By the time I was five my shattered parents had reluctantly faced the fact that the child they had bred by mistake (I had caused an important American tour to be cancelled) was unmusical. Unmusical, that is, in their pure sense. I was not tone deaf and soaring flights of melody had drawn from me childish tears, but I never had, and still have not, their complete understanding, intellectual, emotional, technical and spiritual, of the effect of putting certain sounds in certain orders.
My mother never being one to do things by halves, I had henceforth been shuffled off from London between school terms to a succession of long holidays on farms, ostensibly for my health, but in reality, I knew later, to free my parents for the complicated and lengthy concert tours in which they were engaged. I grew up into a sort of truce with them, in which it was tacitly agreed that as they had not intended to have a child in the first place, and as he had proved to be less than a (musical) credit to them in the second, the less we saw of each other the better.
They disapproved of my venture into jockeyship for no other reason than that racing had nothing to do with music. It was no use my pointing out that the one thing I had learned on the various holiday farms was how to ride (for I was enough my father’s son for farming itself to bore me stiff), and that my present occupation was directly due to their actions in the past. To what they did not want to hear my acute-eared parents were sublimely deaf.
There was still no sign of them down in the street, nor of the uncle who lived with us who played the ’cello, nor the visiting uncle and cousin, violin and clarinet
I opened my two letters. The first informed me that my income tax returns were overdue. I slit the second envelope with a smiling and complacent anticipation of enjoyment, which just shows how often life can get up and slap you when you least expect it. In a familiar childish hand the letter said:
Dearest Rob,
I am afraid this may come as a surprise to you, but I am getting married. He is Sir Morton Henge, who you may have heard of, and he is very sweet and kind and no cracks from you about him being old enough to be my father etc. I don’t think I had better ask you to the reception, do you? Morton doesn’t know about you and you will be a great dear not to let on to anybody about us, if you don’t mind. I shall never forget you, dearest Rob, and all the sweet times we had together. Thank you for everything, and goodbye.
Sir Morton Henge, middle aged widower and canning tycoon. Well, well. I wondered sardonically how his serious-minded son, whom I knew slightly, would enjoy the prospect of a cuddly twenty-year-old model for a stepmother. But being in a lopsided way able to laugh at Paulina’s catch made it no less of a blow.
In the eighteen months since I had first met her she had progressed from mousy-haired obscurity to blonde blossoming on the cover of at least one glossy magazine a week. In the last month her radiant eyes had smiled at me (and eight million other men) from a cigarette advertisement in every underground station in London. I had known that it was inevitable that one day she would forsake me if she struck gold in her profession, and our whole relationship had from the start been based on that assumption; but a future without her happy inanity and her generous love-making seemed all of a sudden more bleak than I had expected.
I went through to my bedroom and putting down Paulina’s letter on the chest of drawers, caught sight of myself in the oval mirror on the wall above it. That is the face, I thought, that she has been pleased to see beside her on her pillow, but which was no match for a title and a canning fortune. Looking objectively at my reflection I noted the black hair, black eyebrows and lashes, brown eyes... not a distinguished face, nor handsome; too thin perhaps. Not bad, not good. Just a face.
I turned away and looked around the little sloping-ceilinged room which had been converted for me from a lumber room when I came home from my travels. There was very little in it; a bed, the chest of drawers, an armchair and a bedside table with a lamp on it. One picture, an impressionistic sketch of racing horses, hung on the wall facing my bed. There were no other ornaments, few books, no clutter. In six years of wandering round the world I had become so used to living with a minimum of possessions that although I had now occupied this little room on and off for two years, I had amassed nothing to put in it.
A clothes cupboard had been built for me across one end of the room. I opened the door and tried to look at its contents as Paulina must have looked, the twice she had been there. One good dark grey suit, one evening jacket with black trousers, one hacking jacket, two pairs of grey slacks, and a pair of jodhpurs. I took off the suit I was wearing and hung it at the end of the meagre row, a tweed mixture of browns. They were enough for me, those clothes. They covered every situation. Sir Morton Henge probably counted his suits in dozens and had a manservant to look after them. I shrugged my shoulders. There was no profit in this melancholy stocktaking. Paulina was gone, and that was that.
Picking up a pair of black sneakers, I shut the cupboard door and changed into jeans and an old checked shirt. That done, I contemplated the desert of time between then and the next day’s racing. The trouble with me was that steeplechasing had got into my blood like a drug addiction, so that all the normal pleasures of life, and even Paulina herself, had become merely ways of passing as quickly as possible the hours away from it.
My stomach gave an extra twist, which I would like to have believed was due to romantic desolation at my blasted love life, but which I knew very well was only the effect of not having eaten for twenty-three hours. Admitting wryly that being jettisoned had not spoiled my appetite, I made for the kitchen. Before I reached it, however, the front door of the flat banged open and in trooped my parents, uncles and cousin.
‘Hello, darling,’ said my mother, presenting a smooth sweet-smelling cheek for a kiss. It was her usual greeting to everyone from impresarios to back row chorus singers, and when applied to me still utterly lacked any maternal quality. She was not a motherly person in any way. Tall, slender, and immensely chic in a style that looked casual but was the result of much thought and expenditure, she was becoming more and more a ‘presence’ as she approached fifty. As a woman I knew her to be passionate and temperamental; as an artist to be a first-class interpretative vehicle for the genius of Haydn, whose piano concertos she poured out with magical, meticulous, ecstatic precision. I had seen hardened music critics leave her performances with tears in their eyes. So I had never expected a broad motherly bosom to comfort my childish woes, nor a sock-darning, cake-making mum to come home to.
My father, who treated me always with polite friendliness, said as a form of greeting, ‘Did you have a good day?’ He always asked. I usually answered briefly yes or no, knowing that he was not really interested.
I said, ‘I saw a man kill himself. No, it wasn’t a good day.’
Five heads swivelled towards me.
My mother said, ‘Darling, what do you mean?’
‘A jockey shot himself at the races. He was only six feet away from me. It was a mess.’ All five of them stood there looking at me with their mouths open. I wished I hadn’t told them, for it seemed even more horrible in memory than it had done at the time.