High Stakes

4

Rupert Ramsey’s voice on the telephone sounded resigned rather than welcoming.

‘Yes, of course, do come down to see your horses, if you’d like to. Do you know the way?’

He gave me directions which proved easy to follow, and at eleven thirty, Sunday morning, I drove through his white painted stone gateposts and drew up in the large gravelled area before his house.

He lived in a genuine Georgian house, simple in design, with large airy rooms and elegant plaster-worked ceilings. Nothing self-consciously antique about the furnishings: all periods mingled together in a working atmosphere that was wholly modern.

Rupert himself was about forty-five, intensely energetic under a misleadingly languid exterior. His voice drawled slightly. I knew him only by sight and it was to all intents the first time we had met.

‘How do you do?’ He shook hands. ‘Care to come into my office?’

I followed him through the white painted front door, across the large square hall and into the room he called his office, but which was furnished entirely as a sitting-room except for a dining table which served as a desk, and a grey filing cabinet in one corner.

‘Do sit down.’ He indicated an armchair. ‘Cigarette?’

‘Don’t smoke.’

‘Wise man.’ He smiled as if he didn’t really think so and lit one for himself.

‘Energise,’ he said, ‘is showing signs of having had a hard race.’

‘But he won easily,’ I said.

‘It looked that way, certainly.’ He inhaled, breathing out through his nose. ‘All the same, I’m not too happy about him.’

‘In what way?’

‘He needs building up. We’ll do it, don’t you fear. But he looks a bit thin at present.’

‘How about the other two?’

‘Dial’s jumping out of his skin. Ferryboat needs a lot of work yet.’

‘I don’t think Ferryboat likes racing any more.’

The cigarette paused on its way to his mouth.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

‘He’s had three races this autumn. I expect you’ll have looked up his form. He’s run badly every time. Last year he was full of enthusiasm and won three times out of seven starts, but the last of them took a lot of winning... and Raymond Child cut him raw with his whip... and during the summer out at grass Ferryboat seems to have decided that if he gets too near the front he’s in for a beating, so it’s only good sense not to get near the front... and he consequently isn’t trying.’

He drew deeply on the cigarette, giving himself time.

‘Do you expect me to get better results than Jody?’

‘With Ferryboat, or in general?’

‘Let’s say... both.’

I smiled. ‘I don’t expect much from Ferryboat. Dial’s a novice, an unknown quantity. Energise might win the Champion Hurdle.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said pleasantly.

‘No... I expect you to get different results from Jody. Will that do?’

‘I’d very much like to know why you left him.’

‘Disagreements over money,’ I said. ‘Not over the way he trained the horses.’

He tapped ash off with the precision that meant his mind was elsewhere. When he spoke, it was slowly.

‘Were you always satisfied with the way your horses ran?’

The question hovered delicately in the air, full of inviting little traps. He looked up suddenly and met my eyes and his own widened with comprehension. ‘I see you understand what I’m asking.’

‘Yes. But I can’t answer. Jody says he will sue me for slander if I tell people why I left him, and I’ve no reason to doubt him.’

‘That remark in itself is a slander.’

‘Indubitably.’

He got cheerfully to his feet and stubbed out the cigarette. A good deal more friendliness seeped into his manner.

‘Right then, Let’s go out and look at your horses.’

We went out into his yard, which showed prosperity at every turn. The thin cold December sun shone on fresh paint, wall-to-wall tarmac, tidy flower tubs and well-kept stable lads. There was none of the clutter I was accustomed to at Jody’s; no brooms leaning against walls, no rugs, rollers, brushes and bandages lying in ready heaps, no straggles of hay across the swept ground. Jody liked to give owners the impression that work was being done, that care for the horses was non-stop. Rupert, it seemed, preferred to tuck the sweat and toil out of sight. At Jody’s, the muck heap was always with you. At Rupert’s it was invisible.

‘Dial is here.’

We stopped at a box along a row outside the main quadrangle, and with an unobtrusive flick of his fingers Rupert summoned a lad hovering twenty feet away.

