Rat Race Part 10

Colin told them about Kenny Bayst's fracas and they exclaimed sympathetically, which made me feel a humbug: Colin habitually drove himself to exhaustion and Midge was irretrievably afflicted, and all I had were a few minor bruises.

Dinner consisted simply of the hot roast chicken and a tossed green salad, with thick wedges of cheese afterwards. We ate in the kitchen with our elbows on the scarlet table, and chewed the bones. I hadn't pa.s.sed a more basically satisfying evening for many a long weary year.

'What are you thinking?' Nancy demanded. 'At this moment?'

'Making a note to fall frequently sick at Cambridge.'

'Well,' said Midge. 'Don't bother. Just come any time.' She looked enquiringly at her sister and brother and they nodded. 'Just come,' she repeated. 'Whenever it's handy.'

The old inner warning raised its urgent head: don't get involved, don't feel anything, don't risk it.

Don't get involved.

I said, 'Nothing I'd like better,' and didn't know whether I meant it or not.

The two girls stacked the plates in a dishwasher and made coffee. Nancy poured cream carefully across the top of her cup.

'Do you think that bomb was really intended for Colin?' she asked suddenly.

I shrugged. 'I don't know. It could just as well have been intended for Major Tyderman or Annie Villars or Goldenberg, or even Kenny Bayst, really, because it must have been on board before he decided not to come. Or it might have been intended for putting the firm out of action... for Derry-downs, itself, if you see what I mean, because if Colin had been killed, Derrydowns would probably have gone bust.'

'I can't see why anyone would want to kill Colin,' Midge said. 'Sure, people are jealous of him, but jealousy is one thing and killing five people is another...'

'Everyone seems to be taking it so calmly,' Nancy suddenly exploded. 'Here is this b.l.o.o.d.y bomb merchant running around loose with no one knowing just what he'll do next, and no one seems to be trying to find him and lock him up.'

'I don't see how they can find him,' Colin said. 'And anyway, I don't suppose he will risk trying it again.'

'Oh you... you... ostrich ostrich,' she said bitterly. 'Doesn't it occur to you that you don't just lightly put a bomb in an aeroplane? Whoever did it must have had an overwhelming reason, however mad it was, and since the whole thing went wrong they still have the same motive rotting away inside them, and what do you think Midge and I will do if next time you get blown to bits?'

I saw Midge looking at her with compa.s.sion and understood the extent of Nancy's fear. One day she was certainly going to lose her sister. She couldn't face losing her brother as well.

'It won't happen,' he said calmly.

They looked at him, and at me. There was a long, long pause. Then Midge picked up the wishbone of the chicken and held it out for me to pull. It snapped with the biggest side in her fist.

'I wish,' she said seriously, 'That Colin would stop cutting his toenails in the bath.'

CHAPTER SEVEN.

I slept on a divan bed in Colin's study, a small room crammed with racing trophies, filing cabinets and form books. Every wall was lined by rows of framed photographs of horses pa.s.sing winning posts and owners proudly leading them in. Their hooves thudded through my head most of the night, but all was peace by morning.

Colin brought me a cup of tea, yawning in his dark woolly bathrobe. He put the cup down on the small table beside the divan and pulled back the curtains.

'It's drizzling cats and dogs,' he announced. 'There's no chance of you flying this morning so you may as well relax and go back to sleep.'

I looked out at the misty rain. Didn't mind a bit.

'It's my day off,' I said.

'Couldn't be better.'

He perched his bottom on the edge of the desk.

'Are you O.K. this morning?'

'Fine,' I said. 'That hot bath loosened things a lot.'

'Every time you moved yesterday evening you could see it hurt.'

I made a face. 'Sorry.'

'Don't be. In this house you say ouch.'

'So I've noticed,' I said dryly.

He grinned. 'Everyone lives on a precipice. All the time. And Midge keeps telling me and Nancy that if we're not careful she'll outlive us both.'

'She's marvellous.'

