Decider. Part 8

CHAPTER 5.

'Where's your car?' Dart asked. 'I'm going out the back way. I'm tired of those hate merchants. Where's your car?'

'I came in the back way,' I said. 'Drop me somewhere down there.'

His eyebrows rose, but all he said was 'Fine,' and he headed on the inner way past the grandstands and down the narrow private inconspicuous road to the racecourse manager's house.

'What's that monstrous bus doing there?' he demanded rhetorically when he saw it.

I said, 'It's mine,' but the words were lost in a sharp horrified exclamation from my driver who had seen, past the bus, the black parked shape of his great aunt's chauffeured Daimler.

'Aunt Marjorie! What the h.e.l.l is she she doing here?' doing here?'

He braked his rusty runabout beside the gleaming ostentation and without much enthusiam decided to investigate. The view that presented itself as we rounded a corner of the manager's neat modern house had me helplessly laughing, even if I laughed alone.

Double garage doors stood open. Within the garage, empty s.p.a.ce, swept clean. Out on the drive, the former contents lay untidily in clumps of gardening tools, cardboard boxes, spare roof tiles and rolls of netting for covering strawberry beds. To one side a discard section included a gutted refrigerator, a rotted baby buggy, battered metal trunk, mouse-eaten sofa and a heap of rusty wire.

Standing more or less to attention in a ragged row stood five young helpers deep in trouble, with Mrs Roger Gardner, sweet but threatened by authority, trying ineffectually to defend them.

Marjorie's penetrating voice was saying, 'It's all very well you boys carrying all that stuff out, but you're not to leave it there. Put everything back at once.'

Poor Mrs Gardner, wringing her hands, was saying, 'But Mrs Binsham, all I wanted was for them to empty the garage...'

'This mess is insupportable. Do as I tell you, boys. Put it all back.'

Christopher, looking desperately around, latched onto my arrival with Dart as if saved at the eleventh hour from the worst horror movie.

'Dad!' he said explosively. 'We cleared out the garage.'

'Yes, well done.'

Marjorie swivelled on one heel and directed her disapproval towards Dart and me, at which point my identification as the father of the workforce left her temporarily speechless.

'Mr Morris,' Roger Gardner's wife said hurriedly, 'your children have been great. Please believe me.'

It was courageous of her, I thought, considering her husband's vulnerability to the Stratton family's whims. I I thanked her warmly for keeping the children employed while I'd attended the shareholders' meeting. thanked her warmly for keeping the children employed while I'd attended the shareholders' meeting.

Marjorie Binsham stared at me piercingly but spoke to Dart, her displeasure a vibration in the air.

'What are you doing here with Mr Morris?'

Dart said with cowardice, 'He wanted to see Stratton Hays.'

'Did he, indeed? Stratton Hays is no business of his. This racecourse, however, is yours yours, or so I should have thought. Yours and your father's. Yet what have either of you done to look after it? It is I who have had to drive round to see that everything is in order. Colonel Gardner and I, not you and your father, have made a thorough inspection of the course.'

I could see, as easily as she could, that it had never occurred to Dart that he had any responsibility for the state of the racecourse. It had never been his domain. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times but came up with no protest or defence.

A frazzled looking Colonel drove up in a jeep and, springing out, a.s.sured Marjorie Binsham that he had already put in hand her requirement that spectators should be kept further away from the fences, to save them from injury henceforth.

'It isn't my job,' she complained to Dart. 'A few posts, and some rope, some instructions to stand back, that's all it takes. You You should have thought of it. The racecourse has had too much bad publicity. We cannot afford another debacle like last Sat.u.r.day.' should have thought of it. The racecourse has had too much bad publicity. We cannot afford another debacle like last Sat.u.r.day.'

No one mentioned that it had been the horses, not the spectators, which had caused the grief.

'Also,' Marjorie continued, 'you and your father must get rid of those people at the main gates. If you don't, they will attract extremists from all over the place, and the race crowds will stay away because of the aggravation. The racecourse will be killed off as quickly as by any of the crackpot schemes of Keith and your father. And as for Rebecca! If you notice, there's a woman just like her in that group at the gate. It's only a group now. Make sure it doesn't grow into a mob.'

'Yes, Aunt Marjorie,' Dart said. The task was beyond him, perhaps beyond anybody.

'Demonstrators don't want to succeed,' Marjorie pointed out. 'They want to demonstrate demonstrate. Go and tell them to demonstrate for better conditions for stable lads. The horses are pampered enough. The lads are not.'

No one remarked that injured stable lads usually lived.

'You, Mr Morris,' she fixed me with a sharp gaze. 'I want to talk to you you.' She pointed to her car. 'In there.'

'All right.'

'And you children, clear this mess up at once. Colonel, I don't know what you're thinking of. This place is a tip tip.'

She headed off vigorously towards her car and didn't look round to make sure I followed, which I did.

'Mark,' she told her chauffeur, who was sitting behind the steering wheel. 'Please take a walk.'

He touched his chauffeur's cap to her and obeyed her as if accustomed to the request, and his employer waited beside one of the rear doors until I opened it for her.

'Good,' she said, climbing into the s.p.a.cious rear seat. 'Get in beside me and sit down.'

I sat where she pointed and closed the door.

'Stratton Hays,' she said, coming at once to the point, 'was where your mother lived with Keith.'

'Yes,' I acknowledged, surprised.

'Did you ask to see it?'

'Dart offered, very kindly. I accepted.'

