On the whole, people accused others of doing what they would do themselves. Dishonesty began at home.
He’d accused me in his time of taking bribes from a bookmaker to lose on one of his hurdlers. I’d told him very politely that I wouldn’t ride for him any more, and a week later, as if nothing had happened, he’d offered me an enormous retainer to ride all his jumpers the next season. It had turned out profitably: I put up with his yelling and he gave me lavish presents when I won. A permanent stand-off perhaps described our ongoing relations.
I took a quick look at the time and switched the phone through to Isobel, who took bookings on Sundays when I was busy. Then I got on with such small things as dressing and tidying and going out into the garden to pick flowers. This peaceful activity was the result of strong promptings from my absent sister and brother who considered that flowers should occasionally be put on our parents’ grave. As it was I, the youngest, who had inherited the family home, and as it was I who lived near the cemetery, they felt it only right and proper that it was I who picked the flowers and put them in place. The whole point, for them, was that the flowers should come from the right garden. Bought flowers would not be the same.
There was little but daffodils in the first week of March, though I scavenged also some crocuses and an early hyacinth along with evergreen sprigs of cupressus, and drove them to the gates of the orderly cemetery on a hillside where we’d buried the parents within two years of each other some time ago.
Actually, I never minded the errand. The grave was high on the hill but the view was worth the walk up there, and as I had no sense of their being around in any way, I tended to leave the flowers as thanks for my own satisfactory childhood, their gift.
The flowers would die, of course. It was delivering them that mattered.
Maudie Watermead’s lunch began in spring sunshine in the garden, with her younger children and guests bouncing on a trampoline and their elders playing tennis. Still too chilly for standing around in, the March air drove faint-hearts back through the garden door to the drawing-room to enjoy the bright log fire and Maudie’s idea of champagne cocktails, which began with angostura bitters on sugar lumps and fizzed to the brim with cold pink bubbles.
Benjy and Dot Usher were playing in long trousers on the hard court, arguing about balls being in or out. We engaged in unathletic mixed doubles, Dot and I being out-argued by Benjy and the Watermeads’ daughter, Tessa. Benjy and Tessa were enjoying their partnership in a way that had Dot hissing, to my private amusement and our public defeat.
Benjy and Tessa, as victors, took on the Watermeads’ son, Ed, and Maudie’s sister, Lorna. Dot glowered until I persuaded her into the drawing-room, where the numbers had swelled and the chatter-level risen to the point where individual voices were lost in conglomerate noise.
Maudie handed me a glass and gave me a smile with the friendly blue eyes that as usual set me thinking powerfully adulterous thoughts. Thoroughly aware of my dilemma, she was for ever trying to transfer my feelings to her sister Lorna who, while alike in platinum hair, shapely waist and endless legs, simply lacked for me anything but physical attraction. Maudie was fun, Lorna was troubled. Maudie laughed, Lorna earnestly championed praiseworthy causes. Maudie cooked roast potatoes, Lorna worried about her weight. Maudie thought I would be good for Lorna but I had no intention of becoming her therapist: that way threatened boredom and disaster. I thought Lorna would be perfect for Bruce Farway.
The worthy doctor himself was at that moment standing near the fire with Maudie’s husband. The bubbles in the Farway glass were colourless. Mineral water, I surmised.
Maudie followed my gaze and answered my unexpressed surprise.
‘Michael thought that as it looks as if he intends to stay in Pixhill, we’d better teach the good doctor that we’re not all rogues and fools.’
I smiled. ‘He’ll have trouble being supercilious with Michael, that’s for sure.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’
My attention moved on towards the woman now talking to Dot, a younger woman, blonde like Maudie, blue-eyed like Maudie, light hearted, left handed, a pianist and thirty-eight.
‘Do you know her?’ Maudie asked, again following my gaze. ‘Susan Palmerstone. Her family are all here somewhere.’
I nodded. ‘I used to ride her father’s horses.’
‘Did you? It’s easy to forget you were a jockey.’
Like many flat-racing trainers’ wives, Maudie seldom went to jump meetings. I’d come to know her only through the transport.
From across the room, Susan Palmerstone looked in my direction and finally walked over.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hugo and the children are here.’
‘I saw the children on the trampoline.’
‘Yes.’
Maudie, making nothing much of the exchange, wandered over to Dot.
Susan said, ‘I didn’t realise you’d be here. We don’t know the Watermeads very well. I would have said we couldn’t come.’
‘Of course not. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, but... someone told Hugo he couldn’t have a brown-eyed child and he’s been fussing about it for weeks.’
‘Hugo’s a green-eyed redhead. He can have anything as a throwback.’
‘I thought I’d better warn you. He’s halfway to obsessed.’
‘OK.’
The tennis players came in from the garden and also Hugo Palmerstone, who’d been watching the children. Through the window I could see my daughter standing on the grass, arms akimbo, disparagingly critical of her straight-haired blond brothers’ bouncing. Cinders, my daughter, had brown eyes and dark curly hair like mine and was nine years old.
I would have married Susan. I’d loved her and been devastated when she chose Hugo, but it had been a long time ago. Nothing remained of the emotion. It was difficult, even, to remember how I’d felt. I didn’t want the long-buried past casting a shadow over that child’s life.
Susan moved from my side the moment Hugo entered the room, but not before he realised we’d been talking together. His expression as he made his way directly to me was not promising.
‘Come outside,’ he said curtly, stopping a yard away. ‘Now.’
I could have refused him but I thought, perhaps wrongly, that if I didn’t give him the opportunity to say what he clearly intended to say it could fester in his mind and do harm to his family. Accordingly I quietly parked my glass and followed him out onto the lawn.
‘I could kill you,’ he said.
It was a remark to which there seemed to be no answer. When I said nothing, he added bitterly, ‘My bloody aunt told me to open my eyes. My father-in-law’s ex-jockey! Take a look at him, she said. Do some sums. Cinders was born seven months after your marriage. Open your eyes.’
‘Your aunt has done you no service.’
He could see, of course, that she hadn’t, but his anger was all for me.
‘She’s my daughter,’ he insisted.
I glanced over towards Cinders, now somersaulting high with exuberance.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘I saw her born. She’s mine, and I love her.’
I looked regretfully at Hugo’s furious green eyes. He and I were almost totally unalike in nature as in looks. A middle-rank City executive, he had an incandescent temper as fiery as his hair, allied to a strong streak of sentimentality. Our lack of affinity with each other had proved, until now, a natural barrier to my getting too close and too fond of my daughter, and I saw clearly, even if he didn’t, that allowing myself to be drawn into a fight with him would destroy what should never be touched.