‘This is Donny,’ he said. ‘Looks after Dial.’

I shook hands with Donny, a young tough-looking boy of about twenty with unsmiling eyes and a you-can’t-con-me expression. From the look he directed first at Rupert and then later at the horse I gathered that this was his overall attitude to life, not an announcement of no confidence in me personally. When we’d looked at and admired the robust little chestnut I tried Donny with a fiver. It raised a nod of thanks, but no smile.

Further along the same row stood Ferryboat, looking out on the world with a lack-lustre eye and scarcely shifting from one leg to the other when we went into his box. His lad, in contrast to Donny, gave him an indulgent smile, and accepted his gift from me with a beam.

‘Energise is in the main yard,’ Rupert said, leading the way. ‘Across in the corner.’

When we were halfway there two other cars rolled up the drive and disgorged a collection of men in sheepskin coats and ladies in furs and jangly bracelets. They saw Rupert and waved and began to stream into the yard.

Rupert said, ‘I’ll show you Energise in just a moment.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You tell me which box he’s in. I’ll look at him myself. You see to your other owners.’

‘Number fourteen, then. I’ll be with you again shortly.’

I nodded and walked on to number fourteen. Unbolted the door. Went in. The near-black horse was tied up inside. Ready, I supposed, for my visit.

Horse and I looked at each other. My old friend, I thought. The only one of them all with whom I’d ever had any real contact. I talked to him, as in the horsebox, looking guiltily over my shoulder at the open door, for fear someone should hear me and think me nuts.

I could see at once why Rupert had been unhappy about him. He looked thinner. All that crashing about in the horsebox could have done him no good.

Across the yard I could see Rupert talking to the newcomers and shepherding them to their horses. Owners came en masse on Sunday mornings.

I was content to stay where I was. I spent probably twenty minutes with my black horse, and he instilled in me some very strange ideas.

Rupert came back hurrying and apologising. ‘You’re still here... I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ I assured him.

‘Come into the house for a drink.’

‘I’d like to.’

We joined the other owners and returned to his office for lavish issues of gin and scotch. Drinks for visiting owners weren’t allowable as a business expense for tax purposes unless the visiting owners were foreign. Jody had constantly complained of it to all and sundry while accepting cases of the stuff from me with casual nods. Rupert poured generously and dropped no hints, and I found it a refreshing change.

The other owners were excitedly making plans for the Christmas meeting at Kempton Park. Rupert made introductions, explaining that Energise, too, was due to run there in the Christmas Hurdle.

‘After the way he won at Sandown,’ remarked one of the sheepskin coats, ‘he must be a cast-iron certainty.’

I glanced at Rupert for an opinion but he was busy with bottles and glasses.

‘I hope so,’ I said.

The sheepskin coat nodded sagely.

His wife, a cosy-looking lady who had shed her ocelot and now stood five-feet-nothing in bright green wool, looked from him to me in puzzlement.

‘But George honey, Energise is trained by that nice young man with the pretty little wife. You know, the one who introduced us to Ganser Mays.’

She smiled happily and appeared not to notice the pole-axed state of her audience. I must have stood immobile for almost a minute while the implications fizzed around my brain, and during that time the conversation between George-honey and the bright green wool had flowed on into the chances of their own chaser in a later race. I dragged them back.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t catch your names.’

‘George Vine,’ said the sheepskin coat, holding out a chunky hand, ‘and my wife, Poppet.’

‘Steven Scott,’ I said.

‘Glad to know you.’ He gave his empty glass to Rupert, who amiably refilled it with gin and tonic. ‘Poppet doesn’t read the racing news much, so she wouldn’t know you’ve left Jody Leeds.’

‘Did you say,’ I asked carefully, ‘that Jody Leeds introduced you to Ganser Mays?’

‘Oh no’ Poppet said, smiling. ‘His wife did.’

‘That’s right,’ George nodded. ‘Bit of luck.’

‘You see,’ Poppet explained conversationally, ‘the prices on the Tote are sometimes so awfully small and it’s all such a lottery isn’t it? I mean, you never know really what you’re going to get for your money, like you do with the bookies.’

