For Kicks

CHAPTER ONE

The Earl of October drove into my life in a pale blue Holden which had seen better days, and danger and death tagged along for the ride.

I noticed the car turn in through the gate posts as I walked across the little paddock towards the house, and I watched its progress up our short private road with a jaundiced eye. Salesmen, I thought, I can do without. The blue car rolled to a gentle halt between me and my own front door.

The man who climbed out looked about forty-five and was of medium height and solid build, with a large well-shaped head and smoothly brushed brown hair. He wore grey trousers, a fine wool shirt, and a dark, discreet tie, and he carried the inevitable briefcase. I sighed, bent through the paddock rails, and went over to send him packing.

"Where can I find Mr. Daniel Roke?" he asked. An English voice, which even to my untuned ear evoked expensive public schools; and he had a subtle air of authority inconsistent with the opening patter of representatives I looked at him more attentively, and decided after all not to say I was out. He might even, in spite of the car, be a prospective customer.

"I," I said, without too much joy in the announcement, 'am Daniel Roke. "

His eyelids flickered in surprise.

"Oh," he said blankly I was used to this reaction. I was no one's idea of the owner of a prosperous stud-farm. I looked, for a start, too young, though I didn't feel it; and my sister Belinda says you don't often meet a business man you can mistake for an Italian peasant. Sweet girl, my sister. It is only that my skin is sallow and tans easily, and I have black hair and brown eyes. Also I was that day wearing the oldest, most tattered pair of jeans I possessed, with unpolished jodhpur boots, and nothing else.

I had been helping a mare who always had difficulty in foaling: a messy job, and I had dressed for it. The result of my and the mare's labours was a weedy filly with a contracted tendon in the near fore and a suspicion of one in the off fore too, which meant an operation, and more expense than she was likely to be worth.

My visitor stood for a while looking about him at the neat white-railed paddocks, the L-shaped stable yard away ahead, and the row of cedar-shingled foaling boxes off to the right, where my poor little newcomer lay in the straw. The whole spread looked substantial and well maintained, which it was; I worked very hard to keep it that way, so that I could reasonably ask good prices for my horses.

The visitor turned to gaze at the big blue-green lagoon to the left, with the snow-capped mountains rising steeply in rocky beauty along the far side of it. Puffs of cloud like plumes crowned the peaks.

Grand and glorious scenery it was, to his fresh eyes.

But to me, walls.

"Breathtaking," he said appreciatively. Then turning to me briskly, but with some hesitation in his speech, he said, "I… er… I heard in Perlooma that you have… er… an English stable hand who… er wants to go back home" He broke off, and started again.

"I suppose it may sound surprising, but in certain circumstances, and if he is suitable, I am willing to pay his fare and give him a job at the other end. " He tailed off again.

There couldn't, I thought, be such an acute shortage of stable boys in England that they needed to be recruited from Australia.

"Will you come into the house?" I said.

"And explain?"

I led the way into the living-room, and heard his exclamation as he stepped behind me. All our visitors were impressed by the room. Across the far end a great expanse of window framed the most spectacular part of the lagoon and mountains, making them seem even closer and, to me, more overwhelming than ever. I sat down in an old bent-wood rocker with my back to them, and gestured him into a comfortable armchair facing the view.

"Now, Mr… er?" I began.

"October," he said easily.

"Not Mister. Earl."

"October… as the month?" It was October at the time.

"As the month," he assented.

I looked at him curiously. He was not my idea of an earl. He looked like a hard-headed company chairman on holiday. Then it occurred to me that there was no bar to an earl being a company chairman as well, and that quite probably some of them needed to be.

"I have acted on impulse, coming here," he said more coherently.

"And I am not sure that it is ever a good thing to do." He paused, took out a machine-turned gold cigarette case, and gained time for thought while he flicked his lighter. I waited.

He smiled briefly.

