by Dick Francis
I slowly nodded. “I’ve never really been totally in charge myself except now and then for a day or so. There’s always someone to report to.”
“This is much better.” He grinned, looking almost boyish. “Think of me sometimes while you’re scuttling round in Whitehall.”
I thought of him as I sat in the jumbo with Greg and Vicky asleep across the aisle. I’d probably learned more about him in the last few days than in all the time in Tokyo, and certainly I liked him better. Being his own chief seemed to have sharpened the outlines of his character and smoothed away a lot of nervous mannerisms and maybe one day even the sweating forehead would remain dry.
Somehow or other he had persuaded me not only to travel to England with his distressed friends but to deliver them safely to their daughter in Gloucestershire. I was aware that if they’d been going to somewhere like Northumberland my response might have been different, but there had been a tug of curiosity about returning to the county of my childhood. Two weeks remained of my leave and I hadn’t planned to do anything in them definitely except find myself somewhere in London to live. So to Gloucestershire—why not?
I RENTED A car at Heathrow when we arrived in the morning and drove the pathetically grateful Wayfields westward in the general direction of Cheltenham and the racecourse, Vicky having said that her daughter lived close to the track itself.
As Vicky hadn’t been there before and my own memory was hazy I stopped a couple of times to consult the map provided with the car, but we arrived in the general area at about noon without getting lost and drew up at a garage to ask for final directions.
“The vets’ place? Turn right, go past the fire station . . .”
The road ran through an uneasy mix of centuries, the mellow and old elbowed into the shade by aggressive shop-fronts and modernized pubs. Not a village, more a suburb: no cohesive character.
“The vets’ place” was a substantial brick building set back from the road, allowing enough parking space in front for not only several cars but a horsebox. A large horsebox, in fact, was parked there. Did vets no longer make house calls?
I stopped the rented car on a spare piece of tarmac and helped Vicky unwind to her feet. She was suffering already from jet lag, from a metabolism telling her she’d been awakened at two in the morning, never mind that it had said seven on the local clocks. There were dark smudges under her eyes and a sag in her facial muscles and an overall impression of exhaustion.
A white plastic shield on a headband neatly covered her repaired ear, but a lot of fluffy bounce had gone out of the white hair around it. She looked a tired old woman, and even the attempt at lipstick in the car as we neared our destination in no way disguised the true state of affairs.
The weather hardly helped. Straight from the warmth of Florida to a gray, cold, windy late-February day in England was a shiversome enough transition for anyone: on top of their injuries, it was debilitating.
Vicky wore a dark green trouser suit with a white blouse, inadequate for the English out-of-doors, and had had no energy for brightening things with jewelry or gold chains. Simply getting onto the airplane had been enough.
Greg did his best to be her mainstay but, despite his protestations, it was clear that being knocked unconscious and helpless had shaken him to the foundations. He had left the humping of all the suitcases entirely to me and apologized six times for feeling weak.
I didn’t in any way think that either of them should have snapped back like elastic. The muggers had been strong, purposeful enemies, and the single punch I’d taken had been like a jab from a pole. Moreover the police had depressed us all by their opinion that the muggers would not be discovered or caught: the savage hostility we’d felt from them wasn’t unusual, it appeared. Vicky was more or less advised not to wear screwed-on earrings in future.
“To make it easier for them to rob me?” she asked with tired sarcasm.
“Better wear fakes, ma’am.”
She’d shaken her head. “No fun, when you have the real thing.”
Outside the vets’ place, Greg extricated himself from the car and all three of us went over to the brick building and in through a glassed entrance door to a lobby. This brown-carpeted space was furnished with two chairs and a counter for leaning on while one talked with the young woman in an office on the far side of it.
She was sitting at a desk and speaking on a telephone.
We waited.
Eventually she made some notes, disconnected, turned an inquiring face in our direction and said, “Yes?”
“Belinda Larch ...” Vicky said tentatively.
