I did not, however, aim to be either her current or future quarry.
‘I came to pick up our exclusive,’ she said.
‘Ah.’Fraid there isn’t one.’
‘But you said.’
‘I hoped,’ I agreed.
‘And you haven’t answered your phone all day.’
I unclipped my mobile phone and looked at it as if puzzled, which I wasn’t. I said, making a discovery, ‘It’s switched off.’
She said, disillusioned, ‘I was warned you weren’t dumb.’
There seemed to be no answer to that, so I didn’t attempt one.
‘We tried to reach you. Where have you been?’
‘Just with friends,’ I said.
‘I went to Combe Bassett. What did I find? No colt, with or without feet. No Sid Halley. No sobbing colt owner. I find some batty old fusspot who says everyone went to Archie’s house.’
I gazed at her with a benign expression. I could do a benign expression rather well.
‘So,’ continued India Cathcart with visible disgust, ‘I go to the house of a Mr Archibald Kirk in the village of Shelley Green, and what do I find there?’
‘What?’
‘I find about five other newspapermen, sundry photographers, a Mrs Archibald Kirk and a deaf old gent saying “Eh?” ’
‘So then what?’
‘Mrs Kirk is lying, all wide-eyed and helpful. She’s saying she doesn’t know where anyone is. After three hours of that, I went back to Combe Bassett to look for ramblers.’
‘Did you find any?’
‘They had rambled twenty miles and had climbed a stile into a field with a resident bull. A bunch of ramblers crashed out in panic through a hedge backwards and the rest are discussing suing the farmer for letting a dangerous animal loose near a public footpath. A man with a pony-tail says he’s also suing Mrs Bracken for not keeping her colt in a stable, thus preventing an amputation that gave his daughter hysterics.’
‘Life’s one long farce,’ I said.
A mistake. She pounced on it. ‘Is that your comment on the maltreatment of animals?’
‘No.’
‘Your opinion of ramblers?’
‘Footpaths are important,’ I said.
She looked past me to the bartender. ‘Sparkling mineral water, ice and lemon, please.’
She paid for her own drink as a matter of course. I wondered how much of her challenging air was unconscious and habitual, or whether she volume-adjusted it according to who she was talking to. I often learned useful things about people’s characters by watching them talk to others than myself, and comparing the response.
‘You’re not playing fair,’ she said, judging me over the wedge of lemon bestriding the rim of her glass. ‘It was The Pump’s Hotline that sent you to Combe Bassett. Kevin says you pay your debts. So pay.’
‘The Hotline was his own idea. Not a bad one, except for about a hundred false alarms. But there’s nothing I can tell you this evening.’
‘Not can’t. Won’t.’
‘It’s often the same thing.’
‘Spare me the philosophy!’
‘I enjoy reading your page every week,’ I said.
‘But you don’t want to figure in it?’
‘That’s up to you.’
She raised her chin. ‘Strong men beg me not to print what I know.’
I didn’t want to antagonize her completely and I could forgo the passing pleasure of banter, so I gave her the benign expression and made no comment.
She said abruptly, ‘Are you married?’
‘Divorced.’
‘Children?’
I shook my head. ‘How about you?’
She was more used to asking questions than answering. There was perceptible hesitation before she said, ‘The same.’
I drank my scotch. I said, ‘Tell Kevin I’m very sorry I can’t give him his inside edge. Tell him I’ll talk to him on Monday.’
‘Not good enough.’
‘No, well… I can’t do more.’
‘Is someone paying you?’ she demanded. ‘Another paper?’
I shook my head. ‘Maybe Monday,’ I said. I put my empty glass on the bar. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Wait!’ She gave me a straight stare, not overtly or aggressively feminist, but one that saw no need to make points in a battle that had been won by the generation before her. I thought that perhaps India Cathcart wouldn’t have made it a condition of continued marriage that I should give up the best skill I possessed. I’d married a loving and gentle girl and turned her bitter: the worst, the most miserable failure of my life.
India Cathcart said, ‘Are you hungry? I’ve had nothing to eat all day. My expense account would run to two dinners.’
There were many worse fates. I did a quick survey of the possibility of being deconstructed all over page fifteen, and decided as usual that playing safe had its limits. Take risks with caution: a great motto.
‘Your restaurant or mine?’ I said, smiling, and was warned by the merest flash of triumph in her eyes that she thought the tarpon hooked and as good as landed.
We ate in a noisy, brightly lit, large and crowded black-mirrored restaurant that was clearly the in-place for the in-crowd. India’s choice. India’s habitat. A few sycophantic hands shot out to make contact with her as we followed a lisping young greeter to a central, noteworthy table. India Cathcart acknowledged the plaudits and trailed me behind her like a comet’s tail (Halley’s?) while introducing me to no one.
The menu set out to amaze, but from long habit I ordered fairly simple things that could reasonably be dealt with one-handed: watercress mousse, then duck curry with sliced baked plantains. India chose baby egg-plants with oil and pesto, followed by a large mound of crisped frogs’ legs that she ate uninhibitedly with her fingers.
The best thing about the restaurant was that the decibel level made private conversation impossible: everything anyone said could be overheard by those at the next table.
‘So,’ India raised her voice, teeth gleaming over a herb-dusted cuisse, ‘was Betty Bracken in tears?’
‘I didn’t see any tears.’
‘How much was the colt worth?’
I ate some plantain and decided they’d overdone the caramel. ‘No one knows,’ I said.
‘Kevin told me it cost a quarter of a million. You’re simply being evasive.’
‘What it cost and what it was worth are different. It might have won the Derby. It might have been worth millions. No one knows.’
‘Do you always play word games?’
‘Quite often.’ I nodded. ‘Like you do.’
‘Where did you go to school?’
‘Ask Kevin,’ I said, smiling.
‘Kevin’s told me things about you that you wouldn’t want me to know.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like it’s easy to be taken in by your peaceful front. Like you having tungsten where other people have nerves. Like you being touchy about losing a hand. That’s for starters.’
I would throttle Kevin, I thought. I said, ‘How are the frogs’ legs?’
‘Muscular.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You have sharp teeth.’
Her mind quite visibly changed gears from patronizing to uncertain, and I began to like her.
Risky to like her, of course.
After the curry and the frogs we drank plain black coffee and spent a pause or two in eye-contact appraisal. I expected she saw me in terms of adjectives and paragraphs. I saw her with appeased curiosity. I now knew what the serial reputation-slasher looked like at dinner.
In the way one does, I wondered what she looked like in bed; and in the way that one doesn’t cuddle up to a potential cobra, I made no flicker of an attempt to find out.
She seemed to take this passivity for granted. She paid for our meal with a Pump business credit card, as promised, and crisply expected I would kick in my share on Monday as an exclusive for Kevin.