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  I pondered a bit. ‘How would you set about finding where someone was, if you wanted to, so to speak?’

  To my surprise he had a ready answer. ‘Get the fellow I had for tailing Moira.’

  ‘Tailing…’

  ‘My lawyer said to do it. It might save me something, he said, if Moira was having a bit on the side, see what I mean?’

  .‘I do indeed,’ I agreed dryly. ‘But I suppose she wasn’t?’

  ‘No such luck.’ He glanced at me. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Well… I just wondered if he could check where everyone in the family was last Friday and tonight.’

  ‘Everyone!’ Malcolm exclaimed. ‘It would take weeks.’

  ‘It would put your mind at rest.’

  He shook his head gloomily. ‘You forget about assassins.’

  ‘Assassins aren’t so frightfully easy to find, not for ordinary people. How would you set about it, for instance, if you wanted someone killed? Put an ad in The Times?’

  He didn’t seem to see such a problem as I did, but he agreed that‘the fellow who tailed Moira’ should be offered the job of checking the family.

  We discussed where we should stay that night: in which hotel, in fact, as neither of us felt like returning home. Home, currently, to me, was a rather dull suburban flat in Epsom, not far from the stable I’d been working for. Home for Malcolm was still the house where I’d been raised, from which Moira had apparently driven him, but to which he had returned immediately after her death. ‘Home’ for all the family was that big house in Berkshire which had seen all five wives come and go: Malcolm himself had been brought up there, and I could scarcely imagine what he must have felt at the prospect of losing it.

  ‘What happened between you and Moira?’ I said.

  ‘None of your goddam business.’

  We travelled ten miles in silence. Then he shifted, sighed, and said, ‘She wanted Coochie’s jewellery and I wouldn’t give it to her. She kept on and on about it, rabbit, rabbit. Annoyed me, do you see? And then … well . . .’ he shrugged, ‘she caught me out.’

  ‘With another woman?’ I said without surprise.

  He nodded, unashamed. He’d never been monogamous and couldn’t understand why it should be expected. The terrible rows in my childhood had all been centred on his affairs: while he’d been married to Vivien and then to Joyce, he had maintained Alicia all the time as his mistress. Alicia bore him two children while he was married to Vivien and Joyce, and also one subsequently, when he’d made a fairly honest woman of her, at her insistence.

  I liked to think he had been faithful finally to Coochie, but on the whole it was improbable, and I was never going to ask.

  Malcolm favoured our staying at the Dorchester, but I persuaded him he was too well known there, and we settled finally on the Savoy.

  ‘A suite,’ Malcolm said at the reception desk. ‘Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting-room, and send up some Bollinger right away.’

  I didn’t feel like drinking champagne, but Malcolm did. He also ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for us both from room-service, with a bottle of Hine Antique brandy and a box of Havana cigars for comforts.

  Idly I totted up the expenses of his day: one solid silver trophy, one two-million-guinea thoroughbred, insurance for same, Cambridge hotel bill, tip for the taxi-driver, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, jumbo suite at the Savoy with trimmings. I wondered how much he was really worth, and whether he intended to spend the lot.

  We ate the food and drank the brandy still not totally in accord with each other. The three years’ division had been, it seemed, a chasm not as easy to cross as I’d thought. I felt that although I’d meant it when I said I loved him, it was probably the long memories of him that I really loved, not his physical presence here and now, and I could see that if I was going to stay close to him, as I’d promised, I would be learning him again and from a different viewpoint; that each of us, in fact, would newly get to know the other.

  ‘Any day now,’ Malcolm said, carefully dislodging ash from his cigar, ‘we’re going to Australia.’

  I absorbed the news and said, ‘Are we?’

  He nodded. ‘We’ll need visas. Where’s your passport?’

  ‘In my flat. Where’s yours?’

  ‘In the house.’

  ‘Then I’ll get them both tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and you stay here.’ I paused. ‘Are we going to Australia for any special reason?’

