by Dick Francis
‘Hello.’
‘Where have you been? Why don’t you answer your telephone?’
Lucy, my elder half-sister. Lucy, the poet.
Lucy’s husband Edwin was, as always, to be found at her side, rather as if he had no separate life. The leech, Malcolm had called him unkindly in the past. From a Bugg to a leech.
Lucy was blessed with an unselfconsciousness about her weight which stemmed both from unworldliness and an overbelief in health foods. ‘But nuts and raisins are good for you,’ she would say, eating them by the kilo. ‘Bodily vanity, like intellectual arrogance, is a sickness of the soul.’
She was forty-two, my sister, with thick straight brown hair uncompromisingly cut, large brown eyes, her mother’s high cheekbones and her father’s strong nose. She was as noticeable in her own way as Malcolm was himself, and not only because of her shapeless clothes and dedicated absence of cosmetics. Malcolm’s vitality ran in her too, though in different directions, expressing itself in vigour of thought and language.
I had often, in the past, wondered why someone as talented and strongminded as she shouldn’t have made a marriage of equal minds, but in recent years had come to think she had settled for a nonentity like Edwin because the very absence of competition freed her to be wholly herself.
‘Edwin is concerned,’ she said, ‘that Malcolm is leaving his senses.’
For Edwin, read Lucy, I thought. She had a trick of ascribing her own thoughts to her husband if she thought they would be unwelcome to her audience.
Edwin stared at me uneasily. He was a good-looking man in many ways, but mean spirited, which if one were tolerant one would excuse because of the perpetual knife-edge state of his and Lucy’s finances. I wasn’t certain any more whether it was he who had actually failed to achieve employment, or whether Lucy had in some way stopped him from trying. In any event, she earned more prestige than lucre for her writing, and Edwin had grown tired of camouflaging the frayed elbows of his jackets with oval patches of thin leather badly sewn on.
Edwin’s concern, it seemed, was real enough although if it had been his alone they wouldn’t have come.
‘It isn’t fair of him,’ he said, meaning Malcolm. ‘Lucy’s trust fund was set up years ago before inflation and doesn’t stretch as far as itused to. He really ought to put that right. I’ve told him so several times, and he simply ignores me. And now he’s throwing his money away in this profligate way as if his heirs had no rights at all.’ Indignation shook in his voice, along with, I could see, a very definite fear of a rocky future if the fortune he’d counted on for so long should be snatched away in the last furlong, so to speak.
I sighed and refrained from saying that I thought that Malcolm’s heirs had no rights while he was alive. I said merely, soothingly, ‘I’m sure he won’t let you starve.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Edwin said with thin fury. ‘The point is that he’s given an immense amount of money to Lucy’s old college to establish post-graduate scholarships for poets.’
I looked from his pinch-lipped agitated mouth to Lucy’s face and saw shame where there should perhaps have been pride. Shame, I thought, because she found herself sharing Edwin’s views when they ran so contrary to her normal disdain for materialism. Perhaps even Lucy, I thought, had been looking forward to a comfortably off old age.
‘You should be honoured,’ I said.
She nodded unhappily. ‘I am.’
‘No,’ Edwin said, ‘It’s disgraceful.’
‘The Lucy Pembroke Scholarships,’ I said slowly.
‘Yes. How did you know?’ Lucy asked.
And there would be the Serena Pembroke Scholarships, of course. And the Coochie Pembroke Memorial Challenge Trophy …
‘What are you smiling at?’ Lucy demanded. ‘You can’t say you’ve made much of a success of your life so far, can you? If Malcolm leaves us all nothing, you’ll end up carting horse-muck until you drop from senility.’
‘There are worse jobs,’ I said mildly.
There were horses around us, and racecourse noises, and a skyful of gusty fresh air. I could happily spend my life, I knew, in almost any capacity that took me to places like Sandown Park.
‘You’ve wasted every talent you have,’ Lucy said.
‘My only talent is riding horses.’
‘You’re blind and stupid. You’re the only male Pembroke with decent brains and you’re too lazy to use them.’
‘Well, thanks,’ I said.
