Reflex by Dick Francis Read Free Book Online

think your mother had a safe?”
    â€œGod knows. Perhaps they just go around ripping off new widows, screaming ‘safe’ at them on the offchance. I mean, if she’d had one, she’d have told them where it was, wouldn’t she? After losing Dad like that. And yesterday’s burglary, while we were at the funeral. Such dreadful shocks. She’d have told them. I know she would.”
    I nodded.
    â€œShe can’t take any more,” he said. There were tears in his voice, and his eyes were dark with the effort of trying not to cry. It was he, I thought, who was closest to the edge. His mother would be tucked up with sympathy and sedation.
    â€œTime for bed,” I said abruptly. “Come on. I’ll help you undress. She’ll be better tomorrow.”
    Â 
    I woke early after an uneasy night and lay watching the dingy November dawn creep through the window. There was a good deal about life that I didn’t want to get up and face: a situation common, no doubt, to the bulk of mankind. Wouldn’t it be marvelous, I thought dimly, to be pleased with oneself, to look forward to the day ahead, to not have to think about mean-minded dying grandmothers and one’s own depressing dishonesty. Normally fairly happy-go-lucky, a taking-things-as-they-come sort of person, I disliked being backed into uncomfortable corners from which escape meant action.
    Things had happened to me all my life. I’d never gone out looking. I had learned whatever had come my way, whatever was there. Like photography, because of Duncan and Charlie. And like riding, because of my mother’s dumping me in a racing stable; and if she’d left me with a farmer, I would no doubt be making hay.
    Survival for so many years had been a matter of accepting what I was given, of making myself useful, of being quiet and agreeable and no trouble, of repression and introversion and self-control, that I was now, as a man, fundamentally unwilling to make a fuss or fight.
    I had taught myself for so long not to want things that weren’t offered to me that I now found very little to want. I had made no major decisions. What I had, had simply come.
    Harold Osborne had offered me the cottage, along with the job of stable jockey. I’d accepted. The bank had offered a mortgage. I’d accepted. The local garage had suggested a certain car. I’d bought it.
    I understood why I was as I was. I knew why I just drifted along, going where the tide took me. I knew why I was passive, but I felt absolutely no desire to change things, to stamp about and insist on being the master of my own fate.
    I didn’t want to look for my half-sister, and I didn’t want to lose my job with Harold. I could simply drift along as usual doing nothing very positive . . . and yet for some obscure reason that instinctive course was seeming increasingly unattractive.
    Irritated, I put my clothes on and went downstairs, peering in at Steve on the way and finding him sound asleep.
    Someone had perfunctorily swept the kitchen floor since the funeral-day burglary, pushing into a heap a lot of broken crockery and spilled groceries. The evening before I’d discovered the coffee and sugar dumped in the dust, but there was milk along with the eggs in therefrigerator, and I drank some of that. Then, to pass the time, I wandered around, just looking.
    The room which had been George Millace’s darkroom would have been far and away the most interesting had there been anything there; but the original burglary there had been the most thorough. All that was left was a wide bench down one side, two large deep sinks down the other and rows of empty shelves across the end. Countless grubby outlines and smudges on the walls showed where the loads of equipment had stood, and stains on the floor marked where he’d stored his chemicals.
    He had, I knew, done a lot of his own color developing and printing, which most professional