Reflex (20 page)

She read them out to me and I wrote them down, and then I said, “Do you happen to know the name of the people living there now?”

“Huh,” she said scornfully. “They're real pests. You won't get far with them, whatever it is you want, I'm afraid. They've got the place practically fortified to ward off furious parents.”

“To . . . what?” I said, mystified.

“Parents trying to persuade their children to come home. It's one of those commune things. Religious brain-washing, something like that. They call themselves Colleagues of Supreme Grace. All nonsense. Pernicious nonsense.”

I felt breathless.

“I'll send Jane the money,” I said. “And thanks very much.”

“What is it?” Clare said, as I slowly replaced the receiver.

“The first real lead to Amanda.”

I explained about the
Horse and Hound
advertisement, and about the tenants of Pine Woods Lodge.

Clare shook her head. “If these Supreme Grace people know where Amanda is, they won't tell you. You must have heard of them, haven't you? Or others like them? They're all gentle and smiling on the surface, and like
steel rat-traps underneath. They lure people my age with friendliness and sweet songs and hook them into Believing, and once they're in the poor slobs never get out. They're in love with their prison. Their parents hardly stand a chance.”

“I've heard of something like it. But I've never seen the point.”

“Money,” Clare said crisply. “All the darling little Colleagues go out with saintly faces and collecting boxes, and rake in the cash.”

“To live on?”

“Sure, to live on. And to further the cause, or in other words, to line the pockets of our great leader.”

I made the tea and we sat by the table to drink it.

Amanda in a stableyard at Horley; Caroline twenty miles away at Pine Woods Lodge. Colleagues of Supreme Grace at Pine Woods Lodge, Colleagues ditto at Horley. Too close a connection to be a coincidence. Even if I never found out precisely what, there had been a rational sequence of events.

“She's probably not still there,” I said.

“But you'll go looking?”

I nodded. “Tomorrow, I think, after racing.”

When we'd finished the tea, Clare said she wanted to see the Jockey's Life folder again, so we took it upstairs, and I showed some of the pictures blown up on the wall to amuse her, and we talked of her life and mine and of nothing in particular; and later in the evening we went to the good pub at Ashbury for a steak.

“A great day,” Clare said, smiling over the coffee. “Where's the train?”

“Swindon. I'll drive you there . . . or you could stay.”

She regarded me levelly. “Is that the sort of invitation I think it is?”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

She looked down and fiddled with her coffee spoon, paying it a lot of attention. I watched the bent dark
thinking head and knew that if it took her so long to answer, she would go.

“There's a fast train at ten-thirty,” I said. “You could catch it comfortably. Just over an hour to Paddington.”

“Philip . . .”

“It's all right,” I said easily. “If one never asks, one never gets.” I paid the bill. “Come on.”

She was distinctly quiet on the six-mile drive to the railway station, and she didn't share her thoughts. Not until I'd bought her a ticket (against her objections) and was waiting with her up on the platform did she give any indication of what was in her mind, and then only obliquely.

“There's a Board meeting in the office tomorrow,” she said. “It will be the first I've been to. They made me a director a month ago, at the last one.”

I was most impressed, and said so. It couldn't be often that publishing houses put girls of twenty-two on the Board. I understood, also, why she wouldn't stay. Why she might never stay. The regret I felt shocked me with its sudden intensity, because my invitation to her hadn't been a desperate plea but only a suggestion for passing pleasure. I had meant it as a small thing, not a lifetime commitment. My sense of loss, on that railway platform, seemed out of all proportion.

The train came in and she climbed aboard, pausing with the door open to exchange kisses. Brief unpassionate kisses, no advance from Monday on the doorstep.

See you soon, she said, and I said yes. About contracts, she said. A lot to discuss.

“Come on Sunday,” I said.

“Let you know. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

The impatient train ground away, accelerating fast, and I drove home to the empty cottage with a most unaccustomed feeling of loneliness.

 

Newbury races, Friday, late November.

Lord White was there, standing under the expanse of glass roof outside the weighing room, talking earnestly to two fellow stewards. He looked the same as always, gray-white hair mostly hidden by trilby, brown covert coat over dark gray suit, air of benign good sense. Hard to imagine him high as a kite on love. Impossible, if one hadn't seen it.

I had to pass near him to reach the weighing-room door. He steadfastly continued his conversation with the stewards, and only through the barest flicker of his eyes in my direction did he show he knew I was there. If he didn't want to talk to me, I didn't mind. Less embarrassing all around.

