I’d ridden always as an amateur, unpaid, because something finally held me back from the total dedication needed for turning professional. Race riding was my deepest pleasure, but not my entire life, and in consequence I’d never developed the competitive drive necessary for climbing the pro ladder. I was happy with the rides I got, with the camaraderie of the changing-room, with the wide skies and the horses themselves, and yes, one had to admit it, with the risk.
‘Staying near me,’ Malcolm said, ‘as you’ve already found out, isn’t enormously safe.’
‘That’s why I’m staying,’ I said.
He stared. He said, ‘My God,’ and he laughed, ‘I thought I knew you. Seems I don’t.’
He finished his brandy, stubbed out his cigar and decided on bed; and in the morning he was up before me, sitting on a sofa in one of the bathrobes and reading the Sporting Life when I ambled out in the underpants and shirt I’d slept in.
‘I’ve ordered breakfast,’ he said. ‘And I’m in the paper - how about that?’
I looked where he pointed. His name was certainly there, somewhere near the end of the detailed lists of yesterday’s sales. ‘Lot 79, ch. colt, 2,070,000 gns. Malcolm Pembroke’.
He put down the paper, well pleased. ‘Now, what do we do today?’
‘We summon your private eye, we fix a trainer for the colt, I fetch our passports and some clothes, and you stay here.’
Slightly to my surprise, he raised no arguments except to tell me not to be away too long. He was looking rather thoughtfully at the healing graze down my right thigh and the red beginnings of bruising around it.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t have the private eye’s phone number. Not with me.’
‘We’ll get another agency, then, from the yellow pages.’
‘Your mother knows it, of course. Joyce knows it.’
‘How does she know it?’
‘She used him,’ he said airily, ‘to follow me and Alicia.’
There was nothing, I supposed, which should ever surprise me about my parents.
‘When the lawyer fellow said to have Moira tailed, I got the private eye’s name from Joyce. After all, he’d done a good job on me and Alicia all those years ago. Too bloody good, when you think of it. So get through to Joyce, Ian, and ask her for the number.’
Bemused, I did as he said.
‘Darling,’ my mother shrieked down the line. ‘Where’s your father?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Darling, do you know what he’s bloody done?’
‘No… what?’
‘He’s given a fortune, darling, I mean literally hundreds of thousands, to some wretched little film company to make some absolutely ghastly film about tadpoles or something. Some bloody fool of a man telephoned to find out where your father was, because it seems he promised them even more money which they’d like to have… I ask you! I know you and Malcolm aren’t talking, but you’ve got to do something to stop him.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s his money.’
‘Darling, don’t be so naive. Someone’s going to inherit it, and if only you’d swallow all that bloody pride, as I’ve told you over and over, it would be yours. If you go on and on with this bloody quarrel, he’ll leave it all to Alicia’s beastly brood, and I cannot bear the prospect of her gloating for ever more. So make it up with Malcolm at once, darling, and get him to see sense.’
‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘I have.’
‘What?’
‘Made it up with him.’
‘Thank God, at last!’ my mother shrieked. ‘Then, darling, what are you waiting for? Get onto him straight away and stop him spending your inheritance.’
Three
Malcolm’s house, after three years of Moira’s occupancy, had greatly changed.
Malcolm’s Victorian house was known as ‘Quantum’ because of the Latin inscription carved into the lintel over the front door. QUANTUM IN ME FUIT - roughly, ‘I did the best I could.’
I went there remembering the comfortable casualness that Coochie had left and not actually expecting that things would be different: and I should have known better, as each wife in turn, Coochie included, had done her best to eradicate all signs of her predecessor. Marrying Malcolm had, for each wife, involved moving into his house, but he had indulged them all, I now understood, in the matter of ambience.
I let myself in through the kitchen door with Malcolm’s keys and thought wildly for a moment that I’d come to the wrong place. Coochie’s pinewood and red-tiled homeliness had been swept away in favour of glossy yellow