Emma was looking into the refrigerator, the light shining out of it on to her fine-boned face and thick platinum hair. Her eyebrows were so pale as to be invisible without pencil, and her lashes the same without mascara. Sometimes she made up her eyes like sunbursts; sometimes, like that evening, she let nature take its course. It depended on the tide of ideas.
‘Haven’t you any yoghurt?’ she demanded.
I sighed. A flood of health foods was not my favourite. ‘Nor wheatgerm either,’ I said.
‘Kelp,’ she said firmly.
‘What?’
‘Seaweed. Compressed into tablets. Very good for you.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Apple cider vinegar. Honey. Organically grown vegetables.’
‘Are we off avocadoes and hearts of palm?’
She pulled out a chunk of Dutch cheese and scowled at it. ‘They’re imported. We should limit imports. We need a siege economy.’
‘No more caviar?’
‘Caviar is immoral.’
‘Would it be immoral if it was plentiful and cheap?’
‘Stop arguing. What did your visitor want? Are these crème caramels for supper?’
‘Yes, they are,’ I said. ‘He wanted me to go to Moscow.’
She straightened up and glared at me. ‘That’s not very funny.’
‘A month ago you said crème caramels were food for angels.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘He said he wanted me to go to Moscow. On an errand, not to embrace the Marxist — Leninist philosophy.’
She slowly shut the refrigerator door.
‘What sort of errand?’
‘He wanted me to look for somebody. But I’m not going.’
‘Who?’
‘He didn’t say.’ I turned away from her. ‘Come and have a drink in the sitting-room. There’s a fire in there.’
She followed me back through the hall and folded herself into a large armchair with a glass of white wine.
‘How are the pigs, geese, and mangold-wurzels?’
‘Coming along nicely,’ I said.
I had no pigs, geese, or, indeed, mangold-wurzels. I had a lot of beef cattle, three square miles of Warwickshire, and all the modern problems of the food producer. I had grown used to measuring yield in tonnes per hectare but was still unconvinced by government policies which paid me sometimes not to grow certain crops, and threatened to prosecute me if I did.
‘And the horses?’ Emma said.
‘Ah well...’
I stretched out lazily in my chair and watched the light from the table lamp fall on her silvery head, and decided it was really high time I stopped wincing over the thought that I would be riding in no more races.
‘I suppose I’ll sell the horses,’ I said.
‘There’s still hunting.’
‘It’s not the same. And these are not hunters. They’re race-horses. They should be on a track.’
‘You’ve trained them all these years... why don’t you just get someone else to ride them?’
‘I only trained them because I was riding them. I don’t want to do it for anyone else.’
She frowned. ‘I can’t imagine you without horses.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘nor can I.’
‘It’s a bloody shame.’
‘I thought you subscribed to the “we know what’s best for you and you’ll damn well put up with it” school of thought.’
‘People have to be protected from themselves,’ she said.
‘Why?’
She stared. ‘Of course they do.’
‘Safety precautions are a growth industry,’ I said with some bitterness. ‘Masses of restrictive legislation to stop people taking everyday risks... and accidents go right on happening, and we have terrorists besides.’
‘You’re still in a right tizz, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you’d got over it.’
‘The first fury may have worn off,’ I said. ‘The resentment will last for ever.’
I had been lucky in my racing, lucky in my horses, and steeplechasing had taken me, as it had so many others, to soul-filling heights and depths of passion and fear and triumphant exaltation. Left to myself I would in that autumn have been busily racing at every opportunity and fixing my sights as usual on the big amateur events in the spring; for, while I hadn’t the world’s toughest physique when it came to chest infections, to which I was as maddeningly prone as cars to rust, I was still, at thirty-two, as muscularly strong as I would ever be. But someone, somewhere, had recently dreamed up the nannying concept that people should no longer be allowed to ride in jump races wearing glasses.
Of course a lot of people thought it daft for anyone to race in glasses anyway, and I daresay they were right: but although I’d broken a few frames and suffered a few superficial cuts from them, I’d never damaged my actual eyes. And they were my eyes, God dammit.
There were restrictions now on contact lenses, though not a total ban: but although I had tried and persevered to the point of perpetual inflammation, my eyes and contacts remained incompatible. So if I couldn’t wear contacts, I could no longer race. So goodbye to twelve years’ fun. Goodbye to endeavour, to speed, to mind-blowing exhilaration. Too bad, too bad about your misery, it’s all for your own good.
The weekend drifted along on its normal course. A drive round the farm on Saturday morning, visit to the local Stratford-upon-Avon races in the afternoon, dinner with friends in the evening. Sunday morning, getting up late, we sprawled in the sitting-room with logs on the fire, newspapers around like snow, and the prospect of toasted ham sandwiches for lunch. Two satisfactory nights had been passed, with another, one hoped, ahead. Emma was at her softest, and we were as near to a married state as we were ever likely to get.
Into this domestic calm drove Hughes-Beckett in his Daimler. The wheels crunched on the graveclass="underline" I stood up to see who had arrived, and Emma also. We watched the chauffeur and a man sitting beside him get out of the car and open the two rear doors. From one stepped Hughes-Beckett, looking apprehensively up the façade of the house, and from the other...
Emma’s eyes widened. ‘My God... isn’t that...?’
‘Yes, it is.’
She swept a wild look round the cosy untidy room. ‘You can’t bring them in here.’
‘No. The drawing-room.’
‘But... did you know they were coming?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Good heavens.’
We watched the two visitors stroll the few steps towards the front door. Talk about not taking no for an answer, I thought. This was wheeling up the big guns with a vengeance.
‘Well, go on,’ said Emma. ‘See what they want.’
‘I know what they want. You sit here by the fire and do the crossword while I think of ways of telling them they can’t have it.’
I went to the front door and opened it.
‘Randall,’ said the Prince, holding out his hand to be shaken. ‘Well, at least you’re at home. Can we come in?’
‘Of course, sir.’
Hughes-Beckett followed him over the threshold with an expression compounded of humiliation and triumph: he might not have been able to persuade me himself, but he was going to take joy in seeing me capitulate to someone else.
I led them into the blue and gold formal drawing-room where at least the radiators were functioning even if there was no welcoming fire.
‘Now, Randall,’ said the Prince. ‘Please go to Moscow.’
‘Can I offer your Royal Highness a drink?’ I said.
‘No, you can’t. Now, Randall, sit down and listen, and stop beating about the bush.’
The cousin of the monarch parked his backside firmly on a silk-covered Regency sofa and waved Hughes-Beckett and me towards adjoining chairs. He was of my generation, though a year or two older, and we had met countless times over the years because of our common pleasure in horses. His taste had taken him more to hounds and to polo than racing, although we had galloped alongside in several point-to-points. He was strong-minded and direct, and could be bracing to the point of bossiness, but I had also seen his tears over the broken-necked body of his favourite hunter.