Bonecrack - Страница 8

He had sent me to Eton, which in its way had proved just as callous, and on my sixteenth birthday I ran away.

I knew that he had never forgiven me. An aunt had relayed to me his furious comment that he had provided me with horses to ride and taught me obedience, and what more could any father do for his son?

He had made no effort to get me back, and during all the years of my commercial success we had not once spoken to each other. In the end, after fourteen years absence, I had gone to Ascot races knowing that he would be there and wanting finally to make peace.

When I said 'Mr Griffon-' he had turned to me from a group of people, raised his eyebrows, and looked at me enquiringly. His eyes were cool and blank. He hadn't known me.

I had said, with more amusement than awkwardness, 'I am your son- I am Neil.'

Apart from surprise he had shown no emotion whatsoever, and on the tacit understanding that none would be expected on either side, he had suggested that any day I happened to be passing through Newmarket, I could call in and see him.

I had called three or four times every year since then, sometimes for a drink, sometimes for lunch, but never staying; and I had come to see him from a much saner perspective in my thirties than I had at fifteen. His manner to me was still for the most part forbidding, critical, and punitive, but as I no longer depended solely upon him for approval, and as he could no longer lock me in my bedroom for disagreeing with him, I found a perverse sort of pleasure in his company.

I had thought when I was called in a hurry to Rowley Lodge after the accident that I wouldn't sleep again in my old bed, that I'd choose any other. But in fact in the end I did sleep in it, because it was the room that had been prepared for me, and there were dust-sheets still over all the rest.

Too much had crowded back when I looked at the unchanged furnishings and the fifty-times read books on the small bookshelf; and smile at myself as cynically as I would, on that first night back I hadn't been able to lie in there in the dark with the door shut.

I sat down in the armchair and read the copy of The Times which rested on his bed. His hand, yellowish, freckled, and with thick knotted veins, lay limply on the sheets, still half entwined in the black-framed spectacles he had removed before sleeping. I remembered that when I was seventeen I had taken to wearing frames like those, with plain glass in, because to me they stood for authority, and I had wanted to present an older and weightier personality to my clients. Whether it was the frames or not which did the trick, the business had flourished.

He stirred, and groaned, and the lax hand closed convulsively into a fist with almost enough force to break the lenses.

I stood up. His face was screwed up with pain and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, but he sensed that there was someone in the room and opened his eyes sharp and wide as if there were nothing the matter.

'Oh- it's you.'

'I'll fetch a nurse,' I said.

'No. Be better- in a minute.'

But I went to fetch one anyway, and she looked at the watch pinned upside down on her bosom and remarked that it was time for his pills, near enough.

After he had swallowed them and the worst of it had passed I noticed that during the short time I was out of the room he had managed to replace his lower teeth. The glass of water stood empty on the locker. A great one for his dignity, my father.

'Have you found anyone to take over the licence?' he asked.

'Can I make your pillows more comfortable?' I suggested.

'Leave them alone,' he snapped. 'Have you found anyone to take charge?' He would go on asking, I knew, until I gave him a direct answer.

'No,' I said. There's no need.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've decided to stay on, myself.'

His mouth opened, just as Etty's had done, and then shut again with equal vigour.

'You can't. You don't know a damn thing about it. You couldn't win a single race.'

'The horses are good, Etty is good, and you can sit here and do the entries.'

'You will not take over. You will get someone who is capable, someone I approve of. The horses are far too valuable to have amateurs messing about. You will do as I say. Do you hear? You will do as I say.'

The pain-killing drug had begun to act on his eyes, if not yet his tongue.

'The horses will come to no harm,' I said, and thought of Moonrock and Lucky Lindsay and the kicked two-year-old, and wished with all my heart I could hand the whole lot over to Bredon that very day.

'If you think,' he said with a certain malice, 'that because you sell antiques and can run a racing stable, you are overestimating yourself.'

'I no longer sell antiques,' I pointed out calmly. As he knew perfectly well.

'The principles are different,' he said.

'The principles of all businesses are the same.'

'Rubbish.'

'Get the costs right and supply what the customer wants.'

'I can't see you supplying winners.' He was contemptuous.

