I hadn't learned boxing or karate, but I did have naturally fast reflexes and, thanks to riding and ski-ing, an instinctive command of balance. Wyvern might have had weight in his fists, but I ducked and dodged two sizzling punches to the face that would have laid me out flat if they'd connected, and concentrated solely on staying on my feet.

He drove me back against the shoulder-height rough stone wall that divided a garden from the pavement, but I squirmed out of his grasp and simply ran, intent on escape and containment, not on winning any battles.

I could hear Wyvern coming after me, and saw my father with renewed fury turning back to my aid.

I yelled at him in frenzy, 'Get in the Range Rover. Get in the vehicle Get in the vehicle,' and he wavered and turned again and marvellously did as I said.

Three steps from the Range Rover I stopped running and swung round fast to face Wyvern, in whom calculation had never been wholly overwhelmed by emotion: he sized up the gallery he was playing to Orinda, my father, Mervyn, Faith and Lavender and under the glare of all those sets of eyes he abruptly conceded that further attack would have legal consequences he wouldn't relish and stopped a bare six paces from where I stood.

The venom in his expression shrivelled the saliva in my mouth.

'One day,' he said, 'I'll get you one day.'

But not today, I thought; and today was all that mattered.

He took a few steps backwards, his face smoothing out to its customary flatness, then he turned and walked towards his car as if nothing had happened. Easing into the driver's seat he started the engine and drove collectedly away with no burning of tyres or other histrionics.

He left a lot of speechlessness in and around the Range Rover.

In the end Mervyn, clearing his throat, said, 'Orinda needs a doctor.'

Orinda disagreed. 'I need a tissue.'

Faith and Lavender between them produced some crumpled white squares. Orinda wiped her face, looked in a small mirror and moaned at the wreck it revealed. 'I'm not going anywhere like this.'

'The police...?' suggested Faith.

'No,' Orinda said, and no one argued.

With everyone subdued I drove the Range Rover back to the headquarters where my father transferred himself and Orinda into her nearby parked car and set off to her home, with me following to bring him back.

He was silent for the whole of the return journey, but as I braked to a halt at the end of it he said, finally, 'Orinda thinks you saved her from being run over by the lorry.'

'Oh.'

'Did you?'

'The lorry driver missed us.'

He insisted I tell him what had happened.

'Her eyes were watering,' I explained. 'She couldn't see where she was going.'

I made as if to get out of the vehicle, but he stopped me.

'Wait.' He seemed to be searching for words and not finding them.

I waited.

He said in the end, 'I'm afraid I've let you in for more than I expected.'

I half laughed. 'It hasn't been boring.'

He went to Quindle with Mervyn early on the following Saturday to undertake an all-embracing round of the town's suburbs and, because of a dinner that evening and yet more commitments on the Sunday morning, he stayed in Quindle overnight.

That Sunday was my eighteenth birthday. My father had told me he would leave me a birthday card with Crystal, and I was to go along at nine in the morning to collect it. He would return that afternoon, he said, and we would dine together that evening to celebrate. No more political meetings, he said. Just the two of us, with champagne.

When I arrived at the party office at nine the door was locked and fifteen minutes passed before Crystal arrived and made her way inside. Yes, she agreed, my father had left me a card: and many happy returns and all that.

She took an envelope out of the desk and gave it to me, and inside I found a card with a joke on it about growing old, and nothing else. 'Yours, Dad,' he'd written.

'George said,' Crystal told me, 'that you are to go out into the street and find a black car with a chauffeur in it. And don't ask me what it's about, George wouldn't tell me, but he was smiling fit to crack his cheeks. So off you go, then, and find the car.'

'Thanks, Crystal.'

She nodded and waved me off, and I went outside and found the black car and the chauffeur a hundred yards away, patiently parked.

The chauffeur without speaking handed me a white envelope, unaddressed.

The card inside read 'Get in the car.'

And underneath, 'Please.'

With a gleam and a breath of good spirits I obeyed the instructions.

