Reflex Page 10

  “My mother,” I said, “was seventeen.”

  “Um. That’s right.” He smiled. “Funny, isn’t it, to think of one’s mother being so young.”

  Poor defenseless little butterfly . . . “Yes,” I said.

  “Your grandmother says . . . has agreed . . . that if you will look for Amanda she will tell you why she threw Caroline out. And also she will tell you who your father is.”

  “My God!”

  I took two compulsive steps away from him, and stopped, and turned, and stared at him.

  “Is that what you said to her?” I demanded. “Tell him who his father is, and he’ll do what you want?”

  “You don’t know who your father is,” he said reasonably. “But you’d want to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  We practically glared at each other.

  “You have to want to know,” he said. “It’s human nature.”

  I swallowed. “Did she tell you who he is?”

  He shook his head. “No. She didn’t. She’s apparently never told anyone. No one at all. If you don’t go and find out, you’ll never know.”

  “You’re a real bastard, Jeremy,” I said.

  He wriggled his body with an embarrassment he didn’t actually feel. The light in his eyes, which would have done a checkmating chessplayer justice, was a far more accurate indicator of how he operated.

  I said bitterly, “I thought solicitors were supposed to sit behind desks and pontificate, not go tearing about manipulating old ladies.”

  “This particular old lady is a . . . a challenge.”

  I had an idea he had changed his sentence in midstride, but I said only, “Why doesn’t she leave her money to her son?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t give reasons. She told my grandfather simply that she wanted to cancel her old will, which left everything to her son, and make a new one in favor of Amanda. The son will contest it, of course. We’ve told her that, but it makes no difference. She’s . . . er . . . stubborn.”

  “Have you met her son?”

  “No,” he said. “Have you?”

  I shook my head. Jeremy took another long vague look around the racecourse and said, “Why don’t we get cracking on this together? We’d turn Amanda up in no time, wouldn’t we? Then you could go back into your shell and forget the whole thing, if you want.”

  “You couldn’t forget . . . who your father was.”

  His gaze sharpened instantly. “Are you on, then?”

  He would persevere, I thought, with or without my help. He would bother me whenever he wanted, catch me at the races any day he cared to read the programs in the newspapers, and never let up, because he wanted, as he’d told me at the beginning, to prove to his grandfather and uncle that when he set his mind to sorting something out, it got sorted.

  As for me . . . the mists around my birth were there for the parting. The cataclysm which had echoed like a storm receding over the horizon through my earliest memories could at last be explained and understood. I could learn what the shouting had been about behind the white-painted door, while I waited in the hall in my new clothes.

  I might in the event detest the man who’d fathered me. I might be horrified. I might wish I hadn’t been told anything about him. But Jeremy was right. Given the chance . . . one had to know.

  “Well?” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Find her together?”

  “Yes.”

  He was visibly pleased. “That’s great.”

  I wasn’t so sure; but it was settled.

  “Can you go this evening?” he said. “I’ll telephone and tell her you’re coming.” He plunged lankily towards the public telephone box and disappeared inside with his eyes switched anxiously my way, watching all through his call to make sure I didn’t go back on my decision and scram.

  The call, however, gave him no joy.

  “Blast,” he said, rejoining me. “I spoke to a nurse. Mrs. Nore had a bad day and they’ve given her an injection. She’s asleep. No visitors. Ring tomorrow.”

  I felt a distinct sense of relief, which he noticed.

  “It’s all very well for you,” I said. “But how would you like to be on the verge of finding out that you owe your existence to a quickie in the bushes with the milkman?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Something like that. It has to be, doesn’t it?”

  “All the same . . .” he said doubtfully.

  “All the same,” I agreed resignedly, “one wants to know.”

  I set off towards the parking lot thinking that Jeremy’s errand was concluded, but it appeared not. He came in my wake, but slowly, so that I looked back and waited.

  “About Mrs. Nore’s son,” he said. “Her son James.”

  “What about him?”

  “I just thought you might visit him. Find out why he’s been disinherited.”

  “You just thought . . .”

  “As we’re working together,” he said hastily.

  “You could go yourself,” I suggested.

  “Er, no,” he said. “As Mrs. Nore’s solicitor, I’d be asking questions I shouldn’t.”

  “And I can just see this James bird answering mine.”

  He pulled a card out of his charcoal pocket. “I brought his address,” he said, holding it out. “And you’ve promised to help.”

  “A pact is a pact,” I said, and took the card. “But you’re still a bastard.

  8

  James Nore lived in London, and since I was more than halfway there I drove straight from the races to the house on Camden Hill. I hoped all the way there that he would be out, but when I’d found the street and the number and pressed the right bell, the door was opened by a man of about forty who agreed that James Nore was his name.

  He was astounded, as well he might be, to find an unknown nephew standing unannounced on his mat, but with only a slight hesitation he invited me in, leading the way into a sitting room crammed with Victorian bric-a-brac and vibrant with color.

  “I thought Caroline had aborted you,” he said baldly. “Mother said the child had been got rid of.”

