his whole personality, causing people often to wriggle away from his company, erupting in didactic outbursts and wretched unjustified jealousies.
Yet his wife appeared to love him forgivingly, and had produced two children, both girls, the first of them appearing a good three years after the well-attended marriage. Gervase had said a little too often that he himself would never in any circumstances have burdened a child with what he had suffered. Gervase, to my mind, would spend his last-ever moments worrying that the word ‘illegitimate’ would appear on his death certificate.
Ferdinand, his brother, was quite different, taking illegitimacy as of little importance, a matter of paperwork, no more.
Three years younger than Gervase, a year younger than myself, Ferdinand looked more like Malcolm than any of us, a living testimony to his parentage. Along with the features, he’d inherited the financial agility but lacking Malcolm’s essential panache had carved himself a niche in an insurance company, not a multi-million fortune.
Ferdinand and I had been friends while we both lived in the house as children, but Alicia had thoroughly soured all that when she’d taken him away, dripping into all her children’s ears the relentless spite of her dispossession. Ferdinand now looked at me with puzzlement as if he couldn’t quite remember why he disliked me, and then Alicia would remind him sharply that if he wasn’t careful I would get my clutches on his, Gervase’s and Serena’s rightful shares of Malcolm’s money, and his face would darken again into unfriendliness.
It was a real pity about Ferdinand, I thought, but I never did much about it.
After Gervase on my answering machine came my mother, Joyce, very nearly incoherent with rage. Someone, it appeared, had already brought the Sporting Life to her notice. She couldn’t believe it, she said. Words failed her. (They obviously didn’t.) How could I have done anything as stupid as taking Malcolm to Newmarket Sales, because obviously I would have been there with him, it wasn’t his scene otherwise, and why had I been so deceitful that morning when I’d talked to her, and would I without fail ring her immediately, this was a crisis, Malcolm had got to be stopped.
The fourth and last message, calmer after Joyce’s hysteria, was from my half-brother Thomas, the third of Malcolm’s children, born to his first wife, Vivien.
Thomas, rising forty, prematurely bald, pale skinned, sporting a gingerish moustache, had married a weman who acidly belittled him every time she opened her mouth. (‘Of course, Thomas is absolutely useless when it comes to …’ [practically anything] and ‘if only poor Thomas was capable of commanding a suitable salary’ and ‘Dear Thomas is one of life’s failures, aren’t you, darling?’) Thomas bore it all with hardly a wince, though after years of it I observed him grow less effective and less decisive, not more, almost as if he had come to believe in and to act out his Berenice’s opinion of him.
‘Ian,’ Thomas said in a depressed voice, ‘this is Thomas. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday lunchtime but you seem to be away. When you’ve read my letter, please will you ring me up.’
I’d picked up his letter from my front doormat but hadn’t yet opened it. I slit the envelope then and found that he too had a problem. I read:
Dear Ian,
Berenice is seriously concerned about Malcolm’s wicked selfishness. She, well, to be honest, she keeps on and on about the amounts he’s throwing away these days, and to be honest the only thing which has pacified her for a long time now is the thought of my eventual share of Malcolm’s money, and if he goes on spending at this rate, well my life is going to be pretty intolerable, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if you weren’t my brother and the best of the bunch, which I suppose I’ve never said until now, but sometimes I think you’re the only sane one in the family even if you do ride in those dangerous races, and, well, can you do anything to reason with Malcolm, as you’re the only one he’s likely to listen to, even though you haven’t been talking for ages, which is unbelievable considering how you used to be with each other, and I blame that money-grubbing Moira, I really do, though Berenice used to think that anything or anyone who came between you and Malcolm could only be to my benefit, because Malcolm might with luck cut you out of his will. Well,