Decider

by Dick Francis

  Roger, returning from his errand, offered not one but two walking sticks, plus, at my cajoling, a copy of Yarrow’s grandstand plans (‘You’ll get me shot’), plus a ride to the station, though as we set off he said he doubted my sanity.

  ‘Do you want to know if Wilson Yarrow can be trusted?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d be happy to know he can’t be.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘I’m healing,’ I said briefly.

  ‘I’ll say no more.’

  I paid for my ticket by credit card, tottered onto the train, took a taxi from Paddington and arrived without incident on Carteret’s doorstep near Shepherd’s Bush. (Bay-windowed terrace built for genteel but impoverished Edwardians.)

  He opened the door himself and we took stock of each other, the years of no contact sliding away. He was still small, rounded, bespectacled and black haired, an odd genetic mixture of Celt and Thai, though born and educated in England. We had paired as strangers to share digs together temporarily during our first year in architectural school and had gone through the whole course helping each other where necessary.

  ‘You look just the same,’ I said.

  ‘So do you.’ He eyed my height, curly hair and brown eyes; raised his eyebrows not at the working clothes but at the sticks I leaned on.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you about it.’

  ‘How’s Amanda?’ he asked, leading me in. ‘Are you still married?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘I never thought it would last,’ he said frankly. ‘And how are the boys? Three, was it?’

  ‘We have six, now.’

  ‘Six! You never did anything by halves.’

  I met his wife, busy, and his two children, excited about going to meet Mickey Mouse. I told him, in his untidy, much lived-in sitting room, about the present and possible future of Stratton Park racecourse. I explained a good deal.

  We drank beer. He said he hadn’t remembered anything else about Wilson Yarrow except that he had been one of the precious élite tipped for immortality.

  ‘And then… what happened?’ he asked. ‘Rumours. A cover-up of some sort. It didn’t affect us, personally, and we were always working so hard ourselves. I remember his name. If he’d been called Tom Johnson or something, I’d have forgotten that too.’

  I nodded. I felt the same. I asked if I could look at his diaries.

  ‘I did find them for you,’ he said. ‘They were in a box in the attic. Do you seriously think I’d have written anything about Wilson Yarrow?’

  ‘I hope you did. You wrote about most things.’

  He smiled. ‘Waste of time, really. I used to think my life would go by and I’d forget it, if I didn’t write it down.’

  ‘You were probably right.’

  He shook his head. ‘One remembers the great things anyway, and all the dreadful things. The rest doesn’t matter.’

  ‘My diaries are balance sheets,’ I said. ‘I look at the old ones and remember what I was doing, when.’

  ‘Did you go on with rebuilding old wrecks?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘I couldn’t work in an office. I tried it.’

  We smiled ruefully at each other, old improbable friends, unalike in everything except knowledge.

  ‘I brought an envelope,’ I said, having clutched its large brown shape awkwardly along with one of the walking sticks during the journey. ‘While I read the diaries, you look at the way Wilson Yarrow thinks a grandstand should be built. Tell me your thoughts.’

  ‘All right.’

  A sensible plan, but no good in the performance. I looked with dismay as he brought out his diaries and piled them on his coffee table. There were perhaps twenty large spiral-bound notebooks, eight inches by ten and a half, literally thousands of pages filled with his neat cramped handwriting; a task of days, not half an hour.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ I said weakly. ‘I didn’t remember…’

  ‘I told you you didn’t know what you were asking.’

  ‘Could you… I mean, would you, lend them to me?’

  ‘To take away, do you mean?’

  ‘You’d get them back.’

  ‘You swear?’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘On my diploma.’

  His face lightened. ‘All right.’ He opened the brown envelope and took a look at the contents, pausing with raised eyebrows at the axonometric drawing. ‘That’s showing off!’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Not necessary.’