“Not in, I’m afraid.” The reply was crisp: not impolite exactly, but not helpful either. Vicky looked as if it wouldn’t take much to bring her to tears.
I said to the young woman, “Perhaps you could tell us where we could find her. This is her mother, just arrived from America. Belinda is expecting her.”
“Oh yes.” She wasn’t moved to any show of excessive welcome. “Supposed to have arrived yesterday, I thought.”
“I telephoned,” Vicky said miserably.
“Sit down,” I said to her. “You and Greg sit on these two chairs and wait, and I’ll find Belinda.”
They sat. I’d been taking care of them for so long now that if I’d said, “Lie down on the floor,” they might have done it.
“Right,” I said to the girl. “Where do I find her?”
She began to answer with the same sort of underlying obstructiveness, and then saw something in my expression that changed her mind. Very prudent, I thought.
“Well, she’s in the hospital section assisting the vets. You can’t go in there. They’re operating on a horse. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait.”
“Can you phone her?”
She started to say no, looked at the Wayfields, looked at me and with raised eyebrows picked up the receiver.
The conversation was short but produced results. The girl put down the phone and drew a labeled bunch of keys out of a drawer.
“Belinda says she can’t get out for an hour at least, but these are the keys of the cottage where her mother will be staying. She says to go there and she’ll come as soon as she can.”
“And where’s the cottage?”
“The address is on that label on the key ring. I don’t know where it is.”
Thanks for very little, I thought, I escorted Greg and Vicky back to the car and sought directions from passersby. Most proved equally uninformed but I finally got a reliable pointer from a telephone repairman up a pole and drove away from the bustle, up a hill, round a bend and down the first turning on the left.
“It’s the first house along there on the right,” I’d been told from aloft. “You can’t miss it.”
I did in fact nearly miss it because it wasn’t my idea of a cottage. No thatched roof and roses round the door. No quaint little windows or bulging whitewashed walls. Thetford Cottage was a full-blown house no older than Vicky or Greg.
I braked the car doubtfully, but there was no mistake: the words “Thetford Cottage” were cut into square stone pillars, one each side of imposing gates. I stopped, got out, opened the gates and drove through and stopped again on the graveled expanse inside.
It was a weathered gray three-story edifice built of stone from the local Cotswold hills, roofed in gray slate and painted brown round the windows. The one surprise in its otherwise austere façade was a roofed balcony over the front entrance, with a stone balustrade and a glimpse of long windows behind.
Vicky got out of the car uncertainly, holding on to my arm, blown by the wind.
“Is this the place?” she said doubtfully.
She looked around at the bare flower beds, the leafless trees and bedraggled grass, her shoulders sagging ever more forlornly.
“Surely this isn’t the place . . . ?”
“If the key fits, it is,” I said, trying to sound encouraging; and indeed the key did fit, and turned easily in the lock.
The
house was cold inside with a deep chill speaking of no recent heating. We stood in a wood-floored hall looking around at a lot of closed doors and a polished wood staircase leading to undiscovered joys above.
“Well,” I said, shivering myself. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I opened one of the doors purposefully, expecting vistas at least, and found it was a washroom.
“Thank God for that,” Greg said with relief, eyeing the comforts within. “Excuse me, Peter.” He brushed past me, went in and closed the door behind him.
“That’s one of us satisfied,” I said, moved nearly to a giggle. “Now let’s find a fire.”
A pair of double doors led into a large drawing room, another door into a dining room, a third into a small sitting room with armchairs, television and, the gods be thanked, a fire that lit with switches, not paper, wood and coal.
Turned on, it warmed up nicely and put on a show of flickering flames. Vicky subsided speechlessly into an armchair near it and sat huddled and shaking, looking ill.
“Back in a moment,” I said, and made tracks up the staircase, looking for blankets or anything warm. All the doors upstairs were again closed. The first I opened revealed a bathroom. I must be a water diviner, I thought. The second held twin beds, unmade, the bedclothes neatly stacked on each.
