Proof

Two

Customers came in all possible shapes, from the school children who bought crisps and cola because I was near the bus stop, to the sergeants’ mess of the local barracks: from pensioners saving for apologetic half bottles of gin to the knowledgeably lavish laying down port. Customers came once a year and daily, with ignorance and expertise, for happiness and comfort, in gloom and insobriety. Customers ranged from syrup to bitters, like their drinks.

My foremost customer, one Sunday morning that cold October, was a racehorse trainer splashing unstinted fizz over a hundred or so guests in his more or less annual celebration of the Flat races his stable had won during the passing season. Each autumn as his name came high on the winners’ list he gave thanks by inviting his owners, his jockeys, his ramifications of friends to share his satisfaction for joys past and to look forward and make plans for starting all over again the following spring.

Each September he would telephone in his perpetual state of rush. Tony? Three weeks on Sunday, right? Just the usual, in the tent. You’ll do the glasses? And sale or return, of course, right?’

‘Right,’ I would say, and he’d be gone before I could draw breath. It would be his wife Flora who later came to the shop smilingly with details.

Accordingly on that Sunday I drove to his place at ten o’clock and parked as close as I could to the large once-white marquee rising tautly from his back lawn. He came bustling out of his house the moment I stopped, as if he’d been looking out for me, which perhaps he had: Jack Hawthorn, maybe sixty, short, plump and shrewd.

‘Tony. Well done.’ He patted me lightly on the shoulder,his usual greeting, as he habitually avoided the social custom of shaking hands. Not, as I had originally guessed, because he feared to catch other people’s contagious germs but because, as an acid racing lady had enlightened me, he had ‘a grip like a defrosting jellyfish’ and hated to see people rub their palms on their clothes after touching him.

‘A good day for it,’ I said.

He glanced briefly at the clear sky. ‘We need rain. The ground’s like concrete.’ Racehorse trainers, like farmers, were never satisfied with the weather. ‘Did you bring any soft drinks? The Sheik’s coming, with his whole teetotal entourage. Forgot to tell you.’

I nodded. ‘Champagne, soft drinks and a box of oddments.’

‘Good. Right. I’ll leave you to it. The waitresses will be here at eleven, guests at twelve. And you’ll stay yourself, of course? My guest, naturally. I take it for granted.’

‘Your secretary sent me an invitation.’

‘Did he? Good heavens. How efficient. Right then. Anything you want, come and find me.’

I nodded and he hurried away, taking his life as usual at a trot. Notwithstanding the secretary, a somewhat languid man with a supercilious nose and an indefatigable capacity for accurate detailed work, Jack never quite caught up with what he wanted to do. Flora, his placid wife, had told me, ‘It’s Jimmy (the secretary) who enters the horses for the races, Jimmy who sends out the bills, Jimmy who runs all the paperwork single-handed, and Jack never so much as has to pick up a postage stamp. It’s habit, all this rushing. Just habit.’ But she’d spoken fondly, as everyone did, more or less, of Jack Hawthorn: and maybe it was actually the staccato energy of the man which communicated to his horses and set them winning.

He always invited me to his celebrations, either formally or not, partly no doubt so that I should be on the spot to solve any booze-flow problems immediately, but also because I had myself been born into a section of the racing world and was still considered part of it, despite my inexplicable defection into retail liquor.

‘Not his father’s son,’ was how the uncharitable put it. Or more plainly, ‘Lacks the family guts.’

My father, a soldier, had won both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Gold Cup, dashing as valiantly into steeplechase fences as he had into enemy territory. His bravery on all battlefields had been awe-inspiring, and he died from a broken neck on Sandown Park racecourse when I was eleven, and watching.

He had been forty-seven at the time and remained, of course, at that age in the racing world’s memory, a tall, straight, laughing, reckless man, untouched, it still seemed to me, by the world’s woes. No matter that he was not an ideal shape for jockeyship, he had resolutely followed in the wake of his own father, my grandfather, a distant Titan who had finished second one year in the Grand National before covering himself with military glory in World War One. My grandfather’s Victoria Cross lay beside my father’s DSO in the display case I had inherited. It was their dash, their flair, their dare-devilment that they had not passed on.

