Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,5
the tangled desolation, unfriendly and cold.
I’d seen almost at once what could be built within there, almost as if the design had been hovering for a long time in my mind, awaiting life. It would be a house for children. Not necessarily for my own children, but for any. For the child I’d been. A house with many rooms, with surprises, with hiding places.
The boys had hated the place at first and Amanda, heavily pregnant, had burst into tears, but the local planners had been helpful and the landowner had sold me the barn with a surrounding acre of land as if he couldn’t believe his luck. When each son found he would be having a separate bedroom as a domain all his own, the objections miraculously ceased.
I’d brought in a conservationist to check the oak. A superb old specimen, he’d said. Three hundred years in the growing. It would outlive us all, he said; and its timeless strength seemed to give me peace.
Amanda repeated, ‘What made you decide?’
I said ‘The oak.’
‘What?’
‘Common sense,’ I said, which satisfied her.
*
On Wednesday I received two direction-changing letters. The first, from an Oxford District Council, turned down my third application for planning permission for restoring the mansion with the beech tree growing in its drawing room. I telephoned to discover why, as I’d understood the third plan had met with their unofficial approval. They now were of the opinion, a repressive voice told me, that the mansion should be restored as one dwelling, not divided into four smaller houses, as I’d suggested. Perhaps I would care to submit revised plans. Sorry, I said. Forget it. I phoned the mansion’s owner to say I was no longer a potential buyer, sending him into predictable orbital rage: but no planning permission, no sale, had been our firm agreement.
Sighing, I disconnected and dropped three months’ work into the wastepaper basket. Back, literally, to the drawing-board.
The second letter came from solicitors acting for the Stratton family, inviting me to a Stratton Park shareholders’ extraordinary meeting the following week.
I phoned the solicitors. ‘Do they expect me to go?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, Mr Morris. But as you are a shareholder, they were required to alert you to the meeting.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Entirely your decision, Mr Morris.’
The voice was cautious and non-committal, no help at all.
I asked if I held voting shares.
‘Yes, you do. Each share has one vote.’
On Friday I did the end-of-term school run, collecting the boys for their Easter break: Christopher, Toby, Edward, Alan and Neil.
What, they wanted to know, had I planned for their holidays?
‘Tomorrow,’ I said calmly, ‘we go to the races.’
‘Motor?’ Christopher asked hopefully.
‘Horses.’
They made vomiting noises.
‘And next week… a ruin hunt,’ I said.
Deafening disapproval lasted all the way home.
‘If I don’t find another nice ramshackle ruin, we’ll have to sell this house after all,’ I said, pulling up outside. ‘Take your pick.’
Sobered, they grumbled, ‘Why can’t you get a proper job?’ which I took as it was meant, resigned acceptance of the programme ahead. I’d always told them where the money came from for food and clothes and bicycles and because they’d suffered no serious shortage they had inexhaustible faith in ruins, and were apt to point them out to me unprompted.
Since the thumbs-down letter on the mansion, I’d checked through the file of replies I’d had to an advertisement I’d run in the Spectator three months earlier:
‘Wanted, an uninhabitable building. Anything from castle
to cowshed considered.’
I enquired of several interesting propositions to see if any were still available. As, owing to a recent severe slump in property prices, it seemed they all were, I promised an inspection and made a list.
I hardly admitted to myself that the uninhabitable buildings niggling away on the fringes of my mind were the grandstands at Stratton Park.
Only I knew the debt I owed to the third baron.
CHAPTER 2
It rained on Stratton Park’s steeplechase meeting, but my five elder sons – Christopher, fourteen, to Neil, seven – grumbled not so much about the weather as about having to wear tidy, unobtrusive clothing on a Saturday. Toby, twelve, the rider of the red bicycle, had tried to avoid the trip altogether, but Amanda had packed him firmly into the mini-van with the others, providing a picnic of Coca-Cola and ham omelettes in burger buns, which we dealt with in the car park on arrival.
‘OK, ground rules,’ I said, collecting the wrappings into a single bag. ‘First, no running about and banging into people. Second, Christopher looks after Alan, Toby