Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,28

architect more like the one who built your own house, but that your architect only designs on a small scale.’

‘The Colonel told you he’d visited me?’

‘Most sensible thing he’s done this year.’

‘You amaze me.’

‘I want you as an ally,’ she said. ‘Help me make the racecourse prosper.’

I tried to sort out my own jumbled responses, and it was out of the jumble and not from thought through reasons that I gave her my answer.

‘All right, I’ll try.’

She held out a small hand to formalise the agreement, and I shook on it, a binding commitment.

Marjorie was driven away without returning to the gutted garage, which was just as well as I found the mess unchanged and the boys, the Gardners and Dart all in the Gardners’ kitchen with their attention on cake. Warm fragrant palecoloured fruit cake, that minute baked. Christopher asked for the recipe ‘so that Dad can make it in the bus’.

‘Dad can cook?’ Dart asked ironically.

‘Dad can do anything,’ Neil said, munching.

Dad, I thought to myself, had probably just impulsively set himself on a high road to failure.

‘Colonel –’ I started.

He interrupted. ‘Call me Roger.’

‘Roger,’ I said, ‘can I?… I mean, may the architect of my house come here tomorrow and make a thorough survey of the grandstands as they are at present? I’m sure you have professional advisers about the state of the fabric and so on, but could we take a fresh detached survey with a view to seeing whether new stands are or are not essential for a profitable future?’

Dart’s cake came to a standstill in mid-chew and Roger Gardner’s face lost some of its habitual gloom.

‘Delighted,’ he said, ‘but not tomorrow. I’ve got the course-builders coming, and the full complement of groundsmen will be here getting everything in shape for next Monday’s meeting.’

‘Friday, then?’

He said doubtfully, ‘That’ll be Good Friday. Easter, of course. Perhaps your man won’t want to work on Good Friday.’

‘He’ll do what I tell him,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

Both Dart and Roger were surprised.

‘I am,’ I said gently, ‘a qualified architect. I did five arduous years at the Architectural Association, one of the most thorough schools in the world. I do choose houses in preference to high rises, but that’s because horizontal lines that fit in with nature please me better. I’m a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, not a Le Corbusier, if that means anything to you.’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ Dart said. ‘Who hasn’t?’

‘Frank Lloyd Wright,’ I said, ‘developed the cantilever roof you see on all new grandstands everywhere.’

‘We don’t have a cantilever,’ Roger said thoughtfully.

‘No, but let’s see what you do have, and what you can get away with not having.’

Dart’s view of me had changed a little. ‘You said you were a builder,’ he accused.

‘Yes, I am.’

Dart looked at the children. ‘What does your father do?’ he asked.

‘Builds houses.’

‘With his own hands, do you mean?’

‘Well,’ Edward amplified, ‘with spades and trowels and a saw and everything.’

‘Ruins,’ Christopher explained. ‘We’re on a ruin hunt for our Easter holidays.’

Together they described the pattern of their lives to an ever more astonished audience. Their matter-of-fact acceptance of not every child’s experience seemed especially to amaze.

‘But we’re going to keep the last one he did. Aren’t we, Dad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise.’

I promised for roughly the twentieth time, which was an indication of the depth of their anxiety, as I’d always kept the promises I’d made them.

‘You must all be so tired of moving on,’ Mrs Gardner said sympathetically.

‘It’s not that,’ Christopher told her, ‘it’s the house. It’s brilliant.’ Brilliant in his teenage vocabulary meant only the opposite of awful (pronounced off-al, ironically).

Roger nodded and agreed, however. ‘Brilliant. Hell to heat, I should think, though, with all that space.’

‘It has a hypocaust,’ Neil said, licking his fingers.

The Gardners and Dart gazed at him.

‘What,’ Dart asked, giving in, ‘is a hypocaust?’

‘Central heating invented by the Romans,’ said my seven-year-old composedly. ‘You make hollow spaces and runways under a stone floor and drive hot air through, and the floor stays warm all the time. Dad thought it would work and it does. We ran about without shoes all winter.’

Roger turned his head my way.

‘Come on Friday, then,’ he said.

When I drove the bus back to the same spot on a sunny morning two days later, the ground outside the garage was cluttered not with the debris of decades but with horses.

My sons gazed out of their safe windows at a moving clutch of about six large quadrupeds and decided not to climb down among the hooves, even though every