Bonecrack

CHAPTER FOUR

The small private room in the North London hospital where my father had been taken after the crash seemed to be almost entirely filled with the frames and ropes and pulleys and weights which festooned his high bed. Apart from all that there was only a high-silled window with limp floral curtains and a view of half the back of another building and a chunk of sky, a chest-high wash basin with lever type taps designed to be turned on by elbows, a bedside locker upon which reposed his lower teeth in a glass of water, and an armchair of sorts, visitors for the use of.

There were no flowers glowing against the margarine coloured walls, and no well-wishing cards brightening the top of the locker. He did not care for flowers, and would have dispatched any that came straight along to other wards, and I doubted that anyone at all would have made the error of sending him a glossy or amusing get-well, which he would have considered most frightfully vulgar.

The room itself was meagre compared with what he would have chosen and could afford, but to me during the first critical days the hospital itself had seemed effortlessly efficient. It did after all, as one doctor had casually explained to me, have to deal constantly with wrecked bodies prised out of crashes on the A. 1. They were used to it. Geared for it. They had a higher proportion of accident cases than of the normally sick.

He had said he thought I was wrong to insist on private treatment for my father and that he would find time hanging less heavy in a public ward where there was a lot going on, but I had assured him that he did not know my father. He had shrugged and acquiesced, but said that the private rooms weren't much. And they weren't. They were for getting out of quickly, if one could.

When I visited him that evening, he was asleep. The ravages of the pain he had endured during the past week had deepened and darkened the lines round his eyes and tinged all his skin with grey, and he looked defenceless in a way he never did when awake. The dogmatic set of his mouth was relaxed, and with his eyes shut he no longer seemed to be disapproving of nineteen twentieths of what occurred. A lock of grey-white hair curved softly down over his forehead, giving him a friendly gentle look which was hopelessly misleading.

He had not been a kind father. I had spent most of my childhood fearing him and most of my teens loathing him, and only in the past very few years had I come to understand him. The severity with which he had used me had not after all been rejection and dislike, but lack of imagination and an inability to love. He had not believed in beating, but he had lavishly handed out other punishments of deprivation and solitude, without realising that what would have been trifling to him was torment to me. Being locked in one's bedroom for three or four days at a time might not have come under the heading of active cruelty, but it had dumped me into agonies of humiliation and shame: and it had not been possible, although I had tried until I was the most repressed child in Newmarket, to avoid committing anything my father could interpret as a fault.

He had sent me to Eton, which in its way had proved just as callous, and on my sixteenth birthday I ran away.

I knew that he had never forgiven me. An aunt had relayed to me his furious comment that he had provided me with horses to ride and taught me obedience, and what more could any father do for his son?

He had made no effort to get me back, and during all the years of my commercial success we had not once spoken to each other. In the end, after fourteen years absence, I had gone to Ascot races knowing that he would be there and wanting finally to make peace.

When I said 'Mr Griffon-' he had turned to me from a group of people, raised his eyebrows, and looked at me enquiringly. His eyes were cool and blank. He hadn't known me.

I had said, with more amusement than awkwardness, 'I am your son- I am Neil.'

Apart from surprise he had shown no emotion whatsoever, and on the tacit understanding that none would be expected on either side, he had suggested that any day I happened to be passing through Newmarket, I could call in and see him.

I had called three or four times every year since then, sometimes for a drink, sometimes for lunch, but never staying; and I had come to see him from a much saner perspective in my thirties than I had at fifteen. His manner to me was still for the most part forbidding, critical, and punitive, but as I no longer depended solely upon him for approval, and as he could no longer lock me in my bedroom for disagreeing with him, I found a perverse sort of pleasure in his company.

I had thought when I was called in a hurry to Rowley Lodge after the accident that I wouldn't sleep again in my old bed, that I'd choose any other. But in fact in the end I did sleep in it, because it was the room that had been prepared for me, and there were dust-sheets still over all the rest.

Too much had crowded back when I looked at the unchanged furnishings and the fifty-times read books on the small bookshelf; and smile at myself as cynically as I would, on that first night back I hadn't been able to lie in there in the dark with the door shut.

