Only one of the nurses the agency sent had been a failure: she’d been heavily unattractive and of gloomy mind, and she’d brought her dog. My grandmother preferred her angels to be of grand-daughter age, unencumbered and pretty, and to their surprise, the agency found their nurses asking to spend repeat live-in weeks with an old woman.
On the Thursday after Caspar Harvey’s lunch I mentioned the sick filly to my grandmother and found her one step ahead of the facts; no real surprise, she read newspapers at vacuum-pump speed and from her own long experience at writing them, understood all the inferences they left out.
‘Caspar Harvey will dump Oliver Quigley, don’t you think, Perry?’ she observed. ‘He’ll send his horses to Loricroft, to be where his daughter’s going.’
As her hands and arms could deal fairly well with newsprint she habitually spread the papers open on her knees. I watched her wrestle, knowing she wouldn’t thank for assistance. Only when she laid the papers down unmoving on her lap with a cross little sigh could one expect to be allowed to help.
As always, though it took her and the current nurse an hour or more to achieve it, she looked fresh, neat and striking, this time in a dark blue lace-edged gown with a silver and white artificial gardenia pinned to her left shoulder, and silver leather shoes on her non-functioning feet.
I asked, mystified, ‘What makes you think Harvey will move his horses?’
‘He’s in the game for glory. And you’ve always told me, haven’t you, that Oliver Quigley has the permanent heebie-jeebies all the time?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
I sat in a large armchair near the window, next to her, with her wheels locked in her favourite place, so that we could both watch the raucous seagulls chase each other over the mud, their display of basic aggressive instinct obvious and so informative that inter-human wars, my grandmother observed, were natural and inevitable.
On that Thursday afternoon it seemed to me that the life force was as low as the ebb tide in my grandmother, however hard she might try to disguise it, and it alarmed me very much because I didn’t want to imagine life without her.
She had been always not only stand-in parent with bandages for scraped knees, but also an intellectual teacher, partner and prompter of thought. The occasional rebellions of my teens were distant memories. I’d come to visit her by habit for years since then, listening to her down-to-earth wisdom and adopting most of it for myself. It was too soon for her to ebb. I wasn’t ready to lose her. I supposed that perhaps it would always be too soon.
‘If Quigley loses the Harvey horses...’ I began vaguely.
My grandmother had her own questions. ‘Who poisoned the filly? Who’s trying to find out? What is that mad friend of yours doing about it?’
I smiled. ‘He’s off to Florida on leave. He has a love-hate thing going with Caspar Harvey’s daughter. You might say he’s running away.’
She tired abruptly of the Harvey saga at that point and, closing her eyes, let the newspaper slide to the floor.
There was a new nurse on duty that week, one I hadn’t met before, and as if called she came quietly into the sitting-room and gathered the papers into a tidy pile. She had been introduced to me by my grandmother as, ‘This dear young woman is Jett van Els. She’ll write it down for you. Her father was Belgian.’
Jett van Els of the Belgian father easily filled my grandmother’s requirements of youth and looks and was moreover tall and trim in a blue and white uniform with an upside-down watch pinned where I would get into harassment trouble looking at the time.
My grandmother’s sleepinesses never lasted more than a few minutes, but that day it took her longer to wake up. Still, she suddenly opened her round blue eyes and as always came back to full awareness immediately.
‘Stay away from Newmarket, Perry, that place is full of villains.’ She spoke as if without prior thought and looked almost surprised at what she’d said.
‘Newmarket’s quite a big town,’ I commented mildly. ‘Stay away from whom, exactly?’
‘Stay away from that filly.’
I said, ‘OK,’ casually and didn’t mean what I said.
As far as I could remember she had only once herself been to Newmarket, and that years ago on a visit prompted by her writing a series of magazine articles on how to squander one’s time and spending-money on cheerful days out. After that, Newmarket had been consigned to her mental file of ‘been there, done that’ and life was too short, she often said, for taking the same road twice.
‘What’s wrong with seeing the filly, anyway?’ I asked.
‘That’s exactly the point. Whatever’s wrong with the filly, stay away from it.’
She frowned, however, and I reckoned she didn’t clearly know what she meant. Worse than physical weakness, I always feared, could be the atrophy of her sharp mind: so what she’d said about the filly was either acutely perceptive or nonsense, and I didn’t want to guess which.
To Jett van Els the exchange meant nothing as horses weren’t her interest. She arranged cushions comfortably at her patient’s back and showed in every fluid movement the expertise of a good nurse. Regardless of her un-English name, she spoke and looked like a home-grown rose, very much the type for whom I’d once ditched a tycoon’s daughter, only to be dumped in my turn when the novelty of being escorted by a well-known face had worn off. Real life began when the screen went dark.
Jett van Els with composure said that Mrs Mevagissey would be having fish pie with parsley sauce for supper: did I want to stay?
Mrs Mevagissey was my grandmother.
‘No, he won’t stay,’ she placidly said. ‘But on past form you may find him asking you to share a pub sandwich in a week or two.’
‘Gran,’ I protested.
‘I’m glad of it,’ she said truthfully. ‘So off you go, and I’ll watch you tomorrow on the box.’
I always left at her bidding so as not to exhaust her, and this time I collected on the way out a friendly and amused reaction from the brown van Els eyes, a visible message that if I asked I might get my sandwich.
Mrs Mevagissey knew me a shade too well, I thought.
I spent Friday in the Weather Centre watching reports come in from all over the world. The steady continental wind from the east was breaking up, but the Newmarket turf would still have been dry and fast for Harvey’s filly that afternoon if she’d been capable of benefiting.
Messages from Bell sounded as if frustration largely prevailed. The industry’s busy news-diggers had broken off their filly chase for the weekend in order to report the races themselves, and by Monday the sick horse would be of back-burner stature, if she got a mention at all. The transfer of all Harvey’s other horses along the road from Quigley to Loricroft earned one strong paragraph: the engagement of Bell as Loricroft’s assistant trainer merited a picture — of Bell, not of Loricroft, not of Harvey, and not of the horses. It was Bell who was pretty.
Poor Oliver Quigley no longer troubled my telephone twice at least every day: I received one pathetic call from him, a matter of a choking throat and barely swallowed emotion, the quivers back at full force.