‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Joe’s wife goes on and on about Joe having to pay child support for Pegotty… and now she’s pregnant herself.’
Life, I thought, brought unlimited and complicated cruelties.
‘Joe isn’t mean,’ Linda said. ‘He loves Rachel and he bought her the pony and he keeps us comfortable, but his wife says I could have six children without getting a match…’ Her voice wavered and stopped, and after a while she said, ‘I don’t know why I burdened you with all that. You’re so easy to talk to.’
‘And interested.’
She nodded, sniffing and blowing her nose. ‘Go out and talk to Rachel. I told her you were coming back today. She liked you.’
Obediently I went out into the garden and gravely shook hands with Rachel, and we sat side by side on a garden bench like two old buddies.
Though still warm, the golden days of early June were graying and growing damp: good for roses, perhaps, but not for the Derby.
I apologized that I hadn’t yet found out who had attacked Silverboy.
‘But you will in the end, won’t you?’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I told Daddy yesterday that I was sure you would.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. He took me out in his car. He does that sometimes, when Didi goes to London to do shopping.’
‘Is Didi his wife?’
Rachel’s nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she made no audible judgment. She said, ‘Daddy says someone chopped your hand off, just like Silverboy.’
She regarded me gravely, awaiting confirmation.
‘Er,’ I said, unnerved, ‘not exactly like Silverboy.’
‘Daddy says the man who did it was sent to prison, but he’s out again now on parole.’
‘Do you know what “on parole” means?’ I asked curiously.
‘Yes. Daddy told me.’
‘Your daddy knows a lot.’
‘Yes, but is it true that someone chopped your hand off?’
‘Does it matter to you?’
‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘I was thinking about it in bed last night. I have awful dreams. I tried to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about you having your hand chopped off.’
She was trying to be grown up and calm, but I could feel screaming hysteria too near the surface; so, stifling my own permanent reluctance to talk about it, I gave her an abbreviated account of what had happened.
‘I was a jockey,’ I began.
‘Yes, I know. Daddy said you were the champion for years.’
‘Well, one day my horse fell in a race, and while I was on the ground another horse landed over a jump straight onto my wrist and… um… tore it apart. It got stitched up, but I couldn’t use my hand much. I had to stop being a jockey, and I started doing what I do now, which is finding out things, like who hurt Silverboy.’
She nodded.
‘Well, I found out something that an extremely nasty man didn’t want me to know, and he… er… he hit my bad wrist and broke it again, and that time the doctors couldn’t stitch it up, so they decided that I’d be better off with a useful plastic hand instead of the useless old one.’
‘So he didn’t really… not really chop it off. Not like with an axe or anything?’
‘No. So don’t waste dreams on it.’
She smiled with quiet relief and, as she was sitting on my left, put her right hand down delicately but without hesitation on the replacement parts. She stroked the tough plastic, unfeeling skin and looked up with surprise at my eyes.
‘It isn’t warm,’ she said.
‘Well, it isn’t cold, either.’
She laughed with uncomplicated fun. ‘How does it work?’
‘I tell it what to do,’ I said simply. ‘I send a message from my brain down my arm saying open thumb from fingers, or close thumb to fingers, to grip things, and the messages reach very sensitive terminals called electrodes, which are inside the plastic and against my skin.’ I paused, but she didn’t say she didn’t understand. I said, ‘My real arm ends about there’ — I pointed — ‘and the plastic arm goes up round my elbow. The electrodes are up in my forearm, there, against my skin. They feel my muscles trying to move. That’s how they work.’
‘Is the plastic arm tied on or anything?’
‘No. It just fits tightly and stays on by itself. It was specially made to fit me.’
Like all children she took marvels for granted, although to me, even though by then I’d had the false arm for nearly three years, the concept of nerve messages moving machinery was still extraordinary.
‘There are three electrodes,’ I said. ‘One for opening the hand, one for closing, and one for turning the wrist.’
‘Do electrodes work on electricity?’ It puzzled her. ‘I mean, you’re not plugged into the wall, or anything?’
‘You’re a clever girl,’ I told her. ‘It works on a special sort of battery which slots into the outside above where I wear my watch. I charge up the batteries on a charger which is plugged into the wall.’
She looked at me assessingly. ‘It must be pretty useful to have that hand.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ I agreed.
‘Daddy says Ellis Quint told him that you can’t tell you have a plastic hand unless you touch it.’
I asked, surprised, ‘Does your daddy know Ellis Quint?’
She nodded composedly. ‘They go to the same place to play squash. He helped Daddy buy Silverboy. He was really really sorry when he found out it was Silverboy himself that he was making his program about.’
‘Yes, he would be.’
‘I wish…’ she began, looking down at my hand, ‘I do wish Silverboy could have had a new foot… with electrodes and a battery.’
I said prosaically, ‘He might have been able to have a false foot fitted, but he wouldn’t have been able to trot or canter, or jump. He wouldn’t have been happy just limping around.’
She rubbed her own fingers over the plastic ones, not convinced.
I said, ‘Where did you keep Silverboy?’
‘The other side of that fence at the end of the garden.’ She pointed. ‘You can’t see it from here because of those trees. We have to go through the house and out and down the lane.’
‘Will you show me?’
There was a moment of drawing back, then she said, ‘I’ll take you if I can hold your hand on the way.’
‘Of course.’ I stood up and held out my real, warm, normal arm.
‘No…’ She shook her head, standing up also. ‘I mean, can I hold this hand that you can’t feel?’
It seemed to matter to her that I wasn’t whole; that I would understand someone ill, without hair.
I said lightly, ‘You can hold which hand you like.’ She nodded, then pushed Pegotty into the house, and matter-of-factly told Linda she was taking me down to the field to show me where Silverboy had lived. Linda gave me a wild look but let us go, so the bald-headed child and the one-handed man walked in odd companionship down a short lane and leaned against a five-barred gate across the end.