Decider

by Dick Francis

  ‘Where’s that bloody Oliver?’ she loudly demanded, looking round.

  ‘With your father…’

  She didn’t listen. She still wore breeches and boots, but with a tan sweater in place of her racing colours. Her eyes glittered, her body looked rigid, she seemed half-way demented. ‘Do you know what that stupid bloody doctor’s done? He’s stood me down from racing for four days. Four days! I ask you. He says I’m concussed. Concussed, my arse. Where’s Oliver? He’s got to tell that bloody man I’m going to ride on Monday. Where is he?’

  Rebecca spun on her heel and strode out with the same energy expenditure as on the way in.

  I said, closing the door after her, ‘She’s concussed to high heaven, I’d have said.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s always a bit like that. If I were the doctor I’d stand her down for life.’

  ‘She’s not your favourite Stratton, I gather.’

  Caution returned to Roger with a rush, ‘I never said…’

  ‘Of course not.’ I paused. ‘So what has changed since last Sunday?’

  He consulted the light cream walls, the framed print of Arkle, the big calendar with days crossed off, a large clock (accurate) and his own shoes, and finally said, ‘Mrs Binsham came out of the woodwork.’

  ‘Is that so momentous?’

  ‘You know who she is?’ He was curious, a little surprised.

  ‘The old Lord’s sister.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know anything about the family.’

  ‘I said I had no contact with them, and I don’t. But my mother talked about them. Like I told you, she was once married to the old man’s son.’

  ‘Do you mean Conrad? Or Keith? Or… Ivan?’

  ‘Keith,’ I said. ‘Conrad’s twin.’

  ‘Fraternal twins,’ Roger said. ‘The younger one.’

  I agreed. ‘Twenty-five minutes younger, and apparently never got over it.’

  ‘It does make a difference, I suppose.’

  It made the difference between inheriting a barony, and not. Inheriting the family mansion, and not. Inheriting a fortune, and not. Keith’s jealousy of his twenty-five minute elder brother had been one – but only one, according to my mother – of the habitual rancours poisoning her ex-husband’s psyche.

  I had my mother’s photographs of her Stratton wedding day, the bridegroom tall, light-haired, smiling, strikingly good looking, all the promise of a splendid life ahead in the pride and tenderness of his manner towards her. She had that day been exploding with bliss, she’d told me; with an indescribable floating feeling of happiness.

  Within six months he’d broken her arm in a fight and punched out two of her front teeth.

  ‘Mrs Binsham,’ Roger Gardner said, ‘has insisted on a shareholders’ meeting next week. She’s a dragon, they say. She’s Conrad’s aunt, of course, and apparently she’s the only living creature who makes him quake.’

  Forty years back she had implacably forced her brother, the third baron, to behave harshly in public to my mother. Even then Mrs Binsham had been the dynamo of the family, the manipulator, the one who laid down the programme of action and forced the rest to follow.

  ‘She never gave up,’ my mother said. ‘She would simply wear down any opposition until you would do what she wanted just to get some peace. In her own eyes, you see, she was always right, so she was always certain that what she wanted was best.’

  I asked Roger, ‘Do you know Mrs Binsham yourself?’

  ‘Yes, but not well. She’s an impressive old lady, very upright. She comes to the races here quite often with Lord Stratton – er, not Conrad, but the old Lord – but I’ve never had any really private conversations with her. Oliver knows her better. Or at least,’ he faintly grinned, ‘Oliver has obeyed her instructions from time to time.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll sort out the present squabbles and quieten things down,’ I said.

  Roger shook his head. ‘What she says might go with Conrad and Keith and Ivan, but the younger generation may rebel, especially since they’re all coming into some shares of their own.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘So now you have an informant in the nest?’

  His face grew still; wary almost, ‘I never said that.’

  ‘No.’

  Oliver returned. ‘The sponsors are unhappy about the dead horse, bless their little hearts. Bad publicity. Not what they pay for. They’ll have to reconsider before next year, they say.’ He sounded dispirited, ‘I’d framed that race well, you know,’ he told me. ‘Ten runners in a three-mile ’chase. That’s good, you know. Often you’ll only attract five or six, or even less. If the sponsor pulls out, it’ll be a poorer affair altogether, next year.’

