Reflex Read online

  “Come on, Philip. We’ll never ask her for anything, ever again. She wouldn’t even see you. Don’t you ever forget, Philip, that your grandmother’s a hateful beast.”

  I hadn’t forgotten. I’d thought of it rarely, but I still clearly remembered sitting in the chair in the hall, my feet not touching the ground, waiting stiffly in my new clothes, listening to the shouting.

  I had never actually lived with my mother, except for a traumatic week or two now and then. We had had no house, no address, no permanent base. Herself always on the move, she had solved the problem of what to do with me by simply dumping me for varying periods with a long succession of mostly astonished married friends, who had been, in retrospect, remarkably tolerant.

  “Do look after Philip for me for a few days, darling,” she would say, giving me a push towards yet another strange lady. “Life is so unutterably cluttered just now and I’m at my wits’ end to know what to do with him, you know how it is, so darling Deborah . . . (or Miranda, or Chloe, or Samantha, or anyone else under the sun) . . . do be an absolute sweetie, and I’ll pick him up on Saturday, I promise.” And mostly she would have soundly kissed darling Deborah or Miranda or Chloe or Samantha and gone off with a wave in a cloud of Joy.

  Saturdays came and my mother didn’t, but she always turned up in the end, full of flutter and laughter and gushing thanks, retrieving her parcel, so to speak, from the left luggage office. I could remain uncollected for days or for weeks or for months: I never knew which in advance, and nor, I suspect, did my hosts. Mostly, I think, she paid something towards my keep, but it was all done with a giggle.

  She was, even to my eyes, deliciously pretty, to the extent that people hugged her and indulged her and lit up when she was around. Only later, when they were left literally holding the baby, did the doubts creep in. I became a bewildered silent child forever tiptoeing nervously around so as not to give offense, perennially frightened that someone, one day, would abandon me altogether out in the street.

  Looking back, I knew I owed a great deal to Samantha, Deborah, Chloe, et al. I never went hungry, was never ill-treated, nor was ever, in the end, totally rejected. Occasionally people took me in twice or three times, sometimes with welcome, mostly with resignation. When I was three or four someone in long hair and bangles and an ethnic smock taught me to read and write, but I never stayed anywhere long enough to be formally sent to school. It was an extraordinary, disorienting and rootless existence from which I emerged at twelve, when I was dumped in my first long-stay home, able to do almost any job around the house and unable to love.

  She left me with two photographers, Duncan and Charlie, standing in their big bare-floored studio, which had a darkroom, a bathroom, a gas ring and a bed behind a curtain.

  “Darlings, look after him until Saturday, there’s a sweet pair of lambs . . .” And although birthday cards arrived, and presents at Christmas, I didn’t see her again for three years. Then when Duncan departed, she swooped in one day and took me away from Charlie, and drove me down to a racehorse trainer and his wife in Hampshire, telling those bemused friends, “It’s only until Saturday, darlings, and he’s fifteen and strong, he’ll muck out the horses for you, and things like that . . .”

  Cards and presents arrived for two years or so, always without an address to reply to. On my eighteenth birthday there was no card, and no present the following Christmas, and I’d never heard from her again.

  She must have died, I had come to understand, from drugs. There was a great deal, as I grew older, that I’d sorted out and understood.

  The old woman glared across the room, as unforgiving and destructive as ever, and still angry at what I’d said.

  “You won’t get far with me if you talk like that,” she said.

  “I don’t want to get far.” I stood up. “This visit is pointless. If you wanted to find your daughter, you should have looked twenty years ago. And as for me . . . I wouldn’t find her for you, even if I could.”

  “I don’t want you to find Caroline. I dare say you’re right, that she’s dead.” The idea clearly caused her no grief. “I want you to find your sister.”

  “My . . . what?”

