Rat Race - By Dick Francis Page 0,58

galley Smash the windows. Smash the walls.

Might have felt better if I had.

Chanter…

Couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep.

Never had listened to my own advice: don’t get involved. Should have stuck to it, stayed frozen. Icy. Safe.

Tried to get back to the Arctic and not feel anything, but it was too late. Feeling had come back with a vengeance and of an intensity I could have done without. I hadn’t known I loved her. Knew I liked her, felt easy with her, wanted to be with her often and for a long time to come. I’d thought I could stop at friendship, and didn’t realise how far, how deep I had already gone.

Oh Nancy…

I went to sleep in the end by drinking half of the bottle of whisky Kenny Bayst had given me, but it didn’t do much good. I woke up at six in the morning to the same dreary torment and with a headache on top.

There were no flights that day to take my mind off it.

Nancy and Chanter…

At some point in the morning I telephoned from the coinbox in the customers’ lounge to the Art School in Liverpool, to ask for Chanter’s home address. A crisp secretarial female voice answered: very sorry, absolutely not their policy to divulge the private addresses of their staff. If I could write, they would forward the letter.

‘Could I speak to him, then, do you think?’ I asked: though what good that would do, Heaven alone knew.

‘I’m afraid not, because he isn’t here. The school is temporarily closed, and we are not sure when it will reopen.’

‘The students,’ I remembered. ‘Are on strike?’

‘That… er… is so,’ she agreed.

‘Can’t you possibly tell me how I could get in touch with Chanter?’

‘Oh dear . . You are the second person pressing me to help… but honestly, to tell you the truth we don’t know where he lives… he moves frequently and seldom bothers to keep us up to date.’ Secretarial disapproval and despair in the tidy voice. ‘As I told Mr Ross, with all the best will in the world, I simply have no idea where you could find him.’

I sat in the crew room while the afternoon dragged by. Finished writing up all records by two thirty, read through some newly arrived information circulars, calculated I had only three weeks and four days to run before my next medical, worked out that if I bought four cups of coffee every day from Honey’s machine, I was drinking away one fifteenth of my total week’s spending money, decided to make it water more often, looked up when Harley came stalking in, received a lecture on loyalty (mine to him), heard that I was on the next day to take a Wiltshire trainer to Newmarket races, and that if I gave Polyplanes any more grounds for reporting me or the firm to the Board of Trade, I could collect my cards.

‘Do my best not to,’ I murmured. Didn’t please him.

Looked at the door swinging shut behind his back.

Looked at the clock. Three twenty two.

Chanter and Nancy.

Back in the caravan, the same as the evening before. Tried turning on the television. Some comedy about American suburban life punctuated by canned laughter. Stood five minutes of it, and found the silence afterwards almost as bad.

Walked half way round the airfield, cut down to the village, drank half a pint in the pub, walked back. Total, four miles. When I stepped into the caravan it was still only nine o’clock.

Honey Harley was waiting for me, draped over the sofa with maximum exposure of leg. Pink checked cotton sun-dress, very low cut.

‘Hi,’ she said with self possession. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘For a walk.’

She looked at me quizzically. ‘Got the Board of Trade on your mind?’

I nodded. That, and other things.

‘I shouldn’t worry too much. Whatever the law says or does, you couldn’t have just left the Rosses to flounder.’

‘Your uncle doesn’t agree.’

‘Uncle,’ she said dispassionately, ‘is a nit. And anyway, play your cards right, and even if you do get a fine, Colin Ross will pay it. All you’d have to do would be to ask.’

I shook my head.

‘You’re daft,’ she said. ‘Plain daft.’

‘You may be right.’

She sighed, stirred, stood up. The curvy body rippled in all the right places. I thought of Nancy: much flatter, much thinner, less obviously sexed and infinitely more desirable. I turned abruptly away from Honey. Like hitting a raw nerve, the thought of Chanter, with his hair and his fringes . . and his hands.

‘O.K.,