"Perhaps I had better start by saying that I am in Australia on business I have interests in Sydney but that I came down here to the Snowies as the last part of a private tour I have been making of your main racing and breeding centres. I am a member of the body which governs National Hunt racing that is to say, steeple chasing jump racing in England, and naturally your horses interest me enormously… Well, I was lunching in Perlooma," he went on, referring to our nearest township, fifteen miles away, 'and I got talking to a man who remarked on my English accent and said that the only other Pommie he knew was a stable hand here who was fool enough to want to go back home. "

"Yes," I agreed.

"Simmons."

"Arthur Simmons," he said, nodding.

"What sort of man is he?"

"Very good with horses," I said.

"But he only wants to go back to England when he's drunk. And he only gets drunk in Perlooma. Never here."

"Oh," he said.

"Then wouldn't he go, if he were given the chance?"

"I don't know. It depends what you want him for."

He drew on his cigarette, and tapped the ash off, and looked out of the window.

"A year or two ago we had a great deal of trouble with the doping of racehorses," he said abruptly.

"A very great deal of trouble. There were trials and prison sentences, and stringent all-round tightening of stable security, and a stepping-up of regular saliva and urine tests. We began to test the first four horses in many races, to stop doping-to-win, and we tested every suspiciously beaten favourite for doping-to-lose. Nearly all the results since the new regulations came into force have been negative."

"How satisfactory," I said, not desperately interested.

"No. It isn't. Someone has discovered a drug which our analysts cannot identify."

"That doesn't sound possible," I said politely. The afternoon was slipping away unprofitably, I felt, and I still had a lot to do.

He sensed my lack of enthusiasm.

"There have been ten cases, all winners. Ten that we are sure of. The horses apparently look conspicuously stimulated I haven't myself actually seen one but nothing shows up in the tests." He paused.

"Doping is nearly always an inside job," he said, transferring his gaze back to me.

"That is to say, stable lads are nearly always involved somehow, even if it is only to point out to someone else which horse is in which box." I nodded. Australia had had her troubles, too.

"We, that is to say, the other two Stewards of the National Hunt Committee, and myself, have once or twice discussed trying to find out about the doping from the inside, so to speak…"

"By getting a stable lad to spy for you?" I said.

He winced slightly.

"You Australians are so direct," he murmured.

"But that was the general idea, yes. We didn't do anything more than talk about it, though, because there are many difficulties to such a plan and frankly we didn't see how we could positively guarantee that any lad we approached was not already working for… er… the other side."

I grinned.

"And Arthur Simmons has that guarantee?"

"Yes. And as he's English, he would fade indis- tinguishably into the racing scene. It occurred to me as I was paying my bill after lunch.

So I asked the way here and drove straight up, to see what he was like. "

"You can talk to him, certainly," I said, standing up.

"But I don't think it will be any good."

"He would be paid far in excess of the normal rate," he said, misunderstanding me.

"I didn't mean that he couldn't be tempted to go," I said, 'but he just hasn't the brain for anything like that. "

He followed me back out into the spring sunshine. The air at that altitude was still chilly and I saw him shiver as he left the warmth of the house. He glanced appraisingly at my still bare chest.

"If you'll wait a moment, I'll fetch him," I said, and walking round the corner of the house, whistled shrilly with my fingers in my teeth towards the small bunkhouse across the yard. A head poked inquiringly out of a window, and I shouted, "I want Arthur."

The head nodded, withdrew, and presently Arthur Simmons, elderly, small, bow-legged, and of an endearing simplicity of mind, made his crab-like way towards me. I left him and Lord October together, and went over to see if the new filly had taken a firm hold on life. She had, though her efforts to stand on her poor misshapen foreleg were pathetic to see.

I left her with her mother, and went back towards Lord October, watching him from a distance taking a note from his wallet and offering it to Arthur. Arthur wouldn't accept it, even though he was English. He's been here so long, I thought, that he's as Australian as anyone. He'd hate to go back to Britain, whatever he says when he's drunk.

"You were right," October said.

"He's a splendid chap, but no good for what I want. I didn't even suggest it."

