To the hilt

CHAPTER TWO

Best to forget that night.

The face that looked back from an oblong of mirror as the train clattered over the points on the approach to Euston was, I realised, going to appeal to my mother's fastidious standards even less than usual. The black eye was developing inexorably, my chin bristled, and even I could see that a comb would be a good idea.

I righted what I could with the help of Jed's cash and a chemist's shop in the station but my Mama predictably eyed me up and down with a pursed mouth before dispensing a minimum hug on her doorstep.

'Really, Alexander,' she said. 'Haven't you any clothes free of paint?'

'Few.'

'You look thin. You look… well, you'd better come in.'

I followed her into the prim polished hallway of the architectural gem she and Ivan inhabited in the semicircle of Park Crescent, by Regent's Park.

As usual, she herself looked neat, pretty, feminine and disciplined, with short shining dark hair, and a hand-span waist, and as usual I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but didn't, because she found such emotion excessive.

I'd grown tall, like my father, and had been taught by him from birth to look after the delicately boned sweet-natured centre of his devotion, to care for her and serve her and to consider it not a duty but a delight. I remembered a childhood of gusty laughter from him and small pleased smiles from her, and he'd lived long enough for me to sense their joint bewilderment that the boy they'd carefully furnished with a good education and Highland skills like shooting, fishing and stalking was showing alarming signs of nonconformity.

At sixteen, I'd said one day, 'Dad… I don't want to go to university.' (Heresy.) 'I want to paint.'

'A good hobby, Al,' he'd said, frowning. He'd praised for years the ease with which I could draw, but never taken it seriously. He never did, to the day he died.

'I'm just telling you, Dad.'

'Yes, Al.'

He hadn't minded my liking for being alone. In Britain the word 'loner' flew none of the danger signals it did over in the United States, where the desirability of being 'one of a team' was indoctrinated from preschool. 'Loners' there, I'd discovered, were people who went off their heads. So maybe I was off mine, but anything else felt wrong.

'How's Ivan?' I asked my mother.

'Would you like coffee?' she said.

'Coffee, eggs, toast… anything.'

I followed her down to the basement-kitchen where I cooked and ate a breakfast that worked a change for the better.

'Ivan?' I said.

She looked away as if refusing to hear the question and asked instead, 'What's the matter with your eye?'

'I walked into… well, it doesn't matter. Tell me about Ivan.'

'I er…' She looked uncharacteristically uncertain. 'His doctors say he should slowly be resuming his normal activities…'

'But?' I said, as she stopped.

'But he won't.'

After a pause I said, 'Well, tell me.'

There was then this subtle thing between us: that shadowy moment when the generations shift and the child becomes the parent. And perhaps it was happening to us at an earlier age than in most families because of my long training in care of her, a training that had been in abeyance since she'd married Ivan, but which now resurfaced naturally and with redoubled force across her kitchen table.

I said, 'James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree…'

She laughed, and went on, 'Took great care of his Mother, though he was only three.'

I nodded. 'James James said to his Mother, "Mother," he said, said he, "You must never go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me." '

'Oh, Alexander.' A whole lifetime of restraint quivered in her voice, but the dammed up feelings didn't break.

'Just tell me,' I said.

A pause. Then she said, 'He's so depressed.'

'Er… clinically depressed?'

'I don't know what that means. But I don't know how to deal with it. He lies in bed most of the time. He won't get dressed. He hardly eats. I want him to go back into the Clinic but he won't do that either, he says he doesn't like it there, and Dr Robbiston doesn't seem to be able to prescribe anything that will pull him out of it.'

'Well… has he a good reason for being depressed? Is his heart in a bad state?'

'They said there wasn't any need for by-passes or a pacemaker. They used one of those balloon things on one of his arteries, that's all. And he has to take pills, of course.'

'Is he afraid he's going to die?'

My mother wrinkled her smooth forehead. 'He just tells me not to worry.'

'Shall I… um… go up and say hello?'

She glanced at the big kitchen clock, high on the wall above an enormous cooker. Five to nine.

