Longshot (11 page)

She sighed, unbuckled her seat belt and stood up out of the car.

“Look,” she said, “I like you, but Perkin does tend to be jealous.”

“I’ll ignore you,” I promised.

She smiled vividly. “A touch of old-fashioned formality should do the trick.” She began to turn away, and then stopped. “I’m going in through our own entrance, Perkin’s and mine. I’ll see how he’s doing. See if he’s stopped work. We’ll probably be along for a drink. We often do, at this time of day.”

“OK.”

She nodded and walked off, and I went around and into Tremayne’s side of the house as if I’d lived there forever. Yesterday morning, I thought incredulously, I awoke to Aunty’s freeze.

Tremayne had lit the log fire in the family room and poured his gin and tonic and, standing within heating range of the flames, he listened with disillusion to the outcome of Nolan’s trial.

“Guilty but unpunished,” he observed. “Newfangled escape clause.”

“Should the guilty always be punished?”

He looked at me broodingly. “Is that a character-assessment question?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s unanswerable, anyway. The answer is, I don’t know.” He turned and with a foot pushed a log farther into the fire. “Help yourself to a drink.”

“Thanks. Mackie said they might be along.”

Tremayne nodded, taking it for granted, and in fact she and Perkin came through from the central hall while I was dithering between the available choices of whisky or gin, neither of which I much liked. Perkin solved the liquid question for himself by detouring into the kitchen and reappearing with a glass of Coke.

“What do you actually
like?”
Mackie asked, seeing my hesitation as she poured tonic into gin for herself.

“Wine, I suppose. Red for preference.”

“There will be some in the office. Tremayne keeps it for owners when they come to see their horses. I’ll get it.”

She went without haste and returned with a Bordeaux-shaped bottle and a sensible corkscrew, both of which she handed over.

Tremayne said, as I liberated the Château Kirwan, “Is that stuff any good?”

“Very,” I said, smelling the healthy cork.

“It’s all grape juice as far as I’m concerned. If you like the stuff, put it on the shopping list.”

“The shopping list,” Mackie explained, “is a running affair pinned to the kitchen corkboard. Whoever does the shopping takes the list with him. Or her.”

Perkin, slouching in an armchair, said I might as well get used to the idea of doing the shopping myself, particularly if I like eating.

“Tremayne takes Gareth to the supermarket sometimes,” he said, “and that’s about it. Or Dee-Dee goes, if there’s no milk for the coffee three days running.” He looked from me to Mackie. “I used to think it quite normal until I married a sensible housekeeper.”

Perkin, I thought, as he reaped a smile from his wife, was a great deal more relaxed than on the evening before, though the faint hostility he’d shown towards me was still there. Tremayne asked him his opinion of the verdict on Nolan, and Perkin consulted his glass lengthily as if seeking illumination.

“I suppose,” he said finally, “that I’m glad he isn’t in jail.”

It was a pretty ambiguous statement after so much thought, but Mackie looked pleasantly relieved. Only she of the three, it was clear, cared much for Nolan the man. To father and son, having Nolan in jail would have been an inconvenience and an embarrassment which they were happy to avoid.

Looking at the two of them, the differences were as powerful as the likenesses. If one discounted Tremayne’s hair, which was gray where Perkin’s was brown, and the thickness in Tremayne’s neck and body that had come with age, then physically they were of one cloth; but where Tremayne radiated strength, Perkin was soggy, where Tremayne was a leader, Perkin retreated. Tremayne’s love was for living horses, Perkin’s was for passive wood.

It came as a shock to me to wonder if Tremayne wanted his own achievements written in an inheritable book because Perkin’s work would be valuable in two hundred years. Wondered if the strong father felt he had to equal his weaker son. I dismissed the idea as altogether too subtle and as anyway tactless in an employed biographer.

Gareth came home with his usual air of a life lived on the run and eyed me with disapproval as I sat in an armchair drinking wine.

“I thought you said—” he began, and stopped, shrugging, an onset of good manners vying with disappointment.

“I will,” I said.

