Outside, blinking in the low-angled sunshine, Daisy was washing her car. She was straddled, panting, over the bonnet trying to clean the far side of the front window. Her left breast had escaped from her bikini. Moving to the right so as not to embarrass her, Ricky took the cloth from her.
‘Shove over. I’ll do it.’
The following week brought no news from either Red or Drew. Perdita was getting frantic about Spotty when, at twilight one warm evening, Angel suddenly rolled up in a new Aston Martin with a pig trailer rattling behind, out of which towered an outraged and decidedly car-sick Spotty.
‘I keednap heem,’ said Angel to an ecstatic Perdita, who instantly revived after a gruelling twelve-hour stint at Ricky’s. ‘Bart’s in New York, Red in Sotogrande. Spotty was being flown back to the States for the Westchester tomorrow, so I steal heem. He not very pleased.’
Spotty, however, was so thrilled to see Perdita that he jumped out of the trailer while he was still tied up, nearly strangling himself. Having thanked Angel incoherently, Perdita leapt on Spotty’s red-and-white back and roared him off up the ride to show Ricky.
‘Ees better?’ Angel asked Daisy.
‘Better now she’s seen you. She’s been desperately down.’
‘She can only go up now. Red is a preek,’ said Angel.
The only time Daisy had seen Angel he’d been trying to murder Drew in the Queen’s Cup, scowling under his bright blue hat, with expletives pouring from his pouting lips, and she had thought him the devil incarnate. But this soulful young man with the snake hips, the tumbled curls and the beautiful carved face, waving a bottle of Dom Perignon and a huge bunch of Regale lilies picked from Bart’s garden, utterly disarmed her.
‘For you,’ he said. ‘Perdita have enough presents.’
‘You really shouldn’t,’ mumbled Daisy.
‘I reech now,’ said Angel simply.
As he opened the bottle, he explained that he was going to play for Victor Kaputnik for three times as much as Drew’d been getting and Victor, enraged at not winning any of the major cups in England, had asked Angel to find him twenty horses.
‘I shall make ten thousand dollars on each horse.’
‘Will you have to ride Sharon as well?’ asked Daisy, holding out a glass as the cork flew out.
‘No. She about to leave Veector for David Waterlane, so I have not to be service station.’
Daisy giggled. ‘Is Veector furious?’
‘Not at all. ’E find new bumbo. Ees easy when you’re reech.’
‘And is Drew upset he’s been sacked?’ It was like putting a bare foot on broken glass. ‘Was he actually sacked?’
‘’E was,’ said Angel with satisfaction. ‘Slimy bastard.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Daisy, raising her glass. ‘Shall we go into the garden?’
Outside it was all blue and misty, with the ravages of the last ten days’ heatwave softened by the half-light and the snow-white flowers of the bindweed hanging luminous.
‘They’re supposed to stay open all night if there’s a moon,’ said Daisy. ‘So life’s good?’
‘Life is so, so,’ said Angel, then, succumbing to Daisy’s sweet enquiring gaze, ‘No, it’s fucking ’orrible. Since Bibi walk out after ‘Urlingham Ball, I am totally meeserable. She work too ’ard, I was angry, I play the pitch, so many other women, but it deedn’t work and now she’s ‘aving an affair with Drew Benedict.’
‘Oooh,’ wailed Daisy. Then, at Angel’s look of surprise: ‘I’m just so sorry for you.’
‘First ’e torture me in the Falklands, then ’e torture me in Eengland, and now in America. Smarmy Eenglish deekhead!’ Angel filled up their glasses.
‘He is, isn’t he?’ agreed Daisy. ‘Why don’t you ring her?’
‘It would be weakness.’
‘On the contrary, it would be very brave,’ urged Daisy, thinking that if the smarmy English dickhead rang her now she would swim straight across the Atlantic to see him. ‘I bet she’s as miserable as you,’ she went on. It wasn’t because she wanted to break up Bibi and Drew, but because she couldn’t imagine anyone loving Bibi more than this stormy, troubled boy.
They finished the champagne and started on Daisy’s Muscadet. Angel, not a heavy drinker, couldn’t manage to dial Bibi’s number in Florida, so Daisy, who wasn’t much soberer, had to do it for him and finally handed him over to Bibi’s Filipino maid. Angel launched into a raging torrent of Spanish.
