does it? As long as his operas are being mounted somewhere, my work will continue. Eventually, we'll reduce the staff at the production company, but someone will have to keep tabs on all the rights. And there'll always be the fund to look after as well.”