Banker

May

Gordon Michaels stood in the fountain with all his clothes on.

‘My God,’ Alec said. ‘What is he doing?’

‘Who?’

‘Your boss,’ Alec said. ‘Standing in the fountain.’

I crossed to the window and stared downwards: down two floors to the ornamental fountain in the forecourt of the Paul Ekaterin merchant bank. Down to where three entwining plumes of water rose gracefully into the air and fell in a glittering circular curtain. To where, in the bowl, calf-deep, stood Gordon in his navy pin-striped suit... in his white shirt and sober silk tie... in his charcoal socks and black shoes... in his gold cufflinks and onyx ring... in his polished City persona... soaking wet.

It was his immobility, I thought, which principally alarmed. Impossible to interpret this profoundly uncharacteristic behaviour as in any way an expression of lightheartedness, of celebration or of joy.

I whisked straight out of the deep-carpeted office, through the fire doors, down the flights of gritty stone staircase and across the marbled expanse of entrance hall. The uniformed man at the security desk was staring towards the wide glass front doors with his fillings showing and two arriving visitors were looking stunned. I went past them at a rush into the open air and slowed only in the last few strides before the fountain.

‘Gordon!’ I said.

His eyes were open. Beads of water ran down his forehead from his dripping black hair and caught here and there on his lashes. The main fall of water slid in a crystal sheet just behind his shoulders with scatterings of drops spraying forwards onto him like rain. Gordon’s eyes looked at me unblinkingly with earnest vagueness as if he were not at all sure who I was.

‘Get into the fountain,’ he said.

‘Er... why, exactly?’

‘They don’t like water.’

‘Who don’t?’

‘All those people. Those people with white faces. They don’t like water. They won’t follow you into the fountain. You’ll be all right if you’re wet.’

His voice sounded rational enough for me to wonder wildly whether this was not after all a joke: but Gordon’s jokes were normally small, civilized, glinting commentaries on the stupidities of mankind, not whooping, gusty, practical affairs smacking of the surreal.

‘Come out of there, Gordon,’ I said uneasily.

‘No, no. They’re waiting for me. Send for the police. Ring them up. Tell them to come and take them all away.’

‘But who, Gordon?’

‘All those people, of course. Those people with white faces.’ His head slowly turned from side to side, his eyes focused as if at a throng closely surrounding the whole fountain. Instinctively I too looked from side to side, but all I could see were the more distant stone and glass walls of Ekaterin’s, with, now, a growing chorus of heads appearing disbelievingly at the windows.

I clung still to a hope of normality. ‘They work here,’ I said. ‘Those people work here.’

‘No, no. They came with me. In the car. Only two or three of them, I thought. But all the others, they were here, you know. They want me to go with them, but they can’t reach me here, they don’t like the water.’

He had spoken fairly loudly throughout so that I should hear him above the noise of the fountain, and the last of these remarks reached the chairman of the bank who came striding briskly across from the building.

‘Now, Gordon, my dear chap,’ the chairman said authoritatively, coming to a purposeful halt at my side, ‘what’s all this about, for God’s sake?’

‘He’s having hallucinations,’ I said.

The chairman’s gaze flicked to my face, and back to Gordon, and Gordon seriously advised him to get into the fountain, because the people with white faces couldn’t reach him there, on account of disliking water.

‘Do something, Tim,’ the chairman said, so I stepped into the fountain and took Gordon’s arm.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we’re wet they won’t touch us. We don’t have to stay in the water. Being wet is enough.’

‘Is it?’ Gordon said. ‘Did they tell you?’

‘Yes, they did. They won’t touch anyone who’s wet.’

‘Oh. All right. If you’re sure.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

He nodded understandingly and with only slight pressure from my arm took two sensible-seeming paces through the water and stepped over the knee-high coping onto the paving slabs of the forecourt. I held onto him firmly and hoped to heaven that the people with white faces would keep their distance; and although Gordon looked around apprehensively it appeared that they were not so far trying to abduct him.

The chairman’s expression of concern was deep and genuine, as he and Gordon were firm and long-time friends. Except in appearance they were much alike; essentially clever, intuitive, and with creative imaginations. Each in normal circumstances had a manner of speaking which expressed even the toughest commands in gentle politeness and both had a visible appetite for their occupation. They were both in their fifties, both at the top of their powers, both comfortably rich.

Gordon dripped onto the paving stones.

‘I think,’ the chairman said, casting a glance at the inhabited windows, ‘that we should go indoors. Into the boardroom, perhaps. Come along, Gordon.’

He took Gordon Michaels by his other sodden sleeve, and between us one of the steadiest banking brains in London walked obediently in its disturbing fog.

‘The people with white faces,’ I said as we steered a calm course across the marble entrance hall between clearly human open-mouthed watchers, ‘are they coming with us?’

‘Of course,’ Gordon said.

It was obvious also that some of them came up in the lift with us. Gordon watched them dubiously all the time. The others, as we gathered from his reluctance to step out into the top-floor hallway, were waiting for our arrival.

‘It’s all right,’ I said to Gordon encouragingly. ‘Don’t forget, we’re still wet.’

‘Henry isn’t,’ he said, anxiously eyeing the chairman.

‘We’re all together,’ I said. ‘It will be all right.’

Gordon looked doubtful, but finally allowed himself to be drawn from the lift between his supporters. The white faces apparently parted before us, to let us through.

The chairman’s personal assistant came hurrying along the corridor but the chairman waved him conclusively to a stop and said not to let anyone disturb us in the boardroom until he rang the bell; and Gordon and I in our wet shoes sloshed across the deep-piled green carpet to the long glossy mahogany boardroom table. Gordon consented to sit in one of the comfortable leather arm-chairs which surrounded it with me and the chairman alongside, and this time it was the chairman who asked if the people with white faces were still there.

‘Of course,’ Gordon said, looking around. ‘They’re sitting in all the chairs round the table. And standing behind them. Dozens of them. Surely you can see them?’

‘What are they wearing?’ the chairman asked.

Gordon looked at him in puzzlement, but answered simply enough. ‘White suits of course. With black buttons. Down the front, three big black buttons.’

‘All of them?’ the chairman asked. ‘All the same?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

‘Clowns,’ I exclaimed.

‘What?’

‘White-faced clowns.’

‘Oh no,’ Gordon said. ‘They’re not clowns. They’re not funny.’

‘White-faced clowns are sad.’

Gordon looked troubled and wary, and kept a good eye on his visitations.

‘What’s best to do?’ wondered the chairman; but he was talking principally to himself. To me directly, after a pause, he said, ‘I think we should take him home. He’s clearly not violent, and I see no benefit in calling in a doctor here, whom we don’t know. I’ll ring Judith and warn her, poor girl. I’ll drive him in my car as I’m perhaps the only one who knows exactly where he lives. And I’d appreciate it, Tim, if you’d come along, sit with Gordon on the back seat, keep him reassured.’

‘Certainly,’ I agreed. ‘And incidentally his own car’s here. He said that when he drove in he thought there were two or three of the white faces with him. The rest were waiting here.’

‘Did he?’ The chairman pondered. ‘He can’t have been hallucinating when he actually left home. Surely Judith would have noticed.’

‘But he seemed all right in the office when he came in,’ I said. ‘Quiet, but, all right. He sat at his desk for nearly an hour before he went out and stood in the fountain.’

‘Didn’t you talk with him?’

‘He doesn’t like people to talk when he’s thinking.’

The chairman nodded. ‘First thing, then,’ he said, ‘see if you can find a blanket. Ask Peter to find one. And... er... how wet are you, yourself?’

‘Not soaked, except for my legs. No problem, honestly. It’s not cold.’

He nodded, and I went on the errand. Peter, the assistant, produced a red blanket with Fire written across one corner for no good reason that I could think of, and with this wrapped snugly round his by now naked chest Gordon allowed himself to be conveyed discreetly to the chairman’s car. The chairman himself slid behind his wheel and with the direct effectiveness which shaped his whole life drove his still half-damp passengers southwards through the fair May morning.

Henry Shipton, chairman of Paul Ekaterin Ltd, was physically a big-framed man whose natural bulk was kept short of obesity by raw carrots, mineral water and will power. Half visionary, half gambler, he habitually subjected every soaring idea to rigorous analytic test: a man whose powerful instinctive urges were everywhere harnessed and put to work.

I admired him. One had to. During his twenty-year stint (including ten as chairman) Paul Ekaterin Ltd had grown from a moderately successful banking house into one of the senior league, accepted world-wide with respect. I could measure almost exactly the spread of public recognition of the bank’s name, since it was mine also: Timothy Ekaterin, great-grandson of Paul the founder. In my schooldays people always said ‘Timothy who? E-kat-erin? How do you spell it?’ Quite often now they simply nodded — and expected me to have the fortune to match, which I hadn’t.

‘They’re very peaceful, you know,’ Gordon said after a while.

‘The white faces?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘They don’t say anything. They’re just waiting.’

‘Here in the car?’

He looked at me uncertainly. ‘They come and go.’

At least they weren’t pink elephants, I thought irreverently: but Gordon, like the chairman, was abstemious beyond doubt. He looked pathetic in his red blanket, the sharp mind confused with dreams, the well-groomed businessman a pre-fountain memory, the patina stripped away. This was the warrior who dealt confidently every day in millions, this huddled mass of delusions going home in wet trousers. The dignity of man was everywhere tissue-paper thin.

He lived, it transpired, in leafy splendour by Clapham Common, in a late Victorian family pile surrounded by head-high garden walls. There were high cream-painted wooden gates which were shut, and which I opened, and a short graveled driveway between tidy lawns.

Judith Michaels erupted from her opening front door to meet the chairman’s car as it rolled to a stop, and the first thing she said, aiming it variously between Henry Shipton and myself, was ‘I’ll throttle that bloody doctor.’

After that she said, ‘How is he?’ and after that, in compassion, ‘Come along, love, it’s all right, come along in, darling, we’ll get you warm and tucked into bed in no time.’

She put sheltering arms round the red blanket as her child of a husband stumbled out of the car, and to me and to Henry Shipton she said again in fury ‘I’ll kill him. He ought to be struck off.’

‘They’re very bad these days about house calls,’ the chairman said doubtfully, ‘But surely... he’s coming?’

‘No, he’s not. Now you lambs both go into the kitchen — there’s some coffee in the pot — and I’ll be down in a sec. Come on Gordon, my dear love, up those stairs...’ She helped him through the front door, across a Persian-rugged hall and towards a panelled wood staircase, with me and the chairman following and doing as we were told.

Judith Michaels, somewhere in the later thirties, was a brown-haired woman in whom the life-force flowed strongly and with whom I could easily have fallen in love. I’d met her several times before that morning (at the bank’s various social gatherings) and had been conscious freshly each time of the warmth and glamour which were as normal to her as breathing. Whether I in return held the slightest attraction for her I didn’t know and hadn’t tried to find out, as entangling oneself emotionally with one’s boss’s wife was hardly best for one’s prospects. All the same I felt the same old tug, and wouldn’t have minded taking Gordon’s place on the staircase.

With these thoughts, I hoped, decently hidden, I went with Henry Shipton into the friendly kitchen and drank the offered coffee.

‘A great girl, Judith,’ the chairman said with feeling, and I looked at him in rueful surprise and agreed.

She came to join us after a while, still more annoyed than worried. ‘Gordon says there are people with white faces sitting all round the room and they won’t go away. It’s really too bad. It’s infuriating. I’m so angry I could spit.’

The chairman and I looked bewildered.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ she said, observing us. ‘Oh no, I suppose I didn’t. Gordon hates anyone to know about his illness. It isn’t very bad, you see. Not bad enough for him to have to stop working, or anything like that.’

‘Er...’ said the chairman. ‘What illness?’

‘Oh, I suppose I’ll have to tell you, now this has happened. I could kill that doctor, I really could.’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘Gordon’s got mild Parkinson’s disease. His left hand shakes a bit now and then. I don’t expect you’ve noticed. He tries not to let people see.’

We blankly shook our heads.

‘Our normal doctor’s just retired, and this new man, he’s one of those frightfully bumptious people who think they know better than everyone else. So he’s taken Gordon off the old pills, which were fine as far as I could see, and put him on some new ones. As of the day before yesterday. So when I rang him just now in an absolute panic thinking Gordon had suddenly gone raving mad or something and I’d be spending the rest of my life visiting mental hospitals he says light-heartedly not to worry, this new drug quite often causes hallucinations, and it’s just a matter of getting the dosage right. I tell you, if he hadn’t been at the other end of a telephone wire, I’d have strangled him.’

Both Henry Shipton and I, however, were feeling markedly relieved.

‘You mean,’ the chairman asked, ‘that this will all just... wear off?’

She nodded. ‘That bloody doctor said to stop taking the pills and Gordon would be perfectly normal in thirty-six hours. I ask you! And after that he’s got to start taking them again, but only half the amount, and to see what happens. And if we were worried, he said pityingly, as if we’d no right to be, Gordon could toddle along to the surgery in a couple of days and discuss it with him, though as Gordon would be perfectly all right by tomorrow night we might think there was no need.’

She herself was shaking slightly with what still looked like anger but was more probably a release of tension, because she suddenly sobbed, twice, and said ‘Oh God,’ and wiped crossly at her eyes.

‘I was so frightened, when you told me,’ she said, half apologetically. ‘And when I rang the surgery I got that damned obstructive receptionist and had to argue for ten minutes before she let me even talk to the doctor.’

After a brief sympathetic pause the chairman, going as usual to the heart of things, said, ‘Did the doctor say how long it would take to get the dosage right?’

She looked at him with a defeated grimace. ‘He said that as Gordon had reacted so strongly to an average dose it might take as much as six weeks to get him thoroughly stabilized. He said each patient was different, but that if we would persevere it would be much the best drug for Gordon in the long run.’

Henry Shipton drove me pensively back to the City.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we’ll say — in the office — that Gordon felt ‘flu’ coming on and took some pills which proved hallucinatory. We might say simply that he imagined that he was on holiday, and felt the need for a dip in a pool. Is that agreeable?’

‘Sure,’ I said mildly.

‘Hallucinatory drugs are, after all, exceedingly common these days.’

‘Yes.’

‘No need, then, Tim, to mention white-faced clowns.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘Nor Parkinson’s disease, if Gordon doesn’t wish it.’

‘I’ll say nothing,’ I assured him.

The chairman grunted and lapsed into silence; and perhaps we both thought the same thoughts along the well-worn lines of drug-induced side effects being more disturbing than the disease.

It wasn’t until we were a mile from the bank that Henry Shipton spoke again, and then he said, ‘You’ve been in Gordon’s confidence for two years now, haven’t you?’

‘Nearly three,’ I murmured, nodding.

‘Can you hold the fort until he returns?’

It would be dishonest to say that the possibility of this offer hadn’t been in my mind since approximately ten-fifteen, so I accepted it with less excitement than relief.

There was no rigid hierarchy in Ekaterin’s. Few explicit ranks: to be ‘in so and so’s confidence’, as house jargon put it, meant one would normally be on course for more responsibility, but unlike the other various thirty-two-year olds who crowded the building with their hopes and expectations I lived under the severe disadvantage of my name. The whole board of directors, consistently afraid of accusations of nepotism, made me double-earn every step.

‘Thank you,’ I said neutrally.

He smiled a shade. ‘Consult,’ he said, ‘whenever you need help.’

I nodded. His words weren’t meant as disparagement. Everyone consulted, in Ekaterin’s, all the time. Communication between people and between departments was an absolute priority in Henry Shipton’s book, and it was he who had swept away a host of small-room offices to form opened-up expanses. He himself sat always at one (fairly opulent) desk in a room that contained eight similar, his own flanked on one side by the vice-chairman’s and on the other by that of the head of Corporate Finance. Further senior directors from other departments occupied a row of like desks opposite, all of them within easy talking earshot of each other.

As with all merchant banks, the business carried on by Ekaterin’s was different and separate from that conducted by the High Street chains of clearing banks. At Ekaterin’s one never actually saw any money. There were no tellers, no clerks, no counters, no paying-ins, no withdrawals and hardly any cheque books.

There were three main departments, each with its separate function and each on its own floor of the building. Corporate Finance acted for major clients on mergers, takeovers and the raising of capital. Banking, which was where I worked with Gordon, lent money to enterprise and industry. And Investment Management, the oldest and largest department, aimed at producing the best possible returns from the vast investment funds of charities, companies, pensions, trusts and trade unions.

There were several small sections like Administration, which did everyone’s paperwork; like Property, which bought, sold, developed and leased; like Research, which dug around; like Overseas Investments, growing fast, and like Foreign Exchange, where about ten frenetic young wizards bought and sold world currencies by the minute, risking millions on decimal point margins and burning themselves out by forty.

The lives of all the three hundred and fifty people who worked for Ekaterin’s were devoted to making money work. To the manufacture, in the main, of business, trade, industry, pensions and jobs. It wasn’t a bad thing to be convinced of the worth of what one did, and certainly there was a tough basic harmony in the place which persisted unruffled by the surface tensions and jealousies and territorial defences of everyday office life.

Events had already moved on by the time the chairman and I returned to the hive. The chairman was pounced upon immediately in the entrance hall by a worriedly waiting figure from Corporate Finance, and upstairs in Banking Alec was giggling into his blotter.

Alec, my own age, suffered, professionally speaking, from an uncontrollable bent for frivolity. It brightened up the office no end, but as court jesters seldom made it to the throne his career path was already observably sideways and erratic. The rest of us were probably hopelessly stuffy. Thank God, I often thought, for Alec.

He had a well-shaped face of scattered freckles on cream-pale skin; a high forehead, a mat of tight tow-coloured curls. Stiff blond eyelashes blinked over alert blue eyes behind gold-framed spectacles, and his mouth twitched easily as he saw the funny side. He was liked on sight by almost everybody, and it was only gradually that one came to wonder whether the examiner who had awarded him a First in law at Oxford had been suffering from critical blindness.

‘What’s up?’ I said, instinctively smiling to match the giggles.

‘We’ve been leaked.’ He lifted his head but tapped the paper which lay on his desk. ‘My dear,’ he said with mischievous pleasure, ‘this came an hour ago and it seems we’re leaking all over the place like a punctured bladder. Like a baby. Like the Welsh.’

Leeking like the Welsh... ah well.

He lifted up the paper, and all, or at least a great deal, was explained. There had recently appeared a slim bi-monthly publication called What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t, which had fast caught the attention of most of the country and was reportedly read avidly by the police. Descendant of the flood of investigative journalism spawned by the tidal wave of Watergate, What’s Going On... was said to be positively bombarded by informers telling precisely what was going on, and all the investigating the paper had to do was into the truth of the information: which task it had been known to perform less than thoroughly.

‘What does it say?’ I asked; as who wouldn’t.

‘Cutting out the larky innuendo,’ he said, ‘it says that someone at Ekaterin’s has been selling inside information.’

‘Selling...’

‘Quite so.’

‘About a takeover?’

‘How did you guess?’

I thought of the man from Corporate Finance hopping from leg to leg with impatience white he waited for the chairman to return and knew that nothing but extreme urgency would have brought him down to the doorstep.

‘Let’s see,’ I said, and took the paper from Alec.

The piece headed merely ‘Tut tut’ was only four paragraphs long, and the first three of those were taken up with explaining with seductive authority that in merchant banks it was possible for the managers of investment funds to learn at an early stage about a takeover being organised by their colleagues. It was strictly illegal, however, for an investment manager to act on this private knowledge, even though by doing so he might make a fortune for his clients.

The shares of a company about to be taken over were likely to rise in value. If one could buy them at a low price before even a rumour of takeover started, the gain could be huge.

Such unprofessional behaviour by a merchant bank would be instantly recognised simply because of the profits made, and no investment manager would invite personal disaster in that way.

However, [asked the article] What’s Going On in the merchant bank of Paul Ekaterin Ltd? Three times in the past year takeovers managed by this prestigious firm have been ‘scooped’ by vigorous buying beforehand of the shares concerned. The buying itself cannot be traced to Ekaterin’s investment managers, but we are informed that the information did come from within Ekaterin’s, and that someone there has been selling the golden news, either for straight cash or a slice of the action.

‘It’s a guess,’ I said flatly, giving Alec back the paper. ‘There are absolutely no facts.’

‘A bucket of cold water,’ he complained, ‘is a sunny day compared with you.’

‘Do you want it to be true?’ I asked curiously.

‘Livens the place up a bit.’

And there, I thought, was the difference between Alec and me. For me the place was alive all the time, even though when I’d first gone there eight years earlier it had been unwillingly; a matter of being forced into it by my uncle. My mother had been bankrupt at that point, her flat stripped to the walls by the bailiffs of everything except a telephone (property of the Post Office) and a bed. My mother’s bankruptcy, as both my uncle and I well knew, was without doubt her own fault, but it didn’t stop him applying his blackmailing pressure.

‘I’ll clear her debts and arrange an allowance for her if you come and work in the bank.’

‘But I don’t want to.’

‘I know that. And I know you’re stupid enough to try to support her yourself. But if you do that she’ll ruin you like she ruined your father. Just give the bank a chance, and if you hate it after three months I’ll let you go.’

