He bought enough sweets for Patrick to keep him sick for three months on end, and drove back to the hills. He was afraid that the sweets were a little too elegant to please Patrick entirely—a little too ‘jessie-like’ perhaps? — since Pat’s avowed favourites were something in Mrs Mair’s window labelled Ogo-Pogo Eyes. But Laura would no doubt dole out the Scoone ones in driblets anyway.
He halted the car above the river, half-way between Moymore and Scoone, and went down across the moor to look for Tad Cullen. It was still early afternoon and he would not yet have finished his after-luncheon spell on the river.
He had not yet begun it. As Grant came to the edge of the moor and looked down at the river’s immediate hollow, he saw below him in the mid-distance a small group of three persons, idle and relaxed on the bank. Zoë was propped in her favourite position against a rock, and on either side of her, on a level with her crossed feet and gazing at her with an unwavering attention, were her two followers: Pat Rankin and Tad Cullen. Looking at them, amused and indulgent, Grant became aware that Bill Kenrick had done him a final service for which he had not yet had credit. Bill Kenrick had saved him from falling in love with Zoë Kentallen.
A few more hours would have done it. A few more hours in her uninterrupted company, and he would have been involved past recovery. Bill Kenrick had intervened just in time.
It was Pat who saw him first and came to meet him and bring him back to the company as children and dogs do to those of whom they approve. Zoë tilted her head back to watch him come and said: ‘You haven’t missed anything, Alan Grant. No one has had a nibble all day. Would you like to take my rod for a little? Perhaps a change of rhythm will fetch them.’
Grant said that he would like that very much, since his time for fishing was running out.
‘You have still a week to catch everything in the river,’ she said.
Grant wondered how she had known that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am going back to London tomorrow morning,’ and for the first time saw Zoë react to a stimulus as an adult would. The instant regret on her face was as vivid as that on Pat’s, but unlike Pat she controlled and removed it. She said in her polite gentle voice how sorry she was, but her face no longer showed any emotion. It was her fairy-tale face again; the Hans Andersen illustration.
Before he could consider this phenomenon, Tad Cullen said: ‘Can I come back with you, Mr Grant? To London.’
‘I meant you to. I’ve booked two seats on the morning plane.’