by Дик Фрэнсис
'His nurse is with him now,' she said. 'A male nurse. He doesn't really need a nurse, but he won't let him go. Wilfred, the nurse - and I don't like him, he's too obsequious - he sleeps on our top floor here in those old attics, and Ivan has had an intercom installed so that he can call him if he has chest pains in the night.'
'And does he have chest pains in the night?'
My mother said with perplexity, 'I don't know. I don't think so. But he did, of course, when he had the attack. He woke up with it at four in the morning, but at the time he thought it was only bad indigestion.'
'Did he wake you?'
She shook her head. She and Ivan had always slept in adjoining but separate bedrooms. Not from absence of love; they simply preferred it.
She said, 'I went in to say good morning to him and give him the papers, as I always do, and he was sweating and pressing his chest with his fist.'
'You should have got a message to me at once,' I said. 'Jed would have driven over with it. You shouldn't have had to deal with all this by yourself.'
'Patsy came…'
Patsy was Ivan's daughter. Sly eyes. Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself. Ivan's assurances got nowhere: and Patsy's feelings for me, as my mother's potential heir, would have curdled sulphuric acid. I always smiled at her sweetly.
'What did Patsy do?' I asked.
'Ivan was in the Clinic when she came here. She used the telephone.' My mother stopped for effect.
'Who did she want?' I prompted helpfully.
Amusement glimmered in my mother's dark eyes. 'She telephoned Oliver Grantchester.'
Oliver Grantchester was Ivan's lawyer.
'How blatant was she?' I asked.
'Oh, straight to the jugular, darling.' Patsy called everyone darling. She would murder, I surmised, with a 'Sorry, darling' while she slid the stiletto into the heart. 'She told Oliver,' smiled my mother, 'that if Ivan tried to change his Will, she would contest it.'
'And she meant you to hear.'
'If she hadn't wanted me to, she could have called him from anywhere else. And naturally she was sugar-candy all over the Clinic. The loving daughter. She's good at it.'
'And she said there was no need for you to bring me all the way from Scotland while she was there to look after things.'
'Oh dear, you know how positive she is…'
'A tidal wave.'
Civility was a curse, I often thought. Patsy needed someone to be brusquely rude about the way she bullied everyone with saccharine; but if ever openly crossed she could produce so intense an expression of 'poor little me-dom' that potential critics found themselves comforting her instead. Patsy at thirty-four had a husband, three children, two dogs and a nanny all anxiously twitching to please her.
'And,' my mother said, 'there's some sort of serious trouble at the brewery, and also I think he's worried about the Cup.'
'What cup?'
'The King Alfred Cup, what else?'
I frowned. 'Do you mean the race?' The King Alfred Gold Cup, sponsored by Ivan's brewery as a great advertisement for King Alfred Gold beer, was a splendid two-mile steeplechase run every October, a regular part now of the racing year.
'The race, or the Cup itself,' my mother said. 'I'm not sure.'
At that inconclusive point the kitchen was abruptly invaded by two large middle-aged ladies who heavily plodded down the outside iron steps from road level to basement and let themselves in with familiarity.
'Morning, Lady Westering,' they said. A double act. Sisters, perhaps. They looked from my mother to me expectantly, awaiting an explanation, I thought, as much as an introduction. My gentle mother could be far too easily intimidated.
I stood and said mildly, 'I am Lady Westering's son. And you are?'
My mother told me, 'Edna and Lois. Edna cooks for us. Lois cleans.'
Edna and Lois gave me stares in which disapproval sheltered sketchily behind a need to keep their jobs. Disapproval? I wondered if Patsy had been at work.
Edna looked with a critical eye at the evidence of my cooking, an infringement of her domain. Too bad. She would have to get used to it. My father and I had historically always done the family meals because we'd liked it that way. It had started with my mother breaking a wrist: by the time it was mended, feeding the three of us had forever changed hands; and as I'd understood very early the chemistry of cooking, good food had always seemed easy.
