To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  Zoe Lang, the real Zoe Lang, now lived in an old body. Through all her ages, persisting into her fanaticism, the essence of Zoe Lang had triumphed. The shell was but a crab’s carapace, grown, hardened, shed and grown again. I played marches for her this time as a salutation.

  She would never find the Kinloch Hilt if I could prevent it, but I would pay my foe the most intense respect (short of capitulation) that I could.

  I never counted time up there on the granite heights. The gray dawn turned to a brilliant blue sparkling day and I reckoned I would go down to the bothy only when the lack of breakfast gave me a shove. Meanwhile I played the pipes and marched to the beat and filled the whole optimism bottle slowly with uncomplicated joy at being there in that wilderness, alive.

  Too good to last, I supposed.

  I was aware first of a buzzing noise that increasingly interfered with the drone of the pipes, and then a helicopter rose fast over the ridge of the mountain at my back and flew overhead, drowning out all sound but the deafening roar of its rotor.

  I stopped playing. The helicopter swooped and wheeled and clattered and circled, and while I still half cursed its insistent penetrating din and half wondered what on earth anyone would be looking for in that deserted area at that early time on a Sunday, the helicopter seemed like a falcon spotting a kill, and dropped purposefully towards its prey.

  The prey, I realized in dismay, was the bothy. I sat down and folded the pipes across my knees, and watched.

  The helicopter made a sort of circuit and approached the bothy from in front, hovering unsteadily over the small plateau there, sliding through the air to one side of my parked replacement truck and finally settling onto the ground the longitudinal bars of the landing support.

  The noise of the engine faded, and the speed of the rotor fell away.

  I watched in extreme apprehension. I sat as motionless as the mountain itself, aware that unless I moved or put my head above the skyline I was invisible from below against the jumble of rocks.

  If the four robbers had come ...

  If the four robbers had come they wouldn’t catch me up in the mountains, but they could again break into my house.

  They could destroy my painting.

  I felt as if it were a child I’d left there. A sleeping child. Irreplaceable. I wondered how I could bear it, if they destroyed it.

  After what seemed time for several deaths the rotor blades came to rest. The side door of the helicopter opened and one man jumped out. A small figure, far below.

  One.

  Not four.

  He looked around him, then walked forwards out of my sight, and I knew he must be trying the front door of the bothy. He reappeared, looked into the truck, stuck his head into the helicopter door as if talking to someone there and then in obvious frustration walked to the edge of the plateau and stood looking down the valley towards the road.

  Something about the set of his shoulders as he turned back towards the helicopter brought me recognition and floods of relief.

  Jed, I thought. It’s Jed.

  Blowing a scant lungful of air into the bag on my knees, I squeezed it and played four or five random notes on the chanter.

  In the clear silent air Jed heard them immediately. He whirled and looked up towards the mountains, shading his eyes against the eastern sun. I stood up and waved, and after a few moments he spotted me, and made huge circular movements with an arm, beckoning, beseeching me to come down.

  Not good news, I thought. Helicopters were extreme.

  I went down to join him, though not with happy haste.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, as soon as I was within earshot. “We’ve been trying to phone you for hours.”

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Oh, shut up. Why do you think you’ve got that portable phone?”

  “Not for lugging around on the mountains. What’s happened?”

  “Well ...” He hesitated.

  “You’d better tell me.”

  “It’s Sir Ivan. He’s had another heart attack.”

  “No! How bad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I stood motionless, just staring at him.

  I said stupidly, “He can’t be dead. He was better.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I hadn’t thought I would care so much but I found I cared very much indeed. I’d grown fond of the old guy in the past three weeks without realizing the depth of my feeling.

  “When?” I said. As if it mattered.

  “Sometime later yesterday. I don’t know exactly. Your mother phoned Himself before six this morning. She said you’d given her your number but she’d phoned you from five onwards and you didn’t answer.”

  I said blankly, “I’d better phone her at once.”

  “Himself said to tell you that Sir Ivan’s daughter is now rerouting all calls, and she wouldn’t let him get back to your mother. He says she has taken complete charge and is unreasonable. So he told me to find you by helicopter and fly you direct to Edinburgh to catch the first flight south ... he said you could do without arguing with Patsy Benchmark.”

  He was right.

  We went into the bothy. Jed seemed struck dumb by the painting but agreed to take care of it again, wrapped in its sheet. We loaded it into the truck: also my pipes and other belongings. I collected a few traveling things into the duffel bag. We locked the bothy door.

  “Jed,” I said awkwardly, aware of how much I owed him.

  “Get going.”

  We didn’t need, I supposed, to say more. He waved me away into the helicopter and watched until it was circling in the air before setting off homewards in the truck.

  chapter 11

  My mother wept. I held her tight while she shook with near-silent sobs, the grief deep and terrible.

  I wondered if she had ever cried in the dark for my father, privately broken up under the public composure. I’d been too young then to be of understanding comfort for her, and also I’d been too immersed in my own feelings.

  This time, when I arrived at Park Crescent, she turned to me on every level, and there was no doubt at all that her emotions were intense and overwhelming.