'His nurse is with him now,' she said. 'A male nurse. He doesn't really need a nurse, but he won't let him go. Wilfred, the nurse - and I don't like him, he's too obsequious - he sleeps on our top floor here in those old attics, and Ivan has had an intercom installed so that he can call him if he has chest pains in the night.'

'And does he have chest pains in the night?'

My mother said with perplexity, 'I don't know. I don't think so. But he did, of course, when he had the attack. He woke up with it at four in the morning, but at the time he thought it was only bad indigestion.'

'Did he wake you?'

She shook her head. She and Ivan had always slept in adjoining but separate bedrooms. Not from absence of love; they simply preferred it.

She said, 'I went in to say good morning to him and give him the papers, as I always do, and he was sweating and pressing his chest with his fist.'

'You should have got a message to me at once,' I said. 'Jed would have driven over with it. You shouldn't have had to deal with all this by yourself.'

'Patsy came…'

Patsy was Ivan's daughter. Sly eyes. Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself. Ivan's assurances got nowhere: and Patsy's feelings for me, as my mother's potential heir, would have curdled sulphuric acid. I always smiled at her sweetly.

'What did Patsy do?' I asked.

'Ivan was in the Clinic when she came here. She used the telephone.' My mother stopped for effect.

'Who did she want?' I prompted helpfully.

Amusement glimmered in my mother's dark eyes. 'She telephoned Oliver Grantchester.'

Oliver Grantchester was Ivan's lawyer.

'How blatant was she?' I asked.

'Oh, straight to the jugular, darling.' Patsy called everyone darling. She would murder, I surmised, with a 'Sorry, darling' while she slid the stiletto into the heart. 'She told Oliver,' smiled my mother, 'that if Ivan tried to change his Will, she would contest it.'

'And she meant you to hear.'

'If she hadn't wanted me to, she could have called him from anywhere else. And naturally she was sugar-candy all over the Clinic. The loving daughter. She's good at it.'

'And she said there was no need for you to bring me all the way from Scotland while she was there to look after things.'

'Oh dear, you know how positive she is…'

'A tidal wave.'

Civility was a curse, I often thought. Patsy needed someone to be brusquely rude about the way she bullied everyone with saccharine; but if ever openly crossed she could produce so intense an expression of 'poor little me-dom' that potential critics found themselves comforting her instead. Patsy at thirty-four had a husband, three children, two dogs and a nanny all anxiously twitching to please her.

'And,' my mother said, 'there's some sort of serious trouble at the brewery, and also I think he's worried about the Cup.'

'What cup?'

'The King Alfred Cup, what else?'

I frowned. 'Do you mean the race?' The King Alfred Gold Cup, sponsored by Ivan's brewery as a great advertisement for King Alfred Gold beer, was a splendid two-mile steeplechase run every October, a regular part now of the racing year.

'The race, or the Cup itself,' my mother said. 'I'm not sure.'

At that inconclusive point the kitchen was abruptly invaded by two large middle-aged ladies who heavily plodded down the outside iron steps from road level to basement and let themselves in with familiarity.

'Morning, Lady Westering,' they said. A double act. Sisters, perhaps. They looked from my mother to me expectantly, awaiting an explanation, I thought, as much as an introduction. My gentle mother could be far too easily intimidated.

I stood and said mildly, 'I am Lady Westering's son. And you are?'

My mother told me, 'Edna and Lois. Edna cooks for us. Lois cleans.'

Edna and Lois gave me stares in which disapproval sheltered sketchily behind a need to keep their jobs. Disapproval? I wondered if Patsy had been at work.

Edna looked with a critical eye at the evidence of my cooking, an infringement of her domain. Too bad. She would have to get used to it. My father and I had historically always done the family meals because we'd liked it that way. It had started with my mother breaking a wrist: by the time it was mended, feeding the three of us had forever changed hands; and as I'd understood very early the chemistry of cooking, good food had always seemed easy.

