‘Ah.’
‘Any more ahs and you won’t get your tubes analysed.’
‘Not another ah shall pass my lips.’
We ate the crisp black duck and during our coffee Benjy Usher took his attention off Dot long enough to notice me across the room.
‘Freddie!’ he shouted uninhibitedly, turning every other diner’s head his way. ‘Come over here, you bugger.’
It seemed easiest to go. I stopped at their table and said hello to Dot.
‘Come and join us,’ Benjy commanded. ‘Bring the bird.’
‘She’s my sister.’
‘Oh sure, pull the other one.’
Benjy had had one drink too many. Dot looked embarrassed. It was for her sake, really, that I went and persuaded Lizzie to cross the carpet.
We accepted coffee from Dot and resisted Benjy’s offer of huge glasses of port. When Benjy summoned another for himself, Dot said conversationally, ‘He’s now at impotence. Paralysis next.’
‘Vicious bitch,’ Benjy said.
Lizzie’s eyes widened.
Dot remarked, ‘Followed by vomiting, ending in tears of maudlin self-pity. He calls himself a man.’
‘Pre-menstrual tension,’ Benjy mocked. ‘Chronic case.’
Lizzie looked at their handsome faces and casually good clothes, at the diamonds on Dot’s fingers and at Benjy’s gold watch. No comment was possible. None was needed. Their pleasure depended not on money but on spite.
‘When are you going to Italy for my colt?’ Benjy asked me.
‘Monday,’ I suggested. ‘It’ll take us three days. He could be here by Wednesday evening.’
‘Which driver? Not that one called Brett. Michael says never Brett.’
‘He’s left. It won’t be Brett.’
‘Send Lewis. Michael swears by him, and he’s driven my horses a lot. That colt’s valuable, you know. And send someone to look after him on the journey. Send that man of yours, that Dave. He can handle him.’
‘Is he difficult to handle?’
‘You know colts,’ Benjy said expansively. ‘You send Dave. He’ll be all right.’
Dot said, ‘I don’t know why you don’t stand him at stud in Italy.’
‘You keep your tongue off what doesn’t concern you,’ her husband replied.
To try to stop their argument, I mentioned that we’d that day brought the load of old horses from Yorkshire and I gathered he was giving a home to two of them.
‘Those old wrecks!’ Dot exclaimed. ‘Not more of them.’
‘Do you have some already?’ Lizzie asked.
‘They died,’ Dot told her. ‘I hate it. I don’t want any more.’
‘Don’t look at them,’ Benjy said.
‘You put them outside the drawing-room window.’
‘I’ll put them in the drawing-room. That should please you.’
‘You’re utterly childish.’
‘You’re utterly stupid.’
Lizzie said sweetly, ‘It’s been terribly nice meeting you,’ and stood up to leave, and when we were out in the Jaguar asked, ‘Do they always go on like that?’
‘I can testify to fifteen years of it.’
‘Good grief.’ She yawned, well-fed and relaxed, sleepy. ‘Beautiful moon tonight. Terrific for flying.’
‘But you’re not going tonight!’
‘No, it’s just a habit of mind. I think of the sky in flying terms, you think of the ground as hard or soft for horses.’
‘I suppose I do.’
She sighed pleasurably. ‘Lovely car, this.’
The Jaguar hummed through the night, powerful, intimate, the best wheels I’d owned. The jockeys lately seemed to have stopped buying speed in favour of middle-rank family saloons, ultra-reliable but rather dull. My bit of flamboyance, alive in my hands, was no longer politically correct with the new serious lot in the changing room.
Bad luck for them, I thought. Looking back, I seemed to have laughed a lot in those years. And cursed and ached and seethed at injustices. And had a sizzling good time.
The last stretch of the road from dinner to bed went past the farmyard. I slowed automatically to glance at the row of transport gleaming in the moonlight. The gates were open, which meant that one or more boxes were still out on the road, and I completed the short distance to the house wondering which one it was.
Lizzie’s Robinson 22 shone in the moonlight, standing on the tarmac where the nine-box had stood with Kevin Keith Ogden on board.
‘I’ll leave about nine in the morning,’ she said, ‘and get your analysis started in the afternoon.’
‘Great.’ I must have sounded preoccupied. She turned her head to study me.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing really. You go in, go to bed. I’ll just nip back to the farmyard to lock the gates. There aren’t any boxes still out, or anyway there shouldn’t be. I won’t be long.’
She yawned. ‘See you in the morning, then.’
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘I’ve enjoyed it.’
We hugged briefly and she went in smiling. I hoped Professor Quipp would love her for a long time, as I’d never known her so at peace.
I drove the Jaguar back to the farmyard and stopped outside the gates. Someone was walking about in the yard, as Harve often did, taking care of things, and I walked towards the half-seen figure, calling ‘Harve?’
No answer. I walked on, reaching the nearest box to Harve’s own, and passing into a patch of shadow.
‘Harve,’ I shouted.
I heard nothing, but something hit me very hard on the back of the head.
I worked out later how long I spent unaware of the world: one hour, forty minutes.
The first sensation of the daze I awoke to was a pain in the head. The second sensation was of being carried. The third was a matter of hearing, with a voice making a nonsensical remark.
‘If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.’
I was dreaming of course.
Of course.
Soon I would wake up.
I felt I was falling. I hated dreams about falling: they were always about falling off buildings, never off horses.
I fell into water. Breathtakingly cold.
I went down into it without struggling. Wholly immersed. Went down deep.
Terrible dream.
Instinct, perhaps, switched me to reality. This was no dream, this was Freddie Croft, in his clothes, drowning.
The first awful compulsion was to take a deep breath, and it was again subconscious knowledge, not present thought, that stopped me.
I kicked, seeking to go upward, and felt sucked to one side and clutched by currents, a rag doll in limbo.
I kicked again with growing horror, urgency flooding finally into a response from arms and legs, muscles bunching, working hard, chest hurting, head hammering.
Swim up, for God’s sake.
Swim... up.
I swam up in crazy panic-driven breaststrokes. Swam as if horizontal, arms sweeping, legs kicking, knowing I was also going sideways, being swept without choice.
Probably I spent barely more than a minute under water. I breaststroked through the surface into the night and gulped air into my starved lungs with a whooping roar, and the moment I stopped swimming my heavily saturated clothes and waterfilled shoes dragged me down again, down like a see-saw, ultimate terror.
The drowning come up twice, and the third time stay down... the bad news wisdom. I swam with ebbing strength to the surface against the weight of my clothes and the drag of the water and its inexorable swirling suction, seeing no light anywhere, only darkness enough for one struggling gasp, and my head went under again, will power urging me up and the salt sea claiming me for its own.
Salt sea... I swallowed it, gagging. Pretty well every vestige of athleticism went into lifting my nose above the surface, and kicking to stay there. In a way I knew it was a losing battle, but I couldn’t accept it. If I’d been dropped off a boat, if I were alone far from land, an end would come soon, and it was intolerable. I protested furiously, vainly, against being murdered.