There was nothing left of that violent scene now in the pleasant big room, no residual shudder in the comfortable atmosphere, no regrets or grief. The trial was over, Nolan was free, Olympia was ashes.
Gareth, unconcerned, asked Perkin. ‘Can I show John your workroom?’
‘Don’t touch anything. I mean anything.’
‘Cross my heart.’
With me still obediently in tow he crossed Perkin and Mackie’s inner hall and opened a door which led into a completely different world, one incredibly fragrant with the scent of untreated wood.
The room where Perkin created his future antiques was of generous size, like all the rooms in the entire big house, but also no larger than the others. It was extremely tidy, which in a way I wouldn’t have expected, with a polished wood-block floor swept spotless, not a shaving or speck of sawdust in sight.
When I commented on it Gareth said it was always like that. Perkin would use one tool at a time and put it away before he used another. Chisels, spokeshaves, things like that.
‘Dead methodical,’ Gareth said. ‘Very fussy.’
There was surprisingly a gas cooker standing against one wall. ‘He heats glue on that,’ Gareth said, seeing me looking, ‘and other sorts of muck like linseed oil.’ He pointed across the room. ‘That’s his lathe, that’s his saw-bench, that’s his sanding machine. I haven’t seen him working much. He doesn’t like people watching him, says it interferes with the feeling for what he’s doing.’
Gareth’s voice held disbelief, but I thought if I had to write with people watching I’d get nothing worthwhile done either.
‘What’s he making at the moment?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know.’
He swanned round the room looking at sheets of veneer stacked against a wall and at little orderly piles of square-cut lengths from exotic black to golden walnut. ‘He makes legs with those,’ Gareth said, pointing.
He stopped by a long solid worktop like a butcher’s block and said to me over his shoulder, ‘I should think he’s just started on this.’
I went across to look and saw a pencil drawing of a display cabinet of sharply spare and unusual lines, a piece designed to draw the eye to its contents, not itself.
The drawing was held down by two blocks of wood, one, I thought, cherry, the other bleached oak, though I was better at living trees than dead.
‘He often slats one sort of wood into the other,’ Gareth said. ‘Makes a sort of stripe. His things don’t actually look bad. People buy them all the time.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.
‘Aren’t you?’ He seemed pleased, as if he’d been afraid I wouldn’t be impressed, but I was, considerably.
As we turned to leave I said, ‘Was it in their sitting-room that that poor girl died?’
‘Gruesome,’ Gareth said, nodding. ‘I didn’t see her. Perkin did, though. He went in just after Mackie and Harry and found it all happening. And, I mean, disgusting... there was a mess on the carpet where she’d been lying and by the time they were allowed to clean it up, they couldn’t. So they got a new carpet from insurance but Perkin acts as if the mess is still there and he’s moved a sofa to cover the place. Bonkers, I think.’
I thought I might easily have done the same. Whoever would want to walk every day over a deathbed? We went back to the sitting-room and one could see, if one knew, just which of the three chintz-covered sofas wasn’t in a logical place.
We stayed only a short while before returning to the family room where Tremayne was safely awake and yawning, getting ready to walk round his yard at evening stables. He invited me to go with him, which I did with pleasure, and afterwards I made cauliflower cheese for supper which Tremayne ate without a tremor.
When he went out at bedtime for a last look round, he came back blowing on his hands cheerfully and smiling broadly.
‘It’s thawing,’ he said. ‘Everything’s dripping. Thank God.’
The world indeed turned from white to green during the night, bringing renewed life to Shellerton and racing.
Out in the melting woodlands, Angela Brickell spent her last night in the quiet undergrowth among the small scavenging creatures that had blessedly cleaned her bones. She was without odour and without horror, weather-scrubbed, long gone into everlasting peace.
Chapter 8
Tremayne promoted me from Touchy to a still actively racing steeplechaser that Monday morning, a nine-year-old gelding called Drifter. I was also permitted to do a regular working gallop and by great good fortune didn’t fall off. Neither Tremayne nor Mackie made any comment on my competence or lack of it, only on the state of fitness of the horse. They were taking me for granted, I realised, and was flattered and glad of it.
When we returned from the newly greenish-brownish Downs there was a strange car in the yard and a strange man drinking coffee in the kitchen; but strange to me only. Familiar to everyone else.
He was young, short, thin, angular and bold, wearing self-assurance as an outer garment. He was, I soon found, almost as foul-mouthed as Nolan but, unlike him, funny.
‘Hello, Sam,’ Tremayne said. ‘Ready for work?’
‘Too sodding right. I’m as stiff as a frigging virgin.’
I wondered idly how many virgins he had personally introduced to frigging: there was something about him that suggested it.
Tremayne said to me, ‘This is Sam Yaeger, our jockey.’ To Sam Yaeger he explained my presence and said I’d been riding out.
Sam Yaeger nodded to me, visibly assessing what threat or benefit I might represent to him, running a glance over my jodhpurs and measuring my height. I imagined that because of my six feet alone he might put away fears that I could annex any of his racing territory.
He himself wore jodhpurs also, along with a brilliant yellow sweatshirt. A multi-coloured anorak, twin of Gareth’s, hung over the back of his chair, and he had brought his own helmet, bright turquoise, with YAEGER painted large in red on the front. Nothing shy or retiring about Sam.
Dee-Dee, appearing for her coffee, brightened by fifty watts at the sight of him.
‘Morning, Lover-boy,’ she said.
Lover-boy made a stab at pinching her bottom as she passed behind him, which she seemed not to mind. Well, well, well, I thought, there was a veritable pussycat lurking somewhere inside that self-contained, touch-me-not secretarial exterior. She made her coffee and sat at the table beside the jockey, not overtly flirting but very aware of him.
I made the toast, which had become my accepted job, and put out the juice, butter, marmalade and so on. Sam Yaeger watched with comically raised eyebrows.
‘Didn’t Tremayne say you were a writer?’ he asked.
‘Most of the time. Want some toast?’
‘One piece, light brown. You don’t look like a sodding writer.’
‘So many people aren’t.’
‘Aren’t what?’
‘What they look like,’ I said. ‘Sodding or not.’
‘What do I look like?’ he demanded, but with, I thought, genuine curiosity.
‘Like someone who won the Grand National among eighty-nine other races last year and finished third on the jockeys’ list.’
‘You’ve been peeking,’ he said, surprised.
‘I’ll be interviewing you soon for your views on your boss as a trainer.’
Tremayne said with mock severity, ‘And they’d better be respectful.’
‘They bloody well would be, wouldn’t they?’
‘If you have any sense,’ Tremayne agreed, nodding.