Extract From Reflex
CHAPTER ONE
Winded and coughing, I lay on one elbow and spat out a mouthful of grass and mud. The horse I'd been riding raised its weight off my ankle, scrambled untidily to its feet and departed at an unfeeling gallop. I waited for things to settle: chest heaving, bones still rattling from the bang, sense of balance recovering from a thirty-mile-an-hour somersault and a few tumbling rolls. No harm done. Nothing broken. Just another fall.
Time and place: sixteenth fence, three-mile steeplechase, Sandown Park racecourse, Friday, November, in thin, cold, persistent rain. At the return of breath and energy I stood wearily up and thought with intensity that this was a damn silly way for a grown man to be spending his life.
The thought itself was a jolt. Not one I'd ever thought before. Riding horses at high speed over various jumps was the only way I knew of making a living, and it was a job one couldn't do if one's heart wasn't in it. The chilling flicker of disillusion nudged like the first twinge of toothache, unexpected, unwelcome, an uneasy hint of possible trouble.
I repressed it without much alarm. Reassured myself that I loved the life, of course I did, the way I always had. Believed quite easily that nothing was wrong except the weather, the fall, the lost race... minor, everyday stuff, business as usual.
Squelching uphill to the stands in paper-thin racing boots unsuitable for hiking, I thought only and firmly about the horse I'd started out on, sorting out what I might and might not say to its trainer. Discarded 'How do you expect it to jump if you don't school it properly?' in favour of 'The experience will do him good.' Thought better of 'useless, panicky, hard-mouthed, underfed dog', and decided on 'might try him in blinkers'. The trainer, anyway, would blame me for the fall and tell the owner I'd misjudged the pace. He was that sort of trainer. Every crash was a pilot error.
I thanked heaven in a mild way that I didn't ride often for that stable, and had been engaged on that day only because Steve Millace, its usual jockey, had gone to his father's funeral. Spare rides, even with disaster staring up from the form books, were not lightly to be turned down. Not if you needed the money, which I did. And not if, like me, you needed your name up on the number boards as often as possible, to show you were useful and wanted and there.
The only good thing, I supposed, about my descent at the fence was that Steve Millace's father hadn't been there to record it. George Millace, pitiless photographer of moments all jockeys preferred to ignore, was safe in his box and approximately at that moment being lowered underground to his long sleep. And good riddance, I thought uncharitably. Goodbye to the snide sneering pleasure George got from delivering to owners the irrefutable evidence of their jockeys' failings. Goodbye to the motorised camera catching at three and a half frames per second one's balance in the wrong place, one's arms in the air, one's face in the mud.
Where other sports photographers played fair and shot you winning from time to time, George trafficked exclusively in ignominy and humiliation. George was a natural-born dragger-down. Newspapers might mourn the passing of his snigger-raising pictures, but there had been little sorrow in the changing room the day Steve told us his father had driven into a tree.
Out of liking for Steve himself, no one had said much. He had listened to the silence, though, and he knew. He had been anxiously defending his father for years; and he knew.
Trudging back in the rain it seemed odd to me still that we wouldn't actually be seeing George Millace again. His image, too familiar for too long, rose sharply in the mind: bright clever eyes, long nose, drooping moustache, twisted mouth sourly smiling. A terrific photographer, one had to admit, with an exceptional talent for anticipation and timing, his lens always pointing in the right direction at the right moment. A comic, too, in his way, showing me less than a week ago a black and white glossy of me taking a dive, nose to ground, bottom up, with a caption written on the back, 'Philip Nore, arse high to a grasshopper.' One would have laughed but for the genuine ill-will which had prompted his humour. One might always have at least tolerated his debunking approach but for the cruelty sliding out of his eyes. He had been a mental thrower of banana skins, lying in wait to scoff at the hurt; and he would be missed with thankfulness.
When I finally reached the shelter of the verandah outside the weighing room, the trainer and owner were waiting there with the expected accusing expressions.
'Misjudged things pretty badly, didn't you?' said the trainer aggressively.
'He took off a stride too soon.'
'Your job to put him right.'
No point in saying that no jockey on earth could get every horse to jump perfectly always, and particularly not a badly schooled rogue. I simply nodded, and smiled a shade ruefully at the owner.
'Might try him in blinkers,' I said.
'I'll decide about that,' said the trainer sharply.
