after, not during. Race-riding was their business, besides their pleasure, and some of them thought of amateur opponents as frivolous unfit nuisances who caused accidents and endangered lives.
Perhaps because of an arrogant desire to prove them wrong, perhaps because of the insights and realities I’d faced in a traumatic week, perhaps because of Young Higgins himself: I rode anywaywith a new sharp reveiationary perception of what was needed for winning, and the horse and I came home in front by four lengths to a fairly stunned silence from the people on the stands who’d backed everything else on the card but us.
George and Jo were vindicated and ecstatic. Young Higgins tossed his head at the modest plaudits. A newspaperman labelled the result as a fluke.
I’d cracked it, I thought. I’d graduated. That had been real professional riding. Satisfactory. But I was already thirty-three. I’d discovered far too late the difference between enjoyment and fire. I’d needed to know it at nineteen or twenty. I’d idled it away.
‘This is no time,’ Jo said laughing, ‘to look sad.’
Seventeen
I flew to New York two days later, still not knowing where to find Malcolm.
The voice at Stamford, Connecticut, always helpful but uninformed, had thought, the previous evening, that the gentlemen might have gone back to Kentucky: they’d been talking of buying a horse that they’d seen there a week earlier. Another horse, not the one they’d bought yesterday.
It was just as well, I thought, that Donald and Helen and Thomas and Berenice and Edwin and Lucy and Vivien and Joyce didn’t know. That Gervase, Ursula, Alicia, Ferdinand, Debs and Serena hadn’t heard. All fourteen of them would have fallen upon Malcolm and torn him apart.
I chose New York for the twin reasons that Stamford, Connecticut, was barely an hour and a halPs drive away (information from the voice) and that everyone should see New York some time. My journeys before that had been only in Europe, to places like Paris, Rome, Athens and Oslo. Beaches and race-meetings and temples. Horses and gods.
I was heading for a hotel on 54th Street, Manhattan, that the voice had recommended: she would tell Mr Pembroke I would be there, as soon as she knew where Mr Pembroke was. It seemed as good an arrangement as any.
Superintendent Yale didn’t know I’d left England, nor did any of the family. I sighed with deep relief on the aeroplane and thought about the visits I’d made the day before to Alicia and Vivien. Neither had wanted to see me and both had been abrasive, Alicia in the morning, Vivien in the afternoon.
Alicia’s flat outside Windsor was spacious and overlooked the Thames, neither of which pleasures seemed to please her. She did reluctantly let me in, but was unplacated by my admiration of her view.
She was, in fact, looking youthfully pretty in a white wool dress and silver beads. Her hair was pulled high in a velvet bow on the crown, and her neat figure spoke of luck or dieting. She had a visitor with her already when I called, a fortyish substantial-looking man introduced coquettishly as Paul, who behaved with unmistakable lordliness, the master in his domain. How long, I wondered, had this been going on?
‘You might have said you were coming,’ Alicia complained. ‘Ferdinand said you would, some time. I told him to tell you not to.’
‘It seemed best to see everyone,’ I said neutrally.
‘Then hurry up,’ she said. ‘We’re going out to lunch.’
‘Did Ferdinand tell you about Malcolm’s new will?’
‘He did, and I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve always been Malcolm’s wretched little pet. He should have sent you back to Joyce when I left. I told him to. But would he listen? No, he wouldn’t.’
‘That was twenty years ago,’ I protested.
‘And nothing’s changed. He does what he likes. He’s utterly selfish.’
Paul listened to the conversation without stirring and with scant apparent interest but he did, it seemed, have his influence. With an arch look at him, Alicia said, ‘Paul says Gervase should force Malcolm to give him power of attorney.’
I couldn’t off-hand think of anything less likely to happen.
‘Have you two known each other long?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Alicia said, and the look she gave Paul was that of a flirt of sixteen.
I asked her if she remembered the tree stump. ‘Of course. I was furious with Malcolm for letting Fred do anything so ridiculous. The boys might have been hurt.’
And did she remember the switches? How could she forget them, she said, they’d been all over