by Dick Francis
I put on my own suit, because his anyway were too long, and came across the tube of the baster, still there in an inner breast pocket. Removing it, I left it among the jumble on the dressing chest and checked in the looking glass on the wall that Franklin, Mark II, wouldn’t entirely disgrace Franklin, Mark I. He had looked in that mirror every day for three months, I supposed. Now his reflection was my reflection and the man that was both of us had dark marks of tiredness under the eyes and a taut thinness in the cheeks, and looked as if he could do with a week’s lying in the sun. I gave him a rueful smile and phoned for a taxi, which took me to Luigi’s with ten minutes to spare.
She was there before me all the same, sitting at a small table in the bar area to one side of the restaurant, with an emptyish glass looking like vodka on a prim mat in front of her. She stood up when I went in and offered me a cool cheek for a polite social greeting, inviting me with a gesture to sit down.
“What will you drink?” she asked formally, but battling, I thought, with an undercurrent of diffidence.
I said I would pay for our drinks and she said no, no, this was her suggestion. She called the waiter and said, “Double water?” to me with a small smile and when I nodded ordered Perrier with ice and fresh lime juice for both of us.
I was down by then to only two or three Distalgesics a day and would soon have stopped taking them, though the one I’d just swallowed in Greville’s house was still an inhibitor for the evening. I wondered too late which would have made me feel better, a damper for the ankle or a large scotch everywhere else.
Clarissa was wearing a blue silk dress with a double-strand pearl necklace, pearl, sapphire and diamond earrings and a sapphire and diamond ring. I doubted if I would have noticed those, in the simple old jockey days. Her hair, smooth as always, curved in the expensive cut and her shoes and handbag were quiet black calf. She looked as she was, a polished, well-bred woman of forty or so, nearly beautiful, slender, with generous eyes.
“What have you been doing since Saturday?” she asked, making conversation.
“Peering into the jaws of death. What have you?”
“We went to ...” She broke off. “What did you say?”
“Martha and Harley Ostermeyer and I were in a car crash on Sunday. They’re OK, they went back to America today, I believe. And I, as you see, am here in one piece. Well ... almost one piece.”
She was predictably horrified and wanted to hear all the details, and the telling at least helped to evaporate any awkwardness either of us had been feeling at the meeting.
“Simms was shot?”
“Yes.”
“But ... do the police know who did it?”
I shook my head. “Someone in a large gray Volvo, they think, and there are thousands of those.”
“Good heavens.” She paused. “I didn’t like to comment, but you look ...” She hesitated, searching for the word.
“Frazzled?” I suggested.
“Smooth.” She smiled. “Frazzled underneath.”
“It’ll pass.”
The waiter came to ask if we would be having dinner and I said yes, and no argument, the dinner was mine. She accepted without fuss, and we read the menus.
The fare was chiefly Italian, the decor cosmopolitan, the ambience faintly European tamed by London. A lot of dark red, lamps with glass shades, no wallpaper, music. A comfortable place, nothing dynamic. Few diners yet, as the hour was early.
It was not, I was interested to note, a habitual rendezvous place for Clarissa and Greville: none of the waiters treated her as a regular. I asked her about it and, startled, she said they had been there only two or three times, always for lunch.
“We never went to the same place often,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been wise.”
“No.”
She gave me a slightly embarrassed look. “Do you disapprove of me and Greville?”
“No,” I said again. “You gave him joy.”
“Oh.” She was comforted and pleased. She said with a certain shyness, “It was the first time I’d fallen in love. I suppose you’ll think that silly. But it was the first time for him too, he said. It was ... truly wonderful. We were like ... as if twenty years younger ... I don’t know if I can explain. Laughing. Lit up.”
“As far as I can see,” I said, “the thunderbolt strikes at any age. You don’t have to be teenagers.”
“Has it ... struck you?”
“Not since I was seventeen and fell like a ton of bricks for a trainer’s daughter.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much. We laughed a lot. Slept together, a bit clumsily at first. She married an old man of twenty-eight. I went to college.”
“I met Henry when I was eighteen. He fell in love with me ... pursued me ... I was flattered ... and he was so very good looking.... and kind.”
“He still is,” I said.
“He’d already inherited his title. My mother was ecstatic ... she said the age difference didn’t matter ... so I married him.” She paused. “We had a son and a daughter, both grown up now. It hasn’t been a bad life, but before Greville, incomplete.”
“A better life than most,” I said, aiming to comfort.
“You’re very like Greville,” she said unexpectedly. “You look at things straight, in the same way. You’ve his sense of proportion.”
“We had realistic parents.”
“He didn’t speak about them much, only that he became interested in gemstones because of the museums his mother took him to. But he lived in the present and he looked outward, not inward, and I loved him to distraction and in a way I didn’t know him ...” She stopped and swallowed and seemed determined not to let emotion intrude further.
“He was like that with me too,” I said. “With everyone, I think. It didn’t occur to him to give running commentaries on his actions and feelings. He found everything else more interesting.”
