Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

Henry, Val and I had clubbed together to give Gordon a small sending-off in the office after his last day’s work, an affair to which most of the banking managers and their wives had been invited.

‘I hate him going,’ I said.

‘To Australia?’

‘From the bank.’

We drank wine and coffee and told each other much without saying a word. Not until we were nearly leaving did she say tentatively ‘We’ll be away for months, you know.’

My feelings must have shown. ‘Months... How many?’

‘We don’t know. We’re going to all the places Gordon or I have wanted to see that couldn’t be fitted into an ordinary holiday. We’re going to potter. Bits of Europe, bits of the Middle East, India, Singapore, Bali, then Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii, America.’ She fell silent, her eyes not laughing now but full of sadness.

I swallowed. ‘Gordon will find it exhausting.’

‘He says not. He passionately wants to go, and I know he’s always yearned to have the time to see things... and we’re going slowly, with lots of rests.’

The restaurant had emptied around us and the waiters hovered with polite faces willing us to go. Judith put on her blue coat and we went outside onto the cold pavement.

‘How do you plan to go home now?’ I asked.

‘Underground.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ I said.

She gave me a small smile and nodded, and we walked slowly across the road to where I’d left the car. She sat in beside me and I did all the automatic things like switching on the lights and letting off the handbrake, and I drove all the way to Clapham without consciously seeing the road.

Gordon’s house behind the big gates lay quiet and dark. Judith looked up at its bulk and then at me, and I leaned across in the car and put my arms round her and kissed her. She came close to me, kissing me back with a feeling and a need that seemed as intense as my own, and for a while we stayed in that way, floating in passion, dreaming in deep unaccustomed touch.

As if of one mind we each at the same time drew back and slowly relaxed against the seat. She put her hand on mine and threaded her fingers through, holding tight.

I looked ahead through the windscreen, seeing trees against the stars: seeing nothing.

A long time passed.

‘We can’t,’ I said eventually.

‘No.’

‘Especially not,’ I said, ‘in his own house.’

‘No.’

After another long minute she let go of my hand and opened the door beside her, and I too opened mine.

‘Don’t get out,’ she said, ‘because of your ankle.’

I stood up however on the driveway and she walked round the car towards me. We hugged each other but without kissing, a long hungry minute of body against body; commitment and farewell.

‘I’ll see you,’ she said, ‘at the party’; and we both knew how it would be, with Lorna Shipton talking about watching Henry’s weight and Henry flirting roguishly with Judith whenever he could, and everyone talking loudly and clapping Gordon on the back.

She walked over to the front door and unlocked it, and looked back, briefly, once, and then went in, putting the walls between us in final, mutual, painful decision.

I felt alone and also lonely, which I’d never been before, and I telephoned to Pen one Sunday in December and suggested taking her out to lunch. She said to come early as she had to open her shop at four, and I arrived at eleven thirty to find coffee percolating richly and Pen trying to unravel the string of the Christmas kite.

‘I found it when I was looking for some books,’ she said. ‘It’s so pretty. When we’ve had coffee, let’s go out and fly it.’

We took it onto the common, and she let the string out gradually until the dragon was high on the wind, circling and darting and fluttering its frilly tail. It took us slowly after it across the grass, Pen delightedly intent and I simply pleased to be back there in that place.

She glanced at me over her shoulder. ‘Are we going too far for your ankle? Or too fast?’

‘No and no,’ I said.

‘Still taking the comfrey?’

‘Religiously.’

The bones and other tissues round my shoulder had mended fast, I’d been told, and although the ankle still lagged I was prepared to give comfrey the benefit of the doubt. Anything which would restore decent mobility attracted my enthusiasm: life with brace and walking stick, still boringly necessary, made even buying groceries a pest.

We had reached a spot on a level with Gordon and Judith’s house when a gust of wind took the kite suddenly higher, setting it weaving and diving in bright-coloured arcs and stretching its land-line to tautness. Before anything could be done the string snapped and the dazzling butterfly wings soared away free, rising in a spiral, disappearing to a shape, to a black dot, to nothing.

‘What a pity,’ Pen said, turning to me with disappointment and then pausing, seeing where my own gaze had travelled downwards to the tall cream gates, firmly shut.

‘Let her go,’ Pen said soberly, ‘like the kite.’

‘She’ll come back.’

‘Take out some other girl,’ she urged.

I smiled lopsidedly. ‘I’m out of practice.’

‘But you can’t spend your whole life...’ she stopped momentarily, and then said, ‘Parkinson’s disease isn’t fatal. Gordon could live to be eighty or more.’

‘I wouldn’t want him dead,’ I protested. ‘How could you think it?’

‘Then what?’

‘Just to go on, I suppose, as we are.’

She took my arm and turned me away from the gates to return to her house.

‘Give it time,’ she said. ‘You’ve got months. You both have.’

I glanced at her. ‘Both?’

‘Gordon and I don’t go around with our eyes shut.’

‘He’s never said anything...’

She smiled. ‘Gordon likes you better than you like him, if possible. Trusts you, too.’ She paused. ‘Let her go, Tim, for your own sake.’

We went silently back to her house and I thought of all that had happened since the day Gordon stood in the fountain, and of all I had learned and felt and loved and lost. Thought of Ginnie and Oliver and Calder, and of all the gateways I’d gone through to grief and pain and the knowledge of death. So much — too much — compressed into so small a span.

‘You’re a child of the light,’ Pen said contentedly. ‘Both you and Judith. You always take sunshine with you. I don’t suppose you know it, but everything brightens when people like you walk in.’ She glanced down at my slow foot. ‘Sorry. When you limp in. So carry the sunlight to a new young girl who isn’t married to Gordon and doesn’t break your heart.’ She paused. ‘That’s good pharmacological advice, so take it.’

‘Yes, doctor,’ I said: and knew I couldn’t.

On Christmas Eve when I had packed to go to Jersey and was checking around the flat before leaving, the telephone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

There was a series of clicks and hums and I was about to put the receiver down when a breathless voice said, ‘Tim...’

‘Judith?’ I said incredulously.

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Listen, just listen. I don’t know who else to ask, not at Christmas... Gordon’s ill and I’m alone and I don’t know, I don’t know...’

‘Where are you?’

‘India... He’s in hospital. They’re very good, very kind, but he’s so ill... unconscious... they say cerebral haemorrhage... I’m so afraid... I do so love him...’ She was suddenly crying, and trying not to, the words coming out at intervals when control was possible. ‘It’s so much to ask... but I need... help.’

‘Tell me where,’ I said. ‘I’ll come at once.’