My mother and Ivan had from the beginning employed a cook, though Edna - and also Lois - was new since my last visit.

I said to my mother, 'Wilfred notwithstanding, I'll go up now and see Ivan. I expect I'll find you upstairs in your sitting-room.'

Edna and Lois hovered visibly between allegiances. I gave them my most cheerful non-combative smile, and found my mother following me gratefully up the stairs to the main floor, quiet now but grandly formal with dining-room and drawing-room for entertaining.

'Don't tell me,' I teased her, once we were out of the kitchen's earshot, 'Patsy employed them.'

She didn't deny it. 'They're very efficient.'

'How long have they worked here?'

'A week.'

She came with me up to the next floor, where she and Ivan each had a bedroom, bathroom and personal day-room, in his case a study-cum-office, in hers the refuge they used most, a comfortable pink and green matter of fat armchairs and television.

'Lois cleans very well,' my mother sighed as we went in there, 'but she will move things. It's almost as if she moves them deliberately, just to prove to me that she's dusted.'

She shifted two vases back to their old familiar position of one at each end of the mantelshelf. Silver candlesticks were returned to flank the clock.

'Just tell her not to,' I said, but I knew she wouldn't. She didn't like to upset people: the opposite of Patsy.

I went along to see Ivan, who was sitting palely in his study while noises from his bedroom next door suggested bed-making and the tidying of bottles.

He wore a crimson woollen dressing-gown and brown leather slippers and showed no surprise at my presence.

'Vivienne said you were coming,' he said neutrally. Vivienne was Mother.

'How are you feeling?' I asked, sitting in a chair opposite him and realising with misgiving that he looked older, greyer and a good deal thinner than he had been on my last visit in the spring. Then, I'd been on my way to America with my mind full of the commercial part of my life. He had made, I now remembered, an unexpected invitation for my advice, and I had been too preoccupied, too impatient and too full of doubt of his sincerity to listen properly to what he'd wanted. It had been something to do with his horses, his steeplechasers in training at Lambourn, and I'd had other reasons than press of business to avoid going there.

I repeated my question, 'How are you feeling?'

He asked merely, 'Why don't you cut your hair?'

'I don't know.'

'Curls are girlish.'

He himself had the short-cut shape that went with the businessman personality: with the baronetcy and membership of the Jockey Club. I knew him to be fair-minded and well respected, a middling man who had inherited a modest title from a cousin and a large brewery from his father and had done his best by both.

It was a sadness with him that he had neither son nor any male relative: he was resigned to the baronetcy dying with him.

I'd often flippantly asked him, 'How's the beer, then?', but on that morning it seemed inappropriate. I said instead, 'Is there anything I can do for you?' and regretted it before the last words were out of my mouth. Not Lambourn, I thought. Anything else.

But 'Look after your mother,' was what he said first.

'Yes, of course.'

'I mean… after I've gone.' His voice was quiet and accepting.

'You're going to live.'

He surveyed me with the usual lack of enthusiasm and said dryly, 'You've had a word with God, have you?'

'Not yet.'

'You wouldn't be so bad, Alexander, if you would come down off your mountain and rejoin the human race.'

He had offered, when he'd married my mother, to take me into the brewery and teach me the business, and at eighteen, with chaotic visions of riotous colours intoxicating my inner eye, I'd learned the first great lesson of harmonious stepsonship, how to say no without giving offence.

I wasn't ungrateful and I didn't dislike him: we were just entirely different. As far as one could see, he and my mother were quietly happy together and there was nothing wrong with his care of her.

He said, 'Have you seen your uncle Robert during the last few days?'

'No.'

My uncle Robert was the earl - 'Himself'. He came to Scotland every year in late August and stayed north for the shooting and fishing and the Highland Games. He sent for me every year to visit him, but although I knew from Jed that he was now in residence, I hadn't so far been summoned.

Ivan pursed his lips. 'I thought he might have wanted to see you.'

'Any time soon, I expect.'

'I've asked him-' He broke off, then continued, 'he'll tell you himself.'

