paid.
'Does he like balloons?' he asked, his eyebrows rising.
'He gets frustrated sometimes. I blow the balloons up, and he bursts them.'
Malcolm looked surprised and in some ways disturbed. 'I didn't know he could feel frustration.'
'it seems like that. As if sometimes he half remembers us… but can't quite.'
'Poor boy.'
We drove soberly onwards and up the drive of the still splendid- looking Georgian house which lay mellow and symmetrical in the autumn sunshine. Inside, its near fifty rooms had been adapted and transformed in the heyday of private medicine into a highly comfortable hospital for mostly chronic, mostly old, mostly rich patients. Short- stay patients came and went, usually convalescing after major operations performed elsewhere, but in general one saw the same faces month after month: the same faces ageing, suffering, waiting for release. Dreadfully depressing, I found it, but for Robin, it was true, it seemed the perfect haven, arrived at after two unsuccessful stays in more apparently suitable homes involving other children, bright colours, breezy nurses and jollying atmospheres. Robin seemed better with peace, quiet and no demands, and Malcolm had finally acted against professional advice to give them to him.
Robin had a large room on the ground floor with french doors opening on to a walled garden. He seldom went out into the garden, but he preferred the doors open in all weathers, including snow- storms. Apart from that, he was docile and easy to deal with, and if anyone had speculated on the upheavals that might happen soon if puberty took its natural course, they hadn't mentioned it in my hearing.
He looked at us blankly, as usual. He seldom spoke, though he did retain the ability to make words: it was just that he seemed to have few thoughts to utter. Brain damage of that magnitude was idiosyncratic, we'd been told, resulting in behaviour individual to each victim. Robin spoke rarely and then only to himself, in private, when he didn't expect to be overheard: the nurses sometimes heard him, and had told us, but said he stopped as soon as he saw them. I'd asked them what he said, but they didn't know, except for words like 'shoes' and 'bread' and 'floor': ordinary words. They didn't know why he wouldn't speak at other times. They were sure, though, that he understood a fair amount of what others said, even if in a haze.
We gave him some pieces of chocolate which he ate, and unwrapped the toys for him which he fingered but didn't play with. He looked at the balloon packet without emotion. It wasn't a frustration day: on those, he looked at the packet and made blowing noises with his mouth.
We sat with him for quite a while, talking, telling him who we were while he wandered around the room. He looked at our faces from time to time, and touched my nose once with his finger as if exploring that I was really there, but there was no connection with our minds. He looked healthy, good looking, a fine boy: heart-breaking, as always.
A nurse came in the end, middle-aged, kind-faced, to take him to a dining-room for lunch, and Malcolm and I transferred to the office where my father was given a saviour's welcome and offered a reviving scotch.
'Your son, slow progress, I'm afraid.' Earnest, dedicated people.
Malcolm nodded. No progress would have been more accurate.
'We do our best for him always.'
'Yes, I know.'
Malcolm drank the scotch, shook their hands, made our farewells. We left, as I always left, in sadness, silence and regret.
'So bloody unfair,' Malcolm said halfway back to London. 'He ought to be laughing, talking, roaring through life.'
'Yes.'
'I can't bear to see him, and I can't bear not to. I'd give all my money to have him well again.'
'And make a new fortune afterwards,' I said.
'Well, yeah, why not?' He laughed, but still with gloom. 'it would have been better if he'd died with the others. Life's a bugger, sometimes, isn't it?'
The gloom lasted back to the Savoy and through the next bottle of Bollinger, but by afternoon Malcolm was complaining of the inactivity I'd thrust upon him and wanting to visit cronies in the City. Unpredictability be our shield, I prayed, and kept my eyes open for speeding cars; but we saw the day out safely in offices, bars, clubs and a restaurant, during which time Malcolm increased his wealth by gambling a tenner at evens on the day's closing price of gold which fell by two pounds when the trend was upwards.
'It'll shoot right up next year, you watch.'
On Friday, despite my pleas for sanity, he insisted on accompanying me to Sandown Park races.
'You'll be safer here,' I protested, 'in the suite.'
'I shan't FEEL safer.'
'At the races, I can't stay beside you.'
'Who's to know I'll be there?'
I gazed at him. 'Anyone who guesses we are now together could know. They'll know how to find me, if they look in the papers.'
'Then don't go.'
'I'm going. You stay here.' I saw, however, that the deep underlying apprehension which he tried to suppress most of the time would erupt into acute nervous anxiety if I left him alone in the suite for several hours, and that he might, out of boredom, do something much sillier than going to the races, like convincing himself that anyone in his family would keep a secret if he asked it.
Accordingly I drove him south of London and took him through the jockeys' entrance gate to the weighing- room area where he made his afternoon a lot safer by meeting yet another crony and being instantly invited to lunch in the holy of holies.
'Do you have cronies all over the world?' I asked.
'Certainly,' he said, smiling broadly. 'Anyone I've known for five minutes is a crony, if I get on with them.'
I believed him. Malcolm wasn't easy to forget, nor was he hard to like. I saw the genuine pleasure in his immediate host's face as they walked away together, talking, and reflected that Malcolm would have been a success in whatever career he had chosen, that success was part of his character, like generosity, like headlong rashness.
I was due to ride in the second race, a steeplechase for amateurs, and as usual had arrived two prudent hours in advance. I turned away from watching Malcolm and looked around for the owner of the horse I was about to partner and found my path blocked by a substantial lady in a wide brown cape. Of all the members of the family, she was the last I would have expected to see on a racecourse.
'Ian,' she said accusingly, almost as if I'd been pretending to be someone else.
'Hello.'
'Where have you been? Why don't you answer your telephone?'
Lucy, my elder half-sister. Lucy, the poet.
Lucy's husband Edwin was, as always, to be found at her side, rather as if he had no separate life. The leech, Malcolm had called him unkindly in the past. From a Bugg to a leech.
Lucy was blessed with an un selfconsciousness about her weight which stemmed both from un worldliness and an over belief in health foods.
'But nuts and raisins are good for you,' she would say, eating them by the kilo. 'Bodily vanity, like intellectual arrogance, is a sickness of the soul.'
She was forty-two, my sister, with thick straight brown hair uncompromisingly cut, large brown eyes, her mother's high cheekbones and her father's strong nose. She was as noticeable in her own way as Malcolm was himself, and not only because of her shapeless clothes and dedicated absence of cosmetics. Malcolm's vitality ran in her too, though in different directions, expressing itself in vigour of thought and language.
I had often, in the past, wondered why someone as talented and strong minded as she shouldn't have made a marriage of equal minds, but in recent years had come to think she had settled for a nonentity like Edwin because the very absence of competition freed her to be wholly herself.
'Edwin is concerned, 'she said, 'that Malcolm is leaving his senses.'
For Edwin, read Lucy, I thought. She had a trick of ascribing her own thoughts to her husband, if she thought
