Hot Money

CHAPTER FIVE

"Some people buy and sell gold without ever seeing it," he said. "But I like possessing the actual stuff. There's no fun in paper transactions. Gold is beautiful on its own account, and I like to see it and feel it. But it's not all that easy to store it in banks or safety deposits. Too heavy and bulky. And insurance is astronomical. Takes too much of the profit. I never insure it."

"You're storing it there in the wall… waiting for the price to rise?"

"You know me, don't you?" He smiled. "Buy low, bide your time, sell high. Wait a couple of years, not often more. The price of gold itself swings like a pendulum, but there's nothing, really, like gold shares. When gold prices rise, gold shares often rise by two or three times as much. I sell the gold first and the shares a couple of months later. Psychological phenomenon, you know, that people go on investing in gold mines, pushing the price up, when the price of gold itself is static or beginning to drop. illogical, but invaluable to people like me."

He sat looking at me with the vivid blue eyes, teaching his child.

"Strategic Minerals, now. There never was anything like the Strategic Minerals Corporation of Australia. This year, the price of gold itself rose twenty-five per cent, but Strats – shares in Strategic Minerals – rose nearly a thousand per cent before they dropped off the top. Incredible. I got in near the beginning of those and sold at nine hundred and fifty per cent profit. But don't be fooled, Strats happen only once or twice in a lifetime."

"How much," I said, fascinated, "did you invest in Strats?"

After a brief pause he said, "Five million. I had a feeling about them… they just smelled right. I don't often go in so deep, and I didn't expect them to fly so high, no one could, but there you are, all gold shares rose this year, and Strats rose like a skylark."

"How are they doing now?" I asked.

"Don't know. I'm concerned with the present. Gold mines, you see, don't go on for ever. They have a life: exploration, development, production, exhaustion. I get in, wait a while, take a profit, forget them. Never stay too long with a rising gold share. Fortunes are lost by selling too late."

He did truly trust me, I thought. If he'd doubted me still, he wouldn't have told me there was gold behind the brick door, nor that even after tax he had made approximately thirty million pounds on one deal. I stopped worrying that he was overstretching himself in buying the colt and a half-share in Blue Clancy. I stopped worrying about practically everything except how to keep him alive and spending.

I'd talked to someone once whose father had died when she was barely twenty. She regretted that she hadn't ever known him adult to adult, and wished she could meet him again, just to talk. Watching Malcolm, it struck me that in a way I'd been given her wish: that the three years' silence had been a sort of death, and that I could talk to him now adult to adult, and know him as a man, not as a father. We spent a peaceful evening together in the suite, talking about what we'd each done during the hiatus, and it was difficult to imagine that outside, somewhere, a predator might be searching for the prey.

At one point I said, "You gave Joyce's telephone number on purpose to the film man, didn't you? And Gervase's number to the retarded- children lady? You wanted me with you to see you buy the colt… You made sure that the family knew all about your monster outlays as soon as possible, didn't you?"

"Huh," he said briefly, which after a moment I took as admission. One misdirected telephone call had been fairly possible: two stretched credibility too far.

"Thomas and Berenice," I said, "were pretty frantic over some little adventure of yours. What did you do to stir them up?"

"How the hell do you know all this?"

I smiled and fetched the cassette player and re-ran for him the message tape from my telephone. He listened grimly but with an undercurrent of amusement to Serena, Gervase and Joyce and then read Thomas's letter and when he reached Thomas's intense closing appeal I waited for explosions.

They didn't come. He said wryly, "I suppose they're what I made them."

"No," I said.

"Why not?"

"Personality is mysterious, but it's born in you, not made."

"But it can be brainwashed."

"Yes, OK," I said. "But you didn't do it."

"Vivien and Alicia did… because of me."

"Don't wallow in guilt so much. It isn't like you."

He grinned. "I don't feel guilty, actually."

