Dick Francis
Trial Run
Thanks
to
Andrew
and
Andrew
1
I could think of three good reasons for not going to Moscow, one of which was twenty-six, blonde, and upstairs unpacking her suitcase.
‘I can’t speak Russian,’ I said.
‘Of course not.’
My visitor took a genteel sip of pink gin, sighing slightly over my obtuseness. His voice was condescending.
‘No one would expect you to speak Russian.’
He had come by appointment, introduced on the telephone by the friend of a friend. He said his name was Rupert Hughes-Beckett; that it was a matter of some... ah... delicacy. That he would be glad of my help, if I could spare him half an hour.
The word ‘mandarin’ had drifted into my mind when I opened the front door to his ring, and every gesture, every intonation since then had deepened the impression. A man of about fifty, tall and spare, with uncreased clothes and quiet shoes. An aura of unflappable civilised composure. A cultivated voice speaking without much lip movement, as if a muscular tightening round the mouth area could in itself prevent the issue of incautious words. There was control, too, in every movement of his hands and even in the way he used his eyes, rationing their forays into small courteous glances at my background between longer disciplined concentrations on my face, the backs of his own hands, or the glass holding his drink.
I had met many men of his type, and liked many, too, but to Rupert Hughes-Beckett I felt an antipathy I couldn’t pin down. Its effect however was all too plain: I wished to say no to his proposals.
‘It would not take a great deal of your time,’ he said patiently. ‘A week... two weeks, we calculate, at a maximum.’
I mustered a careful politeness to match his own. ‘Why don’t you go yourself?’ I said. ‘You would have better access than I.’
The faintest hint of impatience twitched in his eyes. ‘It is thought better to send someone who is intimate with... ah... horses.’
Ribald replies got no further than a laugh in the mind. Rupert Hughes-Beckett would not have been amused. I perceived also, from the disapproving way he said ‘horses’ that he was as unenthusiastic about his present errand as I was. It did nothing to warm me towards him, but at least it explained why I instinctively disliked him. He had done his well-trained best, but hadn’t in that one word been able to disguise his inner feeling of superciliousness: and I had met that stance far too often to mistake it.
‘No cavaliers in the Foreign Office?’ I said flippantly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why me?’ I said: and heard in the question all the despair of the unwillingly chosen. Why me? I don’t want it. Take it away. Pick someone else. Leave me alone.
‘I gather it was felt you should be approached because you have... ah... status,’ he said, and smiled faintly as if deprecating such an extravagant statement. ‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘the time.’
A right kick in the guts, I thought; and kept my face flat and still. Then I took off my glasses and squinted at them against the light, as if trying to see if they were clean, and then put them back on again. It was a delaying tactic I had used all my life, most often unconsciously, to give myself a space for thought: a habit that had started when I was about six and a schoolmaster asked me in an arithmetic lesson what I had done with the multiplicand.
I had pulled off my owl-like silver rims and stared at his suddenly fuzzy outline while I thought wild panicky thoughts. What on earth was a multiplicand?
‘I haven’t seen it, sir. It wasn’t me, sir.’
His sardonic laugh had stayed with me down the years. I had exchanged the silver rims for gold, and then for plastic, and finally for tortoiseshell, but I still took them off when I couldn’t answer.
‘I’ve got a cough,’ I said. ‘And it is November.’
The frivolousness of this excuse was measured by a deepening silence and a gradual reverential bowing of the Hughes-Beckett head over the crystal tumbler.
‘I’m afraid that the answer is no,’ I said.
He raised his head and gave me a calm civil inspection. ‘There will be some disappointment,’ he said. ‘I might almost go as far as to say... ah... dismay.’
‘Flatter someone else,’ I said.
‘It was felt that you...’ He left the words unfinished, hanging in the air.
‘Who felt?’ I asked. ‘Who, exactly, felt?’
He shook his head gently, put down the emptied glass, and rose to his feet.
‘I will convey your reply.’
‘And regrets,’ I said.
‘Very well, Mr Drew.’
‘I wouldn’t have been successful,’ I said. ‘I’m not an investigator. I’m a farmer.’
He gave me a sort of sideways down-the-nose look where a less inhibited man would have said, ‘Come off it.’
I walked with him into the hall, helped him on with his coat, opened the front door, and watched him walk bareheaded through the icy dark to his waiting chauffeur-driven Daimler. He gave me, by way of farewell, merely a five-second full-frontal view of his bland expression through the window. Then the big car crunched away on the gravel towards the gate, and I coughed in the cold air and went back inside.
Emma was walking down the oval sweep of Regency staircase in her Friday evening come-for-the-weekend clothes: jeans, cotton check shirt, baggy sweater and cowboy boots. I wondered fleetingly whether, if the house stood for as long again, the girls of the twenty-second century would look as incongruous against those gracefully curving walls.
‘Fish fingers and the telly, then?’ she said.
‘More or less.’
‘You’ve got bronchitis again.’
‘It isn’t catching.’
She reached the bottom of the stairs and made without pause towards the kitchen. It always took a while with her for the brittle stresses of the week to drop away, and I was used to the jerky arrivals and the spiky brush-offs of the first few hours. I no longer tried to greet her with warmth. She wouldn’t be kissed much before ten, nor loved before midnight, and she wouldn’t relax until Saturday tea-time. Sunday we would slop around in easy contentment, and at six on Monday morning she would be gone.
Lady Emma Louders-Allen-Croft, daughter, sister and aunt of dukes, was ‘into’, as she would say, ‘the working girl ethos’. She was employed full-time, no favours, in a bustling London department store, where, despite her search for social abasement, she had recently been promoted to bed linen buyer on the second floor. Emma, blessed with organisational skills above the average, was troubled about her rise, a screw-up one could trace back directly to her own schooling, where she, in an expensive boarding-school for highborn young ladies, had been taught in fierily left-wing sociology lessons that brains were elitist and that manual work was the noble path to heaven.
Her search for immolation, which had led to exhausting years of serving at tables in cafés as well as behind the counters in shops, seemed to be as strong as ever. She would in no way have starved without employment, but might quite likely have gone to drink or pot.
I believed, and she knew I did, that someone with her abilities and restless drive should have taken a proper training, or at least gone to university, and contributed more than a pair of hands; but I had learned not to talk about it, as it was one of the many no-man’s-lands which led to shrieks and sulks.
‘Why the hell do you bother with that mixed-up kook?’ my step-brother frequently asked. Because, as I never told him, a shot of undiluted life-force every couple of weekends was better for the heart than his monotonous daily jogging.