Longshot (6 page)

Harry, my height but fair and blue-eyed, complied with the instructions as though thoroughly accustomed to being bidden and began rootling around also for spoons, instant coffee and sugar. Swaddled in my blue bathrobe, he looked ready for bed; and he too was older than I’d thought. He and Fiona were revealed as well-off and perhaps rich. The kitchen was large, individual, a combination of technology and sitting room, and the manner and voices of its owners had the unself-conscious assurance of comfortable social status.

Mackie sat down uncertainly at the big central table, her fingers gingerly feeling her temple.

“I was looking at the horse,” she said. “Must have hit my head on the window. Is the jeep all right?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” Harry said without emotion. “It’s lying in water which will be frozen over again by morning. The door on my side buckled when we hit. Filthy ditchwater just rushed in.”

“Damn,” Mackie said wearily. “That on top of everything else.”

She huddled into her fawn-colored padded coat, still deeply shivering, and it was hard to tell what she would look like warm and laughing. All I could see were reddish curls over her forehead followed by closed eyes, pale lips and the rigid muscles of distress.

“Is Perkin home?” Fiona asked her.

“He should be. God, I hope so.”

Fiona, recovering faster than anyone else, perhaps because she was in her own house, went across to a wall telephone and pressed buttons. Perkin, whoever he was, apparently answered and was given a variety of bad news.

“Yes,” Fiona said repeating things, “I did say the jeep’s in a ditch... It’s in that hollow just over the top of the hill after you leave the A34 ... I don’t know whose horse, dammit... No, we had an
abysmal
day in court. Look, can you get down here and collect everyone? Mackie’s all right but she hit her head... Bob Watson and his wife are with us ... Yes, we did pick up the writer, he’s here too. Just
come,
Perkin, for God’s sake. Stop dithering.” She hung up the receiver with a crash.

Harry poured steaming water onto instant coffee in a row of mugs and then picked up a milk carton in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other, offering a choice of additives. Everyone except Ingrid chose brandy, and Harry’s idea of a decent slug cooled the liquid to drinking point.

Although if we had still been outside, the alcohol wouldn’t have been such a good idea, the deep trembles in all our bodies abated and faded away. Bob Watson took off his cap and looked suddenly younger, a short stocky man with wiry brown hair and a returning glint of independence. One could still see what he must have looked like as a schoolboy, with rounded cheeks and a natural insolence not far from the surface but controlled enough to keep him out of trouble. He had called Harry a liar, but too quietly for him to hear. That rather summed up Bob Watson, I thought.

Ingrid, swamped in the ski suit, looked out at the world from a thinly pretty face and sniffed at regular intervals. She sat beside her husband at the table, unspeaking and forever in his shadow.

Standing with his backside propped against the Aga, Harry warmed both hands around his mug and looked at me with the glimmering amusement that, when not under stress from giving evidence, seemed to be his habitual cast of mind.

“Welcome to Berkshire,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“I would have stayed by the jeep and waited for someone to come,” he said.

“I thought someone would,” I agreed.

Mackie said, “I hope the horse is all right,” as if her mind were stuck in that groove. No one else, it seemed to me, cared an icicle for the survival of the cause of our woes, and I suspected, perhaps unfairly, that Mackie kept on about the horse so as to reinforce in our consciousness that the crash hadn’t been her fault.

Warmth gradually returned internally also and everyone looked as if they had come up to room temperature, like wine. Ingrid pushed back the hood of my ski suit revealing soft mouse-brown hair in need of a brush.

No one had a great wish to talk, and there was something of a return to the pre-crash gloom, so it was a relief when wheels, slammed doors and approaching footsteps announced the arrival of Perkin.

He hadn’t come alone. It was Tremayne Vickers who advanced first into the kitchen, his loud voice and large personality galvanizing the subdued group drinking coffee.

“Got yourselves into a load of shit, have you?” he boomed with a touch of not wholly unfriendly scorn. “Roads too much for you, eh?”

Mackie went defensively into the horse routine as if she’d merely been rehearsing earlier.

The man who followed Tremayne through the door looked like a smudged carbon copy: same height, same build, same basic features, but none of Tremayne’s bullishness. If that was Perkin, I thought, he must be Tremayne’s son.

