Дик Фрэнсис - Reflex

‘Too bad.’

‘And if I don’t persuade you, my uncle... that’s Son...’ he pointed to the card again, getting flustered. ‘Er. Folk is my grandfather and Langley is my great-uncle, and... er... they sent me...’ He swallowed. ‘They think I’m frightfully useless, to be honest.’

‘And that’s blackmail,’ I said.

A faint glint in his eyes told me that he wasn’t basically as silly as he made out.

‘I don’t want to see her,’ I said.

‘But she is dying.’

‘Have you yourself seen her... dying?’

‘Er... no...’

‘I’ll bet she isn’t. If she wants to see me, she would say she was dying just to fetch me, because she’d guess nothing else would.’

He looked shocked. ‘She’s seventy-eight, after all.’

I looked gloomily out at the non-stop rain. I had never met my grandmother and I didn’t want to, dying or dead. I didn’t approve of death-bed repentances, last minute insurances at the gates of hell. It was too damned late.

‘The answer,’ I said. ‘Is still no.’

He shrugged dispiritedly and seemed to give up. Walked a few steps out into the rain, bareheaded, vulnerable, with no umbrella. Turned round after ten paces and came tentatively back again.

‘Look... she really needs you, my uncle says.’ He was as earnest, as intense, as a missionary. ‘You can’t just let her die.’

‘Where is she?’ I said.

He brightened. ‘In a nursing home.’ He fished in another pocket, ‘I’ve got the address. But I’ll lead you there, straight away, if you’ll come. It’s in St Albans. You live in Lambourn, don’t you? So it isn’t so terribly far out of your way, is it? I mean, not a hundred miles, or anything like that.’

‘A good fifty, though.’

‘Well... I mean... you always do drive around an awful lot.’

I sighed. The options were rotten. A choice between meek capitulation or a stony rejection. Both unpalatable. That she had dished out to me the stony rejection from my birth gave me no excuse, I supposed, for doing it to her at her death. Also I could hardly go on smugly despising her, as I had done for years, if I followed her example. Irritating, that.

The winter afternoon was already fading, with electric lights growing brighter by the minute, shining fuzzily through the rain. I thought of my empty cottage; of nothing much to fill the evening, of two eggs, a piece of cheese and black coffee for supper, of wanting to eat more and not doing so. If I went, I thought, it would at least take my mind off food, and anything which helped with the perennial fight against weight couldn’t be wholly bad. Not even meeting my grandmother.

‘All right,’ I said, resignedly, ‘lead on.’

The old woman sat upright in bed staring at me, and if she was dying it wasn’t going to be on that evening, for sure. The life force was strong in the dark eyes and there was no mortal weakness in her voice.

‘Philip,’ she said, making it a statement and looking me up and down.

‘Yes.’

‘Hah.’

The explosive sound contained both triumph and contempt and was everything I would have expected. Her ramrod will had devastated my childhood and done worse damage to her own daughter, and there was to be, I was relieved to see, no maudlin plea for forgiveness. Rejection, even if in a moderated form, was still in operation.

‘I knew you’d come running,’ she said, ‘When you heard about the money.’ As a cold sneer it was pretty unbeatable.

‘What money?’

‘The hundred thousand pounds, of course.’

‘No one,’ I said, ‘has mentioned any money.’

‘Don’t lie. Why else would you come?’

‘They said you were dying.’

She gave me a startled and malevolent flash of the eyes and a baring of teeth which had nothing to do with smiling. ‘So I am. So are we all.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and all at the same rate. One day at a time.’

She was no one’s idea of a sweet little pink-cheeked grannie. A strong stubborn face with disapproval lines cut deep around the mouth. Iron grey hair still vigorous, clean and well shaped. Blotchy freckles of age showing brown on an otherwise pale skin, and dark ridged veins on the backs of the hands. A thin woman, almost gaunt; and tall, as far as I could judge.

The large room where she lay was furnished more as a sitting room with a bed in it than as a hospital, which was all of a piece with what I’d seen of the place on the way in. A country house put to new use: hotel with nurses. Carpets everywhere, long chintz curtains, armchairs for visitors, vases of flowers. Gracious dying, I thought.

‘I instructed Mr Folk,’ she said, ‘to make you the offer.’

I reflected. ‘Young Mr Folk? About twenty-five? Jeremy?’

‘Of course not.’ She was impatient. ‘Mr Folk, my solicitor. I told him to get you here. And he did. Here you are.’

‘He sent his grandson.’

I turned away from her and sat unasked in an armchair. Why, I wondered, had Jeremy not mentioned a hundred thousand pounds? It was the sort of trifle, after all, that one didn’t easily forget.

My grandmother stared at me steadily with no sign of affection, and I stared as steadily back. I disliked her certainty that she could buy me. I was repelled by her contempt, and mistrusted her intentions.

‘I will leave you a hundred thousand pounds in my will, upon certain conditions,’ she said.

‘No, you won’t,’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Icy voice, stony look.

‘I said no. No money. No conditions.’

‘You haven’t heard my proposition.’

I said nothing. I felt in fact the first stirrings of curiosity, but I was definitely not going to let her see it. Since she seemed in no hurry, the silence lengthened. More stocktaking on her part, perhaps. Simple patience, on mine. One thing my haphazard upbringing had given me was an almost limitless capacity for waiting. Waiting for people to come, who didn’t; and for promises to be fulfilled, that weren’t.

Finally she said, ‘You’re taller than I expected. And tougher.’

I waited some more.

‘Where is your mother?’ she said.

My mother, her daughter. ‘Scattered on the winds,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think she’s dead.’

‘Think!’ She looked more annoyed than anxious. ‘Don’t you know? ’

‘She didn’t exactly write to me to say she’d died; no.’

‘Your flippancy is disgraceful.’

‘Your behaviour since before my birth,’ I said, ‘gives you no right to say so.’

She blinked. Her mouth opened, and stayed open for fully five seconds. Then it shut tight with rigid muscles showing along the jaw, and she stared at me darkly in a daunting mixture of fury and ferocity. I saw, in that expression, what my poor young mother had had to face, and felt a great uprush of sympathy for the feckless butterfly who’d borne me.

There had been a day, when I was quite small, that I had been dressed in new clothes and told to be exceptionally good as I was going with my mother to see my grandmother. My mother had collected me from where I was living and we had travelled by car to a large house, where I was left alone in the hall, to wait. Behind a white painted closed door there had been a lot of shouting. Then my mother had come out, crying, and had grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me after her to the car.

‘Come on, Philip. We’ll never ask her for anything, ever again. She wouldn’t even see you. Don’t you ever forget, Philip, that your grandmother’s a hateful beast. ’

I hadn’t forgotten. I’d thought of it rarely, but I still clearly remembered sitting in the chair in the hall, my feet not touching the ground, waiting stiffly in my new clothes, listening to the shouting.