‘It’s not a compliment.’
‘No, so I gathered.’
‘Joyce says you’re sure to know where Malcolm is as you’ve finally made up your quarrel, though you’ll lie about it as a matter of course,’ Lucy said. ‘Joyce said you would be here today on this spot at this time, if I wanted to reach you.’
‘Which you did, rather badly.’
‘Don’t be so obtuse. You’ve got to stop him. You’re the only one who can, and Joyce says you’re probably the only one who won’t try… and you must try, Ian, and succeed, if not for yourself, then for the rest of the family.’
‘For you?’ I asked.
‘Well…’ She couldn’t openly abandon her principles, but they were bending, it seemed. ‘For the others,’ she said stalwartly.
I looked at her with new affection. ‘You’re a hypocrite, my dear sister,’ I said.
In smarting retaliation, she said sharply, ‘Vivien thinks you’re trying to cut the rest of us out and ingratiate yourself again with Malcolm.’
‘I expect she would,’ I said. ‘I expect Alicia will think it also, when Vivien has fed it to her.’
‘You really are a bastard.’
‘No,’ I said, my lips twitching, ‘that’s Gervase.’
I laughed, ‘I’ll tell Malcolm you’re concerned. I promise I will, somehow. And now I’ve got to change my clothes and ride in a race. Are you staying?’
Lucy hesitated but Edwin said, ‘Will you win?’
‘I don’t think so. Save your money.’
‘You’re not taking it seriously,’ Lucy said.
I looked straight at her eyes. ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I take it very seriously indeed. No one had a right to murder Moira to stop her taking half Malcolm’s money. No one has a right to murder Malcolm to stop him spending it. He is fair. He will leave us all provided for, when the time comes, which I hope may be twenty years from now. You tell them all to stop fretting, to ease off, to have faith. Malcolm is teasing you all and I think it’s dangerous, but he is dismayed by everyone’s greed, and is determined to teach us a lesson. So you tell them, Lucy, tell Joyce and Vivien and everyone, that the more we try to grab, the less we will get. The more we protest, the more he will spend.’
She looked back silently. Eventually she said, ‘I am ashamed of myself.’
‘Rubbish,’ Edwin said to me vehemently. ‘You must stop Malcolm. You must.’
Lucy shook her head, ‘Ian’s right.’
‘Do you mean Ian won’t even try?’ Edwin demanded incredulously.
‘I’m positive he won’t,’ Lucy said. ‘Didn’t you hear what he said? Weren’t you listening?’
‘It was all rubbish.’
Lucy patted my arm. ‘We may as well see you race, while we’re here. Go and get changed.’
It was a more sisterly gesture and tone than I was used to, and I reflected with a shade of guilt that I’d paid scant attention to her own career for a couple of years.
‘How is the poetry going?’ I asked. ‘What are you working on?’
The question caught her unprepared. Her face went momentarily blank and then filled with what seemed to be an odd mixture of sadness and panic.
‘Nothing just now,’ she said. ‘Nothing for quite a while,’ and I nodded almost apologetically as if I had intruded, and went into the weighing-room and through to the changing-room reflecting that poets, like mathematicians, mostly did their best work when young. Lucy wasn’t writing; had maybe stopped altogether. And perhaps, I thought, t
he frugality she had for so long embraced had begun to seem less worthy and less worth it, if she were losing the inner sustaining comfort of creative inspiration.
Poor Lucy, I thought. Life could be a bugger, as Malcolm said. She had already begun to value the affluence she had long despised or she wouldn’t have come on her mission to Sandown Park, and I could only guess at the turmoil in her spiritual life. Like a nun losing her faith, I thought. But no, not a nun. Lucy, who had written explicitly of sex in a way I could never believe had anything to do with Edwin (though one could be wrong), wouldn’t ever have been a nun.
With such random thoughts, I took off my ordinary clothes and put on white breeches and a scarlet jersey with blue stripes on the sleeves, and felt the usual battened-down excitement which made me breathe deeply and feel intensely happy. I rode in about fifty races a year, if I was lucky… and I would have to get another job fairly soon, I reflected, if I were to ride exercise regularly and stay fit enough to do any good.
