‘There might be a delay.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve lost Peters.’
‘Careless,’ I remarked.
‘Oh ha-ha.’
‘Has he left?’
Simon hesitated perceptibly. ‘It looks like it.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He didn’t come back from one of the trips. Last Monday. Just never turned up for the flight back, and hasn’t been seen or heard of since.’
‘Hospitals?’ I said.
‘We checked those, of course. And the morgue, and the jail. Nothing. He just vanished. And as he hasn’t done anything wrong the police aren’t interested in finding him. No police would be, it isn’t criminal to leave your job without notice. They say he fell for a girl, very likely, and decided not to go home.’
‘Is he married?’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I’ll get on with your yearlings, but I can’t give you even an approximate date.’
‘Simon,’ I said slowly. ‘Didn’t something like this happen before?’
‘Er... do you mean Ballard?’
‘One of your liaison men,’ I said.
‘Yes. Well... I suppose so.’
‘In Italy?’ I suggested gently.
There was a short silence the other end. ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ he said. ‘Funny coincidence. Well... I’ll let you know about the yearlings.’
‘I’ll have to get on to Clarksons if you can’t manage it.’
He sighed. ‘I’ll do my best. I’ll ring you back tomorrow.’
I put down the receiver and started on a large batch of customs declarations, and the long morning disintegrated towards the lunch hour. Maggie and I said nothing at all to each other and Christopher cursed steadily over his letters. At one sharp I beat even Maggie in the rush to the door.
Outside, the December sun was shining. On impulse I jumped on to a passing bus, got off at Marble Arch, and walked slowly through the park to the Serpentine. I was still there, sitting on a bench, watching the sun ripple on the water, when the hands on my watch read two o’clock. I was still there at half past. At a quarter to three I threw some stones with force into the lake, and a park keeper told me not to.
A spoilt bad-tempered bastard. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she had been used to saying things like that, but she was a gentle see-no-evil person who had been made to wash her mouth out with soap for swearing as a child and had never taken the risk again. She was my youngest sister, fifteen years my elder, unmarried, plain, and quietly intelligent. She had reversed roles with our parents: she ran the house and managed them as her children. She also to a great extent managed me, and always had.
A repressed, quiet, ‘good’ little boy I had been: and a quiet, withdrawn, secretive man I had become. I was almost pathologically tidy and methodical, early for every appointment, controlled alike in behaviour, hand-writing and sex. A prim dim nothing, as Maggie said. The fact that for some months now I had not felt in the least like that inside was confusing, and getting more so.
I looked up into the blue gold-washed sky. Only there, I thought with a fleeting inward smile, only there am I my own man. And perhaps in steeplechases. Perhaps there too, sometimes.
She had been waiting for me as usual at breakfast, her face fresh from her early walk with the dogs. I had seen little of her over the week end: I’d been racing on Saturday, and on Sunday I’d left home before breakfast and gone back late.
‘Where did you go yesterday?’ she asked.
I poured some coffee and didn’t answer. She was used to that, however.
‘Mother wanted to speak to you.’
‘What about?’
‘She has asked the Filyhoughs to lunch next Sunday.’
I tidily ate my bacon and egg. I said calmly, ‘That coy spotty Angela. It’s a waste of time. I won’t be here anyway.’
‘Angela will inherit half a million,’ she said earnestly.
‘And we have beetles in the roof,’ I agreed dryly.
‘Mother wants to see you married.’
‘Only to a very rich girl.’
My sister acknowledged that this was true, but saw nothing particularly wrong in it. The family fortunes were waning: as my parents saw it, the swop of a future title for a future fortune was a suitable bargain. They didn’t seem to realise that a rich girl nowadays had more sense than to hand over her wealth to her husband, and could leave with it intact if she felt like it.
‘Mother told Angela you would be here.’
‘That was silly of her.’
‘Henry!’
‘I do not like Angela,’ I said coldly. ‘I do not intend to be here for lunch next Sunday. Is that quite clear?’
‘But you must... you can’t leave me to deal with them all alone.’
‘You’ll just have to restrain Mother from issuing these stupid invitations. Angela is the umpteenth unattractive heiress she’s invited this year. I’m fed up with it.’
‘We need...’
‘I am not,’ I said stiffly, ‘a prostitute.’
She stood up, bitterly offended. ‘That’s unkind.’
‘And while we are at it, I wish the beetles good luck. This damp decaying pile of a house eats up every penny we’ve got and if it fell down tomorrow we’d all be far better off.’
‘It’s our home,’ she said, as if that was the final word.
When it was mine, I would get rid of it; but I didn’t say that, and encouraged by my silence she tried persuasion. ‘Henry, please be here for the Filyhoughs.’
‘No,’ I said forcefully. ‘I won’t. I want to do something else next Sunday. You can count me right out.’
She suddenly and completely lost her temper. Shaking she said, ‘I cannot stand much more of your damned autistic behaviour. You’re a spoilt, bad-tempered bastard...’
Hell, I thought by the Serpentine, was I really? And if so, why?
At three, with the air growing cold, I got up and left the park, but the office I went to was not the elegant suite of Anglia Bloodstock in Hanover Square. There, I thought, they could go on wondering why the ever-punctual Henry hadn’t returned from lunch. I went instead by taxi to a small dilapidated rubbish-strewn wharf down in the Pool, where the smell of Thames mud at low tide rose earthily into my nostrils as I paid the fare.
At one end of the wharf, on an old bombed site, a small square concrete building had been thrown up shortly after the war and shoddily maintained ever since. Its drab walls, striped by rust from leaking gutters, badly needed a coat of ‘Snowcem’; its rectangular metal windows were grimed and flaking, and no one had polished the brass door fittings since my previous visit six months ago. There was no need here to put on a plushy front for the customers; the customers were not expected to come.
I walked up the uncarpeted stairs, across the eight foot square of linoleumed landing and through the open door of Simon Searle’s room. He looked up from some complicated doodling on a memo pad, lumbered to his feet and greeted me with a huge handshake and a wide grin. As he was the only person who ever gave me this sort of welcome I came as near to unbending with him as with anyone. But we had never done more than meet now and again on business and occasionally repair to a pub afterwards. There he was inclined to lots of beer and bonhomie, and I to a single whisky, and that was that.
‘You haven’t trekked all the way down here about those yearlings?’ he protested. ‘I told you...’
‘No,’ I said, coming to the point abruptly. ‘I came to find out if Yardman would give me a job.’
‘You,’ said Simon, ‘want to work here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well I’m damned.’ Simon sat down on the edge of his desk and his bulk settled and spread comfortably around him. He was a vast shambling man somewhere in the doldrums between thirty-five and forty-five, bald on top, bohemian, in dress and broad of mind.