My mother and Ivan had from the beginning employed a cook, though Edna - and also Lois - was new since my last visit.
I said to my mother, 'Wilfred notwithstanding, I'll go up now and see Ivan. I expect I'll find you upstairs in your sitting-room.'
Edna and Lois hovered visibly between allegiances. I gave them my most cheerful non-combative smile, and found my mother following me gratefully up the stairs to the main floor, quiet now but grandly formal with dining-room and drawing-room for entertaining.
'Don't tell me,' I teased her, once we were out of the kitchen's earshot, 'Patsy employed them.'
She didn't deny it. 'They're very efficient.'
'How long have they worked here?'
'A week.'
She came with me up to the next floor, where she and Ivan each had a bedroom, bathroom and personal day-room, in his case a study-cum-office, in hers the refuge they used most, a comfortable pink and green matter of fat armchairs and television.
'Lois cleans very well,' my mother sighed as we went in there, 'but she will move things. It's almost as if she moves them deliberately, just to prove to me that she's dusted.'
She shifted two vases back to their old familiar position of one at each end of the mantelshelf. Silver candlesticks were returned to flank the clock.
'Just tell her not to,' I said, but I knew she wouldn't. She didn't like to upset people: the opposite of Patsy.
I went along to see Ivan, who was sitting palely in his study while noises from his bedroom next door suggested bed-making and the tidying of bottles.
He wore a crimson woollen dressing-gown and brown leather slippers and showed no surprise at my presence.
'Vivienne said you were coming,' he said neutrally. Vivienne was Mother.
'How are you feeling?' I asked, sitting in a chair opposite him and realising with misgiving that he looked older, greyer and a good deal thinner than he had been on my last visit in the spring. Then, I'd been on my way to America with my mind full of the commercial part of my life. He had made, I now remembered, an unexpected invitation for my advice, and I had been too preoccupied, too impatient and too full of doubt of his sincerity to listen properly to what he'd wanted. It had been something to do with his horses, his steeplechasers in training at Lambourn, and I'd had other reasons than press of business to avoid going there.
I repeated my question, 'How are you feeling?'
He asked merely, 'Why don't you cut your hair?'
'I don't know.'
'Curls are girlish.'
He himself had the short-cut shape that went with the businessman personality: with the baronetcy and membership of the Jockey Club. I knew him to be fair-minded and well respected, a middling man who had inherited a modest title from a cousin and a large brewery from his father and had done his best by both.
It was a sadness with him that he had neither son nor any male relative: he was resigned to the baronetcy dying with him.
I'd often flippantly asked him, 'How's the beer, then?', but on that morning it seemed inappropriate. I said instead, 'Is there anything I can do for you?' and regretted it before the last words were out of my mouth. Not Lambourn, I thought. Anything else.
But 'Look after your mother,' was what he said first.
'Yes, of course.'
'I mean… after I've gone.' His voice was quiet and accepting.
'You're going to live.'
He surveyed me with the usual lack of enthusiasm and said dryly, 'You've had a word with God, have you?'
'Not yet.'
'You wouldn't be so bad, Alexander, if you would come down off your mountain and rejoin the human race.'
He had offered, when he'd married my mother, to take me into the brewery and teach me the business, and at eighteen, with chaotic visions of riotous colours intoxicating my inner eye, I'd learned the first great lesson of harmonious stepsonship, how to say no without giving offence.
I wasn't ungrateful and I didn't dislike him: we were just entirely different. As far as one could see, he and my mother were quietly happy together and there was nothing wrong with his care of her.
He said, 'Have you seen your uncle Robert during the last few days?'
'No.'
My uncle Robert was the earl - 'Himself'. He came to Scotland every year in late August and stayed north for the shooting and fishing and the Highland Games. He sent for me every year to visit him, but although I knew from Jed that he was now in residence, I hadn't so far been summoned.
Ivan pursed his lips. 'I thought he might have wanted to see you.'
'Any time soon, I expect.'
'I've asked him-' He broke off, then continued, 'he'll tell you himself.'