  From lifelong habit, though, after the first revealing half hour, she stiffened her whole body, damped all movements, powdered her face and presented, at least to the world if no longer to me, the outward semblance of serenity.

  Ivan was not in the house.

  When she could talk, she told me that at bedtime the previous evening she’d heard Ivan cry out, and she’d found him lying on the stairs.

  “Such pain ...”

  “Don’t talk,” I said.

  She told me at intervals.

  She had been in her nightclothes, and he in his. She didn’t know why he had been downstairs. There was no need for him to go down to the kitchen for anything. He had water and a glass beside his bed, and there was the tray of other drinks in his study. He hadn’t told her why he was coming upstairs. He seemed to be out of breath, as if he’d been hurrying, but why should he have been hurrying, it was after ten o’clock?

  He had said only her name, “Viv ... Vivienne ...”

  I squeezed my mother’s hand.

  She said, “I loved him.”

  ‘ ‘I know.”

  A long pause. She had been very frightened. They had given Wilfred the night off because Ivan had been so much better. They had said they wouldn’t need him much longer. He had left the box of heart-attack remedies at hand on Ivan’s bedside table and my mother had run to fetch them. She had put one of the tiny nitroglycerine tablets under Ivan’s tongue, and although he had tried to cling to her she had run to the telephone and had miraculously reached Keith Robbiston at his home, and he had said he would send an ambulance immediately.

  She had put a second pill under Ivan’s tongue, and then a third.

  They hadn’t stopped the pain.

  She had sat on the stairs, holding him.

  When the fron
t doorbell had rung she had had to go down to answer it as there was no one else in the house. The ambulancemen had been very quick. They had carried a stretcher upstairs and had given him an injection and oxygen, and had put him on the stretcher and had fastened straps round him and carried him down.

  She was wearing only her nightdress.

  The men were kind to her. They said that they were taking him just along the road to the London Clinic, as he had been a patient there and Dr. Robbiston had arranged it. They were a private firm. They gave my mother a card.

  “A card,” she said blankly.

  She had gone down the stairs with Ivan, holding his hand.

  Keith Robbiston had arrived.

  He had waited while she put some clothes on, and he had driven her to the Clinic.

  A long, long pause.

  “I wasn’t with him when he died,” she said.

  I squeezed her hand.

  “Keith said they did everything possible.”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  “He died before they could get him to the operating room.”

  I simply held her.

  “What am I going to do?”

  It was the unanswerable cry, I guessed, of all the bereaved.

  It wasn’t until the next day, Monday, that Patsy swept in. She wasn’t pleased to see me but seemed to realize my presence was inevitable.

  She was brisk, decisive, the manager. Her grief for her father, and to be charitable one had to believe her own description of her feelings as “distraught” (that excellent but overused word), was chiefly expressed by a white tissue clutched valiantly ready for stemming tears.

  “Darling Father,” she announced, “will be cremated ...” She applied the tissue gently to her nose. “... on Thursday at Cockfosters crematorium, where they have a slot at ten o’clock owing to someone else’s postponement ... it’s so difficult to arrange this sort of thing, you would be appalled ... but I agreed to that, so I hope, Vivienne, that you don’t mind the early hour? And of course I’ve asked everyone to come here afterwards, and I’ve booked a caterer for drinks and a buffet lunch ... ”

  She went on talking about the arrangements and the announcements in the papers and the seating in the chapel, and she’d notified the Jockey Club and invited Ivan’s colleagues to the wake; and it seemed she had done most of all this that morning, while I had been seeing to breakfast. I had to admit to relief not to be doing it all myself, and my mother, who seemed mesmerized, simply said, “Thank you, Patsy,” over and over.

  “Do you want flowers?” Patsy demanded of her. “I’ve put ‘no flowers’ in the announcement to the papers. Just a wreath from you on the coffin, don’t you think? And one from me, of course. Do you want me to arrange it? I’ve asked the caterers to bring flowers here for the buffet table, of course ... And I’ll just go down now and talk to Lois about cleaning the silver ...”

  My mother looked exhausted when Patsy left.

  “She loved him,” she said weakly, as if defending her.

  I nodded. “All the activity is her way of showing it.” “I don’t know how you understand her, when she’s always so beastly to you.”

  I shrugged. No amount of understanding would make her a friend.

  We struggled through the next few days somehow. I cooked for my mother; Edna tossed her head. When my mother asked forlornly if I thought she should wear a black hat to the funeral, because she couldn’t face shopping, I went out and bought her one, and pinned a big white silk rose to its sweeping brim so that she looked good enough to paint, though I just refrained from saying so.

  We went one afternoon to see Ivan in his coffin at the funeral home. He looked pale and peaceful; my mother kissed his forehead and said on the way home how icy cold he was; nothing like life; and I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t the chill of death but of efficient refrigeration.

  For Thursday morning I engaged a car with a chauf feur to take the two of us to the crematorium and back again, and I had personally asked a fair number of Ivan’s friends and businesspeople to turn up at Park Crescent even if they couldn’t face the crematorium; but in the event the old boy drew a full house at Cockfosters, an eloquent and moving tribute to a good man.