  Carteret looked at the elevations and floor plans. He made no comment about the amount of glass: building in difficult ways with glass was typical Architectural Association doctrine. We’d been taught to regard glass as avant-garde, as the pushing back of design frontiers. When I’d murmured that surely building with glass had been old hat since Joseph Paxton stuck together the old Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, I’d been reviled as an iconoclast, if not ruthlessly expelled for heresy. In any case, glass was acceptable to Carteret in futuristic ways that I found clever for the sake of cleverness, not for grace or utility. Glass for its own sake was pointless to me: except as a source of daylight, it was normally what one could see through it that mattered.

  ‘Where are the rest of the plans?’ Carteret asked.

  ‘This is all Yarrow showed the Strattons.’

  ‘How does he get crowds up five storeys?’

  I smiled. ‘Presumably they walk, like they did in the old grandstand that exploded…’

  ‘No lifts. No escalators in the floor plan.’ He looked up. ‘No client would buy this, not in this day and age.’

  ‘I’d guess,’ I said, ‘that Conrad Stratton has committed himself and the racecourse to whatever Yarrow produced.’

  ‘Signed a contract, do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. If he did, it’s not binding, as he hadn’t the power to.’

  He frowned. ‘Bit of a mess, though.’

  ‘Not if Wilson Yarrow’s disqualified himself in some way.’

  ‘Literally? Do you mean disbarred? Struck off?’

  ‘More like dishonest.’

  ‘Well, good luck with the diaries. I don’t remember anything like that.’

  ‘But… something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Do you have a number I could ring for a taxi?’

  ‘Sure. It’s in the kitchen. I’ll do it for you.’ He went away on the errand and presently returned, carrying a carrier bag and followed by his wife, who hovered in the doorway.

  ‘Take the diaries in this,’ he said, beginning to transfer them to the carrier, ‘and my wife says I must drive you to Paddington myself. She says you’re in pain.’

  Disconcerted, I glanced at his wife and rubbed a hand over my face while I sought for a response.

  ‘She’s a nurse,’ Carteret said. ‘She thought you had arthritis until I explained about the roof falling in. She says you’re forcing yourself to move and you need to rest a bit.’

  ‘Haven’t time.’

  He cheerfully nodded. ‘Like, I may have a roaring temperature today but I can’t fit in flu until, let’s say, next Tuesday?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘So I will drive you to Paddington.’

  ‘I’m truly grateful.’

  He nodded, satisfied that I meant it.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I thought the current medical theory was “get up and go”.’

  Carteret’s wife gave me a sweetly indulgent smile and went away, and Carteret himself put the carrierful of diaries in his car and on arrival at Paddington Station drove round the back taxi road to park close between platforms, among the trains.

  On the way there I said, ‘Stratton Park racecourse will be advertising for proposals for its new stands. Why don’t you ask your firm to put in for the competition?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about grandstands.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I
could tell you what’s needed.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not my sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ll see what my firm says,’ he remarked doubtfully.

  ‘Tell them to write and express interest and ask for how large a crowd the stands are envisaged to cater for. You can’t even begin to design stands until you’ve an idea of the size needed. Someone must have told Yarrow, because he got that about right.’

  ‘My firm can but try, I suppose,’ Carteret said. ‘There are fifteen thousand architects in Britain currently out of work. People don’t think they need architects. They don’t want to pay the fees, then they complain if they knock down a wall and the bedrooms fall into the basement.’

  ‘Life’s rotten,’ I said dryly.

  ‘Still the same cynic, I see.’

  He carried the diaries to the train and stored them and me into a seat. ‘I’ll phone you when I get back from Disney. Where will you be?’

  I gave him my home number. ‘Amanda may answer. She’ll take a message.’

  ‘Don’t let’s leave it another ten years,’ he said. ‘OK?’

  Swaying towards Swindon I dipped into the diaries and finally drowned in nostalgia. How young we’d been! How unformed and trusting! How serious and certain.

  I came to a deep thrust of the knife.

