Bonecrack

'Yes, it could,' I said reflectively. 'But it often seems to me that people in a firm would rather see the whole ship sink than throw out half of the crew and stay afloat.'

'Fairer to everyone if they all drown?'

'Only the firm drowns. The people swim off and make sure they overload someone else's raft.'

She licked her fingers. 'You used to find sick firms fascinating.'

'I still do,' I said, surprised.

She shook her head. 'Disillusion has been creeping in for a long time.'

I looked back, considering. 'It's usually quite easy to see what's wrong. But there's often a stone-wall resistance on both sides to putting it right. Always dozens of reasons why change is impossible.'

'Russell Arletti rang me up yesterday,' she said casually.

'Did he really?'

She nodded. 'He wanted me to persuade you to leave Newmarket and do a job for him. A big one, he said.'

'I can't,' I said positively.

'He's taking me out to dinner on Tuesday evening to discuss, as he put it, how to wean you from the gee-gees.'

'Tell him to save himself the price of a meal.'

'Well no-' she wrinkled her nose. 'I might just be hungry again by Tuesday. I'll go out with him. I like him. But I think I'll spend the evening preparing him for the worst.'

'What worst?'

'That you won't ever be going back to work for him.'

'Gillie-'

'It was only a phase,' she said, looking out of the window at the sparkle of the million lights slowly sliding by below us. 'It was just that you'd cashed in your antique chips and you weren't exactly starving, and Russell netted you on the wing, so to speak, with an interesting diversion. But you've been getting tired of it recently. You've been restless, and too full of- I don't know- too full of power. I think that after you've played with the gee-gees you'll break out in a great gust and build a new empire- much bigger than before.'

'Have some wine?' I said ironically.

'- and you may scoff, Neil Griffon, but you've been letting your Onassis instinct go to rust.'

'Not a bad thing, really.'

'You could be creating jobs for thousands of people, instead of trotting round a small town in a pair of jodhpurs.'

'There's six million quid's worth in that stable,' I said slowly; and felt the germ of an idea lurch as it sometimes did across the ganglions.

'What are you thinking about?' she demanded. 'What are you thinking about at this moment?'

'The genesis of ideas.'

She gave a sigh that was half a laugh. 'And that's exactly why you'll never marry me, either.'

'What do you mean?'

'You like The Times crossword more than sex.'

'Not more,' I said. 'First.'

'Do you want me to marry you?'

She kissed my shoulder under the sheet. 'Would you?'

'I thought you were fed up with marriage.'

I moved my mouth against her forehead. 'I thought Jeremy had put you off it for life.'

'He wasn't like you.'

He wasn't like you- She said it often. Any time her husband's name cropped up. He wasn't like you.

The first time she said it, three months after I met her, I asked the obvious question.

'What was he like?'

'Fair, not dark. Willowy, not compact. A bit taller; six feet two. Outwardly more fun; inwardly, infinitely more boring. He didn't want a wife so much as an admiring audience- and I got tired of the play.' She paused. 'And when Jennifer died-'

She had not talked about her ex-husband before, and had always shied painfully away from the thought of her daughter. She went on in a careful emotionless quiet voice, half muffled against my skin.

'Jennifer was killed in front of me- by a youth in a leather jacket on a motor-cycle. We were crossing the road. He came roaring round the corner doing sixty in a built-up area. He just- ploughed into her-' A long shuddering pause. 'She was eight- and super.' She swallowed. 'The boy had no insurance- Jeremy raved on and on about it, as if money could have compensated- and we didn't need money, he'd inherited almost as much as I had-' Another pause. 'So, anyway, after that, when he found someone else and drifted off, I was glad, really-'

Though passing time had done its healing, she still had dreams about Jennifer. Sometimes she cried when she woke up, because of Jennifer.

I smoothed her shining hair. I'd make a lousy husband.'

'Oh-' She took a shaky breath. 'I know that. Two and a half years I've known you, and you've blown in every millennium or so, to say Hi.'

'But stayed a while.'

'I'll grant you.'

'So what do you want?' I asked. 'Would you rather be married?'

She smiled contentedly. 'We'll go on as we are- if you like.'

'I do like.' I switched off the light.

'As long as you prove it now and again,' she added unnecessarily.

'I wouldn't let anyone else,' I said, 'hang pink and green curtains against ochre walls in my bedroom.'

'My bedroom. I rent it.'

'You're in arrears. By at least eighteen months.'

'I'll pay up tomorrow- Hey, what are you doing?'

I'm a business man,' I murmured, 'getting down to business.'

Neville Knollys Griffon did not make it easy for me to start a new era in father-son relationships.

He told me that as I did not seem to be making much progress in engaging someone else to take over the stable, he was going to find someone himself. By telephone.

He said he had done some of the entries for the next two weeks, and that Margaret was to type them out and send them off.

He said that Pease Pudding was to be taken out of the Lincoln.

He said that I had brought him the '64 half bottles of Bellinger, and he preferred the '61.

'You are feeling better, then,' I said into the first real gap of the monologue.

'What? Oh yes, I suppose I am. Now did you hear what I said? Pease Pudding is not to go in the Lincoln.'

'Why ever not?'

He gave me an irritated look. 'How do you expect him to be ready?'

'Etty is a good judge. She says he will be.'

'I will not have Rowley Lodge made to look stupid by running hopelessly under-trained horses in important races.'

'If Pease Pudding runs badly, people will only say that it shows how good a trainer you are yourself.'

'That is not the point,' he said repressively.

I opened one of the half bottles and poured the golden bubbles into his favourite Jacobean glass, which I had brought for the purpose. Champagne would not have tasted right to him from a tooth mug. He took a sip and evidently found the '64 was bearable after all, though he didn't say so.

'The point,' he explained as if to a moron, 'is the stud fees. If he runs badly, his future value at stud is what will be affected.'

'Yes, I understand that.'

'Don't be silly, how can you? You know nothing about it.'

I sat down in the visitors' armchair, leant back, crossed my legs, and put into my voice all the reasonableness and weight which I had learned to project into industrial discussions, but which I had never before had the sense to use on my father.

'Rowley Lodge is heading for some financial rocks,' I said, 'And the cause of it is too much prestige-hunting. You are scared of running Pease Pudding in the Lincoln because you own a half share in him, and if he runs badly it will be your own capital investment, as well as Lady Vector's, that will suffer.'

He spilled some champagne on his sheet, and didn't notice it.

I went on, 'I know that it is quite normal for people to own shares in the horses they train. At Rowley Lodge just now, however, you own too many part shares for safety. I imagine you collected so many because you could not bear to see rival stables acquiring what you judged to be the next crop of world beaters, so that you probably said to your owners something like If Archangel goes for forty thousand at auction and that's too much for you, I'll put up twenty thousand towards it. So you've gathered together one of the greatest strings in the country, and their potential stud value is enormous.'