The carbon copy said to Mackie crossly, “Why didn’t you go round the long way? You ought to have more sense than to take that shortcut.”

“It was all right this morning,” Mackie said, “and I always go that way. It was the horse . . .”

Tremayne’s gaze fastened on me. “So you got here. Good. You’ve met everyone? My son, Perkin. His wife, Mackie.”

I’d assumed, I realized, that Mackie had been either Tremayne’s own wife or perhaps his daughter; hadn’t thought of daughter-in-law.

“Why on earth are you wearing a dinner jacket?” Tremayne asked, staring.

“We got wet in the ditch,” Harry said briefly. “Your friend the writer lent us dry clothes. He issued his dinner jacket to himself. Didn’t trust me with it, smart fellow. What I’ve got on is his bathrobe. Ingrid has his ski suit. Fiona is his from head to foot.”

Tremayne looked briefly bewildered but decided not to sort things out. Instead he asked Fiona if she’d been hurt in the crash. “Fiona, my dear . . .”

Fiona, his dear, assured him otherwise. He behaved to her with a hint of roguishness, she to him with easy response. She aroused in all men, I supposed, the desire to flirt.

Perkin belatedly asked Mackie about her head, awkwardly producing anxiety after his ungracious criticism. Mackie gave him a tired understanding smile, and I had a swift impression that she was the one in that marriage who made allowances, who did the looking after, who was the adult to her good-looking husband-child.

“But,” he said, “I do think you were silly to go down that road.” His reaction to her injury was still to blame her for it, but I wondered if it weren’t really a reaction to fright, like a parent clouting a much-loved lost-but-found infant. “And there was supposed to be a police notice at the turnoff saying it was closed. It’s been closed since those cars slid into each other at lunchtime.”

“There wasn’t any police notice,” Mackie said.

“Well, there must have been. You just didn’t see it.”

“There was no police notice in sight,” Harry said, and we all agreed, we hadn’t seen one.

“All the same . . .” Perkin wouldn’t leave it.

“Look,” Mackie said, “if I could go back and do it again then I wouldn’t go along there, but it looked all right and I’d come up in the morning, so I just
did,
and that’s that.”

“We all saw the
horse
,” Harry said, drawling, and from the dry humor lurking in his voice one could read his private opinion of Perkin’s behavior.

Perkin gave him a confused glance and stopped picking on Mackie.

Tremayne said, “What’s done’s done,” as if announcing his life’s philosophy, and added that he would “give the police a ring” when he got home, which would be very soon now.

“About your clothes,” Fiona said to me, “shall I send them to the cleaners with all our wet things?”

“No, don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll come and collect them tomorrow.”

“All right.” She smiled slightly. “I do realize we have to thank you. Don’t think we don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Perkin demanded.

Harry said in his way, “Fellow saved us from ice-cubery.” “From
what
?”

Ingrid giggled. Everyone looked at her. “Sorry,” she whispered, subsiding.

“Quite likely from death,” Mackie said plainly. “Let’s go home.” She stood up, clearly much better for the warmth and the stiffly laced coffee and also, it seemed to me, relieved that her father-in-law hadn’t added his weight to her husband’s bawling-out. “Tomorrow,” she added slowly, “which of us is going back to Reading?”

“Oh, God,” Fiona said. “For a minute I’d forgotten.”

“Some of us will have to go,” Mackie said, and it was clear that no one wanted to.

After a pause Harry stirred. “I’ll go. I’ll take Bob. Fiona doesn’t have to go, nor does Ingrid. Mackie ...” He stopped.

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I owe him that.”

Fiona said, “So will I. He’s my cousin, after all. He deserves us to support him. Though after what Harry did today I don’t know if I can look him in the face.”

“What did Harry do?” Perkin asked.

Fiona shrugged and retreated. “Mackie can tell you.” Fiona, it seemed, could attack Harry all she liked herself, but she wasn’t throwing him to other wolves. Harry was no doubt due for further tongue-lashing after we’d gone, and in fact was glancing at his wife in a mixture of apprehension and resignation.

