Smokescreen

Chapter Two

England in August seemed green and cool in comparison when I got back. At Heathrow I collected my car, a production line B.M.W., darkish blue, ordinarily jumbled registration number, nothing Special about it, and drove westwards into Berkshire with a feeling of ease.

Four o’clock in the afternoon.

Going home.

I found myself grinning at nothing in particular. Like a kid out of school, I thought. Going home to a summer evening.

The house was middle-sized, part old, part new, built on a gentle slope outside a village far up the Thames. There was a view down over the river, and lots of evening sun, and an unsignposted lane to approach by, that most people missed.

There was a boy’s bicycle lying half on the grass, half on the drive, and some gardening tools near a half weeded flower-bed. I stopped the car outside the garage, looked at the shut front door, and walked round the house to the back.

I saw all four of them before they saw me; like looking in through a window. Two small boys splashing in the pool with a black and white beach ball. A slightly faded sun umbrella nearby, with a little girl lying on an air bed in its shade. A young woman with short chestnut hair, sitting on a rug in the sun, hugging her knees.

One of the boys looked up and saw me standing watching them from across the lawn.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘Dad’s home,’ and ducked his brother.

I walked towards them, smiling. Charlie unstuck herself from the rug and came unhurriedly to meet me.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m covered in oil.’ She put her mouth forward for a kiss and held my face between the insides of her wrists.

‘What on earth have you been doing with yourself?’ she asked. ‘You look terribly thin.’

‘It was hot in Spain,’ I said. I walked back to the pool beside her, stripping off my loosened tie, and then my shirt.

‘You didn’t get very sunburned.’

‘No... Sat in the car most of the time...’

‘Did it go all right?’

I made a face. ‘Time will tell... How are the kids?’

‘Fine.’

I had been away a month. It might have been a day. Any father coming home to his family after a day’s work.

Peter levered himself out of the pool via his stomach and splashed across the grass.

‘What did you bring us?’ he demanded.

‘Pete, I’ve told you...’ Charlie said, exasperated. ‘If you ask, you won’t get.’

‘You won’t get much this time anyway,’ I told him. ‘We were miles from any decent shops. And go and pick your bike up off the drive.’

‘Oh honestly,’ he said. ‘The minute you’re home, we’ve done something wrong.’ He retreated round the house, his backview stiff with protest.

Charlie laughed. ‘I’m glad you’re back...’

‘Me too.’

‘Dad, look at me. Look at me do this, Dad.’

I obediently watched while Chris turned some complicated sort of somersault over the beach ball and came up with a triumphant smile, shaking water out of his eyes and waiting for praise.

‘Jolly good,’ I said.

‘Watch me again, Dad...’

‘In a minute.’

Charlie and I walked over to the umbrella, and looked down at our daughter. She was five years old, brown-haired, and pretty. I sat down beside the air bed and tickled her tummy. She chuckled, and smiled at me deliciously.

‘How’s she been?’

‘Same as usual.’

‘Shall I take her in the pool?’

‘She came in with me this morning... but she loves it. It wouldn’t do her any harm to go again.’

Charlie squatted down beside her. ‘Daddy’s home, little one,’ she said. But to Libby, our little one, the words themselves meant almost nothing. Her mental development had slowed to a snail’s pace after the age of ten months, when her skull had been fractured. Peter, who had been five then, had lifted her out of her pram, wanting to be helpful and bring her indoors for lunch. But Charlie, going out to fetch her, had seen him trip and fall and it had been Libby’s head which struck the stone step on the terrace of the flat we then occupied in London. The baby had been stunned, but after an hour or two the doctors could find nothing wrong with her.

It was only two or three weeks later that she fell sick, and later still, when she was surviving a desperate illness, that the hospital doctors told us she had had a hair-line fracture at the base of the brain, which had become infected and given her meningitis. We were so relieved that she was alive that we scarcely took notice of the cautiously phrased warnings... ‘We must not be surprised if she were a little late in developing...’ Of course she would be a little late after being so ill. But she would soon catch up, wouldn’t she? And we dismissed the dubious expression, and that unfamiliar word ‘retarded’.

During the next year we learned what it meant, and in facing such a mammoth disaster had also discovered much about ourselves. Before the accident, our marriage had been shaking towards disintegration under the onslaughts of prosperity and success: after it, we had gradually cemented ourselves together again, with a much clearer view of what was really important, and what was not.

We had left the bright lights, the adulation, and the whoopee, and gone to live in the country, where anyway both of us had our original roots. Better for the kids, we said; and knew it was better for us, too.

