Giles Pt. 01: Down Among the Dead Men

"What do you for a living, then?"

"I am currently reliant on Matt's goodwill," Giles admitted.

The elder Gascoignes exchanged glances. It was becoming just a little annoying.

Giles sighed, "It's complicated. I expected to be in control of the family estate. But I'm not welcome there these days."

Roger Gascoigne's eyebrows rose.

"I behaved rather badly," he admitted, and with those words, dreadful regret and home sickness welled up from the place where they had been buried. His expression cracked and he found himself unable to bear their faces. He rose from the table and strode from the room. Behind him, Matt's parents looked to their son in concern.

Matt started to rise to go after him, but his mother put her hand on his arm. "I think he needs a bit of space right now, darling."

Reluctantly, her son sat back down.

"How serious are you about him?" his father asked.

"I don't know, Dad. He's damaged and it makes no odds that it's almost entirely self-inflicted. Sometimes he can be the most unbelievable jerk and at others he's tender, kind, funny and like yesterday evening, just plain wonderful. I sometimes think he's the one and then I wonder if I might just be a phase for him."

"He's the only one you've ever brought home," his mother murmured.

Matt thought of the train wreck called Ralph and frowned, there was no way he would have brought him here. Unconsciously his next words echoed Anna Mollica. "I thought I would be single all my days until I met him. I'm so scared he'll lose his nerve and crawl back to the estate. He'd never recover."

"Is that what he's doing? Recovering?"

His father looked thoughtful. "It was interesting watching him play."

"You should see him at the piano! He's a demon! There's a nightclub near us in London where he plays from time to time. I don't know where he stores it all, but he plays from memory, classical, rock and roll, ragtime, jazz... I just sit in wonder." He frowned. "It's like he's got this whole other persona hidden away."

His father chuckled, "The Entertainer, you mean?"

Matt stared at him. "Yes! Yes, that's exactly it! Like when he plays at the club, why did I not see it before?"

"It's a gift, a very political gift," his father said. "I knew several people that could charm the birds out of the air. It wasn't who they were - with one notable exception."

"Paul Jennings," Ellen murmured. Matt remembered glittering creatures at his parents' soirées.

Her husband nodded. "It was just something they could do well, like playing the guitar, perhaps. And some of them tired of it, always expected to be the life and soul. We hardly see hide nor hair of George Dalziel these days."

Matt's mind worked furiously. "Oh my God! That must be how he became The Boy Bastard!"

His parents looked at him questioningly.

"What happens when there are no consequences!" he crowed.

Roger Gascoigne inclined his head in agreement. "None of us are saints, Matthew. There are very few people capable of restraint when they are given everything. So, what happened?"

"Family politics, as far as I understand it. His mother sounds like a piece of work. From what I can tell she almost encouraged his nasty tendencies, enabled him to operate without constraints. Then one day his older brother brought his fiancée to the family seat. It was like the first pebble in an avalanche. She was connected to an able political fixer called Rosemary Piper. Between them, they elbowed Giles aside and then suddenly the estate was in the hands of his younger sister."

His father chuckled. "Younger sister?"

"Yep. That really smarts for Giles."

***

January

One afternoon, not long after their return from Scotland, Giles was idling in front of some afternoon television while Matt was at work. He was only half paying attention to the programme, while browsing a magazine. Thus he was taken by surprise to look up and see an aerial view of somewhere very like Dearborn.

His heart panged as he remembered the sunlight on the big house. Images from his life at the estate flashed through his head like a sort of greatest hits show reel. How could his mother have just taken it from him like that? In such an arbitrary way! It almost implied that the decision to give it to him had been just as random.

Then a thought came into his head that he'd never had before. This idea, and variations on it, nagged him until Matt lost patience with him and demanded to know what was eating him.

"Why did Mother give Dearborn to me in the first place, Matt? If not to Charles, then why me rather than Byron?"

"Or even your sister," Matt said dryly.

Giles shot him a black look. Anastacia's elevation still stung, even more than the knowledge that he had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Rosemary. At least she was a player. His sister couldn't organise a piss-up in the proverbial. The very idea of her running Dearborn, let alone develop a business, was absurd.

