by Dick Francis
With about three hundred and fifty miles to go I left soon after the race, and on the empty northern roads made good time to Scotland. My sister Louise lived in a dreary baronial hall near Elgin, a house almost as big as ours at home and just as inadequately heated. She had pleased our parents by marrying for money, and hadn’t discovered her husband’s fanatical tightfistedness until afterwards. For all she’d ever had to spend since, she’d have been better off in a semi-detached in Peckham. Her Christmas gifts to me as a child had been Everyman editions of the classics. I got none at all now.
Even so, when I went in to see her in the morning, having arrived after she was sleeping the night before, it was clear that some of her spirit had survived. We looked at each other as at strangers. She, after a seven-year gap, was much older looking than I remembered, older than forty-three, and pale with illness, but her eyes were bright and her smile truly pleased.
‘Henry, my little brother, I’m so glad you’ve come …’
One had to believe her. I was glad too, and suddenly the visit was no longer a chore. I spent all day with her, looking at old photographs and playing Chinese chequers, which she had taught me as a child, and listening to her chat about the three sons away at boarding school and how poor the grouse had been this winter and how much she would like to see London again, it was ten years since she had been down. She asked me to do various little jobs for her, explaining that ‘dear James’ was apt to be irritated, and the maids had too much else to do, poor things. I fetched things for her, packed up a parcel, tidied her room, filled her hot water bottle and found her some more toothpaste. After that she wondered if we couldn’t perhaps turn out her medicine drawer while we had the opportunity.
The medicine drawer could have stocked a dispensary. Half of them, she said with relief, she would no longer need. ‘Throw them away.’ She sorted the bottles and boxes into two heaps. ‘Put all those in the wastepaper basket.’ Obediently I picked up a handful. One was labelled ‘Conovid,’ with some explanatory words underneath, and it took several seconds before the message got through. I picked that box out of the rubbish and looked inside. There was a strip of foil containing pills, each packed separately. I tore one square open and picked out the small pink tablet.
‘Don’t you want these?’ I asked.
‘Of course not. I don’t need them any more, after the operation.’
‘Oh … I see. No, of course not. Then may I have them?’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Don’t be naïve, Louise.’
She laughed. ‘You’ve got a girl friend at last? Of course you can have them. There’s a full box lying around somewhere too, I think. In my top drawer, perhaps? Maybe some in the bathroom too.’
I collected altogether enough birth control pills to fill a bottle nearly as big as the one Patrick had given Gabriella, a square cornered brown bottle four inches high, which had held a prescription for penicillin syrup for curing the boys’ throat infections. Louise watched with amusement while I rinsed it out, baked it dry in front of her electric fire, and filled it up, stuffing the neck with cotton wool before screwing on the black cap.
‘Marriage?’ she said. As bad as Alice.
‘I don’t know.’ I put the drawer she had tidied back into the bedside table. ‘And don’t tell Mother.’
Wednesday seemed a long time coming, and I was waiting at Gatwick a good hour before the first horses turned up. Not even the arrival of Billy and Alf could damp my spirits, and we loaded the horses without incident and faster than usual, as two of the studs had sent their own grooms as well, and for once they were willing.
It was one of the mornings that Simon came with last minute papers, and he gave them to me warily in the charter airline office when the plane was ready to leave.
‘Good morning, Henry.’
‘Good morning.’
One couldn’t patch up a friendship at seven-thirty in the morning in front of yawning pilots and office staff. I took the papers with a nod, hesitated, and went out across the tarmac, bound for the aircraft and Milan.
There were running steps behind me and a hand on my arm.
‘Lord Grey? You’re wanted on the telephone. They say it’s urgent.’
I picked up the receiver and listened, said ‘All right,’ and slowly put it down again. I was not, after all, going to see Gabriella. I could feel my face contract into lines of pain.
‘What is it?’ Simon said.
‘My father … my father has died … sometime during the night. They have just found him … he was very tired, yesterday evening …’
There was a shocked silence in the office. Simon looked at me with great understanding, for he knew how little I wanted this day.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice thick with sincerity.
I spoke to him immediately, without thinking, in the old familiar way. ‘I’ve got to go home.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But the horses are all loaded, and there’s only Billy …’
‘That’s easy. I’ll go myself.’ He fished in his brief case and produced his passport.
It was the best solution. I gave him back the papers and took the brown bottle of pills out of my pocket. With a black ball point I wrote on the label, ‘Gabriella Barzini, Souvenir Shop, Malpensa Airport.’
‘Will you give this to the girl at the gift counter, and tell her why I couldn’t come, and say I’ll write?’
He nodded.
‘You won’t forget?’ I said anxiously.
‘No, Henry.’ He smiled as he used to. ‘I’ll see she gets it, and the message. I promise.’
We shook hands, and after a detour through the passport office he shambled across the tarmac and climbed up the ramp into the plane. I watched the doors shut. I watched the aircraft fly away, taking my job, my friend and my gift, but not me.
Simon Searle went to Italy instead of me, and he didn’t come back.
Chapter Eight
It was over a week before I found out. I went straight up to his room when I reached the wharf, and it was empty and much too tidy.
