Dick Francis: Twice Shy

The long lingering May evening made the driving easier than usual, although going northwards out of London in the Friday night exodus was always a beast of a journey.

At the far, far end of it lay the neat new box-like house with its big featureless net-curtained windows and its tidy oblong of grass. One bright house in a street of others much the same. One proud statement that Peter had reached a certain salary-level and still aspired to future improvement. A place and a way of life that I understood and saw no harm in: where William would suffocate.

The turmoil behind the uninformative net curtains was much as expected in some ways and much worse in others.

The usually meticulously tidy interior was in much disarray, with unwashed cups and mugs making wet rings on every surface and clothes and papers scattered around. The trail, I came to realise, left by the in-and-out tramp of officialdom over the past two days.

Peter greeted us with gaunt eyes and the hushed voice of a death in the family; and probably for him and Donna what had happened was literally hurting them worse than a death. Donna herself sat in a silent huddle at one end of the big green sofa in their sitting-room and made no attempt to respond to Sarah when she rushed to her side and put her arms round her in almost a frenzy of affection.

Peter said helplessly, 'She won't talk… or eat.'

'Or go to the bathroom?'

'What?'

Sarah looked up at me with furious reproach, but I said mildly, 'If she goes off to the bathroom when she feels the need, it's surely a good sign. It's such a normal act.'

'Well, yes,' Peter said limply. 'She does.'

'Good, then.'

Sarah clearly thought that this was another prime example of what she called my general heartlessness, but I had meant only to reassure. I asked Peter what exactly had taken place, and as he wouldn't tell me in front of Donna herself we removed to the kitchen.

In there, too, the police and medics and court officials and social workers had made the coffee and left the dishes. Peter seemed not to see the mess that in past times would have set both him and Donna busily wiping up. We sat at the table with the last remnants of daytime fading to dusk, and in that gentle light he slowly unlocked the horrors.

It was on the previous morning, he said, that Donna had taken the baby from its pram and driven off with it in her car. She had driven seventy odd miles north-east to the coast, and had at some point abandoned the car with the baby inside it, and had walked off along the beach.

The car and the baby had been traced and found within hours, and Donna herself had been discovered sitting on the sand in pouring rain, speechless and stunned.

The police had arrested her, taken her to the station for a night in the cells, and paraded her before a magistrate in the morning. The bench had called for psychiatric reports, set a date for a hearing a week ahead and, despite protests from the baby's mother, set Donna free. Everyone had assured Peter she would only be put on probation, but he still shuddered from their appalling future of ignominy via the press and the neighbourhood.

After a pause, and thinking of Donna's trancelike state, I said, 'You told Sarah she was suicidal.'

He nodded miserably. 'This afternoon I wanted to warm her. To put her to bed. I ran the bath for her.' It was a while before he could go on. It seemed that the suicide attempt had been in deadly earnest: he had stopped her on the instant before she plunged herself and her switched-on hair-drier into the water. 'And she still had all her clothes on,' he said.

It seemed to me that what Donna urgently needed was some expert and continuous psychiatric care in a comfortable private nursing-home, all of which she was probably not going to get.

'Come on out for a drink,' I said.

'But I can't.' He was slightly trembling all the time, as if his foundations were in an earthquake.

'Donna will be all right with Sarah.'

'But she might try…'

'Sarah will look after her.'

'But I can't face…'

'No,' I said. 'We'll buy a bottle.'

I bought some Scotch and two glasses from a philosophical publican just before closing time, and we sat in my car to drink in a quiet tree-lined street three miles from Peter's home. Stars and street lights between the shadowy leaves.

'What are we going to do?' he said despairingly.

'Time will pass.'

'We'll never get over it. How can we? It's bloody… impossible.' He choked on the last word and began to cry like a boy. An outrush of unbearable, pent-up, half-angry grief.

I took the wobbling glass out of his hand. Sat and waited and made vague sympathetic noises and wondered what to God I would have done if, like she said, it had been Sarah.

'And to happen now,' he said at length, fishing for a handkerchief to blow his nose, 'of all times.'

'Er… oh?'I said.

He sniffed convulsively and wiped his cheeks. 'Sorry about that.'

'Don't be.'

He sighed. 'You're always so calm.'

'Nothing like this has happened to me.'

'I'm in a mess,' he said.

'Well, it'll get better.'

'No, I mean, besides Donna. I didn't know what to do… before… and now, after, I can't even think.'

'What sort of mess? Financial?'

'No. Well, not exactly.' He paused uncertainly, needing a prompt.

'What then?'

I gave him his glass back. He looked at it vaguely, then drank most of the contents in one mouthful.

'You don't mind if I burden you?' he said.

'Of course not.'

He was a couple of years younger than I, the same age as both Donna and Sarah; and all three of them, it had sometimes seemed to me, saw me not only as William's elder brother but as their own. At any rate it was as natural to me as to Peter that he should tell me his troubles.

He was middling tall and thin and had recently grown a lengthy moustache which had not given him the overpoweringly macho appearance he might have been aiming for. He still looked an ordinary inoffensive competent guy who went around selling his computer know-how to small businesses on weekdays and tinkered with his boat on Sundays.

He dabbed his eyes again and for several minutes took slow deep calming breaths.

'I got into something which I wish I hadn't,' he said.

'What sort of thing?'

'It started more or less as a joke.' He finished the last inch of drink and I stretched across and poured him a refill. 'There was this fellow. Our age, about. He'd come up from Newmarket, and we got talking in that pub you bought the whisky from. He said it would be great if you could get racing results from a computer. And we both laughed.'

There was a silence.

'Did he know you worked with computers?' I said.

'I'd told him. You know how one does.'

'So what happened next?'

'A week later I got a letter. From this fellow. Don't know how he got my address. From the pub, I suppose. The barman knows where I live.' He took a gulp from his drink and was quiet for a while, and then went on, 'The letter asked if I would like to help someone who was working out a computer program for handicapping horses. So I thought, why not? All handicaps for horse races are sorted out on computers, and the letter sounded quite official.'

'But it wasn't?'

He shook his head. 'A spot of private enterprise. But I still thought, why not? Anyone is entitled to work out his own program. There isn't such thing as right in handicapping unless the horses pass the post in the exact order that the computer weighted them, which they never do.'

'You know a lot about it,' I said.

'I've learnt, these past few weeks.' The thought brought no cheer. 'I didn't even notice I was neglecting Donna, but she says I've hardly spoken to her for ages.' His throat closed and he swallowed audibly. 'Perhaps if I hadn't been so occupied…'