little bugger. Nightmares ahead, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Toby was anyway the one I most worried about, and this wouldn’t help. He’d been born rebellious, grown into a cantankerous toddler and had never since been easy to persuade. I had a sad feeling that in four years’ time he would develop, despite my best efforts, into a sullen world-hating youth, alienated and miserable. I could sense that it would happen and I ached for it not to, but I’d seen too many other suffering families where a much loved son or daughter had grown destructively angry in the mid-teens, despising attempts to help.
Rebecca Stratton, I surmised, might have been like that, ten years earlier. She came into Oliver’s office now like a whirlwind, smashing the door open until it hit the wall, bringing in with her a swirl of cold outside air and a towering attack of fury.
‘Where’s that bloody Oliver?’ she loudly demanded, looking round.
‘With your father…’
She didn’t listen. She still wore breeches and boots, but with a tan sweater in place of her racing colours. Her eyes glittered, her body looked rigid, she seemed half-way demented. ‘Do you know what that stupid bloody doctor’s done? He’s stood me down from racing for four days. Four days! I ask you. He says I’m concussed. Concussed, my arse. Where’s Oliver? He’s got to tell that bloody man I’m going to ride on Monday. Where is he?’
Rebecca spun on her heel and strode out with the same energy expenditure as on the way in.
I said, closing the door after her, ‘She’s concussed to high heaven, I’d have said.’
‘Yes, but she’s always a bit like that. If I were the doctor I’d stand her down for life.’
‘She’s not your favourite Stratton, I gather.’
Caution returned to Roger with a rush, ‘I never said…’
‘Of course not.’ I paused. ‘So what has changed since last Sunday?’
He consulted the light cream walls, the framed print of Arkle, the big calendar with days crossed off, a large clock (accurate) and his own shoes, and finally said, ‘Mrs Binsham came out of the woodwork.’
‘Is that so momentous?’
‘You know who she is?’ He was curious, a little surprised.
‘The old Lord’s sister.’
‘I thought you didn’t know anything about the family.’
‘I said I had no contact with them, and I don’t. But my mother talked about them. Like I told you, she was once married to the old man’s son.’
‘Do you mean Conrad? Or Keith? Or… Ivan?’
‘Keith,’ I said. ‘Conrad’s twin.’
‘Fraternal twins,’ Roger said. ‘The younger one.’
I agreed. ‘Twenty-five minutes younger, and apparently never got over it.’
‘It does make a difference, I suppose.’
It made the difference between inheriting a barony, and not. Inheriting the family mansion, and not. Inheriting a fortune, and not. Keith’s jealousy of his twenty-five minute elder brother had been one – but only one, according to my mother – of the habitual rancours poisoning her ex-husband’s psyche.
I had my mother’s photographs of her Stratton wedding day, the bridegroom tall, light-haired, smiling, strikingly good looking, all the promise of a splendid life ahead in the pride and tenderness of his manner towards her. She had that day been exploding with bliss, she’d told me; with an indescribable floating feeling of happiness.
Within six months he’d broken her arm in a fight and punched out two of her front teeth.
‘Mrs Binsham,’ Roger Gardner said, ‘has insisted on a shareholders’ meeting next week. She’s a dragon, they say. She’s Conrad’s aunt, of course, and apparently she’s the only living creature who makes him quake.’
Forty years back she had implacably forced her brother, the third baron, to behave harshly in public to my mother. Even then Mrs Binsham had been the dynamo of the family, the manipulator, the one who laid down the programme of action and forced the rest to follow.
‘She never gave up,’ my mother said. ‘She would simply wear down any opposition until you would do what she wanted just to get some peace. In her own eyes, you see, she was always right, so she was always certain that what she wanted was best.’
I asked Roger, ‘Do you know Mrs Binsham yourself?’
‘Yes, but not well. She’s an impressive old lady, very upright. She comes to the races here quite often with Lord Stratton – er, not Conrad, but the old Lord – but I’ve never had any really private conversations with her. Oliver knows her better. Or at least,’ he faintly grinned, ‘Oliver has obeyed her instructions from time to time.’
‘Perhaps she’ll sort out the present squabbles and quieten things