They indecisively shook their heads. ‘Only the dictionaries...’ so I went downstairs with them into a busy world of books. There were indeed dictionaries by the hundred, but after a survey of incomprehensible scripts, with no reliable recognitions, I finally scraped together enough impetus to leave and meet Jett in her scarlet coat for lunch.
‘You’re ill,’ she said over curried egg salads, and I hadn’t the vigour to deny it.
‘Tell the BBC you need sick leave.’
‘It’s only ribs. They’ll be better tomorrow.’
‘Let me drive you to Newmarket, then, in the morning.’
I’d told her I was going to Newmarket to see George Loricroft’s horses school over fences. She’d wanted to come anyway, and although I thought it incautious, I gratefully accepted her offer.
I got through the working day somehow, but when Jett arrived at my front door at six-thirty the next morning she said I wasn’t fit to travel anywhere and should see a doctor.
We had agreed we would go in her own Honda as she felt happier driving it than sitting behind the wheel of my compact runabout. She said she knew a good doctor and I said we were going to Newmarket, and maybe for the last time with Miss van Els, I got my way.
At George Loricroft’s house Bell greeted me with a kiss, switching her gaze past me to see how Jett reacted to the embrace. Waste of time. Jett was cool.
Glenda wrapped her arms lavishly around me so that her mouth ended up by my ear.
‘Don’t tell George...’ it was scarcely more than a whisper. Then more loudly she said, ‘How divine of you to come, luv.’ And George himself, unenthusiastic about me at all times, cheered up considerably when introduced to Jett. A thoroughly sex-conscious bunch of hellos, I thought, and couldn’t eat any breakfast from nausea.
Glenda and Bell rejoiced again about the landing Kris had achieved on Saturday, and George, looking at his watch impatiently, crossly said that in his opinion Kris had been in too much of a hurry to set off from Doncaster before dark and that he’d left the dipstick on the ground and clipped the engine cowling shut without it in place.
‘Easy done,’ he said. ‘Get ready, girls. It’s time to go.’ And he strode out to his horses without looking back.
George, with well-developed brusqueness, had seemed considerably out of tune with his wife, and she from time to time had shot him searing glances of anxiety mixed with ill will. Neither was any longer bothering to pretend devotion to the other, an awkwardness for everyone else.
At a moment well out of her husband’s sight, I gave Glenda her list of the icy venues George had sworn to that were contradictory to the freezing truth, and I watched her cheeks flush with justification and — I thought — with a sort of disappointment and disillusion that she’d been right.
Bell put an arm round Glenda’s drooping shoulders and walked with her into the depths of the house, returning alone to mount a horse out in the stable-yard and lead Jett and me (driving George’s jeep) to the promised jumping practice. I was glad Jett seemed genuinely interested and that Bell, although herself due to ride one hustling breath-stopper over three rattling flights of hurdles, spent time explaining schooling routine in advance to me and the next-best-thing to Florence Nightingale, the Miss van Els, who was that day wearing olive-drab trousers and jacket over the thick white sweater. She and I walked from the jeep to a vantage point near the hurdles, to hear and be part of the noise and commitment.
After the jumping and out of breath from the speed, Bell trotted her mount over to where we stood and dropped down from his back, surprisingly saying to us both with a smile, ‘I’ve not known you long, brother Perry, but I know a good brain when it flashes under my nose, and you and your Jett van Els, you’re both loaded.’
Bell started walking her horse round in a small circle nearby, to cool him, while I tried to keep up with her and talk as well.
‘Like Robin Darcy?’ I suggested.
She took ten seconds of silence to surf her memory, and came up with a straightforward account of bits of her father’s lunch party. ‘I told you not to be fooled by his cuddly shell.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘And I tried to warn Kris that Darcy was way outside his league, but that day Kris wouldn’t have listened to me if I’d been the angel Gabriel.’
Kris had listened to Robin that day and ever since.
‘Kris and Robin talked for ages at Doncaster,’ I said.
Bell nodded. ‘They talked when I went to the loo. Darcy asked Kris to spend another holiday with him and Evelyn, and to take me with him!’
‘A marriage trip?’
‘Sometimes I think we’ll never get to the wedding.’ She looked undecided herself, and then unexpectedly said, ‘Stay here with Jett and hold my horse by his bridle and I’ll go and fetch George’s jeep. Honestly, you look pretty grey.’
I couldn’t understand it, because the cracked ribs in Wales hadn’t caused sickness but only discomfort, but I did accept her offer and stood beside her steaming mount, pleased to be near the great primeval creature under the wide, cold, cloudless skies of Newmarket Heath.
Bell brought the jeep and we exchanged conveyances; she rode the horse and I drove myself and Jett slowly back to George’s yard and felt awful.
In the warm kitchen George and Glenda were standing rigidly opposite each other, glaring as if ready to kill, and the reappearance of others hardly began to melt the cutting edges of hate.
George, in his mid-forties, always emanated heavy forcefulness, but at that moment the handsome set of his shoulders, thick smoothly-brushed dark hair, the thin fingers clenching and stretching with tensile grace, all the stylishness served only to intensify the positive malevolence of his intention.
George’s anger would, I thought, have erupted already into a physical attack on his wife if it weren’t that she herself seemed to wear an impermeable and invisible armour.
Jett and I silently retreated, with Bell on our heels looking worried and trying to say, ‘I’m sorry... I’m so sorry...’
‘Don’t be,’ I said, but I couldn’t reassure her, not with only two brief words.
We walked across George’s parking area and stopped by Jett’s Honda. I looked back at the big Loricroft house and saw only prosperity and peace. Tissue paper over an abyss, I thought.
‘Bell...’ I begged her uneasily, ‘leave Newmarket and move in with Kris in London.’
She was shaking her head before I’d finished speaking.
‘I can’t leave. And what for? Kris doesn’t need me, he said so.’
Neither Bell nor Jett felt any of the urgency making my intestines cramp and my scalp itch. My grandmother, I realised, would have recognised this deep unease as heebie-jeebies, but I didn’t know whether the feelings I was having derived from reason or instinct or simply queasiness.
I said only, but with as much persuasion as I could manage, ‘Bell, I mean it. Leave Newmarket. I have an intuition... you could call it premonition... call it anything, but leave here...’
Jett said, ‘You’re ill.’
‘Maybe... But ill or not, Bell, leave Newmarket now.’
Both she and Jett, puzzled by my vehemence, nevertheless began to waver. I found it impossible to tell her that her father and her employer and Quigley and Robin Darcy were all involved in a conspiracy to supply to many lawless parts of the world and to many a clique and brotherhood, the information needed to acquire tiny quantities of the highest grade fissile material for weapons. Tiny quantities, if enough of them were gathered together, made a threat, an aggregation... a bomb.
All four men, and surely they knew it, were dealing in death.
One or two of them were themselves personally lethal.