I felt no curiosity. Himself and Ivan had known each other for upwards of twenty years, drawn together by a fondness for owning racehorses. They still had their steeplechasers trained in the same yard in Lambourn.

Himself had approved of the match between Ivan and the widow of his much-loved youngest brother. He'd stood beside me at the wedding ceremony and told me to go to him if I ever needed help; and considering that he had five children of his own and half a clan of other nephews and nieces, I'd felt comforted in the loss of my father and in a deep way secure.

I had managed on my own, but I'd known that he was there.

I said to Ivan, 'Mother thinks you may be worried about the Cup.'

He hesitated over an answer, then asked, 'What about it?'

'She doesn't know if it's troubling you and making you feel worse.'

'Your dear mother!' he deeply sighed.

I said, 'Is there something wrong with this year's race? Not enough entries, or something?'

'Look after her.'

She'd been right, I thought, about his depression. A malaise of the soul, outwardly discernible in weak movements of his hands and the lack of vigour in his voice. I didn't think there was much I could do to improve things, if his own doctor couldn't.

As if on cue a fifty-to-sixty, thin, moustached, busy-busy person hurried into the room in a dark flapping suit announcing that as he was passing on his way to the Clinic he had called in for five minutes to check on his patient. 'Morning, Ivan. How's things?'

'Good of you to come, Keith.'

Ivan drifting a limp hand in my direction, I stood up with parent-inculcated politeness and was identified as 'My stepson'.

Dr Keith Robbiston rose in my regard by giving me a sharp glance and a sharper question, 'What analgesic have you been taking for that eye?'

'Aspirin.' Huston station aspirin, actually.

'Huh.' Scorn. 'Are you allergic to any drugs?'

'I don't think so.'

'Are you taking any other drugs?'

'No.'

'Then try these.' He produced a small packet from an inner suit pocket and held it out to me. I accepted it with gratitude.

Ivan, mystified, asked what was going on.

His doctor briskly answered while at the same time producing from other pockets a stethoscope and blood-pressure monitor. 'Your stepson… name?'

'Alexander Kinloch,' I said.

'… Alexander, your stepson, can't move without pain.'

'What?'

'You haven't noticed? No, I suppose not.' To me he said, 'The reduction and management of pain is my speciality. It can't be disguised. How did you get like this? It can't be organic if you're not taking medicine. Car crash?'

I said with a flicker of amusement, 'Four thugs.'

'Really?' He had bright eyes, very alert. 'Bad luck.'

'What are you talking about?' Ivan said.

I shook my head at Dr Robbiston and he checked around his heart-threatened patient with effective economy of movement but no comment on my own state.

'Well done, Ivan,' he said cheerfully, whisking his aids out of sight. 'The ticker's banging away like a baby's. Don't strain yourself, though. But walk around the house a bit. Use this strong stepson as a crutch. How's your dear wife?'

'In her sitting-room,' I said.

'Great.' He departed as abruptly as he'd arrived. 'Hang in there, Ivan.'

He gave me a brief smile on his quick way out. I sat down again opposite Ivan and swallowed one of the tablets the doctor had given me. His assessment had been piercingly on target. Punch-bags led a rotten life.

'He's a good doctor, really,' Ivan told me defensively.

"The best,' I agreed. 'Why do you doubt him?'

'He's always in a hurry. Patsy wants me to change…' He tapered off indecisively; only a shadow seemed left of his former chief-executive decisiveness.

'Why change?' I asked. 'He wants you to be well, and he makes house calls, a miracle these days.'

Ivan frowned. 'Patsy says he's hasty.'

I said mildly, 'Not everyone thinks or moves at the same speed.'

Ivan took a tissue out of a flat box on the table beside him and blew his nose, then dropped the used tissue carefully into a handy waste-paper basket. Always neat, always precise.

He said, 'Where would you hide something?'

I blinked.

'Well?' Ivan prompted.

'Er… it would depend what it was.'

'Something of value.'

'How big?'

He didn't directly answer, but I found what he said next more unusual than anything he'd said to me since I'd known him.

