Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,114

Well, so was I.’

He turned his head, glanced finally at my face and then looked forward again through the windscreen.

‘That plaster…’ He shuddered. ‘I was screaming… I’ve never been so craven in my life.’

‘Fear in a fearful situation is normal. Absence of fear is not.’

He swallowed. ‘I also feared you wouldn’t rescue me.’

‘Wouldn’t? Do you mean couldn’t, or wouldn’t try?’

‘Couldn’t, of course.’ He seemed surprised at the question. ‘It would have been pointless to do anything useless like throwing your life away to make a gesture.’

‘Die in the attempt?’

‘Dying in the attempt,’ he said sombrely, ‘has always seemed to me the height of incompetence.’

‘Or plain bad luck.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll allow bad luck.’

Another silence lengthened. We turned off the motorway and would soon be back where we’d left my car.

‘Are you all right to drive home?’ I said.

‘Yes, perfectly.’

He looked no better than when we’d set off, but not worse either. Still grey, still strained, but still also with apparently endless reserves of stamina.

I had known him for two weeks. Fifteen days, to be accurate, since we had made tunnels under the tent at Flora’s party. With him and through him I had looked newly into many internal mirrors and was coming to understand what I saw there. I owed him a great deal and didn’t know how to tell him.

I stopped his car beside mine. We both got out. We stood looking at each other, almost awkwardly. After such intensity there seemed to be no suitable farewell.

‘I’m in your debt,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Other way round.’

He smiled faintly, ruefully. ‘Call it quits.’

He stepped quietly into his wine-stained car, gave me the briefest of waves, drove away.

I watched him go until he was out of sight. Then in similar peace I unlocked my own door and motored ordinarily home.

The sun was breaking through clouds when I reached the cottage, shining with the heavy golden slant of a late October tea-time.

I went into the hall and looked into the real mirror there. My hair was spiky and sticky with wine. The stains all over my head and face had dried to purple, but in the sun’s rays they still seemed to glow red. My eyes shone pale grey in a burnished landscape.

I smiled. My teeth gleamed. I looked like a red devil, I thought. A bloody red devil from the far side of terror.

I was filled quite suddenly with a sort of restless exultation.

I went through my sun-filled house shouting aloud, ‘Emma… Emma… Emma… Emma…’ and my voice bounced off the walls, reverberating.

I didn’t shout for lack of her but from wanting to tell her… wanting to shout to her to make her hear… that for once I felt I had done what I should, that I hadn’t been for ever a coward, that I knew I hadn’t failed her memory… or myself… or anything I thought I ought to be… and that I felt comforted and whole and at one with her, and that if I wept for her from now on it would be for what she had missed… the whole of life… the unborn child… and not for my own loss, not from loneliness… not from guilt.

TWENTY-TWO

Fragments of information floated my way for days like debris from a shipwreck.

Chief Superintendent Wilson came to tell me the police had had to saw through the crate and transport Naylor and Denny to a hospital to get their unorthodox handcuffs removed. He seemed deeply amused and also content, and took away a bottle of wine for dinner.

Sergeant Ridger returned with a cut forehead from his scuffle with the pickets and told me that the racecourse bars at Martineau Park had been on the police list of whisky complaints. He said we would have gone there on the next raceday and our pub crawl would have been successful: and I didn’t like to tell him that it already had been, thanks to Mrs Alexis.

Mrs Alexis asked me to lunch. I went, laughed a lot, and came away with a commission to choose and supply wine for her restaurant. Wilfred had survived the soot and the sweep got the sack.

Gerard fed me with constant news, mostly good.

The scotch in the big storage tanks had been profile-matched and had proved to be the third load stolen from the tanker. The Martineau Park and Silver Moondance scotch was all from the second load. The first load had presumably been sold and drunk.

Rannoch’s were refusing to collect or accept their scotch because of the tap water. Customs and Excise were pressing all and sundry for the duty. Kenneth Charter’s insurers were insisting that as the whisky was Rannoch’s, Rannoch’s should pay. Rannoch’s said Naylor should pay. Kenneth Charter’s suggestion that they run the stuff away down a drain and forget it was not being treated seriously.

The best news was that the insurers had agreed to reinstate Charter’s policies in full: the tanker fleet would stay in business.

Kenneth Junior’s part was so far unknown to the police and would with luck remain so. Kenneth Junior wrote to his father from Australia asking for more money, which Kenneth Senior sent him along with advice to stay far away until parental disgust had abated.

Mission accomplished, Gerard said with satisfaction. De-glet’s were sending Charter their account.

Into Deglet’s office came news also from the Californian bloodstock agent: he regularly sold the horses shipped by Larry Trent and paid the proceeds as instructed into three bank accounts in the name of Stewart Naylor.

He had met Mr Naylor, who had been over once to open the accounts. The horses were good and had won races for their new owners. Everything was straightforward, he was sure.

Flora came to tell me she and Jack were going to Barbados for a month to lie in the sun.

‘We go every year, dear, but you know Jack, never still for five minutes except that this time his leg will slow him up nicely, won’t it? Of course half the racing world goes to Barbados in the winter… did you know they call it Newmarket-on-Sea?’ And later she sent me a postcard saying Orkney Swayle and Isabella were staying in the same hotel and one couldn’t have everything, dear, could one?

Miles Quigley telephoned, full of importance, to offer me Vernon’s job, starting immediately, as liquor manager to his firm. Double Vernon’s salary, he said, and managerial status and a seat on the board; and I reflected while politely declining that if he’d given Vernon those rewards Vernon might have stayed loyal for life.

Quigley said he was sticking to his agreement not to prosecute and Vernon was co-operating with the police. Co-operating? I asked. Vernon, Quigley said, would be a prosecution witness, chattering in return for immunity. Was I sure about the job?

I was sure. Perfectly certain, thanks all the same.

I would stay with my shop, I thought, because for me it was right. The scale of its life was my scale. We fitted.

I would stay with good-natured Mrs Palissey and maybe one day teach Brian to write his own name. I would eat Sung Li’s dinners and bow to him; and I would listen to my customers and sell them comfort.

Ordinary life would go on.

I went home one night after closing at nine and found the postman had left a package from my mother.

She seldom wrote; mostly telephoned. The note inside the package was characteristically short.

Darling,

Turned out some very old boxes. Found these oddments of your father’s. If you don’t want them, throw them away.

The oddments were from a long way back, I thought, looking through them. One of a pair of military gold cuff links. A bronze belt buckle with his regimental crest. A leather jotter with a slot for a pencil, but no pencil.

I riffled through the pages of the jotter. Nothing but memos about things like duty rosters; notes about the day-to-day running of the regiment. It was only by chance that I came upon the page where he had written something else.

I stared at the page, transfixed. It was a scrawl, a cri de coeur, hurried, barely punctuated, ending without a question mark. I knew my mother wouldn’t have sent it, if she’d seen it. It too nearly destroyed the myth.

I felt nearer to him than ever before. I felt his true son.

He had written… at not quite my present age, he had written:

The battle must be soon now. It is essential not to show fear to the men, but God, I fear Why can’t I have the courage of my father

Somewhere in the battle, I thought, he had found it.