To the hilt [en]

I'd sent the painting as a sort of peace offering: it was one of the first I'd painted in the bothy after I'd left, and seeing it again brought sharply back not just the feel of the paint going onto the canvas but also all the guilt and joyous sense of freedom of that tune.

Emily said behind me, 'One of my owners brought a friend with him a few weeks ago who spotted that painting from across the room and said, "I say, is that an Alexander?"'

I turned. She was carrying two tumblers with ice in and looking at the picture. 'You'd signed it just Alexander,' she said.

I nodded. 'I always do, as you know.'

'Nothing else?'

'Alexander's long enough.'

'Anyway, he recognised it. I was very surprised, but he turned out to be some sort of art critic. He'd seen quite a lot of your work.'

'What was his name?'

She shrugged. 'Can't remember. I said you always painted golf, and he said no you didn't, you painted the perseverance of the human spirit.'

God, I thought, and I asked again, 'What was his name?'

'I told you, I can't remember. I didn't know I was going to see you so soon, did I?' She walked over to the bottles and poured Campari and soda onto ice. 'He also said you might be going to be a great painter one day. He said you had both the technique and the courage. The courage, I ask you! I said what courage did it take to paint golf and he said it took courage to succeed at anything. Like training horses, he said.'

'I wish you could remember his name.'

'Well, I can't. He was a round little man. I told him I knew you and he went on a bit about how you'd got those tiny red flecks into the stems of the dry grass in the foreground.'

'Did he tell you how?'

'No.' She wrinkled her forehead. 'I think the owner asked me about his horse.'

She poured gin and tonic for herself, sat down and waved me to a sofa. It felt extraordinarily odd to be a guest where once I'd been host. The house had always been hers, as it had been her father's, but it had felt like my home when I'd lived there.

'That art man,' Emily said after a large swallow of gin, 'also said that your paintings were too attractive at present to be taken seriously.'

I smiled.

'Don't you mind?' she asked.

'No. Ugly is in. Ugly is considered real.'

'But I don't want ugly paintings on my walls.'

'Well… in the art world I'm sneered at because my paintings sell. I can do portraits, I accept commissions, I can draw - all unforgivable.'

'You don't seem bothered.'

'I paint what I like. I earn my bread. I'll never be Rembrandt. I settle for what I can do, and if that is to give pleasure, well, it's better than nothing.'

'You never said anything like that when you were here.'

'Too much emotion got in the way.'

'Actually,' she rose to her feet and crossed back to the picture, 'since that Sunday morning I've been looking at the grass. So how did you get those tiny red flecks on the stalks? And the brown flecks and the yellow flecks, come to that.'

'You'd be bored.'

'No, actually, I wouldn't.'

Campari tasted sweet and bitter, a lot like life. I said, 'Well, first I painted the whole canvas bright red.'

'Don't be silly.'

'I did,' I assured her. 'Bright solid cadmium red, all over.' I rose and walked over to join her. 'You can still see horizontal faint streaks of red in the silver of the sea. There's even some red in the grey of the clouds. Red in those two figures. All the rest is overpainted with the colours you can see now. That's the chief beauty of acrylic paint. It dries so fast you can paint layer on layer without having to wait days, like with oils. If you try to overpaint oils too soon the layers can mix and go muddy. Anyway, that grass… I over-painted that once with raw umber, which is a dark yellowish brown, and on top of that I put mixtures of yellow ochre, and then I scratched through all the layers with a piece of metal comb.'

'With what?

'A comb. I scratched the metal teeth through the layers right down to the red. The scratches lean as if with the wind… they are the stalks. The scratches show red flecks and brown flecks from the layers. And then I laid a very thin transparent glaze of purple over parts of the yellow, which is what gives it all that ripple effect that you get in long grass in a strong wind.'

She stared silently at the canvas that had hung on her wall for more than five years, and she said eventually, 'I didn't know.'

'What didn't you know?'

'Why you left. Why you couldn't paint here.'

'Em…' The old fond abbreviation arose naturally.

'You did try to tell me. I was too hurt to understand. And too young.' She sighed. 'And nothing's changed, has it?'

'Not really.'

She smiled vividly, without pain. 'For a marriage that lasted barely four months, ours wasn't so bad.'

I felt a great and undeserved sense of release. I hadn't wanted to come to Lambourn again: I'd avoided it from guilt and unwillingness to risk stirring Emily to an ill will she had in fact never shown. I had shied away habitually from the memory of her baffled eyes.

Her actual words to me had been tough. 'All right then, if you want to live on a mountain, bugger off.' It had been her eyes that had begged me to stay.

She'd said, 'If you care more for bloody paint than you do for me, bugger off.'

Now, more than five tranquillising years later, she said, 'I wouldn't have given up training racehorses, not for anything.'

'I know.'

'And you couldn't give up painting.'

'No.'

'So there we are. It's OK now between us, isn't it?'

'You're generous, Em.'

She grinned. 'I quite enjoy saintly forbearance. Do you want something to eat?'

It was she who made mushroom omelettes in the kitchen, though when I'd lived there I'd done most of the cooking. We ate at the kitchen table. She still had a passion for ice cream: strawberry, that evening.

She said, 'Do you want a divorce? Is that why you came here?'

Startled, I said, 'No. Hadn't thought of it! Do you?'

'You can have one any time.'

'Do you want one?'

'Actually,' she said calmly, 'I find it quite useful sometimes to be able to mention a husband, even if he's never around.' She sucked her ice-cream spoon. 'I'm used to being in charge. I no longer want a live-in husband, to be frank.'

She stacked our plates in the dishwasher, and said, 'If you don't want a divorce, why did you come?'

'Ivan's horses.'

'That's crap. You could have asked on the phone.'

The Emily I'd known had been forthrightly honest. She had rid herself of some of the owners she'd inherited from her father because they'd sometimes wanted her to instruct her jockeys not to win. There was a world of difference, she'd said, between giving a young horse an easy race to get him to like the game, and trying to cheat the racing public by stopping a horse from winning in order to come home next time out at better odds. 'My horses run to win,' she said robustly, and the racing world, with clear-eyed judgment, gave her its trust.

It was tentatively, therefore, that I said, 'Ivan wants me to make Golden Malt disappear.'

'What on earth are you talking about? Do you want some coffee?'

She made the coffee in a drip-feed pot, a new one since my days.

I explained about the brewery's financial predicament.

'The brewery,' Emily said tartly, 'owes me four months' training fees for Golden Malt. I wrote to Ivan personally about it not long before his heart attack. I don't like to bitch, but I want my money.'