Going outside, I talked for a while to the trainer and owner of the horse I was to ride, a husband and wife who had themselves riddenuntil twenty years earlier in point-to-point races and who liked to relive it all vicariously through me. The husband, George, was now a public trainer on a fairly grand scale, but the wife, Jo, still preferred to run her own horses in amateur races. She currently owned three steeplechasers, all pretty good. It did me no harm at all to be seen on them and to be associated in racing minds with that stable.
‘Young Higgins is jumping out of his skin,’ Jo said.
Young Higgins was the name of that day’s horse. Young Higgins was thirteen, a venerable gentleman out to disprove rumours of retirement. We all interpreted‘jumping out of his skin’ as meaning fit, sound and pricking his ears with enthusiasm, and at his age one couldn’t ask for much more. Older horses than he had won the Grand National, but Young Higgins and I had fallen in the great race the only time we’d tried it, and to my regret Jo had decided on no more attempts.
‘We’ll see you in the parade ring, then, Ian, before the race,’ George said, and Jo added, ‘And give the old boy a good time.’
I nodded, smiling. Giving all of us a good time was the point of the proceedings. Young Higgins was definitely included.
The minute George and Jo turned away to go off towards the grandstands, someone tapped me on the back of the shoulder. I turned round to see who it was and to my total astonishment found myself face to face with Lucy’s older brother, Malcolm’s first child, my half-brother Donald.
‘Good heavens,’ I said. ‘You’ve never been to the races in your life.’
He often told me he hadn’t, saying rather superciliously that he didn’t approve of the sordid gambling.
‘I haven’t come for the races,’ he said crossly. ‘I’ve come to see you about Malcolm’s taking leave of his senses.’
‘How… er …?’ I stopped. ‘Did Joyce send you?’ I said.
‘What if she did? We are all concerned. She told us where to find you, certainly.’
‘Did she tell the whole family?’ I asked blankly.
‘How do I know? She telephoned us. I daresay she telephoned everyone she could get hold of. You know what she’s like. She’s your mother, after all.’
Even so late in his life, he couldn’t keep out of his voice the old resentments, and perhaps also, I reflected, they were intensifying with age. My mother had supplanted his, he was saying, and any indiscretion my mother ever committed was in some way my fault.He had thought in that illogical way for as long as I’d been aware of him, and nothing had changed.
Donald was, in the family’s opinion, the brother nearest in looks to myself, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Irrefutably, he was the same height and had blue eyes less intense in colour than Malcolm’s. Agreed, Donald had middling brown curly hair and shoulders wider than his hips. I didn’t wear a bushy moustache though, and I just hoped I didn’t walk with what I thought of as a self-important strut; and I sometimes tried to make sure, after I’d been in Donald’s company, that I absolutely didn’t.
Donald’s life had been so disrupted when Malcolm had ousted Vivien, Donald always told us, that he had never been able to decide properly on a career. It couldn’t have been easy, I knew, to survive such an upheaval, but Donald had only been nine at the time, a bit early for life decisions. In any event, as an adult he had drifted from job to job in hotels, coming to harbour at length as secretary of a prestigious golf club near Henley-on-Thames, a post which I gathered had proved ultimately satisfactory in social standing, which was very important to his self-esteem.
I didn’t either like or dislike Donald particularly. He was eleven years older than I was. He was there.
‘Everyone insists you stop Malcolm squandering the family money,’ he said, predictably.
‘It’s his money, not the family’s,’ I said.
‘What?’ Donald found the idea ridiculous. ‘What you’ve got to do is explain that he owes it to us to keep the family fortune intact until we inherit it. Unfortunately we know he won’t listen to any of us except you, and now that you appear to have made up your quarrel with him, you are elected to be our spokesman. Joyce thinks we have to convince you first of the need to stop Malcolm, but I told her it was ridiculous. You don’t need convincing, you want to be well off one day just the same as the rest of us, of course you do, it’s only natural.’
I was saved from both soul-searching and untrue disclaimers by the arrival of Helen, Donald’s wife, who had apparently been buying a racecard.
