Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

The princess touched Lord Vaughnley’s arm and invited him to go out on to the balcony to see the last race. He said however that he should return to the Towncrier’s guests whom he had temporarily abandoned in a sponsors’ hospitality room, and, collecting his wife, he departed.

‘Now, Kit,’ said the princess, ‘while everyone is outside watching the race, tell me about North Face.’

We sat, as so often, in two of the chairs, and I told her without reservation what had happened between her horse and myself.

‘I do wish,’ she said thoughtfully, at the end, ‘that I had your sense of what horses are thinking. I’ve tried putting my head against their heads,’ she smiled almost self-consciously, ‘but nothing happens. I get nothing at all. So how do you do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think head to head would work, anyway. It’s just when I’m riding them, I seem to know. It’s not in words, not at all. It’s just there. It just seems to come. It happens to very many riders. Horses are telepathic creatures.’

She looked at me with her head on one side. ‘But you, Kit, you’re telepathic with people as well as horses. Quite often you’ve answered a question I was just going to ask. Quite disconcerting. How do you do it?’

I was startled. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘But you know you do?’

‘Well... I used to. My twin sister Holly and I were telepathic between ourselves at one time. Almost like an extra way of talking. But we’ve grown out of it, these last few years.’

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Such an interesting gift.’

‘It can’t logically exist.’

‘But it does.’ She patted my hand. ‘Thank you for today, although you and North Face between you almost stopped my heart.’

She stood up without haste, adept from some distant training at ending a conversation gracefully when she wished, and I stood also and thanked her formally for her tea. She smiled through the eyelashes, as she often did with everybody: not out of coquetry but in order, it seemed to me, to hide her private feelings.

She had a husband to whom she went home daily; Monsieur Roland de Brescou, a Frenchman of aristocratic lineage, immense wealth and advanced age. I had met him twice, a frail white-haired figure in a wheel-chair with an autocratic nose and little to say. I asked after his health occasionally: the princess replied always that he was well. Impossible ever to tell from her voice or demeanour what she felt about him: love, anxiety, frustration, impatience, joy... nothing showed.

‘We run at Devon and Exeter, don’t we?’ she said.

‘Yes, Princess. Bernina and Icicle.’

‘Good. I’ll see you there on Tuesday.’

I shook her hand. I’d sometimes thought, after a win such as that day’s, of planting a farewell kiss on her porcelain cheek. I liked her very much. She might consider it the most appalling liberty, though, and give me the sack, so in her own disciplined fashion I made her merely a sketch of a bow, and went away.

‘You’ve been a hell of a long time,’ Holly complained. ‘That woman treats you like a lap dog. It’s sickening.’

‘Yeah... well... here I am.’

She had been waiting for me on her feet outside the weighing room in the cold wind, not snugly in a chair in the bar. The triple gin anyway had been a joke because she seldom drank alcohol, but that she couldn’t even sit down revealed the intensity of her worry.

The last race was over, the crowds streaming towards the car parks. Jockeys and trainers, officials and valets and pressmen bade each other goodnight all around us although it was barely three-forty in the afternoon and not yet dusk. Time to go home from the office. Work was work, even if the end product was entertainment. Leisure was a growth industry, so they said.

‘Will you come home with me?’ Holly asked.

I had known for an hour that that was what she would want.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Her relief was enormous but she tried to hide it with a cough, a joke and a jerky laugh. ‘Your car or mine?’

I’d thought it over. ‘We’ll both go to the cottage. I’ll drive us in your car from there.’

‘OK.’ She swallowed. ‘And Kit...’

‘Save it,’ I said.

She nodded. We’d had an ancient pact: never say thank you out loud. Thanks came in help returned, unstintingly and at once, when one needed it. The pact had faded into abeyance with her marriage but still, I felt, existed: and so did she, or she wouldn’t have come.

Holly and I were more alike in looks than many fraternal twins, but nowhere near identical Viola and Sebastian: Shakespeare, most rarely, got it wrong. We each had dark hair, curly. Each, lightish brown eyes. Each, flat ears, high foreheads, long necks, easily tanned skin. We had different noses and different mouths, though the same slant to the bone above the eye socket. We had never had an impression of looking into a mirror at the sight of the other, although the other’s face was more familiar to us than our own.

When we were two years old our young and effervescent parents left us with our grandparents, went for a winter holiday in the Alps, and skied into an avalanche. Our father’s parents, devastated, had kept us and brought us up and couldn’t in many ways have been better, but Holly and I had turned inward to each other more than might have happened in a normal family. We had invented and spoken our own private language, as many such children do, and from there had progressed to a speechless communication of minds. Our telepathy had been more a matter of knowing what the other was thinking rather than of deliberately planting thoughts in the other’s head. More reception than transmission, one might say: and it happened also without us realising it, as over and over again when we’d been briefly apart we had done things like writing in the same hour to our Australian aunt, getting the same book out of the library, and buying identical objects on impulse. We had both, for instance, one day gone separately home with roller skates as a surprise birthday present for the other and hidden them in our grandmother’s wardrobe. Grandmother herself by that time hadn’t found it strange as we’d done similar things too often, and she’d said that right from when we could talk if she asked, ‘Kit, where’s Holly?’ or, ‘Holly, where’s Kit?’ we would always know, even if logically we couldn’t.

The telepathy between us had not only survived the stresses and upheavals of puberty and adolescence but had actually become stronger: also we were more conscious of it, and used it purposely when we wanted, and grew in young adulthood into a new dimension of friendship. Naturally we put up a front to the world of banter, sarcasm and sibling rivalry, but underneath we were solid, never doubting our private certainty.

When I’d left our grandparents’ house to buy a place of my own with my earnings, Holly had from time to time lived there with me, working away in London most of the time but returning as of right whenever she wished, both of us taking it for granted that my cottage was now her home also.

That state of affairs had continued until she fell in love with Bobby Allardeck and married him.

Even before the wedding the telepathy had begun to fade and fairly soon afterwards it had more or less stopped. I wondered for a while if she had shut down deliberately, and then realised it had been also my own decision: she was off on a new life and it wouldn’t have been a good idea to try to cling to her, or to intrude.

Four years on, the old habit had vanished to such an extent that I hadn’t felt a flicker of her present distress, where once I would somehow have had it in my mind and would have telephoned to find out if she was all right.