'Well,' I said moderately, 'I can't see why not.'

'Can't you?' he asked acidly. 'Can't you, indeed?'

'Not if you will give me your advice.'

He gave me instead a long wordless stare while he searched for an adequate answer. The pupils in his grey eyes had contracted to micro-dots. There was no tension left in the muscles which had stiffened his jaw.

'You must get someone else,' he said: but the words had begun to slur. I made a non-committal movement of my head halfway between a nod and a shake, and the argument was over for that day. He asked after that merely about the horses. I told him how they had each performed during their workouts, and he seemed to forget that he didn't believe I understood what I had seen. When I left him, a short while later, he was again on the edge of sleep.

I rang the door bell of my own flat in Hampstead, two long and two short, and got three quick buzzes back, which meant come on in. So I fitted my key into the latch and opened the door.

Gillie's voice floated disembodiedly across the hall.

'I'm in your bedroom.'

'Convenient,' I said to myself with a smile. But she was painting the walls.

'Didn't expect you tonight,' she said, when I kissed her. She held her arms away from me so as not to smear yellow ochre on my jacket. There was a yellow streak on her forehead and a dusting of it on her shining chestnut hair and she looked companionable and easy. Gillie at thirty-six had a figure no model would have been seen dead in, and an attractive lived-in face with wisdom looking out of grey-green eyes. She was sure and mature and much travelled in spirit, and had left behind her one collapsed marriage and one dead child. She had answered an advertisement for a tenant which I had put in The Times, and for two and a half years she had been my tenant and a lot else.

'What do you think of this colour?' she said. 'And we're having a cinnamon carpet and green and shocking pink striped curtains.'

'You can't mean it.'

'It will look ravishing.'

'Ugh,' I said, but she simply laughed. When she had taken the flat it had had white walls, polished furniture and blue fabrics. Gillie had retained only the furniture, and Sheraton and Chippendale would have choked over their new settings.

'You look tired,' she said. 'Want some coffee?'

'And a sandwich, if there's any bread.'

She thought. 'There's some crisp-bread, anyway.'

She was permanently on diets and her idea of dieting was not to buy food. This led to a lot of eating out, which completely defeated the object.

Gillie had listened attentively to my wise dictums about laying in suitable protein like eggs and cheese and then continued happily in the same old ways, which brought me early on to believe that she really did not lust after a beauty contest figure, but was content as long as she did not burst out of her forty-inch hip dresses. Only when they got tight did she actually shed half a stone. She could if she wanted to. She didn't obsessively want.

'How is your father?' she asked, as I crunched my way through a sandwich of rye crisp-bread and slices of raw tomato.

'It's still hurting him.'

'I would have thought they could have stopped that.'

'Well they do, most of the time. And the sister in charge told me this evening that he will be all right in a day or two. They aren't worried about his leg any more. The wound has started healing cleanly, and it should all be settling down soon and giving him an easier time.'

'He's not young, of course.'

'Sixty-seven,' I agreed.

'The bones will take a fair time to mend.'

'Mm.'

'I suppose you've found someone to hold the fort.'

'No,' I said, 'I'm staying there myself.'

'Oh boy, oh boy,' she said, 'I might have guessed.'

I looked at her enquiringly with my mouth full of bits.

'Anything which smells of challenge is your meat and drink.'

'Not this one,' I said with feeling.

'It will be unpopular with the stable,' she diagnosed, 'and apoplectic to your father, and a riotous success.'

'Correct on the first two, way out on the third.'

She shook her head with the glint of a smile. 'Nothing is impossible for the whiz kids.'

She knew I disliked the journalese term, and I knew she liked to use it. 'My lover is a whiz kid,' she said once into a hush at a sticky party: and the men mobbed her.

She poured me a glass of the marvellous Chateau Lafite 1961 which she sacrilegiously drank with anything from caviare to baked beans. It had seemed to me when she moved in that her belongings consisted almost entirely of fur coats and cases of wine, all of which she had precipitously inherited from her mother and father respectively when they died together in Morocco in an earthquake. She had sold the coats because she thought they made her look fat, and had set about drinking her way gradually through the precious bins that wine merchants were wringing their hands over.