by Dick Francis
I heard the visitors arrive, heard their loud cheerful voices as they were shown up to their rooms, the doors shutting, the bath waters running, the various bumps and murmurs from the adjoining rooms; and eventually the diminishing chatter as they finished changing and went downstairs past my door. I heaved myself off the bed, took off the loose-waisted slacks and jersey shirt I felt most comfortable in, and put on a white cotton shirt and dark grey suit.
My face looked back at me, pale, gaunt and dark-eyed, as I brushed my hair. A bit of death’s head at the feast. I grinned nastily at my reflection. It was only a slight improvement.
THREE
By the time I got to the foot of the stairs, Charles and his guests were coming across the hall from the drawing-room to the dining-room. The men all wore dinner jackets and the women, long dresses. Charles deliberately hadn’t warned me, I reflected. He knew my convalescent kit didn’t include a black tie.
He didn’t stop and introduce me to his guests, but nodded slightly and went straight on into the dining-room, talking with charm to the rounded, fluffy little woman who walked beside him. Behind came Viola and a tall dark girl of striking good looks. Viola, Charles’s elderly widowed cousin, gave me a passing half-smile, embarrassed and worried. I wondered what was the matter: normally she greeted me with affection, and it was only a short time since she had written warm wishes for my recovery. The girl beside her barely glanced in my direction, and the two men bringing up the rear didn’t look at me at all.
Shrugging, I followed them into the dining-room. There was no mistaking the place laid for me: it consisted, in actual fact, of a spoon, a mat, a glass, and a fork, and it was situated in the centre of one of the sides. Opposite me was an empty gap. Charles seated his guests, himself in his usual place at the end of the table, with fluffy Mrs van Dysart on his right, and the striking Mrs Kraye on his left. I sat between Mrs Kraye and Rex van Dysart. It was only gradually that I sorted everyone out. Charles made no introductions whatever.
The groups at each end of the table fell into animated chat and paid me as much attention as a speed limit. I began to think I would go back to bed.
The manservant whom Charles engaged on these occasions served small individual tureens of turtle soup. My tureen, I found, contained more beef juice. Bread was passed, spoons clinked, salt and pepper were shaken and the meal began. Still no one spoke to me, though the visitors were growing slightly curious. Mrs van Dysart flicked her sharp china blue eyes from Charles to me and back again, inviting an introduction. None came. He went on talking to the two women with almost overpowering charm, apparently oblivious.
Rex van Dysart on my left offered me bread with lifted eyebrows and a faint non-committal smile. He was a large man with a flat white face, heavy black rimmed spectacles and a domineering manner. When I refused the bread he put the basket down on the table, gave me the briefest of nods, and turned back to Viola.
Even before he brought quartz into his conversation I guessed it was for Howard Kraye that the show was being put on; and I disliked him on sight with a hackle-raising antipathy that disconcerted me. If Charles was planning that I should ever work for, or with, or near Mr Kraye, I thought, he could think again.
He was a substantial man of about forty-eight to fifty, with shoulders, waist and hips all knocking forty-four. The dinner jacket sat on him with the ease of a second skin, and when he shot his cuffs occasionally he did so without affectation, showing off noticeably well manicured hands.
He had tidy grey-brown hair, straight eyebrows, narrow nose, small firm mouth, rounded freshly shaven chin, and very high unwrinkled lower eyelids, which gave him a secret, shuttered look.
A neat enclosed face like a mask, with perhaps something rotten underneath. You could almost smell it across the dinner table. I guessed, rather fancifully, that he knew too much about too many vices. But on top he was smooth. Much too smooth. In my book, a nasty type of phony. I listened to him talking to Viola.
‘…So when Doria and I got to New York I looked up those fellows in that fancy crystal palace on First Avenue and got them moving. You have to give the clothes-horse diplomats a lead, you know, they’ve absolutely no initiative of their own. Look, I told them, unilateral action is not only inadvisable, its impracticable. But they are so steeped in their own brand of pragmatism that informed opinion has as much chance of osmosing as mercury through rhyolite…’
Viola was nodding wisely while not understanding a word. The pretentious rigmarole floated comfortably over her sensible head and left her unmoved. But its flashiness seemed to me to be part of a gigantic confidence trick: one was meant to be enormously impressed. I couldn’t believe that Charles had fallen under his spell. It was impossible. Not my subtle, clever, cool-headed father-in-law. Mr van Dysart, however, hung on every word.