"Isn't it expecting a great deal of any stable lad, however bright, to uncover something which has got men like you up a gum-tree?"

He grimaced.

"Yes. That is one of the difficulties I mentioned. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel, though. Any idea is worth trying.

Any. You can't realize how serious the situation is. "

We walked over to his car, and he opened the door.

"Well, thank you for your patience, Mr. Roke. As I said, it was an impulse, coming here. I hope I haven't wasted too much of your afternoon?" He smiled, still looking slightly hesitant and disconcerted.

I shook my head and smiled back and he started the car, turned it, and drove off down the road. He was out of my thoughts before he was through the gate posts.

Out of my thoughts; but not by a long way out of my life.

He came back again the next afternoon at sundown. I found him sitting patiently smoking in the small blue car, having no doubt discovered that there was no one in the house. I walked back towards him from the stable block where I had been doing my share of the evening's chores, and reflected idly that he had again caught me at my dirtiest.

He got out of the car when he saw me coming, and stamped on his cigarette.

"Mr. Roke." He held out his hand, and I shook it.

This time he made no attempt to rush into speech. This time he had not come on impulse. There was absolutely no hesitation in his manner:

instead, his natural air of authority was much more pronounced, and it struck me that it was with this power that he set out to persuade a boardroom full of hard directors to agree to an unpopular proposal.

I knew instantly, then, why he had come back.

I looked at him warily for a moment: then gestured towards the house and led him again into the livingroom.

"A drink?" I asked.

"Whisky?"

"Thank you." He took the glass.

"If you don't mind," I said, "I will go and change." And think, I added privately.

Alone in my room I showered and put on some decent trousers, socks, and house-shoes, and a white poplin shirt with a navy blue silk tie. I brushed back my damp hair carefully in front of the mirror, and made sure my nails were clean. There was no point in entering an argument at a social disadvantage. Particularly with an earl as determined as this.

He stood up when I went back, and took in my changed appearance with one smooth glance.

I smiled fleetingly, and poured myself a drink, and another for him.

"I think," he said, 'that you may have guessed why I am here. "

"Perhaps."

"To persuade you to take a job I had in mind for Simmons," he said without preamble, and without haste.

"Yes," I said. I sipped my drink.

"And I can't do it."

We stood there eyeing each other. I knew that what he was seeing was a good deal different from the Daniel Roke he had met before. More substantial. More the sort of person he would have expected to find, perhaps. Clothes make the man, I thought wryly.

The day was fading, and I switched on the lights. The mountains outside the window retreated into darkness;

just as well, as I judged I would need all my resolution, and they were both literally and figuratively ranged behind October. The trouble was, of course, that with more than half my mind I wanted to take a crack at his fantastic job. And I knew it was madness. I couldn't afford it, for one thing.

"I've learned a good deal about you now," he said slowly.

"On my way from here yesterday it crossed my mind that it was a pity you were not Arthur Simmons;

you would have been perfect. You did, if you will forgive me saying so, look the part. " He sounded apologetic.

"But not now?"

"You know you don't. You changed so that you wouldn't, I imagine. But you could again. Oh, I've no doubt that if I'd met you yesterday inside this house looking as civilized as you do at this moment, the thought would never have occurred to me. But when I saw you first, walking across the paddock very tattered and half bare and looking like a gipsy, I did in fact take you for the hired help… I'm sorry."

I grinned faintly.

"It happens often, and I don't mind."

"And there's your voice," he said.

"That Australian accent of yours… I know it's not as strong as many I've heard, but it's as near to cockney as dammit, and I expect you could broaden it a bit. You see," he went on firmly, as he saw I was about to interrupt, 'if you put an educated Englishman into a stable as a lad, the chances are the others would know at once by his voice that he wasn't genuine. But they couldn't tell, with you. You look right, and you sound right. You seem to me the perfect answer to all our problems. A better answer than I could have dreamt of finding. "

"Physically," I commented dryly. He drank, and looked at me thoughtfully.

