by Dick Francis
Thanked the nurses who clattered about with deft hands and noisy machinery, and in absentia thanked the donors of blood type O who had refilled my veins.
Thanked Cassie for her love and for sitting beside me whenever they’d let her.
Thanked the fates that the destructive lump of metal had missed my heart. Thanked everyone I could for anything I could think of in gratitude for my life.
The long recurring dreams that had come during unconsciousness faded, receded, seemed no longer to be vivid fact. I no longer saw the Devil pacing beside me, quiet but implacable, the master waiting for my soul. I no longer saw him, the Fallen Angel, the Devil with Angelo’s face, the yellow face with frosted hair and black empty holes where the eyes should have been. The Presence had gone. I was back in the daft real enjoyable world where tubes were what mattered, not concepts of evil.
I didn’t say how close I had been to death because they were saying it for me, roughly every five minutes. I didn’t say that I had looked on the spaces of eternity and seen the everlasting Darkness and had known it had a meaning and a face. The visions of the dying and the snatched-from-death were suspect. Angelo was a living man, not the Devil, not an incarnation or a house or a dwelling place. It was delirium, the confusion of the brain’s circuits, that had shown me the one as the other, the other as the One. I said nothing for fear of ridicule: and later nothing from feeling that I had in truth been mistaken and that the dreams were indeed . . . merely dreams.
“Where is Angelo?” I said.
“They said not to tire you.”
I looked at the evasion in Cassie’s face. “I’m lying down,” I pointed out. “So give.”
She said reluctantly, “Well . . . he’s here.”
“Here? In this hospital?”
She nodded. “In the room next door.”
I was bewildered. “But why?”
“He crashed his car.” She looked at me for signs, I supposed, of relapse, but was seemingly reassured. “He drove into a bus about six miles from here.”
“After he left the cottage?”
She nodded. “They brought him here. They brought him into the emergency unit while Bananas and I were waiting there. We couldn’t believe it.”
It wasn’t over. I closed my eyes. It was never going to be over. Wherever I went, it seemed that Angelo would follow, even onto the slab.
“William?” Cassie said urgently.
“Mm?”
“Oh. I thought—”
“I’m all right.”
“He was nearly dead,” she said. “Just like you. He’s still in a coma.”
“What?”
“Head injuries,” she said.
I learned bit by bit over the next few days that the hospital people hadn’t believed it when Bananas and Cassie told them it was Angelo who had shot me. They had fought as long and hard to save his life as mine, and apparently we had been placed side by side in the Intensive Care Unit until Cassie told them I’d have a heart attack if I woke and found him there.
The police had more moderately pointed out that if it was Angelo who woke first he might complete the job of murdering me: and Angelo was now in his unwaking sleep along the hallway, guarded by a constable night and day.
It was extraordinary to think of him being there, lying there so close. Unsettling in a fundamental way. I wouldn’t have thought it would have affected me so badly, but my pulse started jumping every time anyone opened the door. Reason said he wouldn’t come. The subconscious feared it.
Bodies heal amazingly quickly. I was free of tubes, moved to a side ward, on my feet, walking about within a week: creeping a bit, sure, and stiff and sore, but positively, conclusively alive. Angelo too, it seemed, was improving. On the way up from the depths. Opening unseeing eyes, showing responses.
I heard it from the nurses, from the cleaners, from the woman who pushed a trolley of comforts, and all of them watched me curiously to see how I would take it. The piquancy of the situation hit first the local paper and then the national dailies, and the constables guarding Angelo started drifting in to chat.
It was from one of them that I learned how Angelo had lost control of his car while going around a roundabout, how a whole queue of people at a bus stop had seen him veer toward the bus as if unable to turn the steering wheel, how he’d been going too fast in any case, and how he had seemed at first to be laughing.
Bananas, when he heard it, said trenchantly, “He crashed because you broke his wrist.”
“Yes,” I said.
He sighed deeply. “The police must know it.”
“I expect so.”
“Have they bothered you?”
I shook my head. “I told them what happened. They wrote it down. No one has said much.”
“They collected the pistol.” He smiled. “They put it in a paper bag.”
I left the hospital after twelve days, walking slowly past Angelo’s room but not going in. Revulsion was too strong even though I knew he was still lightly unconscious and wouldn’t be aware I was there. The damage he had caused in my life and Cassie’s might be over, but my body carried his scars, livid still and still hurting, too immediate for detachment.
I dare say I hated him. Perhaps I feared him. I certainly didn’t want to see him again, then or ever.
For the next three weeks I mooched around the cottage doing paperwork, getting fitter every day and persuading Bananas to drive me along to the Heath to watch the gallops. Cassie went to work, the plastered arm a memory. My blood was washed almost entirely off the sitting room carpet and the baseball bat was in the cellar. Life returned more or less to normal.
Luke came over from California, inspected the yearlings, met Cassie, listened to Sim and Mort and the Berkshire trainers, visited Warrington Marsh, and went off to Ireland. It was he, not I, who bid for Oxidize at Ballsbridge and sent the colt to Donavan, and he who in some way smoothed the Irish trainer’s feelings.