“I do miss him,” she said.
“What will you eat?” I asked.
She gave me a flick of a look and read the menu without seeing it for quite a long time. In the end she said with a sigh, “You decide.”
“Did Greville?”
“Yes.”
“If I order fried zucchini as a starter, then fillet steak in pepper sauce with linguine tossed in olive oil with garlic, will that do?”
“I don’t like garlic. I like everything else. Unusual. Nice.”
“Ok. No garlic.”
We transferred to the dining room before seven-thirty and ate the proposed program, and I asked if she were returning to York that night: if she had a train to catch, if that was why we were eating early.
“No, I’m down here for two nights. Tomorrow I’m going to an old friend’s wedding, then back to York on Thursday morning.” She concentrated on twirling linguine onto her fork. “When Henry and I come to London together we always stay at the Selfridge Hotel, and when I come alone I stay there also. They know us well there. When I’m there alone they don’t present me with an account, they send it to Henry.” She ate the forkful of linguine. “I tell him I go to the cinema and eat in snack bars ... and he knows I’m always back in the hotel before midnight.”
There was a good long stretch of time between this dinner and midnight.
I said, “Every five weeks or so, when you came down to London alone, Greville met you at King’s Cross, isn’t that right, and took you to lunch?”
She said in surprise, “Did he tell you?”
“Not face to face. Did you ever see that gadget of his, the Wizard?”
“Yes, but ...” She was horrified. “He surely didn’t put me in it?”
“Not by name, and only under a secret password. You’re quite safe.”
She twiddled some more with the pasta, her eyes down, her thoughts somewhere else.
“After lunch,” she said, with pauses, “if I had appointments, I’d keep them, or do some shopping ... something to take home. I’d register at the hotel and change, and go
to Greville’s house. He used to have the flat, of course, but the house was much better. When he came, we’d have drinks ... talk ... maybe make love. We’d go to dinner early, then back to his house.” Her voice stopped. She still didn’t look up.
I said, “Do you want to go to his house now, before midnight?”
After a while she said, “I don’t know.”
“Well ... would you like coffee?”
She nodded, still not meeting my eyes, and pushed the linguine away. We sat in silence while waiters took away the plates and poured into cups, and if she couldn’t make up her mind, nor could I.
In the end I said, “If you like, come to Greville’s house now. I’m sleeping there tonight, but that’s not a factor. Come if you like, just to be near him, to be with him as much as you can for maybe the last time. Lie on his bed. Weep for him. I’ll wait for you downstairs ... and take you safely to your hotel before the fairy coach changes back to a pumpkin.”
“Oh!” She turned what was going to be a sob into almost a laugh. “Can I really?”
“Whenever you like.”
“Thank you, then. Yes.”
“I’d better warn you,” I said, “it’s not exactly tidy.” I told her what she would find, but she was inconsolable at the sight of the reality.
“He would have hated this,” she said. “I’m so glad he didn’t see it.”
We were in the small sitting room, and she went round picking up the pink and brown stone bears, restoring them to their tray.
“I gave him these,” she said. “He loved them. They’re rhodonite, he said.”
“Take them to remember him by. And there’s a gold watch you gave him, if you’d like that too.”
She paused with the last bear in her hand and said, “You’re very kind to me.”
“It’s not difficult. And he’d have been furious with me if I weren’t.”
“I’d love the bears. You’d better keep the watch, because of the engraving.”
“OK,” I said.
“I think,” she said with diffidence, “I’ll go upstairs now.”
I nodded.
“Come with me,” she said.
I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and troubled, but not committed, not hungry. Undecided. Like myself.
“All right,” I said.
“Is there chaos up there too?”
“I picked some of it up.”
She went up the stairs ahead of me at about four times my speed, and I heard her small moan of distress at the desecration of the bedroom. When I joined her, she was standing forlornly looking around, and with naturalness she turned to me and put her arms loosely round my waist, laying her head on my shoulder. I shed the confounded crutches and hugged her tight in grief for her and for Greville and we stood there for a long minute in mutual and much-needed comfort.
She let her arms fall away and went over to sit on the bed, smoothing a hand over the black and white checkerboard bedspread.
“He was going to change this room,” she said. “All this drama ...” She waved a hand at the white furniture, the black carpet, one black wall. “It came with the house. He wanted me to choose something softer, that I would like. But this is how I’ll always remember it.”
She lay down flat, her head on the pillows, her legs toward the foot of the bed, ankles crossed. I half-hopped, half-limped across the room and sat on the edge beside her.
She watched me with big eyes. I put my hand flat on her stomach and felt the sharp internal contraction of muscles.
“Should we do this?” she said.
“I’m not Greville.”
“No ... Would he mind?”
“I shouldn’t think so.” I moved my hand, rubbing a little. “Do you want to go on?”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said.
She sat up fast and put her arms round my neck in a sort of released compulsion.