He was sober when he came off the telephone. All the bounce and bubble had gone out of him.
‘Bibi ’as gone into the ’ospital for an operation, Carmen won’t say what for, so I sack her.’
He tried Red in Sotogrande and Grace in Connecticut; they were both out. He was damned if he was going to ring Bart. The hospital would say nothing except that Mrs Solis de Gonzales had been admitted.
‘At least she keep my name. I know eet ees abortion.’ He had to count on his fingers three times to work it out. ‘Could be my child. Could be Drew’s.’ His face blackened.
Thrusting a fistful of tenners into Daisy’s hands to pay for the telephone calls, he was out of the house in an instant, storming off to Heathrow to catch the next plane to Palm Beach.
Sadly, tearfully, Daisy was finishing off the Muscadet and wishing someone had ever loved her as much as that when the telephone rang. Alas, it was not Drew but Sharon Kaputnik.
‘Ay’ve just seen a fraightfully good paintin’ of Chessie Alderton in the Noddy. Dave – we’re together now – wants a portrait of me to grace the Long Gallery. Ay wonder if you’d oblaige, Daisy?’
Angel took a taxi from Miami Airport. His only luggage was his polo sticks, which he left as security for the driver, as he bounded out of the moving car and dived through a door marked Emergency into the hospital.
The receptionist, who was used to the histrionics and antics of South American polo players, had never seen one so fired up as Angel.
‘There were flames coming out of his hair, the glass petition nearly melted,’ she told her friend that evening. ‘Then I had to explain to him that Mrs Gonzales had gone down to the theatre. Sister Passolini had just stopped by to say “Hi”, when this fruitcake falls on her, grabs her by the throat, threatening strangulation if she doesn’t take him to the theatre right away. I buzzed a guard, but this Argy KOed him and ran off before we could stop him.’
Loose in the hospital, Angel had raced past rest rooms and elevators and started throwing open doors. In the first room, he found a lot of fat women gazing at a nurse who was drawing a large carrot on the blackboard.
‘You can’t go in there,’ screeched Sister Passolini who, rather taken by Angel, had caught up with him. ‘That’s Over-Eaters Anonymous. Or in there!’ she added in horror, as Angel discovered a lot of sheepish-looking men gazing at another blackboard on which a male nurse with a beard was drawing an even bigger carrot, ‘That’s the Impotency Support Group. You won’t find your wife in there, nor in Freedom from Smoking next door, and beyond that are all the Consultation Rooms. Try the next floor straight on to the end of the passage,’ she whispered. ‘You better beat it. The heavy brigade has just arrived.’
Chased by two more security guards, Angel sprinted up the stairs past a sign saying, ‘Please be quiet, Theatre in Use’. To left and right he was faced with rows of pale grey doors. Seeing a blonde nurse passing by with a syringe in a kidney-shaped bowl, Angel grabbed her. ‘My wife, Bibi Gonzales,’ he panted. ‘Please, she is somewhere in here.’
‘Wasn’t she Bibi Alderton?’ asked the blonde nurse. ‘Right? She’s in there, first left after the swing doors, but they’re operating. You can’t go in.’
When the two guards tried to restrain him, Angel fobbed them off with fifty dollars each and started breaking up equipment. A trolley loaded with instruments went flying, a kidney machine crashed to the floor, a cupboard full of medicines was wrenched off the wall and went flying through the window. Angel was just kicking over an X-ray machine when a man in a green overall wearing a mask and rubber gloves backed out through the swing doors, crunching on the glass.
‘What the hell’s going on? I’m about to operate.’
Angel leapt on him, grabbing him by his gown, shoving him against the wall.
‘You not going to abort my child,’ he hissed.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ squawked the surgeon. ‘I don’t do terminations.’
Angel’s mad eyes were suddenly vast with fear. ‘Ees more serious? She ’ave cancer? Oh, my poor Bibi.’
‘For goodness sake, cool it,’ said the blonde nurse in amusement. Then, ignoring the frantic signals of the surgeon: ‘Mrs Gonzales is only having a nose job.’