  I made sympathetic noises.

  ‘If there is a next year,’ he said. ‘There’s a shareholders’ meeting next week… did they tell you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re holding it here on the racecourse, in the Strattons’ private dining room,’ he said. ‘Conrad hasn’t moved into the big house yet, and anyway this is less personal, he says. Will you be coming?’ It was less a question, I thought, than an entreaty.

  ‘I haven’t decided,’ I said.

  ‘I do hope you will. I mean, they need an outside view, do you see? They’re all too involved.’

  ‘They wouldn’t want me there.’

  ‘All the more reason for going.’

  I doubted that, but didn’t bother to argue. I suggested collecting the boys, and found them ‘helping’ the valets pack the jockeys’ saddles and other gear into large laundry hampers while eating fruit cake.

  They’d been no trouble, I was told, and hoped I could believe it. I thanked everyone. Thanked Roger. ‘Vote your shares,’ he said anxiously. Thanked Jenkins. ‘Well-behaved little sods,’ he said helpfully. ‘Bring them again.’

  ‘We called everyone “sir”,’ Neil confided to me as we left.

  ‘We called Jenkins “sir”,’ Alan said. ‘He got us the cake.’

  We reached the mini-van and climbed in, and they showed me all the jockeys’ autographs in their racecards. They’d had a good time in the changing room, it seemed.

  ‘Was that man dead?’ Toby asked, reverting to what was most on his mind.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I thought he was. I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’

  ‘You’ve seen dogs,’ Alan said.

  ‘That’s not the same, plank-head.’

  Christopher asked, ‘What did the colonel mean about voting your shares?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He said “Vote your shares.” He looked pretty upset, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘do you know what shares are?’

  ‘Pieces of cake,’ Neil guessed. ‘One each.’

  ‘Say you had a chessboard,’ I said, ‘there would be sixty-four squares, OK? Say you called each square a share. There would be sixty-four shares.’

  The young faces told me I wasn’t getting the idea across.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘say you have a floor made of tiles.’

  They nodded at once. As a builder’s children they knew all about tiles.

  ‘Say you lay ten tiles across and ten tiles down, and fill in the square.’

  ‘A hundred tiles,’ Christopher nodded.

  ‘Yes. Now call each tile a share, a hundredth part of the whole square. A hundred shares. OK?’

  They nodded.

  ‘What about voting?’ Christopher asked.

  I hesitated. ‘Say you owned some of the tiles, you could vote to have yours blue… or red… whatever you’d like.’

  ‘How many could you vote on?’

  ‘Eight,’ I said.

  ‘You could have eight blue tiles? What about the others?’

  ‘All the others, ninety-two, belong to other people. They could all choose whatever colour they liked for the tiles they owned.’

  ‘It would be a mess,’ Edward pointed out. ‘Y
ou wouldn’t get everyone to agree on a pattern.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘But you’re not really meaning tiles, are you?’ Christopher said.

  ‘No.’ I paused. For once, they were all listening. ‘See, say this racecourse is like a hundred tiles. A hundred squares. A hundred shares. I have eight shares of the racecourse. Other people have ninety-two.’

  Christopher shrugged, ‘It’s not much, then. Eight’s not even one row.’

  Neil said, ‘if the racecourse was divided up into a hundred squares, Dad’s eight squares might have the stands on!’

  ‘Plank-head,’ Toby said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Why did I go?

  I don’t know. I doubt if there is such a thing as a wholly free choice, because one’s choices are rooted in one’s personality. I choose what I choose because I am what I am, that sort of thing.

  I chose to go for reprehensible reasons like the lure of unearned gain and from the vanity that I might against all odds tame the dragon and sort out the Stratton feuds peacefully, as Roger and Oliver wanted. Greed and pride… powerful spurs masquerading as prudent financial management and altruistic good works.

  So I disregarded the despairing plea from my mother’s remembered wisdom and took my children into desperate danger and by my presence altered for ever the internal stresses and balances of the Strattons.

  Except, of course, that it didn’t seem like that on the day of the shareholders’ meeting.

