Banker

APRIL

Calder Jackson finally came to dinner with me while he was staying in London to attend a world conference of herbalists. He would be glad, he said, to spend one of the evenings away from his colleagues, and I met him in a restaurant on the grounds that although my flat was civilised my cooking was not.
I sensed immediately a difference in him, though it was hard to define; rather as if he had become a figure still larger than life. Heads turned and voices whispered when we walked through the crowded place to our table, but because of television this would have happened anyway. Yet now, I thought, Calder really enjoyed it. There was still no overt arrogance, still a becoming modesty of manner, but something within him had intensified, crystallised, become a governing factor. He was now, I thought, even to himself, the Great Man.
I wondered what, if anything, had specifically altered him, and it turned out to be the one thing I would have least expected: Ian Pargetter’s death.
Over a plateful of succulent smoked salmon Calder apologised for the abrupt way he’d brushed me off on the telephone on that disturbing night, and I said it was most understandable.
‘Fact is,’ Calder said, squeezing lemon juice, ‘I was afraid my whole business would collapse. Ian’s partners, you know, never approved of me. I was afraid they would influence everyone against me, once Ian had gone.’
‘And it hasn’t worked out that way?’
He shook his head, assembling a pink forkful. ‘Remarkably not. Amazing.’ He put the smoked salmon in his mouth and made appreciative noises, munching. I was aware, and I guessed he was, too, that the ears of the people at the tables on either side were almost visibly attuned to the distinctive voice, to the clear loud diction with its country edge. ‘My yard’s still full. People have faith, you know. I may not get quite so many racehorses, that’s to be expected, but still a few.’
‘And have you heard any more about Ian Pargetter’s death? Did they ever find out who killed him?’
He looked regretful. ‘I’m sure they haven’t. I asked one of his partners the other day, and he said no one seemed to be asking questions any more. He was quite upset. And so am I. I suppose finding his murderer won’t bring Ian back, but all the same one wants to know.’
‘Tell me some of your recent successes,’ I said, nodding, changing the subject and taking a slice of paper-thin brown bread and butter. ‘I find your work tremendously interesting.’ I also found it about the only thing else to talk about, as we seemed to have few other points of contact. Regret it as I might, there was still no drift towards an easy personal friendship.
Calder ate some more smoked salmon while he thought. ‘I had a colt,’ he said at last, ‘a two-year-old in training. Ian had been treating him, and he’d seemed to be doing well. Then about three weeks after Ian died the colt started bleeding into his mouth and down his nose and went on and on doing it, and as Ian’s partner couldn’t find out the trouble the trainer persuaded the owner to send the horse to me.’
‘And did you discover what was wrong?’ I asked.
‘Oh no.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t necessary. I laid my hands on him on three succeeding days, and the bleeding stopped immediately. I kept him at my place for two weeks altogether, and returned him on his way back to full good health.’
The adjacent tables were fascinated, as indeed I was myself.
‘Did you give him herbs?’ I asked.
‘Certainly. Of course. And alfalfa in his hay. Excellent for many ills, alfalfa.’
I had only the haziest idea of what alfalfa looked like, beyond it being some sort of grass.
‘The one thing you can’t do with herbs,’ he said confidently, ‘is harm.’
I raised my eyebrows with my mouth full.
He gave the nearest thing to a grin. ‘With ordinary medicines one has to be so careful because of their power and their side effects, but if I’m not certain what’s wrong with a horse I can give it all the herbal remedies I can think of all at once in the hope that one of them will hit the target, and it quite often does. It may he hopelessly unscientific, but if a trained vet can’t tell exactly what’s wrong with a horse, how can I?’
I smiled with undiluted pleasure. ‘Have some wine,’ I said.
He nodded the helmet of curls, and the movement I made towards the bottle in its ice-bucket was instantly forestalled by a watchful waiter who poured almost reverently into the healer’s glass.
‘How was the American trip,’ I asked, ‘way back in January?’
