Banker

February

Ian Pargetter was murdered at about one in the morning on February 1st.

I learned about his death from Calder when I telephoned that evening on impulse to thank him belatedly for the lunch party, invite him for a reciprocal dinner in London and hear whether or not he had enjoyed his American tour.

‘Who?’ he said vaguely when I announced myself. ‘Who? Oh... Tim... Look, I can’t talk now, I’m simply distracted, a friend of mine’s been killed and I can’t think of anything else.’

I’m so sorry,’ I said inadequately.

‘Yes... Ian Pargetter... but I don’t suppose you know...’

This time I remembered at once. The vet; big, reliable, sandy moustache.

‘I met him,’ I said, ‘in your house.’

‘Did you? Oh yes. I’m so upset I can’t concentrate. Look, Tim, ring some other time, will you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It’s not just that he’s been a friend for years,’ he said, ‘But I don’t know... I really don’t know how my business will fare without him. He sent so many horses my way... such a good friend... I’m totally distraught... Look, ring me another time... Tim, so sorry.’ He put his receiver down with the rattle of a shaking hand.

I thought at the time that he meant Ian Pargetter had been killed in some sort of accident, and it was only the next day when my eye was caught by a paragraph in a newspaper that I realized the difference.

Ian Pargetter, well known, much respected Newmarket veterinary surgeon, was yesterday morning found dead in his home. Police suspect foul play. They state that Pargetter suffered head injuries and that certain supplies of drugs appear to be missing. Pargetter’s body was discovered by Mrs Jane Halson, a daily cleaner. The vet is survived by his wife and three young daughters, all of whom were away from home at the time of the attack. Mrs Pargetter was reported last night to be very distressed and under sedation.

A lot of succinct bad news, I thought, for a lot of sad bereft people. He was the first person I’d known who’d been murdered, and in spite of our very brief meeting I found his death most disturbing: and if I felt so unsettled about a near-stranger, how, I wondered, did anyone ever recover from the murder of someone one knew well and loved. How did one deal with the anger? Come to terms with the urge to revenge?

I’d of course read reports of husbands and wives who pronounced themselves ‘not bitter’ over the slaughter of a spouse, and I’d never understood it. I felt furious on Ian Pargetter’s behalf that anyone should have had the arrogance to wipe him out.

Because of Ascot and Sandcastle my long-dormant interest in racecourses seemed thoroughly to have reawakened, and on three or four Saturday afternoons that winter I’d trekked to Kempton or Sandown or Newbury to watch the jumpers. Ursula Young had become a familiar face, and it was from this brisk well-informed lady bloodstock agent that I learnt most about Ian Pargetter and his death.

‘Drink?’ I suggested at Kempton, pulling up my coat collar against a bitter wind.

She looked at her watch (I’d never seen her do anything without checking the time) and agreed on a quick one. Whisky-mac for her, coffee for me, as at Doncaster.

‘Now tell me,’ she said, hugging her glass and yelling in my ear over the general din of a bar packed with other cold customers seeking inner warmth, ‘when you asked all those questions about stallion shares, was it for Sandcastle?’

I smiled without actually answering, shielding my coffee inadequately from adjacent nudging elbows.

‘Thought so,’ she said. ‘Look — there’s a table. Grab it.’

We sat down in a corner with the racket going on over our heads and the closed-circuit television playing re-runs of the last race fortissimo. Ursula bent her head towards mine. ‘A wow-sized coup for Oliver Knowles.’

‘You approve?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘He’ll be among the greats in one throw. Smart move. Clever man.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Yes. Meet him often at the sales. He had a snooty wife who left him for some Canadian millionaire or other, and maybe that’s why he’s aiming for the big-time; just to show her.’ She smiled fiendishly. ‘She was a real pain and I hope he makes it.’

She drank half her whisky and I said it was a shame about Ian Pargetter, and that I’d met him once at Calder’s house.

She grimaced with a stronger echo of the anger I had myself felt. ‘He’d been out all evening saving the life of a classic-class colt with colic. It’s so beastly. He went home well after midnight, and they reckon whoever killed him was already in the house stealing whatever he could lay his hands on. Ian’s wife and family were away visiting her mother, you see, and the police think the killer thought the house would be empty for the night.’ She swallowed. ‘He was hit on the back of the head with a brass lamp off one of the tables in the sitting room. Just casual. Unpremeditated. Just... stupid.’ She looked moved, as I guessed everyone must have been who had known him. ‘Such a waste. He was a really nice man, a good vet, everyone liked him. And all for practically nothing... The police found a lot of silver and jewellery lying on a blanket ready to be carried away, but they think the thief just panicked and left it when Ian came home... all that anyone can think of that’s missing is his case of instruments and a few drugs that he’d had with him that evening... nothing worth killing for... not even for an addict. Nothing in it like that.’ She fell silent and looked down into her nearly empty glass, and I offered her a refill.

‘No, thanks all the same, one’s enough. I feel pretty maudlin as it is. I liked Ian. He was a good sort. I’d like to throttle the little beast who killed him.’

‘I think Calder Jackson feels much as you do,’ I said.

She glanced up, her good-looking fiftyish face full of genuine concern. ‘Calder will miss Ian terribly. There aren’t that number of vets around who’d not only put up with a faith-healer on their doorstep but actually treat him as a colleague. Ian had no professional jealousy. Very rare. Very good man. Makes it all the worse.’

We went out again into the raw air and I lost five pounds on the afternoon, which would have sent Lorna Shipton swooning to Uncle Freddie, if she’d known.

Two weeks later with Oliver Knowles’ warm approval I paid another visit to his farm in Hertfordshire, and although it was again a Sunday and still winter, the atmosphere of the place had fundamentally changed. Where there had been quiet sleepy near-hibernation there was now a wakeful bustle and eagerness, where a scattering of dams and foals across the paddocks, now a crowd of mares moving alone and slowly with big bellies.

The crop had come to the harvest. Life was ripening into the daylight, and into the darkness the new seed would be sown.

I had not been truly a country child (ten acres of wooded hill in Surrey) and to me the birth of animals still seemed a wonder and joy: to Oliver Knowles, he said, it meant constant worry and profit and loss. His grasp of essentials still rang out strong and clear, but there were lines on his forehead from the details.

‘I suppose,’ he said frankly, walking me into the first of the big yards, ‘that the one thing I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for was the value of the foals now being born here. I mean...’ he gestured around at the patient heads looking over the rows of half-doors, ‘... these mares have been to the top stallions. They’re carrying fabulous blood-lines. They’re history.’ His awe could be felt. ‘I didn’t realise, you know, what anxiety they would bring me. We’ve always done our best for the foals, of course we have, but if one died it wasn’t a tragedy, but with this lot....’ He smiled ruefully. ‘It’s not enough just owning Sandcastle. I have to make sure that our reputation for handling top broodmares is good and sound.’

We walked along beside one row of boxes with him telling me in detail the breeding of each mare we came to and of the foal she carried, and even to my ignorant ears it sounded as if every Derby and Oaks winner for the past half century had had a hand in the coming generation.

‘I had no trouble selling Sandcastle’s nominations,’ he said. ‘Not even at forty thousand pounds a throw. I could even choose, to some extent, which mares to accept. It’s been utterly amazing to be able to turn away mares that I considered wouldn’t do him justice.’

‘Is there a temptation,’ I asked mildly, ‘to sell more than forty places? To... er... accept an extra fee... in untaxed cash... on the quiet?’

He was more amused than offended. ‘I wouldn’t say it hasn’t been done on every farm that ever existed. But I wouldn’t do it with Sandcastle... or at any rate not this year. He’s still young. And untested, of course. Some stallions won’t look at as many as forty mares... though shy breeders do tend to run in families, and there’s nothing in his pedigree to suggest he’ll be anything but energetic and fertile. I wouldn’t have embarked on all this if there had been any doubts.’

It seemed that he was trying to reassure himself as much as me; as if the size and responsibility of his undertaking had only just penetrated, and in penetrating, frightened.

I felt a faint tremor of dismay but stifled it with the reassurance that come hell or high water Sandcastle was worth his buying price and could be sold again even at this late date for not much less. The bank’s money was safe on his hoof.

It was earlier in the day than my last visit — eleven in the morning — and more lads than before were to be seen mucking out the boxes and carrying feed and water.

‘I’ve had to take on extra hands,’ Oliver Knowles said matter-of-factly. ‘Temporarily, for the season.’

‘Has recruitment been difficult?’ I asked.

‘Not really. I do it every spring. I keep the good ones on for the whole year, if they’ll stay, of course: these lads come and go as the whim takes them, the unmarried ones, that is. I keep the nucleus on and put them painting fences and such in the autumn and winter.’

We strolled into the second yard, where the butty figure of Nigel could be seen peering over a half-door into a box.

‘You remember Nigel?’ Oliver said. ‘My stud manager?’

Nigel, I noted, had duly been promoted.

‘And Ginnie,’ I asked, as we walked over, ‘is she home today?’

‘Yes, she’s somewhere about.’ He looked around as if expecting her to materialise at the sound of her name, but nothing happened.

‘How’s it going, Nigel?’ he asked.

Nigel’s hairy eyebrows withdrew from the box and aimed themselves in our direction. ‘Floradora’s eating again,’ he said, indicating the inspected lady and sounding relieved. ‘And Pattacake is still in labour. I’m just going back there.’

‘We’ll come,’ Oliver said. ‘If you’d like to?’ he added, looking at me questioningly.

I nodded and walked on with them along the path into the third, smaller quadrangle, the foaling yard.

Here too, in this place that had been empty, there was purposeful life, and the box to which Nigel led us was larger than normal and thickly laid with straw.

‘Foals usually drop at night,’ Oliver said, and Nigel nodded. ‘She started about midnight. She’s just lazy, eh, girl?’ He patted the brown rump. ‘Very slow. Same thing every year.’

‘She’s not come for Sandcastle, then?’ I said.

‘No. She’s one of mine,’ Oliver said. ‘The foal’s by Diarist.’

We hovered for a few minutes but there was no change in Pattacake. Nigel, running delicately knowledgeable hands over the shape under her ribs, said she’d be another hour, perhaps, and that he would stay with her for a while. Oliver and I walked onwards, past the still closed breeding shed and down the path between the two small paddocks towards the stallion yard. Everything, as before, meticulously tidy.

There was one four-legged figure in one of the paddocks, head down and placid. ‘Parakeet,’ Oliver said. ‘Getting more air than grass, actually. It isn’t warm enough yet for the new grass to grow.’

We came finally to the last yard, and there he was, the gilt-edged Sandcastle, looking over his door like any other horse.

One couldn’t tell, I thought. True there was a poise to the well-shaped head, and an interested eye and alertly pricked ears, but nothing to announce that this was the marvellous creature I’d seen at Ascot. No one ever again, I reflected, would see that arrow-like raking gallop, that sublime throat-catching valour: and it seemed a shame that he should be denied his ability in the hope that he would pass it on.

A lad, broom in hand, was sweeping scatterings of peat off the concrete apron in front of the six stallion boxes, watched by Sandcastle, Rotaboy and Diarist with the same depth of interest as a bus queue would extend to a busker.

