wouldn't give it to her. She kept on and on about it, rabbit. rabbit. Annoyed me, do you see? And then… well…' he shrugged, 'she caught me out.'
'With another woman?' I said-without surprise.
He nodded, unashamed. He'd never been monogamous and couldn't understand why it should be expected. The terrible rows in my childhood had all been cent red on his affairs: while he'd been married to Vivien and then to Joyce, he had maintained Alicia all the time as his mistress. Alicia bore him two children while he was married to Vivien and Joyce, and also one subsequently, when he'd made a fairly honest woman of herat her insistence.
I liked to think he had been faithful finally to Coochie, but on the whole it was improbable, and I was never going to ask.
Malcolm favoured our staying at the Dorchester, but I persuaded him he was too well known there, and we settled finally on the Savoy.
'A suite,' Malcolm said at the reception desk. 'Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting-room, and send up some Bollinger right away.'
I didn't feel like drinking champagne, but Malcolm did. He also ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for us both from room- service, with a bottle of Hine Antique brandy and a box of Havana cigars for comforts.
Idly I totted up the expenses of his day: one solid silver trophy, one two-million-guinea thoroughbred, insurance for same, Cambridge hotel bill, tip for the taxi-driver, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, jumbo suite at the Savoy with trimmings. I wondered how much he was really worth, and whether he intended to spend the lot.
We ate the food and drank the brandy still not totally in accord with each other. The three years' division had been, it seemed, a chasm not as easy to cross as I'd thought. I felt that although I'd meant it when I said I loved him, it was probably the long memories of him that I really loved, not his physical presence here and now, and I could see that if I was going to stay close to him, as I'd promised, I would be learning him again and from a different viewpoint; that each of us, in fact, would newly get to know the other.
'Any day now,' Malcolm said, carefully dislodging ash from his cigar, 'we're going to Australia.'
I absorbed the news and said, 'Are we?'
He nodded. 'We'll need visas. Where's your passport?'
'in my flat. Where's yours?'
'in the house.'
'Then I'll get them both tomorrow,' I said, 'and you stay here.' I paused. 'Are we going to Australia for any special reason?'
'To look at gold mines,' he said. 'And kangaroos.'
After a short silence, I said, 'We don't just have to escape. We do have to find out who's trying to kill you, in order to stop them succeeding.'
'Escape is more attractive,' he said. 'How about a week in Singapore on the way?'
'Anything you say. Only… I'm supposed to ride in a race at Sandown on Friday.'
'I've never understood why you like it. All those cold wet days. All those falls.'
'You get your rush from gold,' I said.
'Danger?' His eyebrows rose. 'Quiet, well-behaved, cautious Ian? Life is a bore without risk, is that it?'
'It's not so extraordinary,' I said.
I'd ridden always as an amateur, unpaid, because something finally held me back from the total dedication needed for turning professional. Race riding was my deepest pleasure, but not my entire life, and in consequence I'd never developed the competitive drive necessary for climbing the pro ladder. I was happy with the rides I got, with the camaraderie of the changing-room, with the wide skies and the horses themselves, and yes, one had to admit it, with the risk.
'Staying near me,' Malcolm said, 'as you've already found out, isn't enormously safe.'
'That's why I'm staying,' I said.
He stared. He said, 'My God,' and he laughed. 'I thought I knew you. Seems I don't.'
He finished his brandy, stubbed out his cigar and decided on bed; and in the morning he was up before me, sitting on a sofa in one of the bathrobes and reading the Sporting Life when I ambled out in the underpants and shirt I'd slept in.
'I've ordered breakfast,' he said. 'And I'm in the paper – how about that?'
I looked where he pointed. His name was certainly there, somewhere near the end of the detailed lists of yesterday's sales. ' Lot 79, ch. colt, 2,070,000 gns. Malcolm Pembroke'.
He put down the paper, well pleased. 'Now, what do we do today?'
'We summon your private eye, we fix a trainer for the colt, I fetch our passports and some clothes, and you stay here.'
Slightly to my surprise, he raised no arguments except to tell me not to be away too long. He was looking rather thoughtfully at the healing graze down my right thigh and the red beginnings of bruising around it.
'The trouble is,' he said, 'I don't have the private eye's phone number. Not with me.' 'We'll get another agency, then, from the yellow pages.'
'Your mother knows it, of course. Joyce knows it.'
'How does she know it?'
'She used him,' he said airily, 'to follow me and Alicia.'
There was nothing, I supposed, which should ever surprise me about my parents.
'When the lawyer fellow said to have Moira tailed, I got the private eye's name from Joyce. After all, he'd done a good job on me and Alicia all those years ago. Too bloody good, when you think of it. So get through to Joyce, Ian, and ask her for the number.'
Bemused, I did as he said.
'Darling,' my mother shrieked down the line. 'Where's your father?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'Darling, do you know what he's bloody done?'
'No… what?'
'He's given a fortune, darling, I mean literally hundreds of thousands, to some wretched little film company to make some absolutely ghastly film about tadpoles or something. Some bloody fool of a man telephoned to find out where your father was, because it seems he promised them even more money which they'd like to have… I ask you! I know you and Malcolm aren't talking, but you've got to do something to stop him.'
'Well,' I said, 'it's his money.'
'Darling, don't be so naive. Someone's going to inherit it, and if only you'd swallow all that bloody pride, as I've told you over and over, it would be yours. If you go on and on with this bloody quarrel, he'll leave it all to Alicia's beastly brood, and I cannot bear the prospect of her gloating for ever more. So make it up with Malcolm at once, darling, and get him to see sense.'
'Calm down,' I said. 'I have.'
'What?'
'Made it up with him.'
'Thank God, at last!' my mother shrieked. 'Then, darling, what are you waiting for? Get onto him straight away and stop him spending your inheritance.'
CHAPTER THREE
Malcolm's house, after three years of Moira's occupancy, had greatly changed.
Malcolm's Victorian house was known as 'Quantum' because of the Latin inscription carved into the lintel over the front door. QUANTUM IN ME FUIT – roughly, 'I did the best I could.'
I went there remembering the comfortable casualness that Coochie had left and not actually expecting that things would be different: and I should have known betteras each wife in turn, Coochie included, had done her best to eradicate all signs of her predecessor. Marrying Malcolm had, for each wife, involved moving into his house, but he had indulged them all, I now understood, in the matter of ambience.