Joyce, I thought, had at least played fair. A screaming fury she might have been on the subject of Alicia, but she'd never tried to set me against Malcolm. She had agreed in the divorce settlement when I was six that he should have custody of me: she wasn't basically maternal, and infrequent visits from her growing son were all she required. She'd never made great efforts to bind me to her, and it had always been clear to me that she was relieved every time at my departure. Her life consisted of playing, teaching, and writing about bridge, a game she played to international tournament standard, and she was often abroad. My visits had always disrupted the acute concentration she needed for winning, and as winning gave her the prestige essential for lecture tours and magazine articles, I had more often raised impatience in her than comradeship, a feeling she had dutifully tried to stifle.

She had given me unending packs of cards to play with and had taught me a dozen card games, but I'd never had her razor memory of any and every card played in any and every game, a perpetual disappointment to her and a matter for impatience in itself. When I veered off to make my life in a totally different branch of the entertainment industry, she had been astonished at my choice and at first scornful, but had soon come round to checking the racing pages during the steeplechase season to see if I was listed as riding.

"What did you tell Thomas and Berenice?" I asked Malcolm again, after a pause.

With satisfaction he said, "I absentmindedly gave their telephone number to a wine merchant who was to let me know the total I owed him for the fifty or so cases of 1979 Pol Roger he was collecting for me to drink."

"And, er, roughly how much would that cost?"

"The 1979, the Winston Churchill vintage, is quite exceptional, you know."

"Of course it would be," I said.

"Roughly twenty-five thousand pounds, then, for fifty cases."

Poor Thomas, I thought.

"I also made sure that Alicia knew I'd given about a quarter of a million pounds to fund scholarships for bright girls at the school Serena went to. Alicia and I haven't been talking recently. I suppose she's furious I gave it to the school and not to Serena herself."

"Well, why did you?"

He looked surprised. "You know my views. You must all carve your own way. To make you all rich too young would rob you of incentive."

I certainly did know his views, but I wasn't sure I always agreed with them. I would have had bags of incentive to make a success of being a racehorse trainer if he'd lent, advanced or given me enough to start, but I also knew that if he did, he'd have to do as much for the others (being ordinarily a fair man), and he didn't believe in it, as he said.

"Why did you want them all to know how much you've been spending?" I asked. "Because of course they all will know by now. The telephone wires will have been red hot."

"I suppose I thought… um… if they believed I was getting rid of most of it there would be less point in killing me… do you see?"

I stared at him. "You must be crazy," I said. "It sounds to me like an invitation to be murdered without delay."

"Ah well, that too has occurred to me of late." He smiled vividly. "But I have you with me now to prevent that."

After a speechless moment I said, "I may not always be able to see the speeding car."

"I'll trust your eyesight."

I pondered. "What else have you spent a bundle on, that I haven't heard about?"

He drank some champagne and frowned, and I guessed that he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Finally he sighed and said, "This is for your ears only. I didn't do it for the same reason, and I did it earlier… several weeks ago, in fact, before Moira was murdered." He paused. "She was angry about it, though she'd no right to be. It wasn't her money. She hated me to give anything to anyone else. She wanted everything for herself." He sighed. "I don't know how you knew right from the beginning what she was like."

"Her calculator eyes," I said.

He smiled ruefully. He must have seen that look perpetually, by the end.

"The nursing home where Robin is," he said unexpectedly, "needed repairs. So I paid for them."

He wasn't talking, I gathered, in terms of a couple of replaced window-frames.

"Of course, you know it's a private nursing home?" he said. "A family business, basically."

"Yes."

"They needed a new roof. New wiring. A dozen urgent upgradings. They tried raising the residential fees too high and lost patients, familiar story. They asked my advice about fund-raising. I told them not to bother. I'd get estimates, and all I'd want in return was that they'd listen to a good business consultant who I'd send them." He shifted comfortably in his armchair. "Robin's settled there. Calm. Any change upsets him, as you know. If the whole place closed and went out of business, which was all too likely, I'd have to find somewhere else for him, and he's lost enough…"

His voice tapered off. He had delighted in Robin and Peter when they'd been small, playing with them on the carpet like a young father, proud of them as if they were his first children, not his eighth and ninth. Good memories: worth a new roof.