So I’d gone with mulish rebellion to tread the path of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my uncle, and within three months you’d have had to prise me loose with a crowbar. I suppose it was in my blood. All the snooty teenage scorn I’d felt for ‘money-grubbing’, all the supercilious disapproval of my student days, all the negative attitudes bequeathed by my failure of a father, all had melted into comprehension, interest and finally delight. The art of money-management now held me as addicted as any junkie, and my working life was as fulfilling as any mortal could expect.

‘Who do you think did it?’ Alec said.

‘If anyone did.’

‘It must have happened,’ he said positively. ‘Three times in the last year... that’s more than a coincidence.’

‘And I’ll bet that that coincidence is all the paper’s working on. They’re dangling a line. Baiting a hook. They don’t even say which takeovers they mean, let alone give figures.’

True or not, though, the story itself was bad for the bank. Clients would back away fast if they couldn’t trust, and What’s Going On... was right often enough to instil disquiet. Henry Shipton spent most of the afternoon in the boardroom conducting an emergency meeting of the directors, with ripples of unease spreading outwards from there through all departments. By going home time that evening practically everyone in the building had read the bombshell, and although some took it as lightheartedly as Alec it had the effect of almost totally deflecting speculation from Gordon Michaels.

I explained only twice about ‘flu’ and pills: only two people asked. When the very reputation of the bank was being rocked, who cared about a dip in the ornamental fountain, even if the bather had had all his clothes on and was a director in Banking.

On the following day I found that filling Gordon’s job was no lighthearted matter. Until then he had gradually given me power of decision over loans up to certain amounts, but anything larger was in his own domain entirely. Within my bracket, it meant that I could arrange any loan if I believed the client was sound and could repay principal and interest at an orderly rate: but if I judged wrong and the client went bust, the lenders lost both their money and their belief in my common sense. As the lenders were quite often the bank itself, I couldn’t afford for it to happen too often.

With Gordon there, the ceiling of my possible disasters had at least been limited. For him, though, the ceiling hardly existed, except that with loans incurring millions it was normal for him to consult with others on the board.

These consultations, already easy and informal because of the open-plan lay-out, also tended to stretch over lunch, which the directors mostly ate together in their own private dining room. It was Gordon’s habit to look with a pleased expression at his watch at five to one and take himself amiably off in the direction of a tomato juice and roast lamb; and he would return an hour later with his mind clarified and made up.

I’d been lent Gordon’s job but not his seat on the board, so I was without the benefit of the lunches; and as he himself had been the most senior in our own green pasture of office expanse, there was no one else of his stature immediately at hand. Alec’s advice tended to swing between the brilliantly perceptive and the maniacally reckless, but one was never quite sure which was which at the time. All high-risk Cinderellas would have gone to the ball under Alec’s wand: the trick was in choosing only those who would keep an eye on the clock and deliver the crystal goods.

Gordon tended therefore to allocate only cast-iron certainties to Alec’s care and most of the Cinderella-type to me, and he’d said once with a smile that in this job one’s nerve either toughened or broke, which I’d thought faintly extravagant at the time. I understood, though, what he meant when I faced without him a task which lay untouched on his desk: a request for financial backing for a series of animated cartoon films.

It was too easy to turn things down... and perhaps miss Peanuts or Mickey Mouse. A large slice of the bank’s profits came from the interest paid by borrowers. If we didn’t lend, we didn’t earn. A toss-up. I picked up the telephone and invited the hopeful cartoonist to bring his proposals to the bank.

Most of Gordon’s projects were half-way through, his biggest at the moment being three point four million for an extension to a cake factory. I had heard him working on this one for a week, so I merely took on where he had left off, telephoning people who sometimes had funds to lend and asking if they’d be interested in underwriting a chunk of Home-made Heaven. The bank itself, according to Gordon’s list, was lending three hundred thousand only, which made me wonder whether he privately expected the populace to go back to eating bread.

There was also, tucked discreetly in a folder, a glossy-prospectus invitation to participate in a multi-million project in Brazil, whereon Gordon had doodled in pencil an army of question marks and a couple of queries: Do we or don’t we? Remember Brasilia! Is coffee enough?? On the top of the front page, written in red, was a jump-to-it memo: Preliminary answer by Friday.

It was already Thursday. I picked up the prospectus and went along to the other and larger office at the end of the passage, where Gordon’s almost-equal sat at one of the seven desks. Along there the carpet was still lush and the furniture still befitting the sums dealt with on its tops, but the view from the windows was different. No fountain, but the sunlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rising like a Fabergé egg from the white stone lattice of the City.

‘Problem?’ asked Gordon’s almost-equal. ‘Can I help?’

‘Do you know if Gordon meant to go any further with this?’ I asked. ‘Did he say?’

Gordon’s colleague looked the prospectus over and shook his head. ‘Who’s along there with you today?’

‘Only Alec. I asked him. He doesn’t know.’

‘Where’s John?’

‘On holiday. And Rupert is away because of his wife.’

The colleague nodded. Rupert’s wife was imminently dying: cruel at twenty-six.

‘I’d take it around,’ he said. ‘See if Gordon’s put out feelers in Research, Overseas, anywhere. Form a view yourself. Then if you think it’s worth pursuing you can take it to Val and Henry.’ Val was head of Banking and Henry was Henry Shipton. I saw that to be Gordon was a big step up indeed, and was unsure whether to be glad or sorry that the elevation would be temporary.

I spent all afternoon drifting round with the prospectus and in the process learned less about Brazil than about the tizzy over the report in What’s Going On... Soul-searching appeared to be fashionable. Long faces enquired anxiously, ‘Could one possibly... without knowing... have mentioned a takeover to an interested party?’ And the short answer to that, it seemed to me, was No, one couldn’t. Secrecy was everywhere second nature to bankers.

If the article in the paper were true there had to be three people involved; the seller, the buyer and the informant; and certainly neither the buyer nor the informant could have acted in ignorance or by chance. Greed and malice moved like worms in the dark. If one were infested by them, one knew.

Gordon seemed to have asked no one about Brazil, and for me it was make-up-your-mind time. It would have been helpful to know what the other merchant banks thought, the sixteen British accepting houses like Schroders, Hambro’s, Morgan Grenfell, Kleinwort Benson, Hill Samuel, Warburg’s, Robert Fleming, Singer and Friedlander... all permitted, like Paul Ekaterin’s, to assume that the Bank of England would come to their aid in a crisis.

Gordon’s opposite numbers in those banks would all be pursing mouths over the same prospectus, committing millions to a fruitful enterprise, pouring millions down the drain, deciding not to risk it either way.

Which?

One could hardly directly ask, and finding out via the grapevine took a little time.

I carried the prospectus finally to Val Fisher, head of Banking, who usually sat at one of the desks facing Henry Shipton, two floors up.

‘Well, Tim, what’s your own view?’ he said. A short man, very smooth, very charming, with nerves like toughened ice.

‘Gordon had reservations, obviously,’ I said. ‘I don’t know enough, and no one else here seems to. I suppose we could either make a preliminary answer of cautious interest and then find out a bit more, or just trust to Gordon’s instinct.’

He smiled faintly. ‘Which?’

Ah, which?

‘Trust to Gordon’s instinct, I think,’ I said.

‘Right.’

He nodded and I went away and wrote a polite letter to the Brazil people expressing regret. And I wouldn’t know for six or seven years, probably, whether that decision was right or wrong.

The gambles were all long term. You cast your bread on the waters and hoped it would float back in the future with butter and jam.

Mildew... too bad.

June

Gordon telephoned three weeks later sounding thoroughly fit and well. I glanced across to where his desk stood mute and tidy, with all the paper action now transferred to my own.

‘Judith and I wanted to thank you...’ he was saying.

‘Really no need,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Wasting time. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, we’ve been offered a half-share in a box at Ascot next Thursday. We thought it might be fun... We’ve six places. Would you like to come? As our guest, of course. As a thank-you.’

‘I’d love it,’ I said. ‘But...’

‘No buts,’ he interrupted. ‘If you’d like to, Henry will fix it. He’s coming himself. He agreed you’d earned a day off, so all you have to do is decide.’

‘Then I’d like to, very much.’

‘Good. If you haven’t a morning coat, don’t worry. We’re not in the Royal Enclosure.’

‘If you’re wearing one... I inherited my father’s.’

‘Ah. Good. Yes, then. One o’clock Thursday, for lunch. I’ll send the entrance tickets to you in the office. Both Judith and I are very pleased you can come. We’re very grateful. Very.’ He sounded suddenly half-embarrassed, and disconnected with a click.

I wondered how much he remembered about the white faces, but with Alec and Rupert and John all in earshot it had been impossible to ask. Maybe at the races he would tell me. Maybe not.

Going racing wasn’t something I did very often nowadays, although as a child I’d spent countless afternoons waiting around the Tote queues while my mother in pleasurable agony backed her dozens of hunches and bankers and third strings and savers and lost money by the ton.

‘I’ve won!’ she would announce radiantly to all about her, waving an indisputably winning ticket: and the bunch of losses on the same race would be thrust into a pocket and later thrown away.

My father at the same time would be standing drinks in the bar, an amiable open-fisted lush with more good nature than sense. They would take me home at the end of the day giggling happily together in a hired chauffeur-driven Rolls, and until I was quite old I never questioned but that this contented affluence was built on rock.

I had been their only child and they’d given me a very good childhood to the extent that when I thought of holidays it was of yachts on warm seas or Christmas in the Alps. The villain of those days was my uncle who descended on us occasionally to utter Dire Warnings about the need for his brother (my father) to find a job.

My father however couldn’t shape up to ‘money-grubbing’ and in any case had no real ability in any direction; and with no habit of working he had quietly scorned people who had. He never tired of his life of aimless ease, and if he earned no one’s respect, few detested him either. A weak, friendly, unintelligent man. Not bad as a father. Not good at much else.

He dropped dead of a heart attack when I was nineteen and it was then that the point of the Dire Warnings became apparent. He and mother had lived on the capital inherited from grandfather, and there wasn’t a great deal left. Enough just to see me through college; enough, with care, to bring mother a small income for life.

Not enough to finance her manner of betting, which she wouldn’t or couldn’t give up. A lot more of the Dire Warnings went unheeded, and finally, while I was trying to stem a hopeless tide by working (of all things) for a bookmaker, the bailiffs knocked on the door.

In twenty-five years, it seemed, my mother had gambled away the best part of half a million pounds; all gone on horses, fast and slow. It might well have sickened me altogether against racing, but in a curious way it hadn’t. I remembered how much she and father had enjoyed themselves: and who was to say that it was a fortune ill spent?

‘Good news?’ Alec said, eyeing my no doubt ambivalent expression.

‘Gordon’s feeling better.’

‘Hm,’ he said judiciously, ‘So he should be. Three weeks off for ‘flu’...’ He grinned. ‘Stretching it a bit.’

I made a non-committal grunt.

‘Be glad, shall we, when he comes back?’

I glanced at his amused, quizzical face and saw that he knew as well as I did that when Gordon reappeared to repossess his kingdom, I wouldn’t be glad at all. Doing Gordon’s job, after the first breath-shortening initial plunge, had injected me with great feelings of vigour and good health; had found me running up stairs and singing in the bath and showing all the symptoms of a love affair; and like many a love affair it couldn’t survive the return of the husband. I wondered how long I’d have to wait for such a chance again, and whether next time I’d feel as high.

‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed,’ Alec said, the eyes electric blue behind the gold-rimmed specs.

‘Noticed what?’ Rupert asked, raising his head above papers he’d been staring blindly at for ninety minutes.

Back from his pretty wife’s death and burial poor Rupert still wore a glazed otherwhere look and tended too late to catch up with passing conversations. In the two days since his return he had written no letters, made no telephone calls, reached no decisions. Out of compassion one had had to give him time, and Alec and I continued to do his work surreptitiously without him realising.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

Rupert nodded vaguely and looked down again, an automaton in his living grief. I’d never loved anyone, I thought, as painfully as that. I think I hoped that I never would.

John, freshly returned also, but from his holidays, glowed with a still-red sunburn and had difficulty in fitting the full lurid details of his sexual adventures into Rupert’s brief absences to the washroom. Neither Alec nor I ever believed John’s sagas, but at least Alec found them funny, which I didn’t. There was an element lurking there of a hatred of women, as if every boasted possession (real of not) was a statement of spite. He didn’t actually use the word possession. He said ‘made’ and ‘screwed’ and ‘had it off with the little cow’. I didn’t like him much and he thought me a prig: we were polite in the office and never went together to lunch. And it was he alone of all of us who actively looked forward to Gordon’s return, he who couldn’t disguise his dismay that it was I who was filling the empty shoes instead of himself.

‘Of course, if I’d been here...’ he said at least once a day; and Alec reported that John had been heard telling Gordon’s almost-equal along the passage that now he, John, was back, Gordon’s work should be transferred from me to him.

‘Did you hear him?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Sure. And he was told in no uncertain terms that it was the Old Man himself who gave you the green light, and there was nothing John could do about it. Proper miffed was our Lothario. Says it’s all because you are who you are, and all that.’

‘Sod him.’

‘Rather you than me.’ He laughed gently into his blotter and picked up the telephone to find backers for a sewage and water purification plant in Norfolk.

‘Did you know,’ he said conversationally, busy dialing a number, ‘that there are so few sewage farms in West Berlin that they pay the East Berliners to get rid of the extra?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ I didn’t especially want to know, either, but as usual Alec was full of useless information and possessed by the urge to pass it on.

‘The East Berliners take the money and dump the stuff out in the open fields. Untreated, mind you.’

‘Do shut up,’ I said.

‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘And smelled it. Absolutely disgusting.’

‘It was probably fertilizer,’ I said, ‘and what were you doing in East Berlin?’

‘Calling on Nefertiti.’

‘She of the one eye?’

‘My God, yes, isn’t it a shock? Oh... hello...’ He got through to his prospective money-source and for far too long and with a certain relish explained the need for extra facilities to reverse the swamp of effluent which had been killing off the Broads. ‘No risk involved, of course, with a water authority.’ He listened. ‘I’ll put you in, then, shall I? Right.’ He scribbled busily and in due course disconnected. ‘Dead easy, this one. Ecology and all that. Good emotional stuff.’

I shuffled together a bunch of papers of my own that were very far from dead easy and went up to see Val Fisher, who happened to be almost alone in the big office. Henry Shipton, it seemed, was out on one of his frequent walkabouts through the other departments.

‘It’s a cartoonist,’ I said. ‘Can I consult?’

‘Pull up a chair.’ Val nodded and waved hospitably, and I sat beside him, spread out the papers, and explained about the wholly level-headed artist I had spent three hours with two weeks earlier.

‘He’s been turned down by his own local bank, and so far by three other firms like ourselves.’ I said. ‘He’s got no realisable assets, no security. He rents a flat and is buying a car on HP. If we financed him, it would be out of faith.’

‘Background?’ he asked. ‘Covenant?’

‘Pretty solid. Son of a Sales Manager. Respected at art school as an original talent: I talked to the Principal. His bank manager gave him a clean bill but said that his head office wouldn’t grant what he’s asking. For the past two years he’s worked for a studio making animated commercials. They say he’s good at the job; understands it thoroughly. They know he wants to go it alone, they think he’s capable and they don’t want to lose him.’

‘How old?’

‘Twenty-four.’

Val gave me an ‘Oh ho ho’ look, knowing, as I did, that it was the cartoonist’s age above all which had invited negative responses from the other banks.

‘What’s he asking?’ Val said, but he too looked as if he were already deciding against.

‘A studio, properly equipped. Funds to employ ten copying artists, with the expectation that it will be a year before any films are completed and can expect to make money. Funds for promotion. Funds for himself to live on. These sheets set out the probable figures.’

Val made a face over the pages, momentarily re-arranging the small neat features, slanting the tidy dark moustache, raising the arched eyebrows towards the black cap of hair.

‘Why haven’t you already turned him down?’ he asked finally.

‘Um,’ I said. ‘Look at his drawings.’ I opened another file and spread out the riotously coloured progression of pages which established two characters and told a funny story. I watched Val’s sophisticated world-weary face as he leafed through them: saw the awakening interest, heard the laugh.

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘Hmph.’ He leaned back in his chair and gave me an assessing stare. ‘You’re not saying you think we should take him on?’

‘It’s an unsecured risk, of course. But yes, I am. With a string or two, of course, like a cost accountant to keep tabs on things and a first option to finance future expansion.’

‘Hm.’ He pondered for several minutes, looking again at the drawings which still seemed funny to me even after a fortnight’s close acquaintance. ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s too like aiming at the moon with a bow and arrow.’

‘They might watch those films one day on space shuttles,’ I said mildly, and he gave me a fast amused glance while he squared up the drawings and returned them to their folder.

‘Leave these all here, then, will you?’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Henry over lunch.’ And I guessed in a swift uncomfortable moment of insight that what they would discuss would be not primarily the cartoonist but the reliability or otherwise of my judgement. If they thought me a fool I’d be back behind John in the promotion queue in no time.

At four-thirty, however, when my inter-office telephone rang, it was Val at the other end.

‘Come up and collect your papers,’ he said. ‘Henry says this decision is to be yours alone. So sink or swim, Tim, it’s up to you.’

One’s first exposure to the Royal Ascot meeting was, according to one’s basic outlook, either a matter of surprised delight or of puritanical disapproval. Either the spirits lifted to the sight of emerald grass, massed flowers, bright dresses, fluffy hats and men elegant in grey formality, or one despised the expenditure, the frivolity, the shame of champagne and strawberries while some in the world starved.

I belonged, without doubt, to the hedonists, both by upbringing and inclination. The Royal meeting at Ascot was, as it happened, the one racing event from which my parents had perennially excluded me, children in any case being barred from the Royal Enclosure for three of the four days, and mother more interested on this occasion in socializing than betting. School, she had said firmly every year, must come first: though on other days it hadn’t, necessarily. So it was with an extra sense of pleasure that I walked through the gates in my father’s resurrected finery and made my way through the smiling throng to the appointed, high-up box.

‘Welcome to the charade,’ Gordon said cheerfully, handing me a bubbling glass, and ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Judith exclaimed, humming with excitement in yellow silk.

‘It’s great,’ I said, and meant it; and Gordon, looking sunburned and healthy, introduced me to the owner of the box.

‘Dissdale, this is Tim Ekaterin. Works in the bank. Tim — Dissdale Smith.’

We shook hands. His was plump and warm, like his body, like his face. ‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘Got a drink? Good. Met my wife? No? Bettina, darling, say hello to Tim.’ He put an arm round the thin waist of a girl less than half his age whose clinging white black-dotted dress was cut low and bare at neck and armholes. There was also a wide black hat, beautiful skin and a sweet and practised smile.

‘Hello, Tim,’ she said. ‘So glad you could come.’ Her voice, I thought, was like the rest of her: manufactured, processed, not natural top drawer but a long way from gutter.

The box itself was approximately five yards by three, most of the space being filled by a dining table laid with twelve places for lunch. The far end wall was of windows looking out over the green course, with a glass door opening to steps going down to the viewing balcony. The walls of the box were covered as if in a house with pale blue hessian, and a soft blue carpet, pink flowers and pictures lent an air of opulence far greater than the actual expense. Most of the walls of the boxes into which I’d peered on the way along to this one were of builders’ universal margarine colour, and I wondered fleetingly whether it was Dissdale or Bettina who had the prettying mind.

Henry Shipton and his wife were standing in the doorway to the balcony, alternately facing out and in, like a couple of Januses. Henry across the room lifted his glass to me in a gesture of acknowledgement, and Lorna as ever looked as if faults were being found.

Lorna Shipton, tall, over-assured, and dressed that frilly day in repressive tailored grey, was a woman from whom disdain flowed outward like a tide, a woman who seemed not to know that words could wound and saw no reason not to air each ungenerous thought. I had met her about the same number of times as I’d met Judith Michaels and mostly upon the same occasions, and if I smothered love for the one it was irritation I had to hide for the other. It was, I suppose, inevitable, that of the two it was Lorna Shipton I was placed next to at lunch.

More guests arrived behind me, Dissdale and Bettina greeting them with whoops and kisses and making the sort of indistinct introductions that one instantly forgets. Dissdale decided there would be less crush if everyone sat down and so took his place at the top of the table with Gordon, his back to the windows, at the foot. When each had arranged their guests around them there were two empty places, one next to Gordon, one up Dissdale’s end.

Gordon had Lorna Shipton on his right, with me beside her: the space on his left, then Henry, then Judith. The girl on my right spent most of her time leaning forward to speak to her host Dissdale, so that although I grew to know quite well the blue chiffon back of her shoulder, I never actually learned her name.

Laughter, chatter, the study of race cards, the refilling of glasses: Judith with yellow silk roses on her hat and Lorna telling me that my morning coat looked a size too small.

‘It was my father’s,’ I said.

‘Such a stupid man.’

I glanced at her face, but she was merely expressing her thoughts, not positively trying to offend.

‘A beautiful day for racing,’ I said.

‘You should be working. Your Uncle Freddie won’t like it, you know. I’m certain that when he bailed you out he made it a condition that you and your mother should both stay away from racecourses. And now look at you. It’s really too bad. I’ll have to tell him, of course.’

I wondered how Henry put up with it. Wondered, as one does, why he’d married her. He, however, his ear attuned across the table in a husbandly way, said to her pleasantly. ‘Freddie knows that Tim is here, my dear. Gordon and I obtained dispensation, so to speak.’ He gave me a glimmer of a smile. ‘The wrath of God has been averted.’

