to leave at home? It would be nice to think so.
At that point, imperceptibly, I fell asleep.
The nerves in my abdomen wouldn’t give up. After about five hours of fighting them unsuccessfully I decided that staying in bed all morning thinking about it was doing no good, and got up and dressed.
Drawn partly against my will, I walked along the passage to Jenny’s room, and went in. It was the small sunny room she had had as a child. She had gone back to it when she left me and it was all hers alone. I had never slept there. The single bed, the relics of childhood, girlish muslin frills on curtains and dressing-table, everything shut me out. The photographs round the room were of her father, her dead mother, her sister, brother-in-law, dogs and horses, but not of me. As far as she could, she had blotted out her marriage.
I walked slowly round touching her things, remembering how much I had loved her. Knowing, too, that there was no going back, and that if she walked through the door at that instant we would not fall into each other’s arms in tearful reconciliation.
Removing a one-eyed teddy bear I sat down for a while on her pink armchair. It’s difficult to say just where a marriage goes wrong, because the accepted reason often isn’t the real one. The rows Jenny and I had had were all ostensibly caused by the same thing: my ambition. Grown finally too heavy for flat racing, I had switched entirely to steeplechasing the season before we married, and I wanted to be champion jumping jockey. To this end I was prepared to eat little, drink less, go to bed early, and not make love if I were racing the next day. It was unfortunate that she liked late-night parties and dancing more than anything else. At first she gave them up willingly, then less willingly, and finally in fury. After that, she started going on her own.
In the end she told me to choose between her and racing. But by then I was indeed champion jockey, and had been for some time, and I couldn’t give it up. So Jenny left. It was just life’s little irony that six months later I lost the racing as well. Gradually since then I had come to realise that a marriage didn’t break up just because one half liked parties and the other didn’t. I thought now that Jenny’s insistence on a gay time was the result of my having failed her in some basic, deeply necessary way. Which did nothing whatsoever for my self-respect or my self-confidence.
I sighed, stood up, replaced the teddy bear, and went downstairs to the drawing-room. Eleven o’clock on a windy autumn morning.
Doria was alone in the big comfortable room, sitting on the window seat and reading the Sunday papers, which lay around her on the floor in a haphazard mess.
‘Hello,’ she said, looking up. ‘What hole did you crawl out of?’
I walked over to the fire and didn’t answer.
‘Poor little man, are his feelings hurt then?’
‘I do have feelings, the same as anyone else.’
‘So you actually can talk?’ she said mockingly. ‘I’d begun to wonder.’
‘Yes, I can talk.’
‘Well, now, tell me all your troubles, little man.’
‘Life is just a bowl of cherries.’
She uncurled herself from the window seat and came across to the fire, looking remarkably out of place in skin-tight leopard printed pants and a black silk shirt.
She was the same height as Jenny, the same height as me, just touching five foot six. As my smallness had always been an asset for racing, I never looked on it as a handicap for life in general, either physical or social. Neither had I ever really understood why so many people thought that height for its own sake was important. But it would have been naive not to take note of the widespread extraordinary assumption that the mind and heart could be measured by tallness. The little man with the big emotion was a stock comic figure. It was utterly irrational. What difference did three or four inches of leg bone make to a man’s essential nature? Perhaps I had been fortunate in coming to terms early with the effect of poor nutrition in a difficult childhood; but it did not stop me understanding why other short men struck back in defensive aggression. There were the pinpricks, for instance, of girls like Doria calling one ‘little’ and intending it as an insult.
‘You’ve dug yourself into a cushy berth here, haven’t you?’ she said, taking a cigarette from the silver box on the mantelpiece.
‘I suppose so.’
‘If I were the Admiral I’d kick you out.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, neglecting to offer her a light. With a mean look she found a box of matches and struck one for herself.
‘Are you ill, or something?’
‘No. Why?’
‘You eat those faddy health foods, and you look such a sickly little creature… I just wondered.’ She blew the smoke down her nose. ‘The Admiral’s daughter must have been pretty desperate for a wedding ring.’
‘Give her her due,’ I said mildly. ‘At least she didn’t pick a rich father-figure twice her age.’
I thought for a moment she meant to go into the corny routine of smacking my face, but as it happened she was holding the cigarette in the hand she needed.
‘You little shit,’ she said instead. A charming girl, altogether.
‘I get along.’
‘Not with me, you don’t.’ Her face was tight. I had struck very deep, it seemed.
‘Where is everyone else?’ I asked, gesturing around the empty room.
‘Out with the Admiral somewhere. And you can take yourself off again too. You’re not wanted in here.’
‘I’m not going. I live here, remember?’
‘You went quick enough last night,’ she sneered. ‘When the Admiral says jump, you jump. But fast, little man. And that I like to see.’
‘The Admiral,’ I pointed out, ‘is the hand that feeds. I don’t bite it.’
‘Boot-licking little creep.’
I grinned at her nastily and sat down in an armchair. I still didn’t feel too good. Pea green and clammy, to be exact. Nothing to be done though, but wait for it to clear off.
Doria tapped ash off her cigarette and looked at me down her nose, thinking up her next attack. Before she could launch it, however, the door opened and her husband came in.
‘Doria,’ he said happily, not immediately seeing me in the armchair, ‘where have you hidden my cigarette case? I shall punish you for it.’
She made a quick movement towards me with her hand and Howard saw me and stopped dead.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said brusquely, the fun-and-games dying abruptly out of his face and voice.
‘Passing the time.’
‘Clear out then. I want to talk to my wife.’
I shook my head and stayed put.
‘Short of picking him up and throwing him out bodily,’ said Doria, ‘you won’t get rid of him. I’ve tried.’
Kraye shrugged. ‘Roland puts up with him. I suppose we can too.’ He picked up one of the newspapers and sat down in an armchair facing me. Doria wandered back to the window-seat, pouting. Kraye straightened up the paper and began to read the front page. Across the back page, the racing page, facing me across the fireplace, the black, bold headlines jumped out.
‘ANOTHER HALLEY?’
Underneath, side by side, were two photographs; one of me, and the other of a boy who had won a big race the day before.
It was by then essential that Kraye should not discover how Charles had misrepresented me; it had gone much too far to be explained away as a joke. The photograph was clearly printed for once. I knew it well. It was an old one which the papers had used several times before, chiefly because it was a good likeness. Even if none of the guests read the racing column, as Doria obviously hadn’t, it might catch their eye in passing, through being in such a conspicuous place.
Kraye finished reading the front page and began to turn the paper over.
‘Mr Kraye,’ I said. ‘Do you have a very big quartz collection yourself?’
