by Dick Francis
At five forty eight she came up from the Underground, wearing a beautifully cut darkish blue coat and carrying a creamy white suitcase. Several heads turned to look at her, and a nearby man who had been waiting almost as long as I had watched her steadfastly until she reached the corner where I stood.
‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
‘I gather,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘that you fixed your wife.’
9
She moved against me in the warm dark and put her mouth on the thin skin somewhere just south of my neck. I tightened my arms round her, and buried my nose in her clean, sweet-scented hair.
‘There’s always something new,’ she said sleepily. ‘Broken ribs are quite a gimmick.’
‘I didn’t feel them.’
‘Oh yes you did.’
I stroked my hands slowly over her smooth skin and didn’t bother to answer. I felt relaxed and wholly content. She had been kind to my ribs, gentle to my bruises. They had even in an obscure way given her pleasure.
‘How did it happen?’
‘What?’
‘The black and blue bit.’
‘I lost an argument.’
She rubbed her nose on my chest. ‘Must have been quite a debate.’
I smiled in the dark. The whole world was inside the sheets, inside the small private cocoon wrapping two bodies in intimate primeval understanding.
‘Ty?’
‘Mm?’
‘Can’t we stay together all weekend?’
I said through her hair, ‘I have to phone in a report from Newcastle. Can’t avoid it.’
‘Damn the Blaze.’
‘There’s Sunday, though.’
‘Hurrah for the Golf Club.’
We lay quiet for a long while, I felt heavy with sleep and fought to stay awake. There were so few hours like this. None to waste.
For Gail time was not so precious. Her limbs slackened and her head slid down on to my arm, her easy breath fanning softly against my chest. I thought of Elizabeth lying closely curled against me like that when we were first married, and for once it was without guilt, only with regret.
Gail woke of her own accord a few hours later and pulled my wrist round to look at the luminous hands on my watch.
‘Are you awake?’ she said. ‘It’s ten to six.’
‘Do you like it in the morning?’
‘With you, Ty, any time.’ Her voice smiled in the darkness. ‘Any old time you care to mention.’
I wasn’t that good. I said, ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re normal, maybe. Nice bread and butter love.’ She played the piano down my stomach. ‘Some men want the weirdest things …’
‘Let’s not talk about them.’
‘O.K.’ she said. ‘Let’s not.’
I caught the Newcastle express at eight o’clock with ten seconds in hand. It was a raw cold morning with steam hissing up from under the train. Hollow clanking noises and unintelligible station announcements filled the ears, and bleary-eyed shivering passengers hurried greyly through the British Standard dawn.
I took my shivering bleary-eyed self into the dining car and tried some strong black coffee, but nothing was going to shift the dragging depression which had settled in inexorably as soon as I left Gail. I imagined her as I had left her, lying warm and luxuriously lazy in the soft bed and saying Sunday was tomorrow, we could start again where we’d left off. Sunday was certainly tomorrow, but there was Saturday to get through first. From where I sat it looked like a very long day.
Four and a half hours to Newcastle. I slept most of the way, and spent the rest remembering the evening and night which were gone. We had found a room in a small private hotel near the station and I had signed the register Mr and Mrs Tyrone. No one there had shown any special interest in us: they had presently shown us to a clean uninspiring room and given us the key, had asked if we wanted early tea, had said they were sorry they didn’t do dinners, there were several good restaurants round about. I paid them in advance, explaining that I had an early train to catch. They smiled, thanked me, withdrew, asked no questions, made no comment. Impossible to know what they guessed.
We talked for a while and then went out to a pub for a drink and from there to an Indian restaurant where we took a long time eating little, and an even longer time drinking coffee. Gail wore her usual air of businesslike poise and remained striking-looking even when surrounded by people of her own skin colour. I, with my pale face, was in a minority.
Gail commented on it. ‘London must be the best place in the world for people like me.’
‘For anyone.’
She shook her head. ‘Especially for people of mixed race. In so many countries I’d be on the outside looking in. I’d never get the sort of job I have.’
