Another quick look at his watch, this time accompanied by a frown. I thought hopefully that perhaps the precious Johnny wouldn’t turn up at all, and I could go contentedly back home and forget the whole thing.
The two tall windows of the study looked out to the sweep of drive in front of the house, in the same way as those of my own sitting-room. Perhaps the Prince, too, found it useful to have early warning of people calling: time to dodge, if he wanted.
My Mercedes was clearly in view on the wide expanse of raked gravel, standing alone, bluish-grey and quiet. While I idly watched, a white Rover suddenly travelled like an arrow across the uncluttered area, making straight for my car’s back. As if in horrorstruck inevitable slow-motion I waited helplessly for the crash.
There was a noise like the emptying of ten metal dustbins into a pulverising plant, followed by the uninterrupted blowing of the horn, as the unconscious driver of the Rover slumped over the steering wheel.
‘Christ!’ said the Prince, appalled and leaping to his feet. ‘Johnny!’
‘My car!’ I said, involuntarily betraying my regrettable priorities.
The Prince was fortunately already on his way to the study door, and I followed on his heels across the hall, bursting into the fresh air after him at a run.
The reverberating crunch and the wailing horn had brought an assortment of horrified faces to the windows and to the fringe of the scene, but it was the Prince and I who reached the tangle first.
The front of the Rover had half mounted the back of my car in a sort of monstrous mechanical mating, so that the Rover’s wheels were slightly off the ground. The whole arrangement looked most precarious, and an assaulting smell of petrol brought one face to face with possibilities.
‘Get him out,’ said the Prince urgently, tugging at the handle of the driver’s door. ‘God...’
The door had buckled under the impact, and was wedged shut. I raced round to the far side, and tried the passenger door. Same thing. If he’d tried, Johnny Farringford couldn’t have hit my Mercedes any straighter.
The rear doors were locked. The hatchback also. The horn blew on, urgent and disturbing.
‘Jesus,’ shouted the Prince frantically. ‘Get him out.’
I climbed up on to the concertina’d mess between the two vehicles and slithered through the space where the windscreen had been, carrying with me a shower of crumbling glass. Knelt on the passenger seat, and hauled the unconscious man off the horn button. The sudden quiet was a blessing, but there was nothing reassuring about Johnny Farringford’s face.
I didn’t wait to look beneath the blood. I stretched across behind him, supporting his lolling head, and pulled up the locking catch on the offside rear door. The Prince worked at it feverishly from the outside, but it took a contortionist manoeuvre from me and a fierce stamp from my heel to spring it open: the thought of sparks from the scraping metal was a vivid horror, as I could now hear as well as scarcely breathe from the flood of escaping petrol.
It didn’t make it any better that it was the petrol from my own car, or that I’d filled the capacious tank that very morning.
The Prince put his head and shoulders into the Rover and thrust his wrists under his brother-in-law’s armpits. I squirmed back into the buckled front space and disengaged the flopping feet from the clutter of clutch, brake and accelerator pedals. The Prince heaved with his considerable strength and I lifted the lower part of the inert body as best I could, and, between us, we shifted him over the back of his seat and out through the rear door. I let go of his legs as the Prince tugged him backwards, and he flopped out free on to the gravel like a calf from a cow.
God help him, I thought, if we’ve made any broken bones worse by our rough handling, but anything on the whole was better than incineration. I scrambled along Johnny Farringford’s escape route with no signs of calm unhurried nonchalance.
Assistance had arrived in a houseman’s coat and in gardening clothes, and the victim was carried more carefully from then on.
‘Take him away from the car,’ the Prince was saying to them while turning back towards me. ‘The petrol... Randall, get out, man.’
Superfluous advice. I’d never felt so slow, so awkward, so over-equipped with knees and elbows and ankle joints.
Whether the balance of one vehicle on the other was in any case unstable, or whether my far from delicate movements rocked it over the brink, the effect was the same: the Rover began to move while I was still inside it.
I could hear the Prince’s voice, rising with apprehension, ‘Randall...’
I got one foot out free: began to put my weight on it, and the Rover shifted further. I stumbled, hung on to the door frame, and pulled myself out by force of arms. Landed sideways on hip and elbow, sprawling and ungainly.
I rolled and put my feet where they ought to be, with my hands on the ground like a runner, to get a bit of purchase. Behind me the Rover’s heavy weight crunched backwards and tore itself off my Mercedes with metal screeching violently on metal, but I dare say it was some form of electrical short-circuiting which let go with a shower of sparks like a hundred cigarette lighters in chorus.
The explosion threw the two cars apart and left both of them burning like mini infernos. There was a hissing noise in the air as the expanding vapour flashed into a second’s flame, and a positive roaring gust of hot wind, which helped me onwards.
‘Your hair’s on fire,’ observed the Prince, as I reached him.
I rubbed a hand over it, and so it was. Rubbed with both hands rather wildly, and put the conflagration out.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Not at all.’
He grinned at me in an un-Princely and most human fashion. ‘And your glasses, I see, haven’t shifted an inch.’
A doctor and a private ambulance arrived in due course for Johnny Farringford, but long before that he had woken up and looked around him in bewilderment. He was lying, by that time, on the long comfortable sofa in the family sitting-room, attended by the Princess, his sister, who was taking things matter-of-factly and mopping his wounds with impressive efficiency.
‘What happened?’ Farringford said, opening dazed eyes.
Bit by bit they told him: he had driven his car across a space as big as a tennis court, straight into the back of my Mercedes. Nothing else in sight.
‘Randall Drew,’ added the Prince, making the introduction.
‘Oh.’
‘Damn silly thing to do,’ said the Princess disparagingly, but in her concerned face I read the lifelong protectiveness of older sister to little brother.
‘I don’t... remember.’
He looked at the red stains on the swabs which were piling up on a tray beside him, at the blood dripping from a cut on one finger, and appeared to be going to be sick.
‘He used to pass out at the sight of blood,’ said his sister. ‘A good job he’s grown out of it.’
Johnny Farringford’s injuries had resolved themselves into numerous cuts to the face but no obviously broken bones. However, he winced every time he moved, pressing his arm across his waist as if to hold himself together, which spoke to me rather reminiscently of cracked ribs.
He was a willowy, fairly tall young man with a great deal of crinkly reddish hair extending into tufty bits of beard down the outer sides of his jaw. His nose looked thin and sharp, and an out-of-door tan sat oddly on his skin over the pallor of shock.
‘Creeping... shit,’ he said suddenly.
‘It could have been worse,’ said the Prince, dubiously.
‘No...’ Farringford said. ‘They hit me.’