Was I older and wiser now? I like to think that I had changed but I probably hadn’t.
For a long time after Jenny, I had been afraid of starting any relationship. I feared that pain and despair would quickly follow the love and excitement. I’d enjoyed a few fleeting encounters but I had always been looking for the way out, a simple pain-free exit, a return to the solitary male condition I imagined was my lot. Forever the failed husband, fearful of making the same mistake again.
With Marina, it was very different.
Sure, I had fancied her at our first meeting, a dinner party at a mutual friend’s house. Who wouldn’t? She was tall, fair and beautiful. But my first attempts to ask her out had fallen on stony ground. She had confided in the friend that she wasn’t sure about going out with a man so much shorter than she, and with only one hand to boot.
Fortunately for me, the friend had batted on my team and had convinced Marina that a single date wasn’t going to be the end of the world so, reluctantly, she had agreed. I decided against an extravagant and expensive evening at the Opera and The Ivy, and had plumped for live jazz downstairs at Pizza on the Park.
‘I hate jazz,’ she had said as we arrived. Not a great start.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘You choose.’
She had opted for a quiet pizza and a bottle of wine upstairs. We had sat in increasingly warm companionship for three hours and a second bottle before she took a taxi home, alone.
I remembered walking back to Ebury Street that night, not disappointed that I was alone but elated that I hadn’t asked her to join me. I wasn’t sure why.
She telephoned me in the morning (at least I had given her my number) to thank me for dinner and we had chatted for an hour. Eventually she had asked if I would like to meet for lunch, ‘a lovely place’ she knew, ‘super food’, ‘wonderful ambiance’. Sure, I had said, why not.
She had arrived before me and was waiting on a bench outside the cafe in Regent’s Park. We had sampled the ‘super food’: I had chosen an over-cooked hamburger whilst she had selected a hot dog with congealed onions and a line of bright yellow mustard. But I had had to agree that the ambiance was wonderful. We had strolled through the park to the lake and had fed the last bit of our lunches to the ducks that had had the good sense to decline. By the time we had walked back to my car, we were holding hands and making plans for the evening.
It had been more than a month later that she had first come willingly and eagerly to my bed. We had both been slightly wary and fearful of the encounter. Not to disappoint, not to repel; worse, not to disgust.
Our fears were unfounded. We had slipped delightedly into each other’s arms between the sheets. Such a release of emotion. Such an understanding of love. Such joy. It had been an adventure, an expedition, a voyage of discovery and it had been hugely satisfying to both of us. We had drifted contentedly to sleep still entwined.
I had woken early as I always did, trained by a life of rising before dawn to ride. I had lain in the dark thinking not how I was to escape this encounter but how to make it permanent. Very scary.
And here we were, some eighteen months later. I loved her more and more each day, a situation that was wonderfully reciprocated. To love someone is a delight, to be loved back as well is a joy beyond measure.
I snuggled up to her back.
‘I love you,’ I whispered into her ear.
‘You’re only saying that because you want a bit of nookie,’ she replied.
‘No, I mean it.’
But we had a bit of nookie nevertheless.
CHAPTER 7
With Jonny Enstone’s reputation for promptness in mind, I arrived at the Peers’ Entrance at one o’clock exactly. ‘Peer’ is a strange title really for a member of the House of Lords since the dictionary definition of ‘peer’ is ‘a person of equal rank’ and the Peers with a capital P were clearly not. Even amongst themselves there were five levels with Duke at the top and Baron at the bottom.
The tones of Big Ben were still ringing in my ears as I stepped into the revolving door, a time-warp portal rotating me from the hustle and bustle of 21st-century London on the outside to the sedate world of 19th-century quiet and formality on the inside.
The staff still wore knee breeches and silk stockings, their tailcoats and starched collars looking somewhat incongruous next to machine-gun-toting police in flak jackets, such are the necessities in our fear-of-terrorist- atrocity society.
Lord Enstone was already there and I noticed him glance at his watch as I arrived. He seemed to nod with approval and came forward to shake my hand.
‘Sid, glad you could make it,’ he said.
Glad I could make it on time, I thought.
‘Let’s go and find ourselves a drink.’
He waited as I went to pass through the security checkpoint.
‘Anything metal in your pockets, sir?’
I obediently emptied keys and loose change into the plastic tray provided. What to do? Should I also remove the pound and a half of steel from the end of my left arm and put it in the tray? I had learnt from multiple experiences at airports that to do so usually caused more problems than leaving it where it was.
I stepped through the detector and, predictably, it went into palpitations.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the security man. ‘Please stand with your legs apart and arms out to your side.’
He waved a black wand up and down my legs and around my waist without success and was about to wave me on through when the wand went berserk at my left wrist. The poor chap was quite startled when he switched to a manual search and discovered the hard fibreglass shell that constituted my lower arm.
Lord Enstone had been watching this exchange with ill-disguised amusement and now burst into laughter.
‘Why didn’t you tell him?’ he asked.
‘He would ask me to take it off and it’s such a bore. It’s normally easier this way.’
The guard regained his composure and, with an embarrassed chuckle, he allowed me to pass. I thought about getting a gun installed to shoot through my middle finger. It was a common failing of security that, having discovered I had a prosthetic hand, they rarely checked it well enough to determine if I had a firearm or a knife built into it.
Jonny Enstone was in his element and clearly loved being a member of what has often been described as the best gentlemen’s club in London (women were not admitted until 1958, and then reluctantly). We climbed one of the hundred or so staircases in the Palace of Westminster and strolled along bookcase-flanked corridors to the peers’ bar overlooking the Thames.
‘Afternoon, my lord,’ said the barman.
Jonny Enstone obviously enjoyed being called ‘my lord’.
‘Afternoon, Eric. G amp; T for me, please. You, Sid?’
‘G amp; T would be fine, thank you.’
We took our drinks over to a small table by the window and sat and discussed the state of the weather.
‘Now, Sid,’ said his lordship at last, ‘how can I help?’
‘Well, sir,’ I started, opting for a formality that matched our surroundings, ‘after our little chat at Cheltenham I was hoping you might be able to give me some more details of why you think that Bill Burton and Huw Walker were fixing the races in which your horses ran.’ I purposely kept my voice low and he leaned closer to hear.
‘Did you hear that Burton’s been arrested for killing Walker?’ he replied.
‘I was there when it happened,’ I said.
‘Were you indeed!’ He made it sound like an accusation in the same way that Carlisle had done.
‘I went to ask him about your horses but never got the chance.’
‘Fancy Burton being a murderer,’ he said. ‘One never can tell.’
‘He hasn’t been convicted yet. Maybe the police have the wrong man.’
‘No smoke without fire,’ he said. I thought about some of the many rumours that surrounded his business