"In every way. You forget, I told you I know a good deal about you. By the time I reached Perlooma yesterday afternoon I had decided toer… investigate you, one might say, to find out what sort of man you really were to see if there were the slightest chance of your being attracted by such a… a job." He drank again, and paused, waiting.

"I can't take on anything like that," I said.

"I have enough to do here." The understatement of the month, I thought.

"Could you take on twenty thousand pounds?" He said it casually, conversationally.

The short answer to that was "Yes'; but instead, after a moment's stillness, I said " Australian, or English? "

His mouth curled down at the corners and his eyes narrowed. He was amused.

"English. Of course," he said ironically.

I said nothing. I simply looked at him. As if reading my thoughts he sat down in an armchair, crossed his legs comfortably, and said, "I'll tell you what you would do with it, if you like. You would pay the fees of the medical school your sister Belinda has set her heart on.

You would send your younger sister Helen to art school, as she wants.

You would put enough aside for your thirteen-year-old brother Philip to become a lawyer, if he is still of the same mind when he grows up.

You could employ more labour here, instead of working yourself into an early grave feeding, clothing, and paying school fees for your family. "

I suppose I should have been prepared for him to be thorough, but I felt a surge of anger that he should have pried so very intimately into my affairs. However, since the time when an angry retort had cost me the sale of a yearling who broke his leg the following week, I had learned to keep my tongue still whatever the provocation.

"I also have had two girls and a boy to educate," he said.

"I know what it is costing you. My elder daughter is at university, and the twin boy and girl have recently left school."

When I again said nothing, he continued, "You were born in England, and were brought to Australia when you were a child. Your father, Howard Roke, was a barrister, a good one. He and your mother were drowned together in a sailing accident when you were eighteen. Since then you have supported yourself and your sisters and brother by horse dealing and breeding. I understand that you had intended to follow your father into the law, but instead used the money he left to set up business here, in what had been your holiday house. You have done well at it. The horses you sell have a reputation for being well broken in and beautifully mannered. You are thorough, and you are respected."

He looked up at me, smiling. I stood stiffly. I could see there was still more to come.

He said "Your headmaster at Geelong says you had a brain and are wasting it. Your bank manager says you spend little on yourself. Your doctor says you haven't had a holiday since you settled here nine years ago except for a month you spent in hospital once with a broken leg. Your pastor says you never go to church, and he takes a poor view of it." He drank slowly.

Many doors, it seemed, were open to determined earls.

"And finally," he added, with a lop-sided smile, 'the bar keeper of the Golden Platypus in Perlooma says he'd trust you with his sister, in spite of your good looks. "

"And what were your conclusions, after all that?" I asked, my resentment a little better under control.

"That you are a dull, laborious prig," he said pleasantly.

I relaxed at that, and laughed, and sat down.

"Quite right," I agreed.

"On the other hand, everyone says you do keep on with something once you start it, and you are used to hard physical work. You know so much about horses that you could do a stable lad's job with your eyes shut standing on your head."

"The whole idea is screwy," I said, sighing.

"It wouldn't work, not with me, or Arthur Simmons, or anybody. It just isn't feasible. There are hundreds of training stables in Britain, aren't there? You could live in them for months and hear nothing, while the dopers got strenuously to work all around you."

He shook his head.

"I don't think so. There are surprisingly few dishonest lads, far fewer than you or most people would imagine. A lad known to be corruptible would attract all sorts of crooks like an unguarded gold mine All our man would have to do would be to make sure that the word was well spread that he was open to offers. He'd get them, no doubt of it."

"But would he get the ones you want? I very much doubt it."

"To me it seems a good enough chance to be worth taking. Frankly, any chance is worth taking, the way things are. We have tried everything else. And we have failed. We have failed in spite of exhaustive questioning of everyone connected with the affected horses. The police say they cannot help us. As we cannot analyse the drug being used, we can give them nothing to work on. We employed a firm of private investigators. They got nowhere at all.