‘Mm.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Interesting.’ He frowned a little and went back to finishing the salmon, leaving me wondering whether that was his total answer. When he’d laid down his knife and fork however he sat back in his chair and told me that the most enjoyable part of his American journey had been, as he’d expected, his few days on the ski slopes; and we discussed ski-ing venues throughout the roast beef and burgundy which followed.
With the crepes suzette I asked after Dissdale and Bettina and heard that Dissdale had been to New York on a business trip and that Bettina had been acting a small part in a British movie, which Dissdale hadn’t known whether to be pleased about or not. ‘Too many gorgeous young studs around,’ Calder said, smiling. ‘Dissdale gets worried anyway, and he was away for ten days.’
I pondered briefly about Calder’s own seemingly nonexistent sex-life: but he’d never seen me with a girl either, and certainly there was no hint in him of the homosexual.
Over coffee, running out of subjects, I asked about his yard in general, and how was the right-hand-man Jason in particular.
Calder shrugged. ‘He’s left. They come and go, you know. No loyalty these days.’
‘And you don’t fear… well, that he’d take your knowledge with him?’
He looked amused. ‘He didn’t know much. I mean, I’d hand out a pill and tell Jason which horse to give it to. That sort of thing.’
We finished amiably enough with a glass of brandy for each and a cigar for him, and I tried not to wince over the bill.
‘A very pleasant evening,’ Calder said. ‘You must come out to lunch again one day.’
‘I’d like to.’
We sat for a final few minutes opposite each other in a pause of mutual appraisal: two people utterly different but bonded by one-tenth of a second on a pavement in Ascot. Saved and saver, inextricably interested each in the other; a continuing curiosity which would never quite lose touch. I smiled at him slowly and got a smile in return, but all surface, no depth, a mirror exactly of my own feelings.
In the office things were slowly changing. John had boasted too often of his sexual conquests and complained too often about my directorship, and Gordon’s almost-equal had tired of such waste of time. I’d heard from Val Fisher in a perhaps edited version that at a small and special seniors meeting (held in my absence and without my knowledge) Gordon’s almost-equal had said he would like to boot John vigorously over St Paul’s. His opinion was respected. I heard from Alec one day merely that the mosquito which had stung me for so long had been squashed, and on going along the passage to investigate had found John’s desk empty and his bull-like presence but a quiver in the past.
‘He’s gone to sell air-conditioning to Eskimos,’ Alec said, and Gordon’s almost-equal, smiling affably, corrected it more probably to a partnership with some brokers on the Stock Exchange.
Alec himself seemed restless, as if his own job no longer held him enthralled.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he said once. ‘You’ve the gift. You’ve the sight. I can’t tell a gold mine from a pomegranate at five paces, and it’s taken me all these years to know it.’
‘But you’re a conjuror,’ I said. ‘You can rattle up outside money faster than anyone.’
‘Gift of the old gab, you mean.’ He looked uncharacteristically gloomy. ‘Syrup with a chisel in it.’ He waved his hand towards the desks of our new older colleagues, who had both gone out to lunch. ‘I’ll end up like them, still here, still smooth-talking, part of the furniture, coming up to sixty.’ His voice held disbelief that such an age could be achieved. ‘That isn’t life, is it? That’s not all?’
I said that I supposed it might be.
‘Yes, but for you it’s exciting,’ he said. ‘I mean, you love it. Your eyes gleam. You get your kicks right here in this room. But I’ll never be made a director, let’s face it, and I have this grotty feeling that time’s slipping away, and soon it will be too late to start anything else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like being an actor. Or a doctor. Or an acrobat.’
‘It’s been too late for that since you were six.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lousy, isn’t it?’ He put his heart and soul ten minutes later, however, into tracking down a source of a hundred thousand for several years and lending it to a businessman at a profitable rate, knitting together such loan packages all afternoon with diligence and success.
