Longshot (14 page)

“No, definitely not. I
am
well. I’ve never felt better in my whole life. I am gloriously and immensely well. Give me a leg-up.”

I told her she needed to rest but she obstinately refused, and in the end I bowed to her judgment and lifted her lightly into the saddle, scrambling up myself onto Touchy’s broad back. She shook up her reins as if nothing had happened and set off up the wood chippings at a medium canter, glancing back for me to follow. I joined her expecting to go the whole way at that conservative pace but she quickened immediately when I reached her and I could hardly hang back and say hold on a minute, I haven’t done this in a while and could easily fall off. Instead, I tucked in my elbows as instructed and relied on luck.

Towards the end Mackie kicked her horse into a frank gallop and it was at that speed that we both passed Tremayne. I was peripherally aware of him standing four-square on the small observation mound, though all my direct attention was acutely focused on balance, grip and what lay ahead between Touchy’s ears.

Touchy, I thanked heaven, slowed when Mackie slowed and brought himself to a good-natured halt without dumping his rider, Friday or not. I was breathless and also exhilarated and thought I could easily get hooked on Touchy after a fix or two more like that.

“Where the hell did you get to?” Tremayne inquired of me, joining us and the rest of the string. “I thought you’d chickened out.”

“We were just talking,” Mackie said.

Tremayne looked at her now glowing face and probably drew the wrong conclusion but made no further comment. He told everyone to walk back down the gallop and dismount and lead them the last part of the way, as usual.

Mackie, taking her place at the head, asked me to ride at the back, to make sure everyone returned safely, which I did. Tremayne’s tractor followed slowly, at a distance.

He came stamping into the kitchen, where I was fishing out orange juice and without preamble demanded, “What were you and Mackie talking about?”

“She’ll tell you,” I said, smiling.

He said belligerently, “Mackie’s off limits.”

I put down the orange juice and straightened, not knowing quite what to say.

“If you mean do I fancy Mackie,” I said, “then yes, she’s a great girl. But off limits is right. We were not flirting, chatting up, or whatever else you care to call it.
Not
.”

After a grudging minute he said, “All right then,” and I thought that in his way he was as possessive of Mackie as Perkin was.

A short while later, munching the toast I’d made for him, he seemed to have forgotten it.

“You can ride out every morning,” he said, “if you’d like.”

He could see I was pleased. I said, “I’d like it very much.”

“Settled, then.”

The day passed in the way that had become routine: clippings, beef sandwiches, taping, evening drinks, Gareth home, cook the dinner. Dee-Dee’s distrust of me had vanished ; Perkin’s hadn’t. Tremayne seemed to have accepted my assurance of the morning, and Mackie smiled into her plain tonic and carefully avoided my eyes for fear of revealing that a secret lay between us.

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING I rode Touchy again but Mackie didn’t materialize, having phoned Tremayne to say she wasn’t well: but she and Perkin appeared in the kitchen during breakfast, he with an arm around her shoulders in a supremely proprietary way.

“We’ve something to tell you,” Perkin said to Tremayne.

“Oh, yes?” Tremayne was busy with some papers.

“Yes. Do pay attention. We’re having a baby.”

“We think so,” Mackie said.

Tremayne paid attention abruptly and was clearly profoundly delighted. Not an overdemonstrative man, he didn’t leap up to embrace them but literally purred in his throat like a cat and beat the table with his fist. Son and daughter-in-law had no difficulty in reading the signals and looked smugly pleased with themselves, sitting down, drinking coffee and working out that the birth would occur in September, but they weren’t quite sure of the date.

Mackie gave me a shy smile which Perkin forgave. Each of them looked more in love with the other, more relaxed, as if the earlier failure to conceive had caused tension between them, now relieved.

After that excitement I labored all morning again on the clippings, unsustained by cups from Dee-Dee, who didn’t work on Saturdays. Gareth went to Saturday morning school and pinned a second message on the corkboard—FOOTBALL MATCH PM—leaving BACK FOR GRUB in place.

Tremayne, cursing the persistent absence of racing even on television, taped the saga of his younger life up to the time he accompanied his father to a brothel.