'You have a quirky mind, Alexander. Tell me a safe hiding place.'

Safe.

'Um,' I said, 'who would be looking?'

'Everyone. After my death.'

'You're not dying.'

'Everyone dies.'

'It's essential to tell someone where you've hidden something, otherwise it may be lost for ever.'

Ivan smiled.

I said, 'Are we talking about your Will?'

'I'm not telling you what we are talking about. Not yet. Your uncle Robert says you know how to hide things.'

That put me into a state of breathlessness. How could they? Those two well-intentioned men must have said something to someone somewhere that had got me beaten to buggery and thrown over the next best thing to a cliff. Nephew of one, stepson of the other… I shifted in undeniable pain in that civilised room and acknowledged that for all their worldliness they had no true conception of the real voracious jungle of greed and cruelty roughly known as mankind.

'Ivan,' I said, 'put whatever it is in a bank vault and send a letter of instruction to your lawyers.'

He shook his head.

Don't give anything to me to hide, I thought. Please don't. Let me off. I'm not hiding anything else. Every battered muscle protested.

'Suppose it's a horse,' he said.

I stared.

He said, 'You can't put a horse in a bank vault.'

'What horse?'

He didn't say. He asked, 'How would you hide a horse?'

'A racehorse?' I asked.

'Certainly.'

'Then…' I paused a moment, 'in a racing stable.'

'Not in an obscure barn miles away from anywhere?'

'Definitely not. Horses have to be fed. Regular visits to an obscure barn would be as good as a sign saying "treasure here".'

'Do you believe in hiding things where everyone can see them but they don't realise what they're looking at?'

I said, 'The snag with that is that in the end someone does understand what they're looking at. Someone spots the rare stamp on the envelope. Someone spots the real pearls when the mistletoe berries wither.'

'But you would still put a racehorse among others?'

'And move it often,' I said.

'And the snag to that?'

'The snag,' I said obligingly, 'is that the horse can't be raced without disclosing its whereabouts. Unless, of course, you're a crook with a ringer, which would be unlike you, Ivan.'

'Thank you for that, Alexander.' His voice was dryly amused.

'And if you didn't race the horse,' I went on, 'you would waste its life and its value, until in the end it wouldn't be worth hiding.'

Ivan sighed. 'Any more snags?'

'Horses are as recognisable as people. They have faces.'

'And legs

After a pause I said, 'Do you want me to hide a horse?' and I thought, What the hell am I saying?

'Would you?'

'If you had a good reason.'

'For money?'

'Expenses.'

'Why?'

'Do you mean, why would I do it?' I asked.

He nodded.

I said feebly, 'For the interest,' but in fact it would be because it might lighten his depression to have something other than his illness to think about. I would do it because of my mother's anxiety.

He said, 'What if I asked you to find a horse?'

He was playing games, I thought.

'I suppose I would look for it,' I said.

The telephone on the table by his elbow rang but he merely stared at it apathetically and made no attempt to pick up the receiver. He simply waited until it stopped ringing and then showed exasperated fatigue when my mother appeared in the doorway to tell him that someone to do with the brewery wanted him.

'I'm ill. I've told them not to bother me.'

'It's Tobias Tollright, dear. He says it's essential he talks to you.'

'No, no.'

'Please, Ivan. He sounds so worried.'

'I don't want to talk to him,' Ivan said tiredly. 'Let Alexander talk to him.'

Both my mother and I thought the suggestion pointless, but once he got the idea in his head Ivan wouldn't be budged. In the end I walked over and picked up the phone and explained who I was.

'But I must speak to Sir Ivan himself,' said an agitated voice. 'You simply don't understand.'

'No,' I agreed, 'but if you'll tell me what's the matter, I'll relay it to him for an answer.'

'It's ridiculous.'

'Yes, but urn… fire away.'

'Do you know who I am?' the voice demanded.

'No, I'm afraid not.'

'I am Tobias Tollright, a partner in a firm of chartered accountants. We audit the King Alfred Brewery accounts.'

