I shook my head and smiled at my folly.
There was unlikely to be a Taliban ambush in a Berkshire village, but I could recall the words of my platoon color sergeant at Sandhurst: "You can never be too careful," he would say. "Never assume anything; always check."
No shots rang out, no IEDs went bang, and no turban-headed Afghan tribesmen sprang out with raised Kalashnikovs as I safely negotiated the climb up from the road to the house, a redbrick-and-flint affair built sometime back between the World Wars.
As usual, in the middle of the day, all was quiet as I wandered around the side of the house towards the back door. A few equine residents put their heads out of their stalls in the nearest stable yard as I crunched across the gravel, inquisitive as ever to see a new arrival.
My mother was out.
I knew she would be. Perhaps that is why I hadn't phoned ahead to say I was coming. Perhaps I needed to be here alone first, to get used to the idea of being back, to have a moment of recollection and renewal before the whirlwind of energy that was my mother swept through and took away any chance I might have of changing my mind.
My mother was a racehorse trainer. But she was much more than just that. She was a phenomenon. In a sport where there were plenty of big egos, my mother had the biggest ego of them all. She did, however, have some justification for her high sense of worth. In just her fifth year in the sport, she had been the first lady to be crowned Champion Jump Trainer, a feat she had repeated for each of the next six seasons.
Her horses had won three Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals, and she was rightly recognized as the "first lady of British racing."
She was also a highly opinionated antifeminist, a workaholic and no sufferer of fools or knaves. If she had been Prime Minister she would have probably brought back both hanging and the birch, and she was not averse to saying so loudly, and at length, whenever she had the opportunity. Her politics made Genghis Khan seem like an indecisive liberal, but everybody loved her nevertheless. She was a "character."
Everyone, that is, except her ex-husbands and her children.
For about the twentieth time that morning, I asked myself why I had come here. There had to be somewhere else I could go. But I knew there wasn't.
My only friends were in the army, mostly in my regiment, and they were still out in Afghanistan for another five weeks. And anyway, I wasn't ready to see them. Not yet. They would remind me too much of what I was no longer-and I wouldn't be able to stand their pity.
I suppose I could have booked myself into an army officers' mess. No doubt, I would have been made welcome at Wellington Barracks, the Grenadiers' home base in London. But what would I have done there?
What could I do anywhere?
Once again I thought it might have been better if the IED explosion, or the pneumonia, had completed the task: Union Jack- draped coffin, firing of volleys in salute, and I'd be six feet under by now and be done with it all. Instead, I was outside my mother's back door, struggling with a damned artificial foot to get down low enough to find the key that she habitually left under a stone in the flower bed.
And for what?
To get into a house I hated, to stay with a parent I despised. To say nothing of my stepfather, to whom I had hardly spoken a civil word since I had walked out of here, aged seventeen.
I couldn't find the damn key. Perhaps my mother had become more security-minded over the years. There had been a time when she would have left the house unlocked completely. I tried the handle. Not anymore.
I sat down on the doorstep and leaned back against the locked door.
My mother would be home later.
I knew where she was. She was at the races-Cheltenham races, to be precise. I had looked up the runners in the morning paper, as I always did. She had four horses declared, including the favorite in the big race, and my mother would never miss a day at her beloved Cheltenham, the scene of her greatest triumphs. And while today's might be a smaller meeting than the Steeplechase Festival in March, I could visualize her holding court in the parade ring before the races, and welcoming the winner back after them. I had seen it so often. It had been my childhood.
The sun had long before given up trying to break through the veil of cloud, and it was now beginning to get cold. I sighed. At least the toes on my right foot wouldn't get chilblains. I put my head back against the wood and rested my eyelids.
"Can I help you?" said a voice.
I reopened my eyes. A short man in his mid-thirties wearing faded jeans and a puffy anorak stood on the gravel in front of me. I silently remonstrated with myself. I must have briefly drifted off to sleep, as I hadn't heard him coming. What would my sergeant have said?
"I'm waiting for Mrs. Kauri," I said.
Mrs. Kauri was my mother, Mrs. Josephine Kauri, although Josephine had not been the name with which she had been christened. It was her name of choice. Sometime back, long before I was born, she had obviously decided that Jane, her real name, was not classy enough for her. Kauri was not her proper name, either. It had been the surname of her first husband, and she was now on her third.
"Mrs. Kauri is at the races," replied the man.
"I know," I said. "I'll just wait for her here."
"She won't be back for hours, not until after dark."
"I'll wait," I said. "I'm her son."
"The soldier?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, somewhat surprised that he would know.
But he did know. It was only fleeting, but I didn't miss his glance down at my right foot. He knew only too well.
"I'm Mrs. Kauri's head lad," he said. "Ian Norland."
He held out a hand, and I used it to help me up.
"Tom," I said. "Tom Forsyth. What happened to old Basil?"
"He retired. I've been here three years now."
"It's been a while longer than that since I've been here," I said.
He nodded. "I saw you from the window of my flat," Ian said, pointing to a row of windows above the stables. "Would you like to come in and watch the racing on the telly? It's too bloody cold to wait out here."
"I'd love to."
We climbed the stairs to what I remembered had once been a storage loft over the stables.
"The horses provide great central heating," Ian said over his shoulder as he led the way. "I never have to turn the boiler on until it actually freezes outside."
The narrow stairway opened out into a long open-plan living area with a kitchen at the near end and doors at the far that presumably led to a bedroom and bathroom beyond. There was no sign of any Mrs. Norland, and the place had a"man look"about it, with stacked-up dishes in the sink and newspapers spread over much of the floor.
"Take a pew," Ian said, waving a hand at a brown corduroy- covered sofa placed in front of a huge plasma television. "Fancy a beer?"
"Sure," I said. I'd not had a beer in more than five months.
Ian went to a fridge, which appeared to contain nothing but beers. He tossed me a can.
We sat in easy companionship on the brown sofa, watching the racing from Cheltenham on the box. My mother's horse won the second race, and Ian punched the air in delight.
"Good young novice, that," Ian said. "Strong quarters. He'll make a good chaser in time."
He took pleasure in the success of his charges, as I had done in the progress of a guardsman from raw recruit into battle-hardened warrior, a man who could then be trusted with one's life.
"Now for the big one," Ian said. "Pharmacist should win. He's frightened off most of the opposition."
" ' Pharmacist'?" I asked.
"Our Gold Cup hope," he said, in a tone that implied I should have known. "This is his last warm-up for the Festival. He loves Cheltenham."
Ian was referring to the Cheltenham Gold Cup at the Steeple-chase Festival in March, the pinnacle of British jump racing.