I turned away from the ruins. I would rebuild what had been lost. Soon, and better, I thought.
‘Where are you planning to sleep?’ Sophie asked.
I looked at her in the dusk. Smooth silver hair. Calm sky-reflecting eyes. Nothing but friendly interest.
Where I was planning to sleep was going to need more welcome than that.
‘Could I borrow your sofa?’ I said.
A pause.
‘It’s not long enough,’ she said.
Another pause. I looked at her and waited.
A smile crept in around her eyes.
‘Oh, all right. You gave me your bed... I’ll give you mine.’
‘With you in it?’
‘I don’t suppose you burned your bedroom just to get there?’ she asked.
‘I wish I could say yes.’
‘You look smug enough as it is,’ she said.
We drove sedately to Esher, she in her car, me in mine. We ate a sedate dinner out of her freezer, and watched a sedate old movie on her box.
She was also in a way sedate in bed. The inner composure persisted. She seemed to raise a mental eyebrow in amusement at the antics humans got up to. She was quiet, and passive.
On the other hand she left me in no doubt that I gave her pleasure; and what I gave, I got.
It was an intense, gentle love making. A matter of small movements, not gymnastics. Of exquisite lingering sensations. And done, on her part also, without reservation.
She lay afterwards with her head on my shoulder.
She said, ‘I can’t stay here till morning.’
‘Why not?’
‘Have to be at Heathrow on duty by six o’clock.’
‘Fine time to say so.’
I could feel her smile. ‘Better than ten minutes ago.”
I laughed in my nose. ‘The off-put of the century.’
She rubbed her hand lazily over my chest. ‘I’ll think of this when I’m up in the tower.’
‘You’ll knit the approaches.’
‘No.’ She kissed my skin. ‘I’m on departures. I tell them when to take off.’
‘When?’
‘And where. But not what.’
I smiled. Shut my eyes in the warm dark.
‘You don’t take your strap off even for love making,’ she said, running her fingers along inside the soft crepe bandage I slept in.
‘Especially,’ I said. ‘Very high risk activity for dislocating shoulders.’
‘You speak from experience?’
‘You might say so.’
‘Serve you right.’
We slid slowly, contentedly, to sleep.
11
At Ascot Sales on Wednesday Vic and his pals closed their ranks when they saw me coming, and moved in my direction in a body.
I met them halfway. Like something out of High Noon, I thought frivolously. All we lacked were the Sheriff’s badge and the guns.
‘I warned you,’ Vic said.
They all stared at me. I looked at them one by one. Vic all open aggression, the rest in various shades from satisfied spite to a trace of uneasiness.
‘People who play with fire get burnt,’ I said.
Vic said, ‘We didn’t do it.’
‘Quite right. Fred Smith did. And he’s not telling who paid him. But you and I know, don’t we Vic?’
He looked extraordinarily startled. ‘You know?’ he exclaimed. ‘You couldn’t.’ He considered it and shook his head. ‘You don’t.’
‘But you know,’ I said slowly. ‘And if it isn’t you... who is it?’
Vic gave a fair imitation of a clam.
‘You just do as we tell you and nothing else will happen,’ he said.
‘You’ve got your psychology all wrong,’ I said. ‘You bash me, I’ll bash back.’
Jiminy Bell said to Vic ‘I told you so.’
Vic gave him a reptilian glance. Jiminy was a great one for losing friends and not influencing people.
Ronnie North stood on one side of their battalion commander and the carrot-headed Fynedale on the other. Neither of them looked either impressed or worried about my vaguely stated intentions.
‘How about a truce?’ I suggested. ‘You leave me entirely alone, and I’ll leave you.’
Six upper lips curled in unison.
‘You can’t do a damn thing,’ Vic said.
I bought four horses for various clients uninfected by Vic, and went home. Crispin, morosely sober, had spent the day watching a demolition gang shift the burnt rubble of the stables into lorries. The stale smell persisted, and the air was full of dust and fine ash, but the hard concrete foundations had been cleared and cleaned in some places and looked like the first outlines of the future.
He was sitting in the office drinking fizzy lemonade in front of a television programme for children. Two days had seen rapid action by the electricity people, who had insulated all burnt-through wires and restored the current, and by the Post Office, who had reconnected me with the outer world. With help from the village I had cleaned up the office and the kitchen and borrowed dry beds, and even if the house was partly roofed by tarpaulin and as sodden as an Irish bog, it was still where I lived.
‘About twenty people telephoned,’ Crispin said. ‘I’ve had a bloody awful day answering the damn thing.’
‘Did you take messages?’
‘Couldn’t be bothered. Told them to ring again this evening.’
‘Have you eaten anything?’
‘Someone brought you an apple pie from the village,’ he said. ‘I ate that.’
I sat down at the desk to make a start on the ever-present paperwork.
‘Get me some lemonade?’ I asked.
‘Get it yourself.’
I didn’t, and presently with an ostentatious sigh he went out to the kitchen and fetched some. The thin synthetic fizz at least took away the taste of brick dust and cinders,though as usual I wished someone would invent a soft drink with a flavour of dry white wine. A great pity all soft drinks were sweet.
During the evening apart from answering the postponed enquiries and finalising various sales I made three more personal calls.
One was to the breeder of the Transporter colt which Vic had bought for thirty thousand and let go to Wilton Young for seventy-five.
One was to Nicol Brevett. And one to Wilton Young himself.
As a result of these the breeder met Nicol the next day in Gloucester, and on the Friday morning I drove them both to see the mail order tycoon in Yorkshire.
The row between Wilton Young and his carrot-headed agent at Doncaster races that Saturday could be heard from Glasgow to The Wash. Along with everyone else I listened avidly and with more than general satisfaction.
Wilton Young had not wanted to believe he had been made a fool of. What man would? I was wrong, he said. His agent Fynedale would never conspire with Vic Vincent to drive the price of a colt up by thousands so that he, Wilton Young, would shell out, while they, the manipulators, split the lolly between them.
I hadn’t said much at the interview. I’d left it all to the breeder. The furious indignation he’d been exploding with at Newmarket had deepened into a bitter consuming resentment, and he had pounced like a starving cat on the opportunity of doing Vic a lot of no good.
Nicol himself had been astounded and angry on his father’s behalf and had sat next to me all the way to Yorkshire saying he couldn’t believe it at regular intervals. I was sure Nicol’s surprise was genuine but I privately doubted whether Constantine’s would be. Nicol’s father was quite subtle enough to make Wilton Young pay and pay and pay for the privilege of outbidding a Brevett. That was, of course, if his pride would allow so private a victory, and on that point I was in a fog.
Wilton Young and Fynedale stood on the grass in front of the weighing room shouting at each other as if oblivious of the fascinated audience of five thousand. Wilton Young attacked like a tough little terrier and Fynedale’s temper burned as flaming bright as his hair. One or two Stewards hovered on the perimeter looking nervous about the outcome and the jockeys on their way out to the first race went past with smiles like water melon slices.