'Right,' I said.

'There are discrepancies… Really, Sir Ivan is Chairman and managing director and majority shareholder… it is unethical for me to speak to you instead of him.'

'Mm,' I said, 'I do see that. Perhaps you'd better write to him.'

'The matter is too urgent. Remind him it is illegal for a limited company to go on trading when it is insolvent, and I fear… I really fear that measures must be taken at once, and only he can authorise them.'

'Well, Mr Tollright, er… hold on, while I explain.'

'What is it?' my mother asked anxiously. Ivan didn't ask but looked deeply exhausted.

He knew.

I said to him, 'There are things that only you can sign.'

Ivan shook his head.

I went back to Tollright, 'Can any of your urgent measures save the day?'

'I have to discuss it with Sir Ivan. But perhaps, yes.'

'What if he gives me power of attorney to act for him in this matter? Would that do the trick?'

He hesitated. It might be a legal move, but he didn't like it.

I said, 'Sir Ivan is still at an early stage of convalescence.'

I couldn't say in front of Ivan that too much worry might kill him, but it seemed as if Tobias's mental cogs abruptly engaged in a higher gear. How soon, he wanted to know without any more protest, could he expect to see me.

'Tomorrow?' I suggested.

'This afternoon,' he contradicted positively. 'Come to our main offices in Reading.' He told me the address. 'This matter is very urgent.'

'Ultra?'

He cleared his throat and repeated the word as if he'd never used it before. 'Well… yes… ultra.'

'Just hold on, would you?' I lowered the receiver and spoke to my unwilling stepfather. 'I can sign things if you give me the authority. Is that what you really want? I mean, you'll have to trust me a lot.'

He said wearily, 'I do trust you.'

'But this is… well, extreme trust.'

He simply napped his hand.

I said into the phone, 'Mr Tollright, I'll see you as soon as I can.'

'Good.'

I put down the receiver and told Ivan that such trust was unwise.

He smiled faintly. 'Your uncle Robert said I could trust you with my life.'

'You just more or less did.' I did a double-take. 'When did he say that?'

'A few days ago. He'll tell you about it.'

And who else had they told? Alexander can hide things… Shit.

'Ivan,' I said, 'It's more solid if a power of attorney is signed and witnessed in front of a lawyer.'

'Phone Oliver Grantchester. I'll talk to him.'

He was vague, however, with his lawyer, telling him only that he wanted to draw up a power of attorney, but not saying what for. Extremely urgent, though, he emphasised; and, as he still felt wretchedly ill, would Oliver please come to his house so that everything could be completed at once.

Oliver Grantchester, it seemed, easily agreed to instant action, but Ivan's gloom nevertheless intensified. How on earth, I wondered, but didn't ask, had a brewery as well known as King Alfred's tied itself in financial knots?

Standing close outside Wantage, the ancient town of the great king's birth, King Alfred's Brewery supplied most of southern England and half of the Midlands with King Alfred's Gold (a fine light brew) and King Alfred's Bronze (a brew more bitter) which flowed by the frothy lakeful down grateful throats.

Ivan had shown me round his brewery. I'd seen the Kingdom and the Crown that I'd declined. He had offered them again and yet again, and he couldn't understand why I went back to the mountains every time.

The phone call done, Ivan seemed grateful when a thin man in a short white cotton jacket came in from the next-door bedroom and told him respectfully that everything was clean and tidy for the day. The obsequious Wilfred, I presumed.

Out in the hallway a vacuum cleaner began whining. At the noise Ivan's fragile tolerance looked on the absolute brink of disintegration. Wilfred went out into the hallway. The vacuuming stopped but an aggrieved female voice could be heard saying, 'It's all very well, but I've got my job to do, you know.'

'Oh dear,' my mother said, and went to pour oil.

'I can't stand it all,' Ivan said.

He stood up, swaying unsteadily and knocking the box of tissues from the table to the floor. I picked up the box, noticing it had numbers written on its underside, one a series that I recognised as Himself's phone number in Scotland.