  The hostile dark eyes assessed me shrewdly. “You didn’t know you had a sister? Well, you have. I’ll leave you a hundred thousand pounds in my will if you find her and bring her here to me. And don’t think,” she went on caustically, before I had time to utter, “that you can produce any little imposter and expect me to believe it. I’m old but I’m far from a fool. You would have to prove to Mr. Folk’s satisfaction that the girl was my grandchild. And Mr. Folk would not be easy to convince.”

  I scarcely heard the acid words, but felt only a curiously intense thrust of shock. There had been only one of me. One single fruit of the butterfly. I felt an unreasonable but stinging jealousy that she had had another. She had been mine alone, and now I had to share her: to revise and share her memory. I thought in confusion that it was ridiculous to be experiencing at thirty the displacement emotions of two.

  “Well?” my grandmother said sharply.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s a lot of money,” she snapped.

  “If you’ve got it.”

  She was again outraged. “You’re insolent!”

  “Oh, sure. Well, if that’s all, I’ll be going.” I turned and went towards the door.

  “Wait,” she said urgently. “Don’t you even want to see her picture? There’s a photograph of your sister over there in the chest.”

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw her nodding towards a chest of drawers across the room. She must have seen the hesitation that slowed my hand on the doorknob because she said with more confidence, “Just look at her, then. Why don’t you look?”

  Without positively wanting to but impelled by undeniable curiosity I walked over to the chest and looked. There was a snapshot lying there, an ordinary postcard-sized family-album print. I picked it up and tilted it towards the light.

  A little girl, three or fours years old, on a pony.

  The child, with shoulder-length brown hair, wore a red and white striped T-shirt and a pair of jeans. The pony was an unremarkable Welsh gray, with clean-looking tack. Photographed in what was evidently a stable yard, they both looked contented and well fed, but the photographer had been standing too far away to bring out much detail in the child’s face. Enlargement would help to some extent.

  I turned the print over, but there was nothing on the back of it to indicate where it had come from, or who had held the camera.

  Vaguely disappointed I put it down again on the chest, and saw, with a wince of nostalgia, an envelope lying there addressed in my mother’s handwriting. Addressed to my grandmother, Mrs. Lavinia Nore, at the old house in Northamptonshire where I’d had to wait in the hall.

  In the envelope, a letter.

  “What are you doing?” said my grandmother in alarm.

  “Reading a letter from my mother.”

  “But I—that letter shouldn’t be out. Put it down at once. I thought it was in the drawer.”

  I ignored her. The loopy extravagant extrovert writing came freshly to me off the paper as if she’d been there in the room, gushing and half laughing, calling out as always for help.

  That letter, dated only October 2, was no joke.

  Dear Mother,

  I know I said I would never ask you for anything ever again but I’m having one more try because I still hope, silly me, that one day you might change your mind. I am sending you a photograph of my daughter, Amanda, your granddaughter. She is very sweet and darling and she’s three now, and she needs a proper home and to go to school and everything, and I know you wouldn’t want a child around but if you’d just give her an allowance or even do one of those trust things for her, she could live with some perfectly angelic people who love her and want to keep her but simply can’t afford everything for another child as they’ve three of their own already. If you could pay something regularly into their b
ank account you wouldn’t even notice it and it would mean your granddaughter was brought up in a happy home and I am so desperate to get that for her that I’m writing to you now.

  She hasn’t the same father as Philip, so you couldn’t hate her for the same reasons, and if you’d see her you’d love her, but even if you won’t see her, please, Mother, look after her. I’ll hope to hear from you soon. Please, please, Mother, answer this letter.

  Your daughter,

  Caroline

  Staying at Pine Woods Lodge,

  Mindle Bridge, Sussex.

  I looked up and across at the hard old woman.

  “When did she write this?”

  “Years ago.” She shrugged irritably. “I can’t remember.”

  “And you didn’t reply,” I said flatly.

  “No.”

