Comeback Read Free Page A

weren’t enough roles for the available voices.
    “It helps to be Italian,” he said ruefully. “And so few of any generation really make it. I sang chorus. I would have starved then rather than sing ‘The Last Farewell.’ I was arrogant, musically, when I was young.” He smiled with forgiveness for his youth. “So I went into a banking house as a junior junior in the trust department and eventually began to be able to afford opera tickets.”
    “But you went on singing,” I protested. “No one could sing as you do without constant practice.”
    He nodded. “In choirs. Sometimes in cathedrals and so on. Anywhere I could. And in the bathroom, of course.”
    Vicky raised the eyelashes to heaven.
    “Now they both sing here two or three times a week,” Fred told me. “This place would die without them.”
    “Hush,” Vicky said, looking round for outraged proprietorial feelings but fortunately not seeing any. “We enjoy it.”
    Greg said they were going to England for a month. One of Vicky’s daughters was getting married.
    Vicky’s daughter?
    Yes, she said, the children were all hers. Two boys, two girls. She’d divorced their father long ago. She and Greg were new together: eighteen months married, still on honeymoon.
    “Belinda—she’s my youngest—she’s marrying a veterinary surgeon,” Vicky said. “She was always mad about animals.”
    I laughed.
    “Well, yes,” she said, “I hope she’s mad about him, too. She’s worked for him for ages, but this came on suddenly a few weeks ago. So, anyway, we’re off to horse country. He deals mostly with horses. He acts as a vet at Cheltenham races.”
    I made a small explosive noise in my throat and they looked at me inquiringly.
    I said, “My father and mother met at Cheltenham races.”
    They exclaimed over it, of course, and it seemed a bit late to say that my mother and stepfather met at Cheltenham races, so I let it pass. My real father, I thought, was anyway John Darwin: the only father I could remember.
    Fred, reflecting, said, “Didn’t your father spend his entire youth at the races? Didn’t you say so in Tokyo, that time you went to the Japan Cup?”
    “I expect I said it,” I agreed, “though it was a bit of an exaggeration. But he still does go when he gets the chance.”
    “Do ambassadors usually go to the races?” Vicky asked doubtfully.
    “This particular ambassador sees racecourses as the perfect place for diplomacy,” I said with ironic affection. “He invites the local Jockey Club bigwigs to an embassy party and they in turn invite him to the races. He says he learns more about a country faster at the races than in a month of diplomatic handshaking. He’s right, too. Did you know they have bicycle parks at Tokyo racecourse?”
    Greg said, “Er ... uh ... I don’t follow.”
    “Not just car parks,” I said. “Motorcycle parks and bicycle parks. Rows and rows of them. They tell you a lot about the Japanese.”
    “What, for instance?” Vicky asked.
    “That they’ll get where they want to go one way or another.”
    “Are you being serious?”
    “Of course,” I said with mock gravity. “And they have a baby park at the races too. You leave your infant to play in a huge bouncing Donald Duck while you bet your money away in a carefree fashion.”
    “And what does this tell you?” Vicky teased.
    “That the baby park draws in more than enough revenue to fund it.”
    “Don’t worry about Peter,” Fred told them reassuringly. “He’s got this awful quirky mind, but you can rely on him in a crisis.”
    “Thanks,” I said dryly.
    Greg asked a few things about our time in Japan. Had we enjoyed it, for instance. Very much, we both said. And did we speak the language? Yes, we did. Fred had been a first secretary in the commercial department, spending his time oiling the wheels of trade. My own job had been to learn what was likely to happen on the political scene.
    “Peter went to the lunches and cocktail