Dick Francis - Wild Horses

We left the set and the house and signed ourselves out with the night-watchman. Nash was driven away in the Roller by his chauffeur, and I returned to Bedford Lodge for a final long session with Moncrieff, discussing the visual impacts and camera angles of tomorrow’s scene.

I was in bed by midnight. At five, the telephone rang beside my head.

‘Thomas?’

Dorothea’s wavery voice, apologetic.

‘I’m on my way,’ I said.

Valentine was dead.

When I arrived in his house I found not the muted private grief I expected, but a showy car, not the doctor’s or the priest’s, parked at the kerbside, and bright lights behind the curtains in every window.

I walked up the concrete path to the closed front door and rang the bell.

After a long pause the door was opened, but not by Dorothea. The man filling the entry was large, soft and unwelcoming. He looked me up and down with a practised superciliousness and said, almost insultingly, ‘Are you the doctor?’

‘Er... no.’

‘Then what do you want so early?’

A minor civil servant, I diagnosed: one of those who enjoyed saying no. His accent was distantly Norfolk, prominently London-suburban and careful.

‘Mrs Pannier asked me to come,’ I said without provocation. ‘She telephoned.’

‘At this hour? She can’t have done.’

‘I’d like to speak to her,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell her someone called.’

Down in the hall behind him, Dorothea appeared from her bathroom and, seeing me, hurried towards the front door.

‘Thomas! Come in, dear.’ She beckoned me to sidle past the blockage. ‘This is my son, Paul,’ she explained to me. ‘And Paul, this is Valentine’s friend Thomas, that I told you about.’

‘How is he?’ I asked. ‘Valentine?’

Her face told me.

‘He’s slipped away, dear. Come in, do. I need your help.’ She was flustered by this son whom she’d described as pompous and domineering; and nowhere had she exaggerated. Apart from his hard bossy stare he sported a thin dark moustache and a fleshy upturned nose with the nostrils showing from in front. The thrust-forward chin was intended to intimidate, and he wore a three-piece important dark blue suit with a striped tie even at that hour in the morning. Standing about five feet ten, he must have weighed well over fourteen stone.

‘Mother,’ he said repressively, ‘I’m all the help you need. I can cope perfectly well by myself.’ He gestured to me to leave, a motion I pleasantly ignored, edging past him, kissing Dorothea’s sad cheek and suggesting a cup of tea.

‘Of course, dear. What am I thinking of? Come into the kitchen.’

She herself was dressed in yesterday’s green skirt and jumper and I guessed she hadn’t been to bed. The dark rings of tiredness had deepened round her eyes and her plump body looked shakily weak.

‘I phoned Paul later, long after you’d gone, dear,’ she said almost apologetically, running water into an electric kettle. ‘I felt so lonely, you see. I thought I would just warn him that his uncle’s end was near... ’

‘So, of course, although it was already late, I set off at once,’ Paul said expansively. ‘It was only right. My duty. You should never have been here alone with a dying man, mother. He should have been in hospital.’

I lifted the kettle from Dorothea’s hands and begged her to sit down, telling her I would assemble the cups and saucers and everything else. Gratefully she let me take over while the universal coper continued to rock on his heels and expound his own virtues.

‘Valentine had already died when I got here.’ He sounded aggrieved. ‘Of course I insisted on telephoning the doctor at once, though Mother ridiculously wanted to let him sleep! I ask you! What are doctors for?’

Dorothea raised her eyes in a sort of despair.

‘The damned man was rude to me,’ Paul complained. ‘He should be struck off. He said Valentine should have been in hospital and he would be here at seven, not before.’

‘He couldn’t do anything by coming,’ Dorothea said miserably. ‘Dying here was what Valentine wanted. It was all right .’

Paul mulishly repeated his contrary opinions. Deeply bored with him, I asked Dorothea if I could pay my respects to Valentine.

‘Just go in, dear,’ she said, nodding. ‘He’s very peaceful.’

I left her listening dutifully to her offspring and went into Valentine’s bedroom which was brightly and brutally lit by a centre bulb hanging from the ceiling in an inadequate lampshade. A kinder lamp stood unlit on a bedside table, and I crossed to it and switched it on.

Valentine’s old face was pale and smoothed by death, his forehead already cooler to the touch than in life. The laboured breathing had given way to eternal silence. His eyes were fully closed. His mouth, half open, had been covered, by Dorothea, I supposed, with a flap of sheet. He did indeed look remarkably at peace.

I crossed to the doorway and switched off the cold overhead light. Dorothea was coming towards me from the kitchen, entering Valentine’s room past me to look down fondly at her dead brother.

‘He died in the dark,’ she said, distressed.

‘He wouldn’t mind that.’

‘No... but... I switched off his bedside light so that people wouldn’t see in, and I was sitting in that chair looking out of the window waiting for Paul to come, listening to Valentine breathing, and I went to sleep. I just drifted off.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘I didn’t know... I mean, I couldn’t help it.’

‘You’ve been very tired.’

‘Yes, but when I woke up it was so dark... and absolutely quiet, and I realised... it was awful , dear. I realised Valentine had stopped breathing... and he’d died while I was asleep , and I hadn’t been there beside him to hold his hand or anything... ’ Her voice wavered into a sob and she wiped her eyes with her fist.

I put an arm round her shoulders as we stood beside Valentine’s bed. I thought it lucky on the whole that she hadn’t seen the jolt of her brother’s heart stopping, nor heard the last rattle of his breath. I’d watched my own mother die, and would never forget it.

‘What time did your son get here?’

‘Oh, it must have been getting on for three. He lives in Surrey, you see, dear. It’s quite a long drive, and he’d been ready for bed, he said. I told him not to come... I only wanted someone to talk to, really, when I rang him, but he insisted on coming... very good of him, dear, really.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He closed the curtains, of course, and switched on all the lights. He was quite cross with me for sitting in the dark, and for not getting Robbie Gill out. I mean, Robbie could only say officially that Valentine was dead. Paul didn’t understand that I wanted just to be in the dark with Valentine. It was a sort of comfort , you see, dear. A sort of goodbye. Just the two of us, like when we were children.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Paul means well,’ she insisted, ‘but I do find him tiring. I’m sorry to wake you up so early. But Paul was so cross with me... so I phoned you when he went to the bathroom because he might have stopped me, otherwise. I’m not myself somehow, I feel so weak.’

‘I’m happy to be here,’ I assured her. ‘What you need is to go to bed.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t. I’ll have to be awake for Robbie. I’m so afraid Paul will be rude to him.’

A certainty, I thought.

The great Paul himself came into the room, switching on the overhead light again.

‘What are you two doing in here?’ he demanded. ‘Mother, do come away and stop distressing yourself. The old man’s had a merciful release, as we all know. What we’ve got to talk about now is your future, and I’ve got plans made for that.’