'Not hurt, are you?' asked the owner timidly.
I shook my head. The trainer brusquely stamped on this humane jockey-orientated enquiry and wheeled his money-source away from the danger that I might say something truthful about why the horse wouldn't jump when asked. I watched them go without rancour and turned towards the weighing room door.
'I say,' said a young man, stepping in front of me, 'are you Philip Nore?'
'That's right.'
'Well... could I have a word with you?'
He was about twenty-five, tall as a stork and earnest, with office-coloured skin. Charcoal flannel suit, striped tie, no binoculars, and no air of belonging where he stood, in the business-only section of the racecourse.
'Sure,' I said. 'If you'll wait while I check with the doctor and get into something dry.'
'Doctor?' He looked alarmed.
'Oh... routine. After a fall. I shan't be long.'
When I went out again, warmed and in street clothes, he was still waiting; and he was more or less alone on the verandah, as nearly everyone else had gone to watch the last race, already in progress.
'I... er... my name is Jeremy Folk.' He produced a card from inside the charcoal jacket and held it out to me. I took it, and read: Folk, Langley, Son and Folk.
Solicitors. Address in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
'That last Folk,' said Jeremy, pointing diffidently, 'is me.'
'Congratulations,' I said.
He gave me an anxious half smile and cleared his throat.
'I've been sent... er... I've come to ask you to...
er...' He stopped, looking helpless and not in the least
like a solicitor.
'To what?' I said encouragingly.
'They said you wouldn't like... but well... I've been sent to ask you... er...'
'Do get on with it,' I said.
'To come and see your grandmother.' The words came out in a nervous rush, and he seemed relieved to be rid of them.
'No,' I said.
He scanned my face and seemed to take heart from its calmness.
'She's dying,' he said. 'And she wants to see you.'
Death all around, I thought. George Millace and my mother's mother. Negative grief in both cases.
'Did you hear?' he said.
'I heard.'
'Now, then? I mean, today?'
'No,' I said. 'I'm not going.'
'But you must.' He looked troubled. 'I mean... she's old... and she's dying... and she wants you...'
'Too bad.'
'And if I don't persuade you, my uncle... that's Son...' He pointed to the card again, getting flustered. 'Er. Folk is my grandfather and Langley is my great-uncle, and... er... they sent me...' He swallowed. 'They think I'm frightfully useless, to be honest.'
'And that's blackmail,' I said.
A faint glint in his eyes told me that he wasn't basically as silly as he made out.
'I don't want to see her,' I said.
'But she is dying.'
'Have you yourself seen her... dying?'
'Er... no...'
'I'll bet she isn't. If she wants to see me, she would say she was dying just to fetch me, because she'd guess nothing else would.'
He looked shocked. 'She's seventy-eight, after all.'
I looked gloomily out at the non-stop rain. I had never met my grandmother and I didn't want to, dying or dead. I didn't approve of death-bed repentances, last minute insurances at the gates of hell. It was too damned late.
'The answer,' I said, 'is still no.'
He shrugged dispiritedly and seemed to give up. Walked a few steps out into the rain, bareheaded, vulnerable, with no umbrella. Turned round after ten paces and came tentatively back again.
'Look... she really needs you, my uncle says.' He was as earnest, as intense, as a missionary. 'You can't just let her die.'
'Where is she?' I said.
He brightened. 'In a nursing home.' He fished in another pocket. 'I've got the address. But I'll lead you there, straight away, if you'll come. It's in St Albans. You live in Lambourn, don't you? So it isn't terribly far out of your way, is it? I mean, not a hundred miles,
or anything like that.'
'A good fifty, though.'
'Well... I mean... you always do drive around an awful lot.'
I sighed. The options were rotten. A choice between meek capitulation or a stony rejection. Both unpalatable. That she had dished out to me the stony rejection from my birth gave me no excuse, I supposed, for doing it to her at her death. Also I could hardly go on smugly despising her, as I had done for years, if I followed her example. Irritating, that.
The winter afternoon was already fading, with electric lights growing brighter by the minute, shining fuzzily through the rain. I thought of my empty cottage; of nothing much to fill the evening, of two eggs, a piece of cheese and black coffee for supper, of wanting to eat more and not doing so. If I went, I thought, it would at least take my mind off food, and anything which helped with the perennial fight against weight couldn't be wholly bad. Not even meeting my grandmother.
