"What's in there?" I repeated.
He put on his airiest expression. "Just some things I didn't want Moira to get her hands on."
I remembered sharply the objects missing from his study.
"The gold dolphin, the amethyst tree, the silver candelabra… those?"
"You've been looking," he accused.
I shook my head. "I noticed they were gone." The few precious objects, all the same, hardly accounted for the severity of his first alarm. "What else is in there?" I said.
"Actually," he said, calmly now, "quite a lot of gold."
CHAPTER FIVE
"Some people buy and sell gold without ever seeing it," he said. "But I like possessing the actual stuff. There's no fun in paper transactions. Gold is beautiful on its own account, and I like to see it and feel it. But it's not all that easy to store it in banks or safety deposits. Too heavy and bulky. And insurance is astronomical. Takes too much of the profit. I never insure it."
"You're storing it there in the wall… waiting for the price to rise?"
"You know me, don't you?" He smiled. "Buy low, bide your time, sell high. Wait a couple of years, not often more. The price of gold itself swings like a pendulum, but there's nothing, really, like gold shares. When gold prices rise, gold shares often rise by two or three times as much. I sell the gold first and the shares a couple of months later. Psychological phenomenon, you know, that people go on investing in gold mines, pushing the price up, when the price of gold itself is static or beginning to drop. illogical, but invaluable to people like me."
He sat looking at me with the vivid blue eyes, teaching his child.
"Strategic Minerals, now. There never was anything like the Strategic Minerals Corporation of Australia. This year, the price of gold itself rose twenty-five per cent, but Strats – shares in Strategic Minerals – rose nearly a thousand per cent before they dropped off the top. Incredible. I got in near the beginning of those and sold at nine hundred and fifty per cent profit. But don't be fooled, Strats happen only once or twice in a lifetime."
"How much," I said, fascinated, "did you invest in Strats?"
After a brief pause he said, "Five million. I had a feeling about them… they just smelled right. I don't often go in so deep, and I didn't expect them to fly so high, no one could, but there you are, all gold shares rose this year, and Strats rose like a skylark."
"How are they doing now?" I asked.
"Don't know. I'm concerned with the present. Gold mines, you see, don't go on for ever. They have a life: exploration, development, production, exhaustion. I get in, wait a while, take a profit, forget them. Never stay too long with a rising gold share. Fortunes are lost by selling too late."
He did truly trust me, I thought. If he'd doubted me still, he wouldn't have told me there was gold behind the brick door, nor that even after tax he had made approximately thirty million pounds on one deal. I stopped worrying that he was overstretching himself in buying the colt and a half-share in Blue Clancy. I stopped worrying about practically everything except how to keep him alive and spending.
I'd talked to someone once whose father had died when she was barely twenty. She regretted that she hadn't ever known him adult to adult, and wished she could meet him again, just to talk. Watching Malcolm, it struck me that in a way I'd been given her wish: that the three years' silence had been a sort of death, and that I could talk to him now adult to adult, and know him as a man, not as a father. We spent a peaceful evening together in the suite, talking about what we'd each done during the hiatus, and it was difficult to imagine that outside, somewhere, a predator might be searching for the prey.
At one point I said, "You gave Joyce's telephone number on purpose to the film man, didn't you? And Gervase's number to the retarded- children lady? You wanted me with you to see you buy the colt… You made sure that the family knew all about your monster outlays as soon as possible, didn't you?"
"Huh," he said briefly, which after a moment I took as admission. One misdirected telephone call had been fairly possible: two stretched credibility too far.
"Thomas and Berenice," I said, "were pretty frantic over some little adventure of yours. What did you do to stir them up?"
"How the hell do you know all this?"
I smiled and fetched the cassette player and re-ran for him the message tape from my telephone. He listened grimly but with an undercurrent of amusement to Serena, Gervase and Joyce and then read Thomas's letter and when he reached Thomas's intense closing appeal I waited for explosions.
They didn't come. He said wryly, "I suppose they're what I made them."
"No," I said.
"Why not?"
"Personality is mysterious, but it's born in you, not made."
"But it can be brainwashed."
"Yes, OK," I said. "But you didn't do it."
"Vivien and Alicia did… because of me."
"Don't wallow in guilt so much. It isn't like you."
He grinned. "I don't feel guilty, actually."
Joyce, I thought, had at least played fair. A screaming fury she might have been on the subject of Alicia, but she'd never tried to set me against Malcolm. She had agreed in the divorce settlement when I was six that he should have custody of me: she wasn't basically maternal, and infrequent visits from her growing son were all she required. She'd never made great efforts to bind me to her, and it had always been clear to me that she was relieved every time at my departure. Her life consisted of playing, teaching, and writing about bridge, a game she played to international tournament standard, and she was often abroad. My visits had always disrupted the acute concentration she needed for winning, and as winning gave her the prestige essential for lecture tours and magazine articles, I had more often raised impatience in her than comradeship, a feeling she had dutifully tried to stifle.
She had given me unending packs of cards to play with and had taught me a dozen card games, but I'd never had her razor memory of any and every card played in any and every game, a perpetual disappointment to her and a matter for impatience in itself. When I veered off to make my life in a totally different branch of the entertainment industry, she had been astonished at my choice and at first scornful, but had soon come round to checking the racing pages during the steeplechase season to see if I was listed as riding.
"What did you tell Thomas and Berenice?" I asked Malcolm again, after a pause.
With satisfaction he said, "I absentmindedly gave their telephone number to a wine merchant who was to let me know the total I owed him for the fifty or so cases of 1979 Pol Roger he was collecting for me to drink."
"And, er, roughly how much would that cost?"
"The 1979, the Winston Churchill vintage, is quite exceptional, you know."
"Of course it would be," I said.
"Roughly twenty-five thousand pounds, then, for fifty cases."
Poor Thomas, I thought.
"I also made sure that Alicia knew I'd given about a quarter of a million pounds to fund scholarships for bright girls at the school Serena went to. Alicia and I haven't been talking recently. I suppose she's furious I gave it to the school and not to Serena herself."
"Well, why did you?"
He looked surprised. "You know my views. You must all carve your own way. To make you all rich too young would rob you of incentive."
I certainly did know his views, but I wasn't sure I always agreed with them. I would have had bags of incentive to make a success of being a racehorse trainer if he'd lent, advanced or given me enough to start, but I also knew that if he did, he'd have to do as much for the others (being ordinarily a fair man), and he didn't believe in it, as he said.
"Why did you want them all to know how much you've been spending?" I asked. "Because of course they all will know by now. The telephone wires will have been red hot."