Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

She kissed me goodnight, with affection and on the cheek. Gordon gave me a smile and a wave, and I went to bed across the hall from them and spent an hour before sleep deliberately not thinking at all about Judith in or out of her nightgown — or not much.

Breakfast was taken in dressing gowns. Judith’s was red, quilted and unrevealing.

They changed and went to church. Pray for me, I said, and set out for a walk on the common.

There were brightly-wrapped gifts waiting around the base of the silver-starred Christmas tree in the Michaels’ drawing room, and a surreptitious inspection had revealed one from Pen addressed to me. I walked across the windy grass, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, wondering what to do about one for her, and as quite often happens came by chance to a solution.

A small boy was out there with his father, flying a kite, and I stopped to watch.

‘That’s fun,’ I said.

The boy took no notice but the father said, ‘There’s no satisfying the little bleeder. I give him this and he says he wants roller skates.’

The kite was a brilliant phosphorescent Chinese dragon with butterfly wings and a big frilly tail, soaring and circling like a joyful tethered spirit in the Christmas sky.

‘Will you sell it to me?’ I asked. ‘Buy the roller skates instead?’ I explained the problem, the need for an instant present.

Parent and child consulted and the deal was done. I wound up the string carefully and bore the trophy home, wondering what on earth the sober pharmacist would think of such a thing: but when she unwrapped it from gold paper (cadged from Judith for the purpose) she pronounced herself enchanted, and back we all went onto the common to watch her fly it.

The whole day was happy. I hadn’t had so good a Christmas since I was a child. I told them so, and kissed Judith uninhibitedly under some mistletoe, which Gordon didn’t seem to mind.

‘You were born sunny,’ Judith said, briefly stroking my cheek, and Gordon, nodding, said, ‘A man without sorrows, unacquainted with grief.’

‘Grief and sorrow come with time,’ Pen said, but not as if she meant it imminently. ‘They come to us all.’

On the morning after Christmas Day I drove Judith across London to Hampstead to put flowers on her mother’s grave.

‘I know you’ll think me silly, but I always go. She died on Boxing Day when I was twelve. It’s the only way I have of remembering her... of feeling I had a mother at all. I usually go by myself. Gordon thinks I’m sentimental and doesn’t like coming.’

‘Nothing wrong with sentiment,’ I said.

Hampstead was where I lived in the upstairs half of a friend’s house. I wasn’t sure whether or not Judith knew it, and said nothing until she’d delivered the pink chrysanthemums to the square marble tablet let in flush with the grass and communed for a while with the memories floating there.

It was as we walked slowly back toward the iron gates that I neutrally said, ‘My flat’s only half a mile from here. This part of London is home ground.’

‘Is it?’

‘Mm.’

After a few steps she said, ‘I knew you lived somewhere here. If you remember, you wouldn’t let us drive you all the way home from Ascot. You said Hampstead was too far.’

‘So it was.’

‘Not for Sir Galahad that starry night.’

We reached the gates and paused for her to look back. I was infinitely conscious of her nearness and of my own stifled desire; and she looked abruptly into my eyes and said, ‘Gordon knows you live here, also.’

‘And does he know how I feel?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t said.’

I wanted very much to go that last half mile: that short distance on wheels, that far journey in commitment. My body tingled... rippled... from hunger, and I found myself physically clenching my back teeth.

‘What are you thinking?’ she said.

‘For God’s sake... you know damn well what I’m thinking... and we’re going back to Clapham right this minute.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose we must.’

‘What do you mean... you suppose?’

‘Well, I...’ she paused. ‘I mean, yes we must. I’m sorry... it was just that... for a moment... I was tempted.’

‘As at Ascot?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘As at Ascot.’

‘Only here and now,’ I said, ‘we have the place and the time and the opportunity to do something about it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what we’re going to do... is... nothing.’ It came out as half a question, half a statement: wholly an impossibility.

‘Why do we care ?’ she said explosively. ‘Why don’t we just get into your bed and have a happy time? Why is the whole thing so tangled up with bloody concepts like honour?’

We walked down the road to where I’d parked the car and I drove southwards with careful observance at every red light; stop signals making round eyes at me all the way to Clapham.

‘I’d have liked it,’ Judith said as we pulled up outside her house.

‘So would I.’

We went indoors in a sort of deprived companionship, and I realized only when I saw Gordon’s smiling unsuspicious face that I couldn’t have returned there if it had been in any other way.

It was at lunch that day, when Pen had again resurfaced from her stint among the pills that I told them about my visit to Calder. Pen, predictably, was acutely interested and said she’d dearly like to know what was in the decoction in the refrigerator.

‘What’s a decoction?’ Judith asked.

‘A preparation boiled with water. If you dissolve things in alcohol, that’s a tincture.’

‘One lives and bloody well learns!’

Pen laughed. ‘How about carminative, anodyne and vermifuge... effects of drugs. They simply roll off the tongue with grandeur.’

‘And what do they mean?’ Gordon asked.

‘Getting rid of gas, getting rid of pain, getting rid of worms.’

Gordon too was laughing. ‘Have some anodyne tincture of grape.’ He poured wine into our glasses. ‘Do you honestly believe, Tim, that Calder cures horses by touch?’

‘I’m sure he believes it.’ I reflected. ‘I don’t know if he will let anyone watch. And if he did, what would one see? I don’t suppose with a horse it’s a case of “take up your bed and walk.”’

Judith said in surprise, ‘You sound as if you’d like it to be true. You, that Gordon and Harry have trained to doubt!’

‘Calder’s impressive,’ I admitted. ‘So is his place. So are the fees he charges. He wouldn’t be able to set his prices so high if he didn’t get real results.’

‘Do the herbs come extra?’ Pen said.

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Would you expect them to?’ Gordon said.

‘Well...’ Pen considered. ‘Some of those that Tim mentioned are fairly exotic. Golden seal — that’s hydrastis — said in the past to cure practically anything you can mention, but mostly used nowadays in tiny amounts in eye-drops. Has to be imported from America. And fo-ti-tieng — which is Hydrocotyle asiatica minor , also called the source of the elixir of long life — that only grows as far as I know in the tropical jungles of the far east. I mean, I would have thought that giving things like that to horses would be wildly expensive.’

If I’d been impressed with Calder I was probably more so with Pen. ‘I didn’t know pharmacists were so clued up on herbs,’ I said.

‘I was just interested so I learned their properties,’ she exclaimed. ‘The age-old remedies are hardly even hinted at on the official pharmacy courses, though considering digitalis and penicillin one can’t exactly see why. A lot of chemists shops don’t sell non-prescription herbal remedies, but I do, and honestly for a stack of people they seem to work.’