Bonecrack

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Every evening during the week before the Lincoln I spent hours answering the telephone. One owner after another rang up, and without exception sounded depressed. This, I discovered, after the fourth in a row had said in more or less identical words, 'can't expect much with your father chained to his bed', was because the invalid in question had been extremely busy on the blower himself.

He had rung them all up, apologised for my presence, told them to expect nothing, and promised them that everything would be restored to normal as soon as he got back. He had also told his co-owner of Pease Pudding, a Major Barnette, that in his opinion the horse was not fit to run; and it had taken me half an hour of my very best persuasive tongue to convince the Major that as my father hadn't seen the horse for the past six weeks, he didn't actually know.

Looking into his activities more closely, I found that my father had also written privately every week to Etty for progress reports and had told her not to tell me she was sending them. I practically bullied this last gem out of her on the morning before the Lincoln, having cottoned on to what was happening only through mentioning that my father had told all the owners the horses were unfit. Something guilty in her expression had given her away, but she fended off my bitterness by claiming that she hadn't actually said they were unfit: that was just the way my father had chosen to interpret things.

I went into the office and asked Margaret if my father had telephoned or written to her for private reports. She looked embarrassed and said that he had.

When I spoke about race tactics to Tommy Hoylake that Friday, he said not to worry, my father had rung him up and given him his instructions.

'And what were they?' I asked, with a great deal more restraint than I was feeling.

'Oh- just to keep in touch with the field and not drop out of the back door when he blows up.'

'Um- If he hadn't rung you up, how would you have planned to ride?' I said.

'Keep him well up all the time,' he said promptly. 'When he's fit, he's one of those horses who likes to make the others try to catch him. I'd pick him up two furlongs out, take him to the front, and just pray he'd stay there.'

'Ride him like that, then,' I said. 'I've got a hundred pounds on him, and I don't usually bet.'

His mouth opened in astonishment. 'But your father-'

'Promise you'll ride the horse to win,' I said pleasantly, 'or I'll put someone else up.'

I was insulting him. No one ever suggested replacing Tommy Hoylake. He looked uncertainly at my open expression and came to the conclusion that because of my inexperience I didn't realise the enormity of what I'd said.

He shrugged. 'All right. I'll give it a whirl. Though what your father will say-'

My father had not finished saying, not by six or more calls, mostly, it appeared, to the Press. Three papers on the morning of the Lincoln quoted his opinion that Pease Pudding had no chance. He'd have me in before the Stewards, I grimly reflected, if the horse did any good.

Among all this telephonic activity he rang me only once. Although the overpowering bossiness had not returned to his voice, he sounded stilted and displeased, and I gathered that the champagne truce had barely seen me out of the door.

He rang on the Thursday evening after I got back from Doncaster, and I told him how helpful everyone had been.

'Hmph,' he said, 'I'll ring the Clerk of the Course tomorrow, and ask him to keep an eye on things.'

'Have you entirely cornered the telephone trolley?' I asked.

'Telephone trolley? Could never get hold of it for long enough. Too many people asking for it all the time. No, no. I told them I needed my own private extension, here in this room, and after a lot of fuss and delay they fixed one up. I insisted, of course, that I had a business to run.'

'And you insisted often?'

'Of course,' he said without humour, and I knew from long experience that the hospital had had as much chance as an egg under a steamroller.

'The horses aren't as backward as you think,' I told him. 'You don't really need to be so pessimistic.'

'You're no judge of a horse,' he said dogmatically; and it was the day after that that he talked to the Press.

Major Barnette gloomed away in the parade ring and poured scorn and pity on my hefty bet.

'Your father told me not to throw good money after bad,' he said. 'And I can't think why I let you persuade me to run.'

'You can have fifty of my hundred, if you like.' I offered it with the noblest of intentions, but he took it as a sign that I wanted to get rid of some of my losses.

'Certainly not,' he said resentfully.

He was a spare, elderly man of middle height, who stood at the slightest provocation upon his dignity. Sign of basic failure, I diagnosed uncharitably, and remembered the old adage that some owners were harder to train than their horses.

