Comeback Read online

  VICKY WOKE AT six-thirty in the evening and came tottering down the stairs complaining of their slipperiness.

  Greg and I had by that time lowered the scotch level, read the newspapers from cover to cover and found out how the television worked. We’d listened to the news, which was all of death, as usual. Amazing how many ways there were of dying.

  Belinda had not telephoned.

  At seven, however, a car arrived outside and the daughter herself came in as before, managerial rather than loving. This time, however, she had brought her affianced.

  “Mother, you met Ken two or three years ago, you remember.”

  “Yes, dear,” Vicky said kindly, though she’d told me she couldn’t bring him to mind. She offered him her cheek for a kiss, and after the fleetest of pauses received one.

  “And this is Greg,” Belinda said. “I suppose he’s my stepfather.” She laughed briefly. “Odd having a stepfather after all these years.”

  “How do you do?” Ken said politely, shaking Greg’s hand. “Glad to meet you, sir.”

  Greg gave him an American smile that was all front with reservations hidden, and said he was sure pleased to be in England for the happy occasion.

  Ken, at the moment, looked a long way from happy. Anxiety vibrated in his every gesture, not a simple nervousness at meeting his future in-laws but a much deeper, overriding bunch of worries, too intense to be covered.

  He was tall, thin, sandy and wiry-looking, like a long-distance runner. A touch of Norwegian, perhaps, about the shape of the head and the light blue of his eyes. Fair hair on the point of thinning. I guessed his age at nearing forty and his dedication to his job as absolute.

  “Sorry,” Belinda said to me, not sounding contrite. “Can’t remember your name.”

  “Peter Darwin.”

  “Oh yes.” She glanced towards Ken. “Mother’s helper.”

  “How do you do?” He shook my hand perfunctorily. “Ken McClure,” he said.

  It sounded very familiar. “Kenny?” I said doubtfully.

  “No. Ken. Kenny was my father.”

  “Oh.”

  None of them paid any attention but I felt as if I’d been kicked in the subconscious by sleeping memory. Kenny McClure. I knew about Kenny McClure—but what did I know?—from a long time ago.

  He’d killed himself.

  The knowledge came back abruptly, accompanied by the curiosity I’d felt about it as a child, never having known before that people could kill themselves, and wondering how he had done it and what it felt like.

  Kenny McClure had acted as veterinary surgeon at Cheltenham races. I knew I’d driven round the track with him in his Land Rover a few times, but I couldn’t now recall what he’d looked like.

  Ken had made an attempt at dressing for the occasion in a suit, shirt and tie but with one black shoe and one brown. Belinda had come in a calf-length blue woolen dress under the padded olive jacket and, having made the effort herself, was critical of Vicky, who hadn’t.

  “Mother, honestly, you look as if you’d slept in those clothes.”

  “Yes, dear, I did.”

  Belinda impatiently swept her upstairs to find something less crumpled and Greg offered Ken some scotch.

  Ken eyed the bottle with regret. “Better not,” he said. “Driving, and all that.”

  A short silence. Between the two of them there was no instant rapport. Eye contact, minimal.

  “Belinda told us,” Greg said, finally, “that you’ve had some trouble with a horse today.”

  “It died.” Ken had clamped a lid tight over his seething troubles and the strain came out in staccato speech. “Couldn’t save it.”

  “I’m real sorry.”

  Ken nodded. His pale eyes turned my way. “Not at my best this evening. Forgotten your name.”

  “Peter Darwin.”

  “Oh yes. Any relation to Charles?”

  “No.”

  He considered me. “I suppose you’ve been asked before.”

  “Once or twice.”

  He lost interest, but I thought that in other circumstances he and I might have done better together than he with Greg.

  Ken tried, all the same. “Belinda says you were both mugged, sir, you and . . . er ... Mother.”

  Greg made a face at the memory and gave him a brief account. Ken raised a show of indignation. “Rotten for you,” he said.