‘Oh.’ Lorna Shipton looked disappointed and I noticed Judith trying not to laugh.

Uncle Freddie, ex-vice chairman, now retired, still owned enough of the bank to make his unseen presence felt, and I knew he was in the habit of telephoning Henry two or three times a week to find out what was going on. Out of interest, one gathered, not from desire to meddle; as certainly, once he had set his terms, he never meddled with mother and me.

Dissdale’s last guest arrived at that point with an unseen flourish of trumpets, a man making an entrance as if well aware of newsworthiness. Dissdale leapt to his feet to greet him and pumped him warmly by hand.

‘Calder, this is great. Calder Jackson, everybody.’

There were yelps of delight from Dissdale’s end and polite smiles round Gordon’s. ‘Calder Jackson,’ Dissdale said down the table, ‘You know, the miracle-worker. Brings dying horses back to life. You must have seen him on television.’

‘Ah yes,’ Gordon responded. ‘Of course.’

Dissdale beamed and returned to his guest who was lapping up adulation with a show of modesty.

‘Who did he say?’ Lorna Shipton asked.

‘Calder Jackson,’ Gordon said.

‘Who?’

Gordon shook his head, his ignorance showing. He raised his eyebrows in a question to me, but I fractionally shook my head also. We listened, however, and we learned.

Calder Jackson was a shortish man with a head of hair designed to be noticed. Designed literally, I guessed. He had a lot of dark curls going attractively grey, cut short towards the neck but free and fluffy on top of his head and over his forehead; and he had let his beard grow in a narrow fringe from in front of his ears round the line of his jaw, the hairs of this being also bushy and curly but grey to white. From in front his weathered face was thus circled with curls: from the side he looked as if he were wearing a helmet. Or a coal scuttle, I thought unflatteringly. Once seen, in any case, never forgotten.

‘It’s just a gift,’ he was saying deprecatingly in a voice that had an edge to it more compelling than loudness: an accent very slightly of the country but of no particular region; a confidence born of acclaim.

The girl sitting next to me was ecstatic. ‘How divine to meet you. One has heard so much... Do tell us, now do tell us your secret.’

Calder Jackson eyed her blandly, his gaze sliding for a second beyond her to me and then back again. Myself he quite openly discarded as being of no interest, but to the girl he obligingly said, ‘There’s no secret, my dear. None at all. Just good food, good care and a few age-old herbal remedies. And, of course... well... the laying on of hands.’

‘But how,’ asked the girl, ‘how do you do that to horses?’

‘I just... touch them.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘And then sometimes I feel them quiver, and I know the healing force is going from me into them.’

‘Can you do it infallibly?’ Henry asked politely, and I noted with interest that he’d let no implication of doubt sound in his voice: Henry whose gullibility could be measured in micrograms, if at all.

Calder Jackson took his seriousness for granted and slowly shook his head. ‘If I have the horse in my care for long enough, it usually happens in the end. But not always. No, sadly, not always.’

‘How fascinating,’ Judith said, and earned another of those kind bland smiles. Charlatan or not, I thought, Calder Jackson had the mix just right: an arresting appearance, a modest demeanour, no promise of success. And for all I knew, he really could do what he said. Healers were an age-old phenomenon, so why not a healer of horses?

‘Can you heal people too?’ I asked in a mirror-image of Henry’s tone. No doubts. Just enquiry.

The curly head turned my way with more civility than interest and he patiently answered the question he must have been asked a thousand times before. Answered in a sequence of words he had perhaps used almost as often. ‘Whatever gift it is that I have is especially for horses. I have no feeling that I can heal humans, and I prefer not to try. I ask people not to ask me, because I don’t like to disappoint them.’

I nodded my thanks, watched his head turn away and listened to him willingly answering the next question, from Bettina, as if it too had never before been asked. ‘No, the healing very seldom happens instantaneously. I need to be near the horse for a while. Sometimes for only a few days. Sometimes for a few weeks. One can never tell.’

Dissdale basked in the success of having hooked his celebrity and told us all that two of Calder’s ex-patients were running that very afternoon. ‘Isn’t that right, Calder?’

The curly head nodded. ‘Cretonne, in the first race, she used to break blood vessels, and Molyneaux, in the fifth, he came to me with infected wounds. I feel they are my friends now. I feel I know them.’

‘And shall we back them, Calder?’ Dissdale asked roguishly. ‘Are they going to win?’

The healer smiled forgivingly. ‘If they’re fast enough. Dissdale.’

Everyone laughed. Gordon refilled his own guests’ glasses. Lorna Shipton said apropos of not much that she had occasionally considered becoming a Christian Scientist and Judith wondered what colour the Queen would be wearing. Dissdale’s party talked animatedly among themselves, and the door from the corridor tentatively opened.

Any hopes I might have had that Gordon’s sixth place was destined for a Bettina-equivalent for my especial benefit were immediately dashed. The lady who appeared and whom Judith greeted with a kiss on the cheek was nearer forty than twenty-five and more solid than lissome. She wore a brownish pink linen suit and a small white straw hat circled with a brownish pink ribbon. The suit, I diagnosed, was an old friend: the hat, new in honour of the occasion.

Judith in her turn introduced the newcomer: Penelope Warner — Pen — a good friend of hers and Gordon’s. Pen Warner sat where invited, next to Gordon and made small-talk with Henry and Lorna. I half listened, and took in a few desultory details like no rings on the fingers, no polish on the nails, no grey in the short brown hair, no artifice in the voice. Worthy, I thought. Well-intentioned; slightly boring. Probably runs the church.

A waitress appeared with an excellent lunch, during which Calder could from time to time be heard extolling the virtues of watercress for its iron content and garlic for the treatment of fever and diarrhoea.

‘And of course in humans,’ he was saying, ‘garlic is literally a life saver in whooping-cough. You make a poultice and bind it onto the bottom of the feet of the child every night, in a bandage and a sock, and in the morning you’ll smell the garlic on the breath of the child, and the cough will abate. Garlic, in fact, cures almost anything. A truly marvellous life-giving plant.’

I saw Pen Warner lift her head to listen and I thought that I’d been wrong about the church. I had missed the worldliness of the eyes, the long sad knowledge of human frailty. A magistrate, perhaps? Yes, perhaps.

Judith leaned across the table and said teasingly, ‘Tim, can’t you forget you’re a banker even at the races?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘You look at everyone as if you’re working out just how much you can lend them without risk.’

‘I’d lend you my soul,’ I said.

‘For me to pay back with interest?’

‘Pay in love and kisses.’

Harmless stuff, as frivolous as her hat. Henry, sitting next to her, said in the same vein, ‘You’re second in the queue, Tim. I’ve a first option, eh, Judith? Count on me, dear girl, for the last drop of blood.’

She patted his hand affectionately and glowed a little from the deep truth of our idle protestations: and Calder Jackson’s voice came through with ‘Comfrey heals tissues with amazing speed and will cause chronic ulcers to disappear in a matter of days, and of course it mends fractures in half the time considered normal. Comfrey is miraculous.’

There was a good deal of speculation after that all round the table about a horse called Sandcastle that had won the 2,000 Guineas six weeks earlier and was hot favourite for the King Edward VII Stakes, the top Ascot race for three-year-old colts, due to be run that afternoon.

Dissdale had actually seen the Guineas at Newmarket and was enthusiastic. ‘Daisy-cutter action. Positively eats up the ground.’ He sprayed his opinions good naturedly to the furthest ear. ‘Big rangy colt, full of courage.’

‘Beaten in the Derby, though,’ Henry said, judiciously responding.

‘Well, yes,’ Dissdale allowed. ‘But fourth, you know. Not a total disgrace, would you say?’

‘He was good as a two-year-old,’ Henry said, nodding.

‘Glory, yes,’ said Dissdale fervently. ‘And you can’t fault his breeding. By Castle out of an Ampersand mare. You can’t get much better than that.’

Several heads nodded respectfully in ignorance.

‘He’s my banker,’ Dissdale said and then spread his arms wide and half laughed. ‘OK, we’ve got a roomful of bankers. But Sandcastle is where I’m putting my money today. Doubling him with my bets in every other race. Trebles. Accumulators. The lot. You all listen to your Uncle Dissdale. Sandcastle is the soundest banker at Ascot.’ His voice positively shook with evangelical belief. ‘He simply can’t be beaten.’

‘Betting is out for you, Tim,’ Lorna Shipton said severely in my ear.

‘I’m not my mother,’ I said mildly.

‘Heredity’ Lorna said darkly. ‘And your father drank.’

I smothered a bursting laugh and ate my strawberries in good humour. Whatever I’d inherited from my parents it wasn’t an addiction to their more expensive pleasures; rather a firm intention never again to lose my record collection to the bailiffs. Those stolid men had taken even the rocking horse on which at the age of six I’d ridden my fantasy Grand Nationals. They’d taken my books, my skis and my camera. Mother had fluttered around in tears saying those things were mine, not hers, and they should leave them, and the men had gone on marching out with all our stuff as if they were deaf. About her own disappearing treasures she had been distraught, her distress and grief hopelessly mixed with guilt.

I had been old enough at twenty-four to shrug off our actual losses and more or less replace them (except for the rocking horse) but the fury of that day had affected my whole life since: and I had been silent when it happened, white and dumb with rage.

Lorna Shipton removed her disapproval from me long enough to tell Henry not to have cream and sugar on his strawberries or she would have no sympathy if he put on weight, had a heart attack, or developed pimples. Henry looked resignedly at the forbidden delights which he wouldn’t have eaten anyway. God preserve me, I thought, from marrying a Lorna Shipton.

By the coffee-brandy-cigar stage the tranquil seating pattern had broken up into people dashing out to back their hopes in the first race and I, not much of a gambler whatever Mrs Shipton might think, had wandered out onto the balcony to watch the Queen’s procession of sleek horses, open carriages, gold, glitter and fluttering feathers trotting like a fairy tale up the green course.

‘Isn’t it splendid,’ said Judith’s voice at my shoulder, and I glanced at the characterful face and met the straight smiling eyes. Damn it to hell, I thought, I’d like to live with Gordon’s wife.

‘Gordon’s gone to bet,’ she said, ‘so I thought I’d take the opportunity... He’s appalled at what happened... and we’re really grateful to you, you know, for what you did that dreadful day.’

I shook my head. ‘I did nothing, believe me.’

‘Well, that’s half the point. You said nothing. In the bank, I mean. Henry says there hasn’t been a whisper.’

‘But... I wouldn’t.’

‘A lot of people would,’ she said. ‘Suppose you had been that Alec’

I smiled involuntarily. ‘Alec isn’t unkind. He wouldn’t have told.’

‘Gordon says he’s as discreet as a town-crier.’

‘Do you want to go down and see the horses?’ I asked.

‘Yes. It’s lovely up here, but too far from life.’

We went down to the paddock, saw the horses walk at close quarters round the ring and watched the jockeys mount ready to ride out onto the course. Judith smelled nice. Stop it, I told myself. Stop it.

‘That horse over there,’ I said, pointing, ‘is the one Calder Jackson said he cured. Cretonne. The jockey in bright pink.’

‘Are you going to back it?’ she asked.

‘If you like.’

She nodded the yellow silk roses and we queued up in good humour to make the wager. All around us in grey toppers and frothy dresses the Ascot crowd swirled, a feast to the eye in the sunshine, a ritual in make-believe, a suppression of gritty truth. My father’s whole life had been a pursuit of the spirit I saw in these Royal Ascot faces; the pursuit and entrapment of happiness.

‘What are you thinking,’ Judith said, ‘so solemnly?’

‘That lotus-eaters do no harm. Let terrorists eat lotus.’

‘As a steady diet,’ she said, ‘it would be sickening.’

‘On a day like this one could fall in love.’

‘Yes, one could.’ She was reading her race-card over-intently. ‘But should one?’

After a pause I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Nor do I.’ She looked up with seriousness and understanding and with a smile in her mind. ‘I’ve known you six years.’

‘I haven’t been faithful,’ I said.

She laughed and the moment passed, but the declaration had quite plainly been made and in a way accepted. She showed no awkwardness in my continued presence but rather an increase of warmth, and in mutual contentment we agreed to stay in the paddock for the first short race rather than climb all the way up and find it was over by the time we’d reached the box.

The backs of the jockeys disappeared down the course as they cantered to the start, and I said, as a way of conversation, ‘Who is Dissdale Smith?’

‘Oh.’ She looked amused. ‘He’s in the motor trade. He loves co make a splash, as no doubt you saw, but I don’t think he’s doing as well as he pretends. Anyway, he told Gordon he was Looking for someone to share the expense of this box here and asked if Gordon would be interested in buying half the box for Today. He’s sold halves for the other days as well. I don’t think he’s supposed to, actually, so better say nothing to anyone else.’

‘No.’

‘Bettina’s his third wife,’ she said. ‘She’s a model.’

‘Very pretty.’

‘And not as dumb as she looks.’

I heard the dryness in her voice and acknowledged that I had myself sounded condescending.

‘Mind you,’ Judith said forgivingly, ‘his second wife was the most gorgeous thing on earth, but without two thoughts to rub together. Even Dissdale got tired of the total vacancy behind the sensational violet eyes. It’s all very well to get a buzz when all men light up on meeting your wife, but it rather kicks the stilts away when the same men diagnose total dimness within five minutes and start pitying you instead.’

‘I can see that. What became of her?’

‘Dissdale introduced her to a boy who’d inherited millions and had an IQ on a par with hers. The last I heard they were in a fog of bliss.’

From where we stood we couldn’t see much of the race, only a head-on view of the horses as they came up to the winning post. In no way did I mind that, and when one of the leaders proved to carry bright pink Judith caught hold of my arm and shook it.

‘That’s Cretonne, isn’t it?’ She listened to the announcement of the winner’s number. ‘Do you realise, Tim, that we’ve damned well won?’ She was laughing with pleasure, her face full of sunshine and wonder.

‘Bully for Calder Jackson.’

‘You don’t trust him,’ she said. ‘I could see it in all your faces, yours and Henry’s and Gordon’s. You all have the same way of peering into people’s souls: you too, though you’re so young. You were all being incredibly polite so that he shouldn’t see your reservations.’

I smiled. ‘That sounds disgusting.’

‘I’ve been married to Gordon for nine years,’ she said.

There was again a sudden moment of stillness in which we looked at each other in wordless question and answer. Then she shook her head slightly, and after a pause I nodded acquiescence: and I thought that with a woman so straightforwardly intelligent I could have been content for ever.

‘Do we collect our winnings now or later?’ she asked.

‘Now, if we wait awhile.’

Waiting together for the jockeys to weigh-in and the all clear to be given for the pay-out seemed as little hardship for her as for me. We talked about nothing much and the time passed in a flash; and eventually we made our way back to the box to find that everyone there too had backed Cretonne and was high with the same success. Calder Jackson beamed and looked modest, and Dissdale expansively opened more bottles of excellent Krug, champagne of Kings.

Escorting one’s host’s wife to the paddock was not merely acceptable but an expected civility, so that it was with a benign eye that Gordon greeted our return. I was both glad and sorry, looking at his unsuspecting friendliness, that he had nothing to worry about. The jewel in his house would stay there and be his alone. Unattached bachelors could lump it.

The whole party, by now markedly carefree, crowded the box’s balcony for the big race. Dissdale said he had staked his all on his banker, Sandcastle; and although he said it with a laugh I saw the tremor in his hands which fidgeted with the race glasses. He’s in too deep, I thought. A bad way to bet.

Most of the others, fired by Dissdale’s certainty, happily clutched tickets doubling Sandcastle every which-way. Even Lorna Shipton, with a pink glow on each bony cheekbone, confessed to Henry that just for once, as it was a special day, she had staked five pounds in forecasts.

‘And you, Tim?’ Henry teased. ‘Your shirt?’

Lorna looked confused. I smiled. ‘Buttons and all,’ I said Cheerfully.

‘No, but...’ Lorna said.

‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘I’ve dozens more shirts at home.’

Henry laughed and steered Lorna gently away, and I found myself standing next to Calder Jackson.

‘Do you gamble?’ I asked, for something to say.

‘Only on certainties.’ He smiled blandly in the way that scarcely warmed his eyes. ‘Though on certainties it’s hardly a gamble.’

‘And is Sandcastle a certainty?’

He shook his curly head. ‘A probability. No racing bet’s a certainty. The horse might feel ill. Might be kicked at the start.’

I glanced across at Dissdale who was faintly sweating, and hoped for his sake that the horse would feel well and come sweetly out of the stalls.

‘Can you tell if a horse is sick just by looking at him?’ I enquired. ‘I mean, if you just watched him walk round the parade ring, could you tell?’

Calder answered in the way that revealed it was again an often-asked question. ‘Of course sometimes you can see at once, but mostly a horse as ill as that wouldn’t have been brought to the races. I prefer to look at a horse closely. To examine for instance the colour inside the eyelid and inside the nostril. In a sick horse, what should be a healthy pink may be pallid.’ He stopped with apparent finality, as if that were the appointed end of that answer, but after a few seconds, during which the whole huge crowd watched Sandcastle stretch out in the sun in the canter to the post, he said almost with awe, ‘That’s a superb horse. Superb.’ It sounded to me like his first spontaneous remark of the day and it vibrated with genuine enthusiasm.

‘He looks great,’ I agreed.

Calder Jackson smiled as if with indulgence at the shallowness of my judgement compared with the weight of his inside knowledge. ‘He should have won the Derby,’ he said. ‘He got shut in on the rails, couldn’t get out in time.’

My place at the great man’s side was taken by Bettina, who threaded her arm through his and said, ‘Dear Calder, come down to the front, you can see better than here at the back.’ She gave me a photogenic little smile and pulled her captive after her down the steps.

In a buzz that rose to a roar the runners covered their mile and a half journey; longer than the 2,000 Guineas, the same length as the Derby. Sandcastle in scarlet and white was making no show at all to universal groans and lay only fifth as the field swept round the last bend, and Dissdale looked as if he might have a heart attack.

Alas for my shirt, I thought. Alas for Lorna’s forecasts. Bang goes the banker that can’t lose.

Dissdale, unable to watch, collapsed weakly onto one of the small chairs which dotted the balcony, and in the next-door boxes people were standing on top of theirs and jumping up and down and screaming.

‘Sandcastle making his move...’ the commentator’s voice warbled over the loudspeakers, but the yells of the crowd drowned the rest.

The scarlet and white colors had moved to the outside. The daisy-cutter action was there for the world to see. The superb horse, the big rangy colt full of courage was eating up his ground.

Our box in the grandstand was almost a furlong down the course from the winning post, and when he reached us Sandcastle still had three horses ahead. He was flying, though, like a streak, and I found the sight of this fluid valour, this all-out striving, most immensely moving and exciting. I grabbed Dissdale by his despairing shoulder and hauled him forcefully to his feet.

‘Look,’ I shouted in his ear. ‘Watch. Your banker’s going to win. He’s a marvel. He’s a dream.’

He turned with a gaping mouth to stare in the direction of the winning post and he saw... he saw Sandcastle among the tumult going like a javelin, free now of all the others, aiming straight for the prize.

‘He’s won,’ Dissdale’s mouth said slackly, though amid the noise I could hardly hear him. ‘He’s bloody won.’

I helped him up the steps into the box. His skin was grey and damp and he was stumbling.

‘Sit down,’ I said, pulling out the first chair I came to, but he shook his head weakly and made his shaky way to his own place at the head of the table. He almost fell into it, heavily, and stretched out a trembling hand to his champagne.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘I’ll never do that again. Never on God’s earth.’

‘Do what?’

He gave me a flickering glance over his glass and said, ‘All on one throw.’

All. He’d said it before. ‘All on the banker...’ He surely couldn’t, I thought, have meant literally all; but yet not much else could have produced such physical symptoms.

Everyone else piled back into the room with ballooning jollity. Everyone without exception had backed Sandcastle, thanks to Dissdale. Even Calder Jackson, when pressed by Bettina, admitted to ‘a small something on the Tote. I don’t usually, but just this once.’ And if he’d lost, I thought, he wouldn’t have confessed.

Dissdale, from near fainting, climbed rapidly to a pulse-throbbing high, the colour coming back to his plump cheeks in a hectic red. No one seemed to have noticed his near-collapse, certainly not his wife, who flirted prettily with the healer and got less than her due response. More wine easily made its way down every throat, and there was no doubt that for the now commingled party the whole day was a riotous success.

In a while Henry offered to take Judith to the paddock. Gordon to my relief invited Lorna, which left me with the mystery lady, Pen Warner, with whom I’d so far exchanged only the thrilling words ‘How do you do.’

‘Would you like to go down?’ I asked.

‘Yes, indeed. But you don’t need to stay with me if it’s too much bother.’

‘Are you so insecure?’

There was a quick widening of the eyes and a visible mental shift. ‘You’re damned rude,’ she said. ‘And Judith said you were nice.’

I let her go past me out onto the landing and smiled as she went. ‘I should like to stay with you,’ I said, ‘if it’s not too much bother.’

She gave me a dry look, but as we more or less had to walk in single file along the narrow passageway owing to people going in the opposite direction she said little more until we had negotiated the lifts, the escalators and the pedestrian tunnel and had emerged into the daylight of the paddock.

It was her first time at Ascot, she said. Her first time, in fact, at the races.

‘What do you think of it?’

‘Very beautiful. Very brave. Quite mad.’