The dim teen-age secretary next door, in answer to my questions, agreed that Mr. Searle wasn’t in today, and that no one seemed to know when he would be in at all … or whether.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He hasn’t been in for a week. We don’t know where he’s got to.’
Disturbed, I went downstairs and knocked on Yardman’s door.
‘Come in.’
I went in. He was standing by the open window, watching colliers’ tugs pulling heavy barges up the river. A Finnish freighter, come up on the flood, was manoeuvring alongside across the river under the vulture-like meccano cranes. The air was alive with hooter signals and the bang and clatter of dock work, and the tide was carrying the garbage from the lower docks steadily upstream to the Palace of Westminster. Yardman turned, saw me, carefully closed the window, and came across the room with both hands outstretched.
‘My dear boy,’ he said, squeezing one of mine. ‘My condolences on your sad loss, my sincere condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You are very kind. Do you … er … know where Simon Searle is?’
‘Mr. Searle?’ he raised his eyebrows so that they showed above the black spectacle frames.
‘He hasn’t been in for a week, the girl says.’
‘No …’ he frowned. ‘Mr. Searle, for reasons best known to himself, chose not to return to this country. Apparently he decided to stay in Italy, the day he went to Milan in your place.’
‘But why?’ I said.
‘I really have no idea. It is very inconvenient. Very. I am having to do his work until we hear from him.’
He shook his head. ‘Well, my dear boy, I suppose our troubles no longer concern you. You’d better have your cards, though I don’t expect you’ll be needing them.’ He smiled the twisted ironic smile and stretched out his hand to the inter-office phone.
‘You’re
giving me the sack, then?’ I said bluntly.
He paused, his hand in mid-air. ‘My dear boy,’ he protested. ‘My dear boy. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that you would want to stay on.’
‘I do.’
He hesitated, and then sighed. ‘It’s against my better judgment, it is indeed. But with Searle and you both away, the agency has had to refuse business, and we can’t afford much of that. No, we certainly can’t. No, we certainly can’t. Very well then, if you’ll see us through at least until I hear from Searle, or find someone to replace him, I shall be very grateful, very grateful indeed.’
If that was how he felt, I thought I might as well take advantage of it. ‘Can I have three days off for Cheltenham races in a fortnight? I’ve got a ride in the Gold Cup.’
He nodded calmly. ‘Let me have the exact dates, and I’ll avoid them.’
I gave them to him then and there, and went back to Simon’s room thinking that Yardman was an exceptionally easy employer, for all that I basically understood him as little as on our first meeting. The list of trips on Simon’s wall showed that the next one scheduled was for the following Tuesday, to New York. Three during the past and present week had been crossed out, which as Yardman had said, was very bad for business. The firm was too small to stand much loss of its regular customers.
Yardman confirmed on the intercom that the Tuesday trip was still on, and he sounded so pleased that I guessed that he had been on the point of cancelling it when I turned up. I confirmed that I would fetch the relevant papers from the office on Monday afternoon, and be at Gatwick on the dot on Tuesday morning. This gave me a long week-end free and unbeatable ideas on how to fill it. With some relief the next day I drove determinedly away from the gloomy gathering of relations at home, sent a cable, picked up a stand-by afternoon seat with Alitalia, and flew to Milan to see Gabriella.
Three weeks and three days apart had changed nothing. I had forgotten the details of her face, shortened her nose in my imagination and lessened the natural solemnity of her expression, but the sight of her again and instantly did its levitation act. She looked momentarily anxious that I wouldn’t feel the same, and then smiled with breathtaking brilliance when she saw that I did.
‘I got your cable,’ she said. ‘One of the girls has changed her free day with me, and now I don’t have to keep the shop tomorrow or Sunday.’
‘That’s marvellous.’
She hesitated, almost blushing. ‘And I went home at lunch time to pack some clothes, and I have told my sister I am going to stay for two days with a girl friend near Genoa.’
‘Gabriella!’
‘Is that all right?’ she asked anxiously.
‘It’s a miracle,’ I said fervently, having expected only snatched unsatisfactory moments by day, and nights spent each side of a wall. ‘It’s unbelievable.’
When she had finished for the day we went to the station and caught a train, and on the principle of not telling more lies than could be helped, we did in fact go to Genoa. We booked separately into a large impersonal hotel full of incurious business men, and found our rooms were only four doors apart.
Over dinner in a warm obscure little restaurant she said, ‘I’m sorry about your father, Henry.’
‘Yes …’ Her sympathy made me feel a fraud. I had tried to grieve for him, and had recognised that my only strong emotion was an aversion to being called by his name. I wished to remain myself. Relations and family solicitors clearly took it for granted, however, that having sown a few wild oats I would now settle down into his pattern of life. His death, if I wasn’t careful, would be my destruction.
‘I was pleased to get your letter,’ Gabriella said, ‘because it was awful when you didn’t come with the horses. I thought you had changed your mind about me.’
‘But surely Simon explained?’
‘Who is Simon?’
‘The big fat bald man who went instead of me. He promised to tell you why I couldn’t come, and to give you a bottle …’ I grinned, ‘a bottle of pills.’