‘Are you going to grow up like your father, then?’ had been said to me in friendly, expectant fashion countless times through my childhood, and it had only slowly dawned on everyone, as on me, that no, I wasn’t. I learned to ride, but without distinction. I went to Wellington, the school for soldiers’ sons, but not in turn to Sandhurst to put on uniform myself. My mother too often said, ‘Never mind, dear,’ suffering many disappointments nobly; and I developed deep powerful feelings of inferiority, which still lingered, defying common sense.

Only with Emma had they retreated to insignificance, but now that she had gone, faint but persistent, they were back. A discarded habit of mind insidiously creeping into unguarded corners. Miserable.

Jimmy, the secretary, never helped. He sauntered out of the house, hands in pockets, and watched as I lugged three galvanised wash tubs from the rear of my van.

‘What are those for?’ he said. He couldn’t help looking down that nose, I supposed, as he topped six feet four. It was just that his tone of voice matched.

‘Ice,’ I said.

He said, ‘Oh,’ or rather ‘Ay-oh,’ as a dipthong.

I carried the tubs into the tent, which contained a row of trestle tables with tablecloths near one end and clusters of potted chrysanthemums round the bases of the two main supporting poles. The living grass of the lawn had been covered with serviceable fawn matting, and bunches of red and gold ribbons decorated the streaky greyish canvas walls at regular intervals. In one far corner stood a blower-heater, unlit. The day was marginally not cold enough. The tent was almost festive. Almost. Jack and Flora, and who could blame them, never wasted good cash on unnecessaries.

There was no tremble in the air. No shudder. No premonition at all of the horror soon to happen there. All was quiet and peaceful; expectant certainly, but benign. I remembered it particularly, after.

Jimmy continued to watch while I carted in a case of champagne and unpacked the bottles, standing them upright in one of the tubs on the floor by the tent wall behind the tables. I didn’t actually have to do this part of the job, but for Jack Hawthorn, somehow, it was easy to give service beyond contract.

I was working in shirtsleeves, warmed by a pale blue V-necked sleeveless pullover (typical racing world clothes) with my jacket waiting in the van for the metamorphosis to guest. Jimmy was understatedly resplendent in thin fawn polo-necked sweater under a navy blue blazer; plain brass buttons, no crests, no pretentions. That was the trouble. If he’d had any pretentions I could perhaps have despised him instead of suspecting it was the other way round.

I fetched a second box of champagne and began unpacking it. Jimmy bent from his great height and picked up one of the bottles, staring at the foil and the label as if he’d never seen such things before.

‘What’s this muck?’ he said. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘It’s the real thing,’ I said mildly. ‘It comes from Epernay.’

‘So I see.’

‘Flora’s choice,’ I said.

He said ‘Ah-oh’ in complete understanding and put the bottle back. I fetched ice cubes in large black plastic bags and poured them over and round the standing bottles.

‘Did you bring any scotch?’ he asked.

‘Front seat of the van.’

He strolled off on the search and came back with an unopened bottle.

‘Glass?’ he enquired.

For reply I went out to the van and fetched a box containing sixty.

‘Help yourself.’

Without comment he opened the box, which I’d set on a table, and removed one of the all-purpose goblets.

‘Is this ice drinkable?’ he said dubiously.

‘Pure tap water.’

He put ice and whisky in the glass and sipped the result.

‘Very prickly this morning, aren’t you?’ he said.

I glanced at him, surprised. ‘Sorry.’

‘Someone knocked off a whole load of this stuff in Scotland yesterday, did you know?’

‘Champagne?’

‘No. Scotch.’

I shrugged. ‘Well... it happens.’

I fetched a third case and unpacked the bottles. Jimmy watched, clinking his ice.

‘How much do you know about whisky, Tony?’ he said.

‘Well... some.’

‘Would you know one from another?’

‘I’m better at wine.’ I straightened from filling the second tub. ‘Why?’

‘Would you know for certain,’ he said with a bad stab at casualness, ‘if you asked for a malt and got sold an ordinary standard, like this?’ He raised his glass, nodding to it.

‘They taste quite different.’

He relaxed slightly, betraying an inner tension I hadn’t until then been aware of. ‘Could you tell one malt from another?’

I looked at him assessingly. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Could you?’ He was insistent.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not this morning. Not to name them. I’d have to practise. Maybe then. Maybe not.’