‘It never seems to worry you, being of mixed race,’ I said.
‘I accept it. In fact I wouldn’t choose now to be wholly white or wholly black, if I could alter it. I am used to being me. And with people like you, of course, it is easy, because you are unaffected by me.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ I said, grinning.
‘Damn it, you know what I mean. You don’t mind me being brown.’
‘You’re brown and you’re beautiful. A shattering combination.’
‘You’re not being serious,’ she complained.
‘And you’re glossy to the bone.’
Her lips curved in amusement. ‘If you mean I’ve a hard core instead of a soft centre, then I expect you’re right.’
‘And one day you’ll part from me without a twinge.’
‘Will we part?’ No anxiety, no involvement.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you wouldn’t leave your wife to live with me.’
Direct, no muddle, no fluffy wrappings.
‘Would you?’ she asked, when I didn’t quickly answer.
‘I’ll never leave her.’
‘That’s what I thought. I like to get things straight. Then I can enjoy what I have, and not expect more.’
‘Hedging your bets.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Insuring against disappointment.’
‘When people desperately want what they can never have, they suffer. Real grinding misery. That’s not for me.’
‘You will be luckier than most,’ I said slowly, ‘if you can avoid it altogether.’
‘I’ll have a damned good try.’
One day uncontrollable emotion would smash up all that organised level-headedness. Not while I was around, if I could help it. I prized it too much. Needed her to stay like that. Only while she demanded so little could I go on seeing her, and since she clearly knew it, we had a good chance of staying safely on the tightrope for as long as we wanted.
With the coffee we talked, as before, about money. Gail complained that she never had enough.
‘Who has?’ I said sympathetically.
‘Your wife, for one.’ There was a faint asperity in her voice, which made me stifle my immediate impulse to deny it.
‘Sorry,’ she said almost at once. ‘Shouldn’t have said that. What your wife has is quite irrelevant. It’s what I haven’t got that we’re talking about. Such as a car of my own, a sports car, and not having to borrow Harry’s all the time. And a flat of my own, a sunny one overlooking a park. Never having to budget every penny. Buying lavish presents for people if I feel like it. Flying to Paris often for a few days, and having a holiday in Japan …’
‘Marry a millionaire,’ I suggested.
‘I intend to.’
We both laughed, but I thought she probably meant it. The man she finally didn’t part with would have to have troubles with his surtax. I wondered what she would do if she knew I could only afford that dinner and the hotel bill because Tally’s fee would be plugging for a while the worst holes in the Tyrone economy. What would she do if she knew that I had a penniless paralysed wife, not a rich
one. On both counts, wave a rapid goodbye, probably. For as long as I could, I wasn’t going to give her the opportunity.
I missed the first Newcastle race altogether and only reached the press stand half way through the second. Delicate probes among colleagues revealed that nothing dramatic had happened in the hurdle race I had spent urging the taxi driver to rise above twenty. Luke-John would never know.
After the fourth race I telephoned through a report, and another after the fifth, in which one of the top northern jockeys broke his leg. Derry came on the line and asked me to go and find out from the trainer who would be riding his horse in the Lamplighter instead, and I did his errand thanking my stars I had had the sense actually to go to Newcastle, and hadn’t been tempted to watch the racing on television and phone through an ‘on-the-spot’ account from an armchair three hundred miles away, as one correspondent of my acquaintance had been known to do.
Just before the last race someone touched my arm. I turned. Collie Gibbons, the handicapper, looking harassed and annoyed.
‘Ty. Do me a favour.’
‘What?’
‘You came by train? First class?’
I nodded. The Blaze wasn’t mean about comfort.
‘Then swap return tickets with me.’ He held out a slim booklet which proved to be an air ticket, Newcastle to Heathrow.
‘There’s some damn meeting been arranged here which I shall have to go to after this race,’ he explained. ‘And I won’t be able to catch the plane. I’ve only just found out and … it’s most annoying. There’s a later train … I particularly want to get to London tonight.’