I sat down in the armchair and read the copy of The Times which rested on his bed. His hand, yellowish, freckled, and with thick knotted veins, lay limply on the sheets, still half entwined in the black-framed spectacles he had removed before sleeping. I remembered that when I was seventeen I had taken to wearing frames like those, with plain glass in, because to me they stood for authority, and I had wanted to present an older and weightier personality to my clients. Whether it was the frames or not which did the trick, the business had flourished.

He stirred, and groaned, and the lax hand closed convulsively into a fist with almost enough force to break the lenses.

I stood up. His face was screwed up with pain and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, but he sensed that there was someone in the room and opened his eyes sharp and wide as if there were nothing the matter.

'Oh- it's you.'

'I'll fetch a nurse,' I said.

'No. Be better- in a minute.'

But I went to fetch one anyway, and she looked at the watch pinned upside down on her bosom and remarked that it was time for his pills, near enough.

After he had swallowed them and the worst of it had passed I noticed that during the short time I was out of the room he had managed to replace his lower teeth. The glass of water stood empty on the locker. A great one for his dignity, my father.

'Have you found anyone to take over the licence?' he asked.

'Can I make your pillows more comfortable?' I suggested.

'Leave them alone,' he snapped. 'Have you found anyone to take charge?' He would go on asking, I knew, until I gave him a direct answer.

'No,' I said. There's no need.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've decided to stay on, myself.'

His mouth opened, just as Etty's had done, and then shut again with equal vigour.

'You can't. You don't know a damn thing about it. You couldn't win a single race.'

'The horses are good, Etty is good, and you can sit here and do the entries.'

'You will not take over. You will get someone who is capable, someone I approve of. The horses are far too valuable to have amateurs messing about. You will do as I say. Do you hear? You will do as I say.'

The pain-killing drug had begun to act on his eyes, if not yet his tongue.

'The horses will come to no harm,' I said, and thought of Moonrock and Lucky Lindsay and the kicked two-year-old, and wished with all my heart I could hand the whole lot over to Bredon that very day.

'If you think,' he said with a certain malice, 'that because you sell antiques and can run a racing stable, you are overestimating yourself.'

'I no longer sell antiques,' I pointed out calmly. As he knew perfectly well.

'The principles are different,' he said.

'The principles of all businesses are the same.'

'Rubbish.'

'Get the costs right and supply what the customer wants.'

'I can't see you supplying winners.' He was contemptuous.

'Well,' I said moderately, 'I can't see why not.'

'Can't you?' he asked acidly. 'Can't you, indeed?'

'Not if you will give me your advice.'

He gave me instead a long wordless stare while he searched for an adequate answer. The pupils in his grey eyes had contracted to micro-dots. There was no tension left in the muscles which had stiffened his jaw.

'You must get someone else,' he said: but the words had begun to slur. I made a non-committal movement of my head halfway between a nod and a shake, and the argument was over for that day. He asked after that merely about the horses. I told him how they had each performed during their workouts, and he seemed to forget that he didn't believe I understood what I had seen. When I left him, a short while later, he was again on the edge of sleep.

I rang the door bell of my own flat in Hampstead, two long and two short, and got three quick buzzes back, which meant come on in. So I fitted my key into the latch and opened the door.

Gillie's voice floated disembodiedly across the hall.

'I'm in your bedroom.'

'Convenient,' I said to myself with a smile. But she was painting the walls.

'Didn't expect you tonight,' she said, when I kissed her. She held her arms away from me so as not to smear yellow ochre on my jacket. There was a yellow streak on her forehead and a dusting of it on her shining chestnut hair and she looked companionable and easy. Gillie at thirty-six had a figure no model would have been seen dead in, and an attractive lived-in face with wisdom looking out of grey-green eyes. She was sure and mature and much travelled in spirit, and had left behind her one collapsed marriage and one dead child. She had answered an advertisement for a tenant which I had put in The Times, and for two and a half years she had been my tenant and a lot else.

'What do you think of this colour?' she said. 'And we're having a cinnamon carpet and green and shocking pink striped curtains.'

'You can't mean it.'

'It will look ravishing.'

'Ugh,' I said, but she simply laughed. When she had taken the flat it had had white walls, polished furniture and blue fabrics. Gillie had retained only the furniture, and Sheraton and Chippendale would have choked over their new settings.

'You look tired,' she said. 'Want some coffee?'

'And a sandwich, if there's any bread.'