“Oh, really? Now?”

I nodded.

“Good. Come on, then, I’ll show you the freezers.”

“Let him alone,” Mackie said mildly. “Let him finish his drink.”

Perkin reacted to this harmless remark with irritation. “As he said he’d cook, let him do it.”

“Of course,” I said cheerfully, getting up. I glanced at Tremayne. “All right with you?”

“You’re all right with me until further notice,” he said, and Perkin didn’t like that testimony of approval either, but Gareth did.

“You’re home and dried with Dad,” he told me happily, steering me through the kitchen. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you do to me?” he asked himself comically, and answered himself. “Nothing. I guess that’s it. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just the way you are. The freezers are through here, in the utility room. If you go straight on through the utility room you get to the garage. Through that door there.” He pointed ahead to a heavy-looking door furnished with businesslike bolts. “I keep my bike through there.”

There were two freezers, both upright, both with incredible contents.

“This one,” Gareth said, opening the door, “is what Dad calls the peezer freezer.”

“Or the pizza frizza?” I suggested.

“Yes, that too.”

It was stacked with pizzas and nothing else, though only half full.

“We eat our way down to the bottom,” Gareth said reasonably, “then fill up again every two or three months.”

“Sensible,” I commented.

“Most people think we’re mad.”

He shut that freezer and opened the other, which proved to contain four packs of beef sandwiches, fifty to a pack. There were also about ten sliced loaves (for toast, Gareth explained), one large turkey (someone gave it to Tremayne for Christmas), pints galore of chocolate ripple ice cream (Gareth liked it) and a whole lot of bags of ice cubes for gins and tonic.

Was it for this, I surmised wildly, that I’d sold my soul?

“Well,” I said in amusement, “what do we have in the larder?”

“What larder?”

“Cupboards, then.”

“You’d better look,” Gareth said, closing the second freezer’s door. “What are you going to make?”

I hadn’t the faintest idea, but what Tremayne, Gareth and I ate not very much later was a hot pie made of beef extracted from twenty defrosted sandwiches and chopped small, then mixed with undiluted condensed mushroom soup (a find) and topped with an inch-thick layer of sandwich breadcrumbs fried crisp.

Gareth watched the simple cooking with fascination, and I found myself telling him about the techniques I’d been taught of how to live off the countryside without benefit of shops.

“Fried worms aren’t bad,” I said.

“You’re kidding me.”

“They’re packed with protein. Birds thrive on them. And what’s so different from eating snails?”

“Could you really live off the land? You yourself?”

“Yes, sure,” I said. “But you can die of malnutrition eating just rabbits.”

“How do you
know
these things?”

“It’s my business, really. My trade.” I told him about the six travel guides. “The company used to send me to all those places to set up holiday expeditions for real rugged types. I had to learn how to get them out of all sorts of local trouble, especially if they struck disasters like losing all their equipment in raging torrents. I wrote the books and the customers weren’t allowed to set off without them. Mind you, I always thought the book on how to survive would have been lost in the raging torrent with everything else, but maybe they would remember some of it, you never know.”

Gareth, helping make breadcrumbs in a blender, said a shade wistfully, “How did you ever start on something like that?”

“My father was a camping nut. A naturalist. He worked in a bank, really, and still does, but every spare second he would head for the wilds, dragging me and my mother along. Actually I took it for granted, as just a fact of life. Then after college I found it was all pretty useful in the travel trade. So bingo.”

“Does he still go camping? Your father, I mean?”

“No. My mother got arthritis and refused to go anymore, and he didn’t have much fun without her. He’s worked in a bank in the Cayman Islands for three or four years now. It’s good for my mother’s health.”

Gareth asked simply, “Where are the Cayman Islands?”

“In the Caribbean, south of Cuba, west of Jamaica.”

“What do you want me to do with these breadcrumbs?”

“Put them in the frying pan.”

“Have
you
ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

“Yes,” I said, “I went for Christmas. They sent me the fare as a present.”

“You are
lucky,”
Gareth said.