"I know you still go to visit him," he said. The nurses tell me. So you must have seen the place growing threadbare."

I nodded, thinking about it. "They used to have huge vases of fresh flowers everywhere."

"They used to have top quality everything, but they've had to compromise to Patch up the building. Country houses are open money drains when they age. I can't see the place outliving Robin, really. You will look after him, when I've gone?"

"Yes," I said.

He nodded, taking it for granted. "I appointed you his trustee when I set up the fund for him, do you remember? I've not altered it."

I was glad that he hadn't. At least, somewhere, obscurely, things had remained the same between us.

"Why don't we go and see him tomorrow?" he said. "No one will kill me there."

"All right," I agreed: so we went in the hired car in the morning, stopping in the local town to buy presents of chocolate and simple toys designed for three-year-olds, and I added a packet of balloons to the pile while Malcolm paid.

"Does he like balloons?" he asked, his eyebrows rising.

"He gets frustrated sometimes. I blow the balloons up, and he bursts them."

Malcolm looked surprised and in some ways disturbed. "I didn't know he could feel frustration."

"it seems like that. As if sometimes he half remembers us… but can't quite."

"Poor boy."

We drove soberly onwards and up the drive of the still splendid- looking Georgian house which lay mellow and symmetrical in the autumn sunshine. Inside, its near fifty rooms had been adapted and transformed in the heyday of private medicine into a highly comfortable hospital for mostly chronic, mostly old, mostly rich patients. Short-stay patients came and went, usually convalescing after major operations performed elsewhere, but in general one saw the same faces month after month: the same faces ageing, suffering, waiting for release. Dreadfully depressing, I found it, but for Robin, it was true, it seemed the perfect haven, arrived at after two unsuccessful stays in more apparently suitable homes involving other children, bright colours, breezy nurses and jollying atmospheres. Robin seemed better with peace, quiet and no demands, and Malcolm had finally acted against professional advice to give them to him.

Robin had a large room on the ground floor with french doors opening on to a walled garden. He seldom went out into the garden, but he preferred the doors open in all weathers, including snow- storms. Apart from that, he was docile and easy to deal with, and if anyone had speculated on the upheavals that might happen soon if puberty took its natural course, they hadn't mentioned it in my hearing.

He looked at us blankly, as usual. He seldom spoke, though he did retain the ability to make words: it was just that he seemed to have few thoughts to utter. Brain damage of that magnitude was idiosyncratic, we'd been told, resulting in behaviour individual to each victim. Robin spoke rarely and then only to himself, in private, when he didn't expect to be overheard: the nurses sometimes heard him, and had told us, but said he stopped as soon as he saw them. I'd asked them what he said, but they didn't know, except for words like "shoes" and "bread" and "floor": ordinary words. They didn't know why he wouldn't speak at other times. They were sure, though, that he understood a fair amount of what others said, even if in a haze.

We gave him some pieces of chocolate which he ate, and unwrapped the toys for him which he fingered but didn't play with. He looked at the balloon packet without emotion. It wasn't a frustration day: on those, he looked at the packet and made blowing noises with his mouth.

We sat with him for quite a while, talking, telling him who we were while he wandered around the room. He looked at our faces from time to time, and touched my nose once with his finger as if exploring that I was really there, but there was no connection with our minds. He looked healthy, good looking, a fine boy: heart-breaking, as always.

A nurse came in the end, middle-aged, kind-faced, to take him to a dining-room for lunch, and Malcolm and I transferred to the office where my father was given a saviour's welcome and offered a reviving scotch.

"Your son, slow progress, I'm afraid." Earnest, dedicated people.

Malcolm nodded. No progress would have been more accurate.

"We do our best for him always."

"Yes, I know."

Malcolm drank the scotch, shook their hands, made our farewells. We left, as I always left, in sadness, silence and regret.

