Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,14

answered him pleasantly, ‘I am a shareholder. I was properly given advance notice of this meeting, and I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I do have a legal right to be here. I’ll just sit quietly and listen.’

I sat down. All of the faces registered stark disapproval except for one, a younger man’s, bearing a hint of a grin.

‘Conrad! This is ridiculous.’ The man who most violently opposed my presence was up on his feet, quivering with fury. ‘Get rid of him at once.’

Conrad Stratton realistically took stock of my size and comparative youth and said defeatedly, ‘Sit down, Keith. Who exactly is going to throw him out?’

Keith, my mother’s first husband, might have been strong enough in his youth to batter a miserable young wife, but there was no way he could begin to do the same to her thirty-five-year-old son. He hated the fact of my existence. I hated what I’d learned of him. The antagonism between us was mutual, powerful and lasting.

The fair hair in the wedding photographs had turned a blondish grey. The good bone structure still gave him a more patrician air than that of his elder twin. His looking glass must still constantly be telling him that the order of his birth had been nature’s horrible mistake, that his should have been the head that engaged first.

He couldn’t sit down. He strode about the big room, snapping his head round in my direction now and then, and glaring at me.

Important chaps who might have been the first and second barons looked down impassively from gold-framed portraits on the walls. The lighting hung from the ceiling in convoluted brass chandeliers with etched glass shades round candle bulbs. Upon a long polished mahogany sideboard stood a short case clock flanked by heavy old throttled-neck vases that, like the whole room, had an air of having remained unchanged for most of the old Lord’s life.

There was no daylight: no windows.

Next to Conrad sat a ramrod-backed old lady easy to identify as his aunt, Marjorie Binsham, the convener of this affair. Forty years earlier, on my mother’s wedding day, she had stared grimly at the camera as if a smile would have cracked her facial muscles, and nothing in that way, either, seemed to have been affected by passing years. Now well into her eighties, she flourished a still sharp brain under disciplined wavy white hair and wore a red and black dog-toothed dress with a white, ecclesiastical-looking collar.

Rather to my surprise she was regarding me more with curiosity than rigid dislike.

‘Mrs Binsham?’ I said from the other end of the table. ‘Mrs Marjorie Binsham?’

‘Yes.’ The monosyllable came out clipped and dry, merely acknowledging information.

‘I,’ said the man whose grin was now in control, ‘am Darlington Stratton, known as Dart. My father sits at the head of the table. My sister Rebecca is on your right.’

‘This is unnecessary!’ Keith snapped at him from somewhere behind Conrad. ‘He does not need introductions. He’s leaving.’

Mrs Binsham said repressively and with exquisite diction, ‘Keith, do stop prowling, and sit down. Mr Morris is correct, he has a right to be here. Face facts. As you cannot eject him, ignore him.’

Mrs Binsham’s direct gaze was bent on me, not on Keith. My own lips twitched. Ignoring me seemed the last thing any of them could do.

Dart said, with a straight face covering infinite mischief, ‘Have you met Hannah, your sister?’

The woman on the other side of Conrad from Mrs Binsham vibrated with disgust. ‘He’s not my brother. He’s not.’

‘Half-brother,’ Marjorie Binsham said, with the same cool fact-facing precision. ‘Unpalatable as you may find it, Hannah, you cannot change it. Just ignore him.’

For Hannah, as for Keith, the advice was impossible to follow. My half-sister, to my relief, didn’t look like our joint mother. I’d been afraid she might: afraid to find familiar eyes hating me from an echo of a loved face. She looked more like Keith, tall, blonde, fine-boned and, at the moment, white with outrage.

‘How dare you!’ She shook. ‘Have you no decency?’

‘I have shares,’ I pointed out.

‘And you shouldn’t have,’ Keith said harshly. ‘Why Father ever gave them to Madeline, I’ll never know.’

I refrained from saying that he must know perfectly well why. Lord Stratton had given shares to Madeline, his daughter-in-law, because he knew why she was leaving. In my mother’s papers, after she’d died, I came across old letters from her father-in-law telling her of his regret, of his regard for her, of his concern