"Helen, dear, do be quiet." Donald's embarrassment showed, but she was undoubtedly right.
"We thought Donald might have inherited before the boys reached thirteen," she said intensely. "As he hasn't, we're borrowing every penny we can to pay the fees, the same as we borrowed for the prep school and a lot of other things. But we've borrowed against Donald's expectations… so you see it's essential for us that there really is plenty to inherit, as there are so many people to share it with. We'll be literally bankrupt if Malcolm throws too much away… and I don't think Donald could face it."
I opened my mouth to answer her but no sound came out. I felt as if I'd been thrust into a farce over which I had no control. Walking purposefully to join us came Serena, Ferdinand and Debs.
CHAPTER SIX
"Stay right here," I said to all of them. "I have to go into the weighing-room to deal with a technicality. Stay right here until I come out."
They nodded with various frowns, and I dived into privacy in a desperate search for a sheet of paper and an envelope.
I wrote to Malcolm:
Half the family have turned up here, sent by Joyce. For God's sake stay where you are, keep out of sight and wait until I come to fetch you.
I stuck the note into the envelope, wrote Malcolm's name on the outside, and sought out an official who had enough rank to send someone to deliver it.
"My father is lunching in the Directors' dining-room," I said. "And it's essential that he gets this note immediately."
The official was obliging. He was going up to the Stewards' room anyway, he said, and he would take it himself. With gratitude and only a minor lessening of despair – because it would be just like Malcolm to come down contrarily to confront the whole bunch – I went out again into the sunlight and found the five of them still faithfully waiting exactly where I'd left them.
"I say," Debs said, half mocking, "you do look dashing in all that kit."
Donald looked at her in surprise, and I had a vivid impression of his saying soon in his golf club, "My brother, the amateur jockey…", knowing that if I'd been a professional he would have hushed it up if he could. A real snob, Donald: but there were worse sins.
Debs, Ferdinand's second wife, had come to the races in a black leather coat belted at the waist, with shoulder-length blond hair above and long black boots below. Her eyelids were purple, like her fingernails. The innocence I'd photographed in her a year ago was in danger of disappearing.
Ferdinand, shorter than Debs and more like Malcolm than ever, appeared to be in his usual indecision over whether I was to be loved or hated.
I smiled at him cheerfully and asked what sort of a journey he'd had.
"A lot of traffic," he said lamely.
"We didn't come here to talk about traffic,"Serena said forbiddingly. "We want to know where Daddy is."
Malcolm's little Serena, now taller than he, was dressed that day in royal blue with white frills at neck and wrists, a white woollen hat with a pompom on top covering her cap of fair hair. She looked a leggy sixteen, not ten years older. Her age showed only in the coldness of her manner towards me, which gave no sign of thawing.
In her high-pitched, girlish voice she said, "We want him to settle very substantial sums on us all right now. Then he can go to blazes with the rest."
I blinked. "Who are you quoting?" I asked.
"Myself," she said loftily, and then more probably added, "Mummy too. And Gervase."
It had Gervase's thug gish style stamped all over it.
Donald and Helen looked distinctly interested in the proposal. Ferdinand and Debs had of course heard it before.
"Gervase thinks it's the best solution," Ferdinand said, nodding.
I doubted very much that Malcolm would agree, but said only,"I'll pass on your message next time he gets in touch with me."
"But Joyce is sure you know where he is," Donald objected.
"Not exactly," I said. "Do you know that Lucy and Edwin are here too?"
They were satisfactorily diverted, looking over their shoulders to see if they could spot them in the growing crowds.
"Didn't Joyce tell you she was sending so many of you here?" I asked generally, and it was Ferdinand, sideways, his face turned away, who answered.
"She told Serena to come here. She told Serena to tell me, which she did, so we came together. I didn't know about Donald and Helen or Lucy and Edwin. I expect she wanted to embarrass you."
His eyes swivelled momentarily to my face, wanting to see my reaction. I don't suppose my face showed any. Joyce might call me "darling" with regularity but could be woundingly unkind at the same time, and I'd had a lifetime to grow armour.
Ferdinand happened to be standing next to me. I said on impulse into his ear, "Ferdinand, who killed Moira?"
He stopped looking for Lucy and Edwin and transferred his attention abruptly and wholly to me. I could see calculations going on in the pause before he answered, but I had no decoder for his thoughts. He was the most naturally congenial to me of all my brothers, yet the others were open books compared with him. He was secretive, as perhaps I was myself. He had wanted to build his own kitchen-wall hidey-hole when I'd built mine, only Malcolm had said we must share, that one was enough. Ferdinand had sulked and shunned me for a while, and smirked at Gervase's dead rats. I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they'd been when very young: whether it was safe to assume they hadn't basically changed, to believe that if one could peel back the layers of living one would come to the known child. I wanted Ferdinand to be as I had known him at ten, eleven, twelve – a boy dedicated to riding a bicycle while standing on his head on the saddle – and not in a million years a murderer.
"I don't know who killed Moira," he said finally. "Alicia says you did. She told the police it HAD to be you."
"I couldn't have."
"She says the police could break your alibi if they really tried."
I knew that they HAD really tried: they'd checked every separate five minutes of my day, and their manner and their suspicions had been disturbing. "And what do YOU think?" I asked curiously.
His eyelids flickered. "Alicia says…"
I said abruptly, "Your mother says too damned much. Can't you think for yourself?"
He was offended, as he would be. He hooked his arms through those of Debs and Serena and made an announcement. "We three are going to have a drink and a sandwich. If you fall off and kill yourself, no one will miss you."
I smiled at him, though his tone had held no joke.
"And don't be so bloody forgiving," he said.
He whirled the girls away from me and marched them off. I wondered how he'd got the day off from work, though I supposed most people could if they tried. He was a statistician, studying to be an actuary in his insurance company. What were the probabilities, I wondered, of a thirty-two-year-old statistician whose wife had purple fingernails being present when his brother broke his neck at Sandown Park?
Donald and Helen said that they too would run a sandwich to earth (Donald's words) and Helen added earnestly that SHE would care that I finished the race safely, whatever Ferdinand said.
"Thanks," I said, hoping I could believe he rand went back into the changing-room for an interval of thought.
Lucy and Edwin might leave before the end of the afternoon, and so might Donald and Helen, but Ferdinand wouldn't. He liked going racing. He'd said on one mellow occasion that he'd have been quite happy being a bookmaker; he was lightning fast at working out relative odds.
The problem of how to extract Malcolm unseen from the racecourse didn't end, either, with those members of the family I'd talked to. If they were all so certain I knew where Malcolm was, one of the others, more cunning, could be hiding behind trees, waiting to follow me when I left. There were hundreds of trees in Sandown Park.