‘But... if you learned one particular taste, could you pick it out again from a row of samples? Or say if it wasn’t there?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. I looked at him, waiting, but he was taking his own troubled time, consulting some inner opinion. Shrugging, I went to fetch more ice, pouring it into the second tub, and then carried in and ripped open the fourth case of champagne.

‘It’s very awkward,’ he said suddenly.

‘What is?’

‘I wish you’d stop fiddling with those bottles and listen to me.’

His voice was a mixture of petulance and anxiety, and I slowly straightened from putting bottles into the third tub and took notice.

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

He was older than me by a few years, and our acquaintanceship had mostly been limited to my visits to the Hawthorn house, both as drinks supplier and as occasional guest. His usual manner to me had been fairly civil but without warmth, as no doubt mine to him. He was the third son of the fourth son of a racehorse-owning earl, which gave him an aristocratic name but no fortune, and his job with Jack Hawthorn resulted directly, it was said, from lack of enough brain to excel in the City. It was a judgment I would have been content to accept were it not for Flora’s admiration of him, but I hadn’t cared enough one way or the other to give it much thought.

‘One of Jack’s owners has a restaurant,’ he said. ‘The Silver Moondance, near Reading. Not aimed at top class. Dinner dances. A singer sometimes. Mass market.’ His voice was fastidious but without scorn: stating a fact, not an attitude.

I waited non-committally.

‘He invited Jack and Flora and myself to dinner there last week.’

‘Decent of him,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Jimmy looked at me down the nose. ‘Quite.’ He paused slightly. ‘The food was all right, but the drinks... Look, Tony, Larry Trent is one of Jack’s good owners. He has five horses here. Pays his bills on the nail. I don’t want to upset him... but what it says on the label of at least one of the bottles in his restaurant is not what they pour out of it.’

He spoke with pained disgust, at which I almost smiled.

‘That’s not actually unusual,’ I said.

‘But it’s illegal.’ He was indignant.

‘Sure it’s illegal. Are you certain?’

‘Yes. Well yes, I think so. But I wondered if perhaps, before I said anything to Larry Trent, you could taste their stuff? I mean, suppose his staff are ripping him off? I mean, er... he could be prosecuted, couldn’t he?’

I said, ‘Why didn’t you mention it to him that evening, while you were there?’

Jimmy looked startled. ‘But we were his guests! It would have been terribly bad form. Surely you can see that.’

‘Hm,’ I said dryly. ‘Then why don’t you just tell him now, and privately, what you thought about his drinks? He might be grateful. He would certainly be warned. Anyway, I can’t see him whisking his five horses away in a huff.’

Jimmy made a pained noise and drank some scotch. ‘I mentioned this to Jack. He said I must be mistaken. But I’m not, you know. I’m pretty sure I’m not.’

I considered him.

‘Why does it bother you so much?’ I asked.

‘What?’ He was surprised. ‘Well, I say, a fraud’s a fraud, isn’t it? It annoys one.’

‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘What were these drinks supposed to be?’

‘I thought the wine wasn’t much, considering its label, but you know how it is, you don’t suspect anything... but there was the Laphroaig.’

I frowned. ‘The malt from Islay?’

‘That’s right,’ Jimmy said. ‘Heavy malt whisky. My grandfather liked it. He used to give me sips when I was small, much to my mother’s fury. Funny how you never forget tastes you learn as a child... and of course I’ve had it since... so there it was, on the trolley of drinks they rolled round with the coffee, and I thought I would have some... Nostalgia, and all that.’

‘And it wasn’t Laphroaig?’

‘No.’

‘What was it?’

He looked uncertain. ‘I thought that you, actually, might know. If you drank some, I mean.’

I shook my head. ‘You’d need a proper expert.’

He looked unhappy. ‘I thought myself, you see, that it was just an ordinary blend, just ordinary, not even pure malt.’

‘You’d better tell Mr Trent,’ I said. ‘Let him deal with it himself.’

He said doubtfully, ‘He’ll be here this morning.’

‘Easy,’ I said.

‘I don’t suppose... er... that you yourself... er... could have a word with him?’

‘No, I certainly couldn’t,’ I said positively. ‘From you it could be a friendly warning, from me it would be a deadly insult. Sorry, Jimmy, but honestly, no.’

