by Francis: TO THE HILT

'And,' my mother said, 'there's some sort of serious trouble at the brewery, and also I think he's worried about the Cup.'

'What cup?'

'The King Alfred Cup, what else?'

I frowned. 'Do you mean the race?' The King Alfred Gold Cup, sponsored by Ivan's brewery as a great advertisement for King Alfred Gold beer, was a splendid two-mile steeplechase run every October, a regular part now of the racing year.

'The race, or the Cup itself,' my mother said. 'I'm not sure.'

At that inconclusive point the kitchen was abruptly invaded by two large middle-aged ladies who heavily plodded down the outside iron steps from road level to basement and let themselves in with familiarity.

'Morning, Lady Westering,' they said. A double act. Sisters, perhaps. They looked from my mother to me expectantly, awaiting an explanation, I thought, as much as an introduction. My gentle mother could be far too easily intimidated.

I stood and said mildly, 'I am Lady Westering's son. And you are?'

My mother told me, 'Edna and Lois. Edna cooks for us. Lois cleans.'

Edna and Lois gave me stares in which disapproval sheltered sketchily behind a need to keep their jobs. Disapproval? I wondered if Patsy had been at work.

Edna looked with a critical eye at the evidence of my cooking, an infringement of her domain. Too bad. She would have to get used to it. My father and I had historically always done the family meals because we'd liked it that way. It had started with my mother breaking a wrist: by the time it was mended, feeding the three of us had forever changed hands; and as I'd understood very early the chemistry of cooking, good food had always seemed easy.

My mother and Ivan had from the beginning employed a cook, though Edna - and also Lois - was new since my last visit.

I said to my mother, 'Wilfred notwithstanding, I'll go up now and see Ivan. I expect I'll find you upstairs in your sitting-room.'

Edna and Lois hovered visibly between allegiances. I gave them my most cheerful non-combative smile, and found my mother following me gratefully up the stairs to the main floor, quiet now but grandly formal with dining-room and drawing-room for entertaining.

'Don't tell me,' I teased her, once we were out of the kitchen's earshot, 'Patsy employed them.'

She didn't deny it. 'They're very efficient.'

'How long have they worked here?'

'A week.'

She came with me up to the next floor, where she and Ivan each had a bedroom, bathroom and personal day-room, in his case a study-cum-office, in hers the refuge they used most, a comfortable pink and green matter of fat armchairs and television.

'Lois cleans very well,' my mother sighed as we went in there, 'but she will move things. It's almost as if she moves them deliberately, just to prove to me that she's dusted.'

She shifted two vases back to their old familiar position of one at each end of the mantelshelf. Silver candlesticks were returned to flank the clock.

'Just tell her not to,' I said, but I knew she wouldn't. She didn't like to upset people: the opposite of Patsy.

I went along to see Ivan, who was sitting palely in his study while noises from his bedroom next door suggested bed-making and the tidying of bottles.

He wore a crimson woollen dressing-gown and brown leather slippers and showed no surprise at my presence.

'Vivienne said you were coming,' he said neutrally. Vivienne was Mother.

'How are you feeling?' I asked, sitting in a chair opposite him and realising with misgiving that he looked older, greyer and a good deal thinner than he had been on my last visit in the spring. Then, I'd been on my way to America with my mind full of the commercial part of my life. He had made, I now remembered, an unexpected invitation for my advice, and I had been too preoccupied, too impatient and too full of doubt of his sincerity to listen properly to what he'd wanted. It had been something to do with his horses, his steeplechasers in training at Lambourn, and I'd had other reasons than press of business to avoid going there.

I repeated my question, 'How are you feeling?'

He asked merely, 'Why don't you cut your hair?'

'I don't know.'

'Curls are girlish.'

He himself had the short-cut shape that went with the businessman personality: with the baronetcy and membership of the Jockey Club. I knew him to be fair-minded and well respected, a middling man who had inherited a modest title from a cousin and a large brewery from his father and had done his best by both.

It was a sadness with him that he had neither son nor any male relative: he was resigned to the baronetcy dying with him.

I'd often flippantly asked him, 'How's the beer, then?', but on that morning it seemed inappropriate. I said instead, 'Is there anything I can do for you?' and regretted it before the last words were out of my mouth. Not Lambourn, I thought. Anything else.

But 'Look after your mother,' was what he said first.

'Yes, of course.'

'I mean… after I've gone.' His voice was quiet and accepting.

'You're going to live.'

He surveyed me with the usual lack of enthusiasm and said dryly, 'You've had a word with God, have you?'

'Not yet.'

'You wouldn't be so bad, Alexander, if you would come down off your mountain and rejoin the human race.'

He had offered, when he'd married my mother, to take me into the brewery and teach me the business, and at eighteen, with chaotic visions of riotous colours intoxicating my inner eye, I'd learned the first great lesson of harmonious stepsonship, how to say no without giving offence.

I wasn't ungrateful and I didn't dislike him: we were just entirely different. As far as one could see, he and my mother were quietly happy together and there was nothing wrong with his care of her.

He said, 'Have you seen your uncle Robert during the last few days?'

'No.'

My uncle Robert was the earl - 'Himself'. He came to Scotland every year in late August and stayed north for the shooting and fishing and the Highland Games. He sent for me every year to visit him, but although I knew from Jed that he was now in residence, I hadn't so far been summoned.

Ivan pursed his lips. 'I thought he might have wanted to see you.'

'Any time soon, I expect.'

'I've asked him-' He broke off, then continued, 'he'll tell you himself.'

I felt no curiosity. Himself and Ivan had known each other for upwards of twenty years, drawn together by a fondness for owning racehorses. They still had their steeplechasers trained in the same yard in Lambourn.

Himself had approved of the match between Ivan and the widow of his much-loved youngest brother. He'd stood beside me at the wedding ceremony and told me to go to him if I ever needed help; and considering that he had five children of his own and half a clan of other nephews and nieces, I'd felt comforted in the loss of my father and in a deep way secure.

I had managed on my own, but I'd known that he was there .

I said to Ivan, 'Mother thinks you may be worried about the Cup.'

He hesitated over an answer, then asked, 'What about it?'

'She doesn't know if it's troubling you and making you feel worse.'

'Your dear mother!' he deeply sighed.

I said, 'Is there something wrong with this year's race? Not enough entries, or something?'

'Look after her.'

She'd been right, I thought, about his depression. A malaise of the soul, outwardly discernible in weak movements of his hands and the lack of vigour in his voice. I didn't think there was much I could do to improve things, if his own doctor couldn't.

As if on cue a fifty-to-sixty, thin, moustached, busy-busy person hurried into the room in a dark flapping suit announcing that as he was passing on his way to the Clinic he had called in for five minutes to check on his patient. 'Morning, Ivan. How's things?'