She looked back silently. Eventually she said, "I am ashamed of myself."
"Rubbish," Edwin said to me vehemently. "You must stop Malcolm. You MUST."
Lucy shook her head. "Ian's right."
"Do you mean Ian won't even try?" Edwin demanded incredulously.
"I'm positive he won't," Lucy said. "Didn't you hear what he said? Weren't you listening?"
"it was all rubbish." Lucy patted my arm. "We may as well see you race, while we're here. Go and get changed."
It was a more sisterly gesture and tone than I was used to, and I reflected with a shade of guilt that I'd paid scant attention to her own career for a couple of years.
"How is the poetry going?" I asked. "What are you working on?"
The question caught her unprepared. Her face went momentarily blank and then filled with what seemed to be an odd mixture of sadness and panic.
"Nothing just now," she said. "Nothing for quite a while," and I nodded almost apologetically as if I had intruded, and went into the weighing-room and through to the changing-room reflecting that poets, like mathematicians, mostly did their best work when young. Lucy wasn't writing; had maybe stopped altogether. And perhaps, I thought, the frugality she had for so long embraced had begun to seem less worthy and less worth it, if she were losing the inner sustaining comfort of creative inspiration.
Poor Lucy, I thought. Life could be a bugger as Malcolm said. She had already begun to value the affluence she had long despised or she wouldn't have come on her mission to Sandown Park, and I could only guess at the turmoil in her spiritual life. Like a nun losing her faith, I thought. But no, not a nun. Lucy, who had written explicitly of sex in a way I could never believe had anything to do with Edwin (though one could be wrong), wouldn't ever have been a nun.
With such random thoughts, I took off my ordinary clothes and put on white breeches and a scarlet jersey with blue stripes on the sleeves, and felt the usual battened-down excitement which made me breathe deeply and feel intensely happy. I rode in about fifty races a year, if I was lucky… and I would have to get another job fairly soon, I reflected, if I were to ride exercise regularly and stay fit enough to do any good.
Going outside, I talked for a while to the trainer and owner of the horse I was to ride, a husband and wife who had themselves ridden until twenty years earlier in point-to-point races and who liked to re-live it all vicariously through me. The husband, George, was now a public trainer on a fairly grand scale, but the wife, Jo, still preferred to run her own horses in amateur races. She currently owned three steeple chasers all pretty good. It did me no harm at all to be seen on them and to be associated in racing minds with that stable.
"Young Higgins is jumping out of his skin," Jo said.
Young Higgins was the name of that day's horse. Young Higgins was thirteen, a venerable gentleman out to disprove rumours of retirement. We all interpreted "jumping out of his skin" as meaning fit, sound and pricking his ears with enthusiasm, and at his age one couldn't ask for much more. Older horses than he had won the Grand National, but Young Higgins and I had fallen in the great race the only time we'd tried it, and to my regret Jo had decided on no more attempts.
"We'll see you in the parade ring, then, Ian, before the race," George said, and Jo added, "And give the old boy a good time."
I nodded, smiling. Giving all of us a good time was the point of the proceedings. Young Higgins was definitely included.
The minute George and Jo turned away to go off towards the grandstands, someone tapped me on the back of the shoulder. I turned round to see who it was and to my total astonishment found myself face to face with Lucy's older brother, Malcolm's first child, my half-brother Donald.
"Good heavens," I said. "You've never been to the races in your life."
He often told me he hadn't, saying rather superciliously that he didn't approve of the sordid gambling.
"I haven't come for the races," he said crossly. "I've come to see you about Malcolm's taking leave of his senses."
"How… er…?" I stopped. "Did Joyce send you?" I said.
"What if she did? We are all concerned. She told us where to find you, certainly."
"Did she tell the whole family?" I asked blankly.
"How do I know? She telephoned us. I daresay she telephoned everyone she could get hold of. You know what she's like. She's your mother after all."
Even so late in his life he couldn't keep out of his voice the old resentments, and perhaps also, I reflected, they were intensifying with age. My mother had supplanted his, he was saying, and any indiscretion my mother ever committed was in some way my fault. He had thought in that illogical way for as long as I'd been aware of him, and nothing had changed.
Donald was, in the family's opinion, the brother nearest in looks to myself, and I wasn't sure I liked it. Irrefutably, he was the same height and had blue eyes less intense in colour than Malcolm's. Agreed, Donald had middling brown curly hair and shoulders wider than his hips. I didn't wear a bushy moustache though, and I just hoped I didn't walk with what I thought of as a self-important strut; and I sometimes tried to make sure, after I'd been in Donald's company, that I absolutely didn't.
Donald's life had been so disrupted when Malcolm had ousted Vivien, Donald always told us, that he had never been able to decide properly on a career. It couldn't have been easy, I knew, to survive such an upheaval, but Donald had only been nine at the time, a bit early for life decisions. In any event, as an adult he had drifted from job to job in hotels, coming to harbour at length as secretary of a prestigious golf club near Henley-on-Thames, a post which I gathered had proved ultimately satisfactory in social standing, which was very important to his self-esteem.
I didn't either like or dislike Donald particularly. He was eleven years older than I was. He was there.
"Everyone insists you stop Malcolm squandering the family money," he said, predictably.
"It's HIS money, not the family's," I said.
"What?" Donald found the idea ridiculous. "What you've got to do is explain that he owes it to us to keep the family fortune intact until we inherit it. Unfortunately we know he won't listen to any of us except you, and now that you appear to have made up your quarrel with him, you are elected to be our spokesman. Joyce thinks we have to convince you first of the need to stop Malcolm, but I told her it was ridiculous. You don't need convincing, you want to be well off one day just the same as the rest of us, of course you do, it's only natural."
I was saved from both soul-searching and untrue disclaimers by the arrival of Helen, Donald's wife, who had apparently been buying a race card
"We're not staying," Donald said disapprovingly, eyeing it.
She gave him a vague smile. "You never know," she said.
Beautiful and brainless, Malcolm had said of he rand perhaps he was right. Tall and thin, she moved with natural Style and made cheap clothes look expensive: I knew they were cheap because she had a habit of saying where they'd come from and how much she'd paid for them, inviting admiration of her thriftiness. Donald always tried to shut her up.
"Do tell us where to watch the races from," she said.
"We're not here for that," Donald said.
"No, dear, we're here because we need money now that the boys have started at Eton."
"No, dear," Donald said sharply.
"But you know we can't afford…"
"Do be quiet, dear," Donald said.
" Eton costs a bomb," I said mildly, knowing that Donald's income would hardly stretch to one son there, let alone two. Donald had twin boys, which seemed to run in the family.
"Of course it does," Helen said, "but Donald puts such store by it. 'My sons are at Eton,' that sort of thing. Gives him standing with the people he deals with in the golf club."