  He was nothing like my memories of his sister. He was plump, soft-muscled and small-mouthed, and had a mournful droop to his eyes. None of her giggly lightness or grace of movement or hectic speed could ever have lived in his flaccid body. I felt ill at ease with him on sight, disliking my errand more by the minute.

  He listened with his small lips pouted while I explained about looking for Amanda, and he showed more and more annoyance.

  “The old bag’s been saying for months that she’s going to cut me off,” he said furiously. “Ever since she came here.” He glanced around the room, but nothing there seemed to me likely to alienate a mother. “Everything was all right as long as I went to Northamptonshire now and then. Then she came here. Uninvited. The old bag.”

  “She’s ill now,” I said.

  “Of course she is.” He flung out his arms in an exaggerated gesture. “I suggest visiting. She says no. Won’t see me. Pigheaded old crone.”

  A brass clock on the mantelshelf sweetly chimed the half hour, and I took note that everything there was of fine quality and carefully dusted. James Nore’s bric-a-brac wasn’t just junk but antiques.

  “I’d be a fool to help you find this wretched second by-blow of Caroline’s, wouldn’t I?” he said. “If no one can find her, the whole estate reverts to me anyway, will or no will. But I’d have to wait years for it. Years and years. Mother’s just being spiteful.”

  “Why?” I said mildly.

  “She loved Noel Coward,” he said resentfully, meaning, by the sound of it, if she loved Noel Coward she should have loved him.

  “The abstract,” I said, enlightened, “isn’t always the same as the particular.”

  “I didn’t want her to come here. It would have saved all this fuss if she hadn’t.” He shrugged. “Are you goi
ng now? There’s no point in your staying.”

  He began to walk towards the door, but before he reached it, it was opened by a man wearing a plastic cooking apron and limply carrying a wooden spoon. He was much younger than James, naturally camp, and unmistakable.

  “Oh, hello dear,” he said, seeing me. “Are you staying for supper?”

  “He’s just going,” James said sharply. “He’s not . . . er . . .”

  They both stood back to leave me room to pass, and as I went out into the hall I said to the man in the apron, “Did you meet Mrs. Nore when she came here?”

  “Sure did, dear,” he said ruefully, and then caught sight of James shaking his head vigorously at him and meaning shut up. I smiled halfheartedly at a point in the air near their heads, and went to the front door.

  “I wish you bad luck,” James said. “That beastly Caroline, spawning all over the place. I never did like her.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Always laughing at me and tripping me up. I was glad when she went.”

  I nodded, and opened the door.

  “Wait,” he said suddenly.

  He came towards me along the hall, and I could see he had had an idea that pleased him.

  “Mother would never leave you anything, of course,” he began.

  “Why not?” I said.

  He frowned. “There was a terrible drama, wasn’t there, when Caroline got pregnant? Frightful scenes. Lots of screaming. I remember it . . . but no one would ever explain. All I do know is that everything changed because of you. Caroline went and Mother turned into a bitter old bag and I had beastly miserable years in that big house with her, before I left. She hated you . . . the thought of you. Do you know what she called you? ‘Caroline’s disgusting fetus,’ that’s what. Caroline’s disgusting fetus.”

  He peered at me expectantly, but in truth I felt nothing. The old woman’s hatred hadn’t troubled me for years.

  “I’ll give you some of the money, though,” he said, “if you can prove that Amanda is dead.”

  On Saturday morning Jeremy Folk telephoned.

  “Will you be at home tomorrow?” he said.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Good. I’ll be over.” He put down his receiver without giving me a chance to say I didn’t want him. It was an advance, I supposed, that he’d announced his visit and not simply turned up.

  Also on Saturday I ran into Bart Underfield in the post office and in place of our usual unenthusiastic “good mornings” I asked him a question.

  “Where is Elgin Yaxley these days, Bart?”

  “Hong Kong,” he said.

  “For a holiday?” I said.

  “Of course not. He lives there.”

  “But he’s over here now, isn’t he?”

  “No, he isn’t. He’d’ve told me.”

  “But he must be,” I said insistently.

  Bart said irritably, “Why must he be? He isn’t. He’s working for a bloodstock agency and they don’t give him much time off. And what’s it to do with you?”

  “I just thought . . . I saw him.”

  “You couldn’t have. When?”

  “Oh . . . last week. A week ago yesterday.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” Bart said triumphantly. “That was the day of George Millace’s funeral, and Elgin sent me a cable . . .” He hesitated and his eyes flickered, but he went on. “And the cable came from Hong Kong.”

  “A cable of regrets, was it?”

  “George Millace,” Bart said with venom, “was a shit.”

  “You didn’t go to the funeral yourself, then?”

  “Are you crazy? I’d have spat on his coffin.”

  “Catch you bending with his camera, did he Bart?”

  He narrowed his eyes and didn’t answer.

  “Oh well,” I said, shrugging, “I must say a good many people will be relieved now he’s gone.”

  “More like down on their knees giving thanks.”

  “Do you ever hear anything nowadays about that chap who shot Elgin’s horses? What’s his name . . . Terence O’Tree?”

  “He’s still in jail,” Bart said.

  “But,” I said, counting with my fingers, “March, April, May . . . he should be out by now.”

  “He lost his remission,” Bart said. “He hit a warder.”