The twenty-nine runners for the Lincoln were stalking long-leggedly round the parade ring, with all the other owners and trainers standing about in considering groups. Strong, cold north-west winds had blown the clouds away and the sun shone brazenly from a brilliant high blue sky. When the jockeys trickled through the crowd and emerged in a sunburst into the parade ring, their glossy colours gleamed and reflected the light like children's toys.

The old-young figure of Tommy Hoylake in bright green bounced towards us with a carefree aura of play-it-as-it-comes, which did nothing to persuade Major Barnette that his half share of the horse would run well.

'Look,' he said heavily to Tommy, 'Just don't get tailed off. If it looks as if you will be, pull up and jump off, for God's sake, and pretend the horse is lame or the saddle's slipped. Anything you like, but don't let it get around that the horse is no good, or its stud value will sink like a stone.'

'I don't think he'll actually be tailed off, sir,' Tommy said judiciously, and cast an enquiring glance up at me.

'Just ride him as you suggested,' I said, 'And don't leave it all in the lap of the Gods.'

He grinned. Hopped on the horse. Flicked his cap to Major Barnette. Went on his light-hearted way.

The Major didn't want to watch the race with me, which suited me fine. My mouth felt dry. Suppose after all that my father was right- that I couldn't tell a fit horse from a letter-box, and that he in his hospital bed was a better judge. Fair enough, if the horse ran stinkingly badly I would acknowledge my mistake and do a salutary spot of grovelling.

Pease Pudding didn't run stinkingly badly.

The horses had cantered a straight mile away from the stands, circled, sorted, lined up, and started back at a flat gallop. Unused to holding race glasses and to watching races head-on from a mile away, I couldn't for a long time see Tommy at all, even though I knew vaguely where to look for him: drawn number twenty-one, almost midfield. I put the glasses down after a while and just watched the mass making its distant way towards the stands, a multi-coloured charge dividing into two sections, one each side of the course. Each section narrowed until the centre of the track was bare, and it looked as though two separate races were being held at the same time.

I heard his name on the commentary before I spotted the colours.

'And now on the stands' side it's Pease Pudding coming to take it up. With two furlongs to go, Pease Pudding on the rails with Gossamer next and Badger making up ground now behind them, and

Willy Nilly on the far side followed by Thermometer, Student Unrest, Manganeta-' He rattled off a long string of names to which I didn't listen.

That he had been fit enough to hit the front two furlongs from home was all that mattered. I honestly didn't care from that moment whether he won or lost. But he did win. He won by a short head from Badger, holding his muzzle stubbornly in front when it looked impossible that he shouldn't be caught, with Tommy Hoylake moving rhythmically over the withers and getting out of him the last milligram of balance, of stamina, of utter bloody-minded refusal to be beaten.

In the winner's unsaddling enclosure Major Barnette looked more stunned than stratospheric, but Tommy Hoylake jumped down with the broadest of grins and said, 'Hey, what about that, then? He had the goods in the parcel after all.'

'So he did,' I said, and told the discountenanced pressmen that anyone could win the Lincoln any old day of the week: any old day, given the horse, the luck, the head lad, my father's stable routine, and the second best jockey in the country.

About twenty people having suddenly developed a close friendship with Major Barnette, he drifted off more or less at their suggestion to the bar to lubricate their hoarse-from-cheering throats. He asked me lamely to join him, but as I had caught his eye just when, recovering from his surprise, he had been telling the world that he always knew Pease Pudding had it in him, I saved him embarrassment and declined.

When the crowd round the unsaddling enclosure had dispersed and the fuss had died away, I somehow found myself face to face with Alessandro, who had been driven to Doncaster that day, and the previous day, by a partially revitalised chauffeur.

His face was as white as his yellowish skin could get, and his black eyes were as deep as pits. He regarded me with a shaking, strung up intensity, and seemed to have difficulty in actually saying what was hovering on the edge. I looked back at him without emotion of any sort, and waited.

'All right,' he said jerkily, after a while. 'All right. Why don't you say it? I expect you to say it.'

'There's no need,' I said neutrally. 'And no point.'