‘Does sanity lie in ugliness and cowardice?’ I asked.

‘Life does, pretty often,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

‘And some aren’t happy unless they’re desperate.’

She quietly laughed. ‘Tragedy inspires, so they say.’

‘They can stick it,’ I said. ‘I’d rather lie in the sun.’

We stood on the raised tiers of steps to watch the horses walk round the ring, and she told me that she lived along the road from Judith in another house fronting the common. ‘I’ve lived there all my life, long before Judith came. We met casually, as one does, in the local shops, and just walked home together one day several years ago. Been friends ever since.’

‘Lucky,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you live alone?’ I asked conversationally.

Her eyes slid my way with inner amusement. ‘Yes, I do. Do you?’

I nodded.

‘I prefer it,’ she said.

‘So do I.’

Her skin was clear and still girlish, the thickened figure alone giving an impression of years passing. That and the look in the eyes, the ‘I’ve seen the lot’ sadness.

‘Are you a magistrate?’ I asked.

She looked startled. ‘No, I’m not. What an odd thing to ask.’

I made an apologetic gesture. ‘You just look as if you might be.’

She shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t have time, even if I had the urge.’

‘But you do do good in the world.’

She was puzzled. ‘What makes you say so?’

‘I don’t know. The way you look.’ I smiled to take away any seriousness and said, ‘Which horse do you like? Shall we choose one and bet?’

‘What about Burnt Marshmallow?’

She liked the name, she said, so we queued briefly at a Tote window and invested some of the winnings from Cretonne and Sandcastle.

During our slow traverse of the paddock crowds on our way back towards the box we came towards Calder Jackson, who was surrounded by respectful listeners and didn’t see us.

‘Garlic is as good as penicillin,’ he was saying. ‘If you scatter grated garlic onto a septic wound it will kill all the bacteria...’

We slowed a little to hear.

’... and comfrey is miraculous,’ Calder said. ‘It knits bones and cures intractable skin ulcers in half the time you’d expect.’

‘He said all that upstairs,’ I said.

Pen Warner nodded, faintly smiling. ‘Good sound herbal medicine,’ she said. ‘You can’t fault him. Comfrey contains allantoin, a well-known cell proliferant.’

‘Does it? I mean... do you know about it?’

‘Mm.’ We walked on, but she said nothing more until we were high up again in the passageway to the box. ‘I don’t know whether you’d think I do good in the world... but basically I dole out pills.’

‘Er...?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I’m a lady in a white coat. A pharmacist.’

I suppose I was in a way disappointed, and she sensed it.

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘we can’t all be glamorous. I told you life was ugly and frightening, and from my point of view that’s often what it is for my customers. I see fear every day... and I know its face.’

‘Pen,’ I said, ‘forgive my frivolity. I’m duly chastened.’

We reached the box to find Judith alone there, Henry having loitered to place a bet.

‘I told Tim I’m a pharmacist,’ Pen said. ‘He thinks it’s boring.’

I got no further than the first words of protestation when Judith interrupted.

‘She’s not just “a” pharmacist,’ she said. ‘She owns her own place. Half the medics in London recommend her. You’re talking to a walking gold-mine with a heart like a wet sponge.’

She put her arm round Pen’s waist and the two of them together looked at me, their eyes shining with what perhaps looked like liking, but also with the mischievous feminine superiority of being five or six years older.

‘Judith!’ I said compulsively. ‘I... I...’ I stopped. ‘Oh damn it,’ I said. ‘Have some Krug.’

Dissdale’s friends returned giggling to disrupt the incautious minute and shortly Gordon, Henry and Lorna crowded in. The whole party pressed out onto the balcony to watch the race, and because it was a time out of reality Burnt Marshmallow romped home by three lengths.

The rest of the afternoon slid fast away. Henry at some point found himself alone out on the balcony beside me while inside the box the table was being spread with a tea that was beyond my stretched stomach entirely and a temptation from which the ever-hungry Henry had bodily removed himself.

‘How’s your cartoonist?’ he said genially. ‘Are we staking him, or are we not?’

‘You’re sure... I have to decide... all alone?’

‘I said so. Yes.’

‘Well... I got him to bring some more drawings to the bank. And his paints.’

‘His paints?’

‘Yes. I thought if I could see him at work, I’d know...’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, I took him into the private interview room and asked him to paint the outline of a cartoon film while I watched; and he did it, there and then, in acrylics. Twenty-five outline sketches in bright colour, all within an hour. Same characters, different story, and terrifically funny. That was on Monday. I’ve been... well... dreaming about those cartoons. It sounds absurd. Maybe they’re too much on my mind.’

‘But you’ve decided?’

After a pause I said, ‘Yes.’

‘And?’

With a sense of burning bridges I said, ‘To go ahead.’

‘All right.’ Henry seemed unalarmed. ‘Keep me informed.’

‘Yes, of course.’

He nodded and smoothly changed the subject. ‘Lorna and I have won quite a bit today. How about you?’

‘Enough to give Uncle Freddie fits about the effect on my unstable personality.’

Henry laughed aloud. ‘Your Uncle Freddie,’ he said, ‘knows you better than you may think.’

At the end of that splendid afternoon the whole party descended together to ground level and made its way to the exit; to the gate which opened onto the main road, and across that to the car park and to the covered walk which led to the station.

Calder just ahead of me walked in front, the helmet of curls sent kindly over Bettina, the strong voice thanking her and Dissdale for ‘a most enjoyable time.’ Dissdale himself, not only fully recovered but incoherent with joy as most of his doubles, trebles and accumulators had come up, patted Calder plumply on the shoulder and invited him over to ‘my place’ for the weekend.

Henry and Gordon, undoubtedly the most sober of the party, were fiddling in their pockets for car keys and throwing their race cards into wastebins. Judith and Pen were talking to each other and Lorna was graciously unbending to Dissdale’s friends. It seemed to be only I, with unoccupied eyes, who saw at all what was about to happen.

We were out on the pavement, still in a group, half-waiting for a chance to cross the road, soon to break up and scatter. All talking, laughing, busy; except me.

A boy stood there on the pavement, watchful and still. I noticed first the fixed, burning intent in the dark eyes, and quickly after that the jeans and faded shirt which contrasted sharply with our Ascot clothes, and then finally with incredulity the knife in his hand.

I had almost to guess at whom he was staring with such deadly purpose, and no time even to shout a warning. He moved across the pavement with stunning speed, the stab already on its upward travel.

I jumped almost without thinking; certainly without assessing consequences or chances. Most unbankerlike behaviour.

The steel was almost in Calder’s stomach when I deflected it. I hit the boy’s arm with my body in a sort of flying tackle and in a flashing view saw the weave of Calder’s trousers, the polish on his shoes, the litter on the pavement. The boy fell beneath me and I thought in horror that somewhere between our bodies he still held that wicked blade.

He writhed under me, all muscle and fury, and tried to heave me off. He was lying on his back, his face just under mine, his eyes like slits and his teeth showing between drawn-back lips. I had an impression of dark eyebrows and white skin and I could hear the breath hissing between his teeth in a tempest of effort.

Both of his hands were under my chest and I could feel him trying to get space enough to up-end the knife. I pressed down onto him solidly with all my weight and in my mind I was saying ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, you bloody fool’; and I was saying it for his sake, which seemed crazy to me at the time and even crazier in retrospect. He was trying to do me great harm and all I thought about was the trouble he’d be in if he succeeded.

We were both panting but I was taller and stronger and I could have held him there for a good while longer but for the two policemen who had been out on the road directing traffic. They had seen the melee; seen as they supposed a man in morning dress attacking a pedestrian, seen us struggling on the ground. In any case the first I knew of their presence was the feel of vice-like hands fastening onto my arms and pulling me backwards.

I resisted with all my might. I didn’t know they were policemen. I had eyes only for the boy: his eyes, his hands, his knife.

With peremptory strength they hauled me off, one of them anchoring my upper arms to my sides by encircling me from behind. I kicked furiously backwards and turned my head, and only then realized that the new assailants wore navy blue.

The boy comprehended the situation in a flash. He rolled over onto his feet, crouched for a split second like an athlete at the blocks and without lifting his head above waist-height slithered through the flow of the crowds still pouring out of the gates and disappeared out of sight inside the racecourse. Through there they would never find him. Through there he would escape to the cheaper rings and simply walk out of the lower gate.

I stopped struggling but the policemen didn’t let go. They had no thought of chasing the boy. They were incongruously calling me ‘sir’ while treating me with contempt, which if I’d been calm enough for reflection I would have considered fairly normal.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said finally to one of them, ‘what do you think that knife’s doing on the pavement?’

They looked down to where it lay; to where it had fallen when the boy ran. Eight inches of sharp steel kitchen knife with a black handle.

‘He was trying to stab Calder Jackson,’ I said. ‘All I did was stop him. Why do you think he’s gone?’

By this time Henry, Gordon, Laura, Judith and Pen were standing round in an anxious circle continually assuring the law that never in a million years would their friend attack anyone except out of direst need, and Calder was looking dazed and fingering a slit in the waistband of his trousers.

The farce slowly resolved itself into duller bureaucratic order. The policemen relinquished their hold and I brushed the dirt off the knees of my father’s suit and straightened my tangled tie. Someone picked up my tumbled top hat and gave it to me. I grinned at Judith. It all seemed such a ridiculous mixture of death and bathos.

The aftermath took half of the evening and was boring in the extreme: police station, hard chairs, polystyrene cups of coffee.

No, I’d never seen the boy before.

Yes, I was sure the boy had been aiming at Calder specifically.

Yes, I was sure he was only a boy. About sixteen, probably.

Yes, I would know him again. Yes, I would help with an Identikit picture.

No. My fingerprints were positively not on the knife. The boy had held onto it until he ran.

Yes, of course they could take my prints, in case.

Calder, wholly mystified, repeated over and over that he had no idea who could want to kill him. He seemed scandalized, indeed, at the very idea. The police persisted: most people knew their murderers, they said, particularly when as seemed possible in this case the prospective killer had been purposefully waiting for his victim. According to Mr Ekaterin the boy had known Calder. That was quite possible, Calder said, because of his television appearances, but Calder had not known him.

Among some of the police there was a muted quality, among others a sort of defiant aggression, but it was only Calder who rather acidly pointed out that if they hadn’t done such a good job of hauling me off, they would now have the boy in custody and wouldn’t need to be looking for him.

‘You could have asked first,’ Calder said, but even I shook my head.

If I had indeed been the aggressor I could have killed the boy while the police were asking the onlookers just who was fighting whom. Act first, ask questions after was a policy full of danger, but getting it the wrong way round could be worse.

Eventually we both left the building, Calder on the way out trying his best with unrehearsed words. ‘Er... Tim... Thanks are in order... If it hadn’t been for you... I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say nothing,’ I said. ‘I did it without thinking. Glad you’re OK.’

I had taken it for granted that everyone else would be long gone, but Dissdale and Bettina had waited for Calder, and Gordon, Judith and Pen for me, all of them standing in a group by some cars and talking to three or four strangers.

‘We know you and Calder both came by train,’ Gordon said, walking towards us, ‘but we decided we’d drive you home.’

‘You’re extraordinarily kind,’ I said.

‘My dear Dissdale...’ Calder said, seeming still at a loss for words. ‘So grateful, really.’

They made a fuss of him; the endangered one, the lion delivered. The strangers round the cars turned out to be gentlemen of the press, to whom Calder Jackson was always news, alive or dead. To my horror they announced themselves, producing notebooks and a camera, and wrote down everything anyone said, except they got nothing from me because all I wanted to do was shut them up.

As well try to stop an avalanche with an outstretched palm. Dissdale and Bettina and Gordon and Judith and Pen did a diabolical job, which was why for a short time afterwards I suffered from public notoriety as the man who had saved Calder Jackson’s life.

No one seemed to speculate about his assailant setting out for a second try.

I looked at my photograph in the papers and wondered if the boy would see it, and know my name.

October

Gordon was back at work with his faintly trembling left hand usually out of sight and unnoticeable.

During periods of activity, as on the day at Ascot, he seemed to forget to camouflage, but at other times he had taken to sitting forwards in a hunched way over his desk with his hand anchored down between his thighs. I thought it a pity. I thought the tremor so slight that none of the others would have remarked on it, either aloud or to themselves, but to Gordon it was clearly a burden.

Not that it seemed to have affected his work. He had come back in July with determination, thanked me briskly in the presence of the others for my stop-gapping and taken all major decisions off my desk and back to his.

John asked him, also in the hearing of Alec, Rupert and myself, to make it clear to us that it was he, John, who was the official next-in-line to Gordon, if the need should occur again. He pointed out that he was older and had worked much longer in the bank than I had. Tim, he said, shouldn’t be jumping the queue.

Gordon eyed him blandly and said that if the need arose no doubt the chairman would take every factor into consideration. John made bitter and audible remarks under his breath about favouritism and unfair privilege, and Alec told him ironically to find a merchant bank where there wasn’t a nephew or some such on the force.

‘Be your age,’ he said. ‘Of course they want the next generation to join the family business. Why shouldn’t they? It’s natural.’ But John was unplacated, and didn’t see that his acid grudge against me was wasting a lot of his time. I seemed to be continually in his thoughts. He gave me truly vicious looks across the room and took every opportunity to sneer and denigrate. Messages never got passed on, and clients were given the impression that I was incompetent and only employed out of family charity. Occasionally on the telephone people refused to do business with me, saying they wanted John, and once a caller said straight out, ‘Are you that playboy they’re shoving ahead over better men’s heads?’

John’s gripe was basically understandable: in his place I’d have been cynical myself. Gordon did nothing to curb the escalating hate campaign and Alec found it funny. I thought long and hard about what to do and decided simply to work harder. I’d see it was very difficult for John to make his allegations stick.

His aggression showed in his body, which was roundedly muscular and looked the wrong shape for a city suit. Of moderate height, he wore his wiry brown hair very short so that it bristled above his collar, and his voice was loud, as if he thought volume equated authority: and so it might have done in schoolroom or on barrack square, instead of on a civilized patch of carpet.

He had come into banking via business school with high ambitions and good persuasive skills. I sometimes thought he would have made an excellent export salesman, but that wasn’t the life he wanted. Alec said that John got his kicks from saying ‘I am a merchant banker’ to pretty girls and preening himself in their admiration.

Alec was a wicked fellow, really, and a shooter of perceptive arrows.

There came a day in October when three whirlwind things happened more or less simultaneously. The cartoonist telephoned; What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t landed with a thud throughout the City; and Uncle Freddie descended on Ekaterin’s for a tour of inspection.

To begin with the three events were unconnected, but by the end of the day, entwined.

I heard the cartoonist’s rapid opening remarks with a sinking heart. ‘I’ve engaged three extra animators and I need five more,’ he said. ‘Ten isn’t nearly enough. I’ve worked out the amount of increased loan needed to pay them all.’

‘Wait,’ I said.

He went right on. ‘I also need more space, of course, but luckily that’s no problem, as there’s an empty warehouse next to this place. I’ve signed a lease for it and told them you’ll be advancing the money, and of course more furniture, more materials...’

‘Stop,’ I said distractedly, ‘You can’t.’

‘What? I can’t what?’ He sounded, of all things, bewildered.

‘You can’t just keep on borrowing. You’ve a limit. You can’t go beyond it. Look for heaven’s sake come over here quickly and we’ll see what can be undone.’

‘But you said,’ his voice said plaintively, ‘that you’d want to finance later expansion. That’s what I’m doing. Expanding.’

I thought wildly that I’d be licking stamps for a living as soon as Henry heard. Dear God...

‘Listen,’ the cartoonist was saying, ‘we all worked like hell and finished one whole film. Twelve minutes long, dubbed with music and sound effects, everything, titles, the lot. And we did some rough-cuts of three others, no music, no frills, but enough... and I’ve sold them.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘Sold them.’ He laughed with excitement. ‘It’s solid, I promise you. That agent you sent me to, he’s fixed the sale and the contract. All I have to do is sign. It’s a major firm that’s handling them, and I get a big perpetual royalty. World-wide distribution, that’s what they’re talking about, and the BBC are taking them. But we’ve got to make twenty films in a year from now, not seven like I meant. Twenty! And if the public like them, that’s just the start. Oh heck, I can’t believe it. But to do twenty in the time I need a lot more money. Is it all right? I mean... I was so sure...’

‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s all right. Bring the contract when you’ve signed it, and new figures, and we’ll work things out.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Tim Ekaterin, God bless your darling bank.’

I put the receiver down feebly and ran a hand over my head and down the back of my neck.

‘Trouble?’ Gordon asked, watching.

‘Well no, not exactly...’ A laugh like the cartoonist’s rose in my throat. ‘I backed a winner. I think perhaps I backed a bloody geyser.’ The laugh broke out aloud. ‘Did you ever do that?’

‘Ah yes,’ Gordon nodded, ‘Of course.’

I told him about the cartoonist and showed him the original set of drawings, which were still stowed in my desk: and when he looked through them, he laughed.

‘Wasn’t that application on my desk,’ he said, wrinkling his forehead in an effort to remember, ‘just before I was away?’

I thought back. ‘Yes, it probably was.’

He nodded. ‘I’d decided to turn it down.’

‘Had you?’

‘Mm. Isn’t he too young, or something?’

‘That sort of talent strikes at birth.’

He gave me a brief assessing look and handed the drawings back. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck to him.’

The news that Uncle Freddie had been spotted in the building rippled through every department and stiffened a good many slouching backbones. Uncle Freddie was given to growling out devastatingly accurate judgements of people in their hearing, and it was not only I who’d found the bank more peaceful (if perhaps also more complacent) when he retired.

He was known as ‘Mr Fred’ as opposed to ‘Mr Mark’ (grandfather) and ‘Mr Paul’, the founder. No one ever called me ‘Mr Tim’; sign of the changing times. If true to form Uncle Freddie would spend the morning in Investment Management, where he himself had worked all his office life, and after lunch in the boardroom would put at least his head into Corporate Finance, to be civil, and end with a march through Banking. On the way, by some telepathic process of his own, he would learn what moved in the bank’s collective mind; sniff, as he had put it, the prevailing scent on the wind.

He had already arrived when the copies of What’s Going On hit the fan.

Alec as usual slipped out to the local paper shop at about the time they were delivered there and returned with the six copies which the bank officially sanctioned. No one in the City could afford not to know about What Was Going On on their own doorstep.

Alec shunted around delivering one copy to each floor and keeping ours to himself to read first, a perk he said he deserved.

‘Your uncle,’ he reported on his return, ‘is beating the shit out of poor Ted Lorrimer in Investments for failing to sell Winkler Consolidated when even a squint-eyed baboon could see it was overstretched in its Central American operation, and a neck sticking out asking for the comprehensive chop.’

Gordon chuckled mildly at the verbatim reporting, and Alec sat at his desk and opened the paper. Normal office life continued for perhaps five more minutes before Alec shot to his feet as if he’d been stung.’

‘Jes-us Christ,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Our leaker is at it again.’

‘What?’ Gordon said.

‘You’d better read it.’ He took the paper across to Gordon whose preliminary face of foreboding turned slowly to anger.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ Gordon said. He made as if to pass the paper to me, but John, on his feet, as good as snatched it out of his hand.

‘I should come first,’ he said forcefully, and took the paper over to his own desk, sitting down methodically and spreading the paper open on the flat surface to read. Gordon watched him impassively and I said nothing to provoke. When John at his leisure had finished, showing little reaction but a tightened mouth, it was to Rupert he gave the paper, and Rupert, who read it with small gasps and widening eyes, who brought it eventually to me.

‘It’s bad,’ Gordon said.

‘So I gather.’ I lolled back in my chair and lifted the offending column to eye level. Under a heading of ‘Dinky Dirty Doings’ it said:

I looked up from the damaging page and across at Alec, and he was, predictably, grinning.

‘I wonder who’s had his hand in the cookie jar,’ he said.

‘And who caught it there,’ I asked.

‘Wow, yes.’

Gordon said bleakly, ‘This is very serious.’

‘If you believe it,’ I said.

‘But this paper...’ he began.

‘Yeah,’ I interrupted. ‘It had a dig at us before, remember? Way back in May. Remember the flap everyone got into?’

‘I was at home... with ‘flu’.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, the furore went on here for ages and no one came up with any answers. This column today is just as unspecific. So... supposing all it’s designed to do is stir up trouble for the bank? Who’s got it in for us? To what raving nut have we for instance refused a loan?’

Alec was regarding me with exaggerated wonder. ‘Here we have Sherlock Holmes to the rescue,’ he said admiringly. ‘Now we can all go out to lunch.’

Gordon however said thoughtfully, ‘It’s perfectly possible, though, to set up a company and lend it money. All it would take would be paperwork. I could do it myself. So could anyone here, I suppose, up to his authorized ceiling, if he thought he could get away with it.’

John nodded. ‘It’s ridiculous of Tim and Alec to make a joke of this,’ he said importantly. ‘The very reputation of the bank is at stake.’

Gordon frowned, stood up, took the paper off my desk, and went along to see his almost-equal in the room facing St Paul’s. Spreading consternation, I thought; bringing out cold sweats from palpitating banking hearts.

I ran a mental eye over everyone in the whole department who could possibly have had enough power along with the opportunity, from Val Fisher all the way down to myself; and there were twelve, perhaps, who could theoretically have done it.

But... not Rupert, with his sad mind still grieving, because he wouldn’t have had the appetite or energy for fraud.