‘Is that what she said?’ I asked.

‘Who? Oh... Jody Leeds’ wife. Yes, that’s right, she did. I’d just been picking up my winnings on one of our horses from the Tote, you see, and she was doing the same at the next window, the Late-Pay window that was, and she said what a shame it was that the Tote was only paying three to one when the bookies’ starting price was five to one, and I absolutely agreed with her, and we just sort of stood there chatting. I told her that only last week we had bought the steeplechaser which had just won and it was our first ever racehorse, and she was so interested and explained that she was a trainer’s wife and that sometimes when she got tired of the Tote paying out so little she bet with a bookie. I said I didn’t like pushing along the rows with all those men shoving and shouting and she laughed and said she meant one on the rails, so you could just walk up to them and not go through to the bookies’ enclosure at all. But of course you have to know them, I mean, they have to know you, if you see what I mean. And neither George nor I knew any of them, as I explained to Mrs Leeds.’

She stopped to take a sip of gin. I listened in fascination.

‘Well,’ she went on, ‘Mrs Leeds sort of hesitated and then I got this great idea of asking her if she could possibly introduce us to her bookie on the rails.’

‘And she did?’

‘She thought it was a great idea.’

She would.

‘So we collected George and she introduced us to dear Ganser Mays. And,’ she finished triumphantly, ‘he gives us much better odds than the Tote.’

George Vine nodded several times in agreement.

‘Trouble is,’ he said, ‘you know what wives are, she bets more than ever.’

‘George honey.’ A token protest only.

‘You know you do, love.’

‘It isn’t worth doing in sixpences,’ she said smiling. ‘You never win enough that way.’

He patted her fondly on the shoulder and said man-to-man to me, ‘When Ganser Mays’ account comes, if she’s won, she takes the winnings, and if she’s lost, I pay.’

Poppet smiled happily. ‘George honey, you’re sweet.’

‘Which do you do most?’ I asked her. ‘Win or lose?’

She made a face. ‘Now that’s a naughty question, Mr Scott.’

Next morning, ten o’clock to the second, I collected Allie from Hampstead.

Seen in daylight for the first time she was sparkling as the day was rotten. I arrived at her door with a big black umbrella holding off slanting sleet, and she opened it in a neat white mackintosh and knee-high black boots. Her hair bounced with new washing, and the bloom on her skin had nothing to do with Max Factor.

I tried a gentlemanly kiss on the cheek. She smelled of fresh flowers and bath soap.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

She chuckled. ‘You English are so formal.’

‘Not always.’

She sheltered under the umbrella down the path to the car and sat inside with every glossy hair dry and in place.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Fasten your lap straps,’ I said. ‘To Newmarket.’

‘Newmarket?’

‘To look at horses.’ I let in the clutch and pointed the Lamborghini roughly north-east.

‘I might have guessed.’

I grinned. ‘Is there anything you’d really rather do?’

‘I’ve visited three museums, four picture galleries, six churches, one Tower of London, two Houses of Parliament and seven theatres.’

‘In how long?’

‘Sixteen days.’

‘High time you saw some real life.’

The white teeth flashed. ‘If you’d lived with my two small nephews for sixteen days you couldn’t wait to get away from it.’

‘Your sister’s children?’

She nodded. ‘Ralph and William. Little devils.’

‘What do they play with?’

She was amused. ‘The toy maker’s market research?’

‘The customer is always right.’

We crossed the North Circular road and took the Ai towards Baldock.

‘Ralph dresses up a doll in soldier’s uniforms and William makes forts on the stairs and shoots dried beans at anyone going up.’

‘Healthy aggressive stuff.’

‘When I was little I hated being given all those educational things that were supposed to be good for you.’

I smiled. ‘It’s well known there are two sorts of toys. The ones that children like and the ones their mothers buy. Guess which there are more of?’

‘You’re cynical.’

‘So I’m often told,’ I said. ‘It isn’t true.’