‘Lenny,’ Oliver said, ‘you can take Sandcastle down to the small paddock opposite to the one with Parakeet.’ He looked up at the sky as if to sniff the coming weather. ‘Put him back in his box when you return for evening stables.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Lenny was well into middle age, small, leathery and of obviously long experience. He propped the broom against one of the empty boxes and disappeared into a doorway to reappear presently carrying a length of rope.

‘Lenny is one of my most trusted helpers,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Been with me several years. He’s good with stallions and much stronger than he looks. Stallions can be quite difficult to handle, but Lenny gets on with them better than with mares. Don’t know why.’

Lenny clipped the rope onto the head collar which Sandcastle, along with every other equine resident, wore at all times. Upon the head collar was stapled a metal plate bearing the horse’s name, an absolute essential for identification. Shuffle all those mares together without their head collars, I thought, and no one would ever sort them. I suggested the problem mildly to Oliver, who positively blenched. ‘God forbid! Don’t suggest such things. We’re very careful. Have to be. Otherwise, as you say, we could breed the wrong mare to the wrong stallion and never know it.’

I wondered, but privately, how often that in fact had happened, or whether indeed it was possible for two mares or two foals to be permanently swapped. The opportunities for mistakes, if not for outright fraud, put computer manipulation in the shade.

Nigel arrived in the yard, and with his scarcely necessary help Lenny opened Sandcastle’s door and led the colt out; and one could see in all their strength the sleek muscles, the tugging sinews, the spring-like joints. The body that was worth its weight in gold pranced and scrunched on the hard apron, wheeling round impatiently and tossing its uncomprehending head.

‘Full of himself,’ Oliver explained. ‘We have to feed him well and keep him fairly fit, but of course he doesn’t get the exercise he used to.’

We stepped to one side with undignified haste to avoid Sandcastle’s restless hindquarters. ‘Has he... er... started work yet?’ I asked.

‘Not yet,’ Oliver said. ‘Only one of his mares has foaled so far. She’s almost through her foal-heat, so when she comes into use in fifteen or sixteen days time, she’ll be his first. After that there will be a pause — give him time to think! — then he’ll be busy until into June.’

‘How often...?’ I murmured delicately.

Oliver fielded the question as if he, like Calder, had had to give the same answer countless times over.

‘It depends on the stallion,’ he said. ‘Some can cover one mare in the morning and another in the afternoon and go on like that for days. Others haven’t that much stamina or that much desire. Occasionally you get very shy and choosy stallions. Some of them won’t go near some mares but will mate all right with others. Some will cover only one mare a fortnight, if that. Stallions aren’t machines, you know, they’re individual like everyone else.’

With Nigel in attendance Lenny led Sandcastle out of the yard, the long bay legs stalking in powerful strides beside the almost trotting little man.

‘Sandcastle will be all right with mares,’ Oliver said again firmly. ‘Most stallions are.’

We stopped for Oliver to give two carrots and a pat each to Rotaboy and Diarist, so that we didn’t ourselves see the calamity. We heard a distant clatter and a yell and the thud of fast hooves, and Oliver went white as he turned to run to the disaster.

I followed him, also sprinting.

Lenny lay against one of the white painted posts of the small paddock’s rails, dazedly trying to pull himself up. Sandcastle, loose and excited, had found his way into one of the paths between the larger paddocks and from his bolting speed must have taken the rails to be those of a racecourse.

Nigel stood by the open gate of the small paddock, his mouth wide as if arrested there by shock. He was still almost speechless when Oliver and I reached him, but had at least begun to unstick.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Oliver shouted. ‘Get going. Get the Land Rover. He can get out onto the road that way through the Watcherleys’. He ran off in the direction of his own house leaving a partially resurrected Nigel to stumble off towards the bungalow, half in sight beyond the stallion yard.

Lenny raised himself and began his excuses, but I didn’t wait to listen. Unused to the problem and ignorant of how best to catch fleeing horses, I simply set off in Sandcastle’s wake, following his path between the paddocks and seeing him disappear ahead of me behind a distant hedge.

I ran fast along the grassy path between the rails, past the groups of incurious mares in the paddocks, thinking that my brief January holiday skiing down the pistes at Gstaad might have its practical uses after all; there was currently a lot more muscle in my legs than was ever to be found by July.

Whereas on my last visit the hedge between Oliver Knowles’ farm and the Watcherleys’ run-down hospital for sick horses had been a thorny unbroken boundary, there were now two or three wide gaps, so that passing from one side to the other was easy. I pounded through the gap which lay straight ahead and noticed almost unconsciously that the Watcherleys’ dilapidation had been not only halted but partially reversed, with new fencing going up and repairs in hand on the roofs.

I ran towards the stable buildings across a thistly field in which there was no sign of Sandcastle, and through an as yet unmended gate which hung open on broken hinges on the far side. Beyond there between piles of rubble and rusting iron I reached the yard itself, to find Ginnie looking around her with unfocused anxiety and a man and a girl walking towards her enquiringly.

Ginnie saw me running, and her first instinctively cheerful greeting turned almost at once to alarm.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is one of the mares out?’

‘Sandcastle.’

‘Oh no...’ It was a wail of despair. ‘He can get on the road.’ She turned away, already running, and I ran after her; out of the Watcherleys’ yard, round their ramshackle house and down the short weedy gateless drive to the dangerous outside world where a car could kill a horse without even trying.

‘We’ll never catch him,’ Ginnie said as we reached the road. ‘It’s no use running. We don’t know which way he went.’ She was in great distress: eyes flooding, tears on her cheeks. ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘I should think he’s out in his car, looking. And Nigel’s in a Land Rover.’

‘I heard a horse gallop through the Watcherleys’,’ she said. ‘I was in one of the boxes with a foal. I never thought... I mean, I thought it might be a mare...’

A speeding car passed in front of us, followed closely by two others doing at least sixty miles an hour, one of them dicily passing a heavy articulated lorry which should have been home in its nest on a Sunday. The thought of Sandcastle loose in that battlefield was literally goose-pimpling and I began for the first time to believe in his imminent destruction. One of those charging monsters would be sure to hit him. He would waver across the road into their path, swerving, rudderless, hopelessly vulnerable... a five million pound traffic accident in the making.

‘Let’s go this way,’ I said, pointing to the left. A motorcyclist roared from that direction, head down in a black visor, going too fast to stop.

Ginnie shook her head sharply. ‘Dad and Nigel will be on the road. But there’s a track over there...’ She pointed slantwise across the road. ‘He might just have found it. And there’s a bit of a hill and even if he isn’t up there at least we might see him from there... you can see the road in places... I often ride up there.’ She was off again, running while she talked, and I fell in beside her. Her face was screwed up with the intensity of her feelings and I felt as much sympathy for her as dismay about the horse. Sandcastle was insured — I’d vetted the policy myself — but Oliver Knowles’ prestige wasn’t. The escape and death of the first great stallion in his care would hardly attract future business.

The track was muddy and rutted and slippery from recent rain. There were also a great many hoofprints, some looking new, some overtrodden and old. I pointed to them as we ran and asked Ginnie pantingly if she knew if any of those were Sandcastle’s.

‘Oh.’ She stopped running suddenly. ‘Yes. Of course. He hasn’t got shoes on. The blacksmith came yesterday, Dad said...’ She peered at the ground dubiously, ‘... he left Sandcastle without new shoes because he was going to make leather pads for under them... I wasn’t really listening.’ She pointed. ‘I think that might be him. Those new marks... they could be, they really could.’ She began running again up the track, impelled by hope now as well as horror, fit in her jeans and sweater and jodhpur boots after all that compulsory jogging.

I ran beside her thinking that mud anyway washed easily from shoes, socks and trouser legs. The ground began to rise sharply and to narrow between bare-branched scratchy bushes; and the jumble of hoof marks inexorably led on and on.

‘Please be up here,’ Ginnie was saying. ‘Please, Sandcastle, please be up here.’ Her urgency pumped in her legs and ran in misery down her cheeks. ‘Oh please... please...’

The agony of adolescence, I thought. So real, so overpowering... so remembered.

The track curved through the bushes and opened suddenly into a wider place where grass grew in patches beside the rutted mud; and there stood Sandcastle, head high, nostrils twitching to the wind, a brown and black creature of power and beauty and majesty.

Ginnie stopped running in one stride and caught my arm fiercely.

‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. You stay here. Keep still. Please keep still.’

I nodded obediently, respecting her experience. The colt looked ready to run again at the slightest untimely movement, his sides quivering, his legs stiff with tension, his tail sweeping up and down restlessly.

He’s frightened, I thought suddenly. He’s out here, lost, not knowing where to go. He’s never been free before, but his instinct is still wild, still against being caught. Horses were never truly tamed, only accustomed to captivity.

Ginnie walked towards him making crooning noises and holding out her hand palm upwards, an offering hand with nothing to offer. ‘Come on, boy,’ she said. ‘Come on boy, there’s a good boy, it’s all right, come on now.’

The horse watched her as if he’d never seen a human before, his alarm proclaimed in a general volatile trembling. The rope hung down from his head collar, its free end curling on the ground; and I wondered whether Ginnie would be able to control the colt if she caught him, where Lenny with all his strength had let him go.

Ginnie came to within a foot of the horse’s nose, offering her open left hand upwards and bringing her right hand up slowly under his chin, reaching for the head collar itself, not the rope: her voice made soothing, murmuring sounds and my own tensed muscles began to relax.

At the last second Sandcastle would have none of it. He wheeled away with a squeal, knocking Ginnie to her knees; took two rocketing strides towards a dense patch of bushes, wheeled again, laid back his ears and accelerated in my direction. Past me lay the open track, down hill again to the slaughtering main road.

Ginnie, seen in peripheral vision, was struggling to her feet in desperation. Without thinking of anything much except perhaps what that horse meant to her family, I jumped not out of his way but at his flying head, my fingers curling for the head collar and missing that and fastening round the rope.

He nearly tore my arms out of their sockets and all the skin off my palms. He yanked me off my feet, pulled me through the mud and trampled on my legs. I clung all the same with both hands to the rope and bumped against his shoulder and knee, and shortly more by weight than skill hauled him to the side of the track and into the bushes.

The bushes, indeed, acted as an anchor. He couldn’t drag my heaviness through them, not if I kept hold of the rope; and I wound the rope clumsily round a stump of branch for leverage, and that was roughly that. Sandcastle stood the width of the bush away, crossly accepting the inevitable, tossing his head and quivering but no longer trying for full stampede.

Ginnie appeared round the curve in the track, running and if possible looking more than ever distraught. When she saw me she stumbled and half fell and came up to me uninhibitedly crying.

‘Oh, I’m so glad, so glad, and you should never do that, you can be killed, you should never do it, and I’m so grateful, so glad... oh dear.’ She leant against me weakly and like a child wiped her eyes and nose on my sleeve.

‘Well,’ I said pragmatically, ‘what do we do with him now?’

What we decided, upon consideration, was that I and Sandcastle should stay where we were, and that Ginnie should go and find Nigel or her father, neither she nor I being confident of leading our prize home without reinforcements.

While she was gone I made an inventory of damage, but so far as my clothes went there was nothing the cleaners couldn’t see to, and as for the skin, it would grow again pretty soon. My legs though bruised were functioning, and there was nothing broken or frightful. I made a ball of my handkerchief in my right palm which was bleeding slightly and thought that one of these days a habit of launching oneself at things like fleeing stallions and boys with knives might prove to be unwise.