"So bloody unfair," Malcolm said halfway back to London. "He ought to be laughing, talking, roaring through life."

"Yes."

"I can't bear to see him, and I can't bear not to. I'd give all my money to have him well again."

"And make a new fortune afterwards," I said.

"Well, yeah, why not?" He laughed, but still with gloom. "it would have been better if he'd died with the others. Life's a bugger, sometimes, isn't it?"

The gloom lasted back to the Savoy and through the next bottle of Bollinger, but by afternoon Malcolm was complaining of the inactivity I'd thrust upon him and wanting to visit cronies in the City. Unpredictability be our shield, I prayed, and kept my eyes open for speeding cars; but we saw the day out safely in offices, bars, clubs and a restaurant, during which time Malcolm increased his wealth by gambling a tenner at evens on the day's closing price of gold which fell by two pounds when the trend was upwards.

"It'll shoot right up next year, you watch."

On Friday, despite my pleas for sanity, he insisted on accompanying me to Sandown Park races.

"You'll be safer here," I protested, "in the suite."

"I shan't FEEL safer."

"At the races, I can't stay beside you."

"Who's to know I'll be there?"

I gazed at him. "Anyone who guesses we are now together could know. They'll know how to find me, if they look in the papers."

"Then don't go."

"I'm going. You stay here." I saw, however, that the deep underlying apprehension which he tried to suppress most of the time would erupt into acute nervous anxiety if I left him alone in the suite for several hours, and that he might, out of boredom, do something much sillier than going to the races, like convincing himself that anyone in his family would keep a secret if he asked it.

Accordingly I drove him south of London and took him through the jockeys' entrance gate to the weighing-room area where he made his afternoon a lot safer by meeting yet another crony and being instantly invited to lunch in the holy of holies.

"Do you have cronies all over the world?" I asked.

"Certainly," he said, smiling broadly. "Anyone I've known for five minutes is a crony, if I get on with them."

I believed him. Malcolm wasn't easy to forget, nor was he hard to like. I saw the genuine pleasure in his immediate host's face as they walked away together, talking, and reflected that Malcolm would have been a success in whatever career he had chosen, that success was part of his character, like generosity, like headlong rashness.

I was due to ride in the second race, a steeplechase for amateurs, and as usual had arrived two prudent hours in advance. I turned away from watching Malcolm and looked around for the owner of the horse I was about to partner and found my path blocked by a substantial lady in a wide brown cape. Of all the members of the family, she was the last I would have expected to see on a racecourse.

"Ian," she said accusingly, almost as if I'd been pretending to be someone else.

"Hello."

"Where have you been? Why don't you answer your telephone?"

Lucy, my elder half-sister. Lucy, the poet.

Lucy's husband Edwin was, as always, to be found at her side, rather as if he had no separate life. The leech, Malcolm had called him unkindly in the past. From a Bugg to a leech.

Lucy was blessed with an un selfconsciousness about her weight which stemmed both from un worldliness and an over belief in health foods.

"But nuts and raisins are good for you," she would say, eating them by the kilo. "Bodily vanity, like intellectual arrogance, is a sickness of the soul."

She was forty-two, my sister, with thick straight brown hair uncompromisingly cut, large brown eyes, her mother's high cheekbones and her father's strong nose. She was as noticeable in her own way as Malcolm was himself, and not only because of her shapeless clothes and dedicated absence of cosmetics. Malcolm's vitality ran in her too, though in different directions, expressing itself in vigour of thought and language.

I had often, in the past, wondered why someone as talented and strong minded as she shouldn't have made a marriage of equal minds, but in recent years had come to think she had settled for a nonentity like Edwin because the very absence of competition freed her to be wholly herself.

"Edwin is concerned, "she said, "that Malcolm is leaving his senses."

For Edwin, read Lucy, I thought. She had a trick of ascribing her own thoughts to her husband, if she thought they would be unwelcome to her audience.

