‘Not bad,’ said Julian’s father beaming. ‘Not bad at all,’ and he gave me a sealed envelope he’d had the faith to prepare in advance.
With about three hundred and fifty miles to go I left soon after the race, and on the empty northern roads made good time to Scotland. My sister Louise lived in a dreary baronial hall near Elgin, a house almost as big as ours at home and just as inadequately heated. She had pleased our parents by marrying for money, and hadn’t discovered her husband’s fanatical tightfistedness until afterwards. For all she’d ever had to spend since, she’d have been better off in a semi-detached in Peckham. Her Christmas gifts to me as a child had been Everyman editions of the classics. I got none at all now.
Even so, when I went in to see her in the morning, having arrived after she was sleeping the night before, it was clear that some of her spirit had survived. We looked at each other as at strangers. She, after a seven-year gap, was much older looking than I remembered, older than forty-three, and pale with illness, but her eyes were bright and her smile truly pleased.
‘Henry, my little brother, I’m so glad you’ve come...’
One had to believe her. I was glad too, and suddenly the visit was no longer a chore. I spent all day with her, looking at old photographs and playing Chinese chequers, which she had taught me as a child, and listening to her chat about the three sons away at boarding school and how poor the grouse had been this winter and how much she would like to see London again, it was ten years since she had been down. She asked me to do various little jobs for her, explaining that ‘dear James’ was apt to be irritated, and the maids had too much else to do, poor things. I fetched things for her, packed up a parcel, tidied her room, filled her hot water bottle and found her some more toothpaste. After that she wondered if we couldn’t perhaps turn out her medicine drawer while we had the opportunity.
The medicine drawer could have stocked a dispensary. Half of them, she said with relief, she would no longer need. ‘Throw them away.’ She sorted the bottles and boxes into two heaps. ‘Put all those in the wastepaper basket.’ Obediently I picked up a handful. One was labelled ‘Conovid,’ with some explanatory words underneath, and it took several seconds before the message got through. I picked that box out of the rubbish and looked inside. There was a strip of foil containing pills, each packed separately. I tore one square open and picked out the small pink tablet.
‘Don’t you want these?’ I asked.
‘Of course not. I don’t need them any more, after the operation.’
‘Oh... I see. No, of course not. Then may I have them?’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Don’t be naïve, Louise.’
She laughed. ‘You’ve got a girl friend at last? Of course you can have them. There’s a full box lying around somewhere too, I think. In my top drawer, perhaps? Maybe some in the bathroom too.’
I collected altogether enough birth control pills to fill a bottle nearly as big as the one Patrick had given Gabriella, a square cornered brown bottle four inches high, which had held a prescription for penicillin syrup for curing the boys’ throat infections. Louise watched with amusement while I rinsed it out, baked it dry in front of her electric fire, and filled it up, stuffing the neck with cotton wool before screwing on the black cap.
‘Marriage?’ she said. As bad as Alice.
‘I don’t know.’ I put the drawer she had tidied back into the bedside table. ‘And don’t tell Mother.’
Wednesday seemed a long time coming, and I was waiting at Gatwick a good hour before the first horses turned up. Not even the arrival of Billy and Alf could damp my spirits, and we loaded the horses without incident and faster than usual, as two of the studs had sent their own grooms as well, and for once they were willing.
It was one of the mornings that Simon came with last minute papers, and he gave them to me warily in the charter airline office when the plane was ready to leave.
‘Good morning, Henry.’
‘Good morning.’
One couldn’t patch up a friendship at seven-thirty in the morning in front of yawning pilots and office staff. I took the papers with a nod, hesitated, and went out across the tarmac, bound for the aircraft and Milan.
There were running steps behind me and a hand on my arm.
‘Lord Grey? You’re wanted on the telephone. They say it’s urgent.’
I picked up the receiver and listened, said ‘All right,’ and slowly put it down again. I was not, after all, going to see Gabriella. I could feel my face contract into lines of pain.
‘What is it?’ Simon said.
‘My father... my father has died... sometime during the night. They have just found him... he was very tired, yesterday evening...’
There was a shocked silence in the office. Simon looked at me with great understanding, for he knew how little I wanted this day.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice thick with sincerity.
I spoke to him immediately, without thinking, in the old familiar way. ‘I’ve got to go home.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But the horses are all loaded, and there’s only Billy...’
‘That’s easy. I’ll go myself.’ He fished in his brief case and produced his passport.
It was the best solution. I gave him back the papers and took the brown bottle of pills out of my pocket. With a black ball point I wrote on the label, ‘Gabriella Barzini, Souvenir Shop, Malpensa Airport.’
‘Will you give this to the girl at the gift counter, and tell her why I couldn’t come, and say I’ll write?’
He nodded.
‘You won’t forget?’ I said anxiously.
‘No, Henry.’ He smiled as he used to. ‘I’ll see she gets it, and the message. I promise.’
We shook hands, and after a detour through the passport office he shambled across the tarmac and climbed up the ramp into the plane. I watched the doors shut. I watched the aircraft fly away, taking my job, my friend and my gift, but not me.
Simon Searle went to Italy instead of me, and he didn’t come back.
Chapter Eight
It was over a week before I found out. I went straight up to his room when I reached the wharf, and it was empty and much too tidy.
The dim teen-age secretary next door, in answer to my questions, agreed that Mr. Searle wasn’t in today, and that no one seemed to know when he would be in at all... or whether.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He hasn’t been in for a week. We don’t know where he’s got to.’
Disturbed, I went downstairs and knocked on Yardman’s door.
‘Come in.’
I went in. He was standing by the open window, watching colliers’ tugs pulling heavy barges up the river. A Finnish freighter, come up on the flood, was manoeuvring alongside across the river under the vulture-like meccano cranes. The air was alive with hooter signals and the bang and clatter of dock work, and the tide was carrying the garbage from the lower docks steadily upstream to the Palace of Westminster. Yardman turned, saw me, carefully closed the window, and came across the room with both hands outstretched.