Oliver, Ginnie, Nigel and Lenny all appeared in the Land Rover, gears grinding and wheels spinning in the mud. Sandcastle, to their obvious relief, was upon inspection pronounced sound, and Oliver told me forcefully that no one, should ever, repeat ever, try to stop a bolting horse in that way.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You could have been killed.’

‘So Ginnie said.’

‘Didn’t it occur to you?’ He sounded almost angry; the aftermath of fright. ‘Didn’t you think?’

‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just did it.’

‘Never do it again,’ he said, ‘And thanks,’ he paused and swallowed and tried to make light of his own shattered state. ‘Thanks for taking care of my investment.’

Lenny and Nigel had brought a different sort of head collar which involved a bit in the mouth and a fierce looking curb chain, and with these in place the captive (if not chastened) fugitive was led away. There seemed to me to be a protest in the stalking hindquarters, a statement of disgust at the injustices of life. I smiled at that fanciful thought; the pathetic fallacy, the ascribing to animals of emotions one felt only oneself.

Oliver drove Ginnie and me back in the Land Rover, travelling slowly behind the horse and telling how Nigel and Lenny had allowed him to go free.

‘Sheer bloody carelessness,’ he said forthrightly. ‘Both of them should know better. They could see the horse was fresh and jumping out of his skin yet Lenny was apparently holding the rope with only one hand and stretching to swing the gate open with the other. He took his eyes off Sandcastle so he wasn’t ready when Nigel made some sharp movement or other and the horse reared and ran backwards. I ask you! Lenny! Nigel! How can they be so bloody stupid after all these years?’

There seemed to be no answer to that so we just let him curse away, and he was still rumbling like distant thunder when the journey ended. Once home he hurried off to the stallion yard and Ginnie trenchantly said that if Nigel was as sloppy with discipline for animals as he was with the lads, it was no wonder any horse with spirit would take advantage.

‘Accidents happen,’ I said mildly.

‘Huh.’ She was scornful. ‘Dad’s right. That accident shouldn’t have happened. It was an absolute miracle that Sandcastle came to no harm at all. Even if he hadn’t got out on the road he could have tried to jump the paddock rails — loose horses often do — and broken his leg or something.’ She sounded as angry as her father, and for the same reason; the flooding release after fear. I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a quick hug, which seemed to disconcert her horribly. ‘Oh dear, you must think me so silly... and crying like that... and everything.’

‘I think you’re a nice dear girl who’s had a rotten morning,’ I said. ‘But all’s well now, you know; it really is.’

I naturally believed what I said, but I was wrong.

April

Calder Jackson finally came to dinner with me while he was staying in London to attend a world conference of herbalists. He would be glad, he said, to spend one of the evenings away from his colleagues, and I met him in a restaurant on the grounds that although my flat was civilized my cooking was not.

I sensed immediately a difference in him, though it was hard to define; rather as if he had become a figure still larger than life. Heads turned and voices whispered when we walked through the crowded place to our table, but because of television this would have happened anyway. Yet now, I thought, Calder really enjoyed it. There was still no overt arrogance, still a becoming modesty of manner, but something within him had intensified, crystallized, become a governing factor. He was now, I thought, even to himself, the Great Man.

I wondered what, if anything, had specifically altered him, and it turned out to be the one thing I would have least expected: Ian Pargetter’s death.

Over a plateful of succulent smoked salmon Calder apologised for the abrupt way he’d brushed me off on the telephone on that disturbing night, and I said it was most understandable.

‘Fact is,’ Calder said, squeezing lemon juice, ‘I was afraid my whole business would collapse. Ian’s partners, you know, never approved of me. I was afraid they would influence everyone against me, once Ian had gone.’

‘And it hasn’t worked out that way?’

He shook his head, assembling a pink forkful. ‘Remarkably not. Amazing.’ He put the smoked salmon in his mouth and made appreciative noises, munching. I was aware, and I guessed he was, too, that the ears of the people at the tables on either side were almost visibly attuned to the distinctive voice, to the clear loud diction with its country edge. ‘My yard’s still full. People have faith, you know. I may not get quite so many racehorses, that’s to be expected, but still a few.’

‘And have you heard any more about Ian Pargetter’s death? Did they ever find out who killed him?’

He looked regretful. ‘I’m sure they haven’t. I asked one of his partners the other day, and he said no one seemed to be asking questions any more. He was quite upset. And so am I. I suppose finding his murderer won’t bring Ian back, but all the same one wants to know.’

‘Tell me some of your recent successes,’ I said, nodding, changing the subject and taking a slice of paper-thin brown bread and butter. ‘I find your work tremendously interesting.’ I also found it about the only thing else to talk about, as we seemed to have few other points of contact. Regret it as I might, there was still no drift towards an easy personal friendship.

Calder ate some more smoked salmon while he thought. ‘I had a colt,’ he said at last, ‘a two-year-old in training. Ian had been treating him, and he’d seemed to be doing well. Then about three weeks after Ian died the colt started bleeding into his mouth and down his nose and went on and on doing it, and as Ian’s partner couldn’t find out the trouble the trainer persuaded the owner to send the horse to me.’

‘And did you discover what was wrong?’ I asked.

‘Oh no.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t necessary. I laid my hands on him on three succeeding days, and the bleeding stopped immediately. I kept him at my place for two weeks altogether, and returned him on his way back to full good health.’

The adjacent tables were fascinated, as indeed I was myself.

‘Did you give him herbs?’ I asked.

‘Certainly. Of course. And alfalfa in his hay. Excellent for many ills, alfalfa.’

I had only the haziest idea of what alfalfa looked like, beyond it being some sort of grass.

‘The one thing you can’t do with herbs,’ he said confidently, ‘is harm.’

I raised my eyebrows with my mouth full.

He gave the nearest thing to a grin. ‘With ordinary medicines one has to be so careful because of their power and their side effects, but if I’m not certain what’s wrong with a horse I can give it all the herbal remedies I can think of all at once in the hope that one of them will hit the target, and it quite often does. It may he hopelessly unscientific, but if a trained vet can’t tell exactly what’s wrong with a horse, how can I?’

I smiled with undiluted pleasure. ‘Have some wine,’ I said.

He nodded the helmet of curls, and the movement I made towards the bottle in its ice-bucket was instantly forestalled by a watchful waiter who poured almost reverently into the healer’s glass.

‘How was the American trip,’ I asked, ‘way back in January?’

‘Mm.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Interesting.’ He frowned a little and went back to finishing the salmon, leaving me wondering whether that was his total answer. When he’d laid down his knife and fork however he sat back in his chair and told me that the most enjoyable part of his American journey had been, as he’d expected, his few days on the ski slopes; and we discussed ski-ing venues throughout the roast beef and burgundy which followed.

With the crepes suzette I asked after Dissdale and Bettina and heard that Dissdale had been to New York on a business trip and that Bettina had been acting a small part in a British movie, which Dissdale hadn’t known whether to be pleased about or not. ‘Too many gorgeous young studs around,’ Calder said, smiling. ‘Dissdale gets worried anyway, and he was away for ten days.’

I pondered briefly about Calder’s own seemingly nonexistent sex-life: but he’d never seen me with a girl either, and certainly there was no hint in him of the homosexual.

Over coffee, running out of subjects, I asked about his yard in general, and how was the right-hand-man Jason in particular.

Calder shrugged. ‘He’s left. They come and go, you know. No loyalty these days.’

‘And you don’t fear... well, that he’d take your knowledge with him?’

He looked amused. ‘He didn’t know much. I mean, I’d hand out a pill and tell Jason which horse to give it to. That sort of thing.’

We finished amiably enough with a glass of brandy for each and a cigar for him, and I tried not to wince over the bill.

‘A very pleasant evening,’ Calder said. ‘You must come out to lunch again one day.’

‘I’d like to.’

We sat for a final few minutes opposite each other in a pause of mutual appraisal: two people utterly different but bonded by one-tenth of a second on a pavement in Ascot. Saved and saver, inextricably interested each in the other; a continuing curiosity which would never quite lose touch. I smiled at him slowly and got a smile in return, but all surface, no depth, a mirror exactly of my own feelings.

In the office things were slowly changing. John had boasted too often of his sexual conquests and complained too often about my directorship, and Gordon’s almost-equal had tired of such waste of time. I’d heard from Val Fisher in a perhaps edited version that at a small and special seniors meeting (held in my absence and without my knowledge) Gordon’s almost-equal had said he would like to boot John vigorously over St Paul’s. His opinion was respected. I heard from Alec one day merely that the mosquito which had stung me for so long had been squashed, and on going along the passage to investigate had found John’s desk empty and his bull-like presence but a quiver in the past.

‘He’s gone to sell air-conditioning to Eskimos,’ Alec said, and Gordon’s almost-equal, smiling affably, corrected it more probably to a partnership with some brokers on the Stock Exchange.

Alec himself seemed restless, as if his own job no longer held him enthralled.

‘It’s all right for you,’ he said once. ‘You’ve the gift. You’ve the sight. I can’t tell a gold mine from a pomegranate at five paces, and it’s taken me all these years to know it.’

‘But you’re a conjuror,’ I said. ‘You can rattle up outside money faster than anyone.’

‘Gift of the old gab, you mean.’ He looked uncharacteristically gloomy. ‘Syrup with a chisel in it.’ He waved his hand towards the desks of our new older colleagues, who had both gone out to lunch. ‘I’ll end up like them, still here, still smooth-talking, part of the furniture, coming up to sixty.’ His voice held disbelief that such an age could be achieved. ‘That isn’t life, is it? That’s not all?’

I said that I supposed it might be.

‘Yes, but for you it’s exciting,’ he said. ‘I mean, you love it. Your eyes gleam. You get your kicks right here in this room. But I’ll never be made a director, let’s face it, and I have this grotty feeling that time’s slipping away, and soon it will be too late to start anything else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like being an actor. Or a doctor. Or an acrobat.’

‘It’s been too late for that since you were six.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lousy, isn’t it?’ He put his heart and soul ten minutes later, however, into tracking down a source of a hundred thousand for several years and lending it to a businessman at a profitable rate, knitting together such loan packages all afternoon with diligence and success.

I hoped he would stay. He was the yeast of the office: my bubbles in the dough. As for myself, I had grown accustomed to being on the board and had slowly found I’d reached a new level of confidence. Gordon seemed to treat me unreservedly as an equal, though it was not until he had been doing it for some time that I looked back and realized.

Gordon’s hitherto uniformly black hair had grown a streak or two of grey. His right hand now trembled also, and his handwriting had grown smaller through his efforts to control his fingers. I watched his valiant struggles to appear normal and respected his privacy by never making even a visual comment: it had become second nature to look anywhere but directly at his hands. In the brain department he remained energetic, but physically over all he was slowing down.

I had only seen Judith once since Christmas, and that had been in the office at a retirement party given for the head of Corporate Finance, a golden-handshake affair to which all managers’ wives had been invited.

‘How are you?’ she said amid the throng, holding a glass of wine and an unidentifiable canapé and smelling of violets.

‘Fine. And you?’

‘Fine.’

