Bonecrack - Страница 25

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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

'I would like you to come in my car to the races,' I said to Alessandro on Wednesday morning, when he turned up for the first lot. 'Give Carlo a day off.'

He looked back dubiously to where Carlo sat as usual in the Mercedes, staring watchfully down the yard.

'He says I talk with you too much. He will object.'

I shrugged. 'All right,' I said, and walked off to mount Cloud Cuckoo-land. We took the string down to Waterhall, where Alessandro rode a pipe opener on both Buckram and Lancat, and Etty grudgingly said that they both seemed to be going well for him. The thirty or so others that we took along there didn't seem to be doing so badly either, and the Lincoln booster was still fizzing around in grins and good humour. The whole stable, that week, had come alive.

Pullitzer had set off to Catterick early in the smaller of the stable's two horse-boxes, accompanied by his own lad and the travelling head lad, Vic Young, who supervised the care of the horses while they were away from home. Second in command to Etty, he was a resourceful, quick-witted Londoner grown too heavy in middle age to ride most of the young stable inmates; but the weight came in useful for throwing around. Vic Young was a great one for getting his own way, and it was just good luck that his own way was usually to the stable's advantage. He was, like all the best older lads, deeply partisan.