“I do want this,” she said. “I’ve wanted it all day. I’ve been pretending to myself, telling myself I shouldn’t, but yes, I do want this passionately, and I know you’re not Greville, I know it will be different, but this is the only way I can love him ... and can you bear it, can you understand it, if it’s him I love?”
I understood it well, and I minded not at all.
I said, smiling, “Just don’t call me Greville. It would be the turn-off of the century.”
She took her face away from the proximity of my ear and looked me in the eyes, and her lips too, after a moment, were smiling.
“Derek,” she said deliberately, “make love to me. Please.”
“Don’t beg,” I said.
I put my mouth on hers and took my brother’s place.
As a memorial service it was quite a success. I lay in the dark laughing in my mind at that disgraceful pun, wondering whether or not to share it with Clarissa.
The catharsis was over, and her tears. She lay with her head on my chest lightly asleep, contented, as far as I could tell, with the substitute loving. Women said men were not all the same in the dark, and I knew both where I’d surprised her and failed her, known what I’d done like Greville and not done like Greville from the instinctive releases and tensions of her reactions.
Greville, I now knew, had been a lucky man, though whether he had himself taught her how to give exquisite pleasure was something I couldn’t quite ask. She knew, though, and she’d done it, and the feeling of her featherlight tattooing fingers on the base of my spine at the moment of climax had been a revelation. Knowledge marched on, I thought. Next time, with anyone else, I’d know what to suggest.
Clarissa stirred and I turned my wrist over, seeing the fluorescent hands of my watch.
“Wake up,” I said affectionately. “It’s Cinderella time.”
“Ohh ...”
I stretched out a hand and turned on a bedside light. She smiled at me sleepily, no doubts remaining.
“That was all right,” she said.
“Mm. Very.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“What ankle?”
She propped herself on one elbow, unashamed of nakedness, and laughed at me. She looked younger and sweeter, and I was seeing, I knew, what Greville had seen, what Greville had loved.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “my friend’s wedding will be over by six or so. Can I come here again?” She put her fingers lightly on my mouth to stop me answering at once. “This time was for him,” she said. “Tomorrow for us. Then I’ll go home.”
“Forever?”
“Yes, I think so. What I had with Greville was unforgettable and unrepeatable. I decided on the train coming down here that whatever happened with you, or didn’t happen, I would live with Henry, and do my best there.”
“I could easily love you,” I said.
“Yes, but don’t.”
I knew she was right. I kissed her lightly.
“Tomorrow for us,” I agreed. “Then goodbye.”
When I went into the office in the morning, Annette told me crossly that Jason hadn’t turned up for work, nor had he telephoned to say he was ill.
Jason had been prudent, I thought. I’d have tossed him down the elevator shaft, insolence, orange hair and all, given half an ounce of provocation.
“He won’t be coming back,” I said, “so we’ll need a replacement.”
She was astonished. “You can’t sack him for not turning up. You can’t sack him for anything without paying compensation.”
“Stop worrying,” I said, but she couldn’t take that advice.
June came zooming into Greville’s office waving a tabloid newspaper and looking at me with wide incredulous eyes.
“Did you know you’re in the paper? Lucky to be alive, it says here. You didn’t say anything about it!”
“Let’s see,” I said, and she laid the Daily Sensation open on the black desk.
There was a picture of the smash in which one could more or less see my head inside the Daimler, but not recognizably. The headline read “Drive
r shot, jockey lives,” and the piece underneath listed the lucky-to-be-alive passengers as Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer of Pittsburgh, America, and ex-champion steeplechase jockey Derek Franklin. The police were reported to be interested in a gray Volvo seen accelerating from the scene, and also to have recovered two bullets from the bodywork of the Daimler. After that tidbit came a rehash of the Hungerford massacre and a query, “Is this a copycat killing?” and finally a picture of Simms looking happy: “Survived by wife and two daughters who were last night being comforted by relatives.”
Poor Simms. Poor family. Poor every shot victim in Hungerford.
“It happened on Sunday,” June exclaimed, “and you came here on Monday and yesterday as if nothing was wrong. No wonder you looked knackered.”
“June!” Annette disapproved of the word.
“Well, he did. Still does.” She gave me a critical, kindly, motherly-sisterly inspection. “He could have been killed, and then what would we all have done here?”
The dismay in Annette’s face was a measure, I supposed, of the degree to which I had taken over. The place no longer felt like quicksand to me either and I was beginning by necessity to get a feel of its pulse.
But there was racing at Cheltenham that day. I turned the pages of the newspaper and came to the runners and riders. That was where my name belonged, not on Saxony Franklin checks. June looked over my shoulder and understood at least something of my sense of exile.
“When you go back to your own world,” she said, rephrasing her thought and asking it seriously, “what will we do here?”
“We have a month,” I said. “It’ll take me that time to get fit.” I paused. “I’ve been thinking about that problem, and, er, you might as well know, both of you, what I’ve decided.”
They both looked apprehensive, but I smiled to reassure them.
“What we’ll do,” I said, “is this. Annette will have a new title, which will be Office Manager. She’ll run things generally and keep the keys.”