I felt no curiosity. Himself and Ivan had known each other for upwards of twenty years, drawn together by a fondness for owning racehorses. They still had their steeplechasers trained in the same yard in Lambourn.
Himself had approved of the match between Ivan and the widow of his much-loved youngest brother. He'd stood beside me at the wedding ceremony and told me to go to him if I ever needed help; and considering that he had five children of his own and half a clan of other nephews and nieces, I'd felt comforted in the loss of my father and in a deep way secure.
I had managed on my own, but I'd known that he was there.
I said to Ivan, 'Mother thinks you may be worried about the Cup.'
He hesitated over an answer, then asked, 'What about it?'
'She doesn't know if it's troubling you and making you feel worse.'
'Your dear mother!' he deeply sighed.
I said, 'Is there something wrong with this year's race? Not enough entries, or something?'
'Look after her.'
She'd been right, I thought, about his depression. A malaise of the soul, outwardly discernible in weak movements of his hands and the lack of vigour in his voice. I didn't think there was much I could do to improve things, if his own doctor couldn't.
As if on cue a fifty-to-sixty, thin, moustached, busy-busy person hurried into the room in a dark flapping suit announcing that as he was passing on his way to the Clinic he had called in for five minutes to check on his patient. 'Morning, Ivan. How's things?'
'Good of you to come, Keith.'
Ivan drifting a limp hand in my direction, I stood up with parent-inculcated politeness and was identified as 'My stepson'.
Dr Keith Robbiston rose in my regard by giving me a sharp glance and a sharper question, 'What analgesic have you been taking for that eye?'
'Aspirin.' Huston station aspirin, actually.
'Huh.' Scorn. 'Are you allergic to any drugs?'
'I don't think so.'
'Are you taking any other drugs?'
'No.'
'Then try these.' He produced a small packet from an inner suit pocket and held it out to me. I accepted it with gratitude.
Ivan, mystified, asked what was going on.
His doctor briskly answered while at the same time producing from other pockets a stethoscope and blood-pressure monitor. 'Your stepson… name?'
'Alexander Kinloch,' I said.
'… Alexander, your stepson, can't move without pain.'
'What?'
'You haven't noticed? No, I suppose not.' To me he said, 'The reduction and management of pain is my speciality. It can't be disguised. How did you get like this? It can't be organic if you're not taking medicine. Car crash?'
I said with a flicker of amusement, 'Four thugs.'
'Really?' He had bright eyes, very alert. 'Bad luck.'
'What are you talking about?' Ivan said.
I shook my head at Dr Robbiston and he checked around his heart-threatened patient with effective economy of movement but no comment on my own state.
'Well done, Ivan,' he said cheerfully, whisking his aids out of sight. 'The ticker's banging away like a baby's. Don't strain yourself, though. But walk around the house a bit. Use this strong stepson as a crutch. How's your dear wife?'
'In her sitting-room,' I said.
'Great.' He departed as abruptly as he'd arrived. 'Hang in there, Ivan.'
He gave me a brief smile on his quick way out. I sat down again opposite Ivan and swallowed one of the tablets the doctor had given me. His assessment had been piercingly on target. Punch-bags led a rotten life.
'He's a good doctor, really,' Ivan told me defensively.
"The best,' I agreed. 'Why do you doubt him?'
'He's always in a hurry. Patsy wants me to change…' He tapered off indecisively; only a shadow seemed left of his former chief-executive decisiveness.
'Why change?' I asked. 'He wants you to be well, and he makes house calls, a miracle these days.'
Ivan frowned. 'Patsy says he's hasty.'
I said mildly, 'Not everyone thinks or moves at the same speed.'
Ivan took a tissue out of a flat box on the table beside him and blew his nose, then dropped the used tissue carefully into a handy waste-paper basket. Always neat, always precise.
He said, 'Where would you hide something?'
I blinked.
'Well?' Ivan prompted.
'Er… it would depend what it was.'
'Something of value.'