Not Alec, surely; because I liked him.

Not John: too self-regarding.

Not Val, not Gordon, unthinkable. Not myself.

That left the people along in the other pasture, and I didn’t know them well enough to judge. Maybe one of them did believe that a strong fiddle on the side was worth the ruin of discovery, but all of us were already generously paid, perhaps for the very reason that temptations would be more likely to be resisted if we weren’t scratching around for the money for the gas.

Gordon didn’t return. The morning limped down to lunch-time, when John bustled off announcing he was seeing a client, and Alec encouraged Rupert to go out with him for a pie and pint. I’d taken to working through lunch because of the quietness, and I was still there alone at two o’clock when Peter, Henry’s assistant, came and asked me to go up to the top floor, because I was wanted.

Uncle Freddie, I thought. Uncle Freddie’s read the rag and will be exploding like a warhead. In some way he’ll make it out to be my fault. With a gusty sigh I left my desk and took the lift to face the old warrior with whom I had never in my life felt easy.

He was waiting in the top floor hallway, talking to Henry. Both of them at six foot three over-topped me by three inches. Life would never have been as ominous, I thought, if Uncle Freddie had been small.

‘Tim,’ Henry said when he saw me, ‘Go along to the small conference room, will you?’

I nodded and made my way to the room next to the boardroom where four or five chairs surrounded a square polished table. A copy of What’s Going On lay there, already dog-eared from many thumbs.

‘Now Tim’, said my uncle, coming into the room behind me, ‘do you know what all this is about?’

I shook my head and said ‘No.’

My uncle growled in his throat and sat down, waving Henry and myself to seats. Henry might be chairman, might indeed in office terms have been Uncle Freddie’s boss, but the white-haired old tyrant still personally owned the leasehold of the building itself and from long habit treated everyone in it as guests.

Henry absently fingered the newspaper. ‘What do you think?’ he said to me. ‘Who... do you think?’

‘It might not be anyone.’

He half smiled. ‘A stirrer?’

‘Mm. Not a single concrete detail. Same as last time.’

‘Last time,’ Henry said, ‘I asked the paper’s editor where he got his information from. Never reveal sources, he said. Useless asking again.’

‘Undisclosed sources,’ Uncle Freddie said, ‘never trust them.’

Henry said, ‘Gordon says you can find out, Tim, how many concerns, if any, are borrowing from us at five per cent. There can’t be many. A few from when interest rates were low. The few who got us in the past to agree to a long-term fixed rate.’ The few, though he didn’t say so, from before his time, before he put an end to such unprofitable straitjackets. ‘If there are more recent ones among them, could you spot them?’

‘I’ll look,’ I said.

We both knew it would take days rather than hours and might produce no results. The fraud, if it existed, could have been going on for a decade. For half a century. Successful frauds tended to go on and on unnoticed, until some one tripped over them by accident. It might almost be easier to find out who had done the tripping, and why he’d told the paper instead of the bank.

‘Anyway,’ Henry said, ‘that isn’t primarily why we asked you up here.’

‘No,’ said my uncle, grunting. ‘Time you were a director.’

I thought: I didn’t hear that right.

‘Er... what?’ I said.

‘A director. A director,’ he said impatiently. ‘Fellow who sits on the board. Never heard of them, I suppose.’

I looked at Henry, who was smiling and nodding.

‘But,’ I said, ‘so soon...’

‘Don’t you want to, then?’ demanded my uncle.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Good. Don’t let me down. I’ve had my eye on you since you were eight.’

I must have looked as surprised as I felt.

‘You told me then,’ he said, ‘how much you had saved, and how much you would have if you went on saving a pound a month at four per cent compound interest for forty years, by which time you would be very old. I wrote down your figures and worked them out, and you were right.’

‘It’s only a formula,’ I said.

‘Oh sure. You could do it now in a drugged sleep. But at eight? You’d inherited the gift, all right. You were just robbed of the inclination.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Look at your father. My little brother. Got drunk nicely, never a mean thought, but hardly there when the brains were handed out. Look at the way he indulged your mother, letting her gamble like that. Look at the life he gave you. All pleasure, regardless of cost. I despaired of you at times. Thought you’d been ruined. But I knew the gift was there somewhere, might still be dormant, might grow if forced. So there you are, I was right.’

I was pretty well speechless.

‘We all agree,’ Henry said. ‘The whole board was unanimous at our meeting this morning that it’s time another Ekaterin took his proper place.’

I thought of John, and of the intensity of rage my promotion would bring forth.

‘Would you,’ I said slowly, ‘have given me a directorship if my name had been Joe Bloggs?’

Henry levelly said, ‘Probably not this very day. But soon, I promise you, yes. You’re almost thirty-three, after all, and I was on the board here at thirty-four.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Rest assured,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve earned it.’ He stood up and formally shook hands. ‘Your appointment officially starts as of the first of November, a week today. We will welcome you then to a short meeting in the boardroom, and afterwards to lunch.’

They must both have seen the depth of my pleasure, and they themselves looked satisfied. Hallelujah, I thought, I’ve made it. I’ve got there... I’ve barely started.

Gordon went down with me in the lift, also smiling.

‘They’ve all been dithering about it on and off for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since you took over from me when I was ill, and did OK. Anyway I told them this morning about your news from the cartoonist. Some of them said it was just lucky. I told them you’d now been lucky too often for it to be a coincidence. So there you are.’

‘I can’t thank you...’

‘It’s your own doing.’

‘John will have a fit.’

‘You’ve coped all right so far with his envy.’

‘I don’t like it, though,’ I said.

‘Who would? Silly man, he’s doing his career no good.’

Gordon straightaway told everyone in the office, and John went white and walked rigidly out of the room.

I went diffidently a week later to the induction and to the first lunch with the board, and then in a few days, as one does, I got used to the change of company and to the higher level of information. In the departments one heard about the decisions that had been made: in the dining room one heard the decisions being reached. ‘Our daily board meeting,’ Henry said. ‘So much easier this way when everyone can simply say what they think without anyone taking notes.’

There were usually from ten to fifteen directors at lunch, although at a pinch the elongated oval table could accommodate the full complement of twenty-three. People would vanish at any moment to answer telephone calls, and to deal. Dealing, the buying and selling of stocks, took urgent precedence over food.

The food itself was no great feast, though perfectly presented. ‘Always lamb on Wednesdays,’ Gordon said at the buffet table as he took a couple from a row of trimmed lean cutlets. ‘Some sort of chicken on Tuesdays, beef Wellington most Thursdays. Henry never eats the crust.’ Each day there was a clear soup before and fruit and cheese after. Alcohol if one chose, but most of them didn’t. No one should deal in millions whose brain wanted to sleep, Henry said, drinking Malvern water steadily. Quite a change, all of it, from a rough-hewn sandwich at my desk.

They were all polite about my failure to discover ‘paper’ companies to whom the bank had been lending at five per cent, although Val and Henry, I knew, shared my own view that the report originated from malice and not from fact.

I had spent several days in the extra-wide office at the back of our floor, where the more mechanical parts of the banking operation were carried on. There in the huge expanse (grey carpet, this time) were row upon row of long desks whose tops were packed with telephones, adding machines and above all computers.

From there went out our own interest cheques to the depositors who had lent us money for us to lend to things like ‘Home-made Heaven cakes’ and ‘Water Purification’ plants in Norfolk. Into there came the interest paid to us by cakes and water and cartoonists and ten thousand such. Machines clattered, phone bells rang, people hurried about.

Many of the people working there were girls, and it had often puzzled me why there were so few women among the managers. Gordon said it was because few women wanted to commit their whole lives to making money and John (in the days when he was speaking to me) said with typical contempt that it was because they preferred to spend it. In any case, there were no female managers in Banking, and none at all on the Board.

Despite that, my best helper in the fraud search proved to be a curvy redhead called Patty who had taken the What’s Going On article as a personal affront, as had many of her colleagues.

‘No one could do that under our noses,’ she protested.

‘I’m afraid they could. You know they could. No one could blame any of you for not spotting it.’

‘Well... where do we start?’

‘With all the borrowers paying a fixed rate of five per cent. Or perhaps four per cent, or five point seven five, or six or seven. Who knows if five is right?’

She looked at me frustratedly with wide amber eyes. ‘But we haven’t got them sorted like that.’

Sorted, she meant, on the computer. Each loan transaction would have its own agreement, which in itself could originally range from one single slip of paper to a contract of fifty pages, and each agreement should say at what rate the loan interest was to be levied, such as two above the current accepted base. There were thousands of such agreements typed onto and stored on computer discs. One could retrieve any one transaction by its identifying number, or alphabetically, or by the dates of commencement, or full term, or by the date when the next interest payment was due, but if you asked the computer who was paying at what per cent you’d get a blank screen and the microchip version of a raspberry.

‘You can’t sort them out by rates,’ she said. ‘The rates go up and down like see-saws.’

‘But there must still be some loans being charged interest at a fixed rate.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘So when you punch in the new interest rate the computer adjusts the interest due on almost all the loans but doesn’t touch those with a fixed rate.’

‘I suppose that’s right.’

‘So somewhere in the computer there must be a code which tells it when not to adjust the rates.’

She smiled sweetly and told me to be patient, and half a day later produced a cheerful-looking computer-programmer to whom the problem was explained.

‘Yeah, there’s a code,’ he said. ‘I put it there myself. What you want, then, is a programme that will print out all the loans which have the code attached. That right?’

We nodded. He worked on paper for half an hour with a much-chewed pencil and then typed rapidly onto the computer, pressing buttons and being pleased with the results.

‘You leave this programme on here,’ he said, ‘then feed in the discs, and you’ll get the results on that line-printer over there. And I’ve written it all out for you tidily in pencil, in case someone switches off your machine. Then just type it all in again, and you’re back in business.’

We thanked him and he went away whistling, the aristocrat among ants.

The line-printer clattered away on and off for hours as we fed through the whole library of discs, and it finally produced a list of about a hundred of the ten-digit numbers used to identify an account.

‘Now,’ Patty said undaunted, ‘do you want a complete print-out of all the original agreements for those loans?’

‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

‘Hang around.’

It took two days even with her help to check through all the resulting paper and by the end I couldn’t spot any companies there that had no known physical existence, though short of actually tramping to all the addresses and making an on-the-spot enquiry, one couldn’t be sure.

Henry, however, was against the expenditure of time. ‘We’ll just be more vigilant,’ he said. ‘Design some more safeguards, more tracking devices. Could you do that, Tim?’

‘I could, with that programmer’s help.’

‘Right. Get on with it. Let us know.’

I wondered aloud to Patty whether someone in her own department, not one of the managers, could set up such a fraud, but once she’d got over her instinctive indignation she shook her head.

‘Who would bother? It would be much simpler — in fact it’s almost dead easy — to feed in a mythical firm who has lent us money, and to whom we are paying interest. Then the computer goes on sending out interest cheques for ever, and all the crook has to do is cash them.’

Henry, however, said we had already taken advice on that one, and the ‘easy’ route had been plugged by systematic checks by the auditors.

The paper-induced rumpus again gradually died down and became undiscussed if not forgotten. Life in our plot went on much as before with Rupert slowly recovering, Alec making jokes and Gordon stuffing his left hand anywhere out of sight. John continued to suffer from his obsession, not speaking to me, not looking at me if he could help it, and apparently telling clients outright that my promotion was a sham.

‘Cosmetic of course,’ Alec reported him of saying on the telephone. ‘Makes the notepaper heading look impressive. Means nothing in real terms, you know. Get through to me, I’ll see you right.’

‘He said all that?’ I asked.

‘Word for word.’ Alec grinned. ‘Go and bop him on the nose.’

I shook my head however and wondered if I should get myself transferred along to the St Paul’s-facing office. I didn’t want to go, but it looked as if John wouldn’t recover his balance unless I did. If I tried to get John himself transferred, would it make things that much worse?

I was gradually aware that Gordon, and behind him Henry, were not going to help, their thought being that I was a big boy now and should be able to resolve it myself. It was a freedom which brought responsibility, as all freedoms do, and I had to consider that for the bank’s sake John needed to be a sensible member of the team.

I thought he should see a psychiatrist. I got Alec to say it to him lightly as a joke, out of my hearing (‘what you need, old pal, is a friendly shrink’), but to John his own anger appeared rational, not a matter for treatment.

I tried saying to him straight, ‘Look, John, I know how you feel. I know you think my promotion isn’t fair. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but either way I can’t help it. You’ll be a lot better off if you just face things and forget it. You’re good at your job, we all know it, but you’re doing yourself no favours with all this bellyaching. So shut up, accept that life’s bloody, and let’s lend some money.’

It was a homily that fell on a closed mind, and in the end it was some redecorating which came to the rescue. For a week while painters re-whitened our walls the five of us in the fountain-facing office squeezed into the other one, desks jammed together in every corner,’ phone calls made with palms pressed to ears against the noise and even normally placid tempers itching to snap. Overcrowd the human race, I thought, and you always got a fight. In distance lay peace.

Anyway, I used the time to do some surreptitious persuasion and shuffling, so that when we returned to our own patch both John and Rupert stayed behind. The two oldest men from the St Paul’s office came with Gordon, Alec and myself, and Gordon’s almost-equal obligingly told John that it was great to be working again with a younger team of bright energetic brains.

November

Val Fisher said at lunch one day, ‘I’ve received a fairly odd request.’ (It was a Friday: grilled fish.)

‘Something new?’ Henry asked.

‘Yes. Chap wants to borrow five million pounds to buy a racehorse.’

Everyone at the table laughed except Val himself.

‘I thought I’d toss it at you,’ he said. ‘Kick it around some. See what you think.’

‘What horse?’ Henry said.

‘Something called Sandcastle.’

Henry, Gordon and I all looked at Val with sharpened attention; almost perhaps with eagerness.

‘Mean something to you three, does it?’ he said, turning his head from one to the other of us.

Henry nodded. ‘That day we all went to Ascot. Sandcastle ran there, and won. A stunning performance. Beautiful.’

Gordon said reminiscently, ‘The man whose box we were in saved his whole business on that race. Do you remember Dissdale, Tim?’

‘Certainly do.’

‘I saw him a few weeks ago. On top of the world. God knows how much he won.’

‘Or how much he staked,’ I said.

‘Yes, well,’ Val said. ‘Sandcastle. He won the 2,000 Guineas, as I understand, and the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot. Also the “Diamond” Stakes in July, and the Champion Stakes at Newmarket last month. This is, I believe, a record second only to winning the Derby or the Arc de Triomphe. He finished fourth, incidentally, in the Derby. He could race next year as a four-year-old, but if he flopped his value would be less than it is at the moment. Our prospective client wants to buy him now and put him to stud.’

The rest of the directors got on with their fillets of sole while listening interestedly with eyes and ears. A stallion made a change, I suppose, from chemicals, electronics and oil.

‘Who is our client?’ Gordon asked. Gordon liked fish. He could eat it right handed with his fork, in no danger of shaking it off between plate and mouth.

‘A man called Oliver Knowles,’ Val said. ‘He owns a stud farm. He got passed along to me by the horse’s trainer, whom I know slightly because of our wives being distantly related. Oliver Knowles wants to buy, the present owner is willing to sell. All they need is the cash.’ He smiled. ‘Same old story.’

‘What’s your view?’ Henry said.

Val shrugged his well-tailored shoulders. ‘Too soon to have one of any consequence. But I thought, if it interested you at all, we could ask Tim to do a preliminary look-see. He has a background, after all, a lengthy acquaintance, shall we say, with racing.’

There was a murmur of dry amusement round the table.

‘What do you think?’ Henry asked me.

‘I’ll certainly do it if you like.’

Someone down the far end complained that it would be a waste of time and that merchant banks of our stature should not be associated with the Turf.

‘Our own dear Queen,’ someone said ironically, ‘is associated with the Turf. And knows the Stud Book backwards, so they say.’

Henry smiled. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least look into it.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Go ahead, Tim. Let us know.’

I spent the next few working days alternately chewing pencils with the computer programmer and joining us to a syndicate with three other banks to lend twelve point four million pounds short term at high interest to an international construction company with a gap in its cash-flow. In between those I telephoned around for information and opinions about Oliver Knowles, in the normal investigative preliminaries to any loan for anything, not only for a hair-raising price for a stallion.

Establishing a covenant, it was called. Only if the covenant was sound would any loan be further considered.

Oliver Knowles, I was told, was a sane, sober man of forty-one with a stud farm in Hertfordshire. There were three stallions standing there with ample provision for visiting mares, and he owned the one hundred and fifty acres outright, having inherited them on his father’s death.

When talking to local bank managers one listened attentively for what they left out, but Oliver Knowles’ bank manager left out not much. Without in the least discussing his client’s affairs in detail he said that occasional fair-sized loans had so far been paid off as scheduled and that Mr Knowles’ business sense could be commended. A rave notice from such a source.

‘Oliver Knowles?’ a racing acquaintance from the long past said. ‘Don’t know him myself. I’ll ask around,’ and an hour later called back with the news. ‘He seems to be a good guy but his wife’s just buggered off with a Canadian. He might be a secret wife-beater, who can tell? Otherwise the gen is that he’s as honest as any horse-breeder, which you can take as you find it, and how’s your mother?’

‘She’s fine, thanks. She remarried last year. Lives in Jersey.’

‘Good. Lovely lady. Always buying us icecreams. I adored her.’

I put the receiver down with a smile and tried a credit rating agency. No black marks, they said: the Knowles credit was good.

I told Gordon across the room that I seemed to be getting nothing but green lights, and at lunch that day repeated the news to Henry. He looked around the table, collecting a few nods, a few frowns and a great deal of indecision.

‘We couldn’t carry it all ourselves, of course,’ Val said. ‘And it isn’t exactly something we could go to our regular sources with. They’d think us crackers.’

Henry nodded. ‘We’d have to canvas friends for private money. I know a few people here or there who might come in. Two million, I think, is all we should consider ourselves. Two and a half at the outside.’

‘I don’t approve,’ a dissenting director said. ‘It’s madness. Suppose the damn thing broke its leg?’

‘Insurance,’ Henry said mildly.

Into a small silence I said, ‘If you felt like going into it further I could get some expert views on Sandcastle’s breeding, and then arrange blood and fertility tests. And I know it’s not usual with loans, but I do think someone like Val should go and personally meet Oliver Knowles and look at his place. It’s too much of a risk to lend such a sum for a horse without going into it extremely carefully.’

‘Just listen to who’s talking,’ said the dissenter, but without ill-will.

‘Mm,’ Henry said, considering. ‘What do you think, Val?’

Val Fisher smoothed a hand over his always smooth face. ‘Tim should go,’ he said. ‘He’s done the groundwork, and all I know about horses is that they eat grass.’

The dissenting director almost rose to his feet with the urgency of his feelings.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘all this is ridiculous. How can we possibly finance a horse?’

‘Well, now,’ Henry answered. ‘The breeding of thoroughbreds is big business, tens of thousands of people round the world make their living from it. Look upon it as an industry like any other. We gamble here on shipbuilders, motors, textiles, you name it, and all of those can go bust. And none of them,’ he finished with a near-grin, ‘can pro-create in their own image.’

The dissenter heavily shook his head. ‘Madness. Utter madness.’

‘Go and see Oliver Knowles, Tim,’ Henry said.

Actually I thought it prudent to bone up on the finances of breeding in general before listening to Oliver Knowles himself, on the basis that I would then have a better idea of whether what he was proposing was sensible or not.

I didn’t myself know anyone who knew much on the subject, but one of the beauties of merchant banking was the ramification of people who knew people who knew people who could find someone with the information that was wanted. I sent out She question-mark smoke signal and from distant out-of-sight mountain tops the answer puff-puffed back.

Ursula Young, I was told, would put me right. ‘She’s a bloodstock agent. Very sharp, very talkative, knows her stuff. She used to work on a stud farm, so you’ve got it every whichway. She says she’ll tell you anything you want, only if you want to see her in person this week it will have to be at Doncaster races on Saturday, she’s too busy to spend the time else.’

I went north to Doncaster by train and met the lady at the racecourse, where the last Flat meeting of the year was being held. She was waiting as arranged by the entrance to the Members’ Club and wearing an identifying red velvet beret, and she swept me off to a secluded table in a bar where we wouldn’t be interrupted.

She was fifty, tough, good-looking, dogmatic and inclined to treat me as a child. She also gave me a patient and invaluable lecture on the economics of owning a stallion.

‘Stop me,’ she said to begin with, ‘if I say something you don’t understand.’

I nodded.

‘All right. Say you own a horse that’s won the Derby and you want to capitalize on your goldmine. You judge what you think you can get for the horse, then you divide that by forty and try to sell each of the forty shares at that price. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. It depends on the horse. With Troy, now, they were queuing up. But if your winner isn’t frightfully well bred or if it made little show except in the Derby you’ll get a cool response and have to bring the price down. OK so far?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘Why only forty shares?’

She looked at me in amazement. ‘You don’t know a thing, do you?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Well, a stallion covers forty mares in a season, and the season, incidentally, lasts roughly from February to June. The mares come to him, of course. He doesn’t travel, he stays put at home. Forty is just about average; physically I mean. Some can do more, but others get exhausted. So forty is the accepted number. Now, say you have a mare and you’ve worked out that if you mate her with a certain stallion you might get a top-class foal, you try to get one of those forty places. The places are called nominations. You apply for a nomination, either directly to the stud where the stallion is standing, or through an agent like me, or even by advertising in a breeders’ newspaper. Follow?’