I hoped he would stay. He was the yeast of the office: my bubbles in the dough. As for myself, I had grown accustomed to being on the board and had slowly found I’d reached a new level of confidence. Gordon seemed to treat me unreservedly as an equal, though it was not until he had been doing it for some time that I looked back and realised.
Gordon’s hitherto uniformly black hair had grown a streak or two of grey. His right hand now trembled also, and his handwriting had grown smaller through his efforts to control his fingers. I watched his valiant struggles to appear normal and respected his privacy by never making even a visual comment: it had become second nature to look anywhere but directly at his hands. In the brain department he remained energetic, but physically over all he was slowing down.
I had only seen Judith once since Christmas, and that had been in the office at a retirement party given for the head of Corporate Finance, a golden-handshake affair to which all managers’ wives had been invited.
‘How are you?’ she said amid the throng, holding a glass of wine and an unidentifiable canapé and smelling of violets.
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Fine.’
She was wearing blue, with diamonds in her ears. I looked at her with absolute and unhappy love and saw the strain it put into her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She shook her head and swallowed. ‘I thought… it might be different… here in the bank.’
‘No.’
She looked down at the canapé, which was squashy and yellow. ‘If I don’t eat this damned thing soon it’ll drop down my dress.’
I took it out of her fingers and deposited it in an ashtray. ‘Invest in a salami cornet. They stay rock-hard for hours.’
‘What’s Tim telling you to invest in?’ demanded Henry Shipton, turning to us a beaming face.
‘Salami,’ Judith said.
‘Typical. He lent money to a seaweed processor last week. Judith, my darling, let me freshen your glass.’
He took the glass away to the bottles and left us again looking at each other with a hundred ears around.
‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘When it’s warmer, could I take you and Gordon, and Pen if she’d like it, out somewhere one Sunday? Somewhere not ordinary. All day.’
She took longer than normal politeness to answer, and I understood all the unspoken things, but finally, as Henry could be seen returning, she said, ‘Yes. We’d all like it. I’d like it… very much.’
‘Here you are,’ Henry said. ‘Tim, you go and fight for your own refill, and leave me to talk to this gorgeous girl.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and swept her off, and although I was vividly aware all evening of her presence, we had no more moments alone.
From day to day when she wasn’t around I didn’t precisely suffer: her absence was more of a faint background ache. When I saw Gordon daily in the office I felt no constant envy, nor hated him, nor even thought much of where he slept. I liked him for the good clever man he was, and our office relationship continued unruffled and secure. Loving Judith was both pleasure and pain, delight and deprivation, wishes withdrawn, dreams denied. It might have been easier and more sensible to have met and fallen heavily for some young glamorous unattached stranger, but the one thing love never did have was logic.
‘Easter,’ I said to Gordon one day in the office. ‘Are you and Judith going away?’
‘We had plans – they fell through.’
‘Did Judith mention that I’d like to take you both somewhere – and Pen Warner – as a thank you for Christmas?’
‘Yes, I believe she did.’
‘Easter Monday, then?’
He seemed pleased at the idea and reported the next day that Judith had asked Pen, and everyone was poised. ‘Pen’s bringing her kite,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s a day trip to Manchester.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tell her it won’t be raining.’
What I did eventually think of seemed to please them all splendidly and also to be acceptable to others concerned, and I consequently collected Gordon and Judith and Pen (but not the kite) from Clapham at eight-thirty on Easter Bank Holiday morning. Judith and Pen were in fizzing high spirits, though Gordon seemed already tired. I suggested abandoning what was bound to be a fairly taxing day for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I want to go,’ he said. ‘Been looking forward to it all week. But I’ll just sit in the back of the car and rest and sleep some of the way.’ So Judith sat beside me while I drove and touched my hand now and then, not talking much but contenting me deeply by just being there. The journey to Newmarket lasted two and a half hours and I would as soon it had gone on for ever.
I was taking them to Calder’s yard, to the utter fascination of Pen. ‘But don’t tell him I’m a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘He might clam up if he knew he had an informed audience.’