"Only one way to find out, old man." Matt murmured, then throwing his hands up at Giles' puzzlement. "Ask your mum."

Giles frowned. Their last exchange had not gone well. However, over the next few days, he came to understand that that was what he was going to have to do. Taking his courage in his hands, he picked up the phone.

"Mother?"

"Yes, Giles, what is it? If it's to ask for Dearborn, then this conversation is over."

In his experience, his mother had two modes, chilly and irritable. This was the latter.

"No! No!" he said, hastily. "I wanted to know something."

"Get on with it then! Couldn't you have done this via email?"

Her manner unsettled him as it always had. Arm's length was her preference, or maybe a little further.

He gathered his courage. "Why me, mother?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you give Dearborn to me?"

She laughed unpleasantly. "You liked to throw your weight around."

He shook his head. "What?"

Monica snorted, "'I'm the king of the castle!' was one of your favourites when you were a child. You liked giving orders - when you could persuade the twins and the staff to play along."

"I don't understand."

"No, I don't imagine you do. Self-awareness was never one of your strong points."

He struggled to regain the purpose of his call. "But Dearborn?"

Bitterness inflected her reply. "I hated the place."

He grimaced. She had rejected the lifestyle completely: the ballroom was unused in thirty years. One famous family anecdote had her facing down the Master of Hounds when the hunt came into the park, telling him that if it happened again, she would personally shoot as many of the dogs as she could, and him too if he loitered. When he protested, she'd demonstrated that she knew how to use a firearm, the bullet lodging in the ground next his feet.

That had prompted a visit from a well-connected senior police officer who'd made noises about 'local traditions' and 'fitting in'. He'd left twenty minutes later, grim faced, his hints that the laws of trespass shouldn't really be expected to apply to the Hunt falling on stony ground. Thereafter she'd been 'that damn Yank' in conversation amongst the people 'who mattered'.

"So I gave it to you," his mother said, breaking into his memories.

"You gave it to me because you hated it?" he said, hesitantly.

"I thought you could be relied upon to destroy it."

The voice in his ear seemed to be coming from the depths of a well.

"Why?" he whispered.

"Why Giles, I wanted to hurt your father, and I could think of no better way of doing that than to put you in charge."

The line went dead, and the phone fell to the floor.

***

February

Matt studied Giles. The phone call to his mother had been deeply damaging. Privately Matt thought Monica's behaviour had been appalling, acts of spite and malice. Giles looked different these days; the arrogance that once ruled his face had metamorphosed into unhappiness.

They sat side by side on the small sofa watching 'Sex and the City'. That is, Matt was watching it with rapt attention. Giles was glancing at it from time to time out of the corner of his eye, while idly flicking through a copy of New Scientist. Matt had eclectic tastes.

"How can you bear to watch this garbage?" Giles murmured.

Matt gasped and shouted, "Don't listen to him, girls!"

Giles chuckled, and Matt cuffed him on the shoulder. "You can be so annoying!"

Widening his eyes, Giles gurned at him, and Matt shrieked with laughter, leaning in to wrap his arms round him. "Don't ever change!"

"Too late for that, Matt. I'm not Mr Bastard or Sadistic Man Baby anymore. If anything, I'm Mr Useless."

"Not useless, darling, we just haven't found your new vocation. Although jobbing pianist might be a start."

Giles grimaced. "Music's for relaxation, doing it as a job would drain all the pleasure out of it. I would have to play material I don't like simply because someone else holds the purse strings."

"Needs must, darling. You're lucky you've got me as your safety net. Stay cute, now."

This time it was Giles' turn to shout with laughter and he pounced on his partner. Struggling for ascendancy - Matt was stronger than he looked - Giles finally ended up sitting astride the other and gazed down at him, panting. Something in Matt's face changed and he looked wistful.

Giles leaned down and kissed him, softly at first and then with increasing passion as Matt's arms came up to encircle him. Then, unexpectedly, he pushed Giles off and sat up. "Ravish me later, but first I've got to see if Carrie can square things with Big!"