  I suppose it was no good getting angry over so old a tragedy. I looked at the envelope to try to see the date of the letter from the postmark, but it was smudged and undecipherable. How long, I wondered, had she waited at Pine Woods Lodge, hoping and caring and desperate? Desperation, of course, when it concerned my mother, was always a relative term. Desperation was a laugh and an outstretched hand—and the Lord (or Deborah or Samantha or Chloe) would provide. Desperation wouldn’t be grim and gritty, but it must have been pretty deep to make her ask her own mother for help.

  I put the letter, the envelope and the photograph in my jacket pocket. It seemed disgusting to me that the old woman had kept them all these years when she had ignored their plea, and I felt in an obscure way that they belonged to me, and not her.

  “So you’ll do it,” she said.

  “No.”

  “But you’re taking the photograph.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then.”

  “If you want . . . Amanda . . . found, you should hire a private detective.”

  “I did,” she said impatiently. “Naturally. Three detectives. They were all useless.”

  “If three failed, she can’t be found,” I said. “There’s no way I could succeed.”

  “More incentive,” she said triumphantly. “You’ll try your damnedest, for that sort of money.”

  “You’re wrong.” I stared bitterly at her across the room, and from her pillow-piled bed she stared as unsmilingly back. “If I took any money from you I’d vomit.”

  I walked over to the door and this time opened it without hesitation.

  To my departing back she said, “Amanda shall have my money . . . if you find her.”

  2

  When I went back to Sandown Park the following day the letter and photograph were still in my pocket but the emotions they had engendered had subsided. The unknown half-sister could be contemplated without infantile rage, and yet another chunk of the past had fallen into place.

  It was the present, in the shape of Steve Millace, which claimed everyone’s attention. He came steaming into the changing room half an hour before the first race with drizzle on his hair and righteous fury in his eyes.

  His mother’s house, he said, had been burgled while they were all out at his father’s funeral.

  We sat in rows on the benches, half-changed into riding clothes, listening with shock. I looked at the scene—jockeys in all stages of undress, in underpants, bare-chested, in silks and pulling on nylon tights and boots, and all of them suddenly still, as if in suspended animation, listening with open mouths and eyes turned towards Steve.

  Almost automatically I reached for my Nikon, twiddled the controls, and took a couple of photographs: and they were all so accustomed to me doing that sort of thing that no one took any notice.

  “It was awful,” Steve said. “Bloody disgusting. She’d made some cakes and things, Mum had, for the aunts and everyone, for when we got back from the cremation, and they were all thrown around the place, squashed flat, jam and such, onto the walls, and stamped into the carpet. And there was more mess everywhere, in the kitchen . . . bathroom . . . It looked as if a herd of mad children had rampaged around the whole house making it as filthy as they could. But it wasn’t children . . . children wouldn’t have stolen all that was taken, the police said.”

  “Your mother have a load of jewels, did she?” said someone, teasing.

  One or two laughed and the first tension was broken, but the sympathy for Steve was genuine enough, and he went on talking about it to anyone who cared to listen; and I did listen, not only because his peg at Sandown was next to mine, which gave me little choice, but also because we always got on well together in a day-to-day superficial way.

  “They stripped Dad’s darkroom,” he said. “Just ripped everything out. And it was senseless . . . like I told the police . . . because they didn’t just take things you could sell, like the enlarger and the developing stuff, but all his work, all those pictures taken over all those years, they’re all gone. It’s such a bloody shame. There’s Mum with all that mess, and Dad dead, and now she hasn’t even got what he spent his life doing. Just nothing. And they took her fur jacket and even the scent Dad gave her for her birthday, that she hadn’t opened, and she’s just sitting there crying—”

  He stopped suddenly and swallowed, as if it was all too much for him too. At twenty-three, although he no longer lived with them, he was still very much his parents’ child, attached to them with a difficult loyalty most people admired. George Millace himself might have been widely disliked, but he had never been belittled by his son.

  Small-boned, slight in build, Steve had bright dark eyes and ears that stuck out widely, giving him an overall slightly comic look; but in character he was more intense than humorous, and was apt, even without so much cause as on that day, to keep on returning obsessively to things which upset him.