Libby’s state no longer caused us any acute grief. It was just part of life, accepted and accustomed. She was treated with good humour by the boys, with love by Charlie, and with gentleness by me; and as she was seldom ill and seemed to be happy enough, it could have been a lot worse.

It had proved harder in the end to grow skins against the reactions of strangers, but after all these years neither Charlie nor I gave a damn what anyone said. So maybe Libby couldn’t talk yet, couldn’t walk steadily, fed herself messily, and was not reliably continent: but she was our daughter, and that was that.

I went into the house, changed into swimming trunks, and took her with me into the pool. She was slowly learning to swim, and had no fear of the water. She splashed around happily in my grasp, patted my face with wet palms and called me ‘Dada’, and wound her arms round my neck and clung to me like a little limpet.

After a bit I handed her over to Charlie to dry, and played water polo (of sorts) with Peter and Chris, and after twenty minutes of that decided that even Evan Pentelow was a lesser task master.

‘More, Dad,’ they said, and, ‘I say, Dad, you aren’t getting out already, are you?’

‘Yes,’ I said firmly, and dried myself sitting beside Charlie on the rug.

She put the kids to bed while I unpacked, and I read them stories while she cooked, and we spent the evening by ourselves, eating chicken and watching an old movie (from before my days) on television. After that we stacked the dishes in the washer and went to bed.

We had no one else living in the house with us. On four mornings a week a woman walked up from the village to help with the chores, and there was also a retired nurse there who would always come to look after Libby and the boys if we wanted to go out. These arrangements were Charlie’s own choice: I had married a quiet, intelligent girl who had grown into a practical, down-to-earth, and to her own surprise, domesticated woman. Since we had left London she had developed an added strength which one could only call serenity, and although she could on occasions lose her temper as furiously as I could, her foundations were now built on rock.

A lot of people in the film world, I knew, thought my wife unexciting and my home life a drag, and expected me to break out in blondes and red-heads, like a rash. But I had very little in common with the sort of larger-than-life action man I played in film after film. They were my work, and I worked hard at them, but I didn’t take them home.

Charlie snuggled beside me under the duvet and put her head on my chest. I smoothed my hands over her bare skin, feeling the ripple deep in her abdomen and the faint tremble in her legs.

‘O.K.?’ I asked, kissing her hair.

‘Very...’

We made love in the simple, ordinary way, as we always did; but because I had been away a month it was one of the best times, one of the breathtaking, fundamental, indescribable times which became a base to live from. Certainty begins here, I thought. With this, what else did one need?

‘Fantastic,’ Charlie sighed. ‘That was fantastic.’

‘Remind us to do it less often.’

She laughed. ‘It does improve with keeping...’

‘Mm.’ I yawned.

‘I say,’ she said, ‘I was reading a magazine in the dentist’s waiting-room this morning while Chris was having his teeth done, and there was a letter in it on the sob-stuff page, from a woman who had a bald fat middle-aged husband she didn’t fancy, and she was asking for advice on her sex life. And do you know what advice they gave her?’ There was a smile in her voice. ‘It was, “Imagine you are sleeping with Edward Lincoln”.’

‘That’s silly.’ I yawned again.

‘Yeah... Actually, I thought of writing up and asking what advice they would give me.’

‘Probably tell you to imagine you’re sleeping with some fat bald middle-aged man you don’t fancy.’

She chuckled. ‘Maybe I will be, in twenty years’ time.’

‘You are so kind.’

‘Think nothing of it.’

We drifted contentedly to sleep.

I had a racehorse, a steeplechaser, in training with a thriving stable about five miles away, and I used to go over when I was not working and ride out with the string at morning exercise. Bill Tracker, the energetic trainer, did not in general like to have owners who wanted to ride their own horses, but he put up with my intermittent presence on the same two counts as his stable lads did, namely that my father had once been a head lad along in Lambourn, and that I had also at one time earned my living by riding, even if not in races.

There wasn’t much doing in August, but I went over, a couple of days after my return, and rode out on the Downs. The new jumping season had barely begun, and most of the horses, including my own, were still plodding round the roads to strengthen their legs. Bill generously let me take out one of the more forward hurdlers which was due to have its first run in two weeks or so, and as usual I much appreciated the chance he gave me to ride to some useful purpose, and to shake the dust off the one skill I had been born with.

I had learned to ride before I could walk, and had grown up intending to be a jockey. But the fates weren’t kind: I was six feet tall when I was seventeen, and whatever special something it took to be a racer, I hadn’t got. The realisation had been painful. The switch to jigging along in films, a wretched second best.