Seeing me looking at it, Ivan said, 'There's a pencil by the phone but that new cleaner keeps moving my notepad over onto the desk. It drives me mad. So I use the tissue-box instead.'

'Why don't you tell her?'

'Yes, I suppose I should.'

I offered him my arm for balance, which he accepted.

'Think I'll just rest until Oliver comes,' he said, and I went with him through to his wide bed, where he lay down on the covers in his dressing-gown and slippers and closed his eyes.

I went back into his study and eased down into the chair I'd occupied before. Dr Robbiston's tablet had at least diminished the persistently acute stabs of muscular pain to an overall ache. I could no longer feel anything but a general soreness round my left eye. Think of something else, I told myself. Think of how to hide a bankruptcy…

I was a painter, dammit. Not a fixer. Not a universal rock. I should cultivate an ability to say no.

My mother came back. The vacuum remained silent. She perched in Ivan's chair and said, 'You see? You see?'

I nodded. 'I see a man who loves you.'

'That's not…'

'That's what's the matter. He knows his brewery is in trouble, is maybe on the edge. The brewery is the base of his life. It may be that the brewery's troubles brought on his heart attack in the first place. He may feel a loss of prestige. He may think he's failed you. He can't bear that.' I paused. 'He told me to look after you.'

She stared at me. 'But,' she said, 'I would live with him in poverty, and comfort him.'

'I think you need to tell him.'

'But-'

'I know you find it hard to put feelings into words, but I think you should do it now.'

'Perhaps

'No,' I said, 'I mean now. This minute. He talks about dying as if it would be a haven. He's told me twice to look after you. I will, but if that's not what you want, go and put your arms round him. I think he's ashamed because of the brewery. He's a good man -he needs saving.'

'I don't…'

'Go and love him,' I said.

She gave me a wild look and walked into Ivan's bedroom as if not sure of her footing.

I sat in a sort of hiatus, waiting for the next buffet of fate and wishing that all I had to decide that day was whether to pick Hooker's green or emerald for the colour of the grass of the eighteenth hole at Pebble Beach. Golf was peaceful and well mannered and tested one's honesty to disintegration. I painted the passions of golf as much as its physical scenery, and I'd learned it was the raw emotion, the conflict within the self, that sold the pictures. If I painted pretty scenery without feeling moral tension in my own mind, it quite likely wouldn't sell. It was golfers who bought my work, and they bought it for its core of struggle.

The four completed paintings stolen from the bothy had all been views of play on the great courses at Pebble Beach, California, and represented not only time spent and future income, but also an ingredient of anguish that I couldn't quantify or explain. Along with the canvas and the paint, the demon hikers had taken psychic energy, and although I could produce other and similar work again and again, never exactly those brushstrokes, those slanting shadows, those understandings of the flow of determination in the seconds before the striking of the ball.

The comparative peace of half an hour came to an end with the arrival of Oliver Grantchester who brought with him a frail-looking young woman hung around with computer, printer and bag of office necessities.

Oliver Grantchester and I had met about twice over the years, neither of us showing regret that it hadn't been oftener. My presence in Ivan's study was stiffeningly unwelcome to him, raising not a smile but a scowl.

He said not 'Good morning' but, 'I thought you were in Scotland.'

Ivan and my mother, hearing his voice, came through from the bedroom and gave him the friendly welcome he hadn't got from me.

'Oliver!' my mother exclaimed, offering her cheek for a routine kiss. 'So good of you to come.'

'Yes, good of you,' Ivan echoed pianissimo, taking his customary chair.

'Any time, Ivan,' Oliver Grantchester said heavily. 'You know that.'

The lawyer's large grey-suited body and authoritative voice somehow took up a lot of room and made the study seem smaller. Perhaps fifty, he had a bald crown surrounded by greying dark hair and a large fleshy mouth with chins to match. I wouldn't have been able to make him look out of a portrait as a friendly, warm-eyed philanthropist, but that could have been because I, Alexander, prompted no smile in him.