With resignation he said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t. But worth a try.’ He poured himself more scotch and again put ice into it, and I thought in passing that true whisky aficionados thought ice an abomination, and wondered about the trustworthiness of his perception of Laphroaig.

Flora, rotund and happy in cherry red wool, came in her light-stepped way into the tent, looking around and nodding in satisfaction.

‘Looks quite bright, doesn’t it, Tony dear?’

‘Splendid,’ I said.

‘When it’s filled with guests...’

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

She was conventional, well-intentioned and cosy, mother of three children (not Jack’s) who telephoned her regularly. She liked to talk about them on her occasional visits to my shop and tended to place larger orders when the news of them was good. Jack was her second husband, mellowing still under her wing but reportedly jealous of her offspring. Amazing the things people told their wine merchants. I knew a great deal about a lot of people’s lives.

Flora peered into the tubs. ‘Four cases on ice?’

I nodded. ‘More in the van, if you need it.’

‘Lets hope not.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘But my dear, I wouldn’t bet on it. Jimmy love, you don’t need to drink whisky. Open some champagne. I’d like a quick glass before everyone swamps us.’

Jimmy obliged with languid grace, easing out the cork without explosion, containing the force in his hand. Flora smilingly watched the plume of released gas float from the bottle and tilted a glass forward to catch the first bubbles. At her insistence both Jimmy and I drank also, but from Jimmy’s expression it didn’t go well with his scotch.

‘Lovely!’ Flora said appreciatively, sipping; and I thought the wine as usual a bit too thin and fizzy, but sensible enough for those quantities. I sold a great deal of it for weddings.

Flora took her glass and wandered down the marquee to the entrance through which the guests would come, the entrance which faced away from the house, towards the field where the cars would be parked. Jack Hawthorn’s house and stableyard were built in a hollow high on the eastern end of the Berkshire Downs, in a place surrounded by hills, invisible until one was close. Most people would arrive by the main road over the hill which faced the rear of the house, parking in the field, and continuing the downward journey on foot through a gate in the low-growing rose hedge, and onto the lawn. After several such parties, Flora had brought crowd control to a fine art: and besides, this way, no one upset the horses.

Flora suddenly exclaimed loudly and came hurrying back.

‘It’s really too bad of him. The Sheik is here already. His car’s coming over the hill. Jimmy, run and meet him. Jack’s still changing. Take the Sheik round the yard. Anything. Really, it’s too bad. Tell Jack he’s here.’

Jimmy nodded, put down his glass without haste and ambled off to intercept the oil-rich prince and his retinue. Flora hovered indecisively, not following, talking crossly with maximum indiscretion.

‘I don’t like that particular Sheik. I can’t help it. He’s fat and horrible and he behaves as if he owns the place, which he doesn’t. And I don’t like the way he looks at me with those half-shut eyes, as if I were of no account... and Tony, dear, I haven’t said any of those things, you understand? I don’t like the way Arabs treat women.’

‘And his horses win races,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Flora sighed. ‘It’s not all sweetness and light being a trainer’s wife. Some of the owners make me sick.’ She gave me a brief half-smile and went away to the house, and I finished the unloading with things like orange juice and cola.

Up on the hill the uniformed chauffeur parked the elongated black-windowed Mercedes, which was so identifiably the Sheik’s, with its nose pointing to the marquee, and gradually more cars arrived to swell the row there, bringing waitresses and other helpers, and finally, in a steady stream, the hundred-and-something guests.

They came by Rolls, by Range Rover, by Mini and by Ford. One couple arrived in a horsebox, another by motorcycle Some brought children, some brought dogs, most of which were left with the cars. In cashmere and cords, in checked shirts and tweeds, in elegance and pearls they walked chatteringly down the grassy slope, through the gate in the rose hedge, across a few steps of lawn, into the beckoning tent. A promising Sunday morning jollification ahead, most troubles left behind.

As always with racing-world parties, everyone there knew somebody else. The decibel count rose rapidly to ear-aching levels and only round the very walls could one talk without shouting. The Sheik, dressed in full Arab robes and flanked by his wary-eyed entourage, was one, I noticed, who stood resolutely with his back to the canvas, holding his orange juice before him and surveying the crush with his half-shut eyes. Jimmy was doing his noble best to amuse, rewarded by unsmiling nods, and gradually and separately other guests stopped to talk to the solid figure in the banded white headgear, but none of them with complete naturalness, and none of them women.