‘Gasping,’ I nodded.

She smiled briefly. ‘People who invest in stallion shares sometimes have broodmares of their own they want to breed from.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps I should have explained more clearly that everyone who owns a share automatically has a nomination to the stallion every year.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘Yes. So say you’ve got your share and consequently your nomination but you haven’t a mare to send to the stallion, then you sell your nomination to someone who has a mare, in the ways I already described.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘After the first three years the nominations may vary in price and in fact are often auctioned, but of course for the first three years the price is fixed.’

‘Why of course?’

She sighed and took a deep breath. ‘For three years no one knows whether the progeny on the whole are going to be winners or not. The gestation period is eleven months, and the first crop of foals don’t race until they’re two. If you work it out, that means that the stallion has stood for three seasons, and therefore covered a hundred and twenty mares, before the crunch.’

‘Right.’

‘So to fix the stallion fee for the first three years you divide the price of the stallion by one hundred and twenty, and that’s it. That’s the fee charged for the stallion to cover a mare. That’s the sum you receive if you sell your nomination.’

I blinked.

‘That means,’ I said, ‘that if you sell your nomination for three years you have recovered the total amount of your original investment?’

That’s right.’

‘And after that... every time, every year you sell your nomination, it’s clear profit?’

‘Yes. But taxed, of course.’

‘And how long does that go on?’

She shrugged. ‘Ten to fifteen years. Depends on the stallion’s potency.’

‘Butthat’s...’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One of the best investments on earth.’

The bar had filled up behind us with people crowding in, talking loudly, and breathing on their fingers against the chill of the raw day outside. Ursula Young accepted a warmer in the shape of whisky and ginger wine, while I had coffee.

‘Don’t you drink?’ she asked with mild disapproval.

‘Not often in the daytime.’

She nodded vaguely, her eyes scanning the company, her mind already on her normal job. ‘Any more questions?’ she asked.

‘I’m bound to think of some the minute we part.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll be here until the end of racing. If you want me, you’ll see me near the weighing room after each race.’

We were on the point of standing up to leave when a man whose head one could never forget came into the bar.

‘Calder Jackson!’ I exclaimed.

Ursula casually looked. ‘So it is.’

‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

‘Everyone does.’ There was almost a conscious neutrality in her voice as if she didn’t want to be caught with her thoughts showing. The same response, I reflected, that he had drawn from Henry and Gordon and me.

‘You don’t like him?’ I suggested.

‘I feel nothing either way.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s part of the scene. From what people say, he’s achieved some remarkable cures.’ She glanced at me briefly. ‘I suppose you’ve seen him on television, extolling the value of herbs?’

‘I met him,’ I said, ‘at Ascot, back in June.’

‘One tends to.’ She got to her feet, and I with her, thanking her sincerely for her help.

‘Think nothing of it,’ she said. ‘Any time.’ She paused. ‘I suppose it’s no use asking what stallion prompted this chat?’

‘Sorry, no. It’s on behalf of a client.’

She smiled slightly. ‘I’m here if he needs an agent.’

We made our way towards the door, a path, I saw, which would take us close to Calder. I wondered fleetingly whether he would know me, remember me after several months. I was after all not as memorable as himself, just a standard issue six foot with eyes, nose and mouth in roughly the right places, dark hair on top.

‘Hello Ursula,’ he said, his voice carrying easily through the general din. ‘Bitter cold day.’

‘Calder.’ She nodded acknowledgement.

His gaze slid to my face, dismissed it, focused again on my companion. Then he did a classic double-take, his eyes widening with recognition.

‘Tim,’ he said incredulously. ‘Tim...’ he flicked his fingers to bring the difficult name to mind, ‘... Tim Ekaterin!’

I nodded.

He said to Ursula, ‘Tim, here, saved my life.’

She was surprised until he explained, and then still surprised I hadn’t told her. ‘I read about it, of course,’ she said. ‘And congratulated you, Calder, on your escape.’

‘Did you ever hear any more,’ I asked him. ‘From the police, or anyone?’

He shook his curly head. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘The boy didn’t try again?’

‘No.’

‘Did you really have no idea where he came from?’ I said. ‘I know you told the police you didn’t know, but... well... you just might have done.’

He shook his head very positively however and said, ‘If I could help to catch the little bastard I’d do it at once. But I don’t know who he was. I hardly saw him properly, just enough to know I didn’t know him from Satan.’

‘How’s the healing?’ I said. ‘The tingling touch.’

There was a brief flash in his eyes as if he had found the question flippant and in bad taste, but perhaps mindful that he owed me his present existence he answered civilly. ‘Rewarding,’ he said. ‘Heartwarming.’

Standard responses, I thought. As before.

‘Is your yard full, Calder?’ Ursula asked.

‘Always a vacancy if needed,’ he replied hopefully. ‘Have you a horse to send me?’

‘One of my clients has a two-year-old which looks ill and half dead all the time, to the despair of the trainer, who can’t get it fit. She — my client — was mentioning you.’

‘I’ve had great success with that sort of general debility.’

Ursula wrinkled her forehead in indecision. ‘She feels Ian Pargetter would think her disloyal if she sent you her colt. He’s been treating him for weeks, I think, without success.’

Calder smiled reassuringly. ‘Ian Pargetter and I are on good terms, I promise you. He’s even persuaded owners himself sometimes to send me their horses. Very good of him. We talk each case over, you know, and act in agreement. After all, we both have the recovery of the patient as our prime objective.’ Again the swift impression of a statement often needed.

‘Is Ian Pargetter a vet?’ I asked incuriously.

They both looked at me.

‘Er... yes,’ Calder said.

‘One of a group practice in Newmarket,’ Ursula added. ‘Very forward-looking. Tries new things. Dozens of trainers swear by him.’

‘Just ask him, Ursula,’ Calder said, ‘Ian will tell you he doesn’t mind owners sending me their horses. Even if he’s a bit open-minded about the laying on of hands, at least he trusts me not to make the patient worse.’ It was said as a self-deprecating joke, and we all smiled. Ursula Young and I in a moment or two walked on and out of the bar, and behind us we could hear Calder politely answering another of the everlasting questions.

‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘one of my favourite remedies for a prolonged cough in horses is liquorice root boiled in water with some figs. You strain the mixture and stir it into the horse’s normal feed...’

The door closed behind us and shut him off.

‘You’d think he’d get tired of explaining his methods,’ I said. ‘I wonder he never snaps.’

The lady said judiciously, ‘Calder depends on television fame, good public relations and medical success, roughly in that order. He owns a yard with about thirty boxes on the outskirts of Newmarket — it used to be a regular training stables before he bought it — and the yard’s almost always full. Short-term and long-term crocks, all sent to him either from true belief or as a last resort. I don’t pretend to know anything about herbalism, and as for supernatural healing powers...’ she shook her head. ‘But there’s no doubt that whatever his methods, horses do usually seem to leave his yard in a lot better health than when they went in.’

‘Someone at Ascot said he’d brought dying horses back to life.’

‘Hmph.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

She gave me a straight look, a canny businesswoman with a lifetime’s devotion to thoroughbreds.

‘Dying,’ she said, ‘Is a relative term when it doesn’t end in death.’

I made a nod into a slight bow of appreciation.

‘But to be fair,’ she said, ‘I know for certain that he totally and permanently cured a ten-year-old broodmare of colitis X, which has a habit of being fatal.’

‘They’re not all horses in training, then, that he treats?’

‘Oh no, he’ll take anybody’s pet from a pony to an event horse. Show jumpers, the lot. But the horse has to be worth it, to the owner, I mean. I don’t think Calder’s hospital is terribly cheap.’

‘Exorbitant?’

‘Not that I’ve heard. Fair, I suppose, if you consider the results.’

I seemed to have heard almost more about Calder Jackson than I had about stallion shares, but I did after all have a sort of vested interest. One tended to want a life one had saved to be of positive use in the world. Illogical, I dare say, but there it was. I was pleased that it was true that Calder cured horses, albeit in his own mysterious unorthodox ways: and if I wished that I could warm to him more as a person, that was unrealistic and sentimental.

Ursula Young went off about her business, and although I caught sight of both her and Calder during the afternoon, I didn’t see them again to speak to. I went back to London on the train, spent two hours of Sunday morning on the telephone, and early Sunday afternoon drove off to Hertfordshire in search of Oliver Knowles.

He lived in a square hundred-year-old stark red brick house which to my taste would have been friendlier if softened by trailing creeper. Blurred outlines, however, were not in Oliver Knowles’ soul: a crisp bare tidiness was apparent in every corner of his spread.

His land was divided into a good number of paddocks of various sizes, each bordered by an immaculate fence of white rails; and the upkeep of those, I judged, as I pulled up on the weedless gravel before the front door, must alone cost a fortune. There was a scattering of mares and foals in the distance in the paddocks, mostly heads down to the grass, sniffing out the last tender shoots of the dying year. The day itself was cold with a muted sun dipping already towards distant hills, the sky quiet with the greyness of coming winter, the damp air smelling of mustiness, wood smoke and dead leaves.

There were no dead leaves as such to be seen. No flower beds, no ornamental hedges, no nearby trees. A barren mind, I thought, behind a business whose aim was fertility and the creation of life.

Oliver Knowles himself opened his front door to my knock, proving to be a pleasant lean man with an efficient, cultured manner of authority and politeness. Accustomed to command, I diagnosed. Feels easy with it; second nature. Positive, straightforward, self-controlled. Charming also, in an understated way.

‘Mr Ekaterin?’ he shook hands, smiling. ‘I must confess I expected someone... older.’

There were several answers to that, such as ‘time will take care of it’ and ‘I’ll be older tomorrow’, but nothing seemed appropriate. Instead I said ‘I report back’ to reassure him, which it did, and he invited me into his house.

Predictably the interior was also painfully tidy, such papers and magazines as were to be seen being squared up with the surface they rested on. The furniture was antique, well polished, brass handles shining, and the carpets venerably from Persia. He led me into a sitting room which was also office, the walls thickly covered with framed photographs of horses, mares and foals, and the window giving on to a view of, across a further expanse of gravel, an archway leading into an extensive stable yard.

‘Boxes for mares,’ he said, following my eyes. ‘Beyond them, the foaling boxes. Beyond those, the breeding pen, with the stallion boxes on the far side of that again. My stud groom’s bungalow and the lads’ hostel, those roofs you can see in the hollow, they’re just beyond the stallions.’ He paused. ‘Would you care perhaps to look round?’

‘Very much,’ I said.

‘Come along, then.’ He led the way to a door at the back of the house, collecting an overcoat and a black retriever from a mud room on the way. ‘Go on then, Squibs, old fellow,’ he said, fondly watching his dog squeeze ecstatically through the opening outside door. ‘Breath of fresh air won’t hurt you.’

We walked across to the stable arch with Squibs circling and zig-zagging nose-down to the gravel.

‘It’s our quietest time of year, of course,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘We have our own mares here, of course, and quite a few at livery.’ He looked at my face to see if I understood and decided to explain anyway. ‘They belong to people who own broodmares but have nowhere of their own to keep them. They pay us to board them.’

I nodded.

‘Then we have the foals born to the mares this past spring and of course the three stallions. Total of seventy-eight at the moment.’

‘And next spring,’ I said, ‘the mares coming to your stallions will arrive?’

‘That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘They come here a month or five weeks before they’re due to give birth to the foals they are already carrying, so as to be near the stallion within the month following. They have to foal here, because the foals would be too delicate straight after birth to travel.’

‘And... how long do they stay here?’

‘About three months altogether, by which time we hope the mare is safely in foal again.’

‘There isn’t much pause then,’ I said. ‘Between... er... pregnancies?’

He glanced at me with civil amusement. ‘Mares come into use nine days after foaling, but normally we would think this a bit too soon for breeding. The oestrus — heat you would call it — lasts six days, then there’s an interval of fifteen days, then the mare comes into use again for six days, and this time we breed her. Mind you,’ he added, ‘Nature being what it is, this cycle doesn’t work to the minute. In some mares the oestrus will last only two days, in some as much as eleven. We try to have the mare covered two or three times while she’s in heat, for the best chance of getting her in foal. A great deal depends on the stud groom’s judgement, and I’ve a great chap just now, he has a great feel for mares, a sixth sense, you might say.’

He led me briskly across the first big oblong yard where long dark equine heads peered inquisitively from over half-open stable doors, and through a passage on the far side which led to a second yard of almost the same size but whose doors were fully shut.

‘None of these boxes is occupied at the moment,’ he said, waving a hand around. ‘We have to have the capacity, though, for when the mares come.’

Beyond the second yard lay a third, a good deal smaller and again with closed doors.

‘Foaling boxes,’ Oliver Knowles explained. ‘All empty now, of course.’

The black dog trotted ahead of us, knowing the way. Beyond the foaling boxes lay a wide path between two small paddocks of about half an acre each, and at the end of the path, to the left, rose a fair sized barn with a row of windows just below its roof.

‘Breeding shed,’ Oliver Knowles said economically, producing a heavy key ring from his trouser pocket and unlocking a door set into a large roll-aside entrance. He gestured to me to go in, and I found myself in a bare concrete-floored expanse surrounded by white walls topped with the high windows, through which the dying sun wanly shone.

‘During the season of course the floor in here is covered with peat,’ he said.

I nodded vaguely and thought of life being generated purposefully in that quiet place, and we returned prosaically to the outer world with Oliver Knowles locking the door again behind us.

Along another short path between two more small paddocks we came to another small stable yard, this time of only six boxes, with feed room, tack room, hay and peat storage alongside.

‘Stallions,’ Oliver Knowles said.

Three heads almost immediately appeared over the half-doors, three sets of dark liquid eyes turning inquisitively our way.

‘Rotaboy,’ my host said, walking to the first head and producing a carrot unexpectedly. The black mobile lips whiffled over the outstretched palm and sucked the goodie in: strong teeth crunched a few times and Rotaboy nudged Oliver Knowles for a second helping. Oliver Knowles produced another carrot, held it out as before, and briefly patted the horse’s neck.

‘He’ll be twenty next year,’ he said. ‘Getting old, eh, old fella?’

He walked along to the next box and repeated the carrot routine. ‘This one is Diarist, rising sixteen.’

By the third box he said, ‘This is Parakeet,’ and delivered the treats and the pat. ‘Parakeet turns twelve on January 1st.’

He stood a little away from the horse so that he could see all three heads at once and said, ‘Rotaboy has been an outstanding stallion and still is, but one can’t realistically expect more than another one or two seasons. Diarist is successful, with large numbers of winners among his progeny, but none of them absolutely top rank like those of Rotaboy. Parakeet hasn’t proved as successful as I’d hoped. He turns out to breed better stayers than sprinters, and the world is mad nowadays for very fast two-year-olds. Parakeet’s progeny tend to be better at three, four, five and six. Some of his first crops are now steeplechasing and jumping pretty well.’

‘Isn’t that good?’ I asked, frowning, since he spoke with no great joy.

‘I’ve had to reduce his fee,’ he said. ‘People won’t send their top flat-racing mares to a stallion who breeds jumpers.’

‘Oh.’

After a pause he said ‘You can see why I need new blood here. Rotaboy is old, Diarist is middle rank, Parakeet is unfashionable. I will soon have to replace Rotaboy, and I must be sure I replace him with something of at least equal quality. The prestige of a stud farm, quite apart from its income, depends on the drawing-power of its stallions.’

‘Yes,’ I said, I see.’

Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet lost interest in the conversation and hope in the matter of carrots, and one by one withdrew into the boxes. The black retriever trotted around smelling unimaginable scents and Oliver Knowles began to walk me back towards the house.

‘On the bigger stud farms,’ he said, ‘you’ll find stallions which are owned by syndicates.’

‘Forty shares?’ I suggested.

He gave me a brief smile. ‘That’s right. Stallions are owned by any number of people between one and forty. When I first acquired Rotaboy it was in partnership with five others. I bought two of them out — they needed the money — so now I own half. This means I have twenty nominations each year, and I have ‘no trouble in selling all of them, which is most satisfactory.’ He looked at me enquiringly to make sure I understood, which, thanks to Ursula Young, I did.

‘I own Diarist outright. He was as expensive in the first place as Rotaboy, and as he’s middle rank, so is the fee I can get for him. I don’t always succeed in filling his forty places, and when that occurs I breed him to my own mares, and sell the resulting foals as yearlings.’

Fascinated, I nodded again.

‘With Parakeet it’s much the same. For the last three years I haven’t been able to charge the fee I did to begin with, and if I fill his last places these days it’s with mares from people who prefer steeplechasing, and this is increasingly destructive of his flat-racing image.’

We retraced our steps past the breeding shed and across the foaling yard.

‘This place is expensive to run,’ he said objectively. ‘It makes a profit and I live comfortably, but I’m not getting any further. I have the capacity here for another stallion — enough accommodation, that is to say, for the extra forty mares. I have a good business sense and excellent health, and I feel underextended. If I am ever to achieve more I must have more capital... and capital in the shape of a world-class stallion.’

‘Which brings us,’ I said, ‘to Sandcastle.’

He nodded. ‘If I acquired a horse like Sandcastle this stud would immediately be more widely known and more highly regarded.’

Understatement, I thought. The effect would be galvanic. ‘A sort of overnight stardom?’ I said.

‘Well, yes,’ he agreed with a satisfied smile. ‘I’d say you might be right.’

The big yard nearest the house had come moderately to life, with two or three lads moving about carrying feed scoops, hay nets, buckets of water and sacks of muck. Squibs with madly wagging tail went in a straight line towards a stocky man who bent to fondle his black ears.

‘That’s Nigel, my stud groom,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Come and meet him.’ And as we walked across he added, ‘If I can expand this place I’ll up-rate him to stud manager; give him more standing with the customers.’

We reached Nigel, who was of about my own age with crinkly light-brown hair and noticeably bushy eyebrows. Oliver Knowles introduced me merely as ‘a friend’ and Nigel treated me with casual courtesy but not as the possible source of future fortune. He had a Gloucestershire accent but not pronounced, and I would have placed him as a farmer’s son, if I’d had to.

‘Any problems?’ Oliver Knowles asked him, and Nigel shook his head.

‘Nothing except that Floating mare with the discharge.’

His manner to his employer was confident and without anxiety but at the same time diffident, and I had a strong impression that it was Nigel’s personality which suited Oliver Knowles as much as any skill he might have with mares. Oliver Knowles was not a man, I judged, to surround himself with awkward, unpredictable characters: the behaviour of everyone around him had to be as tidy as his place.

I wondered idly about the wife who had ‘just buggered off with a Canadian’, and at that moment a horse trotted into the yard with a young woman aboard. A girl, I amended, as she kicked her feet from the stirrups and slid to the ground. A noticeably curved young girl in jeans and heavy sweater with her dark hair tied in a pony tail. She led her horse into one of the boxes and presently emerged carrying the saddle and bridle, which she dumped on the ground outside the box before closing the bottom half of the door and crossing the yard to join us.

‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said.

‘Ginnie,’ added the girl, holding out a polite brown hand. ‘Are you the reason we didn’t go out to lunch?’

Her father gave an instinctive repressing movement and-Nigel looked only fairly interested.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘Oh, I would,’ she said. ‘Pa really doesn’t like parties. He uses any old excuse to get out of them, don’t you Pa?’

He gave her an indulgent smile while looking as if his thoughts were elsewhere.

‘I didn’t mind missing it,’ Ginnie said to me, anxious not to embarrass. ‘Twelve miles away and people all Pa’s age... but they do have frightfully good canapés, and also a lemon tree growing in their greenhouse. Did you know that a lemon tree has everything all at once — buds, flowers, little green knobbly fruit and big fat lemons, all going on all the time?’

‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said unnecessarily, ‘talks a lot.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know about lemon trees.’

She gave me an impish smile and I wondered if she was even younger than I’d first thought: and as if by telepathy she said, ‘I’m fifteen.’

‘Everyone has to go through it,’ I said.

Her eyes widened. ‘Did you hate it?’

I nodded. ‘Spots, insecurity, a new body you’re not yet comfortable in, self-consciousness... terrible.’

Oliver Knowles looked surprised. ‘Ginnie isn’t self-conscious, are you, Ginnie?’

She looked from him to me and back again and didn’t answer. Oliver Knowles dismissed the subject as of no importance anyway and said he ought to walk along and see the mare with the discharge. Would I care to go with him?

I agreed without reservation and we all set off along one of the paths between the white-railed paddocks, Oliver Knowles and myself in front, Nigel and Ginnie following, Squibs sniffing at every fencing post and marking his territory. In between Oliver Knowles explaining that some mares preferred living out of doors permanently, others would go inside if it snowed, others went in at nights, others lived mostly in the boxes, I could hear Ginnie telling Nigel that school this term was a dreadful drag owing to the new headmistress being a health fiend and making them all do jogging.

‘How do you know what mares prefer?’ I asked.

Oliver Knowles looked for the first time nonplussed.‘Er...’ he said. ‘I suppose... by the way they stand. If they feel cold and miserable they put their tails to the wind and look hunched. Some horses never do that, even in a blizzard. If they’re obviously unhappy we bring them in. Otherwise they stay out. Same with the foals.’ He paused. ‘A lot of mares are miserable if you keep them inside. It’s just... how they are.’