  “All the brewery people are here,” my mother murmured. “All the workpeople!”

  They had come in a chartered bus, we found, and were working extra hours to make up.

  The racing people had come. Many bigwigs and owners. Several grooms from her stable accompanied Emily.

  Himself came, with his countess. Jamie came, ever cheerful, with his pretty wife.

  Patsy, with husband and daughter, received everyone graciously.

  My mother looked ethereal and shed no tears.

  Chris Young showed up at my shoulder, dressed as the secretary, lighthearted about his task of guarding my back against Surtees.

  Patsy, at her administrative best, had briefed the presiding cleric thoroughly, so that he spoke knowledgeably and well about Ivan’s life; and Himself, delivering the eulogy, quoted, to my surprise, from the translation of Bede’s Death Song: “No one is wiser in thought than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be adjudged to his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day,” he said; and declared that Ivan Westering had behaved on earth with such uprightness that only good would be adjudged to him now, after his death-day.

  All in all, impressive.

  The grand drawing room at Park Crescent was packed afterwards with mourners, and I had to acknowledge that Patsy had been far more accurate in her estimation than I would have been. The caterers nevertheless sent their van away early for reinforcements.

  Tobias Tollright came, and also Margaret Morden. I asked them both to linger for a while after the crush had cleared to discuss a brewery plan of action, and I was reminded triumphantly by Desmond Finch that all my powers of attorney had been canceled by Ivan’s death, and nothing I might say or do mattered anymore in Ivan’s or the brewery’s affairs.

  Oliver Grantchester made his large presence benevolently felt both at the crematorium and Park Crescent, behaving rather as if Ivan had been his own personal achievement; as if he, Oliver, had been responsible for all Ivan’s good decisions and successes. “Of course Ivan regularly took my advice,” I heard him saying, and he saw me listening and gave me a sideways Patsy-inspired glare of disapproval. I had no need to ask him to stay on for a conference; he showed every sign of wanting to conduct one.

  I had invited Lois and Edna to join the gathering, but they stayed obstinately belowstairs. Wilfred took a brief glass of farewell champagne, spoke a few words to Patsy and descended to join them. Wilfred thought I hadn’t appreciated his services sufficiently: Edna had told me Wilfred thought it was my fault he hadn’t been there when Ivan had needed him. The fact that I’d been in Scotland didn’t excuse me.

  Emily’s grooms ate and drank with an eye on the scales, made awkward but genuine little speeches to my mother and left Emily behind when they departed.

  Emily eyed Chris with obvious speculation, not doubting his/her gender but wondering if the tall leggy dark-haired presence in black tights, short inappropriate skirt and baggy black sweater was a serious girlfriend, in view of the glue that kept him ever and only a short pace away from my side.

  Chris wore white frilled shirt cuffs over the thick wrists, and a small discreet white frill round his neck. He carried a small black purse. Tobias attempted to chat him up. They could both hardly speak for laughing. “This is a funeral, for God’s sake,” I told them.

  Keith Robbiston dashed in, glancing at his watch. He kissed my mother’s cheek and murmured comfort quietly into her ear, so that she smiled at him gratefully. He shook my hand, nodding, and made a sort of sketchy bow to Patsy, who looked forbidding, as if Ivan’s death were the doctor’s fault. She had said, in fact, during the past few days, that clearly Ivan should have stayed in the Clinic and been shielded from stress, though she hadn’t said it when he was alive, and had herse
lf generated a good deal of the stress.

  Keith Robbiston shook hands with Oliver Grantchester, their mutual disregard stiff in their spines; then, duty done, the doctor gave my mother another cheek-to-cheek fondness and hurried away.

  I wandered round the room, thanking people for coming, carrying a glass of champagne that I didn’t feel like drinking.

  The champagne was good. So were the canap6 snacks. Patsy had ordered the best.

  There was a woman standing apart in a far comer of the room, talking to no one and looking a little lost, so I drifted that way to draw her in.

  “You have no champagne,” I said.

  “It’s all right.”

  She was undemanding and not at home among Ivan’s friends. She wore a tweed skirt, a shiny pale blue blouse, a brown cardigan, flat shoes and pearls. Sixty, or thereabouts.

  “Take my champagne,” I said, holding it out to her. “I haven’t drunk any. I’ll get some more.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t.” She took the glass, though, and sipped, eyeing me over the rim.

  “I’m Lady Westering’s son,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. I’ve seen you coming and going.” Then, seeing my surprise, added, “I live next door. I’m the caretaker there, you see. I’ve just popped in to pay my respects to Sir Ivan. Lady Westering invited me. Always so kind to me, both of them. Really nice people.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m ever so sorry Sir Ivan died. Did he find what he was looking for?”

  “Er ...” I said. “What was he looking for?”

  “Ever so distressed he was, poor man.”

  “Was he?” I asked, only half interested. “When was that?”

  “Why, the night he died, of course.”

  She sensed in me the sudden acute sharpening of attention and began to look nervous.

  “It’s all right, Mrs.... er ... ” I assured her, calming us both. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”