In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,23

only children. His mother and mine were sisters. They used to visit each other, with me and Donald in tow. He was always pretty patient about having a young kid under his feet.’

‘He looks very ill, dear.’

‘Yes.’

She drove another ten miles in silence. Then she said, ‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to tell the police? About the paintings, I mean? Because you do think they had something to do with the burglaries, don’t you, dear, and the police might find out things more easily than you.’

I agreed. ‘I’m sure they would, Maisie. But how can I tell them? You heard what Donald said, that he couldn’t stand a new lot of questions. Seeing him today, do you think he could? And as for you, it wouldn’t just be confessing to a bit of smuggling and paying a fine, but of having a conviction against your name for always, and having the customs search your baggage every time you travelled, and all sorts of other complications and humiliations. Once you get on any blacklist nowadays it is just about impossible to get off.’

‘I didn’t know you cared, dear.’ She tried a giggle, but it didn’t sound right.

We stopped after a while to exchange places. I liked driving her car, particularly as for the last three years, since I’d given up a steady income, I’d owned no wheels myself. The power purred elegantly under the pale blue bonnet and ate up the southward miles.

‘Can you afford the fare, dear?’ Maisie said. ‘And hotels, and things?’

‘I’ve a friend out there. Another painter. I’ll stay with him.’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘You can’t get there by hitch-hiking, though.’

I smiled. ‘I’ll manage.’

‘Yes, well, dear, I dare say you can, but all the same, and I don’t want any silly arguments, I’ve got a great deal of this world’s goods thanks to Archie, and you haven’t, and as because it’s partly because of me having gone in for smuggling that you’re going yourself at all, I am insisting that you let me buy your ticket.’

‘No, Maisie.’

‘Yes, dear. Now be a good boy, dear, and do as I say.’

You could see, I thought, why she’d been a good nurse. Swallow the medicine, dear, there’s a good boy. I didn’t like accepting her offer but the truth was that I would have had to borrow anyway.

‘Shall I paint your picture, Maisie, when I get back?’

‘That will do very nicely, dear.’

I pulled up outside the house near Heathrow whose attic was my home, and from where Maisie had picked me up that morning.

‘How do you stand all this noise, dear?’ she said, wincing as a huge jet climbed steeply overhead.

‘I concentrate on the cheap rent.’

She smiled, opening the crocodile handbag and producing her chequebook. She wrote out and gave me the slip of paper which was far more than enough for my journey.

‘If you’re so fussed, dear,’ she said across my protests, ‘you can give me back what you don’t spend.’ She gazed at me earnestly with grey-blue eyes. ‘You will be careful dear, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Maisie.’

‘Because of course, dear, you might turn out to be a nuisance to some really nasty people.’

I landed at Mascot airport at noon five days later, wheeling in over Sydney and seeing the harbour bridge and the opera house down below, looking like postcards.

Jik met me on the other side of Customs with a huge grin and a waving bottle of champagne.

‘Todd the sod,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ His voice soared easily over the din. ‘Come to paint Australia red!’

He slapped me on the back with an enthusiastic horny hand, not knowing his own strength. Jik Cassavetes, longtime friend, my opposite in almost everything.

Bearded, which I was not. Exuberant, noisy, extravagant, unpredictable; qualities I envied. Blue eyes and sun-blond hair. Muscles which left mine gasping. An outrageous way with girls. An abrasive tongue; and a wholehearted contempt for the things I painted.

We had met at Art School, drawn together by mutual truancy on racetrains. Jik compulsively went racing, but strictly to gamble, never to admire the contestants, and certainly not to paint them. Horse-painters, to him, were the lower orders. No serious artist, he frequently said, would be seen dead painting horses.

Jik’s paintings, mostly abstract, were the dark reverse of the bright mind: fruits of depression, full of despair at the hatred and pollution destroying the fair world.

Living with Jik was like a toboggan run, downhill, dangerous, and exhilarating. We’d spent the last two years at Art School sharing