"You were going to tell me. What is it about Vincent Tyrrell that frightens you so?"
She took a gulp of her gin, pulled herself into a corner of the couch, and brought her knees up to her chin.
"He came around here that day. Ten years ago. It wasn't a Sunday, it was the middle of the week. Everything was a bit chaotic here, after the whole By Your Leave thing. A lot of drinking, a lot of…well, I wasn't the most…I could have been a lot more sympathetic to Patrick, put it that way."
"You thought he'd made a mess of the situation."
"I thought he'd been unprofessional. I mean, the rules of the game: jockeys do what they're told. And maybe sometimes you'll stretch that, you'll leave it a bit later than you've been told, you'll take an earlier lead, but it's all forgiven if you win. But what Patrick did, to make such a song and dance about stopping a horse, it was really stupid. I mean, what was the point? Everyone knows what racing is like. And it wasn't as if it changed anything."
"Didn't he ever try to explain himself? To you, at least?"
"No."
"Miranda, I can't help you if you're keeping something back."
"I'm not. I swear to God. Look, it wasn't as if we had a big discussion, we didn't work like that. I didn't know I wasn't going to see him again."
"Was he going to find it hard to get another trainer to take him on?"
"I was worried he might. But I was wrong; he'd been riding well that year, and once the hue and cry had died down, he'd have got another job easily. I was…I was horrible to him, really, put him through a whole guilt trip. I suppose I thought…you know, that Tyrrellscourt has such a reputation, it's been number one for so long, I thought he'd been at the very top and thrown it all away. And what were we, twenty-three or something? It was ridiculous, we were just starting out. And the last time I saw him…"
Her voice faltered and she began to tear up again.
"The last time I saw him was in the morning, I'd made him sleep in the spare room. He'd brought me up a cup of tea, and begged me to talk to him, to forgive him. He said he'd make it all right. I remember, I was lying on my side away from him, and he sounded so sad…so desperate…"
"Can you remember anything he said?"
Miranda took another long drink of gin, this time tipping the glass too far up and spilling it down both sides of her chin.
"Fuck it!" she said. "Don't laugh at me!"
"You have to be the clumsiest person I've ever met," I said.
"Patrick used to say that too. He said I'd never make it as a jockey, my body'd never cope with the injuries, I got bruises enough walking around a room."
She drained her gin and wiped her mouth and passed her glass to me. Her lipstick was smeared all over her mouth like some crazy lady from an old black-and-white movie, Joan Crawford with the sirens howling, and I laughed again, and she glared at me, and I pulled her toward me and put my arms around her, and she punched me a couple of times in the chest and then put her head on my shoulder.
"I was such a cow to him."
"You didn't know you were never going to see him again," I said. We sat for a while like that, as if we'd known each other forever, until I began to wonder whether it was Miranda Hart I was embracing, or the ghost of my ex-wife. Maybe Miranda felt the chill; she leapt up and sat by the fire, where the embers were smoldering, and tried to poke and then to blow them back into life. There was red in the turf and she coaxed it into flame and put another couple of sods on top. When she turned around, the flames danced in the silver of her dress, and her dark eyes flashed red and I found that I couldn't breathe.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said. I nodded.
"Someone who hurt you very badly. Someone I remind you of, someone who maybe looks a little like me."
I nodded again, dumbstruck.
"And now, at last, you're beginning to get over her. That's all right," she said, smiling. "I wanted you too." Then her mouth set hard.
"Now, I think you'd better ask your questions, and go."
I hadn't touched my gin, and found I needed it badly. I felt like I'd been slapped, and for no good reason, and I didn't like it. Miranda Hart was the kind of woman who could sense your weakest spot and reach straight for it. And she could see I wanted something more than what she had given.
"Jackie Tyrrell told me Patrick and Leo Halligan rode together. What did she mean by that?"
"What do you think she meant?"
"That they were both jockeys who came up together at Tyrrellscourt. That they were lovers. What's the truth?"
"Leo didn't have the talent, or the temperament, to be a jockey. Because he was a fucking lunatic, and not in a good way. But I'm sure you know that, if you know his brothers. He was at a reform school near the stables. St. Jude's. So was Patrick. F.X. made a point of taking a couple of lads from there once they'd done their time, as apprentices. They were set to work in the yard; they both graduated to working the horses in the mornings. They'd be given pieces of work. Patrick took to it; Leo didn't. Leo was too smart. In every sense: too quick, too cunning, so sharp he'd cut himself."
"Were you there at the same time?"
Miranda nodded.
"I grew up in the village, a couple of miles downriver. I was the daughter of the local publican. The Tyrrellscourt Inn. Adopted, they never made any secret of that. They tried to make a lady out of me, too, but I was up at the stables any chance I got. My mother died when I was twelve, and they thought sending me to an all-girls' boarding school in England would give me a female influence, and encourage me to show willing. Except the school was in Cheltenham. It just meant I got to the Festival every year of my teens. Finally Jackie made a deal with my father: as long as I finished school, I could come and work at the yard. They didn't say I had to pass my A Levels though, and I didn't."
"Jackie made a deal with your father? Why did she do that?"
"I guess she always looked out for me. She picked me up more than once when I fell. And her and F. X. Tyrrell couldn't have kids-or didn't, I don't know, same difference. I suppose she stood as a kind of mother to me, though it didn't seem that way back then. More like a big sister. We'd go on the tear together, all that. She was a bit trapped down there in Tyrrellscourt, working up the nerve to get out."
"And were Patrick and Leo lovers?"
She smiled, her eyes glittering, as if to say: Some people might think that an insult, but I'm not one of them. I knew then that I could fall in love with Miranda Hart, if I wasn't careful. And I wasn't, as a rule.
"Were they? I don't know. The school had a reputation that way. And there's a bit of it in every stable. Like a jail, the hours are so long, you've no money, you're confined to camp most of the time, and you don't get enough to eat. All these young boys are dieting all the time, and they're at the horniest time of their lives, and dieting, extreme dieting, can make you absolutely obsessed with sex. It always does me. So. Can't say I'd blame them."
"Did it have any effect on your marriage? I mean, do you think he was gay?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. He didn't shy away from his…marital duties, as they used to say. But maybe, in another life…put it this way, what age are you, forty, forty-two?"
"Something like that."
"I bet you had a girlfriend when you were twenty-two, twenty-three, you drank a lot together, or got high, whatever, you laughed and cried, you said you loved each other, you fucked a lot, but even at the time, you knew it probably wasn't forever. Maybe that's the way it was with Patrick and me. We should never have got married, I don't know why we did: to get away from my family, and his lack of one. Maybe that's why. We were so young. And now…you know, we could run into each other on the street, and we probably wouldn't know what to say. So for all I know, he could be anything…"