  “The police said that burglars do it for spite,” Steve said. “Mess up people’s houses and steal their photographs. They told Mum it’s always happening. They said to be thankful there wasn’t urine and shit over everything, which there often was, and she was lucky she didn’t have the chairs and settee slashed and all the furniture scratched.” He went on compulsively talking to all comers, but I finished changing and went out to ride in the first race, and more or less forgot the Millace burglary for the rest of the afternoon.

  It was a day I had been looking forward to, and trying not to, for nearly a month. The day that Daylight was to run in the Sandown Handicap Pattern ’Chase. A big race, a good horse, moderate opposition, and a great chance of winning. Such combinations came my way rarely enough to be prized, but I never liked to believe in them until I was actually on my way down to the post. Daylight, I’d been told, had arrived at the course safe and sound, and for me there was just the first race, a novice hurdle, to come back unscathed from, and then, perhaps, I would win the big Pattern ’Chase and half a dozen people would fall over themselves to offer me the favorite for the Gold Cup.

  Two races a day was about my usual mark, and if I ended a season in the top twenty on the jockeys’ list, I was happy. For years I’d been able to kid myself that the modesty of my success was due to being taller and heavier than was best for the job. Even with constant semi-starvation I weighed ten stone seven stripped, and was cut off, consequently, from the countless horses running at ten stone ten or less. Most seasons I rode in about two hundred races with forty or so winners, and knew that I was considered “strong,” “reliable,” “good over fences,” and “not first class in a close finish.”

  Most people think, when they’re young, that they’re going to the top of their chosen world, and that the climb up is only a formality. Without that faith, I suppose, they might never start. Somewhere on the way they lift their eyes to the summit and know they aren’t going to reach it; and happiness then is looking down and enjoying the view they’ve got, not envying the one they haven’t. At around twenty-six I’d come to terms with the view I’d reached, and with knowing I wasn’t going any further; and oddly, far from depressing me, the realization had been a relief. I’d never been graspingly ambitious,
but only willing to do anything as well as I could. If I couldn’t do better, well, I couldn’t, and that was that. All the same, I’d no positive objection to having Gold Cup winners thrust upon me, so to speak.

  On that afternoon at Sandown I completed the novice hurdle in an uneventful way (“useful but uninspired”), finishing fifth out of eighteen runners. Not too bad. Just the best that I and the horse could do on the day, same as usual.

  I changed into Daylight’s colors and in due course walked out to the parade ring, feeling nothing but pleasure for the coming race. Daylight’s trainer, for whom I rode regularly, was waiting there, and also Daylight’s owner.

  Daylight’s owner waved away my cheerful opener about its being splendid the drizzle had stopped and said without preamble, “You’ll lose this one today, Philip.”

  I smiled. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Indeed you will,” he said sharply. “Lose it. My money’s on the other way.”

  I don’t suppose I kept much of the dismay and anger out of my face. He had done this sort of thing before, but not for about three years, and he knew I didn’t like it.

  Victor Briggs, Daylight’s owner, was a sturdily built man in his forties, about whose job and background I knew almost nothing. Unsociable, secretive, he came to the races with a closed unsmiling face, and never talked to me much. He wore always a heavy navy blue overcoat, a black broad-brimmed hat and thick black leather gloves. He had been, in the past, an aggressive gambler, and in riding for him I had had the choice of doing what he said or losing my job with the stable. Harold Osborne, the trainer, had said to me plainly, soon after I’d joined him, that if I wouldn’t do what Victor Briggs wanted, I was out.

  I had lost races for Victor Briggs that I might have won. It was a fact of life. I needed to eat and to pay off the mortgage on the cottage. For that I needed a good big stable to ride for, and if I had walked out of the one that was giving me a chance, I might easily not have found another. There weren’t so very many of them, and apart from Victor Briggs the Osborne set-up was just right. So, like many another rider in a like fix, I had done what I was told, and kept quiet.