She thought. 'There's some crisp-bread, anyway.'

She was permanently on diets and her idea of dieting was not to buy food. This led to a lot of eating out, which completely defeated the object.

Gillie had listened attentively to my wise dictums about laying in suitable protein like eggs and cheese and then continued happily in the same old ways, which brought me early on to believe that she really did not lust after a beauty contest figure, but was content as long as she did not burst out of her forty-inch hip dresses. Only when they got tight did she actually shed half a stone. She could if she wanted to. She didn't obsessively want.

'How is your father?' she asked, as I crunched my way through a sandwich of rye crisp-bread and slices of raw tomato.

'It's still hurting him.'

'I would have thought they could have stopped that.'

'Well they do, most of the time. And the sister in charge told me this evening that he will be all right in a day or two. They aren't worried about his leg any more. The wound has started healing cleanly, and it should all be settling down soon and giving him an easier time.'

'He's not young, of course.'

'Sixty-seven,' I agreed.

'The bones will take a fair time to mend.'

'Mm.'

'I suppose you've found someone to hold the fort.'

'No,' I said, 'I'm staying there myself.'

'Oh boy, oh boy,' she said, 'I might have guessed.'

I looked at her enquiringly with my mouth full of bits.

'Anything which smells of challenge is your meat and drink.'

'Not this one,' I said with feeling.

'It will be unpopular with the stable,' she diagnosed, 'and apoplectic to your father, and a riotous success.'

'Correct on the first two, way out on the third.'

She shook her head with the glint of a smile. 'Nothing is impossible for the whiz kids.'

She knew I disliked the journalese term, and I knew she liked to use it. 'My lover is a whiz kid,' she said once into a hush at a sticky party: and the men mobbed her.

She poured me a glass of the marvellous Chateau Lafite 1961 which she sacrilegiously drank with anything from caviare to baked beans. It had seemed to me when she moved in that her belongings consisted almost entirely of fur coats and cases of wine, all of which she had precipitously inherited from her mother and father respectively when they died together in Morocco in an earthquake. She had sold the coats because she thought they made her look fat, and had set about drinking her way gradually through the precious bins that wine merchants were wringing their hands over.

'That wine is an investment,' one of them had said to me in agony.

'But someone's got to drink it,' said Gillie reasonably, and pulled out the cork on the second of the Cheval Blanc 61.

Gillie was so rich, because of her grandmother, that she found it more pleasing to drink the super-duper than to sell it at a profit and develop a taste for Brand X. She had been surprised that I had agreed until I had pointed out that that flat was filled with precious pieces where painted deal would have done the same job. So we sat sometimes with our feet up on a sixteenth century Spanish walnut refectory table which had brought dealers sobbing to their knees and drank her wine out of eighteenth century Waterford glass, and laughed at ourselves, because the only safe way to live with any degree of wealth was to make fun of it.

Gillie had said once, 'I don't see why that table is so special, just because it's been here since the Armada. Just look at those moth-eaten legs-' She pointed to four feet which were pitted, stripped of polish, and worn untidily away.

'In the sixteenth century they used to sluice the stone floors with beer because it whitened them. Beer was fine for the stone, but a bit unfortunate for any wood which got continually splashed.'

'Rotten legs proves it's genuine?'

'Got it in one.'

I was fonder of that table than of anything else I possessed, because on it had been founded all my fortunes. Six months out of Eton, on what I had saved out of sweeping the floors at Sotheby's, I set up in business on my own by pushing a barrow round the outskirts of flourishing country towns and buying anything worthwhile that I was offered. The junk I sold to secondhand shops and the best bits to dealers, and by the time I was seventeen I was thinking about a shop.

I saw the Spanish table in the garage of a man from whom I had just bought a late Victorian chest of drawers. I looked at the wrought iron crossed spars bracing the solid square legs under the four inch thick top, and felt unholy butterflies in my guts.

He had been using it as a trestle for paper hanging, and it was littered with pots of paint.

'I'll buy that, too, if you like,' I said.

'It's only an old work table.'

'Well- how much would you want for it?'

He looked at my barrow, on to which he had just helped me lift the chest of drawers. He looked at the twenty pounds I had paid him for it, and he looked at my shabby jeans and jerkin, and he said kindly, 'No lad, I couldn't rob you. And anyway, look, its legs are all rotten at the bottom.'

