Life could be a bugger, as Malcolm said. She had already begun to value the affluence she had long despised or she wouldn’t have come on her mission to Sandown Park, and I could only guess at the turmoil in her spiritual life. Like a nun losing her faith, I thought. But no, not a nun. Lucy, who had written explicitly of sex in a way I could never believe had anything to do with Edwin (though one could be wrong), wouldn’t ever have been a nun.
With such random thoughts, I took off my ordinary clothes and put on white breeches and a scarlet jersey with blue stripes on the sleeves, and felt the usual battened-down excitement which made me breathe deeply and feel intensely happy. I rode in about fifty races a year, if I was lucky… and I would have to get another job fairly soon, I reflected, if I were to ride exercise regularly and stay fit enough to do any good.
Going outside, I talked for a while to the trainer and owner of the horse I was to ride, a husband and wife who had themselves riddenuntil twenty years earlier in point-to-point races and who liked to relive it all vicariously through me. The husband, George, was now a public trainer on a fairly grand scale, but the wife, Jo, still preferred to run her own horses in amateur races. She currently owned three steeplechasers, all pretty good. It did me no harm at all to be seen on them and to be associated in racing minds with that stable.
‘Young Higgins is jumping out of his skin,’ Jo said.
Young Higgins was the name of that day’s horse. Young Higgins was thirteen, a venerable gentleman out to disprove rumours of retirement. We all interpreted‘jumping out of his skin’ as meaning fit, sound and pricking his ears with enthusiasm, and at his age one couldn’t ask for much more. Older horses than he had won the Grand National, but Young Higgins and I had fallen in the great race the only time we’d tried it, and to my regret Jo had decided on no more attempts.
‘We’ll see you in the parade ring, then, Ian, before the race,’ George said, and Jo added, ‘And give the old boy a good time.’
I nodded, smiling. Giving all of us a good time was the point of the proceedings. Young Higgins was definitely included.
The minute George and Jo turned away to go off towards the grandstands, someone tapped me on the back of the shoulder. I turned round to see who it was and to my total astonishment found myself face to face with Lucy’s older brother, Malcolm’s first child, my half-brother Donald.
‘Good heavens,’ I said. ‘You’ve never been to the races in your life.’
He often told me he hadn’t, saying rather superciliously that he didn’t approve of the sordid gambling.
‘I haven’t come for the races,’ he said crossly. ‘I’ve come to see you about Malcolm’s taking leave of his senses.’
‘How… er …?’ I stopped. ‘Did Joyce send you?’ I said.
‘What if she did? We are all concerned. She told us where to find you, certainly.’
‘Did she tell the whole family?’ I asked blankly.
‘How do I know? She telephoned us. I daresay she telephoned everyone she could get hold of. You know what she’s like. She’s your mother, after all.’
Even so late in his life, he couldn’t keep out of his voice the old resentments, and perhaps also, I reflected, they were intensifying with age. My mother had supplanted his, he was saying, and any indiscretion my mother ever committed was in some way my fault.He had thought in that illogical way for as long as I’d been aware of him, and nothing had changed.
Donald was, in the family’s opinion, the brother nearest in looks to myself, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Irrefutably, he was the same height and had blue eyes less intense in colour than Malcolm’s. Agreed, Donald had middling brown curly hair and shoulders wider than his hips. I didn’t wear a bushy moustache though, and I just hoped I didn’t walk with what I thought of as a self-important strut; and I sometimes tried to make sure, after I’d been in Donald’s company, that I absolutely didn’t.
Donald’s life had been so disrupted when Malcolm had ousted Vivien, Donald always told us, that he had never been able to decide properly on a career. It couldn’t have been easy, I knew, to survive such an upheaval, but