By the end of the soup his wife at the other end of the table could contain her curiosity no longer. She put down her spoon, and with her eyes on me said to Charles in a low but clearly audible voice, ‘Who is that?’
All the heads turned towards him, as if they had been waiting for the question. Charles lifted his chin and spoke distinctly, so that they should all hear the answer.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is my son-in-law.’ His tone was light, amused, and infinitely contemptuous; and it jabbed raw on a nerve I had thought long dead. I looked at him sharply, and his eyes met mine, blank and expressionless.
My gaze slid up over and past his head to the wall behind him. There for some years, and certainly that morning, had hung an oil painting of me on a horse going over a fence at Cheltenham. In its place there was now an old-fashioned seascape, brown with Victorian varnish.
Charles was watching me. I looked back at him briefly and said nothing. I suppose he knew I wouldn’t. My only defence against his insults long ago had been silence, and he was counting on my instant reaction being the same again.
Mrs van Dysart leaned forward a little, and with waking malice murmured, ‘Do go on, Admiral.’
Without hesitation Charles obeyed her, in the same flaying voice. ‘He was fathered, as far as he knows, by a window cleaner on a nineteen-year-old unmarried girl from the Liverpool slums. She later worked, I believe, as a packer in a biscuit factory.’
‘Admiral, no!’ exclaimed Mrs van Dysart breathlessly.
‘Indeed yes,’ nodded Charles. ‘As you might guess, I did my best to stop my daughter making such an unsuitable match. He is small, as you see, and he has a crippled hand. Working class and undersized… but my daughter was determined. You know what girls are.’ He sighed.
‘Perhaps she was sorry for him,’ suggested Mrs van Dysart.
‘Maybe,’ said Charles. He hadn’t finished, and wasn’t to be deflected. ‘If she had met him as a student of some sort, one might have understood it… but he isn’t even educated. He finished school at fifteen to be apprenticed to a trade. He has been unemployed now for some time. My daughter, I may say, has left him.’
I sat like stone, looking down at the congealed puddle at the bottom of my soup dish, trying to loosen the clamped muscles in my jaw, and to think straight. Not four hours ago he’d shown concern for me and had drunk from my cup. As far as I could ever be certain of anything, his affection for me was genuine and unchanged. So he must have a good reason for what he was doing to me now. At least I hoped so.
I glanced at Viola. She hadn’t protested. She was looking unhappily down at her place. I remembered her embarrassment out in the hall, and I guessed that Charles had warned her what to expect. He might have warned me too, I thought grimly.
Not unexpectedly, they were all looking at me. The dark and beautiful Doria Kraye raised her lovely eyebrows and in a flat, slightly nasal voice, remarked, ‘You don’t take offence, then.’ It was half-way to a sneer. Clearly she thought I ought to take offence, if I had any guts.
‘He is not offended,’ said Charles easily. ‘Why should the truth offend?’
‘Is it true then,’ asked Doria down her flawless no
se, ‘that you are illegitimate, and all the rest?’
I took a deep breath and eased my muscles.
‘Yes.’
There was an uncomfortable short silence. Doria said, ‘Oh,’ blankly, and began to crumble her bread.
On cue, and no doubt summoned by Charles’ foot on the bell, the manservant came in to remove the plates, and conversation trickled back to the party like cigarette smoke after a cancer scare.
I sat thinking of the details Charles had left out: the fact that my twenty-year-old father, working overtime for extra cash, had fallen from a high ladder and been killed three days before his wedding day, and that I had been born eight months later. The fact that my young mother, finding that she was dying from some obscure kidney ailment, had taken me from grammar school at fifteen, and because I was small for my age had apprenticed me to a racehorse trainer in Newmarket, so that I should have a home and someone to turn to when she had gone. They had been good enough people, both of them, and Charles knew that I thought so.
