clearing surrounded by jungle thickets of ex-wives and discontented siblings.
I grew up and left home but went back often, feeling never excluded. Coochie would have seen Malcolm into a happy old age but, when she was forty and the twins eleven, a hit-and-run driver swerved her car off the road and downhill onto rocks. Coochie and Peter had been killed outright. Robin, the elder twin, suffered brain damage. I had been away. Malcolm was in his office: a policeman went to him to tell him, and he let me know soon after. I’d learned the meaning of grief on that drizzly afternoon, and still mourned them all, their loss irreparable.
On the October evening of Malcolm’s telephone call, I glanced at them as usual as I went to bed, their three bright faces grinning out from a silver frame on my chest of drawers. Robin lived — just — in serene twilight in a nursing home. I went to see him now and again. He no longer looked like the boy in the photograph, but was five years older, growing tall, empty-eyed.
I wondered what Malcolm could possibly want. He was rich enough to buy anything he ne eded, maybe - only maybe - excluding the whole of Fort Knox. I couldn’t think of anything I could do for him that he couldn’t get from anyone else.
Newmarket, I thought. The sales.
Newmarket was all very well for me because I’d been working as an assistant to a racehorse trainer. But Newmarket for Malcolm? Malcolm never gambled on horses, only on gold. Malcolm had made several immense consecutive fortunes from buying and selling the hard yellow stuff, and had years ago reacted to my stated choice of occupation by saying merely, ‘Horses? Racing? Good Lord! Well, if that’s what you want, my boy, off you go. But don’t expect me to know the first thing about anything.’ And as far as I knew, he was still as ignorant of the subject as he’d been all along.
Malcolm and Newmarket bloodstock sales simply didn’t mix. Not the Malcolm I’d known, anyway.
I drove the next day to the isolated Suffolk town whose major industry was the sport of kings, and among the scattered purposeful crowd found my father standing bareheaded in the area outside the sale-ring building, eyes intently focused on a catalogue.
He looked just the same. Brushed grey hair, smooth brown vicuna knee-length overcoat, charcoal business suit, silk tie, polished black shoes; confidently bringing his City presence into the casual sophistication of the country.
It was a golden day, crisp and clear, the sky a cold cloudless blue. I walked across to him in my own brand of working clothes: cavalry twill trousers, checked wool shirt, padded olive-green jacket, tweed cap. A surface contrast that went personality deep.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said neutrally.
He raised his eyes and gave me a stare as blue as the sky.
‘So you came.’
‘Well… yes.’
He nodded vaguely, looking me over. ‘You look older,’ he said.
‘Three years.’
‘Three years and a crooked nose.’ He observed it dispassionately. ‘I suppose you broke that falling off a horse?’
‘No… You broke it.’
‘Did I?’ He seemed only mildly surprised. ‘You deserved it.’
I didn’t answer. He shrugged. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
‘OK.’
We hadn’t touched each other, I thought. Not a hug, not a handshake, not a passing pat on the arm. Three years’ silence couldn’t easily be bridged.
He set off not in the direction of the regular refreshment room, but towards one of the private rooms set aside for the privileged. I followed in his footsteps, remembering wryly that it took him roughly two minutes any time to talk himself into the plushest recesses, wherever.
The Newmarket sales building was in the form of an amphitheatre, sloping banks of seats rising all round from the ground-level ring where each horse was led round while being auctioned. Underneath the seating and in a large adjacent building were rooms used as offices by auctioneers and bloodstock agents, and as entertainment rooms by commercial firms, such as Ebury Jewellers, Malcolm’s present willing hosts.
I was used only to the basic concrete boxes of the bloodstock agents’ offices. Ebury’s space was decorated in contrast as an expensive showroom, with well-lit glass display cases round three walls shining with silver and sparkling with baubles, everything locked away safely but temptingly visible. Down the centre of the room, on brown wall-to-wall carpeting, stood a long polished table surrounded with armed, leather-covered dining chairs. Before each chair was neatly laid a leather-edged blotter alongside a gold-tooled tub containing pens, suggesting