‘We’re not staying,’ Donald said disapprovingly, eyeing it.
She gave him a vague smile. ‘You never know,’ she said.
Beautiful and brainless, Malcolm had said of her, and perhaps he was right. Tall and thin, she moved with natural style and madecheap clothes look expensive: I knew they were cheap because she had a habit of saying where they’d come from and how much she’d paid for them, inviting admiration of her thriftiness. Donald always tried to shut her up.
‘Do tell us where to watch the races from,’ she said.
‘We’re not here for that,’ Donald said.
‘No, dear, we’re here because we need money now that the boys have started at Eton.’
‘No, dear,’ Donald said sharply.
‘But you know we can’t afford …’
‘Do be quiet, dear,’ Donald said.
‘Eton costs a bomb,’ I said mildly, knowing that Donald’s income would hardly stretch to one son there, let alone two. Donald had twin boys, which seemed to run in the family.
‘Of course it does,’ Helen said, ‘but Donald puts such store by it. “My sons are at Eton,” that sort of thing. Gives him standing with the people he deals with in the golf dub.’
‘Helen, dear, do be quiet.’ Donald’s embarrassment showed, but she was undoubtedly right.
‘We thought Donald might have inherited before the boys reached thirteen,’ she said intensely. ‘As he hasn’t, we’re borrowing every penny we can to pay the fees, the same as we borrowed for the prep school and a lot of other things. But we’ve borrowed against Donald’s expectations… so you see it’s essential for us that there really is plenty to inherit, as there are so many people to share it with. We’ll be literally bankrupt if Malcolm throws too much away… and I don’t think Donald could face it.’
I opened my mouth to answer her but no sound came out. I felt as if I’d been thrust into a farce over which I had no control.
Walking purposefully to join us came Serena, Ferdinand and Debs.
Six
‘Stay right here,’ I said to all of them. ‘I have to go into the weighing-room to deal with a technicality. Stay right here until I come out.’
They nodded with various frowns, and I dived into privacy in a desperate search for a sheet of paper and an envelope.
I wrote to Malcolm:
Half the family have turned up here, sent by Joyce. For God’s sake stay where you are, keep out of sight and wait
until I come to fetch you.
I stuck the note into the envelope, wrote Malcolm’s name on the outside, and sought out an official who had enough rank to send someone to deliver it.
‘My father is lunching in the Directors’ dining-room,’ I said. ‘And it’s essential that he gets this note immediately.’
The official was obliging. He was going up to the Stewards’ room anyway, he said, and he would take it himself. With gratitude and only a minor lessening of despair — because it would be just like Malcolm to come down contrarily to confront the whole bunch — I went out again into the sunlight and found the five of them still faithfully waiting exactly where I’d left them.
‘I say,’ Debs said, half mocking, ‘you do look dashing in all that kit.’
Donald looked at her in surprise, and I had a vivid impression of his saying soon in his golf club, ‘My brother, the amateur’jockey…’, knowing that if I’d been a professional he would have hushed it up if he could. A real snob, Donald: but there were worse sins.
Debs, Ferdinand’s second wife, had come to the races in a black leather coat belted at the waist, with shoulder-length blond hair above and long black boots below. Her eyelids were purple, like her fingernails. The innocence I’d photographed in her a year ago was in danger of disappearing.
Ferdinand, shorter than Debs and more like Malcolm than ever, appeared to be in his usual indecision over whether I was to be loved or hated. I smiled at him cheerfully and asked what sort of a journey he’d had.
‘A lot of traffic,’ he said lamely.
‘We didn’t come here to talk about traffic,’ Serena said forbiddingly. ‘We want to know where Daddy is.’
Malcolm’s little Serena, now taller than he, was dressed that day in royal blue with white frills at neck and wrists, a white woollen hat with a pompom on top covering her cap of fair hair. She looked a leggy sixteen, not ten years older. Her age showed only in the coldness of her manner towards me, which gave no sign of thawing.
In her high-pitched, girlish voice she said, ‘We want him to settle very substantial sums on us all right now. Then he can go to blazes with the rest.’