excitements. The first race I'd ever ridden in had seemed to pass in a whirling heaving flurry leaving me breathless and exhausted, but time had stretched out with experience until one could watch and think and even talk.
'Give me room, blast you,' shouted the lieutenant-colonel on one side of me.
'Nice day,' said the earl's son chattily on the other always a clown who enlivened his surroundings.
'Shift your arse!' yelled the mother to her horse, giving him a crack round that part of his anatomy. She was a good rider, hated slow horses, hated not to win, weighed a muscular ten stone and was scornful of the show- jumper, whom she had accused often of incompetence.
The show-jumper, it was true, liked to set his horse right carefully before jumps, as in the show-ring, and hadn't managed to speed up in the several steeplechase races he'd ridden so far. He wasn't in consequence someone to follow into a fence and I avoided him whenever possible.
The journalist was the best jockey in the race, a professional in all but status, and the grandfather was the worst but full of splendid reckless courage. More or less in a bunch, the whole lot of us came round the bottom bend and tackled the last three jumps of the first circuit. The aunt was still in front, then came the lieutenant- colonel, myself and the earl's son in a row, then the mother just behind, with the show-jumper and the grandfather beside her. I couldn't see the journalist: somewhere in the rear, no doubt, biding his wily time.
The lieutenant-colonel's mount made a proper hash of the last of the three fences, jogging both of his rider's feet out of the irons and tipping the military backside into the air somewhere in the region of the horse's mane. Landing alongside and gathering my reins, I saw that the lieutenant-colonel's balance was hopelessly progressing down the horse's galloping shoulder as he fought without success to pull himself back into the saddle.
I put out an arm, grasped his jersey and yanked him upwards and backwards, shifting his disastrous centre of gravity into a more manageable place and leaving him slowing and bumping in my wake as he sat down solidly in the saddle, trying to put his feet back into his flying stirrups, which was never very easy at thirty miles an hour.
He had breathing space to collect things going up the hill, though, as we all did, and we swept round the top bend and down to the difficult fence again with not much change in order from the first time.
Someone had once long ago pulled me back into the saddle in that same way: it was fairly common in jump racing. Someone had also once tipped me straight into the air with an upward wrench of my heel, but that was another story. The lieutenant-colonel was saying 'Thanks' and also 'Move over, you're crowding me,' more or less in the same breath. After crossing the water jump for the second time over on the far side of the track, the show-jumper made a spurt to the front and then slowed almost to a standstill on landing over the next fence, having jumped especially pedantically, and the aunt crashed into the back of him with some singularly un-aunt-like language.
'Lovely lady,' said the earl's son, appreciatively, as we passed the debacle. 'How are you going yourself?'
'Not bad,' I said. 'How are you?'
We jumped the last of the seven far-side fences together and in front, and put all our energies into staying there round the long last bend and over the three last fences. I could hear horses thudding behind me and the mother's voice exhorting her slow coach Approaching the Pond fence, I could sense the earl's son's horse beginning to tire, I could see that precious winning post far ahead and the way to it clear, and for at least a few moments I thought I might win. But then the lieutenant-colonel reappeared fast at my elbow, still shouting for room, and between the last two fences, as I'd feared he would, the journalist materialised from the outback and made it look easy, and Young Higgins tired into Middle-Aged Higgins on the hill.
He and I finished third, which wasn't too bad, with the earl's son, persevering, not far away fourth.
'A nice afternoon out,' he said happily as we trotted back together and I looked at the lights in his eyes and saw it was the same for him as for me, a high that one couldn't put into words, an adventure of body and spirit that made of dismounting and walking on the ground a literal coming down to earth.
Jo was pleased enough, patting Young Higgins hard. 'Ran a great race, didn't you, old boy? jumped like a stag.'
'You'd have been second,' said George, who had good binoculars, 'if you'd let the lieutenant-colonel fall off.'
'Yeah, well,' I said, unbuckling the girths, 'there were a lot of hooves down there.'
George smiled. 'Don't forget to weigh in.' (He said it every time.) 'Come for a drink in the Owners' bar when you've changed.'
I accepted. It was part of the ritual, part of the bargain. They liked to re-live Young Higgins' outing fence for fence in return for having given me the ride. They were still standing in the unsaddling enclosure talking to friends when I went out again in street clothes, and with welcoming smiles waved me into their group. None of my own family being in sight, I went with them without problems and, over glasses of Jo's favourite brandy and ginger ale, earned my afternoon's fun by describing it.
I returned to the weighing-room area afterwards and found that not only were all the same family members still on the racecourse, but that they had coalesced into an angry swarm and had been joined by one of the queen bees herself, my mother Joyce.
Joyce, in fur and a green hat, was a rinsed blonde with greenish eyes behind contact lenses which seldom missed a trick in life as in cards. Dismayed but blank-faced, I gave her a dutiful peck on her smooth cheek which, it seemed, she was in no mood to receive.
'Darling,' she said, the syllables sizzling with displeasure, 'did you or did you not send that weasel Norman West to check up on my whereabouts last Friday?'
'Er,' I said.
'Did you or did you not send him sniffing round Vivien on the same errand?'
'Well,' I said, half smiling, 'I wouldn't have put it as crudely, but I suppose so, yes.'
The battery of eyes from the others was as friendly as napalm.
Why? 'Joyce snapped.
'Didn't Norman West tell you?'
She said impatiently, 'He said something nonsensical about Malcolm being attacked. I told him if Malcolm had been attacked, I would have heard of it.'
'Malcolm was very nearly killed,' I said flatly. 'He and I asked Norman West to make sure that none of you could have done it.'
Joyce demanded to be told what had happened to Malcolm, and I told her. She and all the others listened with open mouths and every evidence of shock, and if there was knowledge, not ignorance, behind any of the horrified eyes, I couldn't discern it.
'Poor Daddy!' Serena exclaimed. 'How beastly.'
'A matter for the police,' Donald said forcefully.
'I agree,' I said. 'I'm surprised they haven't been to see all of you already, as they did when Moira died.'
Edwin said, with a shake of the head, 'How near, how near,' and then, hearing the regret in his voice as clearly as I did, added hurriedly, 'What a blessing he woke up.'
'When the police make their enquiries,' I said, 'they don't exactly report the results to Malcolm. He wants to make sure for himself that none of the family was at Quantum last Friday afternoon. If you cooperate with Norman West when he gets to you, you'll set Malcolm's mind at rest.'
'And what if we can't prove where we were?' Debs asked.
'Or even remember?' Lucy said.
'Malcolm will have to live with it,' Joyce said crisply.
'Living with it would present him less problem,' I Said dryly. 'It's dying he wants to avoid.'
They stared at me in silence. The reality of Moira's murder had been to them, I guessed, as to me, a slow- burning fuse, with seemingly no bad consequences at first, but with accelerating worries as time passed. Perhaps they, as I had done, had clung to the motiveless-intruder-from-outside theory at first because the alternative was surely unthinkable, but in the weeks since then, they must at least have begun to wonder. The fuse would heat soon into active suspicions, I saw, which might tear apart and finally scatter for ever the fragile family fabric.
Would I mind, I thought? Not if I still had Malcolm… and perhaps Ferdinand and Joyce… and maybe Lucy, or Thomas… Serena… would I care if I never again laid eyes on Gervase?
The answer, surprisingly enough, was yes, I would mind. Imperfect, quarrelsome, ramshackle as it was, the
