Come to Grief (24 page)

“Look what I did to her.”

“She knew what she was marrying.”

“I don’t think she did. It isn’t always easy, being married to a jockey.”

“You forgive her too much! And then, do you know what she said just now, when she was leaving? I don’t understand her. She gave me a hug—a hug—not a dutiful peck on the cheek, and she said, ‘Take care of Sid.’ ”

I felt instantly liquefied inside: too close to tears.

“Sid...”

I shook my head, as much to retain composure as anything else.

“We’ve made our peace,” I said.

“When?”

“Just now. The old Jenny came back. She’s free of me. She felt free quite suddenly ... so she’ll have no more need to ... to tear me to pieces, as you put it. I think that all that destructive anger has finally gone. Like she said, she’s flown out of the cage.”

He said, “I do hope so,” but looked unconvinced. “I need a drink.”

I smiled and joined him, but I discovered, as we later ate companionably together, that even though his daughter might no longer despise or torment me, what I perversely felt wasn’t relief, but loss.

Leaving Aynsford early, I drove back to London on Thursday morning and left the car, as 1 normally did, in a large public underground car park near Pont Square. From there I walked to the laundry where I usually took my shirts and waited while they fed my strip of rag from Northampton twice through the dry-cleaning cycle.

What emerged was a stringy-looking object, basically light turquoise in color, with a non-geometric pattern on it of green, brown and salmon pink. There were also black irregular stains that had stayed obstinately in place.

I persuaded the cleaners to iron it, with the only result that I had a flat strip instead of a wrinkled one.

“What if I wash it with detergent and water?” I asked the burly, half-interested dry cleaner.

“You couldn’t exactly
harm
it,” he said sarcastically.

So I washed it and ironed it and ended as before: turquoise strip, wandering indeterminate pattern, stubborn black stain.

With the help of the Yellow Pages I visited the wholesale showrooms of a well-known fabric designer. An infinitely polite old man there explained that my fabric pattern was
woven,
while theirs—the wholesaler‘s—was printed. Different market, he said. The wholesaler aimed at the upper end of the middle-class market. I, he said, needed to consult an interior decorator, and with kindness he wrote for me a short list of firms.

The first two saw no profit in answering questions. At the third address I happened on an underworked twenty-year-old who ran pale long fingers through clean shoulder-length curls while he looked with interest at my offering. He pulled out a turquoise thread and held it up to the light.

“This is silk,” he said.

“Real silk?”

“No possible doubt. This was expensive fabric. The pattern is woven in. See.” He turned the piece over to show me the back. “This is remarkable. Where did you get it? It looks like a very old lampas. Beautiful. The colors are organic, not mineral.”

I looked at his obvious youth and asked if he could perhaps seek a second opinion.

“Because I’m straight out of design school?” he guessed without umbrage. “But I studied fabrics. That’s why they took me on here. I
know
them. The designers don’t weave them, they use them.”

“Then tell me what I’ve got.”

He fingered the turquoise strip and held it to his lips and his cheek and seemed to commune with it as if it were a crystal ball.

“It’s a modern copy,” he said. “It’s very skillfully done. It is lampas, woven on a Jacquard loom. There isn’t enough of it to be sure, but I think it’s a copy of a silk hanging made by Philippe de Lasalle in about 1760. But the original hadn’t a blue-green background, it was cream with this design of ropes and leaves in greens and red and gold.”

I was impressed. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve just spent three years learning this sort of thing.”

“Well ... who makes it now? Do I have to go to France?”

“You could try one or two English firms but you know what—”

He was brusquely interrupted by a severe-looking woman in a black dress and huge Aztec-type necklace who swept in and came to rest by the counter on which lay the unprepossessing rag.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “I asked you to catalog the new shipment of passementerie.”

“Yes, Mrs. Lane.”

“Then please get on with it. Run along now.”

“Yes, Mrs. Lane.”

“Do you want help?” she asked me briskly.