  ‘To look at gold mines,’ he said. ‘And kangaroos.’

  After a short silence, I said, ‘We don’t just have to escape. We do have to find out who’s trying to kill you, in order to stop them succeeding.’

  ‘Escape is more attractive,’ he said. ‘How about a week in Singapore on the way?’

  ‘Anything you say. Only… I’m supposed to ride in a race at Sandown on Friday.’

  ‘I’ve never understood why you like it. All those cold wet days. All those falls.’

  ‘You get your rush from gold,’ I said.

  ‘Danger?’ His eyebrows rose. ‘Quiet, well-behaved, cautious Ian? Life is a bore without risk, is that it?’

  ‘It’s not so extraordinary,’ I said.

  I’d ridden always as an amateur, unpaid, because something finally held me back from the total dedication needed for turning professional. Race riding was my deepest pleasure, but not my entire life, and in consequence I’d never developed the competitive drive necessary for climbing the pro ladder. I was happy with the rides I got, with the camaraderie of the changing-room, with the wide skies and the horses themselves, and yes, one had to admit it, with the risk.

  ‘Staying near me,’ Malcolm said, ‘as you’ve already found out, isn’t enormously safe.’

  ‘That’s why I’m staying,’ I said.

  He stared. He said, ‘My God,’ and he laughed, ‘I thought I knew you. Seems I don’t.’

  He finished his brandy, stubbed out his cigar and decided on bed; and in the morning he was up before me, sitting on a sofa in one of the bathrobes and reading the Sporting Life when I ambled out in the underpants and shirt I’d slept in.

  ‘I’ve ordered breakfast,’ he said. ‘And I’m in the paper - how about that?’

  I looked where he pointed. His name was certainly there, somewhere near the end of the detailed lists of yesterday’s sales. ‘Lot 79, ch. colt, 2,070,000 gns. Malcolm Pembroke’.

  He put down the paper, well pleased. ‘Now, what do we do today?’

  ‘We summon your private eye, we fix a trainer for the colt, I fetch our passports and some clothes, and you stay here.’

  Slightly to my surprise, he raised no arguments except to tell me not to be away too long. He was looking rather thoughtfully at the healing graze down my right thigh and the red beginnings of bruising around it.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t have the private eye’s phone number. Not with me.’

  ‘We’ll get another agency, then, from the yellow pages.’

  ‘Your mother knows it, of course. Joyce knows it.’

  ‘How does she know it?’

  ‘She used him,’ he said airily, ‘to follow me and Alicia.’

  There was nothing, I supposed, which should ever surprise me about my parents.

  ‘When the lawyer fellow said to have Moira tailed, I got the private eye’s name from Joyce. After all, he’d done a good job on me and Alicia all those years ago. Too bloody good, when you think of it. So get through to Joyce, Ian, and ask her for the number.’

  Bemused, I did as he said.

  ‘Darling,’ my mother shrieked down the line. ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Darling, do you know what he’s bloody done?’

  ‘No… what?’

  ‘He’s given a fortune, darling, I mean literally hundreds of thousands, to some wretched little film company to make some absolutely ghastly film about tadpoles or something. Some bloody fool of a man telephoned to find out where
your father was, because it seems he promised them even more money which they’d like to have… I ask you! I know you and Malcolm aren’t talking, but you’ve got to do something to stop him.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s his money.’

  ‘Darling, don’t be so naive. Someone’s going to inherit it, and if only you’d swallow all that bloody pride, as I’ve told you over and over, it would be yours. If you go on and on with this bloody quarrel, he’ll leave it all to Alicia’s beastly brood, and I cannot bear the prospect of her gloating for ever more. So make it up with Malcolm at once, darling, and get him to see sense.’

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘I have.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Made it up with him.’

  ‘Thank God, at last!’ my mother shrieked. ‘Then, darling, what are you waiting for? Get onto him straight away and stop him spending your inheritance.’

  Three

  Malcolm’s house, after three years of Moira’s occupancy, had greatly changed.

