He gave me a small tight smile laced with a sneer for the soft option. A man with no patience or sympathy for anyone else’s problems, not even his sons’.
The sitting-room door opened and a large woman in a sunflower dress came in. She had thick fair down on her legs but no stockings, and a pair of puffed ankles bulged over the edges of some battered blue bedroom slippers. Nevertheless she was very light on her feet and she moved slowly, so that her progress seemed to be a weightless drift: no mean feat considering she must have topped twelve stone.
A mass of fine light brown hair hung in an amorphous cloud round her head, from which a pair of dreamy eyes surveyed the world as though half asleep. Her face was soft and rounded, not young, but still in a way immature. Her fantasy life, I guessed uncharitably, was more real to her than the present. She had been far away in the past hour, much further than upstairs.
‘I didn’t know you were in,’ she said to Roncey.
He stood up several seconds after me. ‘Madge, this is James Tyrone. I told you he was coming.’
‘Did you?’ She transferred her vague gaze to me. ‘Carry on, then.’
‘Where have you been?’ Roncey said. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’
‘Calling?’ She shook her head. ‘I was making the beds, of course.’ She stood in the centre of the room, looking doubtfully around at the mess. ‘Why didn’t you light the fire?’
I glanced involuntarily at the heap of ashes in the grate, but she saw them as no obstacle at all. From a scratched oak box beside the hearth she produced three firelighters and a handful of sticks. These went on top of the ashes, which got only a desultory poke. She struck a match, lit the firelighters, and made a wigwam of coal. The new fire flared up good temperedly on the body of the old while Madge took the hearth brush and swept a few cinders out of sight behind a pile of logs.
Fascinated, I watched her continue with her housework. She drifted across to the dead flowers, opened the window, and threw them out. She emptied the water from the vase after them, then put it back on the window sill and shut the window.
From behind the sofa where Roncey and I sat she pulled a large brown cardboard box. On the outside was stencilled Kellogg’s Cornflakes, 12 x Family Size and on the inside it was half filled with the same sort of jumble which was lying around the room. She wafted methodically around in a large circle taking everything up and throwing it just as it came into the box, a process which took approximately three minutes. She then pushed the box out of sight again behind the sofa and plumped up the seat cushions of two armchairs on her way back to the door. The room, tidy and with the brightly blazing fire, looked staggeringly different. The cobwebs were still there but one felt it might be their turn tomorrow. Peter was right. Ma had got the time and motion kick completely buttoned up; and what did it matter if the motive was laziness.
Roncey insisted that I should stay to lunch and filled in the time beforehand with a brisk but endless account of all the horses he had ever owned. Over lunch, cold beef and pickles and cheese and biscuits served at two-thirty on the kitchen table, it was still he who did all the talking. The boys ate steadily in silence and Madge contemplated the middle distance with eyes which saw only the scenes going on in her head.
When I left shortly afterwards Pat asked for a lift into Bishop’s Stortford and braved his father’s frown to climb into the front seat of the van. Roncey shook hands firmly as before and said he hoped to receive a free copy of Tally. ‘Of course,’ I said. But Tally were notoriously mean: I would have to send it myself.
He waved me out of the yard and told Pat brusquely to come straight back on the four o’clock bus, and we were barely out through the sagging gateposts before Pat unburdened himself of a chunk of bottled resentment.
‘He treats us like children... Ma’s no help, she never listens...’
‘You could leave here,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re what — nineteen?’
‘Next month. But I can’t leave and he knows it. Not if I want to race. I can’t turn professional yet, I’m not well enough known and no one would put me up on their horses. I’ve got to start as an amateur and make a name for myself, Pa says so. Well I couldn’t be an amateur if I left home and got an ordinary job somewhere, I couldn’t afford all the expenses and I wouldn’t have any time.’
‘A job in a stable...’ I suggested.
‘Do me a favour. The rules say you can’t earn a salary in any capacity in a racing stable and ride as an amateur, not even if you’re a secretary or an assistant or anything. It’s bloody unfair. And don’t say I could get a job as a lad and do my two and have a professional licence, of course I could. And how many lads ever get far as jockeys, doing that? None. Absolutely none. You know that.’
I nodded.
‘I do a lad’s work now, right enough. Six horses, we’ve got, and I do the bloody lot. Old Joe’s the only labour we’ve got on the whole farm, except us, believe it or not. Pa’s always got a dozen jobs lined up for him. And I wouldn’t mind the work, and getting practically no pay, I really wouldn’t, if Pa would let me ride in anything except point-to-points, but he won’t, he says I haven’t enough experience, and if you ask me he’s making bloody sure I never get enough experience... I’m absolutely fed up, I’ll tell you straight.’
He brooded over his situation all the way into Bishops Stortford. A genuine grievance, I thought. Victor Roncey was not a father to help his sons get on.
4
They held the inquest on Bert Checkov on that Monday afternoon. Verdict: Misadventure. Dead drunk he was, said the girl typists who saw him fall. Dead drunk.
And after he hit the pavement, just dead.
When I went into the office on Tuesday morning, Luke-John and Derry were discussing whether or not to go to the funeral on the Wednesday.
‘Croxley,’ Derry said. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Watford,’ I said. ‘On the Metropolitan Line. A straight run into Farringdon Street.’
‘What Fleet Street needs,’ said Derry gloomily, ‘is a tube station a lot nearer than blooming Farringdon. It’s three quarters of a mile if it’s an inch.’
‘If you’re right, Ty, we can manage it easily,’ Luke-John said authoritatively. ‘We should all go, I think.’
Derry squinted at the small underground map in his diary. ‘Croxley. Next to Watford. What do you know?’
I’d had a girl at Watford once. The second one. I’d spent a lot of time on the Metropolitan Line while Elizabeth was under the impression I was extra busy in the Blaze. Guilt and deceit were old familiar travelling companions. From Watford, from Virginia Water, from wherever.
‘Ty,’ Luke-John was saying sharply.
‘Huh?’
‘The funeral is at two-thirty. An hour, say, to get there...?’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘There’s this Tally article to be done. It’ll take me at least another two days in interviews.’
He shrugged. ‘I’d have thought...’
‘What depths have you plumbed so far?’ Derry asked. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk. No work in a Sunday paper on Tuesday.
‘The Roncey family,’ I said. ‘Tiddely Pom.’
Derry sniffed. ‘Ante-post favourite.’
‘Will he be your tip?’ I asked with interest.
‘Shouldn’t think so. He’s won a few races but he hasn’t beaten much of any class.’
‘Bert tipped him strongly. Wrote a most emphatic piece about catching the odds now before they shorten. He wrote it last Thursday; it must have been straight after the handicap was published in the racing calendar: and it was in his paper on Friday. Roncey showed me the clipping. He said Bert was drunk when he rang up.’