Inside the weighing room stood Harold, expansively telling a crony about a good place for cut-price new tires. Hardly pausing for breath he told me he'd wait for my saddle if I'd do him a favor and change and weigh quickly, and when I went back to him in colors he was still on about cross-ply and radials. The crony took the opportunity to depart, and Harold, taking my saddle and weightcloth, said with mischievous amusement, “Did you hear that Ghengis Khan got the boot?”

I paid him sharp attention.

“Are you sure?” I said.

Harold nodded. “Old Lanky”—he pointed to the disappearing crony—“was telling me just before you arrived. He says they held an emergency-type meeting of the Jockey Club this morning in London. He was at it. Lord White asked them to cancel plans for a committee chaired by Ivor den Relgan, and as it was old Driven Snow's idea in the first place, they all agreed.”

“It's something, anyway,” I said.

“Something?” Harold swung towards exasperation. “Is that all you think? It's the best about-turn since the Armada.”

He stalked off with my saddle, muttering and shaking
his head, and leaving me, had he but known it, in a state of extreme relief. Whatever else my visit to Lord White had done, it had achieved its primary object. At least, I thought gratefully, I hadn't caused so much havoc in a man I liked for nothing at all.

I rode a novice hurdler, which finished second, pleasing the owner mightily and Harold not much, and later a two-mile 'chase on a sensitive mare who had no real heart for the job and had to be nursed. Getting her around at all was the best to be hoped for, a successful conclusion greeted by Harold with a grunt. As we had also finished fourth I took it for a grunt of approval, but one could never be sure.

When I was changing back into street clothes a racecourse official stepped into the big bustling jockeys' room and shouted down the length of it, “Nore, you're wanted.”

I finished dressing and went out into the weighing room, and found that the person who was waiting was Lord White.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Come over here into the stewards' room . . . and close the door, will you?”

I followed him into the room off the weighing room used by the stewards for on-the-spot enquiries, and, as he asked, shut the door. He stood behind one of the chairs which surrounded the big table, grasping its back with both hands as if it gave him a shield, a barrier, the rampart of a citadel. “I regret,” he said formally, “what I imputed to you on Tuesday.”

“It's all right, sir.”

“I was upset . . . but it was indefensible.”

“I do understand, sir.”

“What do you understand?”

“Well . . . that when someone hurts you, you want to kick them.”

He half smiled. “Poetically put, if I may say so.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“No, it isn't.” He paused, pondering. “I suppose you've heard that the committee is canceled?”

I nodded.

He drew a sober breath. “I want to request den Relgan's resignation from the Jockey Club. The better to persuade him, I am of a mind to show him those photographs, which of course he has seen already. I think, however, that I need your permission to do so, and that is what I am asking.”

Talk about leverage, I thought; and I said, “I've no objection. Please do what you like with them.”

“Are they . . . the only copies?”

“Yes,” I said, which in fact they were. I didn't tell him I also had the negatives. He would have wanted me to destroy them, and my instincts were against it.

He let go of the chair back as if no longer needing it, and walked around me to the door. His face, as he opened it, bore the firm familiar blameless expression of pre-Dana days. The cruel cure, I thought, had been complete.

“I can't exactly thank you,” he said civilly, “but I'm in your debt.” He gave me a slight nod and went out of the room: transaction accomplished, apology given, dignity intact. He would soon be busy persuading himself, I thought, that he hadn't felt what he'd felt, that his infatuation hadn't existed.

Slowly I followed, satisfied on many counts, on many levels, but not knowing if he knew it. The profoundest gifts weren't always those explicitly given.

 

From Marie Millace I learned more.

She had come to Newbury to see Steve ride now that his collarbone had mended, though she confessed, as I steered her off for a cup of coffee, that watching one's son race over fences was an agony.

“All jockeys' wives say it's worse when their sons start,” I said. “Daughters too, I dare say.”

We sat at a small table in one of the bars, surrounded
by people in bulky overcoats which smelled of cold damp air and seemed to steam slightly in the warmth. Marie automatically stacked to one side the debris of cups and sandwich wrappers left by the last customers, and thoughtfully stirred her coffee.

“You're looking better,” I said.

She nodded. “I feel it.”

She had been to a hairdresser, I saw, and had bought some more clothes. Still pale, with smudged grieving eyes. Still fragile, inclined to sound shaky, tears under control but not far. Four weeks away from George's death.

She sipped the hot coffee and said, “You can forget what I told you last week about the Whites and Dana den Relgan.”

“Can I?”

She nodded. “Wendy's here. We had coffee earlier on. She's very much happier.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Are you interested? I'm not prattling on?”

