I stopped again. Jossie sighed with exasperation and said, ‘Do get on with it.’
‘I told her to ditch Mr Jones and get someone else. She said I didn’t understand, I was too young. I promised her that when I got older I would be an accountant, and I’d put her affairs to rights.’ I smiled lopsidedly. ‘When I was thirteen she went down to Boots one morning and bought two hundred aspirins. She stirred them into a glass of water, and drank them. I found her lying on her bed when I came home from school. She left me a note.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It said “Dear Ro, Sorry, Love, Mum.” ’
‘Poor girl.’ Jossie blinked. Not laughing.
‘She’d made a will,’ I said. ‘One of those simple things on a form from the stationers. She left me everything, which was actually nothing much except her own personal things. I kept all the account books and bank statements. I got shuttled around uncles and aunts for a few years, but I kept those account books safe, and then I got another accountant to look at them. He told me Mr Jones seemed to have thought he was working for the Inland Revenue, not his client. I told him I wanted to be an accountant, and I got him to show me exactly what Mr Jones had done wrong. So there you are. That’s all.’
‘Are you still killing Mr Jones to dry your mother’s tears?’ The teasing note was back, but gentler.
I smiled, ‘I enjoy accountancy. I might never have thought of it if it hadn’t been for Mr Jones.’
‘So God bless villains.’
‘He was ultra-righteous. A smug pompous ass. There are still a lot of Mr Joneses around, not pointing out to their clients all the legitimate ways of avoiding tax.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s silly to pay tax when you don’t have to.’
‘That’s obvious.’
‘A lot of people do, though, from ignorance or bad advice.’
I ordered refill drinks and told Jossie it was her turn to unbutton with the family skeletons.
‘My Ma?’ she said in surprise. ‘I thought the whole world knew about my Ma. She canoes up and down the Amazon like a yo-yo, digging up ancient tribes. Sends back despatches in the shape of earnest papers to obscure magazines. Dad and I haven’t seen her for years. We get telegrams in January saying Happy Christmas.’
Revelation dawned. ‘Christabel Saffray Finch! Intrepid female explorer, storming about in rain forests?’
‘Ma,’ Jossie nodded.
‘Good heavens.’
‘Good grief, more like.’
‘Trevor never told me,’ I said. ‘But then he wouldn’t, I suppose.’
Jossie grinned. ‘Trevor disapproves. Trevor also always disapproves of Dad’s little consolations. Aunts, I used to call them. Now I call them Lida and Sandy.’
‘He’s very discreet.’ Even on the racecourse, where gossip was a second occupation, I hadn’t heard of Lida and Sandy. Or that Christobel Saffray Finch, darling of anthropological documentaries, was William’s wife.
‘Sandy is his ever-sick secretary,’ Jossie said, ‘perpetually shuttling between bronchitis, backache and abortion.’
I laughed. ‘And Lida?’
Jossie made a face, suddenly vulnerable under all the bright froth.
‘Lida’s got her hooks into him like a tapeworm. I can’t stand her. Let’s talk about food; I’m starving.’
We read the menu and ordered, and finished our drinks, and went in to dinner in the centuries-old dining-room: stone walls, uncovered oak beams, red velvet and soft lights.
Jossie ate as if waistlines never expanded, which was refreshing after the finicky picker I’d taken out last.
‘Luck of the draw,’ she said complacently, smothering a baked-in-the-skin potato with a butter mountain. I reflected that she’d drawn lucky in more ways than metabolism. A quick mind, fascinating face, tall slender body: there was nothing egalitarian about nature.
Most of the tables around us were filled with softly chattering groups of twos and fours, but over by a far wall a larger party were making the lion’s share of the noise.
‘They keep looking over here,’ Jossie said. ‘Do you know them?’
‘It looks like Sticks Elroy with his back to us.’
‘Is it? Celebrating his winner?’
Sticks Elroy, named for the extreme thinness of his legs, had studiously avoided me in the Towcester changing room, and must have been thoroughly disconcerted to find me having dinner in his local pub. He was one of my jockey clients, but for how much longer was problematical. I was not currently his favourite person.
The noise, however, was coming not from him but from the host of the party, a stubborn-looking man with a naturally loud voice.
‘Avert your gaze,’ I said to Jossie.
The large eyes regarded me over salad and steak.
‘An ostrich act?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘If we bury our heads, maybe the storm won’t notice us.’
The storm, however, seemed to be gathering force. Words like ‘bastard’ rose easily above the prevailing clatter and the uninvolved majority began to look interested.
‘Trouble,’ Jossie said without visible regret, ‘is on its feet and heading this way.’
‘Damn.’
She grinned. ‘Faint heart.’
Trouble arrived with the deliberate movements of the slightly drunk. Late forties, I judged. About five feet eight, short dark hair, flushed cheeks and aggressive eyes. He stood four-square and ignored Jossie altogether.
‘My son tells me you’re that bastard Roland Britten.’ His voice, apart from fortissimo, was faintly slurred.
To ignore him was to invite a punch-up. I laid down my knife and fork. Leaned back in my chair. Behaved as if the enquiry was polite.
‘Is Sticks Elroy your son?’
‘Too right, he bloody is,’ he said.
‘He had a nice winner today,’ I said. ‘Well done.’
It stopped him for barely two seconds.
‘He doesn’t need your bloody “well done”.’
I waited mildly, without answering. Elroy senior bent down, breathed alcohol heavily, and pointed an accusing finger under my nose.
‘You leave my son alone, see? He isn’t doing anyone any harm. He doesn’t want any bastard like you snitching on him to the bloody tax man. Judas, that’s what you are. Going behind his back. Bloody informer, that’s what you are.’
‘I haven’t informed on him.’
‘What’s that?’ He wagged the finger to and fro, belligerently. ‘Costing him hundreds, aren’t you, with the bloody tax man. Bastard like you ought to be locked up. Serve you bloody well right.’
The head waiter arrived smoothly at Elroy’s shoulder.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he began.
Elroy turned on him like a bull. ‘You trot off. You, major-domo, or whatever you are. You trot off. I’ll have my say, and when I’ve had my say I’ll sit down, see? Not before.’
The head waiter cravenly retired, and Elroy returned to his prime target. Jossie’s eyes stared at him with disfavour, which deflected him not at all.
‘I hear someone locked you up for ten days or so just now, and you got out. Bloody shame. You deserve to be locked up, you do. Bastard like you. Whoever it was locked you up had the right idea.’
I said nothing. Elroy half turned away, but he had by no means finished. Merely addressing a wider audience.
‘You know what this bastard did to my son?’ The audience removed its eyes in thoroughly British embarrassment, but they got told the answer whether they liked it or not.
‘This boot-licking creeping bastard went crawling to the tax- man and told him my son had some cash he hadn’t paid taxes on.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said to Jossie.