Some of the jangle drained out of his face. He swallowed with difficulty.

'I will say it for you, then,' he said. 'Pease Pudding would not have won if you had let me ride it.'

'No, he wouldn't,' I agreed.

'I could see,' he said, still with a shake in his voice, That I couldn't have ridden like that. I could see-'

Humility was a torment for Alessandro.

I said, in some sort of compassion, 'Tommy Hoylake has no more determination than you have, and no better hands. But what he does have is a marvellous judgement of pace and tremendous polish in a tight finish. Your turn will come, don't doubt it.'

Even if his colour didn't come back, the rest of the rigidity disappeared. He looked more dumbfounded than anything else.

He said slowly, 'I thought- I thought you would- what is it Miss Craig says-? rub my nose in it.'

I smiled at the sound of the colloquialism in his careful accent.

'No, I wouldn't do that.'

He took a deep breath and involuntarily stretched his arms out sideways.

'I want-' he said, and didn't finish it.

You want the world, I thought. And I said, 'Start on Wednesday.'

When the horsebox brought Pease Pudding back to Rowley Lodge that night the whole stable turned out to greet him. Etty's face was puckered with a different emotion from worry, and she fussed over the returning warrior like a mother hen. The colt himself clattered stiff legged down the ramp into the yard and modestly accepted the melon sized grins and the earthy comments (you did it, you old bugger) which were directed his way.

'Surely every winner doesn't get this sort of reception,' I said to Etty, after I'd come out of the house to investigate the bustle. I had reached the house half an hour before the horse, and found everything quiet: the lads had finished evening stables and gone round to the hostel for their tea.

'It's the first of the season,' she said, her eyes shining in her good plain face. 'And we didn't expect- well, I mean- without Mr Griffon and everything-'

'I told you to have more faith in yourself, Etty.'

'It's bucked the lads up no end,' she said, ducking the compliment. 'Everyone was watching on TV. They made such a noise in the hostel they must have heard them at the Forbury Inn-'

The lads were all spruced up for their Saturday evening out. When they'd seen Pease Pudding safely stowed away, they set off in a laughing and cheering bunch to make inroads into the stocks of the Golden Lion; and until I saw the explosive quality of their pleasure, I hadn't realised the extent of their depression. But they had after all, I reflected, read the papers. And they were used to believing my father rather than their own eyes.

'Mr Griffon will be so pleased,' Etty said, with genuine, unsophisticated certainty.

But Mr Griffon, predictably, was not.

I drove down to see him the following afternoon and found several of the Sunday newspapers in the waste basket. He greeted me with a face that made agate look putty, and was watchfully determined that I shouldn't have a chance of crowing.

He needn't have worried. Nothing made for worse future relations in any field whatsoever than crowing over losers; and if I knew nothing else, I knew how to negotiate for the best long term results.

I congratulated him on the win.

He didn't quite know how to deal with that, but at least it got him out of the embarrassment of having to admit he'd been made to look foolish.

'Tommy Hoylake rode a brilliant race,' he stated, and ignored the fact that he had given him directly opposite instructions.

'Yes, he did,' I agreed wholeheartedly, and repeated that all the rest of the credit lay with Etty and with his own stable routine, which we had faithfully followed.

He unbent a little more, but I found, slightly to my dismay, that in contrast I admired Alessandro for the straightforwardness of his apology, and for the moral courage which had nerved him to offer it. Moral courage was not something I had ever associated with Alessandro, before that moment.

Since my last visit, my father's room had taken on the appearance of an office. The regulation bedside locker had been replaced by a much larger table which pushed around easily on huge wheel castors, like the bed. On the table was the telephone on which he had broadcast so much blight, also a heap of Racing Calendars, copies of the Sporting Life, entry forms, a copy of Horses in Training, the three previous years' form books and, half hidden, the reports from Etty in her familiar schoolgirl handwriting.

'What, no typewriter?' I said flippantly, and he said stiffly that he was arranging for a local girl to come in and take dictation some time in the next week.

'Fine,' I said encouragingly; but he refused to be friendly. He saw the winning of the Lincoln as a serious threat to his authority, and his manner said plainly that that authority was not passing to me or even to Etty, while he could do anything to prevent it.