“Very interested,” I assured her.

“She said that last Tuesday, sometime on Tuesday, her husband found out something he didn't like about Dana den Relgan. She doesn't know what. He didn't tell her. But she said he was like a zombie all evening, white and staring and not hearing a word that was said to him. She didn't know what was the matter, not then, and she was quite frightened. He locked himself away alone all Wednesday, but in the evening he told her his affair with Dana was over, and that he'd been a fool, and would she forgive him.”

I listened, amazed that women so easily relayed that sort of gossip, and pleased they did.

“And after that?” I said.

“Aren't men extraordinary?” Marie Millace said. “After that he began to behave as if the whole thing had never happened. Wendy says that now he has confessed and
apologized, he expects her to go on as before, as if he'd never gone off and slept with the wretched girl.”

“And will she?”

“Oh, I expect so. Wendy says his trouble was the common one among men of fifty or so, wanting to prove to themselves they're still young. She understands him, you see.”

“So do you,” I said.

She smiled with sweetness. “Goodness, yes. You see it all the time.”

When we'd finished the coffee I gave her a short list of agents that she might try, and said I'd give any help I could. After that I told her I'd brought a present for her. I had been going to give it to Steve to give to her, but as she was there herself, she could have it: it was in my bag in the changing room.

I fetched out and handed to her a ten-by-eight-inch cardboard envelope which said “Photographs—Do Not Bend” along its borders.

“Don't open it until you're alone,” I said.

“I
must
,” she said, and opened it there and then.

It contained a photograph I'd taken once of George. George holding his camera, looking towards me, smiling his familiar sardonic smile. George in color. George in a typically George-like pose, one leg forward with his weight back on the other, head back, considering the world a bad joke. George as he'd lived.

There and then in full public view Marie Millace flung her arms round me and hugged me as if she would never let go, and I could feel her tears trickling down my neck.

Z
ephyr Farm Stables was indeed fortified like a stockade, surrounded by a seven-foot-high stout wooden fence and guarded by a gate that would have done credit to Alcatraz. I sat lazily in my car across the street from it, waiting for it to open.

I waited while the cold gradually seeped through my anorak and numbed my hands and feet. Waited while a few intrepid pedestrians hurried along the narrow path beside the fence without giving the gate a glance. Waited in the semisuburban street on the outskirts of Horley, where the streep lamps faltered to a stop and darkness lay beyond.

No one went in or out of the gate. It stayed obstinately shut, secretive and unfriendly, and after two fruitless hours I abandoned the chilly vigil and booked in to a local hotel.

Enquiries brought a sour response. Yes, the receptionist said, they did sometimes have people staying there who were hoping to persuade their sons and daughters to come home from Zephyr Farm Stables. Hardly any of them ever managed it, because they were never allowed to see their children alone, if at all. Proper scandal, said the
receptionist, and the law can't do a thing about it. All over eighteen, they are, see? Old enough to know their own minds. Phooey.

“I just want to find out if someone's there,” I said.

She shook her head and said I didn't have a chance.

I spent the evening drifting around hotels and pubs talking about the Colleagues to a succession of locals propping up the bars. The general opinion was the same as the receptionist's: anything or anyone I wanted from Zephyr Farm Stables, I wouldn't get.

“Do they ever come out?” I asked. “To go shopping, perhaps?”

Amid a reaction of rueful and sneering smiles I was told that yes indeed the Colleagues did emerge, always in groups, and always collecting money.

“They'll sell you things,” one man said. “Try to sell you bits o' polished stone and such. Just beggin' really. For the cause, they say. For the love of God. Bunk, I say. I tell 'em to be off to church, and they don't like that, I'll tell ye.”

“Ever so strict, they are,” a barmaid said. “No smokes, no drinks, no sex. Can't see what the nitwits see in it myself.”

“They don't do no harm,” someone said. “Always smiling.”

Would they be out collecting in the morning, I asked. And if so, where?

“In the summer they hang about the airport all the time, scrounging from people going on holiday and sometimes picking someone up for themselves . . . recruits, like . . . but your best bet would be in the center of town. Right here. Saturday . . . they're sure to be here. Sure to be.”

I thanked them all, and went to bed, and in the morning parked as near to the center as possible and wandered about on foot.

By ten o'clock the town was bustling with its morning trade, and I'd worked out that I would have to leave by
eleven-thirty at the latest to get back to Newbury, and even that was cutting it a bit fine. The first race was at twelve-thirty because of the short winter days, and although I wasn't riding in the first two, I had to be there an hour before the third, or Harold would be dancing mad.

