Dick Francis: Hot Money

He put down the paper, well pleased. "Now, what do we do today?"

"We summon your private eye, we fix a trainer for the colt, I fetch our passports and some clothes, and you stay here."

Slightly to my surprise, he raised no arguments except to tell me not to be away too long. He was looking rather thoughtfully at the healing graze down my right thigh and the red beginnings of bruising around it.

"The trouble is," he said, "I don't have the private eye's phone number. Not with me." "We'll get another agency, then, from the yellow pages."

"Your mother knows it, of course. Joyce knows it."

"How does she know it?"

"She used him," he said airily, "to follow me and Alicia."

There was nothing, I supposed, which should ever surprise me about my parents.

"When the lawyer fellow said to have Moira tailed, I got the private eye's name from Joyce. After all, he'd done a good job on me and Alicia all those years ago. Too bloody good, when you think of it. So get through to Joyce, Ian, and ask her for the number."

Bemused, I did as he said.

"Darling," my mother shrieked down the line. "Where's your father?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Darling, do you know what he's bloody done?"

"No… what?"

"He's given a fortune, darling, I mean literally hundreds of thousands, to some wretched little film company to make some absolutely ghastly film about tadpoles or something. Some bloody fool of a man telephoned to find out where your father was, because it seems he promised them even more money which they'd like to have… I ask you! I know you and Malcolm aren't talking, but you've got to do something to stop him."

"Well," I said, "it's his money."

"Darling, don't be so naive. Someone's going to inherit it, and if only you'd swallow all that bloody pride, as I've told you over and over, it would be yours. If you go on and on with this bloody quarrel, he'll leave it all to Alicia's beastly brood, and I cannot bear the prospect of her gloating for ever more. So make it up with Malcolm at once, darling, and get him to see sense."

"Calm down," I said. "I have."

"What?"

"Made it up with him."

"Thank God, at last!" my mother shrieked. "Then, darling, what are you waiting for? Get onto him straight away and stop him spending your inheritance."

Malcolm's house, after three years of Moira's occupancy, had greatly changed.

Malcolm's Victorian house was known as "Quantum" because of the Latin inscription carved into the lintel over the front door. QUANTUM IN ME FUIT – roughly, "I did the best I could."

I went there remembering the comfortable casualness that Coochie had left and not actually expecting that things would be different: and I should have known betteras each wife in turn, Coochie included, had done her best to eradicate all signs of her predecessor. Marrying Malcolm had, for each wife, involved moving into his house, but he had indulged them all, I now understood, in the matter of ambience.

I let myself in through the kitchen door with Malcolm's keys and thought wildly for a moment that I'd come to the wrong place. Coochie's pine wood and red-tiled homeliness had been swept away in favour of glossy yellow walls, glittering white appliances and shelves crowded with scarlet and deep pink geraniums cascading from white pots.

Faintly stunned, I looked back through time to the era before Coochie, to Alicia's fluffy occupancy of broderie anglaise frills on shimmering white curtains with pale blue work-tops and white floor tiles; and back further still to the starker olive and milk- coffee angularities chosen by Joyce. I remembered the day the workmen had torn out my mother's kitchen, and how I'd gone howling to Malcolm: he'd packed me off to Joyce immediately for a month, which I didn't like eitherand when I returned I'd found the white frills installed, and the pale blue cupboards, and I thought them all sissy, but I'd learned not to say so.

For the first time ever, I wondered what the kitchen had looked like in Vivien's time, when forty-five or so years ago young Malcolm had brought her there as his first bride. Vivien had been dispossessed and resentful by the time I was born, and I'd seldom seen her smiling. She seemed to me the least positive of the five wives and the least intelligent but, according to her photographs, she had been in her youth by streets the most beautiful. The dark sweep of her eyebrows and the high cheekbones remained, but the thick black hair had thinned now in greying, and entrenched bitterness had soured the once sweet mouth. Vivien's marriage, I'd guessed, had died through Malcolm's boredom with herand although they now still met occasionally at events to do with their mutual children and grandchildren, they were more apt to turn their backs than to kiss.

Vivien disliked and was plaintively critical of almost everybody while at the same time unerringly interpreting the most innocent general remarks of others as being criticism of herself. It was impossible to please her often or for long, and I, like almost all the extended family, had long ago stopped trying. She had indoctrinated her three offspring with her own dissatisfactions to the point where they were nastily disparaging of Malcolm behind his back, though not to his face, hypocrites that they were.

Malcolm had steadfastly maintained them through young adult-hood and then cast them loose, each with a trust fund that would prevent them from actually starving. He had treated all seven of his normally surviving children in the same way; his eighth child, Robin, would be looked after for ever. None of us seven could have any complaints: he had given us all whatever vocational training we'd chosen and afterwards the cushion against penury, and at that point in each of our lives had considered his work done. Whatever became of us in the future, he said, had to be in our own hands. With the family powerfully in mind, I went from the kitchen into the hall where I found that Moira had had the oak panelling painted white. Increasingly amused, I thought of the distant days when Alicia had painstakingly bleached all the old wood, only to have Coochie stain it dark again: and I supposed that perhaps Malcolm enjoyed change around him in many ways, not just in women. His own private room, always called the office although more like a comfortable cluttered sitting-room, seemed to have escaped the latest refit except in the matter of gold velvet curtains replacing the old green. Otherwise, the room as always seemed filled with his strong personality, the walls covered with dozens of framed photographs, the deep cup boards bulging with files, the bookshelves crammed, every surface bearing mementoes of his journeyings and achievements, nothing very tidy.

I went over to the desk to find his passport and half-expected to hear his voice at any minute even though I'd left him forty miles away persuasively telephoning to "the fellow who tailed Moira".

His passport, he'd said, was in the second drawer down on the right-hand side, and so it was, among a large clutter of bygone travel arrangements and expired medical insurances. Malcolm seldom threw much away, merely building another cupboard for files. His filing system was such that no one but he had the slightest idea where any paper or information could be found, but he himself could put his finger on things unerringly. His method, he'd told me once long ago, was always to put everything where he would first think of looking for it; and as a child, I'd seen such sense in that that I had copied him ever since.

Looking around again, it struck me that although the room was crammed with objects, several familiar ones were missing. The gold dolphin, for instance, and the gold tree bearing amethysts, and the Georgian silver candelabras. Perhaps at last, I thought, he had stored them prudently in the bank.