  He spoke with a Gloucestershire accent, not strong, but recognizable. If I tried I’d still be able to speak that way easily myself, though I’d lost it to my new father’s Eton English soon after I had met him. He’d told me at once that I had a good ear for languages, and he’d made me learn French, Spanish and Russian intensively all through my teens. “You’ll never learn a language as naturally as now,” he said. “I’ll send you to school in England for two final years to do the university entrance, but to be truly multilingual you must learn languages where they’re spoken.”

  I’d consequently breathed French in Cairo, Russian in Moscow, Spanish in Madrid. He hadn’t envisaged Japanese. That had been a quirk of Foreign Office posting.

  Vicky and Belinda having reappeared, Vicky in red this time, Ken led the way in his car to a small country inn with a restaurant attached. He took Belinda with him and I again drove the rental car with Vicky and Greg sitting together in the back, an arrangement that led Belinda to conclude that “helper” meant chauffeur. She gave me sharply disapproving looks when I followed the group into the bar and accepted Ken’s offer of a drink before dinner.

  We sat round a small dark table in a corner of a room heavily raftered and furnished in oak. The level of light from the red-shaded wall lamps was scarcely bright enough for reading the menus and there was an overall warmth of atmosphere that one met nowhere else on earth but in a British pub.

  Belinda stared at me from over her glass. “Mother says you’re a secretary. I can’t understand why she needs one.”

  “No, dear,” Vicky began, but Belinda made a shushing movement with her hand.

  “Secretary, chauffeur, general helper, what does it matter?” she said. “Now that you’re here, Mother, I can look after you perfectly well myself. I’m sorry to be frank, but I don’t see how you justify the expense of someone else.”

  Greg and Vicky’s mouths dropped open and both of them looked deeply embarrassed.

  “Peter . . .” Vicky’s words failed her.

  “It’s OK,” I reassured her, and to Belinda I said peacefully, “I’m a civil servant. A private secretary in the Foreign Office. Your mother isn’t paying me. I’m literally here just to help them over the few sticky days since they were attacked. I was coming to England in any case, so we traveled together. Perhaps I should have explained sooner. I’m so sorry.”

  An apology where there was no fault usually defused things, I’d found. The Japanese did it all the time. Belinda gave a shrug and twisted her mouth. “Sorry, then,” she said in my general direction but not actually looking at me. “But how was I to know?”

  “I did tell you ...” Vicky began.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What’s good on this menu?”

  Belinda knew the answer to that and began to instruct her mother and Greg. Ken’s thoughts had been on a distant travel throughout, but he made a visible effort then to retrieve the evening from gloom, and to some extent succeeded.

  “What wine do you like with dinner ... um ... Mother?” he asked.

  “Don’t call me Mother—call me Vicky.”

  He called her Vicky easily, without the “um.” She said she preferred red wine. Any. He could choose.

  Vicky and Ken were going to be all right, I thought, and was glad for Vicky’s sake. Belinda softened enough over dinner to put a glow on the thin beauty that had to be attracting Ken, and Greg offered a toast to their marriage.

  “Are you married?” Ken asked me, clinking glasses with Vicky.

  “Not yet.”

  “Contemplating it?”

  “In general.”
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br />   He nodded, and I thought of the young Englishwoman I’d left behind in Japan who had settled for a bigger fish in the diplomatic pond. The English girls on the staff of the embassies abroad were often the high-grade products of fashionable boarding schools, intelligent and good-looking as a general rule. Liaisons between them and the unmarried diplomats made life interesting all round but often ended discreetly, without tears. I’d said fond farewells in three different countries, and not regretted it.

  By the time coffee arrived, the relationships among Greg, Vicky, Belinda and Ken had taken the shape they were likely to retain. Vicky, like a rose given water, had revived to the point of flirting very mildly with Ken. Ken and Greg remained outwardly cordial but inwardly stiff. Belinda bossed her mother, was reserved with Greg and took Ken for granted. A pretty normal setup, all in all.

  Ken still retreated every five minutes or so for brief seconds into his consuming troubles but made no attempt to share them. He talked instead about a horse he’d bought two years earlier for peanuts to save it from being put down.

