When I looked up she was standing in front of me, watching me with an expression which I couldn’t read. There were tears in her eyes.
‘Is it over?’ she said, blinking to disguise them.
‘More or less.’
We both looked at my hands, which were now a fierce red all over.
‘And your feet?’ she asked.
‘They’re fine,’ I said. Their awakening had been nothing.
‘I’d better wash those grazes on your back,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘In the morning.’
‘There’s a lot of dirt in them,’ she protested.
‘It’s been there so long already that a few more hours won’t hurt,’ I said. ‘I’ve had four anti-tetanus injections in the last two years, and there’s always penicillin... and I’m too tired.’
She didn’t argue. She unzipped and helped me take off the anorak, and made me get into her bed, still incongruously dressed in her black trews and blue cardigan and looking like a second-rate ballet dancer with a hangover. The sheets were rumpled from her lying in them before I had woken her up, and there was still a dent in her pillow where her head had been. I put mine there too, with an odd feeling of delight. She saw me grin, and correctly read my mind.
‘It’s the first time you’ve got into my bed,’ she said. ‘And it’ll be the last.’
‘Have a heart, Joanna,’ I said.
She perched herself on the edge of the mattress and looked down at me.
‘It’s no good for cousins,’ she said.
‘And if we weren’t cousins?’
‘I don’t know...’ she sighed. ‘But we are.’
She bent down to kiss me good night on the forehead.
I couldn’t help it; I put my arms up round her shoulders and pulled her down on to my chest and kissed her properly, mouth to mouth. It was the first time I had ever done it, and into it went all the pent-up and suppressed desire I had ever felt for her. It was too hungry, too passionate, much too desperate. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop it. For a moment she seemed to relax and melt and kiss me back, but it was so brief and passing that I thought I had imagined it, and afterwards her body grew rigid.
I let her go. She stood up abruptly and stared at me, her face scrubbed of any emotion. No anger, no disgust; and no love. She turned away without speaking and went across the room to the sofa, where she twisted a blanket around herself and lay down. She stretched out her hand to the table light and switched it off.
Her voice reached me across the dark room, calm, self-controlled. ‘Good night, Rob.’
‘Good night, Joanna,’ I said politely.
There was dead silence.
I rolled over on to my stomach and put my face in her pillow.
Thirteen
I don’t know whether she slept or not during the next four hours. The room was quiet. The time passed slowly.
The pulse in my hands went on throbbing violently for a while, but who cared? It was comforting, even if it hurt. I thought about all the fat red corpuscles forcing their way through the shunken capillaries like water gushing along dry irrigation ditches after a drought. Very nice. Very life-giving. By tomorrow afternoon, I thought — correction, this afternoon — they might be fit for work. They’d got to be, that was all there was about it.
Some time after it was light I heard Joanna go into her narrow bathroom-kitchen where she brushed her teeth and made some fresh coffee. The warm roasted smell floated across to me. Saturday morning, I thought. Midwinter Cup day. I didn’t leap out of bed eagerly to greet it; I turned over slowly from my stomach on to one side, shutting my eyes against the stiffness which afflicted every muscle from neck to waist, and the sharp soreness of my back and wrists. I really didn’t feel very well.
She came across the room with a mug of steaming coffee and put it on the bedside table. Her face was pale and expressionless.
‘Coffee,’ she said unnecessarily.
‘Thank you.’
‘How do you feel?’ she asked, a little too clinically.
‘Alive,’ I said.
There was a pause.
‘Oh, go on,’ I said. ‘Either slosh me one or smile... one or the other. But don’t stand there looking tragic, as if the Albert Hall had burned down on the first night of the Proms.’
‘Damn it, Rob,’ she said, her face crinkling into a laugh.
‘Truce?’ I asked.
‘Truce,’ she agreed, still smiling. She even sat down again on the edge of the bed. I shoved myself up into a sitting position, wincing somewhat from various aches, and brought a hand out from under the bedclothes to reach for the coffee.
As a hand it closely resembled a bunch of beef sausages. I produced the other one. It also was swollen. The skin on both felt very tender, and they were still unnaturally red.
‘Blast,’ I said. ‘What’s the time?’
‘About eight o’clock,’ she said. ‘Why?’
Eight o’clock. The race was at two-thirty. I began counting backwards. I would have to be at Ascot by at the latest one-thirty, preferably earlier, and the journey down, going by taxi, would take about fifty minutes. Allow an hour for hold-ups. That left me precisely four and a half hours in which to get fit enough to ride, and the way I felt, it was a tall order.
I began to consider ways and means. There were the Turkish baths, with heat and massage; but I had lost too much skin for that to be an attractive idea. There was a work-out in a gym; a possibility, but rough. There was a canter in the park — a good solution on any day except Saturday, when the Row would be packed with little girls on leading-reins — or better still a gallop on a racehorse at Epsom, but there was neither time to arrange it nor a good excuse to be found for needing it.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Joanna.
I told her.
‘You don’t mean it?’ she said. ‘You aren’t seriously thinking of racing today?’
‘I seriously am.’
‘You’re not fit to,’ she said.
‘That’s the point. That’s what we are discussing, how best to get fit,’ I said.
‘That isn’t what I mean,’ she protested. ‘You look ill. You need a long, quiet day in bed.’
‘I’ll have it tomorrow,’ I said, ‘today I am riding Template in the Midwinter Cup.’ She began more forcibly to try to dissuade me, so I told her why I was going to ride. I told her everything, all about Kemp-Lore’s anti-jockey obsession and all that had happened on the previous evening before she found me in the telephone box. It took quite a time. I didn’t look at her while I told her about the tack-room episode, because for some reason it embarrassed me to describe it, even to her, and I knew then quite certainly that I was not going to repeat it to anyone else.
When I had finished she looked at me without speaking for half a minute — thirty solid seconds — and then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Yes, I see. We’d better get you fit, then.’
I smiled at her.
‘What first?’ she said.
‘Hot bath and breakfast,’ I said. ‘And can we have the weather forecast on?’ I listened to it every morning, as a matter of routine.
She switched on the radio, which was busy with some sickening matinee music, and started tidying up the room, folding the blanket she had slept in and shaking the sofa cushions. Before she had finished the music stopped, and we heard the eight-thirty news headlines, followed by the forecast.
‘There was a slight frost in many parts of the country last night,’ said the announcer smoothly, ‘and more is expected tonight, especially in exposed areas. Temperatures today will reach five degrees centigrade, forty-one Fahrenheit, in most places, and the north-easterly wind will moderate slightly. It will be bright and sunny in the south. Further outlook: colder weather is expected in the next few days. And here is an announcement. The stewards at Ascot inspected the course at eight o’clock this morning and have issued the following statement. “Two or three degrees of frost were recorded on the racecourse last night, but the ground on both sides of the fences was protected by straw, and unless there is a sudden severe frost during the morning, racing is certain.” ’