He came back briefly to Newmarket before leaving for home, calling in at the cottage and drinking a lunchtime scotch.
“Your year’s nearly through,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Have you enjoyed it?”
“Very much.”
“Want another?”
I lifted my head. He watched me through a whole minute of silence. He didn’t say, and nor did I, that Warrington Marsh was never going to be strong enough again to do the job. That wasn’t the point: the point was permanence—captivity.
“One year,” Luke said. “It’s not forever.”
After another pause I said, “One year, then. One more.”
He nodded and drank his drink, and it seemed to me that somewhere he was smiling. I had a presentiment of him coming over again the next year and offering the same thing. One year. One year’s contract at a time . . . leaving the cage door open but keeping his bird imprisoned: and as long as I could go, I thought, I might stay.
Cassie, when she came home, was pleased. “Mort told him he’d be mad to lose you.”
“Did he?”
“Mort likes you.”
“Donavan doesn’t.”
“You can’t have everything,” she said.
I had quite a lot, it was true; and then the police telephoned and asked me to see Angelo.
“No,” I said.
“That’s a gut reaction,” a voice said calmly. “But I’d like you to listen.”
He talked persuasively for a long time, cajoling again every time I protested, wearing down my opposition until in the end I reluctantly agreed to do what he wanted.
“Good,” he said finally. “Wednesday afternoon.”
“That’s only two days—”
“We’ll send a car. We don’t expect you to be driving yet.”
I didn’t argue. I could drive short distances but I tended to get tired. In another month, they said, I’d be running.
“We’re grateful,” the voice said.
“Yeah . . .”
I told Ca
ssie and Bananas, in the evening.
“How awful,” Cassie said. “It’s too much.”
The three of us were having dinner alone in the dining room as the restaurant didn’t officially open these days on Mondays: the old cow had negotiated Mondays off. Bananas had done the cooking himself, inventing soufflé of whitefish, herbs, orange and nuts to try out on Cassie and me: a concoction typically and indescribably different, an unknown language, a new horizon of taste.
“You could have said you wouldn’t go,” Bananas said, heaping his plate to match ours.
“With what excuse?”
“Selfishness,” Cassie said. “The best reason in the world for not doing things.”
“Never thought of it.”
Bananas said, “I hope you insisted on a bullet-proof vest, a six-inch-thick plate-glass screen and several rolls of barbed wire.”
“They did assure me,” I said mildly, “that they wouldn’t let him leap at my throat.”
“Too kind,” Cassie murmured.
We poured Bananas’ exquisite sauce over his soufflé and said that when we had to leave the cottage we would camp in his garden.
“And will you bet?”
“What do you mean?”
“On the system.”
I thought blankly that I’d forgotten all about that possibility: but we did have the tapes. We did have the choice.
“We don’t have a computer,” I said.
“We could soon pay for one,” Cassie said.
We all looked at each other. We were happy enough with our own jobs, with what we had. Did one always, inevitably, stretch out for more?
Yes, one did.
“You work the computer,” Bananas said, “and I’ll do the betting. Now and then. When we’re short.”
“As long as it doesn’t choke us.”
“I don’t want diamonds,” Cassie said judiciously, “or furs, or a yacht . . . but how soon can we have a pool in our sitting room?”
Whatever Luke said to my brother when he got home to California, I never knew, but it resulted in Jonathan telephoning that night to say he would be arriving at Heathrow on Wednesday morning.
“What about your students?”
“Sod the students. I’ve got laryngitis.” His voice bounced the distance strong and healthy. “I’ll see you.”
He came in a rented car looking biscuit-colored from the sun and anxious about what he would find, and although I was by then feeling well again it didn’t seem to reassure him.
“I’m alive,” I pointed out. “One thing at a time. Come back next month.”
“What exactly happened?”
“Angelo happened.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.
“I’d have told you if I’d died. Or someone would.”
He sat in one of the rockers and looked at me broodingly.
“It was all my fault,” he said.
“Oh, sure.” I was ironic.
“And that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
“I’d probably have told you one day.”
“Tell me now.”
I told him, however, where I was going that afternoon, and why, and he said in his calm positive way that he would come with me. I had thought he would: had been glad he was coming. I told him over the next few hours pretty well everything which had happened between Angelo and me, just as he had told me all those years ago in Cornwall.
“I’m sorry,” he said, at the end.
“Don’t be.”
“You’ll use the system?”
I nodded. “Pretty soon.”
“I think old Mrs. O’Rorke would be glad. She was proud of Liam’s work. She wouldn’t want it wasted.” He reflected for a bit and then said, “What make of pistol? Do you know?”
“I believe . . . the police said . . . a Walther .22?”
He smiled faintly. “True to form. And just as well. If it had been a .38 or something like that you’d have been in trouble.”
“Ah,” I said dryly. “Just as well.”
The car came for us as threatened and took us to a large house in Buckinghamshire. I never did discover exactly what it was: a cross between a hospital and a civil service institution, all long wide corridors and closed doors and hush.