‘We won’t tell,’ Judith assured her. ‘It would absolutely spoil the fun.’
Poor Calder, I thought: but I wouldn’t tell him either.
He greeted us expansively (making me feel guilty) and gave us coffee in the huge oak-beamed sitting room where the memory of Ian Pargetter hovered peripherally by the fireplace.
‘Delighted to see you again,’ Calder said, peering at Gordon, Judith and Pen as if trying to conjure a memory to fit their faces. He knew of course who they were by name, but Ascot was ten months since, and although it had been an especially memorable day for him he had met a great many new people between then and now. ‘Ah yes,’ he said with relief, his brow clearing. ‘Yellow hat with roses.’
Judith laughed. ‘Well done.’
‘Can’t forget anyone so pretty.’
She took it as it was meant, but indeed he hadn’t forgotten: as one tended never to forget people whose vitality brought out the sun.
‘I see Dissdale and Bettina quite often,’ he said, making conversation, and Gordon agreed that he and Judith, also, sometimes saw Dissdale, though infrequently. As a topic it was hardly rivetting, but served as an acceptable unwinding interval between the long car journey and the Grand Tour.
The patients in the boxes were all different but their ailments seemed the same; and I supposed surgeons could be excused their impersonal talk of ‘the appendix in bed 14’, when the occupants changed week by week but the operation didn’t.
‘This is a star three-day-eventer who came here five weeks ago with severe muscular weakness and no appetite. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t be ridden. He goes home tomorrow, strong and thriving. Looks well, eh?’ Calder patted the glossy brown neck over the half-stable door. ‘His owner thought he was dying, poor girl. She was weeping when she brought him here. It’s really satisfying, you know, to be able to help.’
Gordon said civilly that it must be.
‘This is a two-year-old not long in training. Came with an intractably infected wound on his fetlock. He’s been here a week, and he’s healing. It was most gratifying that the trainer sent him without delay, since I’d treated several of his horses in the past.’
‘This mare,’ Calder went on, moving us all along, ‘came two or three days ago in great discomfort with blood in her urine. She’s responding well, I’m glad to say.’ He patted this one too, as he did them all.
‘What was causing the bleeding?’ Pen asked, but with only an uninformed-member-of-the-public intonation.
Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know. His vet diagnosed a kidney infection complicated by crystalluria, which means crystals in the urine, but he didn’t know the type of germ and, every antibiotic he gave failed to work. So the mare came here. Last resort.’ He gave me a wink, ‘I’m thinking of simply re-naming this whole place “Last Resort”.’
‘And you’re treating her,’ Gordon asked, ‘with herbs?’
‘With everything I can think of,’ Calder said. ‘And of course… with hands.’
‘I suppose,’ Judith said diffidently, ‘that you’d never let anyone watch…?’
‘My dear lady, for you, anything,’ Calder said. ‘But you’d see nothing. You might stand for half an hour, and nothing would happen. It would be terribly boring. And I might, perhaps, be unable, you know, if someone was waiting and standing there.’
Judith smiled understandingly and the tour continued, ending as before in the surgery.
Pen stood looking about her with sociable blankness and then wandered over to the glass-fronted cabinets to peer myopically at the contents.
Calder, happily ignoring her in favour of Judith, was pulling out his antique tablet-maker and demonstrating it with pride.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Judith said sincerely. ‘Do you use it much?’
‘All the time,’ he said. ‘Any herbalist worth the name makes his own pills and potions.’
‘Tim said you had a universal magic potion in the fridge.’
Calder smiled and obligingly opened the refrigerator door, revealing the brown-filled plastic containers, as before.
‘What’s in it?’ Judith asked.
‘Trade secret,’ he said, smiling. ‘Decoction of hops and other things.’
‘Like beer?’ Judith said.
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘Horses do drink beer,’ Gordon said. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’
Pen bent down to pick up a small peach-coloured pill which was lying unobtrusively on the floor in the angle of one of the cupboards, and put it without comment on the bench.