“Only the names of some weavers.”

On his way to the passementerie my source of knowledge spoke briefly over his shoulder. “It looks like a solitary weaver, not a firm. Try Saul Marcus.”

“Where?” I called.

“London.”

“Thanks.”

He went out of sight. Under Mrs. Lane’s inhospitable gaze I picked up my rag, smiled placatingly and departed.

I found Saul Marcus first in the telephone directory and then in white-bearded person in an airy artist’s studio near Chiswick, West London, where he created fabric patterns.

He looked with interest at my rag but shook his head.

I urged him to search the far universe.

“It might be Patricia Huxford’s work,” he said at length, dubiously. “You could try her. She does—or did—work like this sometimes. I don’t know of anyone else.”

“Where would I find her?”

“Surrey, Sussex. Somewhere like that.”

“Thank you very much.”

Returning to Pont Square, I looked for Patricia Huxford in every phone book I possessed for Surrey and Sussex and, for good measure, the bordering southern counties of Hampshire and Kent. Of the few Huxfords listed, none turned out to be Patricia, a weaver.

I really
needed
an assistant, I thought, saying good-bye to Mrs. Paul Huxford, wife of a double-glazing salesman. This sort of search could take hours. Damn Chico, and his dolly-bird protective missus.

With no easy success from the directories I started on directory inquiries, the central computerized number-finder. As always, to get a number one had to give an address, but the computer system contemptuously spat out Patricia Huxford, Surrey, as being altogether too vague.

I tried Patricia Huxford, Guildford (Guildford being Surrey’s county town), but learned only of the two listed P. Huxfords that I’d already tried. Kingston, Surrey: same lack of results. I systematically tried all the other main areas; Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead, Dorking ... Surrey might be a small county in square-mile size, but large in population. I drew a uniform blank.

Huxfords were fortunately rare. A good job she wasn’t called Smith.

Sussex, then. There was East Sussex (county town Brighton) and West Sussex (Chichester). I flipped a mental coin and chose Chichester, and could hardly believe my lucky ears.

An impersonal voice told me that the number of Patricia Huxford was ex-directory and could be accessed only by the police, in an emergency. It was not even in the C.O. grade-one class of ex-directory, where one could sweet-talk the operator into phoning the number on one’s behalf (C.O. stood for calls offered). Patricia Huxford valued absolute grade-two privacy and couldn’t be reached that way.

In the highest, third-grade, category, there were the numbers that weren’t on any list at all, that the exchanges and operators might not know even existed; numbers for government affairs, the Royal Family and spies.

I yawned, stretched and ate cornflakes for lunch.

While I was still unenthusiastically thinking of driving to Chichester, roughly seventy more miles of arm-ache, Charles phoned from Aynsford.

“So glad to catch you in,” he said. “I’ve been talking to Thomas Ullaston, I thought you’d like to know.”

“Yes,” I agreed with interest. “What did he say?”

“You know, of course, that he’s no longer Senior Steward of the Jockey Club? His term of office ended.”

“Yes, I know.”

I also regretted it. The new Senior Steward was apt to think me a light-weight nuisance. I supposed he had a point, but it never helped to be discounted by the top man if I asked for anything at all from the department heads in current power. No one was any longer thanking me for ridding them of their villain: according to them, the whole embarrassing incident was best forgotten, and with that I agreed, but I wouldn’t have minded residual warmth.

“Thomas was dumbfounded by your question,” Charles said. “He protested that he’d meant you no harm.”

“Ah!” I said.

“Yes. He didn’t deny that he’d told someone about that morning, but he assured me that it had been only one person, and that person was someone of utterly good standing, a man of the utmost probity. I asked if it was Archibald Kirk, and he
gasped,
Sid. He said it was early in the summer when Archie Kirk sought him out to ask about you. Archie Kirk told him he’d heard you were a good investigator and he wanted to know how good. It seems Archie Kirk’s branch of the civil service occasionally likes to employ independent investigators quietly, but that it’s hard to find good ones they can trust. Thomas Ullaston told him to trust you. Archie Kirk apparently asked more and more questions, until Thomas found himself telling about that chain and those awful marks ... I mean, sorry, Sid.”

