Dick Francis - Enquiry

‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ I said.

Roberta Cranfield looked magnificent in my sitting-room. I came back from buying whisky in the village and found her gracefully draped all over my restored Chippendale. The green velvet supported a lot of leg and a deep purple size ten wool dress, and her thick long hair the colour of dead beech leaves clashed dramatically with the curtains. Under the hair she had white skin, incredible eyebrows, amber eyes, photogenic cheekbones and a petulant mouth.

She was nineteen, and I didn’t like her.

‘Good morning.’ I said.

‘Your door was open.’

‘It’s a habit I’ll have to break.’

I peeled the tissue wrapping off the bottle and put it with the two chunky glasses on the small silver tray I had once won in a race sponsored by some sweet manufacturers. Troy weight, twenty-four ounces: but ruined by the inscription, K. HUGHES, WINNING JOCKEY, STARCHOCS SILVER STEEPLECHASE. Starchocs indeed. And I never ate chocolates. Couldn’t afford to, from the weight point of view.

She flapped her hand from a relaxed wrist, indicating the room.

‘This is all pretty lush.’

I wondered what she had come for. I said, ‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘Coffee and cannabis.’

‘You’ll have to go somewhere else.’

‘You’re very prickly.’

‘As a cactus,’ I agreed.

She gave me a half minute unblinking stare with her liquid eyes. Then she said, ‘I only said cannabis to jolt you.’

‘I’m not jolted.’

‘No. I can see that. Waste of effort.’

‘Coffee, then?’

‘Yes.’

I went into the kitchen and fixed up the percolator. The kitchen was white and brown and copper and yellow. The colours pleased me. Colours gave me the sort of mental food I imagined others got from music. I disliked too much music, loathed the type of stuff you couldn’t escape in restaurants and airliners, didn’t own a record player, and much preferred silence.

She followed me in from the sitting-room and looked around her with mild surprise.

‘Do all jockeys live like this?’

‘Naturally.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

She peered into the pine fronted cupboard I’d taken the coffee from.

‘Do you cook for yourself?’

‘Mostly.’

‘Recherché things like shashlik?’ An undercurrent of mockery.

‘Steaks.’

I poured the bubbling coffee into two mugs and offered her cream and sugar. She took the cream, generously, but not the sugar, and perched on a yellow topped stool. Her copper hair fitted the kitchen, too.

‘You seem to be taking it all right,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Being warned off.’

I didn’t answer.

‘A cactus,’ she said, ‘Isn’t in the same class.’

She drank the coffee slowly, in separate mouthfuls, watching me thoughtfully over the mug’s rim. I watched her back. Nearly my height, utterly self possessed, as cool as the stratosphere. I had seen her grow from a demanding child into a selfish fourteen-year-old, and from there into a difficult-to-please debutante and from there to a glossy imitation model girl heavily tinged with boredom. Over the eight years I had ridden for her father we had met briefly and spoken seldom, usually in parade rings and outside the weighing room, and on the occasions when she did speak to me she seemed to be aiming just over the top of my head.

‘You’re making it difficult,’ she said.

‘For you to say why you came?’

She nodded. ‘I thought I knew you. Now it seems I don’t.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Well... Father said you came from a farm cottage with pigs running in and out of the door.’

‘Father exaggerates.’

She lifted her chin to ward off the familiarity, a gesture I’d seen a hundred times in her and her brothers. A gesture copied from her parents.

‘Hens,’ I said, ‘Not pigs.’

She gave me an up-stage stare. I smiled at her faintly and refused to be reduced to the ranks. I watched the wheels tick over while she worked out how to approach a cactus, and gradually the chin came down.

‘Actual hens?’

Not bad at all. I could feel my own smile grow genuine.

‘Now and then.’

‘You don’t look like... I mean...’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I agreed. ‘And it’s high time you got rid of those chains.’

‘Chains? What are you talking about?’

‘The fetters in your mind. The iron bars in your soul.’

‘My mind is all right.’

‘You must be joking. It’s chock-a-block with ideas half a century out of date.’

‘I didn’t come here to...’ she began explosively, and then stopped.

‘You didn’t come here to be insulted,’ I said ironically.

‘Well, as you put it in that well worn hackneyed phrase, no, I didn’t. But I wasn’t going to say that.’

‘What did you come for?’

She hesitated. ‘I wanted you to help me.’

‘To do what?’

‘To... to cope with Father.’

I was surprised, first that Father needed coping with, and second that she needed help to do it.

‘What sort of help?’

‘He’s... he’s so shattered .’ Unexpectedly there were tears standing in her eyes. They embarrassed and angered her, and she blinked furiously so that I shouldn’t see. I admired the tears but not her reason for trying to hide them.

‘Here are you,’ she said in a rush, ‘Walking about as cool as you please and buying whisky and making coffee as if no screaming avalanche had poured down on you and smothered your life and made every thought an absolute bloody Hell, and maybe you don’t understand how anyone in that state needs help, and come to that I don’t understand why you don’t need help, but anyway. Father does .’

‘Not from me,’ I said mildly. ‘He doesn’t think enough of me to give it any value.’

She opened her mouth angrily and shut it again and took two deep controlling breaths. ‘And it looks as though he’s right.’

‘Ouch,’ I said ruefully. ‘What sort of help, then?’

‘I want you to come and talk to him.’

My talking to Cranfield seemed likely to be as therapeutic as applying itching powder to a baby. However she hadn’t left me much room for kidding myself that fruitlessness was a good reason for not trying.

‘When?’

‘Now... Unless you have anything else to do.’

‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘I haven’t.’

She made a face and an odd little gesture with her hands. ‘Will you come now, then... please?’

She herself seemed surprised about the real supplication in that ‘please’. I imagined that she had come expecting to instruct, not to ask.

‘All right.’

‘Great.’ She was suddenly very cool, very employer’s daughter again. She put her coffee mug on the draining board and started towards the door. ‘You had better follow me, in your car. It’s no good me taking you, you’ll need your own car to come back in.’

‘That is so,’ I agreed.

She looked at me suspiciously, but decided not to pursue it. ‘My coat is in your bedroom.’

‘I’ll fetch it for you.’

‘Thank you.’

I walked across the sitting-room and into the bedroom. Her coat was lying on my bed in a heap. Black and white fur, in stripes going round. I picked it up and turned, and found she had followed me.

‘Thank you so much.’ She presented her back to me and put her arms in the coat-putting-on position. On went the coat. She swivelled slowly, buttoning up the front with shiny black saucers. ‘This flat really is fantastic. Who is your decorator?’

‘Chap called Kelly Hughes.’