Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,46

for weeks.’

I shook my head. ‘He always means to drink again. He just postpones it, like a child saving its sweets.’

We collected my car and drove off towards the ill-smelling cinders.

‘I thought it was a disease,’ she said.

‘An addiction. Like football.’

‘You’ve been at the nonsense again.’

‘Under the influence of football,’ I said, ‘You can tear railway carriages apart and stampede people to death.’

‘More people die of alcohol,’ she protested.

‘I expect you’re right.’

‘You’re having me on.’

I grinned.

‘I thought there was a drug that could cure it,’ she said.

‘You mean antabuse?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Some stuff which makes alcohol taste disgusting. Sure, it works. But you’ve got to want to stop drinking in the first place, otherwise you don’t take it.’

‘Crispin won’t?’

I nodded. ‘You’re so right. Crispin won’t.’

‘How about Alcoholics Anonymous?’ she asked.

‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘If you want to stop drinking, they’re marvellous. If you don’t, you keep away from them.’

‘I never thought about it like that.’

‘Lucky old you.’

‘Pig.’

We went a mile or so in companionable silence.

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I’ve always been told it was an illness. That you couldn’t help it. That one drink sets off a sort of chain reaction.’

‘It isn’t the one drink. It’s the wanting to drink. Alcoholism is in the mind.’

‘And in the legs.’

I laughed. ‘O.K., it invades the body. In fact the bodies of ultra-persistent alcoholics become so adjusted chemically to the irrigation that a sudden cut-off in the supply can cause epileptic fits.’

‘Not… in Crispin?’

‘No. Not so bad. But when he says he needs a bloody drink… he needs it.’

Which was why the drink I’d given him had been only half orange juice and the other half gin.

We stood in the yard for a while with the last of daylight fading over the cooling embers of the stables.

‘What are you thinking?’ Sophie said.

‘Oh…. That I’d like to break Fred Smith’s other elbow. Also his knees, toes, ankles and neck.’

‘In that order,’ she said, nodding.

I laughed, but the inner anger remained. This time the assault had been too much. This had gone beyond a skirmish to a major act of war. If Pauli Teksa were by any chance right and Vic or someone besides him were trying to frighten me off the scene they were having the opposite effect. Far from persuading me to go along with Vic’s schemes they had killed the tolerance with which I had always regarded them. In my own way I could be as bloody minded as frizzy Fred Smith. Vic was going to wish he had left me alone.

I turned away from the ruins. I would rebuild what had been lost. Soon, and better, I thought.

‘Where are you planning to sleep?’ Sophie asked.

I looked at her in the dusk. Smooth silver hair. Calm sky-reflecting eyes. Nothing but friendly interest.

Where I was planning to sleep was going to need more welcome than that.

‘Could I borrow your sofa?’ I said.

A pause.

‘It’s not long enough,’ she said.

Another pause. I looked at her and waited.

A smile crept in around her eyes.

‘Oh, all right. You gave me your bed…. I’ll give you mine.’

‘With you in it?’

‘I don’t suppose you burned your bedroom just to get there?’ she asked.

‘I wish I could say yes.’

‘You look smug enough as it is,’ she said.

We drove sedately to Esher, she in her car, me in mine. We ate a sedate dinner out of her freezer, and watched a sedate old movie on her box.

She was also in a way sedate in bed. The inner composure persisted. She seemed to raise a mental eyebrow in amusement at the antics humans got up to. She was quiet, and passive.

On the other hand she left me in no doubt that I gave her pleasure; and what I gave, I got.

It was an intense, gentle love making. A matter of small movements, not gymnastics. Of exquisite lingering sensations. And done, on her part also, without reservation.

She lay afterwards with her head on my shoulder.

She said, ‘I can’t stay here till morning.’

‘Why not?’

‘Have to be at Heathrow on duty by six o’clock.’

‘Fine time to say so.’

I could feel her smile. ‘Better than ten minutes ago.”

I laughed in my nose. ‘The off-put of the century.’

She rubbed her hand lazily over my chest. Til think of this when I’m up in the tower.’

‘You’ll knit the approaches.’

‘No.’ She kissed my skin. ‘I’m on departures. I tell them when to take off.’

‘When?’

‘And where. But not what.’

I smiled. Shut my eyes in the warm dark.

‘You don’t take your strap off even for love making,’ she said, running her fingers