‘It’s all so absorbing,’ Judith said. ‘So tremendously kind of you to show us everything. I’ll watch all your programmes with more fervour than ever.’
Calder responded to her warmly as all men did and asked us into the house again for a drink before we left. Gordon however was still showing signs of fatigue and now also hiding both hands in his pockets which meant he felt they were trembling badly, so the rest of us thanked Calder enthusiastically for his welcome and made admiring remarks about his hospital and climbed into the car, into the same places as before.
‘Come back any time you like, Tim,’ he said; and I said thank you and perhaps I would. We shook hands, and we smiled, caught in our odd relationship and unable to take it further. He waved, and I waved back as I drove away.
‘Isn’t he amazing?’ Judith said. ‘I must say, Tim, I do understand why you’re impressed.’
Gordon grunted and said that theatrical surgeons weren’t necessarily the best; but yes, Calder was impressive.
It was only Pen, after several miles, who expressed her reservations.
‘I’m not saying he doesn’t do a great deal of good for the horses. Of course he must do, to have amassed such a reputation. But I don’t honestly think he does it all with herbs.’
‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked, twisting round so as to see her better.
Pen leaned forward, ‘I found a pill on the floor. I don’t suppose you noticed.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘You put it on the bench.’
‘That’s right. Well, that was no herb, it was plain straightforward warfarin.’
‘It may be plain straightforward war-whatever to you,’ Judith said. ‘But not to me.’
Pen’s voice was smiling. ‘Warfarin is a drug used in humans, and I dare say in horses, after things like heart attacks. It’s a coumarin – an anticoagulant. Makes the blood less likely to clot and block up the veins and arteries. Widely used all over the place.’
We digested the information in silence for a mile or two, and finally Gordon said ‘How did you know it was warfarin? I mean, how can you tell?’
‘I handle it every day,’ she said. ‘I know the dosages, the sizes, the colours, the manufacturers’ marks. You see all those things so often, you get to know them at a glance.’
‘Do you mean,’ I said interestedly, ‘that if you saw fifty different pills laid out in a row you could identify the lot?’
‘Probably. If they all came from major drug companies and weren’t completely new, certainly, yes.’
‘Like a wine-taster,’ Judith said.
‘Clever girl,’ Gordon said, meaning Pen.
‘It’s just habit.’ She thought. ‘And something else in those cupboards wasn’t strictly herbal, I suppose. He had one or two bags of potassium sulphate, bought from Goodison’s Garden Centre, wherever that is.’
‘Whatever for?’ Judith asked. ‘Isn’t potassium sulphate a fertiliser?’
‘Potassium’s just as essential to animals as to plants,’ Pen said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t one of the ingredients in that secret brew.’
‘What else would you put in it, if you were making it?’ I asked curiously.
‘Oh heavens.’ She pondered. ‘Any sort of tonic. Perhaps liquorice root, which he once mentioned. Maybe caffeine. All sorts of vitamins. Just a pepping-up mish-mash.’
The hardest part of the day had been to find somewhere decent to have lunch, and the place I’d chosen via the various gourmet guides turned out, as so often happens, to have changed hands and chefs since the books were written. The resulting repast was slow to arrive and disappointing to eat, but the mood of my guests forgave all.
‘You remember,’ Gordon said thoughtfully over the coffee, ‘that you told us on the way to Newmarket that Calder was worried about his business when that vet was killed?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was, at the time.’
‘Isn’t it possible,’ Gordon said, ‘that the vet was letting Calder have regular official medicines, like warfarin, and Calder thought his supplies would dry up, when the vet died?’
‘Gordon!’ Judith said. ‘How devious you are, darling.’
We all thought about it however, and Pen nodded. ‘He must have found another willing source, I should think.’
‘But,’ I protested, ‘would vets really do that?’
‘They’re not particularly brilliantly paid,’ Pen said. ‘Not badly by my standards, but they’re never rich.’
