Bonecrack - Страница 14

There didn't seem to be any harm in trying to humanise him, so I went on with the story.

The grave is always looked after, in a haphazard sort of way. It is never overgrown, and fresh flowers are often put there- No one knows exactly who puts them there, but it is supposed to be the gypsies. And there is also a legend that in May the flowers on the grave are in the colours that will win the Derby.'

Alessandro stared down at the pathetic little memorial.

There are no black flowers,' he said slowly: and Archangel 's colours were black, pale blue, and gold.

'The gypsies will solve that if they have to,' I said dryly: and thought that they would opt for an easier-to-stage nap selection.

I turned Cloud Cuckoo-land in the direction of home and walked away. When presently I looked back, Alessandro was walking Traffic quietly along the side of the road, a thin straight figure in his clean clothes and bright blue and white cap. It was a pity, I thought, that he was as he was. With a different father, he might have been a different person.

But with a different father, so would I. And who wouldn't.

I thought about it all the way back to Rowley Lodge. Fathers, it seemed to me, could train, feed or warp their young plants, but they couldn't affect their basic nature. They might produce a stunted oak or a luxuriant weed, but oak and weed were inborn qualities, which would prevail in the end. Alessandro, on such a horticultural reckoning, was like a cross between holly and deadly nightshade; and if his father had his way the red berries would lose out to the black.

Alessandro bore Etty's strongly implied scorn with a frozen face, but few of the other lads teased him on his return, as they would have done to one of their own sort. Most of them seemed to be instinctively afraid of him, which to my mind showed their good sense, and the other, less sensitive types had drifted into the defence mechanism of ignoring his existence.

George took Traffic off to his box, and Alessandro followed me into the office. His glance swept over Margaret, sitting at her desk in a neat navy blue dress with the high curls piled as elaborately as ever, but he saw her as no bar to giving me the benefit of the thoughts that he, evidently, had also had time for on the way back.

'You should not have made me ride such a badly trained horse,' he began belligerently.

'I didn't make you. You chose to.'

'Miss Craig told me to ride it to make a fool of me.'

True enough.

'You could have refused,' I said.

'I could not.'

'You could have said that you thought you needed more practice before taking on the worst ride in the yard.'

His nostrils flared. So self-effacing an admission would have been beyond him.

'Anyway,' I went on. 'I personally don't think riding Traffic is going to teach you much. So you won't be put on him again.'

'But I insist,' he said vehemently.

'You insist what?'

'I insist I ride Traffic again.' He gave me the haughtiest of his selection of stares, and added, 'Tomorrow.'

'Why?'

'Because if I do not, everyone will think it is because I cannot, or that I am afraid to.'

'So you do care,' I said matter-of-factly, 'what the others think of you.'

'No, I do not.' He denied it strongly.

'Then why ride the horse?'

He compressed his strong mouth stubbornly. 'I will answer no more questions. I will ride Traffic tomorrow.'

'Well, O.K.,' I said casually. 'But I'm not sending him on the Heath tomorrow. He'll hardly need another canter. Tomorrow he'll only be walking round the cinder track in the paddock, which will be very boring for you.'

He gave me a concentrated, suspicious, considering stare, trying to work out if I was meaning to undermine him. Which I was, if one can call taking the point out of a Grand Gesture, undermining.

'Very well,' he said grudgingly. 'I will ride him round the paddock.'

He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. Margaret watched him go with a mixed expression I couldn't read.

'Mr Griffon would never stand for him talking like that,' she said.

'Mr Griffon doesn't have to.'

'I can see why Etty can't bear him,' she said. 'He's insolent. There's no other word for it. Insolent.' She handed me three opened letters across the desk. These need your attention, if you don't mind.' She reverted to Alessandro: 'But all the same, he's beautiful.'

'He's no such thing,' I protested mildly. 'If anything, he's ugly.'

She smiled briefly. 'He's absolutely loaded with sex appeal.'

I lowered the letters. 'Don't be silly. He has the sex appeal of a bag of rusty nails.'