  Carteret had written:

  Lee and Amanda got married today in church, the whole bit, like she wanted. They’re both nineteen. I think he’s a fool but have to admit they looked very pleased with themselves. She’s dreamy. Trust Lee. Her father, ultra pukkah, he paid for it all. Her young sister Shelly was bridesmaid, a bit spotty. Lee’s mother came. Madeline. A knockout. Fancied her rotten. She says I’m too young. Went to Amanda’s folks’ house after, for champagne and cake etc. About forty people. Amanda’s cousins, girl friends, old uncles, that sort of thing. I had to toast the bridesmaid. Who’d be a best man? Lee says they’ll live on air. Must say they were walking on it. They went off to practise being Mr and Mrs in Paris for three days. Amanda’s parents gave it to them for a wedding present.

  God, I thought, I remembered that wedding day in every tiny detail. I’d been positive we’d be blissful for ever and ever. Sad, sad illusion.

  On the next page, Carteret had written:

  Lee and Amanda’s party last night. Most of our year came. A rave up. Bit different from last week’s wedding!! They still look ecstatic. Beer and pizza this time. Lee was paying. I went to bed at six and slept through old Hammond’s lecture this morning. I miss Lee in our lodgings. Didn’t realise what I’d got. Better start looking for a replacement, can’t afford this place on my own, bleak though it is.

  Watching lights flash by in the dark countryside outside the train’s windows, I wondered what Amanda was doing at that moment. Was she quietly alone at home with Jamie? Or was she, as I couldn’t help speculating, embarking on an adventure of her own; had she met a new man at her sister’s party? Had she been to her sister’s party? Why did she want me and the boys to stay away for two more days?

  I wondered how I would deal with it if she had finally, after all these years, fallen seriously in love with someone else.

  For all the fragile state of our marriage, I desperately wanted it to continue. Perhaps because I myself hadn’t been engulfed by an irresistible new passion, I still saw only advantages in staying, even unsatisfactorily, together; and top of that list came stability for six young lives. My whole mind skittered away from the thought of breaking everything up, from division of property, loss of sons, uncertainty, unhappiness, loneliness, acrimony. That sort of pain would disintegrate me into uselessness as nothing physical could.

  Let Amanda have a lover, I thought: let her light up with excitement, go off on trips, even bear a child not mine; but, dear God, let her stay.

  I would find out, I thought, when we went home on Thursday. I would see, then. I would know. I didn’t want Thursday to come.

  With an effort I turned back to dipping into Carteret’s diaries for the rest of the journey, but Wilson Yarrow might never have existed for all I found of him.

  It was after ten o’clock when I directed the Swindon taxi to drive into the racecourse by the back road and stop at the bus.

  The boys were all there, drowsily watching a video, Neil fast asleep. Christopher, relieved, went off, as he’d promised, to tell the Gardners I’d come safely back. I lay down gratefully myself with an intense feeling that this was home, this bus, these children. Never regret that unwise wedding day, this had grown out of it. Now, keeping it together was all that mattered.

  Sleep enfolded us all, peacefully; but there was a fire in the night.

  CHAPTER 11

  The boys and I surveyed the smoking ruins of the fence at the open ditch. Black, scorched to stumps and ash, it stretched across the course, smelling healthily of garden bonfire, thirty feet long by three feet wide.

  Roger was there, unworried, with three groundsmen who had apparently dowsed the flames earlier and were now waiting with spades and a truck for the embers to cool to dismantling point.

  ‘Harold Quest?’ I asked Roger.

  He shrugged resignedly. ‘His sort of thing, I suppose, but he left no signature. I’d have expected a “BAN CRUELTY” poster, at the least.’

  ‘Will you doll off the fence?’ I asked.

  ‘Lord, no. Once we get this mess cleared away, we’ll rebuild it. No problem. It’s just a nuisance, not a calamity.’

  ‘No one saw who set it alight?’