The wipers worked overtime against the sleet on the windscreen and I turned up the heater. She sighed with what appeared to be contentment. The car purred easily across Cambridgeshire and into Suffolk, and the ninety minute journey seemed short.

It wasn’t the best of weather but even in July the stable I’d chosen for my three young flat racers would have looked depressing. There were two smallish quadrangles side by side, built tall and solid in Edwardian brick. All the doors were painted a dead dull dark brown. No decorations, no flowers, no grass, no gaiety of spirit in the whole place.

Like many Newmarket yards it led straight off the street and was surrounded by houses. Allie looked around without enthusiasm and put into words exactly what I was thinking.

‘It looks more like a prison.’

Bars on the windows of the boxes. Solid ten foot tall gates at the road entrance. Jagged glass set in concrete along the top of the boundary wall. Padlocks swinging on every bolt on every door in sight. All that was missing was a uniformed figure with a gun, and maybe they had those too, on occasion.

The master of all this security proved pretty dour himself. Trevor Kennet shook hands with a smile that looked an unaccustomed effort for the muscles involved and invited us into the stable office out of the rain.

A bare room; linoleum, scratched metal furniture, strip lighting and piles of paper work. The contrast between this and the grace of Rupert Ramsey was remarkable. A pity I had taken Allie to the wrong one.

‘They’ve settled well, your horses.’ His voice dared me to disagree.

‘Splendid,’ I said mildly.

‘You’ll want to see them, I expect.’

As I’d come from London to do so, I felt his remark silly.

‘They’re doing no work yet, of course.’

‘No,’ I agreed. The last Flat season had finished six weeks ago. The next lay some three months ahead. No owner in his senses would have expected his Flat horses to be in full work in December. Trevor Kennet had a genius for the obvious.

‘It’s raining,’ he said. ‘Bad day to come.’

Allie and I were both wearing macs, and I carried the umbrella. He looked lengthily at these preparations and finally shrugged.

‘Better come on, then.’

He himself wore a raincoat and a droopy hat that had suffered downpours for years. He led the way out of the office and across the first quadrangle with Allie and me close under my umbrella behind him.

He flicked the bolts on one of the dead chocolate doors and pulled both halves open.

‘Wrecker,’ he said.

We went into the box. Wrecker moved hastily away across the peat which covered the floor, a leggy bay yearling colt with a nervous disposition. Trevor Kennet made no effort to reassure him but stood four square looking at him with an assessing eye. Jody for all his faults had been good with young stock, fondling them and talking to them with affection. I thought I might have chosen badly, sending Wrecker here.

‘He needs a gentle lad,’ I said.

Kennet’s expression was open scorn. ‘Doesn’t do to mollycoddle them. Soft horses win nothing.’

End of conversation.

We went out into the rain and he slammed the bolts home. Four boxes further along he stopped again.

‘Hermes.’

Again the silent appraisal. Hermes, from the experience of two full racing seasons, could look at humans without anxiety and merely stared back. Ordinary to look at, he had won several races in masterly fashion... and lost every time I’d seriously backed him. Towards the end of the Flat season he had twice trailed in badly towards the rear of the field. Too much racing, Jody had said. Needed a holiday.

‘What do you think of him?’ I asked.

‘He’s eating well,’ Kennet said.

I waited for more, but nothing came. After a short pause we trooped out again into the rain and more or less repeated the whole depressing procedure in the box of my third colt, Bubbleglass.

I had great hopes of Bubbleglass. A late-developing two-year-old, he had run only once so far, and without much distinction. At three, though, he might be fun. He had grown and filled out since I’d seen him last. When I said so, Kennet remarked that it was only to be expected.

We all went back to the office, Kennet offered us coffee and looked relieved when I said we’d better be going.

‘What an utterly dreary place,’ Allie said, as we drove away.

‘Designed to discourage owners from calling too often, I dare say.’

She was surprised. ‘Do you mean it?’

‘Some trainers think owners should pay their bills and shut up.’

‘That’s crazy.’

I glanced sideways at her.