He seemed dissatisfied with the loose ends of his answer, but I found them reassuring. The one thing he had seemed to me to lack had been any emotional contact with the creatures he bred: even the carrots for the stallions had been slightly mechanical.

The mare with the discharge proved to be in one of the paddocks at the boundary of the farm, and while Oliver Knowles and Nigel peered at her rump end and made obscure remarks like ‘With any luck she won’t slip,’ and ‘It’s clear enough, nothing yellow or bloody,’ I spent my time looking past the last set of white rails to the hedge and fields beyond.

The contrast from the Knowles land was dramatic. Instead of extreme tidiness, a haphazard disorder. Instead of short green grass in well-tended rectangles, long unkempt brownish stalks straggling through an army of drying thistles. Instead of rectangular brick-built stable yards, a ramshackle collection of wooden boxes, light grey from old creosote and with tarpaulins tied over patches of roof.

Ginnie followed my gaze. ‘That’s the Watcherleys’ place,’ she said. ‘I used to go over there a lot but they’re so grimy and gloomy these days, not a laugh in sight. And all the patients have gone, practically, and they don’t even have the chimpanzees any more, they say they can’t afford them.’

‘What patients?’ I said.

‘Horse patients. It’s the Watcherleys’ hospital for sick horses. Haven’t you ever heard of it?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s pretty well known,’ Ginnie said. ‘Or at least it was until that razzamatazz man Calder Jackson stole the show. Mind you, the Watcherleys were no great shakes, I suppose, with Bob off to the boozer at all hours and Maggie sweating her guts out carrying muck sacks, but at least they used to be fun. The place was cosy, you know, even if bits of the boxes were falling off their hinges and weeds were growing everywhere, and all the horses went home blooming, or most of them, even if Maggie had her knees through her jeans and wore the same jersey for weeks and weeks on end. But Calder Jackson, you see, is the in thing, with all those chat shows on television and the publicity and such, and the Watcherleys have sort of got elbowed out.’

Her father, listening to the last of these remarks, added his own view. ‘They’re disorganized,’ he said. ‘No business sense. People liked their gypsy style for a while, but, as Ginnie says, they’ve no answer to Calder Jackson.’

‘How old are they?’ I asked, frowning.

Oliver Knowles shrugged. ‘Thirties. Going on forty. Hard to say.’

‘I suppose they don’t have a son of about sixteen, thin and intense, who hates Calder Jackson obsessively for ruining his parents’ business?’

‘What an extraordinary question,’ said Oliver Knowles, and Ginnie shook her head. ‘They’ve never had any children,’ she said. ‘Maggie can’t. She told me. They just lavish all that love on animals. It’s really grotty, what’s happening to them.’

It would have been so neat, I thought, if Calder Jackson’s would-be assassin had been a Watcherley son. Too neat, perhaps. But perhaps also there were others like the Watcherleys whose star had descended as Calder Jackson’s rose. I said, ‘Do you know of any other places, apart from this one and Calder Jackson’s, where people send their sick horses?’

‘I expect there are some,’ Ginnie said. ‘Bound to be.’

‘Sure to be,’ said Oliver Knowles, nodding. ‘But of course we don’t send away any horse which falls ill here. I have an excellent vet, great with mares, comes day or night in emergencies.’

We made the return journey, Oliver Knowles pointing out to me various mares and foals of interest and distributing carrots to any head within armshot. Foals at foot, foals in utero; the fertility cycle swelling again to fruition through the quiet winter, life growing steadily in the dark.

Ginnie went off to see to the horse she’d been riding and Nigel to finish his inspections in the main yard, leaving Oliver Knowles, the dog and myself to go into the house. Squibs, poor fellow, got no further than his basket in the mud room, but Knowles and I returned to the sitting room-office from which we’d started.

Thanks to my telephone calls of the morning I knew what the acquisition and management of Sandcastle would mean in the matter of taxation, and I’d also gone armed with sets of figures to cover the interest payable should the loan be approved. I found that I needed my knowledge not to instruct but to converse: Oliver Knowles was there before me.

‘I’ve done this often, of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to arrange finance for buildings, for fencing, for buying the three stallions you saw, and for another two before them. I’m used to repaying fairly substantial bank loans. This new venture is of course huge by comparison, but if I didn’t feel it was within my scope I assure you I shouldn’t be contemplating it.’ He gave me a brief charming smile. ‘I’m not a nut case, you know. I really do know my business.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One can see.’

I told him that the maximum length of an Ekaterin loan (if one was forthcoming at all) would be five years, to which he merely nodded.

‘That basically means,’ I insisted, ‘That you’d have to receive getting on for eight million in that five years, even allowing for paying off some of the loan every year with consequently diminishing interest. It’s a great deal of money.... Are you sure you understand how much is involved?’

‘Of course I understand,’ he said. ‘Even allowing for interest payments and the ridiculously high insurance premiums on a horse like Sandcastle, I’d be able to repay the loan in five years. That’s the period I’ve used in planning.’

He spread out his sheets of neatly written calculations on his desk, pointing to each figure as he explained to me how he’d reached it. ‘A stallion fee of forty thousand pounds will cover it. His racing record justifies that figure, and I’ve been most carefully into the breeding of Sandcastle himself, as you can imagine. There is absolutely nothing in the family to alarm. No trace of hereditary illness or undesirable tendencies. He comes from a healthy blue-blooded line of winners, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t breed true.’ He gave me a photocopied genealogical table. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to advance a loan without getting an expert opinion on this. Please do take it with you.’

He gave me also some copies of his figures, and I packed them all into the brief case I’d taken with me.

‘Why don’t you consider halving your risk to twenty-one shares?’ I asked. ‘Sell nineteen. You’d still outvote the other owners — there’d be no chance of them whisking Sandcastle off somewhere else — and you’d be less stretched.’

With a smile he shook his head. ‘If I found for any reason that the repayments were causing me acute difficulty, I’d sell some shares as necessary. But I hope in five years time to own Sandcastle outright, and also as I told you to have attracted other stallions of that calibre, and to be numbered among the world’s top-ranking stud farms.’

His pleasant manner took away any suggestion of megalomania, and I could see nothing of that nature in him.

Ginnie came into the office carrying two mugs with slightly anxious diffidence.

‘I made some tea. Do you want some, Dad?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said immediately, before he could answer, and she looked almost painfully relieved. Oliver Knowles turned what had seemed like an incipient shake of the head into a nod, and Ginnie, handing over the mugs, said that if I wanted sugar she would go and fetch some. ‘And a spoon, I guess.’

‘My wife’s away,’ Oliver Knowles said abruptly.

‘No sugar,’ I said. ‘This is great.’

‘You won’t forget, Dad, will you, about me going back to school?’

‘Nigel will take you.’

‘He’s got visitors.’

‘Oh... all right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In half an hour, then.’

Ginnie looked even more relieved, particularly as I could clearly sense the irritation he was suppressing. ‘The school run,’ he said as the door closed behind his daughter, ‘was one of the things my wife always did. Does...’ He shrugged. ‘She’s away indefinitely. You might as well know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Can’t be helped.’ He looked at the tea-mug in my hand. ‘I was going to offer you something stronger.’

‘This is fine.’

‘Ginnie comes home on four Sundays a term. She’s a boarder, of course.’ He paused. ‘She’s not yet used to her mother not being here. It’s bad for her, but there you are, life’s like that.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.

He gave me a glance in which I read both love for his daughter and a blindness to her needs. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘That you go anywhere near High Wycombe on your way home?’

‘Well,’ I said obligingly, ‘I could do.’

I consequently drove Ginnie back to her school, listening on the way to her views on the new headmistress’s compulsory jogging programme (‘all our bosoms flopping up and down, bloody uncomfortable and absolutely disgusting to look at’) and to her opinion of Nigel (‘Dad thinks the sun shines out of his you-know-what and I dare say he is pretty good with the mares, they all seem to flourish, but what the lads get up to behind his back is nobody’s business. They smoke in the feed sheds, I ask you! All that hay around... Nigel never notices. He’d make a rotten school prefect’) and to her outlook on life in general (‘I can’t wait to get out of school uniform and out of dormitories and being bossed around, and I’m no good at lessons; the whole thing’s a mess. Why has everything changed? I used to be happy, or at least I wasn’t unhappy, which I mostly seem to be nowadays, and no, it isn’t because of Mum going away, or not especially, as she was never a lovey-dovey sort of mother, always telling me to eat with my mouth shut and so on... and you must be bored silly hearing all this.’)

‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I’m not bored.’

‘I’m not even beautiful,’ she said despairingly. ‘I can suck in my cheeks until I faint but I’ll never look pale and bony and interesting.’

I glanced at the still rounded child-woman face, at the peach-bloom skin and the worried eyes.

‘Practically no one is beautiful at fifteen,’ I said. ‘It’s too soon.’

‘How do you mean — too soon?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘say at twelve you’re a child and flat and undeveloped and so on, and at maybe seventeen or eighteen you’re a full-grown adult, just think of the terrific changes your body goes through in that time. Appearance, desires, mental outlook, everything. So at fifteen, which isn’t much more than halfway, it’s still too soon to know exactly what the end product will be like. And if it’s of any comfort to you, you do now look as if you may be beautiful in a year or two, or at least not unbearably ugly.’

She sat in uncharacteristic silence for quite a distance, and then she said, ‘Why did you come today? I mean, who are you? If it’s all right to ask?’

‘It’s all right. I’m a sort of financial adviser. I work in a bank.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded slightly disappointed but made no further comment, and soon after that gave me prosaic and accurate directions to the school.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said, politely shaking hands as we stood beside the car.

‘A pleasure.’

‘And thanks...’ she hesitated. ‘Thanks anyway.’

I nodded, and she half-walked, half-ran to join a group of other girls going into the buildings. Looking briefly back she gave me a sketchy wave, which I acknowledged. Nice child, I thought, pointing the car homewards. Mixed up, as who wasn’t at that age. Middling brains, not quite pretty, her future a clean stretch of sand waiting for footprints.

December

It made the headlines in the Sporting Life (OLIVER KNOWLES, KING OF THE SANDCASTLE) and turned up as the lead story under less fanciful banners on the racing pages of all the other dailies.

SANDCASTLE TO GO TO STUD, SANDCASTLE TO STAY IN BRITAIN, SANDCASTLE SHARES NOT FOR SALE, SANDCASTLE BOUGHT PRIVATELY FOR HUGE SUM. The story in every case was short and simple. One of the year’s top stallions had been acquired by the owner of a heretofore moderately-ranked stud farm. ‘I am very happy,’ Oliver Knowles was universally reported as saying. ‘Sandcastle is a prize for British bloodstock.’

The buying price, all the papers said, was ‘not unadjacent to five million pounds,’ and a few of them added ‘the financing was private.’

‘Well,’ Henry said at lunch, tapping the Sporting Life, ‘not many of our loans make so much splash.’

‘It’s a belly-flop,’ muttered the obstinate dissenter, who on that day happened to be sitting at my elbow.

Henry didn’t hear and was anyway in good spirits. ‘If one of the foals run in the Derby we’ll take a party from the office. What do you say, Gordon? Fifty people on open-topped buses?’

Gordon agreed with the sort of smile which hoped he wouldn’t actually be called upon to fulfil his promise.

‘Forty mares,’ Henry said musingly. ‘Forty foals. Surely one of them might be Derby material.’

‘Er,’ I said, from new-found knowledge. ‘Forty foals is stretching it. Thirty-five would be pretty good. Some mares won’t “take”, so to speak.’

Henry showed mild alarm. ‘Does that mean that five or six fees will have to be returned? Doesn’t that affect Knowles’ programme of repayment?’

I shook my head. ‘For a horse of Sandcastle’s stature the fee is all up in front. Payable for services rendered, regardless of results. That’s in Britain, of course, and Europe. In America they have the system of no foal, no fee, even for the top stallions. A live foal, that is. Alive, on its feet and suckling.’

Henry relaxed, leaning back in his chair and smiling. ‘You’ve certainly learnt a lot, Tim, since this all started.’

‘It’s absorbing.’

He nodded. ‘I know it isn’t usual, but how do you feel about keeping an eye on the bank’s money at close quarters? Would Knowles object to you dropping in from time to time?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Not out of general interest.’

‘Good. Do that, then. Bring us progress reports. I must say I’ve never been as impressed with any horse as I was that day with Sandcastle.’

Henry’s direct admiration of the colt had led in the end to Ekaterin’s advancing three of the five million to Oliver Knowles, with private individuals subscribing the other two. The fertility tests had been excellent, the owner had been paid, and Sandcastle already stood in the stallion yard in Hertfordshire alongside Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet.

December was marching along towards Christmas, with trees twinkling all over London and sleet falling bleakly in the afternoons. On an impulse I sent a card embossed with tasteful robins to Calder Jackson, wishing him well, and almost by return of post received (in the office) a missive (Stubbs reproduction) thanking me sincerely and asking if I would be interested some time in looking round his place. If so, he finished, would I telephone — number supplied.

I telephoned. He was affable and far more spontaneous than usual. ‘Do come,’ he said, and we made a date for the following Sunday.

I told Gordon I was going. We were working on an interbank loan of nine and a half million for five days to a competitor, a matter of little more than a few telephone calls and a promise. My hair had almost ceased to rise at the size and speed of such deals, and with only verbal agreement from Val and Henry I had recently on my own lent seven million for forty-eight hours. The trick was never to lend for a longer time than we ourselves were able to borrow the necessary funds: if we did, we ran the risk of having to pay a higher rate of interest than we were receiving on the loan, a process which physically hurt Val Fisher. There had been a time in the past when owing to a client repaying late he had had to borrow several million for eighteen days at twenty-five per cent, and he’d never got over it.

Most of our dealings weren’t on such a heavy scale, and next on my agenda was a request for us to lend fifty-five thousand pounds to a man who had invented a waste-paper basket for use in cars and needed funds for development. I read the letter out to Gordon, who made a fast thumbs-down gesture.

‘Pity,’ I said. ‘It’s a sorely needed object.’

‘He’s asking too little.’ He put his left hand hard between his knees and clamped it there. ‘And there are far better inventions dying the death.’

I agreed with him and wrote a brief note of regret. Gordon looked up from his pages shortly after, and asked me what I’d be doing at Christmas.

‘Nothing much,’ I said.

‘Not going to your mother in Jersey?’

‘They’re cruising in the Caribbean.’

‘Judith and I wondered...’ he cleared his throat, ‘... if you’d care to stay with us. Come on Christmas Eve, stay three or four days? Just as you like, of course. I daresay you wouldn’t find us too exciting... but the offer’s there, anyway.’

Was it wise, I wondered, to spend three or four days with Judith when three or four hours at Ascot had tempted acutely? Was it wise, when the sight of her aroused so many natural urges, to sleep so long — and so near — under her roof?

Most unwise.

‘I’d like to,’ I said, ‘very much’; and I thought you’re a bloody stupid fool, Tim Ekaterin, and if you ache it’ll be your own ridiculous fault.

‘Good,’ Gordon said, looking as if he meant it. ‘Judith will be pleased. She was afraid you might have younger friends to go to.’

‘Nothing fixed.’

He nodded contentedly and went back to his work, and I thought about Judith wanting me to stay, because if she hadn’t wanted it I wouldn’t have been asked.

If I had any sense I wouldn’t go: but I knew I would.

Calder Jackson’s place at Newmarket, seen that next Sunday morning, was a gem of public relations, where everything had been done to please those visiting the sick. The yard itself, a three-sided quadrangle, had been cosmetically planted with central grass and a graceful tree, and brightly painted tubs, bare now of flowers, stood at frequent intervals outside the boxes. There were park-bench type seats here and there, and ornamental gates and railings in black iron scroll-work, and a welcoming archway labelled ‘Comfort Room This Way.’

Outside the main yard, and to one side, stood a small separate building painted glossy white. There was a large prominent red cross on the door, with, underneath it, the single word ‘Surgery’.

The yard and the surgery were what the visitor first saw: beyond and screened by trees stood Calder Jackson’s own house, more private from prying eyes than his business. I parked beside several other cars on a stretch of asphalt, and walked over to ring the bell. The front door was opened to me by a manservant in a white coat. Butler or nurse?

‘This way, sir,’ he said deferentially, when I announced my name. ‘Mr Jackson is expecting you.’

Butler.

Interesting to see the dramatic hair-cut in its home setting, which was olde-worlde cottage on a grand scale. I had an impression of a huge room, oak rafters, stone flagged floor, rugs, dark oak furniture, great brick fireplace with burning logs... and Calder advancing with a broad smile and outstretched arm.

‘Tim!’ he exclaimed, shaking hands vigorously. ‘This is a pleasure, indeed it is.’

‘Been looking forward to it,’ I said.

‘Come along to the fire. Come and warm yourself. How about a drink? And... oh... this is a friend of mine...’ he waved towards a second man already standing by the fireplace, ‘... Ian Pargetter.’

The friend and I nodded to each other and made the usual strangers-meeting signals, and the name tumbled over in my mind as something I’d heard somewhere before but couldn’t quite recall.

Calder Jackson clinked bottles and glasses and upon consultation gave me a Scotch of noble proportions.

‘And for you, Ian,’ he said. ‘A further tincture?’

Oh yes, I thought. The vet. Ian Pargetter, the vet who didn’t mind consorting with unlicensed practitioners.

Ian Pargetter hesitated but shrugged and held out his glass as one succumbing to pleasurable temptation.

‘A small one, then, Calder,’ he said. ‘I must be off.’

He was about forty, I judged; large and reliable-looking, with sandy greying hair, a heavy moustache and an air of being completely in charge of his life. Calder explained that it was I who had deflected the knife aimed at him at Ascot, and Ian Pargetter made predictable responses about luck, fast reactions and who could have wanted to kill Calder?

‘That was altogether a memorable day,’ Calder said, and I agreed with him.

‘We all won a packet on Sandcastle,’ Calder said. ‘Pity he’s going to stud so soon.’

I smiled. ‘Maybe we’ll win on his sons.’

There was no particular secret, as far as I knew, about where the finance for Sandcastle had come from, but it was up to Oliver Knowles to reveal it, not me. I thought Calder would have been interested, but bankers’ ethics as usual kept me quiet.

‘A superb horse,’ Calder said, with all the enthusiasm he’d shown in Dissdale’s box. ‘One of the greats.’

Ian Pargetter nodded agreement, then finished his drink at a gulp and said he’d be going. ‘Let me know how that pony fares, Calder.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Calder moved with his departing guest towards the door and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for dropping in, Ian. Appreciate it.’

There were sounds of Pargetter leaving by the front door, and Calder returned rubbing his hands together and saying that although it was cold outside, I might care to look round before his other guests arrived for lunch. Accordingly we walked across to the open-sided quadrangle, where Calder moved from box to box giving me a brief resumé of the illness and prospects of each patient.

‘This pony only came yesterday... it’s a prize show pony supposedly, and look at it. Dull eyes, rough coat, altogether droopy. They say it’s had diarrhoea on and off for weeks. I’m their last resort, they say.’ He smiled philosophically. ‘Can’t think why they don’t send me sick horses as a first resort. But there you are, they always try regular vets first. Can’t blame them, I suppose.’

We moved along the line. ‘This mare was coughing blood when she came three weeks ago. I was her owner’s last resort.’ He smiled again. ‘She’s doing fine now. The cough’s almost: gone. She’s eating well, putting on condition.’ The mare blinked at us lazily as we strolled away.

‘This is a two-year-old filly,’ Calder said, peering over a half-door. ‘She’d had an infected ulcer on her withers for six weeks before she came here. Antibiotics had proved useless Now the ulcer’s dry and healing. Most satisfactory.’

We went on down the row.

‘This is someone’s favourite hunter, came all the way from, Gloucestershire. I don’t know what I can do for him, though of course I’ll try. His trouble, truthfully, is just age.’

Further on: ‘Here’s a star three-day-eventer. Came to me with intermittent bleeding in the urine, intractable to antibiotics. He was clearly in great pain, and almost dangerous to deal with on account of it. But now he’s fine. He’ll be staying here for a while longer but I’m sure the trouble is cured.

‘This is a three-year-old colt who won a race back in July but then started breaking blood vessels and went on doing it despite treatment. He’s been here a fortnight. Last resort, of course!’

By the next box he said, ‘Don’t look at this one if you’re squeamish. Poor wretched little filly, she’s so weak she can’t hold her head up and all her bones are sharp under the skin. Some sort of wasting sickness. Blood tests haven’t shown what it is. I don’t know if I can heal her. I’ve laid my hands on her twice so far, but there’s been nothing. No... feeling. Sometimes it takes a long time. But I’m not giving up with her, and there’s always hope.’

He turned his curly head and pointed to another box further ahead. ‘There’s a colt along there who’s been here two months and is only just responding. His owners were in despair, and so was I, privately, but then just three days ago when I was in his box I could feel the force flowing down my arms and into him, and the next day he was mending.’

He spoke with a far more natural fluency on his home ground and less as if reciting from a script, but all the same I felt the same reservations about the healing touch as I had at Ascot. I was a doubter, I supposed. I would never in my life have put my trust in a seventh son of a seventh son, probably because the only direct knowledge I had of any human seeking out ‘the touch’ had been a close friend of mine at college who’d had hopeless cancer and had gone to a woman healer as a last resort, only to be told that he was dying because he wanted to. I could vividly remember his anger, and mine on his behalf: and standing in Calder’s yard I wondered if that same woman would also think that horses got sick to death because they wanted to.