  “Nice horse,” he said. “It cracked a cannon bone. The owner wanted it put down. I told him I could save the horse if he’d pay for the operation but he didn’t want the expense. Then, of course, the horse would have to rest a year before racing. All too much, the owner said. Put it down. So I offered him a bit more than he would have got from the dog-food people and he took it. I did the operation and rested the horse and put it in training and it won a nice race the other day, and now Ronnie Upjohn, that’s the owner, won’t speak to me except to say he’ll sue me.”

  “What a pig,” Vicky said indignantly.

  Ken nodded. “Luckily I got him to sign a paper at the time, saying he understood an operation might save the horse but that he preferred to have it put down, so he hasn’t a chance of winning. He won’t sue in the end. But I guess I’ve lost a client”

  Ronnie Upjohn, I thought.

  I knew that name too. Couldn’t attach any immediate information to it, except that it was linked in my vague memory with another name: Travers.

  Upjohn and Travers.

  Who or what was Upjohn and Travers?

  “We’re planning on running the horse here at Cheltenham in a couple of weeks,” Ken said. “I’m giving it to Belinda and it’ll run in her name, and if it wins it’ll be a nice wedding present for both of us.”

  “What sort of race?” I asked, making conversation.

  “A two-mile hurdle. Are you a racing man?”

  “I go sometimes,” I said. “It’s years since I went to Cheltenham.”

  “Peter’s parents met on Cheltenham racecourse,” Vicky said, and after Belinda’s and Ken’s exclamations of interest I gave them all a version of the facts that was not the whole truth but enough for the casual chat of a dinner party among people one didn’t expect to get close to.

  “My mother was helping out with some secretarial work,” I said. “My father blew into her office with a question, and bingo, love at first sight”

  “It wasn’t at first sight with us,” Belinda said, briefly touching Ken’s hand. “Fiftieth or sixtieth sight, more like.”

  Ken nodded. “I had her under my feet for months and never really saw her.”

  “You were getting over that frightful Eaglewood girl,” Belinda teased him.

  “Izzy Eaglewood isn’t frightful,” Ken protested.

  “Oh, you know what I mean,” his fiancée said; and of course, we did.

  Izzy Eaglewood, I thought. A familiar name, but out of sync. Something different. Eaglewood was right, but not Izzy. Why not Izzy? What else?

  Russet!

  I almost laughed aloud but from long training kept an unmoved face. Russet Eaglewood had been the name to giggle over in extremely juvenile smutty jokes. What color are Russet Eaglewood’s panties? No color, she doesn’t wear any. Russet Eaglewood doesn’t need a mattress; she is one. What does Russet Eaglewood do on Sundays? Same thing, twice. We had been ignorant of course, about what she actually did. We called it “IT,” and “IT” in fact applied to anybody. Are they doing IT? Giggle, giggle. One day—one unimaginable day—we would find out about IT ourselves. Meanwhile IT went on apace throughout the racing world, and indeed everywhere else, we understood.

  Russet Eaglewood’s father had been one of the leading trainers of steeplechasers: it had been that fact, really, that had made the scurrilous stories funniest.

  The knowledge came crowding back. The Eaglewoods had had their stables at the end of our village, half a mile from our little house. Their horses clattered through the village at dawn on their way up to the gallops, and I’d played in the stable yard often with Jimmy Eaglewood until he got hit by a lorry and died after three hushed weeks in a coma. I could remember the drama well, but not Jimmy’s face. I couldn’t clearly remember any of the faces; could dredge up only the sketchiest of impressions.

  “Izzy Eaglewood ran off with a guitarist,” Belinda said disapprovingly.

  “Nothing wrong with guitarists,” Vicky said. “Your father was a musician.”

  “Exactly. Everything wrong with guitarists.”

  Vicky looked as if defending the long-divorced husband from Belinda’s jokes was an unwelcome habit.

  I said to Ken, “Have you heard Vicky and Greg sing? They’ve lovely voices.”

  He said no, he hadn’t. He looked surprised at the thought.

  “Mother,” Belinda said repressively, “I do wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t sing?” Vicky asked. “But you know we enjoy it.”

