‘Do you have cronies all over the world?’ I asked.
‘Certainly,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Anyone I’ve known for five minutes is a crony, if I get on with them.’
I believed him. Malcolm wasn’t easy to forget, nor was he hard to like. I saw the genuine pleasure in his immediate host’s face as they walked away together, talking, and reflected that Malcolm would have been a success in whatever career he had chosen, that success was part of his character, like generosity, like headlong rashness.
I was due to ride in the second race, a steeplechase for amateurs, and as usual had arrived two prudent hours in advance. I turned away from watching Malcolm and looked around for the owner of the horse I was about to partner, and found my path blocked by a substantial lady in a wide brown cape. Of all the members of the family, she was the last I would have expected to see on a racecourse.
‘Ian,’ she said accusingly, almost as if I’d been pretending to be someone else.
‘Hello.’
‘Where have you been? Why don’t you answer your telephone?’
Lucy, my elder half-sister. Lucy, the poet.
Lucy’s husband Edwin was, as always, to be found at her side, rather as if he had no separate life. The leech, Malcolm had called him unkindly in the past. From a Bugg to a leech.
Lucy was blessed with an unselfconsciousness about her weight which stemmed both from unworldliness and an overbelief in health foods. ‘But nuts and raisins are good for you,’ she would say, eating them by the kilo. ‘Bodily vanity, like intellectual arrogance, is a sickness of the soul.’
She was forty-two, my sister, with thick straight brown hair uncompromisingly cut, large brown eyes, her mother’s high cheekbones and her father’s strong nose. She was as noticeable in her own way as Malcolm was himself, and not only because of her shapeless clothes and dedicated absence of cosmetics. Malcolm’s vitality ran in her too, though in different directions, expressing itself in vigour of thought and language.
I had often, in the past, wondered why someone as talented and strongminded as she shouldn’t have made a marriage of equal minds, but in recent years had come to think she had settled for a nonentity like Edwin because the very absence of competition freed her to be wholly herself.
‘Edwin is concerned,’ she said, ‘that Malcolm is leaving his senses.’
For Edwin, read Lucy, I thought. She had a trick of ascribing her own thoughts to her husband if she thought they would be unwelcome to her audience.
Edwin stared at me uneasily. He was a good-looking man in many ways, but mean spirited, which if one were tolerant one would excuse because of the perpetual knife-edge state of his and Lucy’s finances. I wasn’t certain any more whether it was he who had actually failed to achieve employment, or whether Lucy had in some way stopped him from trying. In any event, she earned more prestige than lucre for her writing, and Edwin had grown tired of camouflaging the frayed elbows of his jackets with oval patches of thin leather badly sewn on.
Edwin’s concern, it seemed, was real enough although if it had been his alone they wouldn’t have come.
‘It isn’t fair of him,’ he said, meaning Malcolm. ‘Lucy’s trust fund was set up years ago before inflation and doesn’t stretch as far as itused to. He really ought to put that right. I’ve told him so several times, and he simply ignores me. And now he’s throwing his money away in this profligate way as if his heirs had no rights at all.’ Indignation shook in his voice, along with, I could see, a very definite fear of a rocky future if the fortune he’d counted on for so long should be snatched away in the last furlong, so to speak.
I sighed and refrained from saying that I thought that Malcolm’s heirs had no rights while he was alive. I said merely, soothingly, ‘I’m sure he won’t let you starve.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Edwin said with thin fury. ‘The point is that he’s given an immense amount of money to Lucy’s old college to establish post-graduate scholarships for poets.’
I looked from his pinch-lipped agitated mouth to Lucy’s face and saw shame where there should perhaps have been pride. Shame, I thought, because she found herself sharing Edwin’s views when they ran so contrary to her normal disdain for materialism. Perhaps even Lucy, I thought, had been looking forward