“Yeah,” I said, “go on.”

“Thomas told Archie Kirk that with your jockey constitution and physical resilience—he said physical resilience, Thomas did, so that’s exactly where Kirk got that phrase from—with your natural inborn physical resilience you’d shaken off the whole thing as if it had never happened.”

“Yes,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. One couldn’t ever forget. One could, however, ignore. And it was odd, I thought, that I never had nightmares about whippy chains.

Charles chuckled. “Thomas said he wouldn’t want young master Halley on his tail if he’d been a crook.”

Young master Halley found himself pleased.

Charles asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Sid?”

“You’ve been great.”

“Be careful.”

I smiled as I assured him I would. Be careful was hopeless advice to a jockey, and at heart I was as much out to win as ever.

On my way to the car I bought some robust adhesive bandage and, with my right forearm firmly strapped and a sufficient application of ibuprofen, drove to Chichester in West Sussex, about seven miles inland from the English Channel.

It was a fine spirits-lifting afternoon. My milk-coffee Mercedes swooped over the rolling South Downs and sped the last flat mile to the cathedral city of Chichester, wheels satisfyingly fast but still not as fulfilling as a horse.

I sought out the public library and asked to see the electoral roll.

There were masses of it: all the names and addresses of registered voters in the county, divided into electoral districts.

Where was Chico, blast him?

Resigned to a long search that could take two or three hours, I found Patricia Huxford within a short fifteen minutes. A record. I hated electoral rolls: the small print made me squint.

Huxford,
Patricia
Helen, Bravo House,
Lowell.

Hallelujah.

I followed my road map and asked for directions in the village of Lowell, and found Bravo House, a small converted church with a herd of cars and vans outside. It didn’t look like the reclusive lair of an ex-directory hermit

As people seemed to be walking in and out of the high, heavy open west door, I walked in, too. I had arrived, it was soon clear, towards the end of a photographic session for a glossy magazine.

I said to a young woman hugging a clipboard, “Patricia Huxford?”

The young woman gave me a radiant smile. “Isn’t she
wonderful?”
she said.

I followed the direction of her gaze. A small woman in an astonishing dress was descending from a sort of throne that had been built on a platform situated where the old transepts crossed the nave. There were bright theatrical spotlights that began to be switched off, and there were photographers unscrewing and dismantling and wrapping cables into hanks: There were effusive thanks in the air and satisfied excitement and the overall glow of a job done well.

I waited, looking about me, discovering the changes from church to modem house. The window glass, high up, was clear, not colored. The stone-flagged nave had rugs, no pews, comfortable modern sofas pushed back against the wall to accommodate the crowd, and a large-screen television set.

A white-painted partition behind the throne platform cut off the view of what had been the altar area, but nothing had been done to spoil the sweep of the vaulted ceiling, built with soaring stone arches to the glory of God.

One would have to have a very secure personality, I thought, to choose to live in that place.

The media flock drifted down the nave and left with undiminished goodwill. Patricia Huxford waved to them and closed her heavy door and, turning, was surprised to find me still inside.

“So sorry,” she said, and began to open the door again.

“I’m not with the photographers,” I said. “I came to ask you about something else.”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I must ask you to go.”

“You look beautiful,” I told her, “and it will only take a minute,” I brought my scrap of rag out and showed it to her. “If you are Patricia Huxford, did you weave this?”

“Trish,” she said absently. “I’m called Trish.”

She looked at the strip of silk and then at my face.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“John.”

“John what?”

“John Sidney.”

John Sidney were my real two first names, the ones my young mother had habitually used. “John Sidney, give us a kiss.” “John Sidney, wash your face.” “John Sidney, have you been fighting again?”