Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,65

be.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I’m healing,’ I said briefly.

‘I’ll say no more.’

I paid for my ticket by credit card, tottered onto the train, took a taxi from Paddington and arrived without incident on Carteret’s doorstep near Shepherd’s Bush. (Bay-windowed terrace built for genteel but impoverished Edwardians.)

He opened the door himself and we took stock of each other, the years of no contact sliding away. He was still small, rounded, bespectacled and black haired, an odd genetic mixture of Celt and Thai, though born and educated in England. We had paired as strangers to share digs together temporarily during our first year in architectural school and had gone through the whole course helping each other where necessary.

‘You look just the same,’ I said.

‘So do you.’ He eyed my height, curly hair and brown eyes; raised his eyebrows not at the working clothes but at the sticks I leaned on.

‘Nothing serious,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you about it.’

‘How’s Amanda?’ he asked, leading me in. ‘Are you still married?’

‘Yes, we are.’

‘I never thought it would last,’ he said frankly. ‘And how are the boys? Three, was it?’

‘We have six, now.’

‘Six! You never did anything by halves.’

I met his wife, busy, and his two children, excited about going to meet Mickey Mouse. I told him, in his untidy, much lived-in sitting room, about the present and possible future of Stratton Park racecourse. I explained a good deal.

We drank beer. He said he hadn’t remembered anything else about Wilson Yarrow except that he had been one of the precious élite tipped for immortality.

‘And then… what happened?’ he asked. ‘Rumours. A cover-up of some sort. It didn’t affect us, personally, and we were always working so hard ourselves. I remember his name. If he’d been called Tom Johnson or something, I’d have forgotten that too.’

I nodded. I felt the same. I asked if I could look at his diaries.

‘I did find them for you,’ he said. ‘They were in a box in the attic. Do you seriously think I’d have written anything about Wilson Yarrow?’

‘I hope you did. You wrote about most things.’

He smiled. ‘Waste of time, really. I used to think my life would go by and I’d forget it, if I didn’t write it down.’

‘You were probably right.’

He shook his head. ‘One remembers the great things anyway, and all the dreadful things. The rest doesn’t matter.’

‘My diaries are balance sheets,’ I said. ‘I look at the old ones and remember what I was doing, when.’

‘Did you go on with rebuilding old wrecks?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘I couldn’t work in an office. I tried it.’

We smiled ruefully at each other, old improbable friends, unalike in everything except knowledge.

‘I brought an envelope,’ I said, having clutched its large brown shape awkwardly along with one of the walking sticks during the journey. ‘While I read the diaries, you look at the way Wilson Yarrow thinks a grandstand should be built. Tell me your thoughts.’

‘All right.’

A sensible plan, but no good in the performance. I looked with dismay as he brought out his diaries and piled them on his coffee table. There were perhaps twenty large spiral-bound notebooks, eight inches by ten and a half, literally thousands of pages filled with his neat cramped handwriting; a task of days, not half an hour.

‘I didn’t realise,’ I said weakly. ‘I didn’t remember…’

‘I told you you didn’t know what you were asking.’

‘Could you… I mean, would you, lend them to me?’

‘To take away, do you mean?’

‘You’d get them back.’

‘You swear?’ he said doubtfully.

‘On my diploma.’

His face lightened. ‘All right.’ He opened the brown envelope and took a look at the contents, pausing with raised eyebrows at the axonometric drawing. ‘That’s showing off!’ he said.

‘Yeah. Not necessary.’

Carteret looked at the elevations and floor plans. He made no comment about the amount of glass: building in difficult ways with glass was typical Architectural Association doctrine. We’d been taught to regard glass as avant-garde, as the pushing back of design frontiers. When I’d murmured that surely building with glass had been old hat since Joseph Paxton stuck together the old Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, I’d been reviled as an iconoclast, if not ruthlessly expelled for heresy. In any case, glass was acceptable to Carteret in futuristic ways that I found clever for the sake of cleverness, not for grace or utility. Glass for its own sake was pointless to me: except as a source of daylight, it was normally what one could see through it that mattered.

‘Where are the rest of the plans?’