She was wearing blue, with diamonds in her ears. I looked at her with absolute and unhappy love and saw the strain it put into her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

She shook her head and swallowed. ‘I thought... it might be different... here in the bank.’

‘No.’

She looked down at the canapé, which was squashy and yellow. ‘If I don’t eat this damned thing soon it’ll drop down my dress.’

I took it out of her fingers and deposited it in an ashtray. ‘Invest in a salami cornet. They stay rock-hard for hours.’

‘What’s Tim telling you to invest in?’ demanded Henry Shipton, turning to us a beaming face.

‘Salami,’ Judith said.

‘Typical. He lent money to a seaweed processor last week. Judith, my darling, let me freshen your glass.’

He took the glass away to the bottles and left us again looking at each other with a hundred ears around.

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘When it’s warmer, could I take you and Gordon, and Pen if she’d like it, out somewhere one Sunday? Somewhere not ordinary. All day.’

She took longer than normal politeness to answer, and I understood all the unspoken things, but finally, as Henry could be seen returning, she said, ‘Yes. We’d all like it. I’d like it... very much.’

‘Here you are,’ Henry said. ‘Tim, you go and fight for your own refill, and leave me to talk to this gorgeous girl.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and swept her off, and although I was vividly aware all evening of her presence, we had no more moments alone.

From day to day when she wasn’t around I didn’t precisely suffer: her absence was more of a faint background ache. When I saw Gordon daily in the office I felt no constant envy, nor hated him, nor even thought much of where he slept. I liked him for the good clever man he was, and our office relationship continued unruffled and secure. Loving Judith was both pleasure and pain, delight and deprivation, wishes withdrawn, dreams denied. It might have been easier and more sensible to have met and fallen heavily for some young glamorous unattached stranger, but the one thing love never did have was logic.

‘Easter,’ I said to Gordon one day in the office. ‘Are you and Judith going away?’

‘We had plans — they fell through.’

‘Did Judith mention that I’d like to take you both somewhere — and Pen Warner — as a thank you for Christmas?’

‘Yes, I believe she did.’

‘Easter Monday, then?’

He seemed pleased at the idea and reported the next day that Judith had asked Pen, and everyone was poised. ‘Pen’s bringing her kite,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s a day trip to Manchester.’

‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tell her it won’t be raining.’

What I did eventually think of seemed to please them all splendidly and also to be acceptable to others concerned, and I consequently collected Gordon and Judith and Pen (but not the kite) from Clapham at eight-thirty on Easter Bank Holiday morning. Judith and Pen were in fizzing high spirits, though Gordon seemed already tired. I suggested abandoning what was bound to be a fairly taxing day for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

‘I want to go,’ he said. ‘Been looking forward to it all week. But I’ll just sit in the back of the car and rest and sleep some of the way.’ So Judith sat beside me while I drove and touched my hand now and then, not talking much but contenting me deeply by just being there. The journey to Newmarket lasted two and a half hours and I would as soon it had gone on for ever.

I was taking them to Calder’s yard, to the utter fascination of Pen. ‘But don’t tell him I’m a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘He might clam up if he knew he had an informed audience.’

‘We won’t tell,’ Judith assured her. ‘It would absolutely spoil the fun.’

Poor Calder, I thought: but I wouldn’t tell him either.

He greeted us expansively (making me feel guilty) and gave us coffee in the huge oak-beamed sitting room where the memory of Ian Pargetter hovered peripherally by the fireplace.

‘Delighted to see you again,’ Calder said, peering at Gordon, Judith and Pen as if trying to conjure a memory to fit their faces. He knew of course who they were by name, but Ascot was ten months since, and although it had been an especially memorable day for him he had met a great many new people between then and now. ‘Ah yes,’ he said with relief, his brow clearing. ‘Yellow hat with roses.’

Judith laughed. ‘Well done.’

‘Can’t forget anyone so pretty.’

She took it as it was meant, but indeed he hadn’t forgotten: as one tended never to forget people whose vitality brought out the sun.

‘I see Dissdale and Bettina quite often,’ he said, making conversation, and Gordon agreed that he and Judith, also, sometimes saw Dissdale, though infrequently. As a topic it was hardly riveting, but served as an acceptable unwinding interval between the long car journey and the Grand Tour.

The patients in the boxes were all different but their ailments seemed the same; and I supposed surgeons could be excused their impersonal talk of ‘the appendix in bed 14’, when the occupants changed week by week but the operation didn’t.

‘This is a star three-day-eventer who came here five weeks ago with severe muscular weakness and no appetite. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t be ridden. He goes home tomorrow, strong and thriving. Looks well, eh?’ Calder patted the glossy brown neck over the half-stable door. ‘His owner thought he was dying, poor girl. She was weeping when she brought him here. It’s really satisfying, you know, to be able to help.’

Gordon said civilly that it must be.

‘This is a two-year-old not long in training. Came with an intractably infected wound on his fetlock. He’s been here a week, and he’s healing. It was most gratifying that the trainer sent him without delay, since I’d treated several of his horses in the past.’

‘This mare,’ Calder went on, moving us all along, ‘came two or three days ago in great discomfort with blood in her urine. She’s responding well, I’m glad to say.’ He patted this one too, as he did them all.

‘What was causing the bleeding?’ Pen asked, but with only an uninformed-member-of-the-public intonation.

Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know. His vet diagnosed a kidney infection complicated by crystalluria, which means crystals in the urine, but he didn’t know the type of germ and, every antibiotic he gave failed to work. So the mare came here. Last resort.’ He gave me a wink, ‘I’m thinking of simply re-naming this whole place “Last Resort”.’

‘And you’re treating her,’ Gordon asked, ‘with herbs?’

‘With everything I can think of,’ Calder said. ‘And of course... with hands.’

‘I suppose,’ Judith said diffidently, ‘that you’d never let anyone watch...?’

‘My dear lady, for you, anything,’ Calder said. ‘But you’d see nothing. You might stand for half an hour, and nothing would happen. It would be terribly boring. And I might, perhaps, be unable, you know, if someone was waiting and standing there.’

Judith smiled understandingly and the tour continued, ending as before in the surgery.

Pen stood looking about her with sociable blankness and then wandered over to the glass-fronted cabinets to peer myopically at the contents.

Calder, happily ignoring her in favour of Judith, was pulling out his antique tablet-maker and demonstrating it with pride.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Judith said sincerely. ‘Do you use it much?’

‘All the time,’ he said. ‘Any herbalist worth the name makes his own pills and potions.’

‘Tim said you had a universal magic potion in the fridge.’

Calder smiled and obligingly opened the refrigerator door, revealing the brown-filled plastic containers, as before.

‘What’s in it?’ Judith asked.

‘Trade secret,’ he said, smiling. ‘Decoction of hops and other things.’

‘Like beer?’ Judith said.

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘Horses do drink beer,’ Gordon said. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’

Pen bent down to pick up a small peach-coloured pill which was lying unobtrusively on the floor in the angle of one of the cupboards, and put it without comment on the bench.

‘It’s all so absorbing,’ Judith said. ‘So tremendously kind of you to show us everything. I’ll watch all your program with more fervour than ever.’

Calder responded to her warmly as all men did and asked us into the house again for a drink before we left. Gordon however was still showing signs of fatigue and now also hiding both hands in his pockets which meant he felt they were trembling badly, so the rest of us thanked Calder enthusiastically for his welcome and made admiring remarks about his hospital and climbed into the car, into the same places as before.

‘Come back any time you like, Tim,’ he said; and I said thank you and perhaps I would. We shook hands, and we smiled, caught in our odd relationship and unable to take it further. He waved, and I waved back as I drove away.

‘Isn’t he amazing?’ Judith said. ‘I must say, Tim, I do understand why you’re impressed.’

Gordon grunted and said that theatrical surgeons weren’t necessarily the best; but yes, Calder was impressive.

It was only Pen, after several miles, who expressed her reservations.

‘I’m not saying he doesn’t do a great deal of good for the horses. Of course he must do, to have amassed such a reputation. But I don’t honestly think he does it all with herbs.’

‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked, twisting round so as to see her better.

Pen leaned forward, ‘I found a pill on the floor. I don’t suppose you noticed.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘You put it on the bench.’

‘That’s right. Well, that was no herb, it was plain straightforward warfarin.’

‘It may be plain straightforward war-whatever to you,’ Judith said. ‘But not to me.’

Pen’s voice was smiling. ‘Warfarin is a drug used in humans, and I dare say in horses, after things like heart attacks. It’s a coumarin — an anticoagulant. Makes the blood less likely to clot and block up the veins and arteries. Widely used all over the place.’

We digested the information in silence for a mile or two, and finally Gordon said ‘How did you know it was warfarin? I mean, how can you tell?’

‘I handle it every day,’ she said. ‘I know the dosages, the sizes, the colors, the manufacturers’ marks. You see all those things so often, you get to know them at a glance.’

‘Do you mean,’ I said interestedly, ‘that if you saw fifty different pills laid out in a row you could identify the lot?’

‘Probably. If they all came from major drug companies and weren’t completely new, certainly, yes.’

‘Like a wine-taster,’ Judith said.

‘Clever girl,’ Gordon said, meaning Pen.

‘It’s just habit.’ She thought. ‘And something else in those cupboards wasn’t strictly herbal, I suppose. He had one or two bags of potassium sulphate, bought from Goodison’s Garden Centre, wherever that is.’

‘Whatever for?’ Judith asked. ‘Isn’t potassium sulphate a fertiliser?’

‘Potassium’s just as essential to animals as to plants,’ Pen said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t one of the ingredients in that secret brew.’

‘What else would you put in it, if you were making it?’ I asked curiously.

‘Oh heavens.’ She pondered. ‘Any sort of tonic. Perhaps liquorice root, which he once mentioned. Maybe caffeine. All sorts of vitamins. Just a pepping-up mish-mash.’

The hardest part of the day had been to find somewhere decent to have lunch, and the place I’d chosen via the various gourmet guides turned out, as so often happens, to have changed hands and chefs since the books were written. The resulting repast was slow to arrive and disappointing to eat, but the mood of my guests forgave all.

‘You remember,’ Gordon said thoughtfully over the coffee, ‘that you told us on the way to Newmarket that Calder was worried about his business when that vet was killed?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was, at the time.’

‘Isn’t it possible,’ Gordon said, ‘that the vet was letting Calder have regular official medicines, like warfarin, and Calder thought his supplies would dry up, when the vet died?’

‘Gordon!’ Judith said. ‘How devious you are, darling.’

We all thought about it however, and Pen nodded. ‘He must have found another willing source, I should think.’

‘But,’ I protested, ‘would vets really do that?’

‘They’re not particularly brilliantly paid,’ Pen said. ‘Not badly by my standards, but they’re never rich.’

‘But Ian Pargetter was very much liked,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pen said. ‘Nothing to stop him passing on a few pills and advice to Calder in return for a fat untaxed fee.’

‘To their mutual benefit,’ Gordon murmured.

‘The healer’s feet of clay,’ Judith said. ‘What a shame.’

The supposition seemed slightly to deflate the remembered pleasure of the morning, but the afternoon’s visit put the rest o f the day up high.

We went this time to Oliver Knowles’ stud farm and found the whole place flooded with foals and mares and activity.