‘Done,’ I said. ‘Suits me fine.’
He smiled, still frowning simultaneously. ‘Thanks. And here are the keys to my car. It’s in the multi-storey park opposite the Europa building.’ He told me its number and position. ‘Drive yourself home.’
‘I’ll drive to your house and leave the car there,’ I said. ‘Easier than bringing it over tomorrow.’
‘If you’re sure …’ I nodded, giving him my train ticket.
‘A friend who lives up here was going to run me back to the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll get him to take you instead.’
‘Have you heard from your wife?’ I asked.
‘That’s just it … she wrote to say we’d have a trial reconciliation and she’d be coming home today. If I stay away all night she’ll never believe I had a good reason … She’ll be gone again.’
‘Miss the meeting,’ I suggested.
‘It’s too important, especially now I’ve got your help. I suppose you couldn’t explain to her, if she’s there, that I’m on my way?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
So the friend whisked me off to the airport, and I flew to Heathrow, collected the car, drove to Hampstead, explained to Mrs Gibbons, who promised to wait, and arrived home two and a half hours early. Elizabeth was pleased, even if Mrs Woodward wasn’t.
Sunday morning. Elizabeth’s mother didn’t come.
Ten fifteen, ten thirty. Nothing. At eleven someone telephoned from the health farm and said they were so sorry, my mother-in-law was in bed with a virus infection, nothing serious, don’t worry, she would ring her daughter as soon as she was a little better.
I told Elizabeth. ‘Oh well,’ she said philosophically, ‘we’ll have a nice cosy day on our own.’
I smiled at her and kept the shocking disappointment out of my face.
‘Do you think Sue Davis would pop along for a moment while I get us some whisky?’ I asked.
‘She’d get it for us.’
‘I’d like to stretch my legs …’
She smiled understandingly and rang Sue, who came at twelve with flour down the sides of her jeans. I hurried round corners to the nearest phone box and gave the Huntersons’ number. The bell rang there again and again, but no one answered. Without much hope I got the number of Virginia Water station and rang there: no, they said, there was no young woman waiting outside in an estate car. They hadn’t seen one all morning. I asked for the Huntersons’ number again. Again, no reply.
Feeling flat I walked back to our local pub and bought the whisky, and tried yet again on the telephone too publicly installed in the passage there.
No answer. No Gail.
I went home.
Sue Davis had read out to Elizabeth my piece in the Blaze.
‘Straight between the eyeballs,’ she observed cheerfully. ‘I must say, Ty, no one would connect the punch you pack in that paper with the you we know.’
‘What’s wrong with the him you know?’ asked Elizabeth with real anxiety under the surface gaiety. She hated people to think me weak for staying at home with her. She never told any one how much nursing she needed from me: always pretended Mrs Woodward did everything. She seemed to think that what I did for her would appear unmanly to others; she wanted in public a masculine never-touch-the-dishes husband, and since it made her happy I played that role except when we were alone.
‘Nothing’s wrong with him,’ Sue protested. She looked me over carefully. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘What did you mean, then?’ Elizabeth was smiling still, but she wanted an answer.
‘Oh … only that this Ty is so quiet, and that one …’ she pointed to the paper, ‘bursts the eardrums.’ She put her head on one side, summing me up, then turned to Elizabeth with the best of motives and said: ‘This one is so gentle … that one is tough.’
‘Gentle nothing,’ I said, seeing the distress under Elizabeth’s laugh. ‘When you aren’t here, Sue, I throw her round the room and black her eyes regularly on Fridays.’ Elizabeth relaxed, liking that. ‘Stay for a drink,’ I suggested to Sue, ‘Now that I’ve fetched it.’
She went, however, back to her half-baked Yorkshire pudding, and I avoided discussing what she had said by going out to the kitchen and rustling up some omelettes for lunch. Elizabeth particularly liked them, and could eat hers with the new feeding gadget, up to a point. I helped her when her wrist tired, and made some coffee and fixed her mug in its holder.