He was putting himself in a very ambivalent position. Every winner would be to him personally excruciating, yet at the same time he needed it desperately from the financial angle. Too much of his fortune for safety was still invested in half shares: and if the horses all ran as badly as it seemed he would like them to, their value would curl up like dahlias in a frost.

Understanding him was one thing: sorting him out, quite another.

'I can't wait for you to get back,' I said, but that didn't work either. It seemed that the bones were not mending as fast as had been hoped, and the reminder of the delay simply switched him into a different sort of aggravation.

'Some tommy-rot about elderly bones taking longer to knit,' he said irritably. 'All these weeks- and they can't say when I can get out of all these confounded pulleys. I told them I want a plaster cast I can walk on- damn it, enough people have them- but they say there are lots of cases where it isn't possible, and that I'm one of them.'

'You're lucky to have a leg at all,' I pointed out. 'At first they thought they would have to take it off.'

'Better if they had,' he snorted. Then I would have been back at Rowley Lodge by now.'

I had brought some more champagne, but he refused to drink any. Afraid it might look too much like a celebration, I supposed.

Gillie gave me an uncomplicated hug, and it was she who said, 'I told you so.'

'So you did,' I agreed contentedly. 'And since I won two thousand pounds on your convictions, I'll take you to the Empress.'

The tatty black, however, was tight.

'Just look,' she wailed, pressing in her abdomen with her fingers, 'I wore it only ten days ago and it was perfectly all right. And now, it's impossible.'

'I'm not over addicted to flat chested ladies with hip bones sticking up like Mont Blancs,' I said comfortingly.

'No- but voluptuous plenty can go too far.'

'Grapefruit, then?'

She sighed, considered, went to fetch a cream trench coat which covered a multitude of bulges, and said cheerfully, 'Whoever could do justice to Pease Pudding on a grapefruit?'

We toasted the victory in Chateau Figeac 1964, but out of respect for the tatty black seams ate melon and steak and averted our eyes strong mindedly from the puddings.

Gillie said over the coffee that owing to the continued shortage of orphans she was more or less having time off thrust upon her, and couldn't I think again and let her come to Newmarket.

'No,' I said, more positively than I intended.

She looked a little hurt, which was unusual enough in her to bother me considerably.

'You remember those bruises I had, about five weeks ago?' I said.

'Yes, I do.'

'Well- they were the beginning of a rather unpleasant argument I am still having with a man who has a strong line in threats. So far I have resisted some of the threats, and at present there's a sort of stalemate.' I paused. 'I don't want to upset that balance. I don't want to give him any levers. I've no wife, no children, and no near relatives except a father well protected in hospital. There's no one the enemy can threaten- no one for whose sake I will do anything he says. But you see- if you come to Newmarket, there would be.'

She looked at me for a long time, taking it in, but the hurt went away at once.

Finally she said, 'Archimedes said that if he could find somewhere to stand he could shift the world.'

'Huh?'

'With a lever,' she said, smiling. 'You uneducated goose.'

'Let's not give Archimedes a foothold.'

'No.' She sighed. 'Set your tiny mind at rest. I'll pay you no visits until invited.'

Back at the flat, lying side by side in bed and reading the Sunday papers in companionable quiet, she said, 'You do see what follows from allowing him no levers?'

'What?'

'More bruises.'

'Not if I can help it.'

She rolled her head on the pillow and looked at me. 'You know damn well. You're no great fool.'

'It won't come to that,' I said.

She turned back to the Sunday Times. 'There's an advertisement here for travel on a cargo boat to Australia- Would you feel safer if I went on a cruise on a cargo boat to Australia? Would you like me to go?'

'Yes, I would,' I said. 'And no I wouldn't.'

'Just an offer.'

'Declined.'

She smiled. 'Don't leave this address lying about, then.'

'I haven't.'

She put the paper down. 'Just how much of a lever do you suppose I am?'

I threw the Observer on to the floor. 'I'll show you, if you like.'

'Please do,' she said; and switched off the light.