‘How beautiful,’ Judith said, looking away over the stretches of white railed paddocks with their colonies of mothers and babies. ‘How speechlessly great.’

Oliver Knowles, introduced, was as welcoming as Calder and told Gordon several times that he would never, ever, be out of his debt of gratitude to Paul Ekaterin’s, however soon he had paid off his loan.

The anxiety and misgivings to be seen in him on my February visit had all disappeared: Oliver was again, and more so, the capable and decisive executive I had met first. The foals had done well, I gathered. Not one from the mares coming to Sandcastle had been lost, and none of those mares had had any infection, a triumph of care. He told me all this within the first ten minutes, and also that Sandcastle had proved thoroughly potent and fertile and was a dream of a stallion. ‘He’s tireless,’ he said. ‘Forty mares will be easy.’

‘I’m so glad,’ I said, and meant it from the bottom of my banking heart.

With his dog Squibs at his heels he showed us all again through the succession of yards, where since it was approximately four o’clock the evening ritual of mucking out and feeding was in full swing.

‘A stud farm is not like a racing stable, of course,’ Oliver was explaining to Gordon. ‘One lad here can look after far more than three horses, because they don’t have to be ridden. And here we have a more flexible system because the mares are sometimes in, sometimes out in the paddocks, and it would be impossible to assign particular mares to particular lads. So here a lad does a particular section of boxes, regardless of which animals are in them.’

Gordon nodded, genially interested.

‘Why are some foals in the boxes and some out in the paddocks?’ Judith asked, and Oliver without hesitation told her it was because the foals had to stay with their dams, and the mares with foals in the boxes were due to come into heat, or were already in heat, and would go from their boxes to visit the stallion. When their heat was over they would go out into the paddocks, with their foals.

‘Oh,’ Judith said, blinking slightly at this factory aspect. ‘Yes, I see.’

In the foaling yard we came across Nigel and also Ginnie, who ran across to me when she saw me and gave me a great hug and a smacking kiss somewhere to the left of the mouth. Quite an advance in confidence, I thought, and hugged her back, lifting her off her feet and whirling her round in a circle. She was laughing when I put her down, and Oliver watched in some surprise.

‘I’ve never known her so demonstrative,’ he said.

Ginnie looked at him apprehensively and held onto my sleeve. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked me worriedly.

‘I’m flattered,’ I said, meaning it and also thinking that her father would kill off her spontaneity altogether if he wasn’t careful.

Ginnie, reassured, tucked her arm into mine and said ‘Come and look at the newest foal. It was born only about twenty minutes ago. It’s a colt. A darling.’ She tugged me off, and I caught a fleeting glance of Judith’s face which was showing a mixture of all sorts of unreadable thoughts.

‘Oliver’s daughter,’ I said in explanation over my shoulder, and heard Oliver belatedly introducing Nigel.

They all came to look at the foal over the half-door; a glistening little creature half-lying, half-sitting on the thick straw, all long nose, huge eyes and folded legs, new life already making an effort to balance and stand up. The dam, on her feet, alternately bent her head to the foal and looked up at us warily.

‘It was an easy one,’ Ginnie said. ‘Nigel and I just watched.

‘Have you seen many foals born?’ Pen asked her.

‘Oh, hundreds. All my life. Most often at night.’

Pen looked at her as if she, as I did, felt the imagination stirred by such an unusual childhood: as if she, like myself, had never seen one single birth of any sort, let alone a whole procession by the age of fifteen.

‘This mare has come to Sandcastle,’ Oliver said.

‘And will that foal win the Derby?’ Gordon asked, smiling.

Oliver smiled in return. ‘You never know. He has the breeding.’ He breathed deeply, expanding his chest. ‘I’ve never been able to say anything like that before this year. No foal born or conceived here has in the past won a classic, but now...’ he gestured widely with his arm,‘... one day, from these...’ he paused. ‘It’s a whole new world. It’s... tremendous.’

‘As good as you hoped?’ I asked.

‘Better.’

He had a soul after all, I thought, under all that tidy martial efficiency. A vision of the peaks, which he was reaching in reality. And how soon, I wondered, before the glossy became commonplace, the Classic winners a routine, the aristocrats the common herd. It would be what he’d aimed for; but in a way it would be blunting.

We left the foal and went on down the path past the breeding shed, where the main door was today wide open, showing the floor thickly covered with soft brown crumbly peat. Beyond succinctly explaining what went on there when it was inhabited, Oliver made no comment, and we all walked on without stopping to the heart of the place, to the stallions.

Lenny was there, walking one of the horses round the small yard and plodding with his head down as if he’d been doing it for some time. The horse was dripping with sweat, and from the position of the one open empty box I guessed he would be Rotaboy.

‘He’s just covered a mare,’ Oliver said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s always like that afterwards.’

Judith and Gordon and Pen all looked as if the overt sex of the place was earthier than they’d expected, even without hearing, as I had at one moment, Oliver quietly discussing a vaginal disinfectant process with Nigel. They rallied valiantly however and gazed with proper awe at the head of Sandcastle which swam into view from the inside-box shadows.

He held himself almost imperiously, as if his new role had basically changed his character; and perhaps it had. I had myself seen during my renewed interest in racing how constant success endowed some horses with definite ‘presence’, and Sandcastle, even lost and frightened up on top of the hill, had perceptibly had it; but now, only two months later, there was a new quality one might almost call arrogance, a fresh certainty of his own supremacy.

‘He’s splendid,’ Gordon exclaimed. ‘What a treat to see him again after that great day at Ascot.’

Oliver gave Sandcastle the usual two carrots and a couple of pats, treating the King with familiarity. Neither Judith nor Pen, nor indeed Gordon or myself, tried even to touch the sensitive nose: afraid of getting our fingers bitten off at the wrist, no doubt. It was all right to admire, but distance had virtue.

Lenny put the calming-down Rotaboy back in his box and started mucking out Diarist next door.

‘We have two lads looking after the stallions full time,’ Oliver said. ‘Lenny, here, and another much trusted man, Don. And Nigel feeds them.’

Pen caught the underlying thought behind his words and asked, ‘Do you need much security?’

‘Some,’ he said, nodding. ‘We have the yard wired for sound, so either Nigel or I, when we’re in our houses, can hear if there are any irregular noises.’

‘Like hooves taking a walk?’ Judith suggested.

‘Exactly.’ He smiled at her. ‘We also have smoke alarms and massive extinguishers.’

‘And brick-built boxes and combination locks on these door bolts at night and lockable gates on all the ways out to the roads,’ Ginnie said, chattily. ‘Dad’s really gone to town on security.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Gordon said.

I smiled to myself at the classic example of bolting the stable door after the horse had done likewise, but indeed one could see that Oliver had learned a dire lesson and knew he’d been lucky to be given a second chance.

We began after a while to walk back towards the house, stopping again in the foaling yard to look at the new baby colt, who was now shakily on his feet and searching round for his supper.

Oliver drew me to one side and asked if I would like to see Sandcastle cover a mare, an event apparently scheduled for a short time hence.

‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

‘I can’t ask them all — there isn’t room,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Ginnie to show them the mares and foals in the paddocks and then take them indoors for tea.’

No one demurred at this suggested programme, especially as Oliver didn’t actually mention where he and I were going: Judith, I was sure, would have preferred to join us. Ginnie took them and Squibs off, and I could hear her saying ‘Over there, next door, there’s another yard. We could walk over that way if you like.’

Oliver, eying them amble along the path that Sandcastle had taken at a headlong gallop and I at a sprint, said, ‘The Watcherleys look after any delicate foals or any mares with infections. It’s all worked out most satisfactorily. I rent their place and they work for me, and their expertise with sick animals comes in very useful.’

‘And you were mending their fences for them, I guess, when I came in February.’

‘That’s right.’ He sighed ruefully. ‘Another week and the gates would have been up in the hedge and across their driveway, and Sandcastle would never have got out.’

‘No harm done,’ I said.

‘Thanks to you, no.’

We went slowly back towards the breeding shed. ‘Have you seen a stallion at work before?’ he asked.

‘No, I haven’t.’

After a pause he said, ‘It may seem strong to you. Even violent. But it’s normal to them. Remember that. And he’ll probably bite her neck, but it’s as much to keep himself in position as an expression of passion.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘This mare, the one we’re breeding, is receptive, so there won’t be any trouble. Some mares are shy, some are slow to arouse, some are irritable, just like humans.’ He smiled faintly. ‘This little lady is a born one-nighter.’

It was the first time I’d heard him make anything like a joke about his profession and I was almost startled. As if himself surprised at his own words he said more soberly, ‘We put her to Sandcastle yesterday morning, and all went well.’

‘The mares go more than once then, to the stallion?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘It depends of course on the stud farm, but I’m very anxious as you can guess that all the mares here shall have the best possible chance of conceiving. I bring them all at least twice to the stallion during their heat, then we put them out in the paddocks and wait, and if they come into heat again it means they haven’t conceived, so we repeat the breeding process.’

‘And how long do you go on trying?’

‘Until the end of July. That means the foal won’t be born until well on in June, which is late in the year for racehorses. Puts them at a disadvantage as two-year-olds, racing against March and April foals which have had more growing time.’ He smiled. ‘With any luck Sandcastle won’t have any late June foals. It’s too early to be complacent, but none of the mares he covered three weeks or more ago has come back into use.’

We reached and entered the breeding shed where the mare already stood, held at the head in a loose twitch by one lad and being washed and attended to by another.

‘She can’t wait, sir,’ that lad said, indicating her tail, which she was holding high, and Oliver replied rather repressively, ‘Good.’

Nigel and Lenny came with Sandcastle, who looked eagerly aware of where he was and what for. Nigel closed the door to keep the ritual private; and the mating which followed was swift and sure and utterly primeval. A copulation of thrust and grandeur, of vigour and pleasure, not without tenderness: remarkably touching.

‘They’re not all like that,’ Oliver remarked prosaically, as Sandcastle slid out and backwards and brought his forelegs to earth with a jolt. ‘You’ve seen a good one.’

I thanked him for letting me be there, and in truth I felt I understood more about horses then than I’d ever imagined I would.

We walked back to the house with Oliver telling me that with the four stallions there were currently six, seven or eight matings a day in the breeding shed, Sundays included. The mind stuttered a bit at the thought of all that rampaging fertility, but that, after all, was what the bank’s five million pounds was all about. Rarely, I thought, had anyone seen Ekaterin’s money so fundamentally at work.

We set off homewards fortified by tea, scones and whisky, with Oliver and Gordon at the end competing over who thanked whom most warmly. Ginnie gave me another but more composed hug and begged me to come again, and Judith kissed her and offered female succour if ever needed.

‘Nice child,’ she said as we drove away. ‘Growing up fast.’

‘Fifteen,’ I said.

‘Sixteen. She had a birthday last week.’

‘You got on well with her,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She looked round at Pen and Gordon, who were again sitting in the back. ‘She told us about your little escapade here two months ago.’

‘She didn’t!’

‘She sure did,’ Pen said, smiling. ‘Why ever didn’t you say?’

‘I know why,’ Gordon said dryly. ‘He didn’t want it to be known in the office that the loan he’d recommended had very nearly fallen under a lorry.’

‘Is that right?’ Judith asked.

