They climbed out of the car. Teddy stretched and said, “Getting too old for this lark,” to Bertie. “Old bones can’t sit for long without seizing up.” There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.
Dominic had been dead for three weeks before Antonia saw fit to inform Teddy. His regular phone calls to Sunny had gone unanswered during that time and he was wondering about driving down when finally she telephoned and said there had been “a tragedy.” For one terrible moment Teddy thought she meant Sunny, so when she said that Dominic was dead he almost laughed with relief, not quite the right response obviously, but he managed to say, “Dominic?” Drugs, he supposed, but Antonia said “a terrible accident” and wouldn’t, “couldn’t” elaborate. “I really can’t talk about it.” Why on earth hadn’t she told him sooner? “I have lost my only child,” she said coldly. “I have better things to do than telephone all and sundry.”
“All and sundry?” Teddy spluttered. “Bertie’s Dominic’s daughter.” And Sunny, he thought, how on earth was poor Sunny coping?
He had fretted over how to break the news to Bertie. In the end it wasn’t so much her father’s death that troubled her as the existential problem of his current whereabouts. Nowhere, Teddy thought. Or perhaps he was in the mystic heart of the rose. He plumped for reincarnation as the best child-friendly answer to the conundrum. Her father might have become a tree, he suggested. Or a bird? She settled on a cat. Teddy supposed there was something cat-like about Dominic, mostly his knack for falling asleep. “Will he be a kitten?” Bertie asked. “Or a cat?”
“A kitten, I suppose,” Teddy said. That seemed logical.
“If we find him,” Bertie said, frowning, “should we keep him as a pet?”
“Probably not,” Teddy said. “Tinker might not like it.”
And what of poor Sunny all this time?
He had started school “before his father was even cold and in the ground,” as Mrs. Kerrich put it. Even her lard-hardened heart was softened—slightly—by the way Sunny was expected to get on with things as if nothing had happened. He lasted three days at the school before his grandmother was asked to take him away. “He’s almost feral,” his housemaster reported to her. “Biting, kicking, screaming, fighting everyone in sight. He took quite a chunk out of Matron’s hand. You would think he was raised by wolves.”
“No, by his mother—much the same thing, I suspect. He’s never been disciplined, I’m afraid.” His grandmother turned to Sunny—yes, this conversation was taking place in his presence, Mr. Manners cringing at his side—and said, “Anything to say for yourself?” What could he say? He’d been bullied horribly from the moment he stepped through the door of the school. They had made jokes about his father’s death, about his accent (not posh enough), about his ignorance of “the Three Rs,” whatever they were, about anything they could find to use against him. They had harried him from pillar to post, pinching and shoving and giving him Chinese burns. They pulled his grey flannel shorts down around his ankles—twice—in the toilets, and once one of the boys had waved a ruler about and said, “Stick it up his bum,” and was probably only prevented from doing so by Matron putting her head round the door and saying, “Now, boys, enough fun and games.” (“That’s the normal rough and tumble of a boys’ school,” the housemaster said.)
And all the time his mind was swamped by what had happened on the level-crossing (he had learned that was what it was called). He had managed to wrench himself out of his father’s grip at the last moment, but the rest was just a blur of overwhelming noise and speed. He had flung himself away from the engine and didn’t see what happened to Dominic, although it wasn’t hard to guess. From his perspective on the ground he could see down the track, see that the train, far, far in the distance, had come to a halt. He didn’t think he was actually hurt, a bit of scrape and graze, but he decided just to stay there and pretend to be asleep. The consequences of what had just taken place were going to be too awful to deal with.
A policeman had picked him up and driven him to the hospital. If he closed his eyes Sunny could still feel the thick material of the policeman’s uniform when he had leaned his head against his chest. “You’re all right, sonny,” the policeman said and Sunny wondered how he knew his name. He loved that policeman.