Eunice was, however, the wife of a very good client of his firm. He swallowed his feelings like a pill, and chased them down with a double bourbon in silence. Eunice and Lynnie were on frosted looking daiquiris and happy with it. They both looked marvellous, with honey-brown skin and a languorous and sun-filled way of moving. Eunice wore fluorescent green with bits of gold at anatomical points like ears, wrists, and feet. Lynnie had acquired a locally grown hot pink-orange tunic, and the few straps of her sandals seemed to be made of polished semi-precious stones. Even Walt, after a while, couldn’t take his eyes away from them for long.
We had dinner outside, under a trellis lit by hundreds of tiny multi-coloured lights, on a shallow terrace which led directly out on to the sand. Eunice’s language was for once as soft as the sea breeze, and consequently as a social evening it developed into a reasonable success.
Over the coffee I asked Eunice with a casualness which drew a piercing glance from Walt, ‘Have you by any chance heard of a racehorse breeder called Culham James Offen?’
‘Heard of him,’ she said. ‘Of course I have. Everyone has.’
‘I haven’t,’ Walt said flatly. One couldn’t expect complete capitulation. He was doing very well.
‘I mean, everyone in the bloodstock world would have heard of him,’ Eunice explained without obvious patience. ‘He has that terrifically successful stallion Moviemaker. And Dave says one ought to think of sending mares to another one of his, Centigrade... The first crop of foals is winning two-year-old races this season all over the place. But quite apart from that,’ she smiled broadly, ‘I guess we’ll be seeing a good deal of him from now on.’
‘Er... why?’ I asked diffidently.
‘Our new place is right next to his.’
Walt’s mouth fell open and I stopped stirring my coffee.
‘What did you say?’ I said, feeling my eyes go blank, as I knew they always did under shock.
Our new place, where we’re moving to, is right across the road from Offen. We can see his paddocks from our bedroom windows.’ I gaped in fascination at Eunice while she outlined in such blissful ignorance the reason for the attempted murder of her husband. He himself had told me that the executors of the late Davis L. Davis had accepted his tender for the farm only recently, during the week before our momentous trip on the river. So the something ‘goddam stupid’ which had happened to Yola and Matt Clive’s scheme was that they had discovered that of all the people on earth it was to be Dave Teller who was to be Offen’s new close neighbour. They had discovered it after they’d hi-jacked the horse, or they wouldn’t have gone ahead with the plan.
‘Why are you laughing?’ Eunice asked, frowning. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘It’s not funny,’ I agreed, straightening my face, ‘Far from it. Do you know Culham James personally?’
‘Not yet. Does it matter?’ She still looked puzzled.
‘It would be wiser not to make close friends with him in too much of a hurry.’
‘Why not?’
‘Might prove a prickly flower.’ I had a mental vision of Dave looking out of his bedroom window day after day, looking over to the paddocks where Chrysalis and Allyx were let out to graze. He might never have recognized them. But also he might. Culham James simply couldn’t take the risk. Yola and Matt had flown immediately to England to dispose of Dave a long way from the real scene of danger.
While Allyx remained at Orpheus Farm and Dave continued making active plans to move alongside, the explosive situation would still exist. Though Matt Clive might have given up temporarily, I fervently hoped that Radnor-Halley wouldn’t let their vigilance slide a millimetre. A call to Keeble would be wise... even at California — London rates.
I’m going for a walk on the shore,’ said Lynnie, kicking off the pebbly sandals. ‘Who’s coming?’
I beat Walt to it by quicker reflexes, and collected a grim look from him as I left him alone with Eunice. Lynnie remarked on it, grinning as we ambled silently away on the trickling sand.
‘He’s put off by the bloodies,’ I explained. ‘That’s all.’
‘She says it less often over here,’ Lynnie commented. ‘And she doesn’t drink, except one or two before lunch, until after we’ve changed in the evening. Why is that, do you think?’
‘She’s escaped from the Lexington cage.’
‘That heavenly house... a cage?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘The new one isn’t half so beautiful,’ she protested.
‘It will be, when Eunice has finished. And then the walls will close in again.’
‘Another cage, do you mean?’ She sounded uncertain.
‘Another cage,’ I agreed.
‘Life can’t be just escaping from one cage and ending up in another,’ she said explosively, repudiating violently so bleak a vision.
‘Everyone lives inside bars,’ I said. ‘The trick is not to want to get out.’
‘Stop it,’ she said in distress. ‘I don’t want to hear that.’
‘They used to keep linnets as pets,’ I said. ‘But there aren’t any linnets in cages any more. Budgerigars instead. You’ll be all right, little linnet.’
‘I never know when you’re being serious.’
‘Always.’
‘But half the time what you say is so... so crazy.’
‘Life is serious, life is crazy. Anything crazy is serious, and everything serious is crazy... I’ll race you along to that beach hut.’
She beat me to it in her bare feet, and leaned against the rough wooden wall laughing and getting her breath back while I tipped half-a-ton of sand out of my shoes. We walked on a little farther, and then sat down in the warm night and looked out across the shadowy peaceful ocean. No land between us and Japan, half a world away.
‘Did you come out here to be with... us, or to find Allyx?’ she said.
‘Both.’
She shook her head. ‘You brought Walt. That makes it to find Allyx.’
‘Walt would have chosen to stay somewhere else,’ I said, smiling. ‘So California for Allyx, Santa Barbara for you. Satisfied?’
She murmured something unintelligible, and we sat in silence while she scuffed sand into a heap with her toes.
‘Will you find him, do you think?’ she asked in the end.
‘Allyx? We might do.’
‘When, roughly?’
‘I don’t know. Tomorrow, maybe.’
‘And then... you’ll go home?’
‘I guess.’
‘Back to an office...’ She swept out an arm, embracing the wide sky. Back to an office, I thought coldly: and to the perpetual digging into people’s privacy, to the occasional snaring of a bent applicant, to drizzle, to Putney, to the vacuum of the flat. To, in short, my normal life. The trick was not to want to slip through the bars.
‘What are you going to do, now that you’ve left school?’ I asked.
She sucked in a breath. ‘After this, all the old things seem horribly dreary.’
‘They’ll soon give Dave a walking plaster...’
‘I know,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t think I don’t know. I was supposed to be starting a secretarial course in September... I utterly don’t want to, any more. Why can’t everyone just live on the beach and be warm all the time...’ She rocked with her arms laced round her bent up knees.
‘Not enough beach.’
She giggled. ‘You are just about the least romantic man alive. Comes of being a civil servant, I suppose. Like Daddy.’