  “How do you know?” I asked curiously.

  “I . . . er . . . heard.” He had suddenly had too much of this conversation, and began backing away.

  “And did you hear also that George Millace’s house had burned down?” I said.

  He nodded. “Of course. Heard it at the races.”

  “And that it was arson?”

  He stopped in midstride. “Arson?” he said, looking surprised. “Why would anyone want . . . ? Oh!” He abruptly at that point understood why; and I thought that he couldn’t possibly have achieved that revelationary expression by art.

  He hadn’t known.

  Elgin Yaxley was in Hong Kong and Terence O’Tree was in jail, and neither they nor Bart Underfield had burgled or beaten or burned.

  The easy explanations were all wrong.

  I had jumped, I thought penitently, to conclusions.

  It was only because I’d disliked George Millace that I’d been so ready to believe ill of him. He had taken that incriminating photograph, but there was really nothing to prove that he’d used it, except that Elgin Yaxley had taken a paid job in Hong Kong instead of plowing his insurance money back into racehorses. Still any man had a right to do that. It didn’t make him a villain.

  Yet he had been a villain. He had sworn he’d never met Terence O’Tree, and he had. And it had to have been before the trial in February at least, since O’Tree had been in jail ever since. Not during the winter months just before the trial either, because it had been siting-in-the-street weather; and there had been . . . I had unconsciously noticed and now remembered . . . there had been a newspaper lying on the table in front of the Frenchman, on which one might possibly see a date.

  I walked slowly and thoughtfully home, and projected my big new print hugely onto the sitting room wall through an epidiascope.

  The Frenchman’s newspaper lay too flat on the table. Neither the date nor any useful headlines could be seen.

  Regretfully I studied the rest of the picture for anything at all which might date it; in the background, beside Madame at her cash desk inside the cafe, there was a calendar hanging on a hook. The letters and numbers on it could be discerned by the general shape even if not with pin-sharp clarity, and they announced that it was Avril of the previous year.

  Elgin Yaxley’s horses had been sent out to grass late that same month, and they had been shot on the fourth of May.

  I switched off the projector and drove to Windsor races puzzling over the inconsistencies and feeling that I had gone around a corner in a maze confidently expecting to have reached the center only to find myself in a dead end surrounded by ten-foot hedges.

  It was a moderate day’s racing at Windsor, all the star names having gone to the more important meeting at Cheltenham, and because of the weak opposition one of Harold’s slowest old ’chasers finally had his day. Half of the rest of the equally old runners obligingly fell, and my geriatric pal with his head down in exhaustion loped in first after three and a half miles of slog.

  He stood with his chest heaving in the unsaddling enclosure as I, scarcely less tired, lugged at the girth buckles and pulled off my saddle, but the surprised delight of his faithful elderly lady owner made it all well worth the effort.

  “I knew he’d do it one day,” she said enthusiastically. “I knew he would. Isn’t he a great old boy?”

  “Great,” I agreed.

  “It’s his last season, you know. I’ll have to retire him.” She patted his neck. “We’re all getting on a bit, old boy, aren’t we? Can’t go on forever, more’s the pity. Everything ends, doesn’t it, old boy? But today it’s been great.”

  I went in and sat on the
scales and her words came with me; everything ends, but today it’s been great. Ten years had been great, but everything ends.

  My mind still rebelled against the thought of retirement, particularly one dictated by Victor Briggs; but somewhere the frail seedling of acceptance was stretching its first leaf in the dark. Life changes, everything ends. I myself was changing. I didn’t want it, but it was happening. My long contented float was slowly drifting to shore.

  Outside the weighing room one wouldn’t have guessed it. I had uncharacteristically won four races that week. I was the jockey in form. I had brought a no-hoper home. I was offered five rides for the following week by trainers other than Harold. The success-breeds-success syndrome was coming up trumps. Everything on a high note, with smiles all around. Seven days away from Daylight, and seven leagues in mood.

  I enjoyed the congratulations and thrust away the doubt, and if anyone had asked me in that moment about retiring I’d’ve said, “Oh yes . . . in five years’ time.”

  They didn’t ask me. They didn’t expect me to retire. “Retire” was a word in my mind, not in theirs.

  Jeremy Folk arrived the following morning, as he’d said he would, angling his storklike figure apologetically through my front door and following me along to the kitchen.

  “Champagne?” I said, picking a bottle out of the refrigerator.

  “It’s . . . er . . . only ten o’clock,” he said.

  “Four winners,” I said, “need celebrating. Would you rather have coffee?”

  “Er . . . actually . . . no.”

  He took his first sip all the same as if the wickedness of it would overwhelm him, and I thought that for all his wily ways he was a conformist at heart.

  He had made an effort to be casual in his clothes: wool checked shirt, woolly tie, neat pale-blue sweater. Whatever he thought of my unbuttoned collar, unbuttoned cuffs and unshaven jaw, he didn’t say. He let his gaze do its usual inventorial travel and as usual return to my face when he’d shaped his question.

  “Did you see . . . ah . . . James Nore?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I gestured to him to sit on the leather-covered corner bench around the kitchen table, and joined him, with the bottle in reach.