  “You’re too old for it” More than a gibe, it was a plea.

  Vicky studied her daughter and said with sad enlightenment, “You’re embarrassed, is that it? You don’t like it that your mother brought you up by singing in nightclubs?”

  “Mother!” Belinda cast a horrified glance at Ken, but Ken, far from being shocked, reacted with positive pleasure.

  “Did you really?”

  “Yes, until time put a stop to it”

  “I’d love to hear you,” Ken said.

  Vicky beamed at him.

  “Mother, please don’t go around telling everyone,” Belinda said.

  “Not if you don’t like it, dear.”

  Shout it from the rooftops, I wanted to say: Belinda should be proud of you. Stop indulging your daughter’s every selfish snobbish whim. Vicky’s sort of love, though, forgave all.

  Ken called for the bill and settled it with a credit card but, before we could rise to go, a buzzer sounded insistently somewhere in his clothes.

  “Damn,” he said, feeling under his jacket and unclipping a small portable telephone from his belt. “I’m on call. Sorry about this.”

  He flipped open the phone, said his name and listened; and it was obviously no routine summons to a sick animal because the blood left his face and he stood up clumsily and fast and literally swayed on his feet, tall and toppling.

  He looked wildly, unseeingly, at all of us sitting round the table.

  “The hospital’s on fire,” he said.

  3

  The vets’ place was on fire, but actually not, as it turned out, the new hospital itself, which lay separately to the rear. All one could see from the road, though, was the entrance and office block totally in flames, scarlet tongues shooting far skywards from the roof with showers of golden sparks. It was a single-story building, square, extensive, dying spectacularly, at once a disaster and majestic.

  Ken had raced off frantically from the restaurant alone, driving like the furies, leaving the rest of us to follow and thrusting Belinda into suffering fiercely from feelings of rejection.

  “He might have waited for me.”

  She said it four times aggrievedly but no one commented. I broke the speed limit into the town.

  We couldn’t get the car anywhere near the vets’ place. Fire appliances, police cars and sightseers crowded the edges of the parking area and wholly blocked the roadway. The noise was horrendous. Spotlights, stre
etlights, headlights threw deep black shadows behind the milling helpers and the flames lent orange halos to the firemen’s helmets and shone on spreading sheets of water and on the transfixed faces outside the cordoned perimeter.

  “Oh, God, the horses ...” Belinda, leaving us at a run as soon as our car came willy-nilly to a halt, pushed and snaked a path through to the front, where I briefly spotted her arguing unsuccessfully with a way-barring uniform. Ken was out of sight.

  Great spouts of water rose in plumes from hoses and fell in shining fountains onto the blazing roof, seeming to turn to steam on contact and blow away to the black sky. The heat, even from a distance, warmed the night.

  “Poor things,” Vicky said, having to shout to be heard.

  I nodded. Ken had enough worry besides this.

  There were the thuds of two explosions somewhere inside the walls, each causing huge spurts of flame to fly outwards through the melted front windows. Acrid smoke swirled after them, stinging the eyes.

  “Back, back,” voices yelled.

  Two more thuds. Through the windows, with a searing roar like flame throwers, sharp brilliant tongues licked across the parking space towards the spectators, sending them fleeing in panic.

  Another thud. Another fierce jet-burst of flames. A regrouping among the firemen, heads together in discussion.

  The whole roof fell in like a clap of thunder, seeming to squeeze more flames like toothpaste from the windows, and then, dramatically, the roaring inferno turned to black gritty billowing smoke and the pyrotechnics petered out into a wet and dirty mess, smelling sour.

  Ash drifted in the wind, settling in gray flakes on our hair. One could hear the hiss of water dousing hot embers. Lungs coughed from smoke. The crowd slowly began to leave, allowing the three of us to get closer to the ruined building to look for Belinda and Ken.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Vicky asked doubtfully, stopping well short. “Weren’t those bombs going off?”

  “More like tins of paint,” I said.

  Greg looked surprised. “Does paint explode?”

  Where had he lived, I wondered, that he didn’t know that, at his age?