A few minutes later, without taking his eyes from the screen, Matt said, "Have you thought about going back?"

"Back? Back where?" Giles said, perplexed.

"Dearborn, of course, silly!" Matt smiled.

"Dearborn! Not in a million years! Why on Earth would I want to go there?"

The other put his hand on Giles' arm and said gently, "Because it's where you belong."

Giles' face twisted. "You didn't see the way they all looked at me."

"Then you'll just have to change their minds, won't you?"

Giles stared at him for a long moment and the dark feelings that had been lurking since his talk with Matt's father came back in full force. A tear made its way from the corner of his eye and Matt gathered him into his arms.

***

March

Sixty miles south and west of Gascoigne Junior's London residence, on a bright but chilly Spring morning, with the sun picking out the first hints of green in the hedges outside, Judy Finch trotted into the main office at Dearborn where Stacia's father was studying the estate map.

"If you're looking for your other half, I think she's in the kitchen with Mrs Took," he said without turning round.

How did he do that? Her mother used to boast that she had eyes in the back of her head, but Paul Stanforth really did. She chuckled. She liked him a lot more now that he'd been persuaded to quit the comfort of his library to help bring the winery forward.

She loved his description of Stacia as her 'other half'. Now they were properly together she felt like there was nothing they couldn't do: lying in bed, hands on each other's baby bumps, talking over the day and planning the morrow, like a true meeting of minds.

Making her way to the kitchen, she found Stacia, Naomi, and Eleanor in discussion. They looked round as she entered the room and her heart beat a little faster when she met her lover's eyes.

"Got a moment?" she asked, and they all looked at her expectantly.

"Anyone spoken to a Matthew Gascoigne?"

There was a general shaking of heads.

"He wants to come and talk to you, Stacia."

"What about?"

"He was a bit vague on that. Something to do with the estate."

Stacia shrugged, "I'm here most of the time. I can spare him a few minutes, I guess. You know my schedule, darling."

Judy grinned and coloured slightly. The others were looking at her with kindly eyes.

***

Some days later Matthew Gascoigne arrived at Dearborn in a vintage cream coloured MG Midget. By the time Valerie Cane went out to greet him, he had already collected some admirers, standing round talking car stuff.

"Don't you all have jobs to do?" she scolded, and the estate staff ambled off.

"Matthew Gascoigne?" she asked, and the young man turned to her with a smile.

"The very same! Delighted to meet you..." he left an enquiring pause.

"Mrs Cane, I am the housekeeper here. Let me take you inside."

In the old library, Matthew Gascoigne settled himself into the spare chair and Giles' sister and her partner waited for him to say whatever it was that he'd come to say.

"I've come on behalf of your brother Giles," he said, without preamble.

Judy and Stacia exchanged glances and Stacia waved a hand. "What does he want?" she said wearily.

"He would like to return to Dearborn."

"What?" shouted Judy, "after all the misery he caused!"

Their visitor was unperturbed. "He gave me to understand it would be controversial."

"That's an understatement," Anastacia said drily. "However, the agreement he signed was quite clear. Either work for the business or leave with the money. He chose the latter."

He inclined his head in acknowledgement. "He would like to renegotiate."

Judy snorted.

"As in to repay the money and take the other option," he said with a slight smile.

"Are you a lawyer, by any chance, Mr Gascoigne?"

"As it happens, I am. Mr Stanforth has not retained my services, however, I'm here merely as a go-between."

"I'll need to discuss it with the other partners," Stacia said while Judy looked at her open mouthed.

"Of course," he replied smoothly. "What sort of timeframe might he expect?"

"Two weeks."

After he'd gone, Judy turned to her in incredulity. "Let him back!"

"I didn't say that. If it were only up to me then I'd say no. But I'm not the only voice and it's my duty to put it to them. And he is my brother."

Judy shook her head. "Wonders will never cease. It'd be a hell of a sell to the estate. What would he do?"

"Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. If we ever do."

***

To be continued