‘Very much so,’ I admitted wryly. ‘Some of the board were against the whole thing anyway, and I’d have never heard the end of the horse getting out.’

‘What a coward,’ Pen said, chuckling.

We pottered slowly back to Clapham through the stop-go end-of-Bank-Holiday traffic, and Judith and Pen voted it the best day they’d had since Ascot. Gordon dozed, I drove with relaxation and so we finally reached the tall gates by the common.

I went in with them for supper as already arranged, but all of them, not only Gordon, were tired from the long day, and I didn’t stay late. Judith came out to the car to see me off and to shut the gates after I’d gone.

We didn’t really talk. I held her in my arms, her head on my shoulder, my head on hers, close in the dark night, as far apart as planets.

We stood away and I took her hand, lingering, not wanting all contact lost.

‘A great day,’ she said, and I said ‘Mm’, and kissed her very briefly.

Got into the car and drove away.

October

Summer had come, summer had gone, sodden, cold and unloved. It had been overcast and windy during Royal Ascot week and Gordon and I, clamped to our telephones and pondering our options, had looked at the sullen sky and hardly minded that this year Dissdale hadn’t needed to sell half-shares in his box.

Only with the autumn, far too late, had days of sunshine returned, and it was on a bright golden Saturday that I took the race train to Newbury to see the mixed meeting of two jump races and four flat.

Ursula Young was there, standing near the weighing room when I walked in from the station and earnestly reading her race card.

‘Hello,’ she said when I greeted her. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. How’s the money-lending?’

‘Profitable,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘Are you here for anything special?’

‘No. Just fresh air and a flutter.’

‘I’m supposed to meet a client.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time for a quick sandwich, though. Are you on?’

I was on, and bought her and myself a thin pallid slice of tasteless white meat between two thick pallid tasteless slices of soggy-crusted bread, the whole wrapped up in cardboard and cellophane and costing a fortune.

Ursula ate it in disgust. ‘They used to serve proper luscious sandwiches, thick, juicy handmade affairs which came in a whole stack. I can’t stand all this repulsive hygiene.’ The rubbish from the sandwiches indeed littered most of the tables around us... ‘Every so-called advance is a retreat from excellence,’ she said, dogmatic as ever.

I totally agreed with her and we chewed in joyless accord.

‘How’s trade with you?’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘Fair. The cream of the yearlings are going for huge prices. They’ve all got high reserves on them because they’ve cost so much to produce — stallion fees and the cost of keeping the mare and foal to start with, let alone vet’s fees and all the incidentals. My sort of clients on the whole settle for a second, third or fourth rank, and many a good horse, mind you, has come from the bargain counter.’

I smiled at the automatic sales pitch. ‘Talking of vets,’ I said, is the Pargetter murder still unsolved?’

She nodded regretfully. ‘I was talking to his poor wife in Newmarket last week. We met in the street. She’s only half the girl she was, poor thing, no life in her. She said she asked the police recently if they were still even trying, and they assured her they were, but she doesn’t believe it. It’s been so long, nine months, and if they hadn’t any leads to start with, how can they possibly have any now? She’s very depressed, it’s dreadful.’

I made sympathetic murmurs, and Ursula went on, ‘The only good thing you could say is that he’d taken out decent life insurance and paid off the mortgage on their house, so at least she and the children aren’t penniless as well. She was telling me how he’d been very careful in those ways, and she burst into tears, poor girl.’

Ursula looked as if the encounter had distressed her also.

‘Have another whisky-mac,’ I suggested. ‘To cheer you up.’

She looked at her watch. ‘All right. You get it, but I’ll pay. My turn.’

Over the second drink, in a voice of philosophical irritation, she told me about the client she was presently due to meet, a small-time trainer of steeplechasers. ‘He’s such a fool to himself,’ she said. ‘He makes hasty decisions, acts on impulse, and then when things go wrong he feels victimized and cheated and gets angry. Yet he can be perfectly nice when he likes.’

I wasn’t especially interested in the touchy trainer, but when I went outside again with Ursula he spotted her from a short distance away and practically pounced on her arm.

‘There you are,’ he said, as if she’d had no right to be anywhere but at his side. ‘I’ve been looking all over.’

‘It’s only just time,’ she said mildly.

He brushed that aside, a short wiry intense man of about forty with a pork-pie hat above a weatherbeaten face.

‘I wanted you to see him before he’s saddled,’ he said. ‘Do come on, Ursula. Come and look at his conformation.’

She opened her mouth to say something to me but he almost forcefully dragged her off, holding her sleeve and talking rapidly into her ear. She gave me an apologetic look of long-suffering and departed in the direction of the pre-parade ring, where the horses for the first race were being led round by their lads before going off to the saddling boxes.

I didn’t follow but climbed onto the steps of the main parade ring, round which walked several of the runners already saddled. The last of the field to appear some time later was accompanied by the pork-pie hat, and also Ursula, and for something to do I looked the horse up in the race card.

Zoomalong, five-year-old gelding, trained by F. Barnet.

F. Barnet continued his dissertation into Ursula’s ear, aiming his words from approximately six inches away, which I would have found irritating but which she bore without flinching. According to the flickering numbers on the Tote board Zoomalong had a medium chance in the opinion of the public, so for interest I put a medium stake on him to finish in the first three.

I didn’t see Ursula or F. Barnet during the race, but Zoomalong zoomed along quite nicely to finish third, and I walked down from the stands towards the unsaddling enclosure to watch the patting-on-the-back post-race routine.

F. Barnet was there, still talking to Ursula and pointing out parts of his now sweating and stamping charge. Ursula nodded non-committally, her own eyes knowledgeably raking the gelding from stem to stern, a neat competent good looking fifty in a rust-coloured coat and brown velvet beret.

Eventually the horses were led away and the whole cycle of excitement began slowly to regenerate towards the second race.

Without in the least meaning to I again found myself standing near Ursula, and this time she introduced me to the pork-pie hat, who had temporarily stopped talking.

‘This is Fred Barnet,’ she said. ‘And his wife Susan.’ A rounded motherly person in blue. ‘And their son, Ricky.’ A boy taller than his father, dark-haired, pleasant-faced.

I shook hands with all three, and it was while I was still touching the son that Ursula in her clear voice said my name, ‘Tim Ekaterin.’

The boy’s hand jumped in mine as if my flesh had burned him. I was astonished, and then I looked at his whitening skin, at the suddenly frightened dark eyes, at the stiffening of the body, at the rising panic: and I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t reacted in that way.

‘What’s the matter, Ricky?’ his mother said, puzzled.

He said ‘Nothing’ hoarsely and looked around for escape, but all too clearly he knew I knew exactly who he was now and could always find him however far he ran.

‘What do you think, then, Ursula?’ Fred Barnet demanded, returning to the business in hand. ‘Will you buy him? Can I count on you?’

Ursula said she would have to consult her client.

‘But he was third,’ Fred Barnet insisted. ‘A good third... In that company, a pretty good showing. And he’ll win, I’m telling you. He’ll win.’

‘I’ll tell my client all about him. I can’t say fairer than that.’

‘But you do like him, don’t you? Look, Ursula, he’s a good sort, easy to handle, just right for an amateur...’ He went on for a while in this vein while his wife listened with a sort of aimless beam meaning nothing at all.

To the son, under cover of his father’s hard sell, I quietly said, ‘I want to talk to you, and if you run away from me now I’ll be telephoning the police.’

He gave me a sick look and stood still.

‘We’ll walk down the course together to watch the next race,’ I said. ‘We won’t be interrupted there. And you can tell me why. And then we’ll see.’

It was easy enough for him to drop back unnoticed from his parents, who were still concentrating on Ursula, and he came with me through the gate and out across the track itself to the centre of the racecourse, stumbling slightly as if not in command of his feet. We walked down towards the last fence, and he told me why he’d tried to kill Calder Jackson.

‘It doesn’t seem real, not now, it doesn’t really,’ he said first. A young voice, slightly sloppy accent, full of strain.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Seventeen.’

I hadn’t been so far out, I thought, fifteen months ago.

‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ he said explosively, sounding faintly aggrieved at the twist of fate. ‘I mean, the papers said you worked in a bank.’

‘So I do. And I go racing.’ I paused. ‘You remembered my name.’

‘Yeah. Could hardly forget it, could I? All over the papers.’

We went a few yards in silence. ‘Go on,’ I said.

He made a convulsive gesture of frustrated despair. ‘All right. But if I tell you, you won’t tell them, will you, not Mum and Dad?’

I glanced at him, but from his troubled face it was clear that he meant exactly what he’d said: it wasn’t my telling the police he minded most, but my telling his parents.

‘Just get on with it,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘Well, we had this horse. Dad did. He’d bought it as a yearling and ran it as a two-year-old and at three, but it was a jumper really, and it turned out to be good.’ He paused. ‘Indian Silk, that’s what it was called.’

I frowned. ‘But Indian Silk... didn’t that win at Cheltenham this year, in March?’

He nodded. ‘The Gold Cup. The very top. He’s only seven now and he’s bound to be brilliant for years.’ The voice was bitter with a sort of resigned, stifled anger.

‘But he doesn’t any longer belong to your father?’

‘No, he doesn’t.’ More bitterness, very sharp.

‘Go on, then,’ I said.

He swallowed and took his time, but eventually he said, ‘Two years ago this month, when Indian Silk was five, like, he won the Hermitage ’Chase very easily here at Newbury, and everyone was tipping him for the Gold Cup last year, though Dad was saying he was still on the young side and to give him time. See, Dad was that proud of that horse. The best he’d ever trained, and it was his own, not someone else’s. Don’t know if you can understand that.’

‘I do understand it,’ I said.

He gave a split-second glance at my face. ‘Well, Indian Silk got sick,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was nothing you could put your finger on. He just lost his speed. He couldn’t even gallop properly at home, couldn’t beat the other horses in Dad’s yard that he’d been running rings round all year. Dad couldn’t run him in races. He could hardly train him. And the vet couldn’t find out what was wrong with him. They took blood tests and all sorts, and they gave him antibiotics and purges, and they thought it might be worms or something, but it wasn’t.’

We had reached the last fence, and stood there on the rough grass beside it while in twos and threes other enthusiasts straggled down from the grandstand towards us to watch the horses in action at close quarters.

‘I was at school a lot of the time, see,’ Ricky said. ‘I was home every night of course but I was taking exams and had a lot of homework and I didn’t really want to take much notice of Indian Silk getting so bad or anything. I mean, Dad does go on a bit, and I suppose I thought the horse just had the virus or something and would get better. But he just got slowly worse and one day Mum was crying.’ He stopped suddenly, as if that part was the worst. ‘I hadn’t seen a grown up cry before,’ he said. ‘Suppose you’ll think it funny, but it upset me something awful.’

‘I don’t think it funny,’ I said.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, seeming to gather confidence, ‘It got so that Indian Silk was so weak he could barely walk down the road and he wasn’t eating, and Dad was in real despair because there wasn’t nothing anyone could do, and Mum couldn’t bear the thought of him going to the knackers, and then some guy telephoned and offered to buy him.’

To buy a sick horse?’ I said, surprised.

