house? No more surprises? William doesn’t have a wife and six children that you haven’t got round to mentioning yet?”
“William does have a wife,” said McKendrick, “and two children. Margot lives in the States; I don’t know where the kids are now. They couldn’t cope with William’s illness. They were used to depending on him, couldn’t face the idea that he was going to be dependent on them. For everything, for the rest of his life.”
“She left him?” It was none of his business, and Horn tried to keep his voice neutral.
McKendrick gave a gruff chuckle. “Not exactly. She just went on holiday and hasn’t come back yet.”
“When?”
“About eight years ago.”
Horn’s family had never been the conventional nuclear model, but it had been warm and close and he’d been into his teens before he realized it was unusual enough to raise eyebrows. But he’d cut himself off from them after Alaska. Not because they blamed him for what happened. All the Horns were fiercely loyal: matriarch Angela, she of the Velcro-fastened underwear, took as her mantra the Arab proverb “Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.” They’d have stood shoulder to shoulder with Nicky whatever he’d done: it was how they operated. It was his decision to stay away. If a man with a gun came to their door one day, he wanted them to be able to say with absolute honesty that they hadn’t heard from Nicky in years. Not because he thought they might betray him, but because he was genuinely afraid what Tommy Hanratty might do if he thought they could provide the information he wanted and wouldn’t.
But he never stopped loving them and he never stopped missing them. Two of his sisters had families of their own now: he was an uncle. His mother had been starting to have trouble with her eyes. It weighed on him that she might be blind by now and he didn’t know. Sometimes he spent all night plotting how he might get in touch with one or another of them without leaving a trail; but in the cold, hard light of morning he always decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk. For himself he’d have taken it, but not for them. They had so much more to lose.
So while to all intents and purposes he had no family now, it wasn’t long since he’d been an integral part of a close-knit clan whose members argued passionately and behaved irresponsibly and loved without reservation. And he couldn’t imagine any one of them turning their backs on another of them who fell ill.
McKendrick saw him recoil and his tone softened. “It’s asking a lot, you know. William now isn’t the man that she married. You expect to grow old and stiff and doddery together—you don’t expect that one of you will jump the gun by thirty years. It sounds great, doesn’t it—all that in sickness and in health stuff. And if he’d fallen off his hunter and ended up in a wheelchair, or if he’d got cancer and gone bald and frail and left her a widow before she was fifty, I don’t doubt she’d have done her best for him and seen it through to the bitter end. Alzheimer’s is different. It doesn’t kill you. William could live into his nineties. But everything that made him William—that made Margot marry him and have two children with him—has gone. I never held it against her—well, not really, not for long—that she didn’t want to see him reduced like this.” He gave his brother a friendly grin that robbed the words of their sting.
“Marriage is a matter of choice,” he went on pensively. “You choose someone to spend your life with. If they change, even if it’s not their fault, maybe it’s fair enough to consider all bets off. The family you’re born into is different. They have to take you as you are, for better or worse. If Margot finally gets a divorce, William will no longer be her husband. But he’ll always be my brother.” He looked at the man in the bed with a mixture of sorrow and affection. “I promised him this would be his home for as long as he lived.”
A terrible thought occurred to McKendrick. “My God. You don’t suppose he”—a glance toward the window and the car at the bottom of the garden—“would kill the rest of us and leave William alive?”
It was possible. Even a very cautious man