Edwin stared at me uneasily. He was a good-looking man in many ways, but mean spirited, which if one were tolerant one would excuse because of the perpetual knife-edge state of his and Lucy's finances. I wasn't certain any more whether it was he who had actually failed to achieve employment, or whether Lucy had in some way stopped him from trying. In any event, she earned more prestige than lucre for her writing, and Edwin had grown tired of camouflaging the frayed elbows of his jackets with oval patches of thin leather badly sewn on.

Edwin's concern, it seemed, was real enough although if it had been his alone they wouldn't have come.

"it isn't fair of him," he said, meaning Malcolm. "Lucy's trust fund was set up years ago before inflation and doesn't stretch as far as it used to. He really ought to put that right. I've told him so several times, and he simply ignores me. And now he's throwing his money away in this profligate way as if his heirs had no rights at all." Indignation shook in his voice, along with, I could see, a very definite fear of a rocky future if the fortune he'd counted on for so long should be snatched away in the last furlong, so to speak.

I sighed and refrained from saying that I thought that Malcolm's heirs had no rights while he was alive. I said merely, soothingly, "I'm sure he won't let you starve."

"That's not the point," Edwin said with thin fury. "The point is that he's given an immense amount of money to Lucy's old college to establish post-graduate scholarships for poets."

I looked from his pinch-lipped agitated mouth to Lucy's face and saw shame where there should perhaps have been pride. Shame, I thought, because she found herself sharing Edwin's views when they ran so contrary to her normal disdain for materialism. Perhaps even Lucy, I thought, had been looking forward to a comfortably off old age.

"You should be honoured," I said.

She nodded unhappily. "I am."

"No," Edwin said. "It's disgraceful."

"The Lucy Pembroke Scholarships," I said slowly.

"Yes. How did you know?" Lucy asked.

And there would be the Serena Pembroke Scholarships, of course. And the Coochie Pembroke Memorial Challenge Trophy…

"What are you smiling at?" Lucy demanded. "You can't say you've made much of a success of your life so far, can you? If Malcolm leaves us all nothing, you'll end up carting horse-muck until you drop from senility."

"There are worse jobs," I said mildly.

There were horses around us, and racecourse noises, and a skyful of gusty fresh air. I could happily spend my life, I knew, in almost any capacity that took me to places like Sandown Park.

"You've wasted every talent you have," Lucy said.

"My only talent is riding horses."

"You're blind and stupid. You're the only male Pembroke with decent brains and you're too lazy to use them."

"Well, thanks," I said.

"It's not a compliment."

"No, so I gathered."

"Joyce says you're sure to know where Malcolm is as you've finally made up your quarrel, though you'll lie about it as a matter of course," Lucy said. "Joyce said you would be here today on this spot at this time, if I wanted to reach you."

"Which you did, rather badly."

"Don't be so obtuse. You've got to stop him. You're the only one who can, and Joyce says you're probably the only one who won't try… and you MUST try, Ian, and succeed, if not for yourself, then for the rest of the family."

"For you?" I asked.

"Well…" She couldn't openly abandon her principles, but they were bending, it seemed. "For the others," she said stalwartly.

I looked at her with new affection. "You're a hypocrite, my dear sister," I said.

In smarting retaliation, she said sharply, "Vivien thinks you're trying to cut the rest of us out and ingratiate yourself again with Malcolm."

"I expect she would," I said. "I expect Alicia will think it also, when Vivien has fed it to her."

"You really are a bastard."

"No," I said, my lips twitching, "that's Gervase."

"Ian!"

I laughed. "I'll tell Malcolm you're concerned. I promise I will, somehow. And now I've got to change my clothes and ride in a race. Are you staying?"

Lucy hesitated but Edwin said, "Will you win?"

"I don't think so. Save your money."

"You're not taking it seriously," Lucy said.