It wasn't much of a surprise when the chauffeur (not the same man as before, nor the same car) refused to tell me where we were going. It was, however, clear shortly that the direction was westwards and that many signposts distantly promised Exeter.

The chauffeur aimed at the heart of that city and pulled up outside the main doors of its grandest hotel. As before, the car's rear door was ceremoniously opened for me to step out and again, smiling broadly (not in the script), he pointed silently towards the interior and left me to the uniformed porters enquiring sniffily about my luggage.

My luggage this time again consisted of what I wore: a white long-sleeved sweatshirt, new blue jeans, and well-tried running shoes. With undoubtedly more self-confidence than at Brighton I walked into the grand lobby and asked at the reception desk for George Juliard.

The receptionist pressed buttons on a computer.

'Sorry, no one called Juliard staying at the hotel.'

'Please check again.'

She checked. Gave me a professional smile. Still no one called Juliard, past, present or future.

I was definitely not this time in sawn-off shorts and message-laden T-shirt land. Even on the last summer Sunday of August, business suits here prevailed. Ladies were fifty. In a cathedral city, people had been to church. The chauffeur, I gloomily concluded, had taken me to the wrong place.

The hotel's entrance lobby bulged at one side into a glass-roofed conservatory section with armchairs and green plants, and I sat there for a while considering what I should do next. Had my father intended me to get to know Exeter before I went to its university?

Or what?

After about half an hour a man dressed much as I was myself, though a good ten years older, appeared in the lobby. He looked around and drifted unhurriedly in my direction.

'Juliard?' he said. 'Benedict?'

'Yes.' I stood up, taller than he by an inch or two, which seemed to surprise him. He had yellow-blond hair, white eyelashes and outdoor skin. A man of strong muscles, self-confident, at home in his world.

'I'm Jim,' he said. 'I've come to collect you.'

'Who are you?' I asked. 'Where are we going?'

He smiled and said merely, 'Come on.'

He led the way out of the hotel and round a few corners, fetching up beside a dusty dented red car that contained torn magazines, screwed-up sandwich papers, coffee-stained polystyrene cups and a mixed-parentage dog introduced as Bert.

'Disregard the mess,' Jim said cheerfully, sweeping crumpled newspapers off the front passenger seat onto the floor. 'Happy birthday, by the way.'

'Uh... thanks.'

He drove the way I'd been taught not to; jerking acceleration and sudden brakes. Start and stop. Impulse and caution. I would have gone a long way with Jim.

It turned out to be only eight miles westward, as far as I could judge. Out of the city, past a signpost to Exeter University's Streatham Campus (home among much else of the department of mathematics), deep into rural Devon, with heavy thatched roofs frowning over tiny-windowed cottages.

Jim jerked to a halt in front of a larger example of the basic pattern and pointed to a heavy wooden front door.

'Go in there,' he instructed. 'Down the passage, last room on the left.' He grinned. 'And good luck.'

I was quite glad to be getting out of his car, even if only to stop the polymorphous Bert from licking my neck.

'Who lives here?' I asked.

'You'll find out.'

He left me with a simple choice: to do as I'd been told or find a way of returning to Exeter. Alice down the bleeding rabbit hole, I thought.

I opened the heavy door and went along the passage to the last room on the left.

EIGHTH.

In the last room on the left a man sat behind a large desk, and at first I thought with an unwelcome skipped heart-beat that he was Vivian Durridge, intent on sacking me all over again.

He looked up from his paperwork as I went in and I saw that though he wasn't Vivian Durridge himself he was of the same generation and of the same severe cast of mind.

He gave me no warm greeting, but looked me slowly up and down.

'Your father has gone to a great deal of trouble for you,' he said. 'I hope you're worth it.'

No reply seemed suitable, so I didn't make one.

'Do you know who I am?' he demanded.

'I'm afraid not... sir.'

'Stallworthy.'

He waited for the name to trickle through my brain, which it did pretty fast. It was the implication of his name that slowed my reply. Too much hope was bad for the pulse.

'Er... do you mean Spencer Stallworthy, the racehorse trainer?'