Direct action has achieved absolutely nothing. Indirect action cannot achieve less. I am willing to gamble twenty thousand pounds that with you it can achieve more. Will you do it? "

"I don't know," I said, and cursed my weakness. I should have said, "No, certainly not."

He pounced on it, leaning forward and talking more rapidly, every word full of passionate conviction.

"Can I make you understand how concerned my colleagues and I are over these undetectable cases of doping? I own several racehorses mostly steeple chasers and my family for generations have been lovers and supporters of racing… The health of the sport means more to me, and people like me, than I can possibly say… and for the second time in three years it is being seriously threatened. During the last big wave of doping there were satirical jokes in the papers and on television, and we simply cannot afford to have it happen again. So far we have been able to stifle comment because the cases are still fairly widely spaced it is well over a year since the first and if anyone inquires we merely report that the tests were negative.

But we must identify this new dope before there is a widespread increase in its use. Otherwise it will become a worse menace to racing than anything which has happened before. If dozens of undetectably doped winners start turning up, public faith will be destroyed altogether, and steeple chasing will suffer damage which it will take years to recover from, if it ever does. There is much more at stake than a pleasant pastime. Racing is an industry employing thousands of people. and not the least of them are stud owners like you. The collapse of public support would mean a great deal of hardship.

"You may think that I have offered you an extraordinarily large sum of money to come over and see if you can help us, but I am a rich man, and, believe me, the continuance of racing is worth a great deal more than that to me. My horses won nearly that amount in prize money last season, and if it can buy a chance of wiping out this threat I will spend it gladly."

"You are much more vehement today," I said slowly, 'than you were yesterday. "

He sat back.

"Yesterday I didn't need to convince you. But I felt just the same."

"There must be someone in England who can dig Out the information you want," I protested.

"People who know the ins and outs of your racing.

I know nothing at all. I left your country when I was nine. I'd be useless. It's impossible. "

That's better, I approved myself. That's much firmer.

He looked down at his glass, and spoke as if with reluctance.

"Well we did approach someone in England… A racing journalist, actually. Very good nose for news; very discreet, too; we thought he was just the chap. Unfortunately he dug away without success for some weeks. And then he was killed in a car crash, poor fellow."

"Why not try someone else?" I persisted.

"It was only in June that he died, during steeplechas- ing's summer recess. The new season started in August and it was not until after that that we thought of the stable lad idea, with all its difficulties."

"Try a farmer's son," I suggested.

"Country accent, knowledge of horses… the lot."

He shook his head.

" England is too small. Send a farmer's son to walk a horse round the parade ring at the races, and what he was doing would soon be no secret. Too many people would recognize him, and ask questions."

"A farm worker's son, then, with a high IQ."

"Do we hold an exam?" he said sourly.

There was a pause, and he looked up from his glass. His face was solemn, almost severe.

"Well?" he said.

I meant to say "No', firmly. What I actually said was again " I don't know. "

"What can I say to persuade you?"

"Nothing," I said.

"I'll think about it. I'll let you know tomorrow."

"Very well." He stood up, declined my offer of a meal, and went away as he had come, the strength of his personality flowing out of him like heat. The house felt empty when I went back from seeing him off.

The full moon blazed in the black sky, and through a gap in the hills behind me Mount Kosciusko distantly stretched its blunt snow-capped summit into the light. I sat on a rock high up on the mountain, looking down on my home.

There lay the lagoon, the big pasture paddocks stretching away to the bush, the tidy white-railed small paddocks near the house, the silvery roof of the foaling boxes, the solid bulk of the stable block, the bunkhouse, the long low graceful shape of the dwelling house with a glitter of moonlight in the big window at the end.

There lay my prison.

It hadn't been bad at first. There were no relations to take care of us, and I had found it satisfying to disappoint the people who said I couldn't earn enough to keep three small children, Belinda and Helen and Philip, with me. I liked horses, I always had, and from the beginning the business went fairly well. We all ate, anyway, and I even convinced myself that the law was not really my vocation after all.

