quiet and no demands, and Malcolm had finally acted against professional advice to give them to him.
Robin had a large room on the ground floor with french doors opening on to a walled garden. He seldom went out into the garden, but he preferred the doors open in all weathers, including snowstorms. Apart from that, he was docile and easy to deal with, and if anyone had speculated on the upheavals that might happen soon if puberty took its natural course, they hadn’t mentioned it in my hearing.
He looked at us blankly, as usual. He seldom spoke, though he did retain the ability to make words: it was just that he seemed to have few thoughts to utter. Brain damage of that magnitude was idiosyncratic, we’d been told, resulting in behaviour individual to each victim. Robin spoke rarely and then only to himself, in private, when he didn’t expect to be overheard: the nurses sometimes heard him, and had told us, but said he stopped as soon as he saw them.
I’d asked them what he said, but they didn’t know, except forwords like ‘shoes’ and ‘bread’ and ‘floor’: ordinary words. They didn’t know why he wouldn’t speak at other times. They were sure, though, that he understood a fair amount of what others said, even if in a haze.
We gave him some pieces of chocolate which he ate, and unwrapped the toys for him which he fingered but didn’t play with. He looked at the balloon packet without emotion. It wasn’t a frustration day: on those, he looked at the packet and made blowing noises with his mouth.
We sat with him for quite a while, talking, telling him who we were while he wandered around the room. He looked at our faces from time to time, and touched my nose once with his finger as if exploring that I was really there, but there was no connection with our minds. He looked healthy, good looking, a fine boy: heartbreaking, as always.
A nurse came in the end, middle-aged, kind-faced, to take him to a dining-room for lunch, and Malcolm and I transferred to the office where my father was given a saviour’s welcome and offered a reviving scotch.
Malcolm nodded. No progress would have been more accurate.
‘We do our best for him always.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Malcolm drank the scotch, shook their hands, made our farewells. We left, as I always left, in sadness, silence and regret.
‘So bloody unfair,’ Malcolm said halfway back to London. ‘He ought to be laughing, talking, roaring through life.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t bear to see him, and I can’t bear not to. I’d give all my money to have him well again.’
‘And make a new fortune afterwards,’ I said.
‘Well, yeah, why not?’ He laughed, but still with gloom. ‘It would have been better if he’d died with the others. Life’s a bugger, sometimes, isn’t it?’
The gloom lasted back to the Savoy and through the next bottle of Bollinger, but by afternoon Malcolm was complaining of the inactivity I’d thrust upon him and wanting to visit cronies in the City. Unpredictability be our shield, I prayed, and kept my eyes open for speeding cars; but we saw the day out safely in offices, bars, clubs and a restaurant, during which time Malcolm increased his wealth by gambling a tenner at evens on the day’s closing price of gold whichfell by two pounds when the trend was upwards, ‘It’ll shoot right up next year, you watch.’
On Friday, despite my pleas for sanity, he insisted on accompanying me to Sandown Park races.
‘You’ll be safer here,’ I protested, ‘in the suite.’
‘I shan’t feel safer.’
‘At the races, I can’t stay beside you.’
‘Who’s to know I’ll be there?’
I gazed at him. ‘Anyone who guesses we are now together could know. They’ll know how to find me, if they look in the papers.’
‘Then don’t go.’
‘I’m going. You stay here.’
I saw, however, that the deep underlying apprehension which he tried to suppress most of the time would erupt into acute nervous anxiety if I left him alone in the suite for several hours, and that he might, out of boredom, do something much sillier than going to the races, like convincing himself that anyone in his family would keep a secret if he asked it.
Accordingly I drove him south of London and took him through the jockeys’ entrance gate to the weighing-room area where he made his afternoon a lot safer by meeting yet another crony and being instantly invited