I looked straight at her eyes. "Believe me," I said, "I take it very seriously indeed. No one had a right to murder Moira to stop her taking half Malcolm's money. No one has a right to murder Malcolm to stop him spending it. He is fair. He will leave us all provided for, when the time comes, which I hope may be twenty years from now. You tell them all to stop fretting, to ease off, to have faith. Malcolm is teasing you all and I think it's dangerous, but he is dismayed by everyone's greed, and is determined to teach us a lesson. So you tell them, Lucy, tell Joyce and Vivien and everyone, that the more we try to grab, the less we will get. The more we protest, the more he will spend."

She looked back silently. Eventually she said, "I am ashamed of myself."

"Rubbish," Edwin said to me vehemently. "You must stop Malcolm. You MUST."

Lucy shook her head. "Ian's right."

"Do you mean Ian won't even try?" Edwin demanded incredulously.

"I'm positive he won't," Lucy said. "Didn't you hear what he said? Weren't you listening?"

"it was all rubbish." Lucy patted my arm. "We may as well see you race, while we're here. Go and get changed."

It was a more sisterly gesture and tone than I was used to, and I reflected with a shade of guilt that I'd paid scant attention to her own career for a couple of years.

"How is the poetry going?" I asked. "What are you working on?"

The question caught her unprepared. Her face went momentarily blank and then filled with what seemed to be an odd mixture of sadness and panic.

"Nothing just now," she said. "Nothing for quite a while," and I nodded almost apologetically as if I had intruded, and went into the weighing-room and through to the changing-room reflecting that poets, like mathematicians, mostly did their best work when young. Lucy wasn't writing; had maybe stopped altogether. And perhaps, I thought, the frugality she had for so long embraced had begun to seem less worthy and less worth it, if she were losing the inner sustaining comfort of creative inspiration.

Poor Lucy, I thought. Life could be a bugger as Malcolm said. She had already begun to value the affluence she had long despised or she wouldn't have come on her mission to Sandown Park, and I could only guess at the turmoil in her spiritual life. Like a nun losing her faith, I thought. But no, not a nun. Lucy, who had written explicitly of sex in a way I could never believe had anything to do with Edwin (though one could be wrong), wouldn't ever have been a nun.

With such random thoughts, I took off my ordinary clothes and put on white breeches and a scarlet jersey with blue stripes on the sleeves, and felt the usual battened-down excitement which made me breathe deeply and feel intensely happy. I rode in about fifty races a year, if I was lucky… and I would have to get another job fairly soon, I reflected, if I were to ride exercise regularly and stay fit enough to do any good.

Going outside, I talked for a while to the trainer and owner of the horse I was to ride, a husband and wife who had themselves ridden until twenty years earlier in point-to-point races and who liked to re-live it all vicariously through me. The husband, George, was now a public trainer on a fairly grand scale, but the wife, Jo, still preferred to run her own horses in amateur races. She currently owned three steeple chasers all pretty good. It did me no harm at all to be seen on them and to be associated in racing minds with that stable.

"Young Higgins is jumping out of his skin," Jo said.

Young Higgins was the name of that day's horse. Young Higgins was thirteen, a venerable gentleman out to disprove rumours of retirement. We all interpreted "jumping out of his skin" as meaning fit, sound and pricking his ears with enthusiasm, and at his age one couldn't ask for much more. Older horses than he had won the Grand National, but Young Higgins and I had fallen in the great race the only time we'd tried it, and to my regret Jo had decided on no more attempts.

"We'll see you in the parade ring, then, Ian, before the race," George said, and Jo added, "And give the old boy a good time."

I nodded, smiling. Giving all of us a good time was the point of the proceedings. Young Higgins was definitely included.

The minute George and Jo turned away to go off towards the grandstands, someone tapped me on the back of the shoulder. I turned round to see who it was and to my total astonishment found myself face to face with Lucy's older brother, Malcolm's first child, my half-brother Donald.

"Good heavens," I said. "You've never been to the races in your life."

He often told me he hadn't, saying rather superciliously that he didn't approve of the sordid gambling.

"I haven't come for the races," he said crossly. "I've come to see you about Malcolm's taking leave of his senses."