  It took place on the Wednesday afternoon, on the third day of the ruin hunt. On Monday morning the five boys and I had set off from home in the big converted single-decker bus that had in the past served as mobile home for us all during periods when the currently-being-rebuilt ruin had been truly and totally uninhabitable.

  The bus had its points: it would sleep eight, it had a working shower room, a galley, sofas and television. I’d taken lessons from a yacht builder in creating storage spaces where none might seem to exist, and we could in fact store a sizeable household very neatly aboard. It did not, all the same, offer privacy or much personal space, and as the boys grew they had found it increasingly embarrassing as an address.

  They packed into it quite happily on the Monday, though, as I had promised them a real holiday in the afternoons if I could visit a ruin each morning, and in fact with map and timetables I’d planned a series of the things they most liked to do. Monday afternoon we spent canoeing on the Thames, Tuesday they beat the hell out of a bowling alley, and on the Wednesday they’d promised to help Roger Gardner’s wife clean out her garage, a chore they bizarrely enjoyed.

  I left the bus outside the Gardner house and with Roger walked to the stands.

  ‘I’m not invited to the meeting,’ he said as if it were a relief, ‘but I’ll show you to the door.’

  He took me up a staircase, round a couple of corners, and through a door marked Private into a carpeted world quite different from the functional concrete of the public areas. Silently pointing to panelled and polished double-doors ahead, he gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder and left me, rather in the manner of a colonel avuncularly sending a rookie into his first battle.

  Regretting my presence already, I opened one of the double-doors and went in.

  I’d gone to the meeting in business clothes (grey trousers, white shirt, tie, navy blazer) to present a conventional boardroom appearance. I had a tidy normal haircut, the smoothest of shaves, clean fingernails. The big dusty labourer of the building sites couldn’t be guessed at.

  The older men at the meeting all wore suits. Those more my own age and younger hadn’t bothered with such formality. I had, I thought in satisfaction, hit it just right.

  Although I had arrived at the time stated in the solicitor’s letter, it seemed that the Strattons had jumped the clock. The whole tribe were sitting round a truly imposing Edwardian dining table of old French-polished mahogany, their chairs newer, nineteen-thirtyish, like the grandstands themselves.

  The only one I knew by sight was Rebecca, the jockey, dressed now in trousers, tailored jacket and heavy gold chains. The man sitting at the head of the table, grey-haired, bulky and authoritative, I took to be Conrad, the fourth and latest baron.

  He turned his head to me as I went in. They all, of course, turned their heads. Five men, three women.

  ‘I’m afraid you are in the wrong place,’ Conrad said with scant politeness. ‘This is a private meeting.’

  ‘Stratton shareholders?’ I asked inoffensively.

  ‘As it happens. And you are…?’

  ‘Lee Morris.’

  The shock that rippled through them was almost funny, as if they hadn’t realised that I would even be notified of the meeting, let alone had considered that I might attend; and they had every reason to be surprised, as I had never before responded to any of their official annual bits of paper.

  I closed the door quietly behind me. ‘I was sent a notification,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but –’ Conrad said without welcome. ‘I mean, it wasn’t necessary… You weren’t expected to bother…’ He stopped uncomfortably, unable to hide what looked like dismay.

  ‘As I’m here,’ I said amiably, ‘I may as well stay. Shall I sit here?’ I indicated an empty chair at the foot of the table, walking towards it purposefully. ‘We’ve never met,’ I went on, ‘but you must be Conrad, Lord Stratton.’

  He said ‘Yes’, tight lipped.

  One of the older men said violently, ‘This is a disgrace! You’ve no right here. Don’t sit down. You’re leaving.’

  I stood by the empty chair and brought the solicitor’s letter out of a pocket. ‘As you’ll see,’ I answered him pleasantly, ‘I am a shareholder. I was properly given advance notice of this meeting, and I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I do have a legal right to be here. I’ll just sit quietly and listen.’

  I sat down. All of the faces registered stark disapproval except for one, a younger man’s, bearing a hint of a grin.

  ‘Conrad! This is ridiculous.’ The man who most violently opposed my presence was up on his feet, quivering with fury. ‘Get rid of him at once.’