She said positively, ‘If I was spending all that dough, I’d sure expect to be welcomed.’

‘Biting the hand that feeds is a national sport.’

‘You’re all nuts.’

‘How about some lunch?’

We stopped at a pub which did a fair job for a Monday, and in the afternoon drove comfortably back to London. Allie made no objections when I pulled up outside my own front door and followed me in through it with none of the prickly reservations I’d feared.

I lived in the two lower floors of a tall narrow house in Prince Albert Road overlooking Regent’s Park. At street level, garage, cloakroom, workshop. Upstairs, bed, bath, kitchen and sitting-room, the last with a balcony half as big as itself. I switched on lights and led the way.

‘A bachelor’s pad if ever I saw one,’ Allie said, looking around her. ‘Not a frill in sight.’ She walked across and looked out through the sliding glass wall to the balcony. ‘Don’t you just hate all that traffic?’

Cars drove incessantly along the road below, yellow sidelights shining through the glistening rain.

‘I quite like it,’ I said. ‘In the summer I practically live out there on the balcony... breathing in great lungfuls of exhaust fumes and waiting for the clouds to roll away.’

She laughed, unbuttoned her mac and took it off. The red dress underneath looked as unruffled as it had at lunch. She was the one splash of bright colour in that room of creams and browns, and she was feminine enough to know it.

‘Drink?’ I suggested.

‘It’s a bit early...’ She looked around her as if she had expected to see more than sofas and chairs. ‘Don’t you keep any of your toys here?’

‘In the workshop,’ I said. ‘Downstairs.’

‘I’d love to see them.’

‘All right.’

We went down to the hall again and turned towards the back of the house. I opened the civilised wood-panelled door which led straight from carpet to concrete, from white collar to blue, from champagne to tea breaks. The familiar smell of oil and machinery waited there in the dark. I switched on the stark bright lights and stood aside for her to go through.

‘But it is... a factory.’ She sounded astonished.

‘What did you expect?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Something much smaller, I guess.’

The workshop was fifty feet long and was the reason I had bought the house on my twenty-third birthday with money I had earned myself. Selling off the three top floors had given me enough back to construct my own first floor flat, but the heart of the matter lay here, legacy of an old-fashioned light engineering firm that had gone bust.

The pulley system that drove nearly the whole works from one engine was the original, even if now powered by electricity instead of steam, and although I had replaced one or two and added another, the old machines still worked well.

‘Explain it to me,’ Allie said.

‘Well... this electric engine here...’ I showed her its compact floor-mounted shape. ‘... drives that endless belt, which goes up there round that big wheel.’

‘Yes.’ She looked up where I pointed.

‘The wheel is fixed to that long shaft which stretches right down the workshop, near the ceiling. When it rotates, it drives all those other endless belts going down to the machines. Look, I’ll show you.’

I switched on the electric motor and immediately the big belt from it turned the wheel, which rotated the shaft, which set the other belts circling from the shaft down to the machines. The only noises were the hum of the engines, the gentle whine of the spinning shaft and the soft slapping of the belts.

‘It looks alive,’ Allie said. ‘How do you make the machines work?’

‘Engage a sort of gear inside the belt, then the belt revolves the spindle of the machine.’

‘Like a sewing machine,’ Allie said.

‘More or less.’

We walked down the row. She wanted to know what job each did, and I told her.

‘That’s a milling machine, for flat surfaces. That’s a speed lathe; I use that for wood as well as metal. That tiny lathe came from a watchmaker for ultra fine work. That’s a press. That’s a polisher. That’s a hacksaw. And that’s a drilling machine; it bores holes downwards.’

I turned round and pointed to the other side of the workshop.

‘That big one on its own is an engine lathe, for heavier jobs. It has its own electric power.’

‘It’s incredible. All this.’

‘Just for toys?’

‘Well...’

‘These machines are all basically simple. They just save a lot of time.’

‘Do toys have to be so... well... accurate?’

‘I mostly make the prototypes in metal and wood. Quite often they reach the shops in plastic, but unless the engineering’s right in the first place the toys don’t work very well, and break easily.’

