Bonecrack

The pain-killing drug had begun to act on his eyes, if not yet his tongue.

'The horses will come to no harm,' I said, and thought of Moonrock and Lucky Lindsay and the kicked two-year-old, and wished with all my heart I could hand the whole lot over to Bredon that very day.

'If you think,' he said with a certain malice, 'that because you sell antiques and can run a racing stable, you are overestimating yourself.'

'I no longer sell antiques,' I pointed out calmly. As he knew perfectly well.

'The principles are different,' he said.

'The principles of all businesses are the same.'

'Rubbish.'

'Get the costs right and supply what the customer wants.'

'I can't see you supplying winners.' He was contemptuous.

'Well,' I said moderately, 'I can't see why not.'

'Can't you?' he asked acidly. 'Can't you, indeed?'

'Not if you will give me your advice.'

He gave me instead a long wordless stare while he searched for an adequate answer. The pupils in his grey eyes had contracted to micro-dots. There was no tension left in the muscles which had stiffened his jaw.

'You must get someone else,' he said: but the words had begun to slur. I made a non-committal movement of my head halfway between a nod and a shake, and the argument was over for that day. He asked after that merely about the horses. I told him how they had each performed during their workouts, and he seemed to forget that he didn't believe I understood what I had seen. When I left him, a short while later, he was again on the edge of sleep.

I rang the door bell of my own flat in Hampstead, two long and two short, and got three quick buzzes back, which meant come on in. So I fitted my key into the latch and opened the door.

Gillie's voice floated disembodiedly across the hall.

'I'm in your bedroom.'

'Convenient,' I said to myself with a smile. But she was painting the walls.

'Didn't expect you tonight,' she said, when I kissed her. She held her arms away from me so as not to smear yellow ochre on my jacket. There was a yellow streak on her forehead and a dusting of it on her shining chestnut hair and she looked companionable and easy. Gillie at thirty-six had a figure no model would have been seen dead in, and an attractive lived-in face with wisdom looking out of grey-green eyes. She was sure and mature and much travelled in spirit, and had left behind her one collapsed marriage and one dead child. She had answered an advertisement for a tenant which I had put in The Times, and for two and a half years she had been my tenant and a lot else.

'What do you think of this colour?' she said. 'And we're having a cinnamon carpet and green and shocking pink striped curtains.'

'You can't mean it.'

'It will look ravishing.'

'Ugh,' I said, but she simply laughed. When she had taken the flat it had had white walls, polished furniture and blue fabrics. Gillie had retained only the furniture, and Sheraton and Chippendale would have choked over their new settings.

'You look tired,' she said. 'Want some coffee?'

'And a sandwich, if there's any bread.'

She thought. 'There's some crisp-bread, anyway.'

She was permanently on diets and her idea of dieting was not to buy food. This led to a lot of eating out, which completely defeated the object.

Gillie had listened attentively to my wise dictums about laying in suitable protein like eggs and cheese and then continued happily in the same old ways, which brought me early on to believe that she really did not lust after a beauty contest figure, but was content as long as she did not burst out of her forty-inch hip dresses. Only when they got tight did she actually shed half a stone. She could if she wanted to. She didn't obsessively want.

'How is your father?' she asked, as I crunched my way through a sandwich of rye crisp-bread and slices of raw tomato.

'It's still hurting him.'

'I would have thought they could have stopped that.'

'Well they do, most of the time. And the sister in charge told me this evening that he will be all right in a day or two. They aren't worried about his leg any more. The wound has started healing cleanly, and it should all be settling down soon and giving him an easier time.'

'He's not young, of course.'

'Sixty-seven,' I agreed.

'The bones will take a fair time to mend.'

'Mm.'

'I suppose you've found someone to hold the fort.'

'No,' I said, 'I'm staying there myself.'

'Oh boy, oh boy,' she said, 'I might have guessed.'

I looked at her enquiringly with my mouth full of bits.

'Anything which smells of challenge is your meat and drink.'

'Not this one,' I said with feeling.

'It will be unpopular with the stable,' she diagnosed, 'and apoplectic to your father, and a riotous success.'

'Correct on the first two, way out on the third.'

She shook her head with the glint of a smile. 'Nothing is impossible for the whiz kids.'

She knew I disliked the journalese term, and I knew she liked to use it. 'My lover is a whiz kid,' she said once into a hush at a sticky party: and the men mobbed her.

She poured me a glass of the marvellous Chateau Lafite 1961 which she sacrilegiously drank with anything from caviare to baked beans. It had seemed to me when she moved in that her belongings consisted almost entirely of fur coats and cases of wine, all of which she had precipitously inherited from her mother and father respectively when they died together in Morocco in an earthquake. She had sold the coats because she thought they made her look fat, and had set about drinking her way gradually through the precious bins that wine merchants were wringing their hands over.

'That wine is an investment,' one of them had said to me in agony.

'But someone's got to drink it,' said Gillie reasonably, and pulled out the cork on the second of the Cheval Blanc 61.

Gillie was so rich, because of her grandmother, that she found it more pleasing to drink the super-duper than to sell it at a profit and develop a taste for Brand X. She had been surprised that I had agreed until I had pointed out that that flat was filled with precious pieces where painted deal would have done the same job. So we sat sometimes with our feet up on a sixteenth century Spanish walnut refectory table which had brought dealers sobbing to their knees and drank her wine out of eighteenth century Waterford glass, and laughed at ourselves, because the only safe way to live with any degree of wealth was to make fun of it.

Gillie had said once, 'I don't see why that table is so special, just because it's been here since the Armada. Just look at those moth-eaten legs-' She pointed to four feet which were pitted, stripped of polish, and worn untidily away.

'In the sixteenth century they used to sluice the stone floors with beer because it whitened them. Beer was fine for the stone, but a bit unfortunate for any wood which got continually splashed.'

'Rotten legs proves it's genuine?'

'Got it in one.'

I was fonder of that table than of anything else I possessed, because on it had been founded all my fortunes. Six months out of Eton, on what I had saved out of sweeping the floors at Sotheby's, I set up in business on my own by pushing a barrow round the outskirts of flourishing country towns and buying anything worthwhile that I was offered. The junk I sold to secondhand shops and the best bits to dealers, and by the time I was seventeen I was thinking about a shop.

I saw the Spanish table in the garage of a man from whom I had just bought a late Victorian chest of drawers. I looked at the wrought iron crossed spars bracing the solid square legs under the four inch thick top, and felt unholy butterflies in my guts.

He had been using it as a trestle for paper hanging, and it was littered with pots of paint.

'I'll buy that, too, if you like,' I said.

'It's only an old work table.'

'Well- how much would you want for it?'

He looked at my barrow, on to which he had just helped me lift the chest of drawers. He looked at the twenty pounds I had paid him for it, and he looked at my shabby jeans and jerkin, and he said kindly, 'No lad, I couldn't rob you. And anyway, look, its legs are all rotten at the bottom.'