Homecoming by Elizabeth Jennings Page B

struck again by how good-looking he was. He was better looking than Jack, his features more even and less craggy. But it was to Jack’s face that her eyes kept wandering. “He said ‘one down, two to go’.”
    “He also said that you two would never get married.” Lilly was nestling comfortably in Norman’s embrace. “He said you were too flighty and Jack was too serious.”
    Federica was mulling this over when an extraordinary apparition rounded the corner of the cottage.
    “Lilly, blast it all, where are you, woman? My mug’s broken and I need a new one. How can I drink my whisky out of a broken mug?”
    An ancient man, bent almost double over a cane, hobbled into view. The hand clutching the cane was twisted with arthritis. Nonetheless, he covered ground surprisingly quickly. He stood for a moment while Jack got him a chair, then sat down, pulling off a battered black felt beret and revealing a bald, brown liver-spotted pate.
    “Goddammit. I shouted myself hoarse out front.” His black eyes, as crafty as Cavendish’s, surveyed the picnic table, and the empty bottles of Pigswill scattered over the tabletop like so many fallen soldiers. “Of course, if I’d known you people were out here getting pie-eyed, I would have saved my breath and joined you earlier.”
    “Here, Horace.” Wyatt uncorked another bottle and poured the old man a full glass of wine. “Dad wants to know what you think of it.”
    “Don’t mind if I do, boy. Don’t mind if I do.” The wine disappeared down the old man’s throat in two long swallows. “Ah…” He smacked his lips and held out the glass. “Okay, now I’ve primed the pump.”
    Wyatt had been holding the bottle ready and topped the glass up again. The next sip was worthy of a sommelier. The old man chewed the wine for a moment, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    “Chateau Sutter.” He nodded slowly. “Tell old Charlie it’s better than the St. Emilion I used to drink in Paris.”
    Federica gasped and took a closer look at the man. Most of the light had drained from the evening sky and a few stars had come out, but it was still possible to see. The skin was more flaccid and the monk’s rim of hair had gone, as had a few teeth, but the face was the same as the one on the back cover of one of her favorite books.
    Horace .
    Wyatt had called him Horace. Of course.
    Horace Milton, author of America’s most famous dirty books. He had written movingly, lyrically, lewdly, hilariously about his life and loves as a struggling artist in Paris during the Depression years. Federica had learned a lot about life—and love—by reading his forbidden books. Horace Milton. But how could Horace Milton be here? Now ? He had been in his twenties at the start of the Depression, which made him…
    “I thought you were dead,” Federica blurted.
    The old man turned his head slowly. He stared at her out of coal-black eyes which, for all their age, had lost nothing of their sharpness. For a moment, Federica felt stripped to the bone as he seemed to stare straight into her soul.
    “Dead?” The old man’s lips widened in a smile to reveal a mouthful of blackened stumps. “No, sweetheart. Not as long as there’s a Republican majority I’m not. Though there are a lot of husbands who would have been happy to dance on my grave.” Federica stared for a moment into his lively, ferociously intelligent black eyes. “ Ha !” he suddenly cackled, and Federica jumped. “Outlived them all!”
    “I used to read you in school,” she breathed.
    It was hard to believe he was here, at a picnic table with her in a small town in Northern California. He was forever fixed in her mind in the corner of a smoky bistro in Montmartre with a girl in one hand and a filter-less cigarette in another.
    Again, she had the impression that he could see straight into her as he stared at her. “Good God, girl. Don’t tell me I’m being taught in school now. I’d hate to be required reading in