‘Where do you keep them?’ She looked around at the bare well-swept area with no work in sight.

‘Over there. In the right-hand cupboard.’

I went over with her and opened the big double doors. She pulled them wider with outstretched arms.

‘Oh!’ She looked utterly astounded.

She stood in front of the shelves with her mouth open and her eyes staring, just like a child.

‘Oh,’ she said again, as if she could get no breath to say anything else. ‘Oh... They’re the Rola toys!’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘Habit, really. I never do.’

She gave me a smile without turning her eyes away from the bright coloured rows in the cupboard. ‘Do so many people ask for free samples?’

‘It’s just that I get tired of talking about them.’

‘But I played with them myself.’ She switched her gaze abruptly in my direction, looking puzzled. ‘I had a lot of them in the States ten or twelve years ago.’ Her voice plainly implied that I was too young to have made those.

‘I was only fifteen when I did the first one,’ I explained. ‘I had an uncle who had a workshop in his garage... he was a welder, himself. He’d shown me how to use tools from the time I was six. He was pretty shrewd. He made me take out patents before I showed my idea to anyone, and he raised and lent me the money to pay for them.’

‘Pay?’

‘Patents are expensive and you have to take out one for each different country, if you don’t want your idea pinched. Japan, I may say, costs the most.’

‘Good heavens.’ She turned back to the cupboard, put out her hand and lifted out the foundation of all my fortunes, the merry-go-round.

‘I had the carousel,’ she said. ‘Just like this, but different colours.’ She twirled the centre spindle between finger and thumb so that the platform revolved and the little horses rose and fell on their poles. ‘I simply can’t believe it.’

She put the merry-go-round back in its slot and one by one lifted out several of the others, exclaiming over old friends and investigating the strangers. ‘Do you have a Rola-base down here?’

‘Sure,’ I said, lifting it from the bottom of the cupboard.

‘Oh do let me... please?’ She was as excited as if she’d still been little. I carried the base over to the workbench and laid it there, and she came over with four of the toys.

The Rola-base consisted of a large flat box, in this case two feet square by six inches deep, though several other sizes had been made. From one side protruded a handle for winding, and one had to have that side of the Rola-base aligned with the edge of the table, so that winding was possible. Inside the box were the rollers which gave the toy its phonetic Rola name; wide rollers carrying a long flat continuous belt inset with many rows of sideway facing cogwheel teeth. In the top of the box were corresponding rows of holes: dozens of holes altogether. Each of the separate mechanical toys, like the merry-go-round and a hundred others, had a central spindle which protruded down from beneath the toy and was grooved like a cogwheel. When one slipped any spindle through any hole it engaged on the belt of cog teeth below, and when one turned the single handle in the Rola-base, the wide belt of cog teeth moved endlessly round and all the spindles rotated and all the toys performed their separate tasks. A simple locking device on the base of each toy engaged with stops by each hole to prevent the toy rotating as a whole.

Allie had brought the carousel and the roller-coaster from the fairground set, and a cow from the farm set, and the firing tank from the army set. She slotted the spindles through random holes and turned the handle. The merry-go-round went round and round, the trucks went up and down the roller-coaster, the cow nodded its head and swished its tail, and the tank rotated with sparks coming out of its gun barrel.

She laughed with pleasure.

‘I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it. I never dreamt you could have made the Rola toys.’

‘I’ve made others, though.’

‘What sort?’

‘Um... the latest in the shops is a coding machine. It’s doing quite well this Christmas.’

‘You don’t mean the Secret Coder?’

‘Yes.’ I was surprised she knew of it.

‘Do show me. My sister’s giving one each to the boys, but they were already gift-wrapped.’

So I showed her the coder, which looked like providing me with racehorses for some time to come, as a lot of people besides children had found it compulsive. The new adult version was much more complicated but also much more expensive, which somewhat increased the royalties.

From the outside the children’s version looked like a box, smaller than a shoe box, with a sloping top surface. Set in this were letter keys exactly like a conventional typewriter, except that there were no numbers, no punctuations and no space bar.

