Dick Francis - Silks

‘And?’

‘He said that my bones would be fully healed and as good as new in about three months, but he wasn’t so sure about my brain.’

‘What about your brain?’ she asked.

‘He said it couldn’t take too many bangs like that.’

‘Seems all right to me,’ she said, smiling at me broadly with her mouth slightly open and all her perfect top teeth showing. The sparkle in her lovely blue eyes was there again, the same sparkle I had noticed at the equine hospital at our first meeting.

I sat opposite her and smiled back. But then suddenly I looked away, almost in embarrassment.

‘Tell me about her,’ she said.

‘About who?’ I asked. But I knew who she meant before she replied.

‘Angela.’

‘There’s not much to tell really,’ I said, trying to deflect her direct approach. ‘Why do you want to know?’

She sat silently for a while, looking up at the ceiling as if making a decision. The jury was out deliberating.

Finally, she looked down again at my face and answered softly, ‘I need to know what I’m up against.’

I looked down at the table and cupped my mouth and nose in my hands. I breathed out heavily once or twice, feeling the hot air on my skin. Eleanor just sat quietly, leaning forward slightly, with an expectant expression on her face.

‘We met while I was doing the Bar Vocational Course, that’s the course you study to become a barrister,’ I said. ‘Angela was a second-year student at King’s reading clinical psychology. We were both guests at the same party and we just clicked. Right there and then.

‘We got married six months after that first meeting, in spite of her parents’ disapproval. They wanted her to wait until after she had finished her degree but we were so keen to marry straight away. There was a huge row and they never really forgave us. Silly really, but it seemed to matter so much to us back then. Now her mother blames me for her death.’

Eleanor reached forward across the table and took my hand.

‘We were so blissfully happy together for five years. She wanted to have a baby as soon as we were married but I talked her into waiting until she had qualified, but then we discovered that having a child was not as straight forward as we thought. We tried for ages without success, but a scan then showed that her tubes were blocked so we had to try for in vitro, you know, test-tube baby and all that. And that worked absolutely straight away. It was brilliant. And we were both so pleased that she was carrying a boy.’

I stopped. Tears welled in my eyes for Angela and our unborn son.

‘She was eight months pregnant when she died.’ I had to stop again and take a few deep breaths. Eleanor went on holding my hand and saying nothing.

‘It was a pulmonary embolism,’ I said. ‘I found her lying on the floor. The doctors said it would have been very sudden.’ I sighed loudly. ‘That was more than seven years ago now. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.’ I let go of Eleanor’s hand and held the cotton table napkin up to my face. It was as much as I could do not to sob.

We sat there together in silence for what felt like ages until a waiter came over and asked us if we wanted some more coffee.

‘Thanks,’ I said, back in control. He poured the hot black liquid into our cups and then left us alone again.

‘So,’ said Eleanor with a sigh. ‘Not much chance for me then.’

We laughed, a short embarrassed laugh.

‘Give me some more time,’ I said. But I’d had seven years. How much longer did I need?

‘How much more time?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said in exasperation.

‘But I need to,’ she said in all seriousness. She stared at my face. ‘I like you, Mister Barrister. I like you a lot. But I do need some response if I’m going to invest my time and my emotions. I’m thirty-three years old and, as they say, my body clock is ticking. I want…’ She tailed off and dropped her eyes.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You… I think,’ she said, suddenly looking back up at my face. ‘And a house and kids and… family life.’ She paused and I waited patiently. ‘When I started out as a vet, with all the years of training, I only cared about my job and my career. I loved it, and I still do. But now I find I need more than just that. I realize that I want what my parents had,’ she said. ‘Love, home and family.’ She paused again for a moment and took my hand again in hers. ‘And I think I want it with you.’

Eleanor went back to her hotel near Tower Bridge for the night and I took a taxi home to Barnes. It wasn’t that we took a conscious decision to go in diametrically opposite directions, it was just sensible logistically. The equine symposium would start again for her at nine in the morning while, at the same time, I was due to be collected from my home by a car from a private hire company and taken to Bullingdon Prison to see my client. However, I now spent the whole journey home from the restaurant, along the Cromwell Road, past the V &A and Natural History museums, under the dark sloping walls of the London Ark and across Hammersmith Bridge, wondering whether I should ask the taxi driver to turn round and take me back to Eleanor at the Tower.

Then, quite suddenly and before I had made up my mind, we were outside my home at Ranelagh Avenue in Barnes. I clambered unsteadily out of the cab and paid off the driver, who gunned his engine and noisily departed, no doubt back to the West End to find another late-night passenger in need of a ride home.

I stood for a moment on my crutches and looked at the old Edwardian property with its two side-by-side front doors and I speculated about what it was that had kept me here these past seven years. Perhaps I really had been foolish enough to think that life would have somehow returned to the blissful time with Angela. Maybe I had been living too long with my head in the sand and now was the time to make a fresh start with someone different. But how could I dispel the feeling that doing so would somehow be disloyal to Angela’s memory?

A car turned slowly into the far end of the avenue and all of a sudden I felt very vulnerable, standing alone on the poorly lit pavement at nearly midnight with no one else about, no one this time to come running to my rescue if I shouted. Even my downstairs neighbour’s lights were out. And Julian Trent, or whoever had been into my house to take that photograph, knew exactly where I lived.

I hurried as best I could up the half a dozen outside steps to the front doors and fumbled with my keys and the crutches. The car’s headlights moved little by little down the road towards me and then swept on past, round the bend and out of sight.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief, found the right key, and let myself in. I leaned up against the closed front door and found that I was trembling. I slid the bolt across behind me and carefully negotiated the stairs.

Why did I exist like this? I had asked myself that question umpteen times over the past weeks as I had struggled with the six steps up from the street to my front door and then the thirteen steps up from there to my sitting room. I had often not bothered with the twelve more to my bedroom, sleeping, instead, stretched out on the sofa. I had no garden, no terrace, no deck, not even a balcony. Just a view of Barnes Common, and even that was obscured in the summer months from all but the topmost bedroom windows by the leaves on the trees.

I had stayed here for the memories but maybe it was time now to make more memories elsewhere. Time to shake off this half-life existence. Time to live my life again to the full.

Steve Mitchell was a shell of his former self. As a jockey, he was well used to existing on meagre rations, and prison food was not exactly appealing to the discerning palate. But it was not the lack of food that had made the greatest difference to Steve, it was the lack of his daily diet of riding up to six races with the muscle toning and stamina which comes from regular exercise as a professional sportsman. He looked pale, thin and unfit, because he was, but he seemed to be coping fairly well mentally, considering the circumstances. Steeplechase jockeys had to be strong in mind as well as in body, to cope with the inevitable injuries that came with the job.