Ironic, to remember that.

The Downs were wide and windy and covered in breathable air: nice and primaeval still, except for the power station on the horizon and the distant slash of a motorway. We walked and trotted up to the gallops, cantered, galloped where and when bidden, and walked down again, cooling the horses off; and it was absolutely great.

I stayed to breakfast with the Trackers and rode my own horse afterwards with the second lot round the roads, cursing like the rest of the lads at the cars which didn’t slow down to pass. I relaxed easily in the saddle and smiled as I remembered how my father had yelled himself hoarse at me — ‘Sit up, you bloody boy. And keep your elbows in.’

Evan Pentelow and Madroledo were in another world.

When I got back, the boys were squabbling noisily over whose turn it was with the unbroken roller skates, and Charlie was making a cake.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Did you have a good ride?’

‘Great.’

‘Fine... Well there weren’t any calls, except Nerissa rang... Will you two be quiet, we can’t hear ourselves think...’

‘It’s my turn,’ Peter yelled.

‘If you two don’t both shut up I’ll twist your ears,’ I said.

They shut up. I’d never carried out the often repeated threat, but they didn’t like the idea of it. Chris immediately pinched the disputed skates and disappeared out of the kitchen, and Peter gave chase with muted yells.

‘Kids!’ Charlie said disgustedly.

I scooped out a fingerful of raw cake mixture and got my wrist slapped.

‘What did Nerissa want?’

‘She wants us to go to lunch.’ Charlie paused, with the wooden spoon dropping gouts of chocolate goo into the bowl. ‘She was a bit... well... odd, in a way. Not her usual brisk self. Anyway, she wanted us to go today...’

‘Today!’ I said, looking at the clock.

‘Oh, I told her we couldn’t, that you wouldn’t be back until twelve. So she asked if we could make it tomorrow.’

‘Why the rush?’

‘Well, I don’t know, darling. She just said, could we come as soon as poss. Before you got tied up in another film, she said.’

‘I don’t start the next one until November.’

‘Yes, I told her that. Still, she was pretty insistent. So I said we’d love to go tomorrow unless you couldn’t, in which case I’d ring back this lunch time.’

‘I wonder what she wants,’ I said. ‘We haven’t seen her for ages. We’d better go, don’t you think?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

So we went.

It is just as well one can never foresee the future.

Nerissa was a sort of cross between an aunt, a godmother, and a guardian, none of which I had ever actually had. I had had a stepmother who loved her two previous children exclusively, and a busy father nagged by her to distraction. Nerissa, who had owned three horses in the yard where my father reigned, had given me first sweets, then pound notes, then encouragement, and then, as the years passed, friendship. It had never been a close relationship, but always a warmth in the background.

She was waiting for us, primed with crystal glasses and a decanter of dry sherry on a silver tray, in the summer sitting-room of her Cotswold house, and she rose to meet us when she heard her manservant bringing us through the hall.

‘Come in, my dears, come in,’ she said. ‘How lovely to see you. Charlotte, I love you in yellow... and Edward, how very thin you are...’

She had her back to the sunlight which poured in through the window framing the best view in Gloucestershire, and it was only when we each in turn kissed her offered cheek that we could see the pitiful change in her.

The last time I had seen her she had been an attractive woman of fifty plus, with young blue eyes and an apparently indestructible vitality. Her walk seemed to be on the edge of dancing, and her voice held a wise sense of humour. She came from the blue-blooded end of the Stud Book and had what my father had succinctly described as ‘class’.

But now, within three months, her strength had vanished and her eyes were dull. The gloss on her hair, the spring in her step, the laugh in her voice: all were gone. She looked nearer seventy than fifty, and her hands trembled.

‘Nerissa,’ Charlie exclaimed in a sort of anguish, for she like me held her in much more than affection.

‘Yes, dear. Yes,’ Nerissa said comfortingly. ‘Now sit down, dear, and Edward shall pour you some sherry.’

I poured all three of us some of the fine pale liquid, but Nerissa hardly sipped hers at all. She sat in a gold brocade chair in a long-sleeved blue linen dress, with her back to the sun and her face in shadow.

‘How are those two little monkeys?’ she asked. ‘And how is dear little Libby? And Edward, my dear, being so thin doesn’t suit you...’ She talked on, making practised conversation and looking interested in our answers, and gave us no opening to ask what was the matter with her.

When she went into the dining-room it was with the help of a walking stick and my arm, and the feather-light lunch which had been geared to her needs did nothing to restore my lost pounds. Afterwards, we went slowly back to the summer-room for coffee.

