Edwardian aunt, and how to release it without shocking her was a puzzle.
'Love's easy to learn,' I said. 'It's like taking a risk. You set your mind on it and refuse to be afraid, and in no time you feel terrifically exhilarated and all your inhibitions fly out of the window.'
'And you're left holding the baby,' said Kate, keeping her feet on the ground.
'We could get married first,' I said, smiling at her.
'No. Dear Alan. No. Not yet.' Then she said, almost in a whisper, 'I'm so sorry.'
She got into the car and drove slowly round to the barn garage. I followed behind the car and helped her shut the big garage doors, and walked back with her to the house. On the doorstep she paused and squeezed my hand, and gave me a soft, brief, sisterly kiss.
I didn't want it.
I didn't feel at all like a brother.
CHAPTER TEN
On Tuesday it began to rain, cold slanting rain which lashed at the opening daffodils and covered the flowers with splashed-up mud. The children went to school in shining black capes with sou'-westers pulled down to their eyes and gum boots up to their knees. All that could be seen of William was his cherubic mouth with milk stains at the corners.
Scilla and I spent the day sorting out Bill's clothes and personal belongings. She was far more composed than I would have expected, and seemed to have won through to an acceptance that he was gone and that life must be lived without him. Neither of us had mentioned, since it happened, the night she had spent in my bed, and I had become convinced that when she woke the next morning she had had no memory of it. Grief and drugs had played tricks with her mind.
We sorted Bill's things into piles. The biggest section was to be saved for Henry and William, and into this pile Scilla put not only cuff links and studs and two gold watches, but dinner jackets and a morning suit and grey top hat. I teased her about it.
'It isn't silly,' she said. 'Henry will be needing them in ten years, if not before. He'll be very glad to have them.' And she added a hacking jacket and two new white silk shirts.
'We might just as well put everything back into the cupboards and wait for Henry and William to grow,' I said.
'That's not a bad idea,' said Scilla, bequeathing to the little boys their father's best riding breeches and his warmly lined white mackintosh.
We finished the clothes, went downstairs to the cosy study, and turned our attention to Bill's papers. His desk was full of them. He clearly hated to throw away old bills and letters, and in the bottom drawer we found a bundle of letters that Scilla had written to him before their marriage. She sat on the window seat reading them nostalgically while I sorted out the rest.
Bill had been methodical. The bills were clipped together in chronological order, and the letters were in boxes and files. There were some miscellaneous collections in the pigeon-holes, and a pile of old, empty, used envelopes with day-to-day notes on the backs. They were reminders to himself, mostly, with messages like 'Tell Simpson to mend fence in five-acre field,' and Polly's birthday Tuesday.' I looked through them quickly, hovering them over the heap bound for the wastepaper basket.
I stopped suddenly. On one of them, in Bill's loopy sprawling handwriting, was the name Clifford Tudor, and underneath, a telephone number and an address in Brighton.
'Do you know anyone called Clifford Tudor?' I asked Scilla.
'Never heard of him,' she said without looking up.
If Tudor had asked Bill to ride for him, as he had told me when I drove him from Plumpton to Brighton, it was perfectly natural for Bill to have his name and address. I turned the envelope over. It had come from a local tradesman, whose name was printed on the top left-hand corner, and the postmark was date-stamped January, which meant that Bill had only recently acquired Tudor's address.
I put the envelope in my pocket and went on sorting. After the old envelopes I started on the pigeon-holes. There were old photographs and some pages the children had drawn and written on with straggly letters in their babyhood, address books, luggage labels, a birthday card, school reports, and various notebooks of different shapes and sizes.
'You'd better look through these, Scilla,' I said.
'You look,' she said, glancing up from her letters with a smile. 'You can tell me what's what, and I'll look at them presently.'
Bill had had no secrets. The notebooks mainly contained his day-to-day expenses, jotted down to help his accountant at the annual reckoning. They went back some years. I found the latest, and leafed through it.
School fees, hay for the horses, a new garden hose, a repair to the Jaguar's head-lamp in Bristol, a present for Scilla, a bet on Admiral, a donation to charity. And that was the end. After that came the blank pages which were not going to be filled up.
I looked again at the last entries. A bet on Admiral. Ten pounds to win, Bill had written. And the date was the day of his death. Whatever had been said to Bill about Admiral's falling, he had taken it as a joke and had backed himself to win in spite of it. I would dearly have liked to know what the 'joke' had been. He had told Pete, whose mind was with the horses. He had not told Scilla, nor any of his friends as far as I could find out. Possibly he had thought it so unimportant that after he spoke to Pete it had wholly slipped his mind.
I stacked up the notebooks and began on that last pigeon-hole full of oddments. Among them were fifteen or twenty of the betting tickets issued by bookmakers at race meetings. As evidence of bets lost, they are usually torn up or thrown away by disappointed punters, not carefully preserved in a tidy desk.
'Why did Bill keep these betting tickets?' I asked Scilla.
'Henry had a craze for them not long ago, don't you remember?' she said. 'And after it wore off Bill still brought some home for him. I think he kept them in case William wanted to play bookmakers in his turn.'
I did remember. I had backed a lot of horses for halfpennies with Henry the bookmaker, the little shark. They never won.
The extra tickets Bill had saved for him were from several different bookmakers. It was part of Bill's pleasure at the races to walk among the bookmakers' stands in Tattersall's and put his actual cash on the best odds, instead of betting on credit with a bookmaker on the rails.
'Do you want to keep them for William still?' I asked.
'May as well,' said Scilla.
I put them back in the desk, and finished the job. It was late in the afternoon. We went into the drawing-room, stoked up the fire, and settled into armchairs.
She said, 'Alan, I want to give you something which belonged to Bill. Now, don't say anything until I've finished. I've been wondering what you'd like best, and I'm sure I've chosen right.'
She looked from me to the fire and held her hands out to warm them.
She said, 'You are to have Admiral.'
'No.' I was definite.
'Why not?' She looked up, sounding disappointed.
'Dearest Scilla, it's far too much,' I said. 'I thought you meant something like a cigarette case, a keepsake. You can't possibly give me Admiral. He's worth thousands. You must sell him, or run him in your name if you want to keep him, but you can't give him to me. It wouldn't be fair to you or the children for me to have him.'
'He might be worth thousands if I sold him – but I couldn't sell him, you know. I couldn't bear to do that. He meant so much to Bill. How could I sell him as soon as Bill's back was turned? And if I keep him and run him, I'll have to pay the bills, which might not be easy for a while with death duties hanging over me. If I give him to you, he's in hands Bill would approve of, and you can pay for his keep. I've thought it all out, so you're not to argue. Admiral is yours.'
She meant it.
'Then let me lease him from you,' I said.
