Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,4

it and nodded, making no promise one way or another, but he took the acknowledgement as assent.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said.

Oliver Wells sat impassively beside him, showing his certainty that their mission had been, as he’d all along expected, unproductive. He still failed to raise guilt in me. Everything I knew of the Strattons urged me strongly to stay away from them in every way I could.

Roger Gardner gave me a sad farewell and drove off, and I went back into my house hoping I wouldn’t see him again.

‘Who were those people?’ Amanda said. ‘What did they want?’

The fair-haired woman, my wife, lay at the far side of our seven foot square bed, emphasising as usual the distance between us.

‘They wanted a white knight act on Stratton Park racecourse.’

She worked it out. ‘A rescue job? You? Those old shares of yours? I hope you said no.’

‘I said no.’

‘Is that why you’re lying there wide awake in the moonlight, staring at the canopy?’

The pleated silk canopy roofed our great four-poster like a mediaeval sleeping tent, the only way to achieve privacy in those days before separate bedrooms. The theatrical glamour of the tester, the tassels and the bed’s cosy promise beguiled friends: only Amanda and I understood the significance of its size. It had taken me two days of carpentry and stitching to construct, and it was understood by both of us to be a manifestation of a hard-won compromise. We would live in the same house, and also in the same bed, but apart.

‘The boys break up from school this week,’ Amanda said.

‘Do they?’

‘You said you’d take them somewhere for Easter.’

‘Did I?’

‘You know you did.’

I’d said it to de-fuse an argument. Never make rash promises, I told myself. An incurable failing.

‘I’ll think of something,’ I said.

‘And about this house…’

‘If you like it, we’ll stay here,’ I said.

‘Lee!’ It briefly silenced her. I knew she had a thousand persuasions ready: the scattered hints and sighs had been unmistakable for weeks, ever since the gravel had been laid in the drive and the building inspector had called for the last time. The house was freehold, finished and ready for sale, and we needed the money. Half my working capital lay cemented into its walls.

‘The boys need a more settled existence,’ Amanda said, not wanting to waste her reasons.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not fair to keep dragging them from school to school.’

‘No.’

‘They worry about leaving here.’

‘Tell them not to.’

‘I can’t believe it! Can we afford it? I thought you’d say you couldn’t afford it. What about the mansion near Oxford, with the tree growing in the drawing room?’

‘With luck I’ll get planning permission this week.’

‘But we’re not going there, are we?’ Despite my assurance, her anxiety rose sharply.

‘I’ll go there,’ I said. ‘You and the boys will stay here for as long as you want. For years. I’ll commute.’

‘You promise.’

‘Yes.’

‘No more mud? No more mess? No more tarpaulins for roofs and brick dust in the cornflakes?’

‘No.’

‘What made you decide?’

The mechanics of decision, I thought, were mysterious. I could have said it was indeed because it was time to settle down for the children’s sake, that the eldest had reached the examination time zone and needed continuity in teaching. I could have said that this area, the smiling countryside on the Surrey-Sussex border, was as wholesome as anywhere nowadays. I could have made the decision sound eminently logical.

Instead, I knew in my private mind that the decider had been the old oak. It had appealed to me powerfully, to the inner boy who had been brought up in London traffic, surrounded by landscapes of stone.

I’d seen the oak first a year earlier, fuzzy then as now with the promise of leaf. Mature, perfect, its boughs invited climbers, and as I’d gone there alone I climbed it without embarrassment, sitting at home in its ancient embrace, looking at the rotting great eyesore of a barn that the hard-up landowner had been forbidden to demolish. A historic tithe barn! A local landmark! It would have to stay there until it actually fell down.

A lot of crap, I’d thought, descending from the tree and walking into the ruin through a creaking gap doing duty as a doorway. History-worship gone mad.

Parts of the roof far above were missing. Along the west side the timbers all leaned drunkenly at wild angles, their supports wholly weathered away. A rusted abandoned tractor and heaps of other assorted junk lay among saplings struggling up from the cracked concrete floor. A stiff breeze blew through