'Yes, she is.' He looked out of the window. 'It was a terrible shock at first. Terrible. But now... I don't know... we seem to have accepted it. All of us. Even her.'

I said hesitantly, 'How long...?'

'How long will she live? No one knows. It varies so much, apparently. She's had it, they think, for about three years now. It seems a lot of people have it for about a year before it becomes noticeable enough to be diagnosed, so no one knows when it started with Midge. Some people die within days of getting it. Some have lived for twenty years. Nowadays, with all the modern treatments, they say the average after diagnosis is from two to six years, but it will possibly be ten. We've had two... We just believe it will be ten... and that makes it much easier...'

'She doesn't look especially ill.'

'Not at the moment. She had pneumonia a short while ago and the odd thing about that is that it reverses leukaemia for a while. Any fever does it, apparently. Actually makes her better. So do doses of radiation on her arms and legs, and other bones and organs. She's had several relapses and several good long spells of being well. It just goes on like that... but her blood is different, and her bones are changing inside all the time... I've seen pictures of what is happening... and one day... well, one day she'll have a sort of extreme relapse, and she won't recover.'

'Poor Midge...'

'Poor all of us.'

'What about... Nancy? Being her twin...'

'Do identical bodies get identical blood diseases, do you mean?' He looked at me across the room, his eyes in shadow. 'There's that too. They say the chances are infinitesimal. They say there are only eighteen known cases of leukaemia occurring twice in the same family unit. You can't catch it, and you can't inherit it. A girl with leukaemia can have a baby, and the baby won't have leukaemia. You can transfuse blood from someone with leukaemia into someone without it, and he won't catch it. They say there's no reason why Nancy should develop it any more than me or you or the postman. But they don't know know. The books don't record any cases of an identical twin having it, or what became of the other one.' He paused. Swallowed, 'I think we are all more afraid of Nancy getting it too than of anything on earth.'

I stayed until the sky cleared up at five o'clock. Colin spent most of the day working out which races he wanted to ride in during the coming week and answering telephone calls from owners and trainers anxious to engage him. Princ.i.p.ally he rode for a stable half a mile down the road, he said, but the terms of his retainer there gave him a good deal of choice.

He worked at a large chart with seven columns, one for each day of the week. Under each day he listed the various meetings, and under each meeting he listed the names, prizes and distances of the races. Towards the end of the afternoon there was a horse's name against a fair proportion of races, especially, I noticed, those with the highest rewards.

He grinned at my interest. 'A business is a business,' he said.

'So I see. A study in time and motion.'

On three of the days he proposed to ride at two meetings.

'Can you get me from Brighton to Windsor fast enough for two races an hour and a half apart? Three o'clock race at Brighton. Four-thirty, Windsor. And on Sat.u.r.day, three o'clock race at Bath, four-thirty at Brighton?'

'With fast cars both ends, don't see why not.'

'Good.' He crossed out a couple of question marks and wrote ticks instead. 'And next Sunday, can you take me to France?'

'If Harley says so.'

'Harley will say so,' he said with certainty.

'Don't you ever take a day off?'

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. 'Today,' he said, 'is off. Hadn't you noticed?'

'Er... yes.'

'The horse I was going over to ride today went lame on Thursday. Otherwise I was going to Paris. B.E.A., though, for once.'

Nancy said with mock resignation, 'The dynamo whirs nonstop from March to November in England and Europe and then goes whizzing off to j.a.pan and so on, and around about February there might be a day or two when we can all flop back in armchairs and put our feet up.'

Midge said, 'We put them up in the Bahamas last time. It was gorgeous. All that hot sun...'

The others laughed. 'It rained the whole of the first week.'

The girls cooked steaks for lunch. 'In your honour,' Midge said to me. 'You're too thin.'

I was fatter than any of them; which wasn't saying much.

Midge cleared the things away afterwards and Nancy covered the kitchen table with maps and charts.

'I really am flying Colin to the races one day soon, and I wondered if you'd help...'