“My father wouldn’t have anybody but the madam and she said she’d retired long ago but she accommodated him in the end. Couldn’t resist him, the mad old charmer.”

In the evening I fed the three of us on lamb chops, peas and potatoes in their skins and on Sunday morning Fiona and Harry came to the stables to see her horses and drink with Tremayne afterwards in the family room. Nolan came with them, but not Lewis. An aunt of Harry’s, another Mrs. Goodhaven, tagged quietly along. Mackie, Perkin and Gareth congregated as if to a normal ritual.

Mackie couldn’t keep her good news to herself, and Fiona and Harry hugged her while Perkin looked important and Nolan gave halfhearted congratulations. Tremayne opened champagne.

 

 

AT ABOUT THAT time, ten miles away in lonely woodland, a gamekeeper came across what was left of Angela Brickell.

T
he discovery made no impact on Shellerton on that

Sunday because at first no one knew whose bones lay among the dead brambles and the dormant oaks.

The gamekeeper went home to his Sunday lunch and telephoned the local police after he’d eaten, feeling that as the bones were old it wouldn’t matter if they waited one hour longer.

 

 

IN TREMAYNE’S HOUSE, when the toasts to the future Vickers had been drunk, Gareth showed Fiona a couple of the travel guides and Fiona in astonishment showed Harry. Nolan picked up
Safari
as if absentmindedly and said that no one but a bloody fool would go hunting tigers in Africa.

“There aren’t any tigers in Africa,” Gareth said.

“That’s right. He’d be a bloody fool.”

“Oh ... it’s a joke,” Gareth said, obviously feeling that it was he who’d been made a fool of. “Very funny.”

Nolan, though the shortest man there, physically dominated the room, eclipsing even Tremayne. His strong animal vigor and powerful saturnine features seemed to charge the very air with static, as if his presence alone could generate sparks. One could see how Mackie had been struck by lightning. One could see how Olympia might have died by violent accident. One’s reactions to Nolan had little to do with reason, all with instinct.

Harry’s aunt was looking into
Ice
in a faintly superior way as if confronted with a manifestation of the lower orders.

“How frightfully
rugged
,” she said, her voice as languid as Harry’s but without the God-given amusement.

“Er,” Harry said to me. “I didn’t introduce you properly. I must present you to my aunt, Erica Goodhaven. She’s a writer.”

There was a subterranean flood of mischief in his eyes. Fiona glanced at me with a hint of a smile and I thought both of them looked as though I were about to be thrown to the lions for their entertainment. Anticipation of enjoyment, loud and clear.

“Erica,” Harry said, “John wrote these books.”

“And a novel,” Tremayne said defensively, coming to an aid I didn’t realize I needed. “It’s going to be published. And he’s writing my biography.”

“A
novel
,” Harry’s aunt said, in the same way as before. “Going to be published. How interesting. I, also, write novels. Under my unmarried name, Erica Upton.”

Thrown to a literary lion, I perceived. A real one, a lioness. Erica Upton’s five-star prize-winning reputation was for erudition, elegant syntax, esoteric backgrounds, elegiac characters and a profound understanding of incest.

“Your aunt?” I said to Harry.

“By marriage.”

Tremayne refilled my glass with champagne as if I would need it and muttered under his breath, “She’ll eat you.”

From across the room she did look faintly predatory at that moment, though was otherwise a slender, intense-looking gray-haired woman in a gray wool dress with flat shoes and no jewelry. A quintessential aunt, I thought; except that most people’s aunts weren’t Erica Upton.

“What is your novel
about
?” she inquired of me. Her voice was patronizing but I didn’t mind that: she was entitled to it.

The others all waited with her to hear my answer. Incredible, I thought, that nine people in one room weren’t carrying on several noisy separate conversations, as usually happened.

“It’s about survival,” I said politely.

Everyone listened. Everyone always listened to Erica Upton.

“What sort of survival?” she asked. “Medical? Economic? Creative?”

“It’s about some travelers cut off by an earthquake. About how they coped. It’s called Long Way
Home
.”

“How
quaint
,” she said.

She wasn’t intending to be outright offensive, I thought. She seemed merely to know that her own work was on a summit I would never reach, and in that she was right. All the same I felt again the mild recklessness that I had on Touchy: even if I lacked confidence, relax and have a go.