I saw no groups of collecting Colleagues. No groups at all. No chanting people with shaven heads and bells, or anything like that. All that happened was that a smiling girl touched my arm and asked if I would like to buy a pretty paperweight.

The stone lay on the palm of her hand, wedge-shaped, greeny-brown and polished.

“Yes,” I said. “How much?”

“It's for charity,” she said. “As much as you like.” She produced in her other hand a wooden box with a slit in the top but with no names of charities advertised on its sides.

“What charity?” I asked pleasantly, fishing for my wallet.

“Lots of good causes,” she said.

I sorted out a pound note, folded it, and pushed it through the slit.

“Are there many of you collecting?” I asked.

She turned her head involuntarily sideways, and I saw from the direction of her eyes that there was another girl offering a stone to someone waiting at a bus stop, and on the other side of the road, another. All pretty girls in ordinary clothes, smiling.

“What's your name?” I asked.

She broadened the smile as if that were answer enough, and gave me the stone. “Thank you very much,” she said. “Your gift will do so much good.”

I watched her move on down the street, pulling another stone from a pocket in her swirling skirt and accosting a kind-looking old lady. She was too old to be Amanda, I thought, though it wasn't always easy to tell. Especially not, I saw a minute later as I stood in the path of another
stone-seller, in view of the otherwordly air of saintliness they wore like badges.

“Would you like to buy a paperweight?”

“Yes,” I said, and we went through the routine again.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Susan,” she said. “What's yours?”

I in my turn gave her the smile and the shake of the head, and moved on.

In half an hour I bought four paperweights. To the fourth girl I said, “Is Amanda out here this morning?”

“Amanda? We haven't got a . . .” She stopped, and her eyes, too, went on a giveaway trek.

“Never mind,” I said, pretending not to see. “Thanks for the stone.”

She smiled the bright empty smile and moved on, and I waited a short while until I could decently drift in front of the girl she'd suddenly glanced at.

She was young, short, smooth-faced, curiously blank about the eyes, and dressed in an anorak and swirling skirt. Her hair was medium brown, like mine, but straight, not slightly curling, and there was no resemblance that I could see between our faces. She might or she might not be my mother's child.

The stone she held out to me was dark blue with black flecks, the size of a plum.

“Very pretty,” I said. “How much?”

I got the stock reply, and gave her a pound.

“Amanda,” I said.

She jumped. She looked at me doubtfully. “My name's not Amanda.”

“What then?”

“Mandy.”

“Mandy what?”

“Mandy North.”

I breathed very slowly, so as not to alarm her, and smiled, and asked her how long she had lived at Zephyr Farm Stables.

“All my life,” she said limpidly.

“With your friends?”

She nodded. “They're my guardians.”

“And you're happy?”

“Yes, of course. We do God's work.”

“How old are you?”

Her doubts returned. “Eighteen . . . yesterday . . . but I'm not supposed to talk about myself . . . only about the stones.”

The childlike quality was very marked. She seemed not exactly to be mentally retarded, but in the old sense, simple. There was no life in her, no fun, no awakening of womanhood. Beside the average teenager she was like a sleepwalker.

“Have you any more stones then?” I asked.

She nodded and produced another one from her skirt. I admired it and agreed to buy it, and said while picking out another note, “What was your mother's name, Mandy?”

She looked scared. “I don't know. You mustn't ask things like that.”

“When you were little did you have a pony?”

For an instant her blank eyes lit with an uncrushable memory, and then she glanced at someone over my left shoulder, and her simple pleasure turned to red-faced shame.

I half turned. A man stood there; not young, not smiling. A tough-looking man a few years older than myself, very clean, very neatly dressed and very annoyed.

“No conversations, Mandy,” he said to her severely. “Remember the rule. Your first day out collecting, and you break the rule. The girls will take you home now. You'll be back on housework, after this. Go along, they're waiting over there.” He nodded sharply to where a group of girls waited together, and watched as she walked leaden-footed to join them. Poor Mandy in disgrace. Poor Amanda. Poor little sister.

“What's your game?” the man said to me. “The girls say you've bought stones from all of them. What are you after?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They're pretty stones.”

He glared at me doubtfully, and he was joined by another similar man who walked across after talking to the now departing girls.

“This guy was asking the girls their names,” he said. “Looking for Amanda.”

“There's no Amanda.”

“Mandy. He talked to her.”

They both looked at me with narrowed eyes, and I decided it was time to leave. They didn't try to stop me when I headed off in the general direction of the parking lot. They didn't try to stop me, but they followed along in my wake.