“Let’s be off,” Tremayne said. “Come along, Bob.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bob Watson, I remembered, was Tremayne’s head lad. He and his Ingrid went over to the door, followed by Mackie and Perkin. I put down my mug, thanking Harry for the reviver.

“Come this time tomorrow to fetch your clothes,” he said. “Come for a drink. An ordinary drink, not an emergency.”

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

He nodded amiably, and Fiona also, and I picked up my dry-clothes bag and the camera case and followed Tremayne and the others out again into the snow. The six of us squeezed into a large Volvo, Tremayne driving, Perkin sitting beside him, Ingrid sitting on Bob’s lap in the back with Mackie and me. At the end of the village Tremayne stopped to let Bob and Ingrid get out, Ingrid giving me a sketchy smile and saying Bob would bring my suit and boots along in the morning, if that would be all right. Of course, I said.

They turned away to walk through a garden gate towards a small shadowy house, and Tremayne started off again towards open country, grousing that the trial would take his head lad away for yet another day. Neither Mackie nor Perkin said anything, and I still had no idea what the trial was all about. I didn’t know them well enough to ask, I felt.

“Not much of a welcome for you, John, eh?” Tremayne said over his shoulder. “Did you bring a typewriter?”

“No. A pencil, actually. And a tape recorder.”

“I expect you know what you’re doing.” He sounded cheerfully more sure of that than I was. “We can start in the morning.”

After about a mile of cautious crawling along a surface much like the one we’d come to grief on, he turned in through a pair of imposing gateposts and stopped outside a very large house where many lights showed dimly through curtains. As inhabitants of large houses seldom used their front doors, we went into this one also at the side, not directly into the kitchen this time but into a warm carpeted hall leading to doorways in all directions.

Tremayne, saying, “Bloody cold night,” walked through a doorway to the left, looking back for me to follow. “Come on in. Make yourself at home. This is the family room, where you’ll find newspapers, telephone, drinks, things like that. Help yourself to whatever you want while you’re here.”

The big room looked comfortable in a sprawling way, not tidy, not planned. There was a mixture of patterns and colors, a great many photographs, a few poinsettias left over from Christmas and a glowing log fire in a wide stone fire-place.

Tremayne picked up a telephone and briefly told the local police that his jeep was in the ditch in the lane, not to worry, no one had been hurt, he would get it picked up in the morning. Duty done, he went across to the fire and held out his hands to warm them.

“Perkin and Mackie have their own part of the house, but this room is where we all meet,” he said. “If you want to leave a message for anybody, pin it to that board over there.” He pointed to a chair on which was propped a cork-board much like the one in Ronnie’s office. Red drawing pins were stuck into it at random, one of them anchoring a note which in large letters announced briefly, BACK FOR GRUB.

“That’s my other son,” Tremayne said, reading the message from a distance. “He’s fifteen. Unmanageable.” He spoke however with indulgence. “I expect you’ll soon get the hang of the household.”

“Er . . .
Mrs.
Vickers?” I said tentatively.

“Mackie?” He sounded puzzled.

“No . . . Your wife?”

“Oh. Oh, I see. No, my wife took a hike. Can’t say I minded. There’s just me and Gareth, the boy. I’ve a daughter, married a frog, lives outside Paris, has three children, they come here sometimes, turn the place upside down. She’s the eldest, then Perkin. Gareth came later.”

He was feeding me facts without feelings, I thought. I’d have to change that, if I were to do any good: but maybe it was too soon for feelings. He was glad I was there, but jerky, almost nervous, almost—now we were alone—shy. Now that he had got what he wanted, now that he had secured his writer, a lot of the agitation and anxiety he’d displayed in Ronnie’s office seemed to have abated. The Tremayne of today was running on only half-stress.

Mackie, coming into the room, restored him to his confident self. Carrying an ice bucket, she glanced quickly at her father-in-law as if to assess his mood, to find out if his tolerance in Fiona and Harry’s kitchen was still in operation. Reassured in some way, she took the ice over to a table bearing a tray of bottles and glasses and began mixing a drink.

She had taken off her padded coat and woolly hat, and was wearing a blue jersey dress over knee-high narrow black boots. Her red-brown hair, cut short, curled neatly on a well-shaped head and she was still pale, without lipstick or vivacity.