Longshot. Part 22

Touchy, I thanked heaven, slowed when Mackie slowed and brought himself to a good-natured halt without dumping his rider, Friday or not. I was breathless and also exhilarated and thought I could easily get hooked on Touchy after a fix or two more like that.

'Where the h.e.l.l did you get to?' Tremayne enquired of me, joining us and the rest of the string. 'I thought you'd chickened out.'

'We were just talking,' Mackie said.

Tremayne looked at her now glowing face and probably drew the wrong conclusion but made no further comment. He told everyone to walk back down the gallop and dismount and lead them the last part of the way, as usual.

Mackie, taking her place at the head, asked me to ride at the back, to make sure everyone returned safely, which I did. Tremayne's tractor followed slowly, at a distance.

He came stamping into the kitchen where I was fishing out orange juice and without preamble demanded, 'What were you and Mackie talking about?'

'She'll tell you,' I said, smiling.

He said belligerently, 'Mackie's off limits.'

I put down the orange juice and straightened, not knowing quite what to say.

'If you mean do I fancy Mackie,' I said, 'then yes, she's a great girl. But off limits is right. We were not flirting, chatting up, or whatever else you care to call it. Not.'

After a grudging minute he said, 'All right then,' and I thought that in his way he was as possessive of Mackie as Perkin was.

A short while later, munching the toast I'd made for him, he seemed to have forgotten it.

'You can ride out every morning,' he said, 'if you'd like.'

He could see I was pleased. I said, 'I'd like it very much.'

'Settled, then.'

The day pa.s.sed in the way that had become routine: clippings, beef sandwiches, taping, evening drinks, Gareth home, cook the dinner. Dee-Dee's distrust of me had vanished; Perkin's hadn't. Tremayne seemed to have accepted my a.s.surance of the morning, and Mackie smiled into her plain tonic and carefully avoided my eyes for fear of revealing that a secret lay between us.

On Sat.u.r.day morning I rode Touchy again but Mackie didn't materialise, having phoned Tremayne to say she wasn't well. She and Perkin appeared in the kitchen during breakfast, he with an arm round her shoulders in a supremely proprietary way.

'We've something to tell you,' Perkin said to Tremayne.

'Oh, yes?' Tremayne was busy with some papers.

'Yes. Do pay attention. We're having a baby.'

'We think so,' Mackie said.

Tremayne paid attention abruptly and was clearly profoundly delighted. Not an over-demonstrative man he didn't leap up to embrace them but literally purred in his throat like a cat and beat the table with his fist. Son and daughter-in-law had no difficulty in reading the signals and looked smugly pleased with themselves, sitting down, drinking coffee and working out that the birth would occur in September, but they weren't quite sure of the date.

Mackie gave me a shy smile which Perkin forgave. Each of them looked more in love with the other, more relaxed, as if the earlier failure to conceive had caused tension between them, now relieved.

After that excitement I laboured all morning again on the clippings, unsustained by cups from Dee-Dee, who didn't work on Sat.u.r.days. Gareth went to Sat.u.r.day morning school and pinned a second message on the corkboard - 'FOOTBALL MATCH PM' - leaving 'BACK FOR GRUB' in place.

Tremayne, cursing the persistent absence of racing even on television, taped the saga of his younger life up to the time he accompanied his father to a brothel.

'My father wouldn't have anybody but the madam and she said she'd retired long ago but she accommodated him in the end. Couldn't resist him, the mad old charmer.'

In the evening I fed the three of us on lamb chops, peas and potatoes in their skins and on Sunday morning Fiona and Harry came to the stables to see her horses and drink with Tremayne afterwards in the family room. Nolan came with them, but not Lewis. An aunt of Harry's, another Mrs Goodhaven, tagged quietly along. Mackie, Perkin and Gareth congregated as if for a normal ritual.

Mackie couldn't keep her good news to herself and Fiona and Harry hugged her while Perkin looked important and Nolan gave half-hearted congratulations. Tremayne opened champagne.

At about that time, ten miles away in lonely woodland, a gamekeeper came across what was left of Angela Brickell.

CHAPTER 7.

The discovery made no impact on Sh.e.l.lerton on that Sunday because at first no one knew whose bones lay among the dead brambles and the dormant oaks.

The gamekeeper went home to his Sunday lunch and telephoned the local police after he'd eaten, feeling that as the bones were old it wouldn't matter if they waited one hour longer.

In Tremayne's house, when the toasts to the future Vickers had been drunk, Gareth showed Fiona a couple of the travel guides and Fiona in astonishment showed Harry. Nolan picked up Safari as if absent-mindedly and said that no one but a b.l.o.o.d.y fool would go hunting tigers in Africa.

'There aren't any tigers in Africa,' Gareth said.

'That's right. He'd be a b.l.o.o.d.y fool.'

'Oh- it's a joke,' Gareth said, obviously feeling that it was he who'd been made a fool of. 'Very funny.'

Nolan, though the shortest man there, physically dominated the room, eclipsing even Tremayne. His strong animal vigour and powerful saturnine features seemed to charge the very air with static, as if his presence alone could generate sparks. One could see how Mackie had been struck by lightning. One could see how Olympia might have died by violent accident. One's reactions to Nolan had little to do with reason, all with instinct.

Harry's aunt was looking into Ice in a faintly superior way as if confronted with a manifestation of the lower orders.

'How frightfully rugged,' she said, her voice as languid as Harry's but without the G.o.d-given amus.e.m.e.nt.

'Er,' Harry said to me. 'I didn't introduce you properly. I must present you to my aunt, Erica Goodhaven. She's a writer.'

There was a subterranean flood of mischief in his eyes. Fiona glanced at me with a hint of a smile and I thought both of them looked as though I were about to be thrown to the lions for their entertainment. Antic.i.p.ation of enjoyment, loud and clear.

'Erica,' Harry said, 'John wrote these books.'

'And a novel,' Tremayne said defensively, coming to an aid I didn't realise I needed. 'It's going to be published. And he's writing my biography.'

'A novel,' Harry's aunt said, in the same way as before.

'Going to be published. How interesting. I, also, write novels. Under my unmarried name, Erica Upton.'

Thrown to a literary lion, I perceived. A real one, a lioness. Erica Upton's five-star prize-winning reputation was for erudition, elegant syntax, esoteric backgrounds, elegiac characters and a profound understanding of incest.

'Your aunt?' I said to Harry.

'By marriage.'

Tremayne refilled my gla.s.s with champagne as if I would need it and muttered under his breath, 'She'll eat you.'

From across the room she did look faintly predatory at that moment, though was otherwise a slender, intense-looking, grey-haired woman in a grey wool dress with flat shoes and no jewellery. A quintessential aunt, I thought; except that most people's aunts weren't Erica Upton.