  Malcolm’s Victorian house was known as ‘Quantum’ because of the Latin inscription carved into the lintel over the front door. QUANTUM IN ME FUIT - roughly, ‘I did the best I could.’

  I went there remembering the comfortable casualness that Coochie had left and not actually expecting that things would be different: and I should have known better, as each wife in turn, Coochie included, had done her best to eradicate all signs of her predecessor. Marrying Malcolm had, for each wife, involved moving into his house, but he had indulged them all, I now understood, in the matter of ambience.

  I let myself in through the kitchen door with Malcolm’s keys and thought wildly for a moment that I’d come to the wrong place. Coochie’s pinewood and red-tiled homeliness had been swept away in favour of glossy yellow walls, glittering white appliances and shelves crowded with scarlet and deep pink geraniums cascading from white pots.

  Faintly stunned, I looked back through time to the era before Coochie, to Alicia’s fluffy occupancy of broderie anglaise frills on shimmering white curtains with pale blue work-tops and white floor tiles; and back further still to the starker olive and milk-coffee angularities chosen by Joyce. I remembered the day the workmen had torn out my mother’s kitchen, and how I’d gone howling to Malcolm: he’d packed me off to Joyce immediately for a month, which I didn’t like either, and when I returned I’d found the white frills installed, and the pale blue cupboards, and I thought them all sissy, but I’d learned not to say so.

  For the first time ever, I wondered what the kitchen had looked like in Vivien’s time, when forty-five or so years ago young Malcolm had brought her there as his first bride. Vivien had been dispossessed and resentful by the time I was born, and I’d seldom seen her smiling. She seemed to me the least positive of the five wives and the least intelligent but, according to her photographs, she had been in her youth by streets the most beautiful. The dark sweep of her eyebrows and the high cheekbones remained, but the thick black hair had thinned now in greying, and entrenched bitterness had soured the once sweet mouth. Vivien’s marriage, I’d guessed, had died through Malcolm’s boredom with her, and although they now still met occasionally at events to do with their mutual children and grandchildren, they were more apt to turn their backs than to kiss.

  Vivien disliked and was plaintively critical of almost everybody while at the same time unerringly interpreting the most innocent general remarks of others as being criticism of herself. It was impossible to please her often or for long, and I, like almost all the extended family, had long ago stopped trying. She had indoctrinated her three offspring with her own dissatisfactions to the point where they were nastily disparaging of Malcolm behind his back, though not to his face, hypocrites that they were.

  Malcolm had steadfastly maintained them through young adulthood and then cast them loose, each with a trust fund that would prevent them from actually starving. He had treated all seven of his normally surviving children in the same way; his eighth child, Robin, would be looked after for ever. None of us seven could have any complaints: he had given us all whatever vocational training we’d chosen and afterwards the cushion against penury, and at that point in each of our lives had considered his work done. Whatever became of us in the future, he said, had to be in our own hands.

  With the family powerfully in mind, I went from the kitchen into the hall where I found that Moira had had the oak panelling painted white. Increasingly amused, I thought of the distant days when Alicia had painstakingly bleached all the old wood, only to have Coochie stain it dark again: and I supposed that perhaps Malcolm enjoyed change around him in many ways, not just in women.

  His own private room, always called the office although more like a comfortable cluttered sitting-room, seemed to have escaped the latest refit except in the matter of gold velvet curtains replacing the old green. Otherwise, the room as always seemed filled with his strong personality, the walls covered with dozens of framed photographs, the deep cupboards bulging with files, the bookshelves crammed, every surface bearing mementoes of his journey ings and achievements, nothing very tidy.

  I went over to the desk to find his passport and half-expected to hear his voice at any minute even though I’d left him forty miles away persuasively telephoning to ‘the fellow who tailed Moira’.