I didn't think much about it, and turned into the short side road which led to the parking lot. Glancing back to see if they were still following I found not only that they were, but that there were now four of them. The two new ones were young, like the girls.

It seemed too public a place for much to happen; and I suppose by many standards nothing much did. There were three more of them loitering around the parking lot entrance, and all seven of them encircled me outside, before I got there. I pushed one of them to get him out of the way, and got shoved in return by a forest of hands. Shoved sideways along the road a few steps and against a brick wall. If any of the Great British Public saw what was happening, they passed by on the other side of the road.

I stood looking at the seven Colleagues. “What do you want?” I said.

The second of the two older men said, “Why were you asking for Mandy?”

“She's my sister.”

It confounded the two elders. They looked at each other. Then the first one decisively shook his head. “She's
got no family. Her mother died years ago. You're lying. How could you possibly think she's your sister?”

“We don't want you nosing around, making trouble,” the second one said. “If you ask me, he's a reporter.”

The word stung them all into reconciling violence with their strange religion. They banged me against the wall a shade too often, and also pushed and kicked a shade too hard, but apart from trying to shove all seven away like a rugger scrum there wasn't a great deal I could physically do to stop them. It was one of those stupid sorts of scuffles in which no one wanted to go too far. They could have half-killed me easily if they'd meant to, and I could have hurt them more than I did. Escalation seemed a crazy risk when all they were truly delivering was a warning, so I pushed against their close bodies and hacked at a couple of shins, and that was that.

I didn't tell them the one thing which would have saved me the drubbing: that if they could prove that Mandy was indeed my sister she would inherit a fortune.

 

Harold watched my arrival outside the weighing room with a scowl of disfavor.

“You're bloody late,” he said. “And why are you limping?”

“Twisted my ankle.”

“Are you fit to ride?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

“Is Victor Briggs here?” I said.

“No, he isn't. You can stop worrying. Sharpener's out to win, and you can ride him in your usual way. None of those crazy damn-fool heroics. Understood? You look after Sharpener or I'll belt the hide off you. Bring him back whole.”

I nodded, smothering a smile, and he gave me another extensive scowl and walked off.

“Honestly, Philip,” said Steve Millace, wandering past. “He treats you like dirt.”

“No . . . just his way.”

“I wouldn't stand for it.”

I looked at the easy belligerence in the overyoung face and realized that he didn't really know about affection's coming sometimes in a rough package.

“Good luck, today,” I said neutrally, and he said, “Thanks,” and went on into the weighing room. He would never be like his father, I thought. Never as bright, as ingenious, as perceptive, as ruthless or as wicked.

I followed Steve inside and changed into Victor Briggs' colors, feeling the effects of the Colleagues' attentions as an overall ache. Nothing much. A nuisance. Not enough, I hoped, to make any difference to my riding.

When I went outside I found Elgin Yaxley and Bart Underfield, who were slapping each other on the shoulder and looking the faintest bit drunk. Elgin Yaxley peeled off and rolled away, and Bart, turning with an extravagant lack of coordination, bumped into me.

“Hullo,” he said, giving a spirits-laden cough. “You'll be the first to know. Elgin's getting some more horses. They're coming to me, of course. We'll make Lambourn sit up. Make the whole of racing sit up.” He gave me a patronizing leer. “Elgin's a man of ideas.”

“He is indeed,” I said dryly.

Bart remembered he didn't much like me and took his good news off to other, more receptive ears. I stood watching him, thinking that Elgin Yaxley would never kill another horse for the insurance. No insurance company would stand for it twice. But Elgin Yaxley believed himself undetected . . . and people didn't change. If their minds ran to fraud once, they would again. I didn't like the sound of Elgin Yaxley's having ideas.

The old dilemma still remained. If I gave the proof of Elgin Yaxley's fraud to the police or the insurance company, I would have to say how I came by the photograph.
From George Millace . . . who wrote threatening letters. George Millace, husband of Marie, who was climbing back with frail handholds from the wreck of her life. If justice depended on smashing her deeper into soul-wrecking misery, justice would have to wait.

 

Sharpener's race came third on the card. Not the biggest event of the day, which was the fourth race, a brandy-sponsored Gold Cup, but a well-regarded two-mile 'chase. Sharpener had been made favorite because of his win at Kempton and with some of the same
joie de vivre
he sailed around most of Newbury's long oval in fourth place. We lay third at the third-to-last fence, second at the second-to-last, and jumped to the front over the last. I sat down and rode him out with hands and heels, and my God, I thought, I could do with the muscle-power I lost in Horley.