Even Money Read online

  “Do you want a hand with that?” a voice shouted from behind me.

  I stopped pulling and turned around. It was the man in the cream linen suit. He was about fifteen yards away, leaning up against the metal fence between the betting ring and the Royal Enclosure. I hadn’t noticed him as we’d packed up, and I wondered how long he’d been there watching me.

  “Who’s offering?” I called back to him.

  “I knew your grandfather,” he said again while walking over to me.

  “You said,” I replied.

  But lots of people knew my grandfather, and nearly all of them hadn’t liked him. He had been a typically belligerent bookie who had treated both his customers and his fellow bookmakers with almost the same degree of contempt that they clearly held for him. He had been what many might have called a “character” on the racetrack, standing out in all weathers at an age when most men would be content to put their feet up in retirement. Yes, indeed, lots of people had known my grandfather, but he’d had precious few friends, if any.

  “When did he die?” asked the man, taking hold of one side of the handle.

  We pulled the trolley together in silence up the slope to the grandstand and stopped on the flat of the concourse. I turned and looked at my helper. His gray hair was accentuated by the deeply tanned skin of his face. I reckoned it wasn’t an English-summer tan.

  “Seven years ago,” I said.

  “What did he die from?” he asked. I could detect a slight accent in his voice, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “Just old age.”And bloody-mindedness, I thought. It was as if he had decided that he’d had his allocated stretch in this world and it was time to go to the next. He had returned from Cheltenham races and had seemingly switched off inside on the Friday, and then he had expired on the Sunday evening. The post-mortem pathologist couldn’t say why he had died. All his bits had apparently been working quite well and his brain had been sharp. I was sure he had simply willed himself to death.

  “But he wasn’t very old,” said the man.

  “Seventy-eight,” I said. “And two days.”

  “That’s not old,” said the man, “not these days.”

  “It was old enough for him,” I said.

  The man looked at me quizzically.

  “My grandfather decided that his time was up, so he lay down and died.”

  “You’re kidding?” he said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Absolutely serious.”

  “Silly old bugger,” he said, almost under his breath.

  “Exactly how well did you know my grandfather?” I asked him.

  “I’m his son,” he said.

  I stared at him with an open mouth.

  “So you must be my uncle,” I said.

  “No,” he said, staring back. “I’m your father.”

  2

  But you can’t be my father” I said, nonplussed.

  “I can,” he said with certainty, “and I am.”

  “My father’s dead,” I said.

  “How do you know?” he asked. “Did you see him die?”

  “No,” I said. “I just… know. My parents died in a car crash.”

  “Is that what your grandfather told you?”

  My legs felt detached from my body. I was thirty-seven years old, and I had believed for as long as I could remember that I was fatherless. And motherless too. An orphan. I had been raised by my grandparents, who had told me that both my parents had died when I was a baby. Why would they lie?

  “But I’ve seen a photo,” I said.

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Of my parents,” I said.

  “So you recognize me, then?”

  “No,” I said. But the photo was very small and at least thirty-seven years old, so would I actually recognize him now?

  “Look,” he said. “Is there anywhere we could go and sit down?”

  In the end I did have that beer.

  We sat at a table near the bar overlooking the pre-parade ring while the man in the cream linen suit told me who I was.

  I wasn’t sure what to believe. I couldn’t understand why my grandparents would have lied to me, but, equally, why would this stranger suddenly appear and lie to me now? It made no sense.

  “Your mother and I were in a road accident,” he told me. He looked down. “And then she died.” He paused for a long time as if wondering whether to carry on.

  I sat there in silence, looking at him. I didn’t feel any real emotion, just confusion.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?” he said.

  “Why have you come here today to tell me this?” I began to feel angry that he had chosen to disrupt my life in this way. “Why didn’t you stay away?” I raised my voice at him. “Why didn’t you stay away as you have done for the past thirty-seven years?”

  “Because I wanted to see you,” he said. “You are my son.”

  “No, I’m not,” I shouted at him.

  There were a few others enjoying a quick drink before making their way home, and they were looking in our direction.

  “You are,” he said quietly, “whether you like it or not.”

  “But how can you be so sure?” I was clutching at imaginary straws.

  “Edward, don’t be stupid,” he said, picking at his fingers.

  It was the first time he had used my name, and it sounded odd. I had been christened Edward, but I’d been known as Ned all my life. Not even my grandfather had called me Edward, except, that is, when he was cross with me or I had done something naughty as a child.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Peter,” he said. “Peter James Talbot.”

  My father’s name was indeed Peter James Talbot. It said so in green ink on both my birth certificate and his. I knew by heart every element of those documents. Over the years the handwritten details on them had somehow been the only tangible link to my parents, that and the small creased-and-fading photograph that I still carried with me everywhere.