‘I don’t think Dad was going to tell him just how bad he was. Well, I mean, at that point Indian Silk was worth just what the knackers would pay for his carcass, which wasn’t much, and this man was offering nearly twice that. But the man said he knew Indian Silk couldn’t race any more but he’d like to give him a good home in a nice field for as long as necessary, and it meant that Dad didn’t have the expense of any more vets’ bills and he and Mum didn’t have to watch Indian Silk just getting worse and worse, and Mum wouldn’t have to think of him going to the knackers for dog meat, so they let him go.’

The horses for the second race came out onto the course and galloped down past us, the jockeys’ colors bright in the sun.

‘And then what?’ I said.

‘Then nothing happened for weeks and we were getting over it, like, and then someone told Dad that Indian Silk was back in training and looking fine, and he couldn’t believe it.’

‘When was that?’ I asked.

‘It was last year, just before... before Ascot.’

A small crowd gathered on the landing side of the fence, and I drew him away down the course a bit further, to where the horses would set themselves right to take off.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘My exams were coming up,’ he said. ‘And I mean, they were important, they were going to affect my whole life, see?’

I nodded.

‘Then Dad found that the man who’d bought Indian Silk hadn’t put him in any field, he’d sent him straight down the road to Calder Jackson.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘And there was this man saying Calder Jackson had the gift of healing, some sort of magic, and had simply touched Indian Silk and made him well. I ask you... And Dad was in a frightful state because someone had suggested he should send the horse there, to Calder Jackson, while he was so bad, of course, and Dad had said don’t be so ridiculous it was all a lot of rubbish. And then Mum was saying he should have listened to her, because she’d said why not try it, it couldn’t do any harm, and he wouldn’t do it, and they were having rows, and she was crying...’ He gulped for air, the story now pouring out faster almost than he could speak. ‘And I wasn’t getting any work done with it all going on, they weren’t ever talking about anything else, and I took the first exam and just sat there and couldn’t do it, and I knew I’d failed and I was going to fail them all because I couldn’t concentrate... and then there was Calder Jackson one evening talking on television, saying he’d got a friend of his to buy a dying horse, because the people who owned it would just have let it die because they didn’t believe in healers, like a lot of people, and he hoped the horse would be great again some day, like before, thanks to him, and I knew he was talking about Indian Silk. And he said he was going to Ascot on that Thursday... and there was Dad screaming that Calder Jackson had stolen the horse away, it was all a filthy swindle, which of course it wasn’t, but at the time I believed him... and it all got so that I hated Calder Jackson so much that I couldn’t think straight. I mean, I thought he was the reason Mum was crying and I was failing my exams and Dad had lost the only really top horse he’d have in his whole life, and I just wanted to kill him.’

The bed-rock words were out, and the flood suddenly stopped, leaving the echo of them on the October air.

‘And did you fail your exams?’ I asked, after a moment.

‘Yeah. Most of them. But I took them again at Christmas and got good passes.’ He shook his head, speaking more slowly, more quietly. ‘I was glad even that night that you’d stopped me stabbing him. I mean... I’d have thrown my whole life away, I could see it afterwards, and all for nothing, because Dad wasn’t going to get the horse back whatever I did, because it was a legal sale, like.’

I thought over what he’d told me while in the distance the horses lined up and set off on their three mile steeplechase.

‘I was sort of mad,’ he said. ‘I can’t really understand it now. I mean, I wouldn’t go around trying to kill people. I really wouldn’t. It seems like I was a different person.’

Adolescence, I thought, and not for the first time, could be hell.

‘I took Mum’s knife out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘She never could think where it had gone.’

I wondered if the police still had it; with Ricky’s fingerprints on file.

‘I didn’t know there would be so many people at Ascot,’ he said. ‘And so many gates into the course. Much more than Newmarket. I was getting frantic because I thought I wouldn’t find him. I meant to do it earlier, see, when he arrived. I was out on the road, running up and down the pavement, mad, you know, really, looking for him and feeling the knife kind of burning in my sleeve, like I was burning in my mind... and I saw his head, all those curls, crossing the road, and I ran, but I was too late, he’d gone inside, through the gate.’

‘And then,’ I suggested. ‘You simply waited for him to come out?’

He nodded. ‘There were lots of people around. No one took any notice. I reckoned he’d come up that path from the station, and that was the way he would go back. It didn’t seem long, the waiting. Went in a flash.’

The horses came over the next fence down the course like a multi-coloured wave and thundered towards the one where we were standing. The ground trembled from the thud of the hooves, the air rang with the curses of jockeys, the half-ton equine bodies brushed through the birch, the sweat and the effort and the speed filled eyes and ears and mind with pounding wonder and then were gone, flying away, leaving the silence. I had walked down several times before to watch from the fences, both there and on other tracks, and the fierce fast excitement had never grown stale.

‘Who is it who owns Indian Silk now?’ I asked.

‘A Mr Chacksworth, comes from Birmingham,’ Ricky answered. ‘You see him at the races sometimes, slobbering all over Indian Silk. But it wasn’t him that bought him from Dad. He bought him later, when he was all right again. Paid a proper price for him, so we heard. Made it all the worse.’

A sad and miserable tale, all of it.

‘Who bought the horse from your father?’ I said.

‘I never met him... his name was Smith. Some funny first name. Can’t remember.’

Smith. Friend of Calder’s.

‘Could it,’ I asked, surprised, ‘have been Dissdale Smith?’

‘Yeah. That sounds like it. How do you know?’

‘He was there that day at Ascot,’ I said. ‘There on the pavement, right beside Calder Jackson.’

‘Was he?’ Ricky looked disconcerted. ‘He was a dead liar, you know, all that talk about nice fields.’

‘Who tells the truth,’ I said, ‘when buying or selling horses?’

The runners were round again on the far side of the track, racing hard now on the second circuit.

‘What are you going to do?’ Ricky said. ‘About me, like? You won’t tell Mum and Dad. You won’t, will you?’

I looked directly at the boy-man, seeing the continuing anxiety but no longer the first panic-stricken fear. He seemed to sense now that I would very likely not drag him into court, but he wasn’t sure of much else.

‘Perhaps they should know,’ I said.

‘No!’ His agitation rose quickly. ‘They’ve had so much trouble and I would have made it so much worse if you hadn’t stopped me, and afterwards I used to wake up sweating at what it would have done to them; and the only good thing was that I did learn that you can’t put things right by killing people, you can only make things terrible for your family.’

After a long pause I said ‘All right. I won’t tell them.’ And heaven help me, I thought, if he ever attacked anyone again because he thought he could always get away with it.

The relief seemed to affect him almost as much as the anxiety. He blinked several times and turned his head away to where the race was again coming round into the straight with this time an all-out effort to the winning post. There was again the rise and fall of the field over the distant fences but now the one wave had split into separate components, the runners coming home not in a bunch but a procession.

I watched again the fierce surprising speed of horse and jockey jumping at close quarters and wished with some regret that I could have ridden like that: but like Alec I was wishing too late, even strong and healthy and thirty-three.

The horses galloped off towards the cheers on the grandstand and Ricky and I began a slow walk in their wake. He seemed quiet and composed in the aftermath of confession, the soul’s evacuation giving him ease.

‘What do you feel nowadays about Calder Jackson?’ I asked.

He produced a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing much. That’s what’s so crazy. I mean, it wasn’t his fault Dad was so stubborn.’

I digested this. ‘You mean,’ I said. ‘That you think your father should have sent him the horse himself?’

‘Yes, I reckon he should’ve, like Mum wanted. But he said it was rubbish and too expensive, and you don’t know my Dad but when he makes his mind up he just gets fighting angry if anyone tries to argue, and he shouts at her, and it isn’t fair.’

‘If your father had sent the horse to Calder Jackson, I suppose he would still own it,’ I said thoughtfully.

‘Yes, he would, and don’t think he doesn’t know it, of course he does, but it’s as much as anyone’s life’s worth to say it.’

We trudged back over the thick grass, and I asked him how Calder or Dissdale had known that Indian Silk was ill.

He shrugged. ‘It was in the papers. He’d been favourite for the King George VI on Boxing Day, but of course he didn’t run, and the press found out why.’

We came again to the gate into the grandstand enclosure and went through it, and I asked where he lived.

‘Exning,’ he said.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Near Newmarket. Just outside.’ He looked at me with slightly renewed apprehension. ‘You meant it, didn’t you, about not telling?’

‘I meant it,’ I said. ‘Only...’ I frowned a little, thinking of the hot-house effect of his living with his parents.

‘Only what?’ he asked.

I tried a different tack. ‘What are you doing now? Are you still at school?’

‘No, I left once I’d passed those exams. I really needed them, like. You can’t get a half-way decent job without those bits of paper these days.’

‘You’re not working for your father, then?’

He must have heard the faint relief in my voice because for the first time he fully smiled. ‘No, I reckon it wouldn’t be good for his temper, and anyway I don’t want to be a trainer, one long worry, if you ask me.’

‘What do you do, then?’ I asked.

‘I’m learning electrical engineering in a firm near Cambridge. An apprentice, like.’ He smiled again. ‘But not with horses, not me.’ He shook his head ruefully and delivered his young-solomon judgement of life. ‘Break your heart, horses do.’

November

To my great delight the cartoonist came up trumps, his twenty animated films being shown on television every weeknight for a month in the best time-slot for that sort of humour, seven in the evening, when older children were still up and the parents home from work. The nation sat up and giggled, and the cartoonist telephoned breathlessly to ask for a bigger loan.

‘I do need a proper studio, not this converted warehouse. And more animators, and designers, and recordists, and equipment.’

‘All right,’ I said into the first gap. ‘Draw up your requirements and come and see me.’

‘Do you realise,’ he said, as if he himself had difficulty, ‘That they’ll take as many films as I can make? No limit. They said just go on making them for years and years... they said please go on making them.’

‘I’m very glad,’ I said sincerely.

‘You gave me faith in myself,’ he said. ‘You’ll never believe it, but you did. I’d been turned down so often, and I was getting depressed, but when you lent me the money to start it was like being uncorked. The ideas just rushed out.’

‘And are they still rushing?’

‘Oh sure. I’ve got the next twenty films roughed out in drawings already and we’re working on those, and now I’m starting on the batch after that.’

‘It’s terrific,’ I said.

‘It sure is. Brother, life’s amazing.’ He put down his receiver and left me smiling into space.

‘The cartoonist?’ Gordon said.

I nodded. ‘Going up like a rocket.’

‘Congratulations.’ There was warmth and genuine pleasure in his voice. Such a generous man, I thought: so impossible to do him harm.

‘He looks like turning into a major industry,’ I said.

‘Disney, Hanna Barbera, eat your hearts out,’ Alec said from across the room.

‘Good business for the bank.’ Gordon beamed. ‘Henry will be pleased.’

Pleasing Henry, indeed, was the aim of us all.

‘You must admit, Tim,’ Alec said, ‘That you’re a fairish rocket yourself... so what’s the secret?’

‘Light the blue paper and retire immediately,’ I said good-humoredly, and he balled a page of jottings to throw at me, and missed.

At mid-morning he went out as customary for the six copies of What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t and having distributed five was presently sitting back in his chair reading our own with relish.

Ekaterin’s had been thankfully absent from the probing columns ever since the five-per-cent business, but it appeared chat some of our colleagues along the road weren’t so fortunate.

