Дик Фрэнсис - Reflex

The policeman was equally unappreciative. He said to her, ‘And you still can’t remember any more about the car they drove off in?’

Defensively she said, ‘It was dark.’

‘A lightish-coloured car, medium sized. Is that all?’

‘I don’t notice cars much.’

No one suggested that this was a car she should have noticed. Everyone thought it.

I cleared my throat and said diffidently to the policeman, ‘I don’t know if it would be of any use, and of course you may want your own man or something, but I’ve a camera in my car, if you could do with any photographs of all this.’

He raised his eyebrows and considered and said yes: so I fetched both cameras and took two sets of pictures, in colour and in black and white, with close-ups of the damaged face and wide-angle shots of the room. Steve’s mother bore the flashlight without complaint, and none of it took very long.

‘Professional, are you, sir?’ the policeman said.

I shook my head. ‘Just had a lot of practice.’

He told me where to send the photographs when they were printed, and the doctor arrived.

‘Don’t go yet,’ Steve said to me, and I looked at the desperation in his overstretched face, and stayed with him through all the ensuing bustle, sitting on the stairs out in the hall.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, joining me there. ‘I can’t drive like this, and I’ll have to go and see that she’s all right. They’re taking her to hospital for the night. I suppose I can get a taxi...’

He didn’t actually ask it, but the question was there. I stifled a small sigh and offered my services, and he thanked me as if I’d thrown him a lifebelt.

I found myself finally staying the night, because when we got back from the hospital he looked so exhausted that one simply couldn’t drive away and leave him. I made us a couple of omelettes as by that time, ten o’clock, we were both starving, neither of us having eaten since breakfast; and after that I picked up some of the mess.

He sat on the edge of the sofa looking white and strained and not mentioning that his fracture was hurting quite a bit. Perhaps he hardly felt it, though one could see the pain in his face. Whenever he spoke it was of his mother.

‘I’ll kill them,’ he said. ‘Those bastards ’.

More guts than sense, I thought; same as usual. By the sound of things, if nine-stone-seven Steve met up with the two young bulls, it would be those bastards who’d do the killing.

I started at the far end of the room, picking up a lot of magazines, newspapers, and old letters, and also the base and lid of a flat ten-by-eight-inch box which had once held photographic printing paper. An old friend.

‘What shall I do with all this?’ I asked Steve.

‘Oh, just pile it anywhere,’ he said vaguely. ‘Some of it came out of that rack over there by the television.’

A wooden-slatted magazine rack, empty, lay on its side on the carpet.

‘And that’s Dad’s rubbish box, that battered old orange thing. He kept it in that rack with the papers. Never threw it away. Just left it there, year after year. Funny really.’ He yawned. ‘Don’t bother too much. Mum’s neighbour will do it.’

I picked up a small batch of oddments; a transparent piece of film about three inches wide by eight long, several strips of 35 mm colour negatives, developed but blank, and an otherwise pleasant picture of Mrs Millace spoilt by splashes of chemical down the hair and neck.

‘Those were in Dad’s rubbish box, I think,’ Steve said, yawning again. ‘You might as well throw them away.’

I put them in the wastepaper basket, and added to them a nearly black black-and-white print which had been torn in half, and some more colour negatives covered in magenta blotches.

‘He kept them to remind himself of his worst mistakes,’ Steve said. ‘It doesn’t seem possible that he isn’t coming back.’

There was another very dark print in a paper folder, showing a shadowy man sitting at a table. ‘Do you want this?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Dad’s junk.’

I put some feminine magazines and a series on woodwork back in the magazine rack, and piled the letters on the table. The bulk of the mess left on the floor seemed to be broken china ornaments, the remnants of a spindly-legged sewing box which had been thoroughly smashed, and a small bureau, tipped on its side, with cascades of writing paper falling out of the drawers. None of the damage seemed to have had any purpose beyond noise and speed and frightening power, all of a piece with the pushing, shoving and shouting that Mrs Millace had described. A rampage designed to confuse and bewilder: and when they got no results from attacking her possessions, they’d started on her face.

I stood the bureau up again and shovelled most of the stuff back into it, and collected together a heap of scattered tapestry patterns and dozens of skeins of wool. One began at last to see clear stretches of carpet.

‘ Bastards, ’ Steve said. ‘I hate them. I’ll kill them.’

‘Why would they think your mother had a safe?’

‘God knows. Perhaps they just go round ripping off new widows, screaming “safe” at them on the off-chance. I mean, if she’d had one, she’d have told them where it was, wouldn’t she? After losing Dad like that. And yesterday’s burglary, while we were at the funeral. Such dreadful shocks. She’d have told them. I know she would.’

I nodded.

‘She can’t take any more,’ he said. There were tears in his voice, and his eyes were dark with the effort of trying not to cry. It was he, I thought, who was closest to the edge. His mother would be tucked up with sympathy and sedation.

‘Time for bed,’ I said abruptly. ‘Come on. I’ll help you undress. She’ll be better tomorrow.’

I woke early after an uneasy night and lay watching the dingy November dawn creep through the window. There was a good deal about life that I didn’t want to get up and face; a situation common, no doubt, to the bulk of mankind. Wouldn’t it be marvellous, I thought dimly, to be pleased with oneself, to look forward to the day ahead, to not have to think about mean-minded dying grandmothers and one’s own depressing dishonesty. Normally fairly happy-go-lucky, a taking-things-as-they-come sort of person, I disliked being backed into uncomfortable corners from which escape meant action.

Things had happened to me, had arrived, all my life. I’d never gone out looking. I had learned whatever had come my way, whatever was there. Like photography, because of Duncan and Charlie. And like riding, because of my mother dumping me in a racing stable: and if she’d left me with a farmer I would no doubt be making hay.

Survival for so many years had been a matter of accepting what I was given, of making myself useful, of being quiet and agreeable and no trouble, of repression and introversion and self-control, that I was now, as a man, fundamentally unwilling to make a fuss or fight.

I had taught myself for so long not to want things that weren’t offered to me that I now found very little to want. I had made no major decisions. What I had, had simply come.

Harold Osborne had offered me the cottage, along with the job of stable jockey. I’d accepted. The bank had offered a mortgage. I’d accepted. The local garage had suggested a certain car. I’d bought it.

I understood why I was as I was. I knew why I just drifted along, going where the tide took me. I knew why I was passive, but I felt absolutely no desire to change things, to stamp about and insist on being the master of my own fate.

I didn’t want to look for my half-sister, and I didn’t want to lose my job with Harold. I could simply drift along as usual doing nothing very positive... and yet for some obscure reason that instinctive course was seeming increasingly wet.