he could check where everyone in the family was last Friday and tonight.’
‘Everyone!’ Malcolm exclaimed. ‘It would take weeks.’
‘It would put your mind at rest.’
He shook his head gloomily. ‘You forget about assassins.’
‘Assassins aren’t so frightfully easy to find, not for ordinary people. How would you set about it, for instance, if you wanted someone killed? Put an ad in The Times?’
He didn’t seem to see such a problem as I did, but he agreed that‘the fellow who tailed Moira’ should be offered the job of checking the family.
We discussed where we should stay that night: in which hotel, in fact, as neither of us felt like returning home. Home, currently, to me, was a rather dull suburban flat in Epsom, not far from the stable I’d been working for. Home for Malcolm was still the house where I’d been raised, from which Moira had apparently driven him, but to which he had returned immediately after her death. ‘Home’ for all the family was that big house in Berkshire which had seen all five wives come and go: Malcolm himself had been brought up there, and I could scarcely imagine what he must have felt at the prospect of losing it.
‘What happened between you and Moira?’ I said.
‘None of your goddam business.’
We travelled ten miles in silence. Then he shifted, sighed, and said, ‘She wanted Coochie’s jewellery and I wouldn’t give it to her. She kept on and on about it, rabbit, rabbit. Annoyed me, do you see? And then … well . . .’ he shrugged, ‘she caught me out.’
‘With another woman?’ I said without surprise.
He nodded, unashamed. He’d never been monogamous and couldn’t understand why it should be expected. The terrible rows in my childhood had all been centred on his affairs: while he’d been married to Vivien and then to Joyce, he had maintained Alicia all the time as his mistress. Alicia bore him two children while he was married to Vivien and Joyce, and also one subsequently, when he’d made a fairly honest woman of her, at her insistence.
I liked to think he had been faithful finally to Coochie, but on the whole it was improbable, and I was never going to ask.
Malcolm favoured our staying at the Dorchester, but I persuaded him he was too well known there, and we settled finally on the Savoy.
‘A suite,’ Malcolm said at the reception desk. ‘Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting-room, and send up some Bollinger right away.’
I didn’t feel like drinking champagne, but Malcolm did. He also ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for us both from room-service, with a bottle of Hine Antique brandy and a box of Havana cigars for comforts.
Idly I totted up the expenses of his day: one solid silver trophy, one two-million-guinea thoroughbred, insurance for same, Cambridge hotel bill, tip for the taxi-driver, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, jumbo suite at the Savoy with trimmings. I wondered how much he was really worth, and whether he intended to spend the lot.
We ate the food and drank the brandy still not totally in accord with each other. The three years’ division had been, it seemed, a chasm not as easy to cross as I’d thought. I felt that although I’d meant it when I said I loved him, it was probably the long memories of him that I really loved, not his physical presence here and now, and I could see that if I was going to stay close to him, as I’d promised, I would be learning him again and from a different viewpoint; that each of us, in fact, would newly get to know the other.
‘Any day now,’ Malcolm said, carefully dislodging ash from his cigar, ‘we’re going to Australia.’
I absorbed the news and said, ‘Are we?’
He nodded. ‘We’ll need visas. Where’s your passport?’
‘In my flat. Where’s yours?’
‘In the house.’
‘Then I’ll get them both tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and you stay here.’ I paused. ‘Are we going to Australia for any special reason?’
‘To look at gold mines,’ he said. ‘And kangaroos.’
After a short silence, I said, ‘We don’t just have to escape. We do have to find out who’s trying to kill you, in order to stop them succeeding.’
‘Escape is more attractive,’ he said. ‘How about a week in Singapore on the way?’
‘Anything you say. Only… I’m supposed to ride in a race at Sandown on Friday.’
‘I’ve never understood why you like it. All those cold wet days. All those falls.’
‘You get your rush from gold,’ I said.
‘Danger?’ His eyebrows rose. ‘Quiet, well-behaved, cautious