‘Did you know,’ Alec said conversationally, ‘That some of our investment manager chums down on the corner have set up a nice little fiddle on the side, accepting pay-offs from brokers in return for steering business their way?’

‘How do you know?’ Gordon asked, looking up from a ledger.

Alec lifted the paper. ‘The gospel according to this dicky bird.’

‘Gospel meaning good news,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so damned erudite.’ He grinned at me with mischief and went back to reading aloud, ‘Contrary to popular belief the general run of so-called managers in merchant banks are not in the princely bracket.’ He looked up briefly. ‘You can say that again.’ He went on, ‘We hear that four of the investment managers in this establishment have been cosily supplementing their middle-incomes by steering fund money to three stockbrokers in particular. Names will be revealed in our next issue. Watch this space.’

‘It’s happened before,’ Gordon said philosophically. ‘And will happen again. The temptation is always there.’ He frowned. ‘All the same, I’m surprised their senior managers and the directors haven’t spotted it.’

‘They’ll have spotted it now,’ Alec said.

‘So they will.’

‘It would be pretty easy,’ I said musingly, ‘To set up a computer programme to do the spotting for Ekaterin’s, in case we should ever find the pestilence cropping up here.’

‘Would it?’ Gordon asked.

‘Mm. Just a central programme to record every deal in the Investment Department with each stockbroker, with running totals, easy to see. Anything hugely unexpected could be investigated.’

‘But that’s a vast job, surely,’ Gordon said.

I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. I could get our tame programmer to have a go, if you like.’

‘We’ll put it to the others. See what they say.’

‘There will be screeches from Investment Management,’ Alec said. ‘Cries of outraged virtue.’

‘Guards them against innuendo like this, though,’ Gordon said, pointing to What’s Going On Where...

The board agreed, and in consequence I spent another two days with the programmer, building dykes against future leaks.

Gordon these days seemed no worse, his illness not having progressed in any visible way. There was no means of knowing how he felt, as he never said and hated to be asked, but on the few times I’d seen Judith since the day at Easter, she had said he was as well as could be hoped for.

The best of those times had been a Sunday in July when Pen had given a lunch party in her house in Clapham; it was supposed to have been a lunch-in-the-garden party, but like so much that summer was frustrated by chilly winds. Inside was to me much better, as Pen had written place-cards for her long refectory table and put me next to Judith, with Gordon on her right hand.

The other guests remained a blur, most of them being doctors of some sort or another, or pharmacists like herself. Judith and I made polite noises to the faces on either side of us but spent most of the time talking to each other, carrying on two conversations at once, one with voice, one with eyes; both satisfactory.

When the main party had broken up and gone, Gordon and Judith and I stayed to supper, first helping Pen clear up from what she described as ‘repaying so many dinners at one go’.

It had been a day when natural opportunities for touching people abounded, when kisses and hugs of greeting had been appropriate and could be warm, when all the world could watch and see nothing between Judith and me but an enduring and peaceful friendship: a day when I longed to have her for myself worse than ever.

Since then I’d seen her only twice, and both times when she’d come to the bank to collect Gordon before they went on to other events. On each of these times I’d managed at least five minutes with her, stiffly circumspect, Gordon’s colleague being polite until Gordon himself was ready to leave.

It wasn’t usual for wives to come to the bank: husbands normally joined them at wherever they were going. Judith said, the second time, ‘I won’t do this often. I just wanted to see you, if you were around.’

‘Always here,’ I said.

She nodded. She was looking as fresh and poised as ever, wearing a neat blue coat with pearls showing. The brown hair was glossy, the eyes bright, the soft mouth half smiling, the glamour born in her and unconscious.

‘I get... well... thirsty, sometimes,’ she said.

‘Permanent state with me,’ I said lightly.

She swallowed. ‘Just for a moment or two...’

We were standing in the entrance hall, not touching, waiting for Gordon.

‘Just to see you...’ She seemed uncertain that I understood, but I did.

‘It’s the same for me,’ I assured her. ‘I sometimes think of going to Clapham and waiting around just to see you walk down the street to the bakers. Just to see you, even for seconds.’

‘Do you really?’

‘I don’t go, though. You might send Gordon to buy the bread.’

She laughed a small laugh, a fitting size for the bank; and he came, hurrying, struggling into his overcoat. I sprang to help him and he said to her, ‘Sorry, darling, got held up on the telephone, you know how it is.’

‘I’ve been perfectly happy,’ she said, kissing him, ‘talking to Tim.’

‘Splendid. Splendid. Are we ready then?’

They went off to their evening smiling and waving and leaving me to hunger futilely for this and that.

In the office one day in November Gordon said ‘How about you coming over to lunch on Sunday? Judith was saying it’s ages since she saw you properly.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘Pen’s coming, Judith said.’

Pen, my friend; my chaperone.

‘Great,’ I said positively. ‘Lovely.’

Gordon nodded contentedly and said it was a shame we couldn’t all have a repeat of last Christmas, he and Judith had enjoyed it so much. They were going this year to his son and daughter-in-law in Edinburgh, a visit long promised; to his son by his first long-dead wife, and his grandchildren, twin boys of seven.

‘You’ll have fun,’ I said regretfully.

‘They’re noisy little brutes.’

His telephone rang, and mine also, and money-lending proceeded. I would be dutiful, I thought, and spend Christmas with my mother in Jersey, as she wanted, and we would laugh and play backgammon, and I would sadden her as usual by bringing no girl-friend, no prospective producer of little brutes.

‘Why, my love,’ she’d said to me once a few years earlier in near despair, ‘do you take out these perfectly presentable girls and never marry them?’

‘There’s always something I don’t want to spend my life with.’

‘But you do sleep with them?’

‘Yes, darling, I do.’

‘You’re too choosy.’

‘I expect so,’ I said.

‘You haven’t had a single one that’s lasted,’ she complained. ‘Everyone else’s sons manage to have live-in girl friends, sometimes going on for years even if they don’t marry, so why can’t you?’

I’d smiled at the encouragement to what would once have been called sin, and kissed her, and told her I preferred living alone, but that one day I’d find the perfect girl to love for ever; and it hadn’t even fleetingly occurred to me that when I found her she would be married to someone else.

Sunday came and I went to Clapham: bitter-sweet hours, as ever.

Over lunch I told them tentatively that I’d seen the boy who had tried to kill Calder, and they reacted as strongly as I’d expected, Gordon saying, ‘You’ve told the police, of course,’ and Judith adding ‘He’s dangerous, Tim.’

I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t think so. I hope not.’ I smiled wryly and told them all about Ricky Barnet and Indian Silk, and the pressure which had led to the try at stabbing. ‘I don’t think he’ll do anything like that again. He’s grown so far away from it already that he feels a different person.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ Gordon said.

‘Fancy it being Dissdale who bought Indian Silk,’ Pen said. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’

‘Especially as he was saying he was short of cash and wanting to sell box-space at Ascot,’ Judith added.

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘But after Calder had cured the horse Dissdale sold it again pretty soon, and made a handsome profit, by what I gather.’

‘Typical Dissdale behaviour,’ Gordon said without criticism. ‘Face the risk, stake all you can afford, take the loot if you’re lucky, and get out fast.’ He smiled. ‘By Ascot I guess he’d blown the Indian Silk profit and was back to basics. It doesn’t take someone like Dissdale any longer to lose thousands than it does to make them.’

‘He must have colossal faith in Calder,’ Pen said musingly.

‘Not colossal, Pen,’ Gordon said. ‘Just twice what a knacker would pay for a carcass.’

‘Would you buy a sick-to-death horse?’ Judith asked, i mean, if Calder said buy it and I’ll cure him, would you believe it?’

Gordon looked at her fondly. ‘I’m not Dissdale, darling, and I don’t think I’d buy it.’

‘And that is precisely,’ I pointed out, ‘why Fred Barnet lost Indian Silk. He thought Calder’s powers were all rubbish and he wouldn’t lash out good money to put them to the test. But Dissdale did. Bought the horse and presumably also paid Calder... who boasted about his success on television and nearly got himself killed for it.’

‘Ironic, the whole thing,’ Pen said, and we went on discussing it desultorily over coffee.

I stayed until six, when Pen went off to her shop for a Sunday-evening stint and Gordon began to look tired, and I drove back to Hampstead in the usual post-Judith state; half-fulfilled, half-starved.

Towards the end of November, and at Oliver Knowles’ invitation, I travelled to another Sunday lunch, this time at the stud farm in Hertfordshire.

It turned out, not surprisingly, to be one of Ginnie’s days home from school, and it was she, whistling to Squibs, who set off with me through the yards.

‘Did you know we had a hundred and fifty-two mares here all at the same time, back in May?’ she said.

‘That’s a lot,’ I said, impressed.

‘They had a hundred and fourteen foals between them, and only one of the mares and three of the foals died. That’s a terrifically good record, you know.’

‘Your father’s very skilled.’

‘So is Nigel,’ she said grudgingly. ‘You have to give him his due.’

I smiled at the expression.

‘He isn’t here just now,’ she said. ‘He went off to Miami yesterday to lie in the sun.’

‘Nigel?’

She nodded. ‘He goes about this time every year. Sets him up for the winter, he says.’

‘Always Miami?’

‘Yes, he likes it.’

The whole atmosphere of the place was back to where I’d known it first, to the slow chill months of gestation. Ginnie, snuggling inside her padded jacket, gave carrots from her pocket to some of the mares in the first yard and walked me without stopping through the empty places, the second yard, the foaling yard, and past the breeding shed.

We came finally as always to the stallion yard where the curiosity of the residents brought their heads out the moment they heard our footsteps. Ginnie distributed carrots and pats with the aplomb of her father, and Sandcastle graciously allowed her to stroke his nose.

‘He’s quiet now,’ she said. ‘He’s on a much lower diet at this time of year.’

I listened to the bulk of knowledge behind the calm words and I said, ‘What are you going to do when you leave school?’

‘This, of course.’ She patted Sandcastle’s neck. ‘Help Dad. Be his assistant.’

‘Nothing else?’

She shook her head. ‘I love the foals. Seeing them born and watching them grow. I don’t want to do anything else, ever.’

We left the stallions and walked between the paddocks with their foals and dams, along the path to the Watcherleys’, Squibs trotting on ahead and marking his fence posts. The neighbouring place, whose ramshackle state I’d only glimpsed on my pursuit of the loose five million, proved now to be almost as neat as the parent spread, with much fresh paint in evidence and weeds markedly absent.

‘Dad can’t bear mess,’ Ginnie said when I remarked on the spit-and-polish. ‘The Watcherleys are pretty lucky, really, with Dad paying them rent and doing up their place and employing them to look after the animals in this yard. Bob may still gripe a bit at not being on his own, but Maggie was telling me just last week that she would be everlastingly thankful that Calder Jackson stole their business.’

‘He hardly stole it,’ I said mildly.

‘Well, you know what I mean. Did better at it, if you want to be pedantic’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, Maggie’s bought some new clothes at last, and I’m glad for her.’

We opened and went into a few of the boxes where she handed out the last of the carrots and fondled the inmates, both mares and growing foals, talking to them, and all of them responded amiably to her touch, nuzzling her gently. She looked at peace and where she belonged, all growing pains suspended.