beauty contest figure, but was content as long as she did not burst out of her forty-inch hip dresses. Only when they got tight did she actually shed half a stone. She could if she wanted to. She didn't obsessively want.
'How is your father?' she asked, as I crunched my way through a sandwich of rye crisp-bread and slices of raw tomato.
'It's still hurting him.'
'I would have thought they could have stopped that.'
'Well they do, most of the time. And the sister in charge told me this evening that he will be all right in a day or two. They aren't worried about his leg any more. The wound has started healing cleanly, and it should all be settling down soon and giving him an easier time.'
'He's not young, of course.'
'Sixty-seven,' I agreed.
'The bones will take a fair time to mend.'
'Mm.'
'I suppose you've found someone to hold the fort.'
'No,' I said, 'I'm staying there myself.'
'Oh boy, oh boy,' she said, 'I might have guessed.'
I looked at her enquiringly with my mouth full of bits.
'Anything which smells of challenge is your meat and drink.'
'Not this one,' I said with feeling.
'It will be unpopular with the stable,' she diagnosed, 'and apoplectic to your father, and a riotous success.'
'Correct on the first two, way out on the third.'
She shook her head with the glint of a smile. 'Nothing is impossible for the whiz kids.'
She knew I disliked the journalese term, and I knew she liked to use it. 'My lover is a whiz kid,' she said once into a hush at a sticky party: and the men mobbed her.
She poured me a glass of the marvellous Chateau Lafite 1961 which she sacrilegiously drank with anything from caviare to baked beans. It had seemed to me when she moved in that her belongings consisted almost entirely of fur coats and cases of wine, all of which she had precipitously inherited from her mother and father respectively when they died together in Morocco in an earthquake. She had sold the coats because she thought they made her look fat, and had set about drinking her way gradually through the precious bins that wine merchants were wringing their hands over.
'That wine is an investment,' one of them had said to me in agony.
'But someone's got to drink it,' said Gillie reasonably, and pulled out the cork on the second of the Cheval Blanc 61.
Gillie was so rich, because of her grandmother, that she found it more pleasing to drink the super-duper than to sell it at a profit and develop a taste for Brand X. She had been surprised that I had agreed until I had pointed out that that flat was filled with precious pieces where painted deal would have done the same job. So we sat sometimes with our feet up on a sixteenth century Spanish walnut refectory table which had brought dealers sobbing to their knees and drank her wine out of eighteenth century Waterford glass, and laughed at ourselves, because the only safe way to live with any degree of wealth was to make fun of it.
Gillie had said once, 'I don't see why that table is so special, just because it's been here since the Armada. Just look at those moth-eaten legs-' She pointed to four feet which were pitted, stripped of polish, and worn untidily away.
'In the sixteenth century they used to sluice the stone floors with beer because it whitened them. Beer was fine for the stone, but a bit unfortunate for any wood which got continually splashed.'
'Rotten legs proves it's genuine?'
'Got it in one.'
I was fonder of that table than of anything else I possessed, because on it had been founded all my fortunes. Six months out of Eton, on what I had saved out of sweeping the floors at Sotheby's, I set up in business on my own by pushing a barrow round the outskirts of flourishing country towns and buying anything worthwhile that I was offered. The junk I sold to secondhand shops and the best bits to dealers, and by the time I was seventeen I was thinking about a shop.
I saw the Spanish table in the garage of a man from whom I had just bought a late Victorian chest of drawers. I looked at the wrought iron crossed spars bracing the solid square legs under the four inch thick top, and felt unholy butterflies in my guts.
He had been using it as a trestle for paper hanging, and it was littered with pots of paint.
'I'll buy that, too, if you like,' I said.
'It's only an old work table.'
'Well- how much would you want for it?'
He looked at my barrow, on to which he had just helped me lift the chest of drawers. He looked at the twenty pounds I had paid him for it, and he looked at my shabby jeans and jerkin, and he said kindly, 'No lad, I couldn't rob you. And anyway, look, its legs are all rotten at the bottom.'
'I could afford another twenty,' I said doubtfully. 'But that's about all I've got with me.'
He took a lot of persuading, and in the end would only let me give him fifteen. He shook his head over me, telling me I'd better learn a bit more before I ruined myself. But I cleaned up the table and repolished the beautiful slab of walnut, and I sold it a fortnight later to a dealer I knew from the Sotheby days for two hundred and seventy pounds.
With those proceeds swelling my savings I had opened the first shop, and things never looked back. When I sold out twelve years later to an American syndicate there was a chain of eleven, all bright and clean and filled with treasures.
A short time afterwards, on a sentimental urge, I traced the Spanish table, and bought it back. And I sought out the handyman with his garage and gave him two hundred pounds, which almost caused a heart attack; so I reckoned if anyone was going to put their feet up on that expensive plank, no one had a better right.
'Where did you get all those bruises?' Gillie said, sitting up in the spareroom bed and watching me undress.
I squinted down at the spatter of mauve blotches.
'I was attacked by a centipede.'
She laughed. 'You're hopeless.'
'And I've got to be back at Newmarket by seven tomorrow morning.'
'Stop wasting time, then. It's midnight already.'
I climbed in beside her, and lying together in naked companionship we worked our way through The Times crossword.
It was always better like that. By the time we turned off the light we were relaxed and entwined, and we turned to each other for an act that was a part but not the whole of a relationship.
'I quite love you,' Gillie said. 'Believe it or not.'
'Oh, I believe you,' I said modestly. 'Thousands wouldn't.'
'Stop biting my ear, I don't like it.'
'The books say the ear is an A1 erogenous zone.'
'The books can go stuff themselves.'
'Charming.'
'And all those women's lib publications about The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. So much piffle. Of course it isn't a myth.'
'This is not supposed to be a public meeting,' I said, 'This is supposed to be a spot of private passion.'
'Oh well- if you insist.'
She wriggled more comfortably into my arms.
'I'll tell you something, if you like,' she said.
'If you absolutely must.'
'The answer to four down isn't hallucinated, it's halucinogen.'
I shook. 'Thanks very much.'
'Thought you'd like to know.'
