Bonecrack

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.'

'I could afford another twenty,' I said doubtfully. 'But that's about all I've got with me.'

He took a lot of persuading, and in the end would only let me give him fifteen. He shook his head over me, telling me I'd better learn a bit more before I ruined myself. But I cleaned up the table and repolished the beautiful slab of walnut, and I sold it a fortnight later to a dealer I knew from the Sotheby days for two hundred and seventy pounds.

With those proceeds swelling my savings I had opened the first shop, and things never looked back. When I sold out twelve years later to an American syndicate there was a chain of eleven, all bright and clean and filled with treasures.

A short time afterwards, on a sentimental urge, I traced the Spanish table, and bought it back. And I sought out the handyman with his garage and gave him two hundred pounds, which almost caused a heart attack; so I reckoned if anyone was going to put their feet up on that expensive plank, no one had a better right.

'Where did you get all those bruises?' Gillie said, sitting up in the spareroom bed and watching me undress.

I squinted down at the spatter of mauve blotches.

'I was attacked by a centipede.'

She laughed. 'You're hopeless.'

'And I've got to be back at Newmarket by seven tomorrow morning.'

'Stop wasting time, then. It's midnight already.'

I climbed in beside her, and lying together in naked companionship we worked our way through The Times crossword.

It was always better like that. By the time we turned off the light we were relaxed and entwined, and we turned to each other for an act that was a part but not the whole of a relationship.

'I quite love you,' Gillie said. 'Believe it or not.'

'Oh, I believe you,' I said modestly. 'Thousands wouldn't.'

'Stop biting my ear, I don't like it.'

'The books say the ear is an A1 erogenous zone.'

'The books can go stuff themselves.'

'Charming.'

'And all those women's lib publications about The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. So much piffle. Of course it isn't a myth.'

'This is not supposed to be a public meeting,' I said, 'This is supposed to be a spot of private passion.'

'Oh well- if you insist.'

She wriggled more comfortably into my arms.

'I'll tell you something, if you like,' she said.

'If you absolutely must.'

'The answer to four down isn't hallucinated, it's halucinogen.'

I shook. 'Thanks very much.'

'Thought you'd like to know.'

I kissed her neck and laid my hand on her stomach.

'That makes it a g, not a t, in twenty across,' she said.

'Stigma?'

'Clever old you.'

'Is that the lot?'

'Mm.'

After a bit she said, 'Do you really loathe the idea of green and shocking pink curtains?'

'Would you mind just concentrating on the matter in hand?'

I could feel her grin in the darkness.

'O. K.' she said.

And concentrated.

She woke me up like an alarm clock at five o'clock. It was not so much the pat she woke me up with, but where she chose to plant it. I came back to the surface laughing.

'Good morning, little one,' she said.

She got up and made some coffee, her chestnut hair in a tangle and her skin pale and fresh. She looked marvellous in the mornings. She stirred a dollop of heavy cream into the thick black coffee and sat opposite me across the kitchen table.

'Someone really had a go at you, didn't they?' she said casually.

I buttered a piece of rye crunch and reached for the honey.

'Sort of,' I agreed.

'Not telling?'

'Can't,' I said briefly. 'But I will when I can.'

'You may have a mind like teak,' she said, 'but you've a vulnerable body, just like anyone else.'

I looked at her in surprise, with my mouth full. She wrinkled her nose at me.

'I used to think you mysterious and exciting,' she said.

Thanks.'

'And now you're about as exciting as a pair of old bedroom slippers.'

'So kind,' I murmured.

'I used to think there was something magical about the way you disentangled all those nearly bankrupt businesses- and then I found out that it wasn't magic but just uncluttered common sense-'

'Plain, boring old me,' I agreed, washing down the crumbs with a gulp of coffee.

'I know you well, now,' she said. 'I know how you tick- And all those bruises-' She shivered suddenly in the warm little room.

'Gillie,' I said accusingly, 'You are suffering from intuition;' and that remark in itself was a dead giveaway.

'No- from interpretation,' she said. 'And just you watch out for yourself.'

'Anything you say.'

'Because,' she explained seriously, 'I do not want to have the bother of hunting for another ground floor flat with cellars to keep the wine in. It took me a whole month to find this one.'

CHAPTER FIVE

It was drizzling when I got back to Newmarket. A cold wet horrible morning on the Heath. Also the first thing I saw when I turned into the drive of Rowley Lodge was the unwelcome white Mercedes.

The uniformed chauffeur sat behind the wheel. The steely young Alessandro sat in the back. When I stopped not far away from him he was out of his car faster than I was out of mine.

'Where have you been?' he demanded, looking down his nose at my silver-grey Jensen.

'Where have you?' I said equably, and received the full freeze of the Rivera speciality in stares.

'I have come to begin,' he said fiercely.

'So I see.'

He wore superbly cut jodhpurs and glossy brown boots. His waterproof anorak had come from an expensive ski shop and his string gloves were clean and pale yellow. He looked more like an advertisement in Country Life than a working rider.

'I have to go in and change,' I said. 'You can begin when I come out.'

'Very well.'

He waited again in his car and emerged from it immediately I reappeared. I jerked my head at him to follow, and went down into the yard wondering just how much of a skirmish I was going to have with Etty.