'Of course.'

She bent over the table, the long dark hair swinging down over her neck. Don't get involved, I said to myself. Just don't.

'Next week, to Haydock. If the weather's good enough.'

'She's doing you out of a job,' Midge observed, wiping gla.s.ses.

'Wait till it thunders.'

'Beast,' Nancy said.

She had drawn a line on the map. She wanted me to tell her how to proceed in the Manchester control zone, and what to do if they gave her instructions she didn't understand.

'Ask them to repeat them. If you still don't understand, ask them to clarify.'

'They'll think I'm stupid,' she protested.

'Better that than barging on regardless and crashing into an airliner.'

'O.K.,' she sighed. 'Point taken.'

'Colin deserves a medal,' Midge said.

'Just shut up,' Nancy said. 'You're all b.l.o.o.d.y rude.'

When the drizzle stopped they all three took me back to Cambridge, squashing into the Aston Martin. Midge drove, obviously enjoying it. Nancy sat half on Colin and half on me, and I sat half on the door handle.

They stood in a row, and waved when I took off. I rolled the wings in salute and set course for Buckingham, and tried to ignore the regret I felt to be leaving.

Honey was up in the control tower at Derrydowns, Sunday or no Sunday, and Harley was aloft in the trainer giving someone a lesson. When he heard me on the radio he said snappily 'And about time too,' and I remembered the dimensions of my bank balance and didn't snap back. Chanter, I thought wryly, would have plain despised me.

I left the Cherokee Six in the hangar and walked round to the caravan. It seemed emptier, more sordid, more dilapidated than before. The windows all needed cleaning. The bed wasn't made. Yesterday's milk had gone sour again, and there was still no food.

I sat for a while watching the evening sun struggle through the breaking clouds, watching Harley's pupil stagger through some ropy landings, wondering how long it would be before Derrydowns went broke, and wondering if I could save enough before that happened to buy a car. Harley was paying me forty-five pounds a week, which was more than he could afford and less than I was worth. Of that, Susan, taxes and insurance would be taking exactly half, and with Harley deducting four more for my rent it wasn't going to be easy.

Impatiently I got up and cleaned all the windows, which improved my view of the airfield but not of the future.

When the light began to fade I had a visitor. A ripe shapely girl in the minimum of green cotton dress. Long fair hair. Long legs. Large mouth. Slightly protruding teeth. She walked with a man-eating sway and spoke with the faintest of lisps.

Honey Harley, come down from her tower.

She knocked on her way in. All the same if I'd been naked. As it was, I had my shirt off from the window cleaning and for Honey, it seemed, that was invitation enough. She came over holding out a paper in one hand and putting the other lightly on my shoulder. She let it slide down against my skin to half way down my back and then brought it up again to the top.

'Uncle and I were making out the list for the next week. We wondered if you fixed anything up with Colin Ross.'

I moved gently away, picked up a nylon sweater, and put it on.

'Yes... he wants us Tuesday, Friday, Sat.u.r.day and Sunday.'

'Great.'

She followed me across the small s.p.a.ce. One step further backwards and I'd be in my bedroom. Internally I tried lo stifle a laugh. I stepped casually round her, back towards the door. Her face showed nothing but businesslike calm.

'Look,' she said, 'Monday, that's tomorrow, then, you collect a businessman at Coventry, take him to Rotterdam, wait for him, and bring him back. That's in the Aztec. Tuesday, Colin Ross. Wednesday, nothing yet. Thursday, probably a trainer in Lambourn wanting to look at a horse for sale in Yorkshire, he'll let us know, and then Colin Ross again all the end of the week.'

'O.K.'

'And the Board of Trade want to come out and see you again. I told them early Tuesday or Wednesday.'

'All right.' As usual, the automatic sinking of the heart even at the words Board of Trade: though this time, surely, surely, my responsibility was a technicality. This time, surely, I couldn't get ground to bits.

Honey sat down on the two seat sofa and crossed her legs. She smiled.