‘You’ll come, then? Mrs Cross will look after you splendidly.’

‘Yes, Charles, thank you. I’d like to come for a little while.’

He gripped the cigar in his teeth, squinted through the smoke, and took out his diary.

‘Let’s see, suppose you leave here in, say, another week… No point in hurrying out before you’re fit to go… that brings us to the twenty-sixth… hm… now, suppose you come down a week on Sunday, I’ll be at home all that day. Will that suit you?’

‘Yes, fine, if the doctors agree.’

‘Right, then.’ He wrote in the diary, put it away and took the cigar carefully out of his mouth, smiling at me with the usual inscrutable blankness in his eyes. He sat easily in his dark city suit, Rear-Admiral Charles Roland, R.N., retired, a man carrying his sixty-six years lightly. War photographs showed him tall, straight, bony almost, with a high forehead and thick dark hair. Time had greyed the hair, which in receding left his forehead higher than ever, and had added weight where it did no harm. His manner was ordinarily extremely charming and occasionally patronisingly offensive. I had been on the receiving end of both.

He relaxed in the arm-chair, talking unhurriedly about steeplechasing.

‘What do you think of that new race at Sandown? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s framed rather awkwardly. They’re bound to get a tiny field with those conditions, and if Devil’s Dyke doesn’t run after all the whole thing will be a non-crowd puller par excellence.’

His interest in the game only dated back a few years, but recently to his pleasure he had been invited by one or two courses to act as a Steward. Listening to his easy familiarity with racing problems and racing jargon, I was in a quiet inward way amused. It was impossible to forget his reaction long ago to Jenny’s engagement to a jockey, his unfriendly rejection of me as a future son-in-law, his absence from our wedding, the months afterwards of frigid disapproval, the way he had seldom spoken to or even looked at me.