My parents had planned to send Belinda and Helen to Frensham, and when the time came, they went. I

dare say I could have found a cheaper school, but I had to try to give them what I had had. and that was why Philip was away at Geelong.

The business had grown progressively, but so had the school fees and the men's wages and the maintenance costs. I was caught in a sort of upward spiral, and too much depended on my being able to keep on going. The leg I had broken in a steeplechase when I was twenty-two had caused the worst financial crisis of the whole nine years: and I had had no choice but to give up doing anything so risky.

I didn't grudge the unending labour. I was very fond of my sisters and brother. I had no regrets at all that I had done what I had. But the feeling that I had built a prosperous trap for myself had slowly eaten away the earlier contentment I had found in providing for them.

In another eight or ten years they would all be grown, educated, and married, and my job would be done. In another ten years I would be thirty-seven. Perhaps I too would be married by then, and have some children of my own, and send them to Frensham and Geelong. For more than four years I had done my best to stifle a longing to escape. It was easier when they were at home in the holidays, with the house ringing with their noise and Philip's carpentry all over the place and the girls' frillies hanging to dry in the bathroom. In the summer we rode or swam in the lagoon (the lake, as my English parents called it) and in the winter we skied in the mountains. They were very good company and never took anything they had for granted. Nor, now that they were growing up, did they seem to be suffering from any form of teenage rebellions. They were, in fact, thoroughly rewarding.

It usually hit me about a week after they had gone back to school, this fierce aching desperation to be free. Free for a good long while:

to go farther than the round of horse sales, farther than the occasional quick trip to Sidney or Melbourne or Cooma.

To have something else to remember but the procession of profitable days, something else to see besides the beauty with which I was surrounded. I had been so busy stuffing worms down my fellow nestlings' throats that I had never stretched my wings.

Telling myself that these thoughts were useless, that they were self-pity, that my unhappiness was unreasonable, did no good at all. I continued at night to sink into head-holding miseries of depression, and kept these moods out of my days and my balance sheets only by working to my limit.

When Lord October came the children had been back at school for eleven days, and I was sleeping badly. That may be why I was sitting on a mountainside at four o'clock in the morning trying to decide whether or not to take a peculiar job as a stable lad on the other side of the world. The door of the cage had been opened for me, all right. But the tit-bit that had been dangled to tempt me out seemed suspiciously large.

Twenty thousand English pounds. A great deal of money. But then he couldn't know of my restless state of mind, and he might think that a smaller sum would make no impression. (What, I wondered, had he been prepared to pay Arthur?) On the other hand, there was the racing journalist who had died in a car crash. If October or his colleagues had the slightest doubt it was an accident, that too would explain the size of his offer, as conscience money. Throughout my youth, owing to my father's profession, I had learned a good deal about crime and criminals, and I knew too much to dismiss the idea of an organized accident as fantastic nonsense.

I had inherited my father's bent for orderliness and truth and had grown up appreciating the logic of his mind, though I had often thought him too ruthless with innocent witnesses in court. My own view had always been that justice should be done and that my father did the world no good by getting the guilty acquitted. I would never make a barrister, he said, if I thought like that. I'd better be a policeman, instead.

England, I thought. Twenty thousand pounds. Detection. To be honest, the urgency with which October viewed the situation had not infected me. English racing was on the other side of the world. I knew no one engaged in it. I cared frankly little whether it had a good or a bad reputation. If I went it would be no altruistic crusade: I would be going only because the adventure appealed to me, because it looked amusing and a challenge, because it beckoned me like a siren to fling responsibility to the wind and cut the self-imposed shackles off my wilting spirit.

Common sense said that the whole idea was crazy, that the Earl of October was an irresponsible nut, that I hadn't any right to leave my family to fend for themselves while I went gallivanting round the world, and that the only possible course open to me was to stay where I was, and learn to be content.

Common sense lost.