'You wouldn't notice,' she said judiciously, 'Being a man.'

I shook my head. 'He's only eighteen.'

'Age has nothing to do with it,' she said. 'Either you've got it, or you haven't got it, right from the start. And he's got it.'

I didn't pay much attention: Margaret herself had so little sex appeal that I didn't think her a reliable judge. When I'd read through the letters and agreed with her how she should answer them, I went along to the kitchen for some coffee.

The remains of the night's work lay littered about: the various dregs of brandy, cold milk, coffee, and masses of scribbled-on bits of paper. It had taken me most of the night to do the entries; a night I would far rather have spent lying warmly in Gillie's bed.

The entries had been difficult, not only because I had never done them before, and had to read the conditions of each race several times to make sure I understood them, but also because of Alessandro. I had to make a balance of what I would have done without him, and what I would have to let him ride if he were still there in a month's time.

I was taking his father's threats seriously. Part of the time I thought I was foolish to do so; but that abduction a week ago had been no playful joke, and until I was certain Enso would not let loose a thunderbolt it was more prudent to go along with his son. I still had nearly a month before the Flat season started, still nearly a month to see a way out. But, just in case, I had put down some of the better prospects for apprentice races, and had duplicated the entries in many open races, because if two ran there would be one for Alessandro. Also I entered a good many in the lesser meetings, particularly those in the north: because whether he liked it or not, Alessandro was not going to start his career in a blaze of limelight. After all that I dug around in the office until I found the book in which old Robinson had recorded all the previous years' entries, and I checked my provisional list against what my father had done. After subtracting about twenty names, because I had been much too lavish, and shuffling things around a little, I made the total number of entries for that week approximately the same as those for the year before, except that I still had more in the north. But I wrote the final list on to the official yellow form, in block letters as requested, and double checked again to make sure I hadn't entered two-year-olds in handicaps, or fillies in colts-only, and made any other such giveaway gaffs.

When I gave the completed form to Margaret to record and then post, all she said was, 'This isn't your father's writing.'

'No,' I said. 'He dictated the entries. I wrote them down.'

She nodded non-comittally, and whether she believed me or not I had no idea.

Alessandro rode Pullitzer competently next day at first lot, and kept himself to himself. After breakfast he returned with a stony face that forbade comment, and when the main string had started out for the Heath, was given a leg-up on to Traffic. Looking back from the gate I saw the fractious colt kicking away at shadows as usual, and noticed that the two other lads detailed to stay in and walk their charges were keeping well away from him.

When we returned an hour and a quarter later, George was holding Traffic's reins, the other lads had dismounted, and Alessandro was lying on the ground in an unconscious heap.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Traffic just bucked him off, sir,' one of the lads said. 'Just bucked him clean off, sir. And he hit his head on the paddock rail, sir.'

'Just this minute, sir,' added the other anxiously.

They were both about sixteen, both apprentices, both tiny, neither of them very bold. I thought it unlikely they would have done anything purposely to upset Traffic further and bring the stuck-up Alessandro literally down to earth, but one never knew. What I did know was that Alessandro's continuing health was essential to my own.

'George,' I said, 'put Traffic away in his box, and Etty-' she was at my shoulder, clicking her tongue but not looking over-sorry, 'Is there anything we can use as a stretcher?'

'There's one in the tackroom,' she said, nodding, and told Ginge to go and get it.

The stretcher turned out to be a minimal affair of a piece of grubby green canvas slung between two uneven shaped poles, which looked as though they might once have been a pair of oars. By the time Ginge returned with it my heart-beat had descended from Everest: Alessandro was alive and not in too deep a coma, and Enso's pistol would not yet be popping me off in revenge to kingdom come.

As far as I could tell, none of his bones were broken, but I took exaggerated care over lifting him on to the stretcher. Etty disapproved: she would have had George and Ginge lift him up by his wrists and ankles and sling him on like a sack of corn. I, more moderately, told George and Ginge to lift him gently, carry him down to the house, and put him on the sofa in the owners' room. Following, I detoured off into the office and asked Margaret to telephone for a doctor.