  ‘’Fraid not. The night watchman spotted the flames from the stands at about dawn. He phoned me, woke me up, and of course I drove up here, but there was no one about. It would have been handy to catch someone with a can of petrol, but no dice. It was a pretty thorough job, as you see. Not a cigarette. The whole width of the fence burned at once. There isn’t much wind. It had to be petrol.’

  ‘Or firelighters,’ Christopher said.

  Roger looked interested. ‘Yes. I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘Dad won’t let us light fires with petrol,’ my son explained. ‘He says we could easily light ourselves.’

  ‘Firelighters,’ Roger said thoughtfully.

  All the boys nodded.

  ‘Lots of twigs,’ Neil said.

  ‘Birch,’ Edward corrected.

  Toby said, shuddering, ‘I don’t like this place.’

  Roger and I both abruptly remembered that it was here that Toby had seen the racegoer with his eyes kicked out. Roger said briskly, ‘Jump in the jeep, boys,’ and as they tumbled to obey him, added to me, ‘You walked up here from the bus!’

  ‘It’s not far,’ I pointed out, ‘and it’s getting easier all the time.’ I’d taken only one stick: felt stiff and creaky but definitely stronger.

  Roger said, ‘Good. Well, get in the jeep yourself. Henry’s a genius!’

  He drove up to the by now familiar roadway and parked outside his office and positively beamed at the sight before us.

  The fine weather, though cooling, had lasted. The sky was a washed pale blue with a few streaky clouds slowly thinning and vanishing. The morning sun shone unhampered on strings of bright flags, which fluttered gently from the ridge lines of the big top’s spreading roof right down to the ground in a blizzard of strings, arcading the whole huge tent like an arch of honour. Merrie Englande come again to gorgeous light-hearted life, uplifting the spirits, making one laugh.

  I breathed, ‘Oh, my boy,’ and Roger said, ‘There are your flags. Henry said he brought every last one. When his men unfurled them all less than an hour ago, and that big white spread of canvas blossomed like that… well, you’d have to have been a sneering misogynist not to have been moved.’

  ‘Colonel, you’re a sentimentalist!’

  ‘Who’s talking!’

  ‘I’m a hard-headed businessman,’ I said, only half truthfully. ‘The flags make people ready to spend more. Don’t ask for the psychology, it just happens.’
r />   He said contentedly, ‘That’s the perfect squelch for possible cynics. Mind if I use it?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Henry’s vast trucks had gone. Henry’s own personal van, Roger said, was now parked out of sight at the far end of the big top. Henry was somewhere about.

  Two Portakabins now stood, neatly aligned end to end, where Henry’s trucks had been. Into one of them jockeys’ valets were carrying saddles and hampers from their nearby vans, setting up the changing room for the male riders. Through the open door of the other could be seen an official weighing machine, borrowed from an obliging Midlands course.

  A row of caterers’ vans were drawn up outside the small feeder tents on the side of the big top furthest from the track, with busy hands carrying tables and trestles and folding chairs through the specially made passages into what would soon be fully-fledged dining rooms and bars.

  ‘It’s all working,’ Roger said in wonderment, it’s bloody amazing.’

  ‘It’s great.’

  ‘And the stables, of course, are OK. Horses have been arriving as usual. The canteen for drivers and lads is open, serving hot food. The Press are here. The stable security staff say that for once everyone seems to be in a holiday mood. Like the Blitz, there’s nothing like a bloody disaster to make the English good humoured.’

  We climbed out of the jeep and went into the big top itself. Each ‘room’ now had a high-rising Moorish-looking tented ceiling of pleated peach ‘silk’ above white solid-seeming walls, some of which were in fact taut whitened canvas laced onto poles. The floor throughout was of brown matting glued onto wooden sections slotted levelly together, firm and easy to the feet. Lights shone everywhere, discreetly. The fans up by the high roof silently circled, changing the air. Each room had an identifying board at its entrance. It all looked spacious, organised and calm. A rebirth; marvellous.

  ‘What have we forgotten?’ I said.

  ‘You’re such a comfort.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’