The next course was some sort of fish smothered in mushroom coloured sauce. My astronaut’s delight, coming at the same time, didn’t look noticeably different, as it was not in its pot, but out on a plate. Dear Mrs Cross, I thought fervently, I could kiss you. I could eat it this way with a fork, single-handed. The pots needed to be held; in my case inelegantly hugged between forearm and chest; and at that moment I would have starved rather than take my left hand out of my pocket.
Fluffy Mrs van Dysart was having a ball. Clearly she relished the idea of me sitting there practically isolated, dressed in the wrong clothes, and an object of open derision to her host. With her fair frizzy hair, her baby-blue eyes and her rose pink silk dress embroidered with silver, she looked as sweet as sugar icing. What she said showed that she thoroughly understood the pleasures of keeping a whipping boy.
‘Poor relations are such a problem, aren’t they?’ she said to Charles sympathetically, and intentionally loud enough for me to hear. ‘You can’t neglect them in our position, in case the Sunday papers get hold of them and pay them to make a smear. And it’s especially difficult if one has to keep them in one’s own house… one can’t, I suppose, put them to eat in the kitchen, but there are so many occasions when one could do without them. Perhaps a tray upstairs is the best thing.’
‘Ah, yes,’ nodded Charles smoothly, ‘but they won’t always agree to that.’
I half choked on a mouthful, remembering the pressure he had exerted to get me downstairs. And immediately I felt not only reassured but deeply interested. This, then, was what he had been so industriously planning, the destruction of me as a man in the eyes of his guests. He would no doubt explain why in his own good time. Meanwhile I felt slightly less inclined to go back to bed.
I glanced at Kraye, and found his greenish-amber eyes steady on my face. It wasn’t as overt as in Mrs van Dysart’s case, but it was there: pleasure. My toes curled inside my shoes. Interested or not, it went hard to sit tight before that loathsome, taunting half-smile. I looked down, away blotting him out.
He gave a sound half-way between a cough and a laugh, turned his head, and began talking down the table to Charles about the collection of quartz.
‘So sensible of you, my dear chap, to keep them all behind glass, though most tantalising to me from here. Is that a geode, on the middle shelf? The reflection, you know… I can’t quite see.’
‘Er…’ said Charles, not knowing any more than I did what a geode was. ‘I’m looking forward to showing them to you. After dinner, perhaps? Or tomorrow?’
‘Oh, tonight, I’d hate to postpone such a treat. Did you say that you had any felspar in your collection?’
‘No,’ said Charles uncertainly.
‘No, well, I can see it is a small specialised collection. Perhaps you are wise in sticking to silicon dioxide.’
Charles glibly launched into the cousinly-bequest alibi for ignorance, which Kraye accepted with courtesy and disappointment.
‘A fascinating subject, though, my dear Roland. It repays study. The earth beneath our feet, the fundamental sediment from the Triassic and Jurassic epochs, is our priceless inheritance, the source of all our life and power… There is nothing which interests me so much as land.’
Doria on my right gave the tiniest of snorts, which her husband didn’t hear. He was busy constructing another long, polysyllabic and largely unintelligible chat on the nature of the universe.
I sat unoccupied through the steaks, the meringue pudding, the cheese and the fruit. Conversations went on on either side of me and occasionally past me, but a deaf mute could have taken as much part as I did. Mrs van Dysart commented on the difficulties of feeding poor relations with delicate stomachs and choosey appetites. Charles neglected to tell her that I had been shot and wasn’t poor, but agreed that a weak digestion in dependants was a moral fault. Mrs van Dysart loved it. Doria occasionally looked at me as if I were an interesting specimen of low life. Rex van Dysart again offered me the bread; and that was that. Finally Viola shepherded Doria and Mrs van Dysart out to have coffee in the drawing-room and Charles offered his guests port and brandy. He passed me the brandy bottle with an air of irritation and compressed his lips in disapproval when I took some. It wasn’t lost on his guests.
