Dick Francis - Straight

He said nothing. He in no way denied it.

I felt such anger on Greville’s behalf that I wanted suddenly to hurt and punish the man before me with a ferocity I wouldn’t have expected in myself, and I stood there trembling with the self-knowledge and the essential restraint, and felt my throat close over any more words.

Without thinking I put my left foot down to walk out and felt the pain as an irrelevance, but then after three steps used the crutches to make my way to his doorway and round the screen into the shop and through there out onto the sidewalk, and I wanted to yell and scream at the bloody injustice of Greville’s death and the wickedness of the world and call down the rage of angels.

I stood blindly on the sidewalk oblivious to the passersby finding me an obstacle in their way. The swamping tidal wave of fury and desolation swelled and broke and gradually ebbed, leaving me still shaking from its force, a tornado in the spirit.

I loosened a jaw I hadn’t realized was clamped tight shut and went on feeling wretched.

A grandmotherly woman touched my arm and said, “Do you need help?” and I shook my head at her kindness because the help I needed wasn’t anyone’s to give. One had to heal from the inside: to knit like bones.

“Are you all right?” she asked again, her eyes concerned.

“Yes.” I made an effort. “Thank you.”

She looked at me uncertainly, but finally moved on, and I took a few sketchy breaths and remembered with bathos that I needed a telephone if I were ever to move from that spot.

A hairdressing salon having (for a consideration) let me use their phone, Brad came within five minutes to pick me up. I shoved the crutches into the back and climbed wearily in beside him, and he said, “Where to?” giving me a repeat of the grandmotherly solicitude in his face if not his words.

“Uh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Home?”

“No...” I gave it a bit of thought. I had intended to go to Greville’s house to change into my suit that was hanging in his wardrobe before meeting Clarissa at seven, and it still seemed perhaps the best thing to do, even if my energy for the project had evaporated.

Accordingly we made our way there, which wasn’t far, and when Brad stopped outside the door, I said, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight. This house is as safe as anywhere. So you can go on to Hungerford now, if you like.”

He didn’t look as if he liked, but all he said was, “I come back tomorrow?”

“Yes, please,” I agreed.

“Pick you up. Take you to the office?”

“Yes, please.”

He nodded, seemingly reassured that I still needed him. He got out of the car with me and opened the gate, brought my overnight bag and came in with me to see, upstairs and down, that the house was safely empty of murderers and thieves. When he’d departed I checked that all the alarms were switched on and went up to Greville’s room to change.

I borrowed another of his shirts and a navy silk tie, and shaved with his electric razor which was among the things I’d picked up from the floor and put on his white chest of drawers, and brushed my hair with his brushes for the same reason, and thought with an odd frisson that all of these things were mine now, that I was in his house, in his room, in his clothes... in his life.

I put on my own suit, because his anyway were too long, and came across the tube of the baster, still there in an inner breast pocket. Removing it, I left it among the jumble on the dressing chest and checked in the looking glass on the wall that Franklin, Mark II, wouldn’t entirely disgrace Franklin, Mark I. He had looked in that mirror every day for three months, I supposed. Now his reflection was my reflection and the man that was both of us had dark marks of tiredness under the eyes and a taut thinness in the cheeks, and looked as if he could do with a week’s lying in the sun. I gave him a rueful smile and phoned for a taxi, which took me to Luigi’s with ten minutes to spare.

She was there before me all the same, sitting at a small table in the bar area to one side of the restaurant, with an emptyish glass looking like vodka on a prim mat in front of her. She stood up when I went in and offered me a cool cheek for a polite social greeting, inviting me with a gesture to sit down.

“What will you drink?” she asked formally, but battling, I thought, with an undercurrent of diffidence.

I said I would pay for our drinks and she said no, no, this was her suggestion. She called the waiter and said, “Double water?” to me with a small smile and when I nodded ordered Perrier with ice and fresh lime juice for both of us.

I was down by then to only two or three Distalgesics a day and would soon have stopped taking them, though the one I’d just swallowed in Greville’s house was still an inhibitor for the evening. I wondered too late which would have made me feel better, a damper for the ankle or a large scotch everywhere else.

Clarissa was wearing a blue silk dress with a double-strand pearl necklace, pearl, sapphire and diamond earrings and a sapphire and diamond ring. I doubted if I would have noticed those, in the simple old jockey days. Her hair, smooth as always, curved in the expensive cut and her shoes and handbag were quiet black calf. She looked as she was, a polished, well-bred woman of forty or so, nearly beautiful, slender, with generous eyes.

“What have you been doing since Saturday?” she asked, making conversation.

“Peering into the jaws of death. What have you?”

“We went to...” She broke off. “ What did you say?”

“Martha and Harley Ostermeyer and I were in a car crash on Sunday. They’re OK, they went back to America today, I believe. And I, as you see, am here in one piece. Well... almost one piece.”

She was predictably horrified and wanted to hear all the details, and the telling at least helped to evaporate any awkwardness either of us had been feeling at the meeting.

“Simms was shot ?”

“Yes.”

“But... do the police know who did it?”

I shook my head. “Someone in a large gray Volvo, they think, and there are thousands of those.”

“Good heavens.” She paused. “I didn’t like to comment, but you look...” She hesitated, searching for the word.

“Frazzled?” I suggested.

“Smooth.” She smiled. “Frazzled underneath.”

“It’ll pass.”

The waiter came to ask if we would be having dinner and I said yes, and no argument, the dinner was mine. She accepted without fuss, and we read the menus.

The fare was chiefly Italian, the decor cosmopolitan, the ambience faintly European tamed by London. A lot of dark red, lamps with glass shades, no wallpaper, music. A comfortable place, nothing dynamic. Few diners yet, as the hour was early.

It was not, I was interested to note, a habitual rendezvous place for Clarissa and Greville: none of the waiters treated her as a regular. I asked her about it and, startled, she said they had been there only two or three times, always for lunch.

“We never went to the same place often,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been wise.”

“No.”

She gave me a slightly embarrassed look. “Do you disapprove of me and Greville?”

“No,” I said again. “You gave him joy.”

“Oh.” She was comforted and pleased. She said with a certain shyness, “It was the first time I’d fallen in love. I suppose you’ll think that silly. But it was the first time for him too, he said. It was... truly wonderful . We were like... as if twenty years younger... I don’t know if I can explain. Laughing. Lit up.”

“As far as I can see,” I said, “the thunderbolt strikes at any age. You don’t have to be teenagers.”