Jimmy after a while detached himself and I found him at my elbow.

‘Sticky going, the Sheik?’ I said.

‘He’s not such a bad fellow,’ Jimmy said loyally. ‘No social graces in western gatherings and absolutely paranoid about being assassinated... never even sits in the dentist’s chair, I’m told, without all those bodyguards being right there in the surgery... but he does know about horses. Loves them. You should have seen him just now, going round the yard, those bored eyes came right to life.’ He looked round the gathering and suddenly exclaimed, ‘See that man talking to Flora? That’s Larry Trent.’

‘Of the absent Laphroaig?’

Jimmy nodded, wrinkled his brow in indecision and moved off in another direction altogether, and I for a few moments watched the man with Flora, a middle-aged, dark-haired man with a moustache, one of the few people wearing a suit, in his case a navy pinstripe with the coat buttoned, a line of silk handkerchief showing in the top pocket. The crowd shifted and I lost sight of him, and I talked, as one does, to a succession of familiar half-known people, seen once a year or less, with whom one took on as one had left off, as if time hadn’t existed in between. It was one of those, with best intentions, who said inevitably, ‘And how’s Emma? How’s your pretty wife?’

I thought I would never get used to it, that jab like a spike thrust into a jumpy nerve, that positively physical pain. Emma... dear God.

‘She’s dead,’ I said, shaking my head slightly, breaking it to him gently, absolving him from embarrassment. I’d had to say it like that often: far too often. I knew how to do it now without causing discomfort. Bitter, extraordinary skill of the widowed, taking the distress away from others, hiding one’s own.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, meaning it intensely for the moment, as they do. ‘I’d no idea. None at all. Er... when...?’

‘Six months ago,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ He adjusted his sympathy level suitably. ‘I’m really very sorry.’

I nodded. He sighed. The world went on. Transaction over, until next time. Always a next time. And at least he hadn’t asked ‘How...?’, and I hadn’t had to tell him, hadn’t had to think of the pain and the coma and the child who had died with her, unborn.

A fair few of Jack’s guests were also my customers, so that even in that racing gathering I found myself talking as much about wine as horses, and it was while an earnest elderly lady was soliciting my views on Côtes du Rhône versus Côte de Nuits that I saw Jimmy finally talking to Larry Trent. He spotted me too and waved for me to come over, but the earnest lady would buy the better wine by the caseful if convinced, and I telegraphed ‘later’ gestures to Jimmy, to which he flipped a forgiving hand.

Waitresses wove through the throng carrying dishes of canapés and sausages on sticks, and I reckoned that many more than a hundred throats had turned up and that at the present rate of enthusiasm the forty-eight original bottles would be emptied at any minute. I had already begun to make my way to the tent’s service entrance near the house when Jack himself pounced at me, clutching my sleeve.

‘We’ll need more champagne and the waitresses say your van is locked.’ His voice was hurried. ‘The party’s going well, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes, very.’

‘Great. Good. I’ll leave it to you, then.’ He turned away, patting shoulders in greeting, enjoying his role as host.

I checked the tubs, now empty but for two standing bottles in a sea of melting ice, and went onwards out to the van, fishing in my pocket for the keys. For a moment I glanced up the hill to where all the cars waited, to the Range Rover, the horsebox, the Sheik’s Mercedes. No gaps in the line: no one had yet gone home. There was a child up there, playing with a dog.

I unlocked the rear door of my van and leaned in to pull forward the three spare cases which were roughly cooling under more black bags of ice. I threw one of the bags out onto the grass, and I picked up one of the cases.

Movement on the edge of my vision made me turn my head, and in a flash of a second that ordinary day became a nightmare.

The horsebox was rolling forwards down the hill.

Pointing straight at the marquee, gathering speed.

It was already only feet from the rose-hedge. It smashed its way through the fragile plants, flattening the last pink flowers of autumn. It advanced inexorably onto the grass.

I leapt to the doorway of the tent screaming a warning which nobody heard above the din and which was anyway far too late.

For a frozen infinitesimal moment I saw the party still intact, a packed throng of people smiling, drinking, living and unaware.

Then the horsebox ploughed into the canvas, and changed many things for ever.