'All right,' I said, resignedly, 'lead on.'
The old woman sat upright in bed staring at me, and if she was dying it wasn't going to be on that evening, for sure. The life force was strong in the dark eyes and there was no mortal weakness in her voice.
'Philip,' she said, making it a statement and looking me up and down.
'Yes.'
'Hah.'
The explosive sound contained both triumph and contempt and was everything I would have expected. Her ramrod will had devastated my childhood and done worse damage to her own daughter, and there was to be, I was relieved to see, no maudlin plea for forgiveness. Rejection, even if in a moderated form, was still in operation.
'I knew you'd come running,' she said, 'when you heard about the money.' As a cold sneer it was pretty unbeatable.
'What money?'
'The hundred thousand pounds, of course.'
'No one,' I said, 'has mentioned any money.'
'Don't lie. Why else would you come?'
'They said you were dying.'
She gave me a startled and malevolent flash of the eyes and a baring of teeth which had nothing to do with smiling. 'So I am. So are we all.'
'Yeah,' I said, 'and all at the same rate. One day at a time.'
She was no one's idea of a sweet little pink-cheeked grannie. A strong stubborn face with disapproval lines cut deep around the mouth. Iron grey hair still vigorous, clean and well shaped. Blotchy freckles of age showing brown on an otherwise pale skin, and dark ridged veins on the backs of the hands. A thin woman, almost gaunt; and tall, as far as I could judge.
The large room where she lay was furnished more as a sitting room with a bed in it than as a hospital, which was all of a piece with what I'd seen of the place on the way in. A country house put to new use: hotel with nurses. Carpets everywhere, long chintz curtains, armchairs for visitors, vases of flowers. Gracious dying, I thought.
'I instructed Mr Folk,' she said, 'to make you the offer.'
I reflected. 'Young Mr Folk? About twenty-five? Jeremy?'
'Of course not.' She was impatient. 'Mr Folk, my solicitor. I told him to get you here. And he did. Here you are.'
'He sent his grandson.'
I turned away from her and sat unasked in an armchair. Why, I wondered, had Jeremy not mentioned a hundred thousand pounds? It was the sort of trifle, after all, that one didn't easily forget.
My grandmother stared at me steadily with no sign of affection, and I stared as steadily back. I disliked her certainty that she could buy me. I was repelled by her contempt, and mistrusted her intentions.
'I will leave you a hundred thousand pounds in my will, upon certain conditions,' she said.
'No, you won't,' I said.
'I beg your pardon?' Icy voice, stony look.
'I said no. No money. No conditions.'
'You haven't heard my proposition.'
I said nothing. I felt in fact the first stirrings of curiosity, but I was definitely not going to let her see it. Since she seemed in no hurry, the silence lengthened. More stocktaking on her part, perhaps. Simple patience, on mine. One thing my haphazard upbringing had given me was an almost limitless capacity for waiting. Waiting for people to come, who didn't; and for promises to be fulfilled, that weren't.
Finally she said, 'You're taller than I expected. And tougher.'
I waited some more.
'Where is your mother?' she said.
My mother, her daughter. 'Scattered on the winds,' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'I think she's dead.'
'Think!' She looked more annoyed than anxious. 'Don't you know?'
'She didn't exactly write to me to say she'd died; no.'
'Your flippancy is disgraceful.'
'Your behaviour since before my birth,' I said, 'gives you no right to say so.'
She blinked. Her mouth opened, and stayed open for fully five seconds. Then it shut tight with rigid muscles showing along the jaw, and she stared at me darkly in a daunting mixture of fury and ferocity. I saw, in that expression, what my poor young mother had had to face, and felt a great uprush of sympathy for the feckless butterfly who'd borne me.
There had been a day, when I was quite small, that I had been dressed in new clothes and told to be exceptionally good as I was going with my mother to see my grandmother. My mother had collected me from where I was living and we had travelled by car to a large house, where I was left alone in the hall, to wait. Behind a white painted closed door there had been a lot of shouting. Then my mother had come out, crying, and had grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me after her to the car.
'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 offence, 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, disorientating 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 that 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 on 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 four 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 grey, 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 as 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 2nd, 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 covenant 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 bank 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.'
'And you didn't reply,' I said flatly.
'No.'
I supposed 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 indecipherable. 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 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.'