"How… er…?" I stopped. "Did Joyce send you?" I said.

"What if she did? We are all concerned. She told us where to find you, certainly."

"Did she tell the whole family?" I asked blankly.

"How do I know? She telephoned us. I daresay she telephoned everyone she could get hold of. You know what she's like. She's your mother after all."

Even so late in his life he couldn't keep out of his voice the old resentments, and perhaps also, I reflected, they were intensifying with age. My mother had supplanted his, he was saying, and any indiscretion my mother ever committed was in some way my fault. He had thought in that illogical way for as long as I'd been aware of him, and nothing had changed.

Donald was, in the family's opinion, the brother nearest in looks to myself, and I wasn't sure I liked it. Irrefutably, he was the same height and had blue eyes less intense in colour than Malcolm's. Agreed, Donald had middling brown curly hair and shoulders wider than his hips. I didn't wear a bushy moustache though, and I just hoped I didn't walk with what I thought of as a self-important strut; and I sometimes tried to make sure, after I'd been in Donald's company, that I absolutely didn't.

Donald's life had been so disrupted when Malcolm had ousted Vivien, Donald always told us, that he had never been able to decide properly on a career. It couldn't have been easy, I knew, to survive such an upheaval, but Donald had only been nine at the time, a bit early for life decisions. In any event, as an adult he had drifted from job to job in hotels, coming to harbour at length as secretary of a prestigious golf club near Henley-on-Thames, a post which I gathered had proved ultimately satisfactory in social standing, which was very important to his self-esteem.

I didn't either like or dislike Donald particularly. He was eleven years older than I was. He was there.

"Everyone insists you stop Malcolm squandering the family money," he said, predictably.

"It's HIS money, not the family's," I said.

"What?" Donald found the idea ridiculous. "What you've got to do is explain that he owes it to us to keep the family fortune intact until we inherit it. Unfortunately we know he won't listen to any of us except you, and now that you appear to have made up your quarrel with him, you are elected to be our spokesman. Joyce thinks we have to convince you first of the need to stop Malcolm, but I told her it was ridiculous. You don't need convincing, you want to be well off one day just the same as the rest of us, of course you do, it's only natural."

I was saved from both soul-searching and untrue disclaimers by the arrival of Helen, Donald's wife, who had apparently been buying a race card

"We're not staying," Donald said disapprovingly, eyeing it.

She gave him a vague smile. "You never know," she said.

Beautiful and brainless, Malcolm had said of he rand perhaps he was right. Tall and thin, she moved with natural Style and made cheap clothes look expensive: I knew they were cheap because she had a habit of saying where they'd come from and how much she'd paid for them, inviting admiration of her thriftiness. Donald always tried to shut her up.

"Do tell us where to watch the races from," she said.

"We're not here for that," Donald said.

"No, dear, we're here because we need money now that the boys have started at Eton."

"No, dear," Donald said sharply.

"But you know we can't afford…"

"Do be quiet, dear," Donald said.

" Eton costs a bomb," I said mildly, knowing that Donald's income would hardly stretch to one son there, let alone two. Donald had twin boys, which seemed to run in the family.

"Of course it does," Helen said, "but Donald puts such store by it. 'My sons are at Eton,' that sort of thing. Gives him standing with the people he deals with in the golf club."

"Helen, dear, do be quiet." Donald's embarrassment showed, but she was undoubtedly right.

"We thought Donald might have inherited before the boys reached thirteen," she said intensely. "As he hasn't, we're borrowing every penny we can to pay the fees, the same as we borrowed for the prep school and a lot of other things. But we've borrowed against Donald's expectations… so you see it's essential for us that there really is plenty to inherit, as there are so many people to share it with. We'll be literally bankrupt if Malcolm throws too much away… and I don't think Donald could face it."

I opened my mouth to answer her but no sound came out. I felt as if I'd been thrust into a farce over which I had no control. Walking purposefully to join us came Serena, Ferdinand and Debs.