  Conrad Stratton realistically took stock of my size and comparative youth and said defeatedly, ‘Sit down, Keith. Who exactly is going to throw him out?’

  Keith, my mother’s first husband, might have been strong enough in his youth to batter a miserable young wife, but there was no way he could begin to do the same to her thirty-five-year-old son. He hated the fact of my existence. I hated what I’d learned of him. The antagonism between us was mutual, powerful and lasting.

  The fair hair in the wedding photographs had turned a blondish grey. The good bone structure still gave him a more patrician air than that of his elder twin. His looking glass must still constantly be telling him that the order of his birth had been nature’s horrible mistake, that his should have been the head that engaged first.

  He couldn’t sit down. He strode about the big room, snapping his head round in my direction now and then, and glaring at me.

  Important chaps who might have been the first and second barons looked down impassively from gold-framed portraits on the walls. The lighting hung from the ceiling in convoluted brass chandeliers with etched glass shades round candle bulbs. Upon a long polished mahogany sideboard stood a short case clock flanked by heavy old throttled-neck vases that, like the whole room, had an air of having remained unchanged for most of the old Lord’s life.

  There was no daylight: no windows.

  Next to Conrad sat a ramrod-backed old lady easy to identify as his aunt, Marjorie Binsham, the convener of this affair. Forty years earlier, on my mother’s wedding day, she had stared grimly at the camera as if a smile would have cracked her facial muscles, and nothing in that way, either, seemed to have been affected by passing years. Now well into her eighties, she flourished a still sharp brain under disciplined wavy white hair and wore a red and black dog-toothed dress with a white, ecclesiastica
l-looking collar.

  Rather to my surprise she was regarding me more with curiosity than rigid dislike.

  ‘Mrs Binsham?’ I said from the other end of the table. ‘Mrs Marjorie Binsham?’

  ‘Yes.’ The monosyllable came out clipped and dry, merely acknowledging information.

  ‘I,’ said the man whose grin was now in control, ‘am Darlington Stratton, known as Dart. My father sits at the head of the table. My sister Rebecca is on your right.’

  ‘This is unnecessary!’ Keith snapped at him from somewhere behind Conrad. ‘He does not need introductions. He’s leaving.’

  Mrs Binsham said repressively and with exquisite diction, ‘Keith, do stop prowling, and sit down. Mr Morris is correct, he has a right to be here. Face facts. As you cannot eject him, ignore him.’

  Mrs Binsham’s direct gaze was bent on me, not on Keith. My own lips twitched. Ignoring me seemed the last thing any of them could do.

  Dart said, with a straight face covering infinite mischief, ‘Have you met Hannah, your sister?’

  The woman on the other side of Conrad from Mrs Binsham vibrated with disgust. ‘He’s not my brother. He’s not.’

  ‘Half-brother,’ Marjorie Binsham said, with the same cool fact-facing precision. ‘Unpalatable as you may find it, Hannah, you cannot change it. Just ignore him.’

  For Hannah, as for Keith, the advice was impossible to follow. My half-sister, to my relief, didn’t look like our joint mother. I’d been afraid she might: afraid to find familiar eyes hating me from an echo of a loved face. She looked more like Keith, tall, blonde, fine-boned and, at the moment, white with outrage.

  ‘How dare you!’ She shook. ‘Have you no decency?’

  ‘I have shares,’ I pointed out.

  ‘And you shouldn’t have,’ Keith said harshly. ‘Why Father ever gave them to Madeline, I’ll never know.’

  I refrained from saying that he must know perfectly well why. Lord Stratton had given shares to Madeline, his daughter-in-law, because he knew why she was leaving. In my mother’s papers, after she’d died, I came across old letters from her father-in-law telling her of his regret, of his regard for her, of his concern that she shouldn’t suffer financially, as she had physically. Though loyal in public to his son, he had privately not only given her the shares ‘for the future’ but had endowed her also with a lump sum to keep her comfortable on the interest. In return, she had promised never ever to speak of Keith’s behaviour, still less to drag the family name through a messy divorce. The old man wrote that he understood her rejection of Hannah, the result of his son’s ‘sexual attacks’. He would care for the child, he wrote. He wished my mother ‘the best that can be achieved, my dear’.