‘Do you really know where the horse is?’ she asked.
‘Tiddely Pom? Yes, of course.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Dark and deadly secret, honey,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell anyone, even you.’
‘Oh go on,’ she urged. ‘You know I won’t tell either.’
‘I’ll tell you next Sunday.’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘Thanks for nothing.’ The pump heaved away, giving her breath. ‘You don’t think anyone would try to … well … make you tell. Where he is, I mean.’ More worry, more anxiety. She couldn’t help it. She was always on the edge of a precipice, always on the distant look out for anything which would knock her over.
‘Of course not, honey. How could they?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said; but her eyes were full of horrors.
‘Stop fussing,’ I said with a smile. ‘If anyone threatened me with anything really nasty, I’d say quick enough where he is. No horse is worth getting in too deep for.’ Echoes of Dembley. The matrix which nurtured the germ. No one would sacrifice themselves or their families for the sake of running a horse.
Elizabeth detected the truth in my voice and was satisfied. She switched on the television and watched some fearful old movie which bored me to death. Three o’clock came and went. Even if I’d gone to Virginia Water, I would have been on the way back again. And I’d had Friday night. Rare, unexpected Friday night. Trouble was, the appetite grew on what it fed on, as someone else once said. The next Sunday was at the wrong end of a telescope.
Drinks, supper, jobs for Elizabeth, bed. No one else called, no one telephoned. It crossed my mind once or twice as I lazed in the armchair in our customary closed-in little world, that perhaps the challenge implicit in my column had stirred up, somewhere, a hive of bees.
Buzz buzz, busy little bees. Buzz around the Blaze. And don’t sting me.
I spent all Monday in and around the flat. Washed the van, wrote letters
, bought some socks, kept off race trains from Leicester.
Derry telephoned twice to tell me (a) that Tiddely Pom was flourishing, and (b) the Roncey children had sent him a stick of peppermint rock.
‘Big deal,’ I said.
‘Not bad kids.’
‘You’ll enjoy fetching them.’
He blew a raspberry and hung up.
Tuesday morning I walked to the office. One of those brownish late November days, with saturated air and a sour scowl of fog to come. Lights shone out brightly at 11 a.m. People hurried along Fleet Street with pinched, mean eyes working out whose neck to scrunch on the next rung of the ladder, and someone bought a blind man’s matches with a poker chip.
Luke-John and Derry wore moods to match.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked mildly.
‘Nothing’s happened,’ Derry said.
‘So?’
‘So where’s our reaction?’ Luke-John enquired angrily. ‘Not a letter. No one’s phoned, even. Unless,’ he brightened, ‘Unless Charlie Boston’s boys have called on you with a few more threats?’
‘They have not.’
Relapse into gloom for the Sports Desk. I alone wasn’t sorry the article had fallen with a dull thud. If it had. I thought it was too soon to be sure. I said so.
‘Hope you’re right, Ty,’ Luke-John said sceptically. ‘Hope it hasn’t all been a coincidence … Bert Checkov and the non-starters … hope the Blaze hasn’t wasted its time and money for nothing on Tiddely Pom …’
‘Charlie Boston’s boys were not a coincidence.’
‘I suppose not.’ Luke-John sounded as though he thought I might have misunderstood what the Boston boys had said.
‘Did your friend in Manchester find out any more about Charlie B?’ I asked.
Luke-John shrugged. ‘Only that there was some talk about his chain of betting shops being taken over by a bigger concern. But it doesn’t seem to have happened. He is still there, anyway, running the show.’
‘Which bigger concern?’
‘Don’t know.’
To pass the time we dialled four of the biggest London book-making businesses which had chains of betting shops all over the country. None of them admitted any immediate interest in buying out Charlie Boston. But one man was hesitant, and when I pressed him, he said, ‘We did put out a feeler, about a year ago. We understood there was a foreign buyer also interested. But Boston decided to remain independent and turned down both offers.’