'I do.' He paused. 'Your father telephoned me. He wants to buy a horse and put it in training here with me, so that you can bicycle over from the university to ride it out at exercise. He asked me to enter it in amateur events so that you can ride it in races.'

He studied my face. I must have looked pretty ecstatic because a slow wintry smile lightened his heavy expression.

'I just hope,' he said, 'that you can ride well enough not to disgrace my stable.'

I just hoped he hadn't been talking to Vivian Durridge.

'Your father asked me to find a suitable horse. We discussed price, of course. I told him I train forty or so horses and one or two of them are always for sale. I have two here at present which might fit the bill. Your father and I agreed that you should come here today and have a ride on both. You are to choose which of them you prefer. He wanted it to be a surprise for your birthday and I see it is.'

I breathlessly nodded.

'Right. Then go out of the back door. My assistant, Jim he was the one who brought you here he'll drive you along to the stables where the horses are ready for you. So off you go, then.'

'Er...' I said. 'Thank you... very much.'

He nodded and bent his head to his paperwork; and Jim, grinning widely, drove half a mile to the stable yard that was old, needed paint and had sent out winners by the dozen over the years to small races on West Country courses. Stallworthy didn't aim for Cheltenham, Sandown or Aintree. He trained for local farmers and businessmen and ran their horses near home.

Jim stood in the yard and laconically pointed. 'Tack-room there.' He half turned. 'Horse in number twenty-seven. OK?'

'OK.'

I took a look at the occupant of box 27 and found a heavily muscled chestnut gelding standing there, anxious, it seemed, to be out on the gallops. He had nice short legs, with hocks not too angular, and a broad chest capable of pushing his way over or through any obstacle which came his way. More the type of a tough hardy steeplechaser than an ex-flat racer graduating to jumps.

I guessed at stamina and an unexcitability that might take a tiring amateur steadfastly towards the finish line, and if there were anything against him at first sight it was, perhaps, that he was a bit short in the neck.

Jim whistled up a lad to saddle and bridle the chestnut, though I had the impression that he had at first intended that I should do it myself.

Jim had considered me a sort of a joke. Perhaps my actual presence in the yard had converted me from joke to customer. In any case, neither Jim nor the lad saw anything but ordinary sense when I asked if I could see the chestnut being led round the yard at a walk. Somewhere along the way in my scrappy racing education I'd been told and shown by an avuncular old pro jockey that a horse that walked well galloped well. A long slow stride boded well for long-distance 'chases. A tittupping scratchy little walker meant a nervous scratchy little galloper.

The stride of the chestnut's walk was long enough and slow enough to suggest a temperament that would plod for ever. When he and his lad had completed two circuits of the yard I stopped him and felt his legs (no bumps from past tendon trouble) and looked in his mouth (which perhaps one shouldn't do to a gift horse) and estimated him to be about seven years old, a good solid age for a steeplechaser.

'Where do I ride him?' I asked Jim, and he pointed to a way out of the yard which led to a gate into a vast field that proved to be the chief training ground for the whole stable. There were no wide open downland gallops, it seemed, in that cosy part of Devon.

'You can trot or canter down to the far end,' Jim said, 'and come back at a half-speed gallop. He... the chestnut... knows the way.'

I swung onto the chestnut's back and put the toes of my unsuitable running shoes into the stirrups, lengthening the leathers while getting to know the 'feel' of the big creature who would give me half speed and at least an illusion of being where I belonged.

I might never be a great jockey, and I might at times be clumsy and uncoordinated owing to growing in spurts and changing shape myself, but I'd ridden a great many different horses in my school holidays by working for people who wanted a few horses cared for while they went away on trips. I'd begged racehorse experience from trainers, and for the past two years had ridden in any race offered: I had had twenty-six outings to date, with three wins, two thirds and three falls.

The Stallworthy chestnut was in a good mood and let me know it by standing still patiently through the stirrup-leather lengthening and the pause while Jim sorted out a helmet in the tack-room, insisting that I wear it even though it was a size too small.