Part 22 (1/2)

Touchy, I thanked heaven, slowed when Mackie slowed and brought himself to a good-natured halt without dumping his rider, Friday or not. I was breathless and also exhilarated and thought I could easily get hooked on Touchy after a fix or two more like that.

'Where the h.e.l.l did you get to?' Tremayne enquired of me, joining us and the rest of the string. 'I thought you'd chickened out.'

'We were just talking,' Mackie said.

Tremayne looked at her now glowing face and probably drew the wrong conclusion but made no further comment. He told everyone to walk back down the gallop and dismount and lead them the last part of the way, as usual.

Mackie, taking her place at the head, asked me to ride at the back, to make sure everyone returned safely, which I did. Tremayne's tractor followed slowly, at a distance.

He came stamping into the kitchen where I was fis.h.i.+ng out orange juice and without preamble demanded, 'What were you and Mackie talking about?'

'She'll tell you,' I said, smiling.

He said belligerently, 'Mackie's off limits.'

I put down the orange juice and straightened, not knowing quite what to say.

'If you mean do I fancy Mackie,' I said, 'then yes, she's a great girl. But off limits is right. We were not flirting, chatting up, or whatever else you care to call it. Not.'

After a grudging minute he said, 'All right then,' and I thought that in his way he was as possessive of Mackie as Perkin was.

A short while later, munching the toast I'd made for him, he seemed to have forgotten it.

'You can ride out every morning,' he said, 'if you'd like.'

He could see I was pleased. I said, 'I'd like it very much.'

'Settled, then.'

The day pa.s.sed in the way that had become routine: clippings, beef sandwiches, taping, evening drinks, Gareth home, cook the dinner. Dee-Dee's distrust of me had vanished; Perkin's hadn't. Tremayne seemed to have accepted my a.s.surance of the morning, and Mackie smiled into her plain tonic and carefully avoided my eyes for fear of revealing that a secret lay between us.

On Sat.u.r.day morning I rode Touchy again but Mackie didn't materialise, having phoned Tremayne to say she wasn't well. She and Perkin appeared in the kitchen during breakfast, he with an arm round her shoulders in a supremely proprietary way.

'We've something to tell you,' Perkin said to Tremayne.

'Oh, yes?' Tremayne was busy with some papers.

'Yes. Do pay attention. We're having a baby.'

'We think so,' Mackie said.

Tremayne paid attention abruptly and was clearly profoundly delighted. Not an over-demonstrative man he didn't leap up to embrace them but literally purred in his throat like a cat and beat the table with his fist. Son and daughter-in-law had no difficulty in reading the signals and looked smugly pleased with themselves, sitting down, drinking coffee and working out that the birth would occur in September, but they weren't quite sure of the date.

Mackie gave me a shy smile which Perkin forgave. Each of them looked more in love with the other, more relaxed, as if the earlier failure to conceive had caused tension between them, now relieved.

After that excitement I laboured all morning again on the clippings, unsustained by cups from Dee-Dee, who didn't work on Sat.u.r.days. Gareth went to Sat.u.r.day morning school and pinned a second message on the corkboard - 'FOOTBALL MATCH PM' - leaving 'BACK FOR GRUB' in place.

Tremayne, cursing the persistent absence of racing even on television, taped the saga of his younger life up to the time he accompanied his father to a brothel.

'My father wouldn't have anybody but the madam and she said she'd retired long ago but she accommodated him in the end. Couldn't resist him, the mad old charmer.'