‘Is there anything you can’t treat?’ I asked. ‘Anything you turn away?’

‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘There are some things, like advanced laminitis, with which I feel hopeless, and as for coryne...’ he shook his head,’... it’s a killer.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.

‘So sorry. Well, laminitis is a condition of the feet where the bone eventually begins to crumble, and horses in the end can’t bear the pain of standing up. They lie down, and horses can’t live for more than a few days lying down.’ He spoke with regret. ‘And coryne,’ he went on, ‘is a frightful bacterial infection which is deadly to foals. It induces a sort of pneumonia with abcesses in the lungs. Terribly contagious. I know of one stud farm in America which lost seventy foals in one day.’

I listened in horror. ‘Do we have it in England?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes, in pockets, but not widespread. It doesn’t affect older horses. Foals of three months or over are safe.’ He paused. ‘Some very young foals do survive, of course, but they’re likely to have scar tissue in the lungs which may impair their breathing for racing purposes.’

‘Isn’t there a vaccine?’ I said.

He smiled indulgently. ‘Very little research is done into equine diseases, chiefly because of the cost but also because horses are so large, and can’t be kept in a laboratory for any controlled series of tests.’

I again had the impression that he had said all this many times before, but it was understandable and I was getting used to it. We proceeded on the hospital round (four-year-old with general debility, show-jumper with festering leg) and came at length to a box with an open door.

‘We’re giving this one sun treatment,’ Calder said, indicating that I should look; and inside the box a thin youth was adjusting the angle of an ultra-violet lamp set on a head-high, wall-mounted bracket. It wasn’t at the dappled grey that I looked, however, but at the lad, because in the first brief glimpse I thought he was the boy who had tried to attack Calder.

I opened my mouth... and shut it again.

He wasn’t the boy. He was of the same height, same build, same litheness, same general coloring, but not with the same eyes or jawline or narrow nose.

Calder saw my reaction and smiled. ‘For a split second, when I saw that boy move at Ascot, I thought it was Jason here. But it wasn’t, of course.’

I shook my head. ‘Alike but different.’

Calder nodded. ‘And Jason wouldn’t want to kill me, would you, Jason?’ He spoke with a jocularity to which Jason didn’t: respond.

‘No, sir,’ he said stolidly.

‘Jason is my right-hand man,’ said Calder heartily. ‘Indispensable.’

The right-hand man showed no satisfaction at the flattery and maintained an impassive countenance throughout. He touched the grey horse and told it to shift over a bit in the manner of one equal talking to another, and the horse obediently shifted.

‘Mind your eyes with that lamp,’ Calder said. ‘Where are your glasses?’

Jason fished into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced some ultra-dark sun-shades. Calder nodded. ‘Put them on,’ he said, and Jason complied. Where before there had already been a lack of mobility of expression, there was now, with the obscured eyes, no way at all of guessing Jason’s thoughts.

‘I’ll be finished with this one in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else after that, sir?’

Calder briefly pondered and shook his head. ‘Just the evening rounds at four.’

‘Your invalids get every care,’ I said, complimenting them.

Jason’s blacked-out eyes turned my way, but it was Calder who said ‘Hard work gets results.’ And you’ve said that a thousand times, I thought.

We reached the last box in the yard, the first one which was empty.

‘Emergency bed,’ Calder said, jokingly, and I smiled and asked how much he charged for his patients.

He replied easily and without explanation or apology. ‘Twice the training fees currently charged for horses in the top Newmarket stables. When their rates go up, so do mine.’

‘Twice...?’

He nodded. ‘I could charge more, you know. But if I charged less I’d be totally swamped by all those “last resort” people, and I simply haven’t the room or the time or the spiritual resources to take more cases than I do.’

I wondered how one would ever get to the essence of the man behind the temperate, considerate public face, or indeed if the public face was not a façade at all but the essence itself. I looked at the physical strength of the shoulders below the helmet head and listened to the plain words describing a mystical force, considered the dominating voice and the mild manner, and still found him a man to admire rather than like.

‘The surgery,’ he said, gesturing towards it as we walked that way. ‘My drug store!’ He smiled at the joke (how often, I wondered, had he said it?) and produced a key to unlock the door. ‘There’s nothing dangerous or illegal in here, of course, but one has to protect against vandals. So sad, don’t you think?’

The surgery, which had no windows, was basically a large brick-built hut. The internal walls, like the outer, were painted white, and the floor was tiled in red. There were antiseptic-looking glass-fronted cabinets along the two end walls and a wide bench with drawers underneath along the wall facing the door. On the bench, a delicate-looking set of scales, a pestle and mortar and a pair of fine rubber gloves: behind the glass of the cabinets, rows of bottles and boxes. Everything very business-like and tidy: and along the wall which contained the doer stood three kitchen appliances, refrigerator, cooker and sink.

Calder pointed vaguely towards the cabinets. ‘In there I keep the herbs in pill and powder form. Comfrey, myrrh, sarsaparilla, golden seal, fo-ti-tieng, things like that.’

‘Er...‘I said. ‘What do they do?’

He ran through them obligingly. ‘Comfrey knits bones, and heals wounds, myrrh is antiseptic and good for diarrhoea and rheumatism, sarsaparilla contains male hormones and increases physical strength, golden seal cures eczema, improves appetite and digestion, fo-ti-tieng is a revitalising tonic second to none. Then there’s liquorice for coughs and papaya enzymes for digesting proteins and passiflora to use as a general pacifier and tranquilliser.’ He paused. ‘There’s ginseng also, of course, which is a marvellous rejuvenator and invigorator, but it’s really too expensive in the quantities needed to do a horse significant good. It has to be taken continuously, for ever.’ He sighed. ‘Excellent for humans, though.’

The air in the windowless room was fresh and smelled very faintly fragrant, and as if to account for it Calder started showing me the contents of the drawers.

‘I keep seeds in here,’ he said. ‘My patients eat them by the handful every day.’ Three or four of the drawers contained large opaque plastic bags fastened by bull-dog clips. ‘Sunflower seeds for vitamins, phosphorus and calcium, good for bones and teeth. Pumpkin seeds for vigour — they contain male hormones — and also for phosphorus and iron. Carrot seeds for calming nervous horses. Sesame seeds for general health.’

He walked along a yard or two and pulled open an extra-large deep drawer which contained larger bags; more like sacks. ‘These are hops left after beer-making. They’re packed full of all good things. A great tonic, and cheap enough to use in quantity. We have bagfuls of them over in the feed shed to grind up as chaff but I use these here as one ingredient of my special decoction, my concentrated tonic’

‘Do you make it... on the stove?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Like a chef.’ He opened the refrigerator door. ‘I store it in here. Want to see?’

I looked inside. Nearly the whole space was taken with gallon-sized plastic containers full of brownish liquid. ‘We mix it in a bran mash, warmed of course, and the horses thrive.’

I knew nothing about the efficiency of his remedies, but I was definitely impressed.

‘How do you get the horses to take pills?’ I said.

‘In an apple, usually. We scoop out half the core, put in the tablet or capsule, or indeed just powder, and replace the plug.’

So simple.

‘And incidentally, I make most of my own pills and capsules. Some, like comfrey, are commercially available, but I prefer to buy the dried herbs in their pure form and make my own recipes.’ He pulled open one of the lower drawers under the work-bench and lifted out a heavy wooden box. ‘This,’ he said, laying it on the work surface and opening the lid, ‘contains the makings.’

I looked down at a whole array of brass dies, each a small square with a pill-sized cavity in its centre. The cavities varied from tiny to extra large, and from round to oblong.

‘It’s an antique,’ he said with a touch of pride. ‘Early Victorian. Dates from when pills were always made by hand — and it’s still viable, of course. You put the required drug in powder form into whatever sized cavity you want, and compress it with the rod which exactly fits.’ He lifted one of a series of short brass rods from its rack and fitted its end into one of the cavities, tamping it up and down; then picked the whole die out of the box and tipped it right over. ‘Hey presto,’ he said genially, catching the imaginary contents, ‘a pill!’

‘Neat,’ I said, with positive pleasure.

He nodded. ‘Capsules are quicker and more modern.’ He pulled open another drawer and briefly showed me the empty tops and bottoms of a host of gelatin capsules, again of varying sizes, though mostly a little larger than those swallowed easily by humans. ‘Veterinary size,’ he explained.

He closed his gem of a pill-making box and returned it to its drawer, straightening up afterwards and casting a caring eye around the place to make sure everything was tidy. With a nod of private satisfaction he opened the door for us to return to the outside world, switching off the fluorescent lights and locking the door behind us.

A car was just rolling to a stop on the asphalt, and presently two recognised figures emerged from it: Dissdale Smith and his delectable Bettina.

‘Hello, hello,’ said Dissdale, striding across with ready hand. ‘Calder said you were coming. Good to see you. Calder’s been showing you all his treasures, eh? The conducted tour, eh, Calder?’ I shook the hand. ‘Calder’s proud of his achievements here, aren’t you, Calder?’

‘With good reason,’ I said civilly, and Calder gave me a swift glance and a genuine-looking smile.

Bettina drifted more slowly to join us, a delight in high heeled boots and cuddling fur, a white silk scarf round her throat and smooth dark hair falling glossily to her shoulders. Her scent travelled sweetly across the quiet cold air and she laid a decorative hand on my arm in an intimate touch.

‘Tim the saviour,’ she said. ‘Calder’s hero.’

The over-packaged charm unaccountably brought the contrasting image of Ginnie sharply to my mind, and I briefly thought that the promise was more beckoning than the performance, that child more interesting than that woman.

Calder took us all soon into his maxi-cottage sitting-room and distributed more drinks. Dissdale told me that Sandcastle had almost literally saved his business and metaphorically his life, and we all drank a toast to the wonder horse. Four further guests arrived — a married couple with their two twentyish daughters — and the occasion became an ordinarily enjoyable lunch party, undemanding, unmemorable, good food handed round by the manservant, cigars offered with the coffee.

Calder at some point said he was off to America in the New Year on a short lecture tour.

‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘I’ll be talking to health clubs, not horse people. American racehorse trainers aren’t receptive to me. Or not yet. But then, it took a few years for Newmarket to decide I could make a contribution.’

Everyone smiled at the scepticism of America and Newmarket.

Calder said, ‘January is often a quiet month here. We don’t take any new admissions if I’m away, and of course my head lad just keeps the establishment routines going until I return. It works pretty well.’ He smiled. ‘If I’m lucky I’ll get some skiing; and to be honest, I’m looking forward to the ski-ing much more than the talks.’

Everyone left soon after three, and I drove back to London through the short darkening afternoon wondering if the herbs of antiquity held secrets we’d almost wilfully lost.

‘Caffeine,’ Calder had been saying towards the end, ‘is a get-up-and-go stimulant, tremendously useful. Found in coffee beans of course, and in tea and cocoa and in cola drinks. Good for asthma. Vigorous marvellous tonic. A life-saver after shock. And now in America, I ask you, they’re casting caffeine as a villain and are busy taking it out of everything it’s naturally in. You might as well take the alcohol out of bread.’

‘But Calder dear,’ Bettina said, ‘There’s no alcohol in bread.’

He looked at her kindly as she sat on his right. ‘Bread that is made with yeast definitely does contain alcohol before it’s cooked. If you mix yeast with water and sugar you get alcohol and carbon-dioxide, which is the gas which makes the dough rise. The air in a bakery smells of wine... simple chemistry, my dear girl, no magic in it. Bread is the staff of life and alcohol is good for you.’

There had been jokes and lifted glasses, and I could have listened to Calder for hours.

The Christmas party at Gordon Michael’s home was in a way an echo, because Judith’s apothecary friend Pen Warner was in attendance most of the time. I got to know her quite well and to like her very much, which Judith may or may not have intended. In any case, it was again the fairy-tale day at Ascot which had led on to friendly relations.

‘Do you remember Burnt Marshmallow?’ Pen said. ‘I bought a painting with my winnings.’

‘I spent mine on riotous living.’

‘Oh yes?’ She looked me up and down and shook her head. ‘You haven’t the air.’

‘What do I have the air of?’ I asked curiously, and she answered in amusement, ‘Of intelligent laziness and boring virtue.’

‘All wrong,’ I said.

‘Ho hum.’

She seemed to me to be slightly less physically solid than at Ascot, but it might have been only the change of clothes; there were still the sad eyes and the ingrained worthiness and the unexpected cast of humour. She had apparently spent twelve hours that day — it was Christmas Eve — doling out remedies to people whose illnesses showed no sense of timing, and proposed to go back at six in the morning. Meanwhile she appeared at the Michaels’ house in a long festive caftan with mood to match, and during the evening the four of us ate quails with our fingers, and roasted chestnuts, and played a board game with childish gusto.

Judith wore rose pink and pearls and looked about twenty-five. Gordon in advance had instructed me ‘Bring whatever you like as long as it’s informal’ and himself was resplendent in a plum velvet jacket and bow tie My own newly bought cream wool shirt which in the shop had looked fairly theatrical seemed in the event to be right, so that on all levels the evening proved harmonious and fun, much more rounded and easy than I’d expected.

Judith’s housekeeping throughout my stay proved a poem of invisibility. Food appeared from freezer and cupboard, remnants returned to dishwasher and dustbin. Jobs were distributed when essential but sitting and talking had priority: and nothing so smooth, I reflected, ever got done without hard work beforehand.

‘Pen will be back soon after one tomorrow,’ Judith said at midnight on that first evening. ‘We’ll have a drink then and open some presents, and have our Christmas feast at half past three. There will be breakfast in the morning, and Gordon and I will go to church.’ She left an invitation lingering in the air, but I marginally shook my head. ‘You can look after yourself, then, while we’re gone.’

She kissed me goodnight, with affection and on the cheek. Gordon gave me a smile and a wave, and I went to bed across the hall from them and spent an hour before sleep deliberately not thinking at all about Judith in or out of her nightgown — or not much.

Breakfast was taken in dressing gowns. Judith’s was red, quilted and unrevealing.

They changed and went to church. Pray for me, I said, and set out for a walk on the common.

There were brightly-wrapped gifts waiting around the base of the silver-starred Christmas tree in the Michaels’ drawing room, and a surreptitious inspection had revealed one from Pen addressed to me. I walked across the windy grass, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, wondering what to do about one for her, and as quite often happens came by chance to a solution.

A small boy was out there with his father, flying a kite, and I stopped to watch.

‘That’s fun,’ I said.

The boy took no notice but the father said, ‘There’s no satisfying the little bleeder. I give him this and he says he wants roller skates.’

The kite was a brilliant phosphorescent Chinese dragon with butterfly wings and a big frilly tail, soaring and circling like a joyful tethered spirit in the Christmas sky.

‘Will you sell it to me?’ I asked. ‘Buy the roller skates instead?’ I explained the problem, the need for an instant present.

Parent and child consulted and the deal was done. I wound up the string carefully and bore the trophy home, wondering what on earth the sober pharmacist would think of such a thing: but when she unwrapped it from gold paper (cadged from Judith for the purpose) she pronounced herself enchanted, and back we all went onto the common to watch her fly it.

The whole day was happy. I hadn’t had so good a Christmas since I was a child. I told them so, and kissed Judith uninhibitedly under some mistletoe, which Gordon didn’t seem to mind.

‘You were born sunny,’ Judith said, briefly stroking my cheek, and Gordon, nodding, said, ‘A man without sorrows, unacquainted with grief.’

‘Grief and sorrow come with time,’ Pen said, but not as if she meant it imminently. ‘They come to us all.’

On the morning after Christmas Day I drove Judith across London to Hampstead to put flowers on her mother’s grave.

‘I know you’ll think me silly, but I always go. She died on Boxing Day when I was twelve. It’s the only way I have of remembering her... of feeling I had a mother at all. I usually go by myself. Gordon thinks I’m sentimental and doesn’t like coming.’

‘Nothing wrong with sentiment,’ I said.

Hampstead was where I lived in the upstairs half of a friend’s house. I wasn’t sure whether or not Judith knew it, and said nothing until she’d delivered the pink chrysanthemums to the square marble tablet let in flush with the grass and communed for a while with the memories floating there.

It was as we walked slowly back toward the iron gates that I neutrally said, ‘My flat’s only half a mile from here. This part of London is home ground.’

‘Is it?’

‘Mm.’

After a few steps she said, ‘I knew you lived somewhere here. If you remember, you wouldn’t let us drive you all the way home from Ascot. You said Hampstead was too far.’

‘So it was.’

‘Not for Sir Galahad that starry night.’

We reached the gates and paused for her to look back. I was infinitely conscious of her nearness and of my own stifled desire; and she looked abruptly into my eyes and said, ‘Gordon knows you live here, also.’

‘And does he know how I feel?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t said.’

I wanted very much to go that last half mile: that short distance on wheels, that far journey in commitment. My body tingled... rippled... from hunger, and I found myself physically clenching my back teeth.

‘What are you thinking?’ she said.

‘For God’s sake... you know damn well what I’m thinking... and we’re going back to Clapham right this minute.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose we must.’

‘What do you mean... you suppose?’

‘Well, I...’ she paused. ‘I mean, yes we must. I’m sorry... it was just that... for a moment... I was tempted.’

‘As at Ascot?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘As at Ascot.’

‘Only here and now,’ I said, ‘we have the place and the time and the opportunity to do something about it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what we’re going to do... is... nothing.’ It came out as half a question, half a statement: wholly an impossibility.

‘Why do we care?’ she said explosively. ‘Why don’t we just get into your bed and have a happy time? Why is the whole thing so tangled up with bloody concepts like honour?’

We walked down the road to where I’d parked the car and I drove southwards with careful observance at every red light; stop signals making round eyes at me all the way to Clapham.

‘I’d have liked it,’ Judith said as we pulled up outside her house.

‘So would I.’

We went indoors in a sort of deprived companionship, and I realized only when I saw Gordon’s smiling unsuspicious face that I couldn’t have returned there if it had been in any other way.

It was at lunch that day, when Pen had again resurfaced from her stint among the pills that I told them about my visit to Calder. Pen, predictably, was acutely interested and said she’d dearly like to know what was in the decoction in the refrigerator.

‘What’s a decoction?’ Judith asked.

‘A preparation boiled with water. If you dissolve things in alcohol, that’s a tincture.’

‘One lives and bloody well learns!’

Pen laughed. ‘How about carminative, anodyne and vermifuge... effects of drugs. They simply roll off the tongue with grandeur.’

‘And what do they mean?’ Gordon asked.

‘Getting rid of gas, getting rid of pain, getting rid of worms.’

Gordon too was laughing. ‘Have some anodyne tincture of grape.’ He poured wine into our glasses. ‘Do you honestly believe, Tim, that Calder cures horses by touch?’

‘I’m sure he believes it.’ I reflected. ‘I don’t know if he will let anyone watch. And if he did, what would one see? I don’t suppose with a horse it’s a case of “take up your bed and walk.”’

Judith said in surprise, ‘You sound as if you’d like it to be true. You, that Gordon and Harry have trained to doubt!’

‘Calder’s impressive,’ I admitted. ‘So is his place. So are the fees he charges. He wouldn’t be able to set his prices so high if he didn’t get real results.’

‘Do the herbs come extra?’ Pen said.

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Would you expect them to?’ Gordon said.

‘Well...’ Pen considered. ‘Some of those that Tim mentioned are fairly exotic. Golden seal — that’s hydrastis — said in the past to cure practically anything you can mention, but mostly used nowadays in tiny amounts in eye-drops. Has to be imported from America. And fo-ti-tieng — which is Hydrocotyle asiatica minor, also called the source of the elixir of long life — that only grows as far as I know in the tropical jungles of the far east. I mean, I would have thought that giving things like that to horses would be wildly expensive.’

If I’d been impressed with Calder I was probably more so with Pen. ‘I didn’t know pharmacists were so clued up on herbs,’ I said.

‘I was just interested so I learned their properties,’ she exclaimed. ‘The age-old remedies are hardly even hinted at on the official pharmacy courses, though considering digitalis and penicillin one can’t exactly see why. A lot of chemists shops don’t sell non-prescription herbal remedies, but I do, and honestly for a stack of people they seem to work.’

‘And do you advocate garlic poultices for the feet of babies with whooping-cough?’ Gordon asked.

Pen didn’t. There was more laughter. If one believed in Calder, Judith said firmly, one believed in him, garlic poultices and all.

The four of us spent a comfortable afternoon and evening together, and when Judith and Gordon went to bed I walked along with Pen to her house, where she’d been staying each night, filling my lungs with the fresh air off the common.

‘You’re going home tomorrow, aren’t you?’ she said, fishing out her keys.

I nodded. ‘In the morning.’

‘It’s been great fun.’ She found the keys and fitted one in the lock. ‘Would you like to come in?’

‘No... I’ll just walk for a bit.’

She opened the door and paused there. ‘Thank you for the kite... it was brilliant. And goodbye for this time, though I guess if Judith can stand it I’ll be seeing you again.’

‘Stand what?’ I asked.

She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Goodnight,’ she said. ‘And believe it or not, the herb known as passion flower is good for insomnia.’

Her grin shone out like the Cheshire Cat’s as she stepped inside her, house and closed the door, and I stood hopelessly on her pathway wanting to call her back.