Better than blankets: duvets. Royal blue, scattered with white daisies. I gathered the pair of them into my arms and negotiated the bare polished wooden stairs downwards, thinking that they were a skating rink for the unwary.
Vicky hadn’t moved. Greg stood over her, looking helpless.
“Right,” I said, handing them the duvets. “You tuck these round you and I’ll see what’s in the kitchen in the way of hot drinks.”
“Johnnie Walker?” Greg suggested.
“I’ll look.”
I’d left all the hall doors open, though two were as yet unexplored. One led to a capacious broom, gardenware and flower-vase storeroom, the other to a cold antiseptic kitchen of white fitments round a black-and-white-tiled floor. On a central table stood the first signs of recent human life: an unopened box of tea bags, some artificial sweeteners and a tartan-printed packet of shortbread.
The refrigerator was empty except for a carton of milk. The cupboards on inspection held, besides the normal clutter, a large quantity of homemade marmalade, serried ranks of condensed soups and several stacks of tinned fish, mostly tuna.
I went back to Vicky and Greg, who now sat dumbly in royal blue scattered with white daisies.
“Tea bags or instant coffee?” I asked.
“Tea,” Vicky said.
“Johnnie Walker?” Greg repeated hopefully.
I smiled at him, warming to him, and went on the quest. No alcohol, however, in the dining room cupboards, none in the kitchen, none in the drawing room. I made tea for both of them and carried it, along with the shortbread and the bad news, to the little sitting room.
“You mean, no drink anywhere?” Greg exclaimed, dismayed. “Not even beer?”
“I can’t find any.”
“They’ve locked it up,” Vicky said unexpectedly. “Bet they have.”
They, the owners, whoever they were, might have done so, I supposed, but they’d left their storeroom cupboards stocked and unprotected, and I hadn’t come across any unopenable spaces.
Vicky drank her tea holding the cup with both hands, as if to warm them. The room itself by then was perceptibly warmer than the rest of the house and I began to think of roaming round switching on every heater I could find.
Action was frustrated by the arrival of a car outside, the slam of a door and the rapid entrance into the house of a young woman in a hurry. Belinda, one supposed.
We heard her voice calling “Mother?” followed by her appearance in the doorway. She was slim in stone-washed jeans topped by a padded olive green jacket. Pretty in a fine-boned scrubbed sort of way. Maybe thirty, I thought. Her light brown hair was drawn up into a ponytail that seemed more utilitarian than decorative and she looked worried, but not, it soon appeared, on her mother’s account.
“Mother? Oh good, you got here.”
“Yes, dear,” Vicky said wearily.
“Hello, Greg,” Belinda said briefly, going over to him and giving him a dutiful peck. Her mother got the same treatment in turn: a kiss on the cheek but no deeply loving welcoming hug.
“Well, Mother, I’m sorry, but I can’t stay,” she said. “I’d arranged to have yesterday free, but you being a day late . . .” She shrugged. “I have to go back. The horse died. They have to do a postmortem.” She stared hard at her mother. “What’s the matter with your ear?”
“I told you on the phone . . .”
“Oh yes, so you did. I’m so worried about the horse. . . . Is the ear all right now? By the way, we’re getting married in church instead of the registrar’s office, and we’re having the reception here in this house. I’ll tell you about it later. I have to go back to the hospital now. Make yourselves comfortable, won’t you? Get some food in, or something. I brought some milk, etcetera, yesterday.” Her gaze sharpened from vague to center upon myself. “Sorry, didn’t catch your name?”
“Peter Darwin,” I obliged.
“Peter,” Vicky said forcefully, “has been our lifeline.”
“Oh? Well, good. Nice of you to have helped them.” Her gaze slid away, encompassing the room in general. “The Sandersons, who own the house, have gone to Australia for a couple of months. They’re renting it to you quite cheaply, Mother, and I’ve engaged the caterers.... You always said you wanted me to have a proper wedding and I decided it would be a good idea after all.”