‘Do smoke, Edward dear... There are some cigars in the cupboard. You know how I love the smell... and so few people smoke here, nowadays.’

I imagined they didn’t because of her condition, but if she wanted it, I would, even though I rarely did, and only in the evening. They were Coronas, but a little dry from old age. I lit one, and she inhaled the smoke deeply, and smiled with real pleasure.

‘That’s so good,’ she said.

Charlie poured the coffee, but again Nerissa hardly drank. She settled back gently into the same chair as before, and crossed her elegant ankles.

‘Now, my dears,’ she said calmly, ‘I shall be dead by Christmas.’

We didn’t even make any contradictory noises. It was all too easy to believe.

She smiled at us. ‘So sensible, you two are. No silly swooning, or making a fuss.’ She paused. ‘It appears I have some stupid ailment, and they tell me there isn’t much to be done. As a matter of fact, it’s what they do do which is making me feel so ill. Before, it wasn’t so bad... but I have had to have X-rays so often... and now all these horrid cytotoxic drugs, and really, they make me most unwell.’ She managed another smile. ‘I’ve asked them to stop, but you know what it’s like... if they can, they say they must. Quite an unreasonable view to take, don’t you think? Anyway, my dears, that need not trouble you...’

‘But you would like us to do something for you?’ Charlie suggested.

Nerissa looked surprised. ‘How did you know I had anything like that in mind?’

‘Oh... Because you wanted us in a hurry... and you must have known for weeks how ill you were.’

‘Edward, how clever your Charlotte is,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do want something... want Edward to do something for me, if he will.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

A dry amusement crept back into her voice. ‘Wait until you hear what it is, before you promise so glibly.’

‘O.K.’

‘It is to do with my horses.’ She paused to consider, her head inclined to one side. ‘They are running so badly.’

‘But,’ I said in bewilderment, ‘they haven’t been out yet, this season.’

She still had two steeplechasers trained in the yard where I had grown up, and although since my father’s death I had had no direct contact with them, I knew they had won a couple of races each the season before.

She shook her head. ‘Not the jumpers, Edward. My other horses. Five colts and six fillies, running on the flat.’

‘On the flat? I’m sorry... I didn’t realise you had any.’

‘In South Africa.’

‘Oh.’ I looked at her a bit blankly. ‘I don’t know anything about South African racing. I’m awfully sorry. I’d love to be of use to you... but I don’t know enough to begin to suggest why your horses there are running badly.’

‘It’s nice of you, Edward dear, to look disappointed. But you really can help me, you know. If you will.’

‘Just tell him how,’ Charlie said, ‘and he’ll do it. He’ll do anything for you, Nerissa.’

At that time, and in those circumstances, she was right. The finality of Nerissa’s condition made me sharply aware of how much I had always owed her: not in concrete terms as much as in the feeling that she was there, interested and caring about what I did. In my motherless teens, that had meant a lot.

She sighed. ‘I’ve been writing to my trainer out there about it, and he seems very puzzled. He doesn’t know why my horses are running badly, because all the others he trains are doing all right. But it takes so long for letters to pass... the postal services at both ends seem to be so erratic these days. And I wondered, Edward, my dear, if you could possibly... I mean, I know it’s a good deal to ask... but could you possibly give me a week of your time, and go out there and find out what’s happening?’

There was a small silence. Even Charlie did not rush to say that of course I would go, although it was clear already that it would have to be a matter of how, not of whether.

Nerissa went on persuasively, ‘You see, Edward, you do know about racing. You know what goes on in a stable, and things like that. You could see, couldn’t you, if there is something wrong with their training? And then of course you are so good at investigating things...’

‘I’m what?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never investigated anything in my life.’

She fluttered a hand. ‘You know how to find things out, and nothing ever deflects you.’

‘Nerissa,’ I said suspiciously, ‘you’ve been seeing my films.’

‘Well, of course. I’ve seen nearly all of them.’

‘Yes, but that’s not me. Those investigating supermen, they’re just acting.’

‘Don’t be silly, Edward dear. You couldn’t do all the things you do in films without being brave and determined and very clever at finding things out.’

I looked at her in a mixture of affection and exasperation. So many people mistook the image for the man, but that she should...

‘You’ve known me since I was eight,’ I protested. ‘You know I’m not brave or particularly determined. I’m ordinary. I’m me. I’m the boy you gave sweets to, when I was crying because I’d fallen off a pony, and said “never mind” to, when I didn’t have the nerve to be a jockey.’