‘How does it work?’ Allie asked.

‘You type your message and it comes out in code.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Try it.’

She gave me an amused look, turned so that I couldn’t see her fingers, and with one hand expertly typed about twenty-five letters. From the end of the box a narrow paper strip emerged, with letters typed on it in groups of five.

‘What now?’

‘Tear the strip off,’ I said.

She did that. ‘It’s like ticker-tape,’ she said.

‘It is. Same size, anyway.’

She held it out to me. I looked at it and came as close to blushing as I’m ever likely to.

‘Can you read it just like that?’ she exclaimed. ‘Some coder, if you can read it at a glance.’

‘I invented the damn thing,’ I said. ‘I know it by heart.’

‘How does it work?’

‘There’s a cylinder inside with twelve complete alphabets on it, each arranged in a totally random manner and all different. You set this dial here... see,’ I showed her, ‘to any numbers from one to twelve. Then you type your message. Inside, the keys don’t print the letter, you press on the outside, but the letter that’s aligned with it inside. There’s an automatic spring which jumps after every five presses, so the message comes out in groups of five.’

‘It’s fantastic. My sister says the boys have been asking for them for weeks. Lots of children they know have them, all sending weird secret messages all over the place and driving their mothers wild.’

‘You can make more involved codes by feeding the coded message through again, or backwards,’ I said. ‘Or by switching the code number every few letters. All the child receiving the message needs to know is the numbers he has to set on his own dial.’

‘How do I decode this?’

‘Put that tiny lever... there... down instead of up, and just type the coded message. It will come out as it went in, except still in groups of five letters, of course. Try it.’

She herself looked confused. She screwed up the tape and laughed, ‘I guess I don’t need to.’

‘Would you like one?’ I asked diffidently.

‘I sure would.’

‘Blue or red?’

‘Red.’

In another cupboard I had a pile of manufactured coders packed like those in the shops. I opened one of the cartons, checked that the contents had a bright red plastic casing and handed it over.

‘If you write me a Christmas message,’ she said, ‘I’ll expect it in code number four.’

I took her out to dinner again as I was on a bacon-and-egg level myself as a cook, and she was after all on holiday to get away from the kitchen.

There was nothing new in taking a girl to dinner. Nothing exceptional, I supposed, in Allie herself, I liked her directness, her naturalness. She was supremely easy to be with, not interpreting occasional silences as personal insults, not coy or demanding, nor sexually a tease. Not a girl of hungry intellect, but certainly of good sense.

That wasn’t all, of course. The spark which attracts one person to another was there too, and on her side also, I thought.

I drove her back to Hampstead and stopped outside her sister’s house.

‘Tomorrow?’ I said.

She didn’t answer directly. ‘I go home on Thursday.’

‘I know. What time is your flight?’

‘Not till the evening. Six-thirty.’

‘Can I drive you to the airport?’

‘I could get my sister...’

‘I’d like to.’

‘Okay.’

We sat in a short silence.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said finally. ‘I guess... If you like.’

‘Yes.’

She nodded briefly, opened the car door, and spoke over her shoulder. ‘Thank you for a fascinating day.’

She was out on the pavement before I could get round to help her. She smiled. Purring and contented, as far as I could judge.

‘Good night.’ She held out her hand.

I took it, and at the same time leant down and kissed her cheek. We looked at each other, her hand still in mine. One simply cannot waste such opportunities. I repeated the kiss, but on her lips.

She kissed as I’d expected, with friendliness and reservations. I kissed her twice more on the same terms.

‘Good night,’ she said again, smiling.

I watched her wave before she shut her sister’s front door, and drove home wishing she were still with me. When I got back I went into the workshop and retrieved the screwed up piece of code she’d thrown in the litter bin. Smoothing it, I read the jumbled up letters again.

No mistake. Sorted out, the words were still a pat on the ego.

I put the scrap of paper in my wallet and went upstairs to bed feeling the world’s biggest fool.