“Yes, dear,” Vicky said, accepting it meekly.
“Three weeks tomorrow,” Belinda told her. “And now, Mother, I really have to run.”
I abruptly recalled a conversation I’d had long ago in Madrid, with my father.
“A child who calls its mother ‘Mother,’ wants to dominate her,” he said. “You will never call your mother ‘Mother.’ ”
“No, Dad.”
“You can call her Mum, Darling, Mater, Popsie or even silly old cow, as I heard you saying under your breath last week, but never Mother. Understood?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“And why did you call her a silly old cow?”
Lying to him was fairly impossible: he always saw through it. Swallowing, I told him the truth. “She wouldn’t let me go to Pamplona to run with the bulls because I’m only fifteen.”
“Quite right. Your mother’s always right. She’s made a good job of you and one day you’ll thank her. And never call her Mother.”
“No, Dad.”
“Mother,” Belinda said, “Ken says we’ll have dinner together soon. He meant it to be tonight, but with all this worry . . . I’ll phone you later.”
She gave a brief wave, turned and departed as speedily as she’d come.
After a short silence Vicky said valiantly, “She was a really sweet baby, very cuddly and loving. But girls grow up so independent. . . .” She paused and sighed. “We get on quite well really, as long as we don’t see each other too much.”
Greg gave me a sideways look and made no comment, though I saw that he felt much as I did about the offhand welcome. Belinda, I thought, was as self-centered as they come.
“Right,” I said cheerfully, “we may as well get your cases in, and if you like I’ll go to the shops.”
A certain amount of bustle at least partially filled the emotional vacuum, and after a while Vicky felt recovered just enough to investigate upstairs. The large bed in what was clearly the Sandersons’ own domain at least looked ready for occupation, though their clothes still filled the closets. Vicky said apathetically that she would unpack later the cases I’d carried up for her but meanwhile she was going to sleep at once, in her clothes, on the bed.
I left Greg fussing over her and went downstairs, and presently he followed, agitated and displeased.
“Belinda’s a pain in the ass,
” he said. “Vicky’s crying. She doesn’t like being in someone else’s house. And I feel so helpless.”
“Sit down by the fire,” I said. “I’ll go foraging.”
When I came to think of it, I hadn’t been shopping regularly for food in England since I’d been at Oxford, and not much then. I was more accustomed to eating what I was given: the sort of life I led was rarely domestic.
I drove back to the straggly suburb and bought all the essentials I could think of, and felt like a stranger in my own country. The inside layouts of shops were subtly different from my last brief visit four years earlier. The goods available were differently packaged. Colors were all brighter. Even the coins had changed shape.
I found I’d lost, if I’d ever really known, any clear idea of what things in England should cost. Everything seemed expensive, even by Tokyo standards. My ignorance puzzled the shop assistants as I was obviously English, and it was altogether an unexpectedly disorienting experience. What on earth would it be like, I wondered, for someone to return after half a century, return to the world of my parents’ childhood, a time that millions still clearly remembered?
Every child had chilblains in the winter back then, my mother said; but I hadn’t known what a chilblain was.
I collected some scotch for Greg and a newspaper and other comforts and headed back to Thetford Cottage, finding things there as I’d left them.
Greg, dozing, woke up when I went in and came shivering out into the hall. The whisky brightened his eye considerably and he followed me into the kitchen to watch me stow the provisions.
“You should be all right now,” I said, closing the fridge.
He was alarmed. “But surely you’re staying?”
“Well . . . no.”
“Oh, but . . .” His voice deepened with distress. “I know you’ve done a lot for us, but please ... just one more night?”
“Greg . . .”
“Please. For Vicky’s sake. Please.”
For his sake too, I saw. I sighed internally. I liked them well enough and I supposed I could stay one night there and start my rediscovery of Gloucestershire in the morning, so again, against my gut reaction, I said yes.