'How big?'
He didn't directly answer, but I found what he said next more unusual than anything he'd said to me since I'd known him.
'You have a quirky mind, Alexander. Tell me a safe hiding place.'
Safe.
'Um,' I said, 'who would be looking?'
'Everyone. After my death.'
'You're not dying.'
'Everyone dies.'
'It's essential to tell someone where you've hidden something, otherwise it may be lost for ever.'
Ivan smiled.
I said, 'Are we talking about your Will?'
'I'm not telling you what we are talking about. Not yet. Your uncle Robert says you know how to hide things.'
That put me into a state of breathlessness. How could they? Those two well-intentioned men must have said something to someone somewhere that had got me beaten to buggery and thrown over the next best thing to a cliff. Nephew of one, stepson of the other… I shifted in undeniable pain in that civilised room and acknowledged that for all their worldliness they had no true conception of the real voracious jungle of greed and cruelty roughly known as mankind.
'Ivan,' I said, 'put whatever it is in a bank vault and send a letter of instruction to your lawyers.'
He shook his head.
Don't give anything to me to hide, I thought. Please don't. Let me off. I'm not hiding anything else. Every battered muscle protested.
'Suppose it's a horse,' he said.
I stared.
He said, 'You can't put a horse in a bank vault.'
'What horse?'
He didn't say. He asked, 'How would you hide a horse?'
'A racehorse?' I asked.
'Certainly.'
'Then…' I paused a moment, 'in a racing stable.'
'Not in an obscure barn miles away from anywhere?'
'Definitely not. Horses have to be fed. Regular visits to an obscure barn would be as good as a sign saying "treasure here".'
'Do you believe in hiding things where everyone can see them but they don't realise what they're looking at?'
I said, 'The snag with that is that in the end someone does understand what they're looking at. Someone spots the rare stamp on the envelope. Someone spots the real pearls when the mistletoe berries wither.'
'But you would still put a racehorse among others?'
>
'And move it often,' I said.
'And the snag to that?'
'The snag,' I said obligingly, 'is that the horse can't be raced without disclosing its whereabouts. Unless, of course, you're a crook with a ringer, which would be unlike you, Ivan.'
'Thank you for that, Alexander.' His voice was dryly amused.
'And if you didn't race the horse,' I went on, 'you would waste its life and its value, until in the end it wouldn't be worth hiding.'
Ivan sighed. 'Any more snags?'
'Horses are as recognisable as people. They have faces.'
'And legs
After a pause I said, 'Do you want me to hide a horse?' and I thought, What the hell am I saying?
'Would you?'
'If you had a good reason.'
'For money?'
'Expenses.'
'Why?'
'Do you mean, why would I do it?' I asked.
He nodded.
I said feebly, 'For the interest,' but in fact it would be because it might lighten his depression to have something other than his illness to think about. I would do it because of my mother's anxiety.
He said, 'What if I asked you to find a horse?'
He was playing games, I thought.
'I suppose I would look for it,' I said.
The telephone on the table by his elbow rang but he merely stared at it apathetically and made no attempt to pick up the receiver. He simply waited until it stopped ringing and then showed exasperated fatigue when my mother appeared in the doorway to tell him that someone to do with the brewery wanted him.
'I'm ill. I've told them not to bother me.'
'It's Tobias Tollright, dear. He says it's essential he talks to you.'
'No, no.'
'Please, Ivan. He sounds so worried.'
'I don't want to talk to him,' Ivan said tiredly. 'Let Alexander talk to him.'
Both my mother and I thought the suggestion pointless, but once he got the idea in his head Ivan wouldn't be budged. In the end I walked over and picked up the phone and explained who I was.
'But I must speak to Sir Ivan himself,' said an agitated voice. 'You simply don't understand.'
'No,' I agreed, 'but if you'll tell me what's the matter, I'll relay it to him for an answer.'
'It's ridiculous.'
'Yes, but urn… fire away.'
'Do you know who I am?' the voice demanded.