  I removed my wallet from my pocket and passed the photo over to him.

  “Blackpool,” he said with confidence, studying the image. “This was taken in Blackpool. We were there for the illuminations in November. Tricia, your mother, was about three months pregnant. With you.”

  I took the photo back and looked again closely at the young man standing next to a dark green Ford Cortina, as I had done hundreds of times before. I glanced up at the man in front of me and then back down at the picture. I couldn’t say for sure that they were the same person, but, equally, I couldn’t say they weren’t.

  “It is me, I assure you,” he said. “That was my first car. I was nineteen when that picture was taken.”

  “How old was my mother?” I asked.

  “Seventeen, I think,” he said. “Yes, she must have been just seventeen. I tried to teach her to drive on that trip.”

  “You started young.”

  “Yes… well.” He seemed embarrassed. “You weren’t actually planned, as such. More of a surprise.”

  “Oh thanks,” I replied somewhat sarcastically. “Were you married?” I asked.

  “Not when that picture was taken, no.”

  “How about when I was born?” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.

  “Oh yes,” he said with certainty. “We were by then.”

  Strangely, I was relieved that I was legitimate and not a bastard. But did it really matter? Yes, I decided, it did. It meant that there had been commitment between my parents, maybe even love. They cared, or, at least, they had then.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked him. It was the big question.

  He didn’t answer immediately but sat quiet, still looking at me.

  “Shame, I suppose,” he said eventually. “After your mother died, I couldn’t cope with having a baby and no wife. So I ran away.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Australia,” he said. “Eventually. First I signed on
to a Liberian-registered cargo ship in the Liverpool docks. I went all over the world for a while. I got off one day in Melbourne and just stayed there.”

  “So why come back now?”

  “It seemed like a good idea,” he said.

  It wasn’t.

  “What did you expect?” I asked. “Did you think I would just welcome you with open arms after all this time? I thought you were dead.” I looked at him. “I think it might be better for me if you were.”

  He looked back at me with doleful eyes. Perhaps I had been a bit hard.

  “Well,” I said, “it would definitely have been better if you hadn’t come back.”

  “But I wanted to see you,” he said.

  “Why?” I demanded loudly. “You haven’t wanted to for the last thirty-seven years.”

  “Thirty-six,” he said.

  I threw my hands up in frustration. “That’s even worse,” I said. “It means you deserted me when I was a year old. How could a father do that?” I was getting angry again. So far my own life had not been blessed with children, but it was not from a lack of longing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure it was enough.

  “So what made you want to see me now?” I said. “You can’t just have decided suddenly after all this time.” He sat there in front of me in silence. “You didn’t even know that your own father was dead. And what about your mother? You haven’t asked me about her.”

  “It was only you I wanted to see,” he said.

  “But why now?” I asked him again.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said.

  “Don’t try and tell me you had a fit of conscience after all these years,” I scoffed at him with an ironic laugh.

  “Edward,” he said somewhat sternly, “it doesn’t befit you to be so caustic.”

  The laughter died in my throat. “You have no right to tell me how to behave,” I replied with equal sternness. “You forfeited that right when you walked away.” He looked down like a scalded cat. “So what do you want?” I asked him. “I’ve got no money.”

  His head came up again quickly. “I don’t want your money,” he said.

  “What, then?” I asked. “Don’t expect me to give you any love.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked suddenly.

  “Deliriously,” I lied. “I leap out of bed each morning with joy in my heart, delighting at the miracle of a new day.”

  “Are you married?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, giving no more details. “Are you?”

  “No,” he replied. “Not anymore. But I have been. Twice-three times, if you count your mother.”

  I thought I probably would count my mother.

  “Widowed twice and divorced once,” he said with a wry smile. “In that order.”

  “Children?” I asked. “Other than me.”

  “Two,” he said. “Both girls.”

  I had sisters. Half sisters anyway

  “How old are they?”

  “Both in their twenties now, late twenties, I suppose. I haven’t seen them for, oh, fifteen years.”

  “You seem to have made a habit of deserting your children.”

  “Yes,” he said wistfully. “It appears I have.”

  “Why didn’t you leave me alone and go and find them?”

  “But I know where they are,” he said. “They won’t see me, not the other way round. They blame me for their mother’s death.”

  “Did she die in a car crash too?” I said with a touch of cruelty in my voice.

  “No,” he said slowly. “Maureen killed herself.” He paused, and I sat still watching him. “I was made bankrupt, and she swallowed enough tablets to kill a horse. I came home from the court to find bailiffs sitting in the driveway and my wife lying dead in the house.”

  His life was like a soap opera, I thought. Disaster and sorrow had been a constant companion.

  “Why were you made bankrupt?” I asked.

  “Gambling debts,” he said.