“My agent says,” I said neutrally, “that
Long Way Home
is really about the spiritual consequences of deprivation and fear.”

She knew a gauntlet when she heard one. I saw the stiffening in her body and suspected it in her mind.

She said, “You are too young to write with authority of spiritual consequences. Too young for your soul to have been tempered. Too young to have learned the intensity of understanding that comes only through deep adversity.”

Was that true? I wondered. How old was old enough?

I said, “Shouldn’t contentment be allowed its insights?”

“It has none. Insight grows best on stony ground. Unless you have suffered or are poor or can tap into melancholy, you have defective perception.”

I rolled with that one. Sought for a response.

“I
am
poor,” I said. “Well, fairly. Poor enough to perceive that poverty is the enemy of moral strength.”

She peered at me as if measuring a prey for the pounce. “You are a lightweight person,” she said, “if you have no conception of the moral strength of redemption and atonement in penury.”

I swallowed. “I don’t seek sainthood. I seek insight through a combination of imagination and common sense.”

“You are not a serious writer.” A dire accusation; her worst.

“I write to entertain,” I said.

“I,” she said simply, “write to enlighten.”

I could find no possible answer. I said wryly, with a bow, “I am defeated.”

She laughed with pleasure, her muscles loosening. The lion had devoured the sacrifice and all was well. She turned away to begin talking to Fiona, and Harry made his way to my side, watching me dispatch my champagne with a gulp.

“You didn’t do too badly,” he said. “Nice brisk duel.”

“She ran me through.”

“Oh, yes. Never mind. Good sport, though.”

“You set it up.”

He grinned. “She phoned this morning. She comes occasionally for lunch, so I told her to beetle over. Couldn’t resist it.”

“What a pal.”

“Be honest. You enjoyed it.”

I sighed. “She outguns me by far.”

“She’s more than twice your age.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Seriously,” he said, as if he thought my ego needed patching, “these survival guides are pretty good. Do you mind if we take a few of them home?”

“They’re Tremayne’s and Gareth’s, really.”

“I’ll ask them, then.” He looked at me shrewdly. “Nothing wrong with your courage, is there?”

“How do you mean?”

“You took her on. You didn’t have to.”

I half laughed. “My agent calls it impulsive behavior. He says it will kill me, one day.”

“You’re older than you look,” he said cryptically, and went off to talk to Tremayne.

Mackie, her drink all but untouched, took his place as kind blotter of bleeding feelings.

“It’s not fair of her to call you lightweight,” she said. “Harry shouldn’t have brought her. I know she’s highly revered but she can make people cry. I’ve seen her do it.”

“My eyes are dry,” I said. “Are you drinking that champagne?”

“I’d better not, I suppose.”

“Care to give it to the walking wounded?”

She smiled her brilliant smile and we exchanged glasses.

“Actually,” she said, “I didn’t understand all Erica was saying.”

“She was saying she’s cleverer than me.”

“I.”

“I,” I agreed.

“I’ll bet she can’t catch people who’re fainting off horses.”

Mackie was, as Tremayne had said, a sweet young woman.

 

 

ANGELA BRICKELL’S REMAINS lay on the Quillersedge Estate at the western edge of the Chilterns.

The Quillersedge gamekeeper arranged on the telephone for the local police to collect him from his cottage on the estate and drive as near to the bones as possible on the estate’s private roads. From there, everyone would have to go through the woods on foot.

The few policemen on duty on Sunday afternoon thought of cold wet undergrowth and shivered.

 

 

IN TREMAYNE’S HOUSE, the informal party lingered cheerfully. Fiona and Mackie sat on a sofa, silver-blond head beside dark red-brown, talking about Mackie’s baby. Nolan discussed with Tremayne the horses Nolan hoped still to be riding when racing resumed. Gareth handed around potato chips while eating most of them himself, and Perkin read aloud how to return safely from getting lost. “‘Go downhill, not up,”’ he read. “‘People live in valleys. Follow streams in their flow direction. People live beside rivers.’ I can’t imagine I’ll ever need this advice. I steer clear of jungles.”