After a while he rose, opened the glass bookcase doors, and showed the quartz to Kraye. Piece by piece the two discussed their way along the rows, with van Dysart standing beside them exhibiting polite interest and hiding his yawns of boredom. I stayed sitting down. I also helped myself to some more brandy.
Charles kept his end up very well and went through the whole lot without a mistake. He then transferred to the drawing-room, where his gem cabinet proved a great success. I tagged along, sat in an unobtrusive chair and listened to them all talking, but I came to no conclusions except that if I didn’t soon go upstairs I wouldn’t get there under my own steam. It was eleven o’clock and I had had a long day. Charles didn’t look round when I left the room.
Half an hour later, when his guests had come murmuring up to their rooms, he came quietly through my door and over to the bed. I was still lying on top in my shirt and trousers, trying to summon some energy to finish undressing.
He stood looking down at me, smiling.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘It is you,’ I said, ‘who is the dyed-in-the-wool, twenty-four carat, unmitigated bastard.’
He laughed. ‘I thought you were going to spoil the whole thing when you saw your picture had gone.’ He began taking off my shoes and socks. ‘You looked as bleak as the Bering Strait in December. Pyjamas?’
‘Under the pillow.’
He helped me undress in his quick neat naval fashion.
‘Why did you do it?’ I said.
He waited until I was lying between the sheets, then he perched on the edge of the bed.
‘Did you mind?’
‘Hell, Charles… of course. At first anyway.’
‘I’m afraid it came out beastlier than I expected, but I’ll tell you why I did it. Do you remember that first game of chess we had? When you beat me out of sight? You know why you won so easily?’
‘You weren’t paying enough attention.’
‘Exactly. I wasn’t paying enough attention, because I didn’t think you were an opponent worth bothering about. A bad tactical error.’ He grinned. ‘An admiral should know better. If you underrate a strong opponent you are at a disadvantage. If you grossly underrate him, if you are convinced he is of absolutely no account, you prepare no defence and are certain to be defeated.’ He paused for a moment, and went on. ‘It is therefore good strategy to delude the enemy into believing you are too weak to be considered. And that is what I was doing tonight on your behalf.’
He looked at me gravely. After some seconds I said, ‘At what game, exactly, do you expect me to play Howard Kraye?’
He sighed contentedly, and smiled. ‘Do you remember what he said interested him most?’
I thought back. ‘L
and.’
Charles nodded. ‘Land. That’s right. He collects it. Chunks of it, yards of it, acres of it…’ He hesitated.
‘Well?’
‘You can play him,’ he said slowly, ‘for Seabury Racecourse.’
The enormity of it took my breath away.
‘What?’ I said incredulously. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m only…’
‘Shut up,’ he interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear what you think you are only. You’re intelligent, aren’t you? You work for a detective agency? You wouldn’t want Seabury to close down? Why shouldn’t you do something about it?’
‘But I imagine he’s after some sort of take-over bid, from what you say. You want some powerful city chap or other to oppose him, not… me.’
‘He is very much on his guard against powerful chaps in the city, but wide open to you.’
I stopped arguing because the implications were pushing into the background my inadequacy for such a task.
‘Are you sure he is after Seabury?’ I asked.
‘Someone is,’ said Charles. ‘There has been a lot of buying and selling of the shares lately, and the price per share is up although they haven’t paid a dividend this year. The Clerk of the Course told me about it. He said that the directors are very worried. On paper, there is no great concentration of shares in any one name, but there wasn’t at Dunstable either. There, when it came to a vote on selling out to a land developer, they found that about twenty various nominees were in fact all agents for Kraye. He carried enough of the other shareholders with him, and the racecourse was lost to housing.’
‘It was all legal, though?’
‘A wangle; but legal, yes. And it looks like happening again.’
‘But what’s to stop him, if it’s legal?’
‘You might try.’
I stared at him in silence. He stood up and straightened the bedcover neatly. ‘It would be a pity if Seabury went the way of Dunstable.’ He went towards the door.
‘Where does van Dysart fit in?’ I asked.