I paused from cutting up the beef. “Yes,” I agreed, thinking about it. “Yes, I am. And grateful. And you’ve got a good father, too.”

He seemed extraordinarily pleased that I should say so, but it seemed to me, unconventional housekeeping or not, that Tremayne was making a good job of his younger son.

Notwithstanding Tremayne’s professed lack of interest in food, he clearly enjoyed the pie, which three healthy appetites polished off to the last fried crumb. I got promoted instantly to resident chef, which suited me fine. Tomorrow I could do the shopping, Tremayne said, and without ado pulled out his wallet and gave me enough to feed the three of us for a month, though he said it was for a week. I protested it was too much and he kindly told me I had no idea how much things cost. I thought wryly that I knew how much things cost to the last anxious penny, but there was no point in arguing. I stowed the money away and asked them what they didn’t like.

“Broccoli,” Gareth said instantly. “Yuk.”

“Lettuce,” said Tremayne.

Gareth told his father about fried worms and asked me if I had any of the travel guides with me.

“No, sorry, didn’t think of bringing them.”

“Couldn’t we possibly get some? I mean, I’d buy them with my pocket money. I’d like to keep them. Are they in the shops?”

“Sometimes, but I could ask the travel company to send a set,” I suggested.

“Yes, do that,” Tremayne said, “and I’ll pay for them. We’d all like to look at them, I expect.”

“But Dad ... ” Gareth protested.

“All right,” Tremayne said, “get two sets.”

I began to appreciate Tremayne’s simple way of solving problems and in the morning, after I’d driven him on the tractor up to the Downs to see the horses exercise and after orange juice, coffee and toast, I phoned my friend in the travel agency and asked him to organize the books.

“Today?” he said, and I said, “Yes, please,” and he said he would Red Star—parcel them by train, if I liked. I consulted Tremayne, who thought it a good idea and told me to get them sent to Didcot station where I could go to pick them up when I went in to do the shopping.

“Fair enough,” the friend said. “You’ll get them this afternoon.”

“My love to your aunt,” I said, “and thanks.”

“She’ll swoon.” He laughed. “See you.”

Tremayne began reading the day’s papers, both of which carried the results of the trial. Neither paper took any particular stance either for or against Nolan, though both quoted Olympia’s father at length. He came over as a sad obsessed man whose natural grief had turned to self-destructive anger and one could feel sorry for him on many counts. Tremayne read and grunted and passed no opinion.

The day slowly drifted into a repetition of the one before. Dee-Dee came into the kitchen for coffee and instructions and when Tremayne had gone out again with his second lot of horses I returned to the boxes of clippings in the dining room.

I decided to reverse yesterday’s order and start at the most recent clippings, and work backwards.

It was Dee-Dee, I had discovered, who cut the sections out of the newspapers and magazines, and certainly she had been more zealous than whoever had done it before her, as the boxes for the last eight years were much fuller.

I laid aside the current box as it was still almost empty and worked through from January to December of the previous year, which had been a good one for Tremayne, embracing not only his Grand National with Top Spin Lob but many other successes important enough to get the racing hacks excited. Tremayne’s face smiled steadily from clipping after clipping including, inappropriately, those dealing with the death of the girl, Olympia.

Drawn irresistibly, I read a whole batch of accounts of that death from a good many different papers, the number of them suggesting that someone had gone out and bought an armful of everything available. In total, they told me not much more than I already knew, except that Olympia was twice described as a “jockette,” a word I somehow found repulsive. It appeared that she had ridden in several ladies’ races at point-to-point meetings, which one paper, to help the ignorant, described as “the days the hunting classes stop chasing the fox and chase each other instead.” Olympia the jockette had been twenty-three, had come from a “secure suburban background” and had worked as an instructor in a riding school in Surrey. Her parents, not surprisingly, were said to be “distraught.”

Dee-Dee came into the dining room, offering more coffee, and saw what I was reading.

“That Olympia was a sexpot bimbo,” she remarked flatly. “I was there at the party and you could practically smell it. Secure little suburban riding instructor, my foot.”