'Are you busy tomorrow?'
'Have a heart. The girl in Wembley.' He looked at his watch and swallowed the rest of the beer. 'And so long, Sid boy, or I'll be late. She doesn't like me sweaty.'
He grinned and departed, and I more slowly finished my drink and went home.
Wandered about. Changed the batteries. Ate some cornflakes. Got out the form books and looked up the syndicated horses. Highly variable form: races lost at short odds and won at long. All the signs of steady and expert fixing. I yawned. It went on all the time.
I pottered some more, restlessly, sorely missing the peace that usually filled me in that place, when I was alone. Undressed, put on a bathrobe, pulled off the arm. Tried to watch the television: couldn't concentrate. Switched it off.
I usually pulled the arm off after I'd put the bathrobe on because that way I didn't have to look at the bit of me that remained below the left elbow. I could come to terms with the fact of it but still not really the sight, though it was neat enough and not horrific, as the messed up hand had been. I dare say it was senseless to be faintly repelled, but I was. I hated anyone except the limb man to see it; even Chico. I was ashamed of it, and that too was illogical. People without handicaps never understood that ashamed feeling, and nor had I, until the day soon after the original injury when I'd blushed crimson because I'd had to ask someone to cut up my food. There had been many times after that when I'd gone hungry rather than ask. Not having to ask, ever, since I'd had the electronic hand, had been a psychological release of soul-saving proportions.
The new hand had meant, too, a return to full normal human status. No one treated me as an idiot, or with the pity which in the past had made me cringe. No one made allowances any more, or got themselves tongue-tied with trying not to say the wrong thing. The days of the useless deformity seemed in retrospect an unbearable nightmare. I was often quite grateful to the villain who had set me free.
With one hand, I was a self-sufficient man.
Without any…
Oh God, I thought. Don't think about it. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Hamlet, however, didn't have the same problems.
I got through the night, and the next morning, and the afternoon, but at around six I gave up and got in the car, and drove to Aynsford.
If Jenny was there, I thought, easing up the back drive and stopping quietly in the yard outside the kitchen, I would just turn right round and go back to London, and at least the driving would have occupied the time. But no one seemed to be about, and I walked into the house from the side door which had a long passage into the house.
Charles was in the small sitting room that he called the wardroom, sitting alone, sorting out his much-loved collection of fishing flies.
He looked up. No surprise. No effusive welcome. No fuss. Yet I'd never gone there before without invitation.
'Hallo,' he said.
'Hallo.'
I stood there, and he looked at me, and waited.
'I wanted some company,' I said.
He squinted at a dry fly; 'Did you bring an overnight bag?'
I nodded.
He pointed to the drinks tray. 'Help yourself. And pour me a pink gin, will you? Ice in the kitchen.'
I fetched him his drink, and my own, and sat in an armchair.
'Come to tell me?' he said.
'No.'
He smiled. 'Supper then? And chess.'
We ate, and played two games. He won the first easily, and told me to pay attention. The second, after an hour and a half, was a draw. 'That's better,' he said.
The peace I hadn't been able to find on my own came slowly back with Charles, even though I knew it had more to do with the ease I felt with him personally, and the timelessness of his vast old house, than with a real resolution of the destruction within. In any case, for the first time in ten days, I slept soundly for hours.
At breakfast we discussed the day ahead. He himself was going to the steeplechase meeting at Towcester, forty-five minutes northwards, to act as a Steward, an honorary job that he enjoyed. I told him about John Viking and the balloon race, and also about the visits to the M people, and Antiques for All, and he smiled with his own familiar mixture of satisfaction and amusement, as if I were some creation of his that was coming up to expectations. It was he who had originally driven me to becoming an investigator. Whenever I got anything right he took the credit for it himself.
'Did Mrs Cross tell you about the telephone call?' he said, buttering toast. Mrs Cross was his housekeeper, quiet, effective and kind.
'What telephone call?'
'Someone rang here about seven this morning, asking if you were here. Mrs Cross said you were asleep and could she take a message, but whoever it was said he would ring later.'
'Was it Chico? He might guess I'd come here, if he couldn't get me in the flat.'
'Mrs Cross said he didn't give a name.'
I shrugged and reached for the coffee pot. 'It can't have been urgent, or he'd have told her to wake me up.'
Charles smiled. 'Mrs Cross sleeps in curlers and face cream. She'd never have let you see her at seven o'clock in the morning, short of an earthquake. She thinks you're a lovely young man. She tells me so, every time you come.'
'For God's sakes.'
'Will you be back here, tonight?' he said.
'I don't know yet.'
He folded his napkin, looking down at it. 'I'm glad that you came, yesterday.'
I looked at him. 'Yeah,' I said. 'Well, you want me to say it, so I'll say it. And I mean it.' I paused a fraction, searching for the simplest words that would tell him what I felt for him. Found some. Said them. 'This is my home.'
He looked up quickly, and I smiled twistedly, mocking myself, mocking him, mocking the whole damned world.
Highalane Park was a stately home uneasily coming to terms with the plastic age. The house itself opened to the public like an agitated virgin only half a dozen times a year, but the parkland was always out for rent for game fairs and circuses, and things like the May Day jamboree.
They had made little enough effort on the roadside to attract the passing crowd. No bunting, no razzamatazz, no posters with print large enough to read at ten paces; everything slightly coy and apologetic. Considering all that, the numbers pouring onto the showground were impressive. I paid at the gate in my turn and bumped over some grass to park the car obediently in a row in the roped off parking area. Other cars followed, neatly alongside.
There were a few people on horses cantering busily about in haphazard directions, but the roundabouts on the fairground to one side were silent and motionless, and there was no sight of any balloons.
I got out of the car and locked the door, and thought that one-thirty was probably too early for much in the way of action.
One can be so wrong.
A voice behind me said, 'Is this the man?'
I turned and found two people advancing into the small space between my car and the one next to it: a man I didn't know, and a little boy, whom I did.
'Yes,' the boy said, pleased. 'Hallo.'
'Hallo, Mark,' I said. 'How's your Mum?'
'I told Dad about you coming.' He looked up at the man beside him.
'Did you, now?' I thought his being at Highalane was only an extraordinary coincidence, but it wasn't. 'He described you,' the man said. 'That hand, and the way you could handle horses… I knew who he meant, right enough.' His face and voice were hard and wary, with a quality that I by now recognised on sight: guilty knowledge faced by trouble. 'I don't take kindly to you poking your nose around my place.'
'You were out,' I said mildly.
'Aye I was out. And this nipper, here, he left you there all alone.'