“Down there,” we were directed. “Right along at the end. Last door on the right.”
We walked unhurriedly along the parquet flooring, our heels punctuating the silence. At the far end there was a tall window, floor to ceiling, casting not quite enough daylight; and silhouetted against the window were two figures, a man in a wheelchair with another man pushing him.
Those two and Jonathan and I in due course approached each other, and as we drew nearer I saw with unwelcome shock that the man in the wheelchair was Harry Gilbert. Old, gray, bowed, ill Harry Gilbert who still consciously repelled compassion.
Eddy, who was pushing, faltered to a halt, and Jonathan and I also stopped, we staring at Harry and Harry staring at us over a space of a few feet. He looked from me to Jonathan, glancing at him briefly at first and then looking longer, more carefully, seeing what he didn’t believe.
He switched to me. “You said he was dead,” he said.
I nodded slightly.
His voice was cold, dry, bitter, past passion, past hope, past strength to avenge. “Both of you,” he said. “You destroyed my son.”
Neither Jonathan nor I answered. I wondered about the genetics of evil, the chance that bred murder, the predisposition which lived already at birth. The biblical creation, I thought, was also the truth of evolution. Cain existed, and in every species there was survival of the ruthless.
It was only by luck that I had lived, by Bananas’ speed and surgeons’ dedication. Abel and centuries of other victims were dead: and in every generation, in many a race, the genes still threw up the killer. The Gilberts bred their Angelos forever.
Harry Gilbert jerked his head back, aiming at Eddy, signaling that he wanted to go; and Eddy the look-alike, Eddy the easily led, Eddy the sheep from the same flock, wheeled his uncle quietly away.
“Arrogant old bastard,” Jonathan said under his breath, looking back at them.
“The breeding of racehorses,” I said, “is interesting.”
Jonathan’s gaze came around very slowly to my face. “And do rogues,” he asked, “beget rogues?”
“Quite often.”
He nodded and we went on walking along the corridor, up to the window, to the last door on the right.
The room into which we went must once have been finely proportioned, but with the insensitivity of government departments it had been hacked into two for utility. The result was one long narrow room with a window and another inner long narrow room without one.
In the outer room, which was furnished only by a strip of mud-colored carpet on the parquet leading to a functional desk and two hard chairs, were two men engaged in what looked like unimportant passing of the time. One sat behind the desk, one sat on it, both fortyish, smallish, smooth, bored-looking and with an air of wishing to be somewhere else.
They looked up inquiringly as we went in.
“I’m William Derry,” I said.
“Ah.”
The man sitting on the desk rose to his feet, came toward me, shook hands, and looked inquiringly at Jonathan.
“My brother, Jonathan Derry,” I said.
“Ah.”
He shook hands with him too. “I don’t think,” he said neutrally, “that we’ll need to bother your brother.”
I said, “Angelo is more likely to react violently to my brother than to me.”
“But it was you he tried to kill.”
“Jonathan got him jailed . . . fourteen years ago.”
“Ah.”
He looked from one of us to the other, his head tilted slightly back to accommodate our height. We seemed to be in some way not what he’d expected, though I didn’t know why. Jonathan did certainly look pretty distinguished, especially since age had giv
en him such an air of authority, and he had always of the two of us had the straighter features; and I, I supposed, looked less a victim than I might have. I wondered vaguely if he’d been expecting a shuffling little figure in a dressing gown and hadn’t reckoned on clothes like his own.
“I think I’ll just go and explain about your brother,” he said at last. “Will you wait?”
We nodded and he opened the door to the inner room parsimoniously and eeled himself through the gap, closing it behind him. The man behind the desk went on looking bored and offered no comment of any sort, and presently his colleague slid back through the same-sized opening and said they were ready for us inside and would we please go in.
The inner room was lit brightly and entirely by electricity and contained four people and a great deal of electrical equipment with multitudinous dials and sprouting wires. I saw Jonathan give them a swift sweep of the eyes and supposed he could identify the lot, and he said afterward that they had all seemed to be standard machines for measuring body changes—cardiograph, encephalograph, gauges for temperature, respiration and skin moisture—and there had been at least two of each.
One of the four people wore an identifying white coat and introduced himself quietly as Tom Course, doctor. A woman in similar white moved among the machines, checking their faces. A third person, a man, seemed to be there specifically as an observer, since that was what he did, without speaking, during the next strange ten minutes.
The fourth person, sitting in a sort of dentist’s chair with his back toward us, was Angelo.
We could see only the top of his bandaged head, and also his arms, which were strapped by the wrists to the arms of the chair.
There was no sign of any plaster on the arm I’d broken: mended, no doubt. His arms were bare and covered sparsely with dark hairs, the hands lying loose, without tension. From every part of his body it seemed that wires led backward to the machines, which were all ranked behind him. In front of him there was nothing but a stretch of empty brightly lit room.
Dr. Course, young, wiry, bolstered by certainties, gave me an inquiring glance and said in the same quiet manner, “Are you ready?”