He introduced his assistant dismissively as 'Miranda', and it was my mother who settled her helpfully at Ivan's desk against one wall, and made space for her to set out her portable machines.

Grantchester said to Ivan, 'You want to draw up a power of attorney? Very wise of you, if I may say so, in view of your health. I brought with me a basic document. You have that ready, Miranda?' Miranda meekly nodded. Grantchester went on, 'It's a pity more people aren't as thoughtful as you, my old friend. Life must go on. A temporary power of attorney will smooth things over nicely until you're back to your old self again.'

Ivan meekly agreed.

'So who is to act for you?' Grantchester asked. 'You know I would be honoured to help you in any way I can. However, you might prefer to have Patsy. Yes, your daughter will be eminently suitable. I expect you've already discussed it with her.' He looked round the room as if expecting her to materialise. 'Patsy it is, then.' To Miranda he said in explanation, 'Draw up the document, naming Mrs Patsy Benchmark, Sir Ivan's daughter.'

Ivan cleared his throat and said to her, 'No. Not Mrs Benchmark. I'm giving the power of attorney to my stepson, here. Write Alexander Kinloch.'

Oliver Grantchester's mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. He looked utterly astounded and also angry.

'Alexander Robert Kinloch,' Ivan repeated to Miranda, and spelled out my last name letter by letter so that there should be no mistake.

The lawyer, finally finding his voice, said, 'You can't.'

'Why not?' Ivan asked.

'But he's… he's… look at him.'

'He has long hair,' Ivan agreed. 'I wish he would cut it. All the same-'

'But your daughter, Grantchester protested, 'what will she say?'

What Patsy would say raised anxious lines on Ivan's forehead. He gave me a long look of doubt, and I looked back with calm, allowing the decision to be his alone. If Patsy got her busy fingers on his affairs, I thought, he would never get them back.

Ivan looked at my mother. 'Vivienne, what do you think?'

She clearly felt, as I did, that he would have to make up his own mind. She said, 'The choice is yours, my dear. Your judgment is best.'

Ivan said to me, 'Alexander?'

'Whatever you want.'

'I advise Mrs Benchmark,' Oliver Grantchester said firmly. 'She's the natural person. She's your heir.'

Ivan dithered. The post-heart-attack Ivan dithered where once he would have dominated. The brewery's predicament had knocked his certainties to pulp.

'Alexander,' he said finally, 'I want you.'

I nodded, giving him a tacit promise.

'Alexander,' he said to Grantchester. 'I'll give the power of attorney to him.'

'You could have both of them,' his lawyer said, desperately. 'You could have both of them, acting jointly.'

Even he could see, though, that such a path would lead to chaos.

'Only Alexander,' Ivan said.

His lawyer wouldn't accept it without a struggle. I listened to him trying to persuade Ivan with heavy legal arguments to change his decision, and I thought frivolously that, never mind my stepfather, it was Oliver himself who didn't want to have to deal with Patsy raging.

Ivan, true at least to part of his nature, wouldn't be budged. Miranda typed my name on the document and Grantchester told me crossly to sign it, which I did. Ivan, of course, signed it also.

'Make certified copies,' Ivan said. 'Make ten.'

With irritation, the lawyer waved at Miranda who made ten copies on a portable fax machine. Grantchester himself signed them all, thereby, I gathered, certifying that the power of attorney had been properly drawn.

'Also,' Ivan said tiredly, 'I will write a letter to the brewery's Company Secretary making Alexander my Alternate Director, which will give him authority to act on my behalf in all business decisions at the brewery, not just my personal affairs, that are covered by the power of attorney.'

'You can't!' Grantchester said explosively. 'He knows nothing at all about business.'

Ivan looked at me calmly. 'I think he does,' he said.

'But he's… he's an artist: Grantchester filled the word with an opinion near contempt.

Ivan said obstinately, 'Alexander will be my Alternate Director. I'll write the letter at once.'

The lawyer scowled. 'No good will come of it,' he said.