She paused, inspecting me.

'I never saw Madeline again, after she left,' she said at length, 'I disapproved of her leaving. Did she tell you?'

'Yes, she told me, but after so many years she bore you no animosity. She said you had urged your brother to close family ranks against her, but she was fond of your brother.'

'It was a long time,' she said, 'before I found out what sort of a man Keith is. His second wife killed herself, did you know? When I said to my brother that Keith was an unlucky picker, he told me it wasn't bad luck, it was Keith's own nature. He told me your mother couldn't love or nurse the baby Hannah because of the way the child had been conceived. Your mother told my brother that touching the baby made her feel sick.'

'She didn't tell me that.'

Marjorie said, 'I am now offering you a formal apology for the way I behaved to your mother.'

I paused only briefly to check what my parent would have wanted. 'It's accepted,' I said.

'Thank you.'

I thought that that must conclude the conversation, but it seemed not.

'Keith's third wife left him and divorced him for irretrievable breakdown of marriage. He now has a fourth wife, Imogen, who spends half of the time drunk.'

'Why doesn't she leave him too?' I asked.

'She won't or can't admit she made a mistake.'

It was close enough to my own feelings to strike me dumb.

'Keith,' his aunt said, 'is the only Stratton short of money. Imogen told me. She can't keep her mouth shut after six gla.s.ses of vodka. Keith is in debt. That's why he's pushing to sell the racecourse. He needs the money.'

I looked at the appearance Marjorie presented to the world: the little old lady well into her eighties with wavy white hair, soft pink and white skin and hawk-like dark eyes. The pithy, forceful mind, and the sinewy vocabulary were, I imagined, the nearest in quality in the Stratton family to the financial genius who had founded them.

'I was furious with my brother for giving Madeline those shares,' she said. 'He could be obstinate sometimes. Now, all these years later, I'm glad that he did. I am glad,' she finished slowly, 'that someone outside the family can bring some sense of proportion into the Stratton hothouse.'

'I don't know that I can.'

'The point,' she said, 'is whether you want to. Or rather, how much you want to. If you hadn't been in the least bit interested, you wouldn't have turned up here today.'

'True.'

'You could oblige me,' she said, 'by finding out how much money Keith owes, and to whom. And by finding out what relationship Conrad has with the architect he's committed to, who Colonel Gardner tells me knows nothing about racing and is designing a monstrosity. The Colonel tells me we need an architect more like the one who built your own house, but that your architect only designs on a small scale.'

'The Colonel told you he'd visited me?'

'Most sensible thing he's done this year.'

'You amaze me.'

'I want you as an ally,' she said. 'Help me make the racecourse prosper.'

I tried to sort out my own jumbled responses, and it was out of the jumble and not from thought through reasons that I gave her my answer.

'All right, I'll try.'

She held out a small hand to formalise the agreement, and I shook on it, a binding commitment.

Marjorie was driven away without returning to the gutted garage, which was just as well as I found the mess unchanged and the boys, the Gardners and Dart all in the Gardners' kitchen with their attention on cake. Warm fragrant palecoloured fruit cake, that minute baked. Christopher asked for the recipe 'so that Dad can make it in the bus'.

'Dad can cook?' Dart asked ironically.

'Dad can do anything,' Neil said, munching.

Dad, I thought to myself, had probably just impulsively set himself on a high road to failure.

'Colonel ' I started.

He interrupted. 'Call me Roger.'

'Roger,' I said, 'can I?... I mean, may the architect of my house come here tomorrow and make a thorough survey of the grandstands as they are at present? I'm sure you have professional advisers about the state of the fabric and so on, but could we take a fresh detached survey with a view to seeing whether new stands are or are not essential for a profitable future?'

Dart's cake came to a standstill in mid-chew and Roger Gardner's face lost some of its habitual gloom.

'Delighted,' he said, 'but not tomorrow. I've got the course-builders coming, and the full complement of groundsmen will be here getting everything in shape for next Monday's meeting.'

'Friday, then?'

He said doubtfully, 'That'll be Good Friday. Easter, of course. Perhaps your man won't want to work on Good Friday.'

'He'll do what I tell him,' I said. 'It's me.'

Both Dart and Roger were surprised.

'I am,' I said gently, 'a qualified architect. I did five arduous years at the Architectural a.s.sociation, one of the most thorough schools in the world. I do choose houses in preference to high rises, but that's because horizontal lines that fit in with nature please me better. I'm a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, not a Le Corbusier, if that means anything to you.'

'I've heard of them,' Dart said. 'Who hasn't?'

'Frank Lloyd Wright,' I said, 'developed the cantilever roof you see on all new grandstands everywhere.'

'We don't have a cantilever,' Roger said thoughtfully.

'No, but let's see what you do do have, and what you can get away with not having.' have, and what you can get away with not having.'

Dart's view of me had changed a little. 'You said you were a builder,' he accused.

'Yes, I am.'

Dart looked at the children. 'What does your father do?' he asked.

'Builds houses.'

'With his own hands, do you mean?'

'Well,' Edward amplified, 'with spades and trowels and a saw and everything.'

'Ruins,' Christopher explained. 'We're on a ruin hunt for our Easter holidays.'

Together they described the pattern of their lives to an ever more astonished audience. Their matter-of-fact acceptance of not every child's experience seemed especially to amaze.

'But we're going to keep the last one he did. Aren't we, Dad?'

'Yes.'

'Promise.'