In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,24

a studio flat and kicking each other out for passing girls. They would have chucked him out of school except for his prodigious talent, because he’d missed weeks in the summer for his other love, which was sailing.

I’d been out with him, deep sea, several times in the years afterwards. I reckoned he’d taken us on several occasions a bit nearer death than was strictly necessary, but it had been a nice change from the office. He was a great sailor, efficient, neat, quick and strong, with an instinctive feeling for wind and waves. I had been sorry when one day he had said he was setting off singlehanded round the world. We’d had a paralytic farewell party on his last night ashore; and the next day, when he’d gone, I’d given the estate agent my notice.

He had brought a car to fetch me: his car, it turned out. A British M.G. Sports, dark blue. Both sides of him right there, extrovert and introvert, the flamboyant statement in a sombre colour.

‘Are there many of these here?’ I asked, surprised, loading suitcase and satchel into the back. ‘It’s a long way from the birth pangs.’

He grinned. ‘A few. They’re not popular now because petrol passes through them like salts.’ The engine roared to life, agreeing with him, and he switched on the windscreen wiper against a starting shower. ‘Welcome to sunny Australia. It rains all the time here. Puts Manchester in the sun.’

‘But you like it?’

‘Love it, mate. Sydney’s like rugger, all guts and go and a bit of grace in the line-out.’

‘And how’s business?’

‘There are thousands of painters in Australia. It’s a flourishing cottage industry.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘A hell of a lot of competition.’

‘I haven’t come to seek fame and fortune.’

‘But I scent a purpose,’ he said.

‘How would you feel about harnessing your brawn?’

‘To your brain? As in the old days?’

‘Those were pastimes.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘What are the risks?’

‘Arson and murder, to date.’

‘Jesus.’

The blue car swept gracefully into the centre of the city. Skyscrapers grew like beanstalks.

‘I live right out on the other side,’ Jik said. ‘God, that sounds banal. Suburban. What has become of me?’

‘Contentment oozing from every pore,’ I said smiling.

‘Yes. So O.K., for the first time in my life I’ve been actually happy. I dare say you’ll soon put that right.’

The car nosed on to the expressway, pointing towards the bridge.

‘If you look over your right shoulder,’ Jik said, ‘You’ll see the triumph of imagination over economics. Like the Concorde. Long live madness, it’s the only thing that gets us anywhere.’

I looked. It was the opera house, glimpsed, grey with rain.

‘Dead in the day,’ Jik said. ‘It’s a night bird. Fantastic’.

The great arch of the bridge rose above us, intricate as steel lace. ‘This is the only flat bit of road in Sydney,’ Jik said. We climbed again on the other side.

To our left, half-seen at first behind other familiar-looking high-rise blocks, but then revealed in its full glory, stood a huge shiny red-orange building, all its sides set with regular rows of large curve-cornered square windows of bronze-coloured glass.

Jik grinned. ‘The shape of the twenty-first century. Imagination and courage. I love this country.’

‘Where’s your natural pessimism?’

‘When the sun sets, those windows glow like gold.’ We left the gleaming monster behind. ‘It’s the water-board offices,’ Jik said sardonically. ‘The guy at the top moors his boat near mine.’

The road went up and down out of the city through close-packed rows of one-storey houses, whose roofs, from the air, had looked like a great red-squared carpet.

‘There’s one snag,’ Jik said. ‘Three weeks ago, I got married.’

The snag was living with him aboard his boat, which was moored among a colony of others near a headland he called The Spit: and you could see why, temporarily at least, the glooms of the world could take care of themselves.

She was not plain, but not beautiful. Oval-shaped face, mid-brown hair, so-so figure and a practical line in clothes. None of the style or instant vital butterfly quality of Regina. I found myself the critically inspected target of bright brown eyes which looked out with impact-making intelligence.

‘Sarah,’ Jik said. ‘Todd. Todd, Sarah.’

We said hi and did I have a good flight and yes I did. I gathered she would have preferred me to stay at home.

Jik’s thirty-foot ketch, which had set out from England as a cross between a studio and a chandler’s warehouse, now sported curtains, cushions, and a flowering plant. When Jik opened the champagne he poured