  His passport, he’d said, was in the second drawer down on the right-hand side, and so it was, among a large clutter of bygone travel arrangements and expired medical insurances. Malcolm seldom threw much away, merely building another cupboard for files. His filing system was such that no one but he had the slightest idea where any paper or information could be found, but he himself could put his finger on things unerringly. His method, he’d told me once long ago, was always to put everything where he would first think of looking for it; and as a child, I’d seen such sense in that that I had copied him ever since.

  Looking around again, it struck me that although the room was crammed with objects, several familiar ones were missing. The gold dolphin, for instance, and the gold tree bearing amethysts, and the Georgian silver candelabras. Perhaps at last, I thought, he had stored them prudently in the bank.

  Carrying the passport, I went upstairs to fetch clothes to add to his sketchy packing and out of irresistible curiosity detoured into the room which had been mine. I expected a bright Moira-style transformation, but in fact nothing at all had been changed, except that nothing of me remained.

  The room was without soul; barren. The single bed, stripped, showed a bare mattress. There were no cobwebs, no dust, no smell of neglect, but the message was clear: the son who had slept there no longer existed.

  Shivering slightly, I closed the door and wondered whether the absolute rejection had been Malcolm’s or Moira’s and, shrugging, decided I didn’t now mind which.

  Moira’s idea of the perfect bedroom turned out to be plum and pink with louvred doors everywhere possible. Malcolm’s dressing-room next door had received the same treatment, as had their joint bathroom, and I set about collecting his belongings with a strong feeling of intruding upon strangers.

  I found Moira’s portrait only because I kicked it while searching for pyjamas: it was underneath Malcolm’s chest of drawers in the dressing-room. Looking to see what I’d damaged, I pulled out a square gold frame which fitted a discoloured patch on the wall and, turning it over, found the horrible Moira smiling at me with all her insufferable complacency.

  I had forgotten how young she had been, and how pretty. Thirty years younger than Malcolm; thirty-five when she’d married him and, in the painting anyway, unlined. Reddish-gold hair, pale unfreckled skin, pointed chin, delicate neck. The artist seemed to me to have caught the calculation in her eyes with disconcerting clarity, and when I glanced at the name scrawled at the bottom I understood why. Malcolm might not have given her diamonds, but her portrait had been painted by the best.

  I put her back face down under the chest of drawers as I’d found her, where Malcolm, I was sure, had consigned her.

>   Fetching a suitcase from the boxroom (no decor changes there), I packed Malcolm’s things and went downstairs, and in the hall came face to face with a smallish man carrying a large shotgun, the business end pointing my way.

  I stopped abruptly, as one would.

  ‘Put your hands up,’ he said hoarsely.

  I set the suitcase on the floor and did as he bid. He wore earth-stained dark trousers and had mud on his hands, and I asked him immediately, ‘Are you the gardener?’

  ‘What if I am? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Collecting clothes for my father… er… Mr Pembroke. I’m his son.’

  I don’t know you. I’m getting the police.’ His voice was belligerent but quavery, the shotgun none too steady in his hands.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  He was faced then with the problem of how to telephone while aiming my way.

  I said, seeing his hesitation, ‘I can prove I’m Mr Pembroke’s son, and I’ll open the suitcase to show you I’m not stealing anything. Would that help?’

  After a pause, he nodded. ‘You stay over there, though,’ he said.

  I judged that if I alarmed him there would be a further death in my father’s house, so I very slowly and carefully opened the suitcase, removed the underpants and the rest, and laid them out on the hall floor. After that, 1 equally slowly took my own wallet out of my pocket, opened it, removed a credit card and laid it on the floor face upwards. Then I retreated backwards from the exhibits, ending with my back against the closed and locked front door.

  The elderly gardener came suspiciously forward and inspected the show, dropping his eyes only in split seconds, raising them quickly, giving me no chance to jump him.

  ‘That’s his passport,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘He asked me to fetch it.’

  ‘Where is he?’ he said. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘I have to meet him with his passport. I don’t know where he’s going.’ I paused. ‘I really am his son. You must be new here. I haven’t seen you before.’