Longshot. Part 13

'Be my guest.'

I loaded up four of the boxes and set off with them, and in a minute found her following me.

'Wait,' she said inside the dining-room door, 'mahogany gets scratched easily.'

She went over to a large sideboard and from a drawer drew out a vast green baize cloth which she draped over the whole expanse of the large oval table.

'You can work on that,' she said.

'Thank you.'

I put down the boxes and went to fetch another load, ferrying them until the whole lot was transferred. Dee-Dee meanwhile went back to her desk and her work, which largely consisted of the telephone. I could hear her still talking on and off while I arranged the boxes of cuttings chronologically and took the lid off the first, realising from the date on its end that it had to go back beyond Tremayne; that he hadn't started training when he was a baby. Tattered yellow pieces of newsprint informed me that Mr Loxley Vickers, of Sh.e.l.lerton House, Berkshire, had bought Triple Subject, a six-year-old gelding, for the record sum for a steeplechaser of twelve hundred guineas. A house, an astonished reporter wrote, could be bought for less.

I looked up, smiling, and found Dee-Dee standing in the doorway, hesitantly hovering.

'I've been talking to Fiona Goodhaven,' she said abruptly.

'How is she?'

'All right. Thanks to you, it seems. Why didn't you tell me about your rescue job?'

'It didn't seem important.'

'Are you mad?'

'Well, it didn't seem important in the context of whether I could or couldn't do justice to Tremayne's biography.'

'G.o.d Almighty.' She went away but shortly came back. 'If you turn that thermostat,' she said, pointing, 'it will get warmer in here.'

She whisked away again before I could thank her, but I understood that peace had been declared, or, at the very least, hostilities temporarily suspended.

Tremayne returned in time. I heard him talking forcefully into an office telephone and presently he strode into the dining-room to tell me that someone had finally found they had a horse missing.

'It came over the hill from the next village. They're sending a box to pick it up. How are you doing?'

'Reading about your father.'

'A lunatic. Had an obsession about how things would look in his stomach after he'd eaten them. He used to make his butler put an extra serving of everything he was going to eat into a bucket and stir it round. If my father didn't like the look of it, he wouldn't eat his dinner. Drove the cook mad.'

I laughed. 'What about your mother?'

'She'd fallen off the perch by then. He wasn't so bad when she was alive. He went screwy after.'

'How old were you when she- er- fell off the perch?'

'Ten. Same age as Gareth when his mother finally hopped it. You might say I know what it's like to be Gareth. Except his mother's still alive and he sees her sometimes. I can't remember mine very clearly, to be honest.'

After a moment I said, 'How much can I ask you?'

'Ask anything. If I don't want to answer, I'll say so.'

'Well- you said your father inherited a fortune. Did he- er- leave it to you?'

Tremayne laughed in his throat. 'A fortune seventy or eighty years ago is not a fortune now. But yes, in a way he did. Left me this house. Taught me the principles of landowning which he'd learnt from his father but hardly practised. My father spent; my grandfather acc.u.mulated. I'm more like my grandfather, though I never knew him. I tell Gareth sometimes that we can't afford things even if we can. I don't want him to turn out a spender.'

'What about Perkin?'

'Perkin?' For a second Tremayne looked blank. 'Perkin has no money sense at all. Lives in a world of his own. It's no use talking to Perkin about money.'

'What does he do,' I asked, 'in his world?'

Tremayne looked as if his elder son's motivations were a mystery, but somewhere also I sensed a sort of exasperated pride.

'He makes furniture,' he said. 'Designs it. Makes it himself, piece by piece. Chests, tables, screens, anything. Two hundred years from now they will be valuable antiques. That's Perkin's money sense for you.' He sighed. 'Best thing he ever did was marry a smart girl like Mackie. She sells his pieces, makes sure he makes a profit. He used to sell thing sometimes for less than they cost to make. Absolutely hopeless.'

'As long as he's happy.'

Tremayne made no comment on his son's state of happiness but asked about my tape recorder.

'Didn't it get wet last night? Won't it be ruined?'

'No. I keep everything in waterproof bags. Sort of habit.'

'Jungles and deserts?' he asked, remembering.

'Mm.'

'Then you go and fetch it, and we'll start. And I'll move the office television in here with the video player so you can watch the races I've won. And if you want any lunch,' he added as an afterthought, 'I nearly always have beef sandwiches; buy them by the fifty, ready-made from the supermarket, and put them in the freezer.'

We both ate mostly-thawed uninteresting beef sandwiches in due course and I thought that even if Tremayne's housekeeping were slightly eccentric, at least he hadn't stirred his food up first in a bucket.

CHAPTER 5.

At about six-thirty that day I walked down to Sh.e.l.lerton to collect my clothes from the Goodhavens, Fiona and Harry. Darkness had fallen but it seemed to me that the air temperature hadn't, and there was less energy in the wind than in the morning.

I had by that time taped three hours' worth of Tremayne's extraordinary childhood and walked round with him to inspect his horses at evening stables. At every one of the fifty doors he had stopped to check on the inmate's welfare, discussing it briefly with the lad and dispensing carrots to enquiring muzzles with little pats and murmurs of affection.

In between times as we moved along the rows he explained that the horses would now be rugged up against the frost in wool blankets and duvets, then covered with jute rugs (like sacking) securely buckled on. They would be given their main feed of the day and be shut up for the night to remain undisturbed until morning.

'One of us walks round last thing at night,' he said, 'Bob or Mackie or I, to make sure they're all right. Not kicking their boxes and so on. If they're quiet they're all right, and I don't disturb them.'

Like fifty children, I thought, tucked up in bed.

I'd asked him how many lads he had. Twenty-one, he said, plus Bob Watson, who was worth six, and the travelling head lad and a box driver and a groundsman. With Mackie and Dee-Dee, twenty-seven full-time employees. The economics of training racehorses, he remarked, put the book trade's problems in the shade.

When I reminded him that I was going down to Fiona and Harry's to fetch my belongings he offered me his car.

'I quite like walking,' I said.