  “Gambling debts!” I was astounded. “And you the son of a bookmaker.”

  “It was being a bookie that got me into trouble,” he said. “Obviously, I hadn’t learned enough standing at my father’s side. I was a bad bookie.”

  “I thought gambling debts couldn’t be enforced in a court.”

  “Maybe not technically, but I had borrowed against everything and I couldn’t afford the repayments. Lost the lot. Every single thing, including the girls, who went off to live with their aunt. I never saw them again.”

  “Are you still bankrupt?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” he said. “That was years ago. I’ve been doing fine recently.”

  “As what?” I said.

  “Business,” he said unhelpfully. “My business.”

  One of the bar staff in a white shirt and black trousers came over to us.

  “Sorry, we’re closing,” he said. “Can you drink up, please?”

  I looked at my watch. It was well past six o’clock already. I stood up and drank down the last of my beer.

  “Can we go somewhere to continue talking?” my father asked.

  I thought about Sophie. I had promised I would go and see her straight after the races.

  “I have to go to my wife,” I said.

  “Can’t she wait?” he implored. “Call her. Or I could come with you.”

  “No,” I said rather too quickly.

  “Why not?” he persisted. “She’s my daughter-in-law.”

  “No,” I said decisively. “I need time to get used to this first.”

  “OK,” he said. “But call her and say you’ve been held up and will be home later.”

  I thought again about Sophie, my wife. She wasn’t at home. She would be sitting in front of the television in her room watching the news as she always did at six o’clock. I knew she would be there because she wasn’t allowed not to be.

  Sophie’s room was locked, from the outside.

  Sophie Talbot had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983 and detained for the past five months in secure accommodation. It wasn’t actually a prison; it was a hospital, a low-risk mental hospital, but it was a prison to her. And this wasn’t the first time. In all, my wife had spent more than half the previous ten years in one mental institution or another. And, in spite of their care and treatment, her condition had progressively deteriorated. What the future held was anyone’s guess.

  “How about a pub somewhere?” my father said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I needed to be at the hospital by nine at the latest. I looked at my watch.

  “I have about an hour maximum,” I said. “Then I’ll have to go.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Do you have a car?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Came on the train from Waterloo.”

  “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  “Some seedy little hotel in Sussex Gardens,” he said.“Guesthouse, really. Near Paddington Station.”

  “Right,” I said deciding. “I’ll drive you somewhere for a drink, then I’ll drop you at the railway station in Maidenhead and you can get the train back to London.”

  “Great,” he said, smiling.

  “Come on, then.”

  Together, we pulled the trolley out through the racetrack’s main gate and across the busy road.

  “What sort of business are you in now?” I asked him as we hauled our load through the deep gravel at the entrance to the parking lot.

  “This and that,” he said.

  “Bookmaking?” I persisted.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “But mostly not.”

  He seemed determined to be vague and evasive.

  “Is it legal?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” he repeated.

  “But mostly not?” I asked, echoing his previous answer.

  He just smiled at me and pulled harder on the trolley.

  “Are you going to go back to Australia?�
�� I asked, changing the subject.

  “Expect so,” he said. “But I’m just lying low for a while.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He just smiled again. Perhaps it’s better, I thought, if I don’t know why.

  I had parked my car, my trusty, twelve-year-old Volvo 940 station wagon, at the back of parking lot number two, behind the owners-and-trainers’ area. As always, I’d had to pay for my parking. The racetracks gave bookmakers nothing.

  Bookmakers’ pitches had once been held on the basis of seniority, as they still were in Ireland. However, in Britain, pitch positions had been offered for sale and, once bought, remained the property of the bookie, to keep or sell as he wished. Whoever owned number one had the first choice of where to stand in the betting ring, number two had second choice, and so on. My number was eight, bought by my grandfather about twenty years ago for a king’s ransom. I stood not quite at the best position, but good enough.

  A bookmaker’s badge fee, paid by me to the racetrack to allow me to stand on any day at the races, was set at five times the public-entry cost. So if a racegoer paid forty pounds each day to get into the betting ring, as they did at Royal Ascot, then the badge fee was set at two hundred. Plus, of course, the regular entrance cost for Betsy and Luca to get in. On any day at the Royal Meeting, I was many hundreds out of pocket before I even took my first bet.

  There were controversial plans for the old system to be thrown out in 2012 and for pitches to be auctioned by each racetrack to the highest bidder. The bookmakers objected to what they saw as the stealing of their property, and they believed that the racetracks were greedy, while everyone else thought the reverse was true.

  The downtrodden bookie, the man that all and sundry love to hate. “You never see a poor bookie,” people always say with a degree of loathing. That’s because poor bookies rapidly go out of business. You never see a poor lawyer either. But, there again, all and sundry love to hate them too.

  “How long are you staying?” I asked my father.