'I could afford another twenty,' I said doubtfully. 'But that's about all I've got with me.'

He took a lot of persuading, and in the end would only let me give him fifteen. He shook his head over me, telling me I'd better learn a bit more before I ruined myself. But I cleaned up the table and repolished the beautiful slab of walnut, and I sold it a fortnight later to a dealer I knew from the Sotheby days for two hundred and seventy pounds.

With those proceeds swelling my savings I had opened the first shop, and things never looked back. When I sold out twelve years later to an American syndicate there was a chain of eleven, all bright and clean and filled with treasures.

A short time afterwards, on a sentimental urge, I traced the Spanish table, and bought it back. And I sought out the handyman with his garage and gave him two hundred pounds, which almost caused a heart attack; so I reckoned if anyone was going to put their feet up on that expensive plank, no one had a better right.

'Where did you get all those bruises?' Gillie said, sitting up in the spareroom bed and watching me undress.

I squinted down at the spatter of mauve blotches.

'I was attacked by a centipede.'

She laughed. 'You're hopeless.'

'And I've got to be back at Newmarket by seven tomorrow morning.'

'Stop wasting time, then. It's midnight already.'

I climbed in beside her, and lying together in naked companionship we worked our way through The Times crossword.

It was always better like that. By the time we turned off the light we were relaxed and entwined, and we turned to each other for an act that was a part but not the whole of a relationship.

'I quite love you,' Gillie said. 'Believe it or not.'

'Oh, I believe you,' I said modestly. 'Thousands wouldn't.'

'Stop biting my ear, I don't like it.'

'The books say the ear is an A1 erogenous zone.'

'The books can go stuff themselves.'

'Charming.'

'And all those women's lib publications about The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. So much piffle. Of course it isn't a myth.'

'This is not supposed to be a public meeting,' I said, 'This is supposed to be a spot of private passion.'

'Oh well- if you insist.'

She wriggled more comfortably into my arms.

'I'll tell you something, if you like,' she said.

'If you absolutely must.'

'The answer to four down isn't hallucinated, it's halucinogen.'

I shook. 'Thanks very much.'

'Thought you'd like to know.'

I kissed her neck and laid my hand on her stomach.

'That makes it a g, not a t, in twenty across,' she said.

'Stigma?'

'Clever old you.'

'Is that the lot?'

'Mm.'

After a bit she said, 'Do you really loathe the idea of green and shocking pink curtains?'

'Would you mind just concentrating on the matter in hand?'

I could feel her grin in the darkness.

'O. K.' she said.

And concentrated.

She woke me up like an alarm clock at five o'clock. It was not so much the pat she woke me up with, but where she chose to plant it. I came back to the surface laughing.

'Good morning, little one,' she said.

She got up and made some coffee, her chestnut hair in a tangle and her skin pale and fresh. She looked marvellous in the mornings. She stirred a dollop of heavy cream into the thick black coffee and sat opposite me across the kitchen table.

'Someone really had a go at you, didn't they?' she said casually.

I buttered a piece of rye crunch and reached for the honey.

'Sort of,' I agreed.

'Not telling?'

'Can't,' I said briefly. 'But I will when I can.'

'You may have a mind like teak,' she said, 'but you've a vulnerable body, just like anyone else.'

I looked at her in surprise, with my mouth full. She wrinkled her nose at me.

'I used to think you mysterious and exciting,' she said.

Thanks.'

'And now you're about as exciting as a pair of old bedroom slippers.'

'So kind,' I murmured.

'I used to think there was something magical about the way you disentangled all those nearly bankrupt businesses- and then I found out that it wasn't magic but just uncluttered common sense-'

'Plain, boring old me,' I agreed, washing down the crumbs with a gulp of coffee.

'I know you well, now,' she said. 'I know how you tick- And all those bruises-' She shivered suddenly in the warm little room.

'Gillie,' I said accusingly, 'You are suffering from intuition;' and that remark in itself was a dead giveaway.

'No- from interpretation,' she said. 'And just you watch out for yourself.'

'Anything you say.'

'Because,' she explained seriously, 'I do not want to have the bother of hunting for another ground floor flat with cellars to keep the wine in. It took me a whole month to find this one.'