She smiled indulgently. ‘But since then you’ve learned to fight. And look at that last picture, when you were clinging to a ledge by one hand with a thousand foot drop just below you...’

‘Nerissa, dear Nerissa,’ I interrupted her. ‘I’ll go to South Africa for you. I really will. But those fights in films... most of the time that isn’t me, it’s someone my size and shape who really does know judo. I don’t. I can’t fight at all. It’s just my face in close-ups. And those ledges I was clinging to... certainly they were on a real rock face, but I was in no danger. I wouldn’t have fallen a thousand feet, but only about ten, into one of those nets they use under trapeze acts in circuses. I did fall, two or three times. And there wasn’t really a thousand feet below me; not sheer anyway. We filmed it in the Valley of Rocks in North Devon, where there are a lot of little plateaux among the rock faces, to stand the cameras on.’

She listened with an air of being completely unconvinced. I reckoned it was useless to go on: to tell her that I was not a crack shot, couldn’t fly an aeroplane or beat Olympic skiers downhill, couldn’t speak Russian or build a radio transmitter or dismantle bombs, and would tell all at the first threat of torture. She knew different, she’d seen it with her own eyes. Her expression told me so.

‘Well, all right,’ I said, capitulating. ‘I do know what should and should not go on in a racing stable. In England, anyway.’

‘And,’ she said complacently, ‘you can’t say it wasn’t you who did all that trick riding when you first went into films.’

I couldn’t. It was. But it had been nothing unique.

‘I’ll go and look at your horses, and see what your trainer says,’ I said; and thought that if he had no reasons to offer, I would be most unlikely to find any.

‘Dear Edward, so kind...’ She seemed suddenly weaker, as if the effort of persuading me had been too much. But when she saw the alarm on Charlie’s face, and on mine, she raised a reassuring smile.

‘Not yet, my dears. Another two months, perhaps... Two months at least, I think.’

Charlie shook her head in protest, but Nerissa patted her hand. ‘It’s all right, my dear. I’ve come to terms with it. But I want to arrange things... which is why I want Edward to see about the horses, and I really ought to explain...’

‘Don’t tire yourself,’ I said.

‘I’m not... tired,’ she said, obviously untruthfully. ‘And I want to tell you. The horses used to belong to my sister, Portia, who married and went to live in South Africa thirty years ago. After she was widowed she stayed there because all her friends were there, and I’ve been out to visit her several times over the years. I know I’ve told you about her.’

We nodded.

‘She died last winter,’ I said.

‘Yes... a great sorrow.’ Nerissa looked a good deal more upset about her sister’s death than about her own. ‘She had no close relatives except me, and she left me nearly everything she had inherited from her husband. And all her horses, too.’ She paused, as much to gather her forces as her thoughts. ‘They were yearlings. Expensive ones. And her trainer wrote to me to ask if I wanted to sell them, as of course owing to the African horsesickness quarantine laws we cannot bring South African horses to England. But I thought it might be fun... interesting... to run them in South Africa, and then sell them for stud. But now... well, now I won’t be here when they are old enough for stud, and meanwhile their value has dropped disastrously.’

‘Dearest Nerissa,’ Charlie said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, my dear, it does,’ she said positively. ‘Because I’m leaving them to my nephew, Danilo, and I don’t like the idea of leaving him something worthless.’

She looked from one of us to the other. ‘I can’t remember — have you ever met Danilo?’

Charlie said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Once or twice, when he was a small boy. You used to bring him to the stables.’

‘That’s right, so I did. And then of course my brother-in-law divorced that frightful woman, Danilo’s mother, and took him to live in California with him. Well... Danilo has been back in England recently, and he has grown into such a nice young man. And isn’t that lucky, my dears? Because, you see, I have so few relatives. In fact, really, Danilo is the only one, and even he is not a blood relative, his father being dear John’s youngest brother, do you see?’

We saw. John Cavesey, dead sixteen years or more, had been a country gent with four hunters and a sense of humour. He had also had Nerissa, no children, one brother, one nephew, and five square miles of Merrie England.

After a pause Nerissa said, ‘I’ll cable to Mr Arknold... that’s my trainer... to tell him you’re coming to look into things, and to book some rooms for you.’

‘No, don’t do that. He might resent your sending anyone, and I’d get no co-operation from him at all. I’ll fix the rooms, and so on. And if you cable him, just say I might be calling in, out of interest, while I’m in South Africa on a short visit.’

She smiled slowly and sweetly, and said, ‘You see, my dear, you do know how to investigate, after all.’