‘So they were from you!’
‘Simon gave them to you. I suppose he couldn’t explain why I hadn’t come, because he doesn’t know Italian. I forgot to tell him to speak French.’
She shook her head.
‘One of the crew gave them to me. He said he’d found them in the toilet compartment just after they had landed, and he brought them across to see if I had lost them. He is a tall man, in uniform. I’ve seen him often. It was not your bald, fat Simon.’
‘And Simon didn’t try to talk to you at all?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I see hundreds of bald fat travellers, but no one tried to speak to me about you.’
‘A friendly big man, with kind eyes,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a frightful old green corduroy jacket, with a row of pins in one lapel. He has a habit of picking them up.’
She shook her head again. ‘I didn’t see him.’
Simon had promised to give her my message and the bottle. He had done neither, and he had disappeared. I hadn’t liked to press Yardman too hard to find out where Simon had got to because there was always the chance that too energetic spadework would turn up the export bonus fraud: and I had vaguely assumed that it was because of the fraud that Simon had chosen not to come back. But even if he had decided on the spur of the moment to duck out, he would certainly have kept his promise to see Gabriella. Or didn’t a resuscitated friendship stretch that far?
‘What’s the matter?’ Gabriella asked.
I explained.
‘You are worried about him?’
‘He’s old enough to decide for himself …’ But I was remembering like a cold douche that my predecessor Peters hadn’t come back from Milan, and before him the liaison man Ballard.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said firmly, ‘you will go back to Milan and find him.’
‘I can’t speak Italian.’
‘Undoubtedly you will need an interpreter,’ she nodded. ‘Me.’
‘The best,’ I agreed, smiling.
We walked companionably back to the hotel.
‘Were the pills all right?’ I asked.
‘Perfect, thank you very much. I gave them to the wife of our baker … She works in the bakery normally, but when she gets pregnant she’s always sick for months, and can’t stand the sight of dough, and he gets bad-tempered because he has to pay a man to help him instead. He is not a good Catholic.’ She laughed. ‘He makes me an enormous cake oozing with cream when I take the pills.’
No one took the slightest notice of us in the hotel. I went along the empty passage in my dressing-gown and knocked on her door, and she opened it in hers to let me in. I locked it behind me.
‘If my sister could see us,’ she said smiling, ‘she’d have a fit.’
‘I’ll go away … if you like.’
‘Could you?’ She put her arms round my neck.
‘Very difficult.’
‘I don’t ask it.’
I kissed her. ‘It would be impossible to go now,’ I said.
She sighed happily. ‘I absolutely agree. We will just have to make the best of it.’
We did.
We went back to Milan in the morning sitting side by side in the railway carriage and holding hands surreptitiously under her coat, as if by this tiny area of skin contact we could keep alive the total union of the night. I had never wanted to hold hands with anyone before: never realised that it could feel like being plugged into a small electric current, warm, comforting, and vibrant, all at the same time.
Apart from being together, it was a depressing day. No one had seen Simon.
‘He couldn’t just vanish,’ I said in exasperation, standing late in the afternoon in a chilly wind outside the last of the hospitals. We had drawn a blank there as everywhere else, though they had gone to some trouble to make sure for us. No man of his description had been admitted for any illness or treated for any accident during the past ten days.
‘W
here else can we look?’ she said, the tiredness showing in her voice and in the droop of her rounded body. She had been splendid all day, asking questions unendingly from me and translating the replies, calm and business-like and effective. It wasn’t her fault the answers had all been negative. Police, government departments, undertakers, we had tried them all. We had rung up every hotel in Milan and asked for him: he had stayed in none.
‘I suppose we could ask the taxi drivers at the airport …’ I said finally.
‘There are so many … and who would remember one passenger after so long?’
‘He had no luggage,’ I said as I’d said a dozen times before. ‘He didn’t know he was coming here until fifteen minutes before he took off. He couldn’t have made any plans. He doesn’t speak Italian. He hadn’t any Italian money. Where did he go? What did he do?’
She shook her head dispiritedly. There was no answer. We took a tram back to the station and with half an hour to wait made a few last enquiries from the station staff. They didn’t remember him. It was hopeless.
Over dinner at midnight in the same café as the night before we gradually forgot the day’s frustration; but the fruitless grind, though it hadn’t dug up a trace of Simon, had planted foundations beneath Gabriella and me.
She drooped against me going back to the hotel, and I saw with remorse how exhausted she was. ‘I’ve tired you too much.’
She smiled at the anxiety in my voice. ‘You don’t realise how much energy you have.’
‘Energy?’ I repeated in surprise.
‘Yes. It must be that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t look energetic. You’re quiet, and you move like machinery, oiled and smooth. No effort. No jerks. No awkwardness. And inside somewhere is a dynamo. It doesn’t run down. I can feel its power. All day I’ve felt it.’
I laughed. ‘You’re too fanciful.’
‘No. I’m right.’
I shook my head. There were no dynamos ticking away inside me. I was a perfectly ordinary and not too successful man, and the smoothness she saw was only tidiness.