‘But Ian Pargetter was very much liked,’ I said.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pen said. ‘Nothing to stop him passing on a few pills and advice to Calder in return for a fat untaxed fee.’
‘To their mutual benefit,’ Gordon murmured.
‘The healer’s feet of clay,’ Judith said. ‘What a shame.’
The supposition seemed slightly to deflate the remembered pleasure of the morning, but the afternoon’s visit put the rest o f the day up high.
We went this time to Oliver Knowles’ stud farm and found the whole place flooded with foals and mares and activity.
‘How beautiful,’ Judith said, looking away over the stretches of white railed paddocks with their colonies of mothers and babies. ‘How speechlessly great.’
Oliver Knowles, introduced, was as welcoming as Calder and told Gordon several times that he would never, ever, be out of his debt of gratitude to Paul Ekaterin’s, however soon he had paid off his loan.
The anxiety and misgivings to be seen in him on my February visit had all disappeared: Oliver was again, and more so, the capable and decisive executive I had met first. The foals had done well, I gathered. Not one from the mares coming to Sandcastle had been lost, and none of those mares had had any infection, a triumph of care. He told me all this within the first ten minutes, and also that Sandcastle had proved thoroughly potent and fertile and was a dream of a stallion. ‘He’s tireless,’ he said. ‘Forty mares will be easy.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said, and meant it from the bottom of my banking heart.
With his dog Squibs at his heels he showed us all again through the succession of yards, where since it was approximately four o’clock the evening ritual of mucking out and feeding was in full swing.
‘A stud farm is not like a racing stable, of course,’ Oliver was explaining to Gordon. ‘One lad here can look after far more than three horses, because they don’t have to be ridden. And here we have a more flexible system because the mares are sometimes in, sometimes out in the paddocks, and it would be impossible to assign particular mares to particular lads. So here a lad does a particular section of boxes, regardless of which animals are in them.’
Gordon nodded, genially interested.
‘Why are some foals in the boxes and some out in the paddocks?’ Judith asked, and Oliver without hesitation told her it was because the foals had to stay with their dams, and the mares with foals in the boxes were due to come into heat, or were already in heat, and would go from their boxes to visit the stallion. When their heat was over they would go out into the paddocks, with their foals.
‘Oh,’ Judith said, blinking slightly at this factory aspect. ‘Yes, I see.’
In the foaling yard we came across Nigel and also Ginnie, who ran across to me when she saw me and gave me a great hug and a smacking kiss somewhere to the left of the mouth. Quite an advance in confidence, I thought, and hugged her back, lifting her off her feet and whirling her round in a circle. She was laughing when I put her down, and Oliver watched in some surprise.
‘I’ve never known her so demonstrative,’ he said.
Ginnie looked at him apprehensively and held onto my sleeve. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked me worriedly.
‘I’m flattered,’ I said, meaning it and also thinking that her father would kill off her spontaneity altogether if he wasn’t careful.
Ginnie, reassured, tucked her arm into mine and said ‘Come and look at the newest foal. It was born only about twenty minutes ago. It’s a colt. A darling.’ She tugged me off, and I caught a fleeting glance of Judith’s face which was showing a mixture of all sorts of unreadable thoughts.
‘Oliver’s daughter,’ I said in explanation over my shoulder, and heard Oliver belatedly introducing Nigel.
They all came to look at the foal over the half-door; a glistening little creature half-lying, half-sitting on the thick straw, all long nose, huge eyes and folded legs, new life already making an effort to balance and stand up. The dam, on her feet, alternately bent her head to the foal and looked up at us warily.
‘It was an easy one,’ Ginnie said. ‘Nigel and I just watched.
‘Have you seen many foals born?’ Pen asked her.
‘Oh, hundreds. All my life. Most often at night.’
Pen looked at her as if she, as I did, felt the imagination stirred by such an unusual childhood: as if she, like myself, had never seen one single birth of any sort, let alone a whole procession by the age of fifteen.
‘This mare has come to Sandcastle,’ Oliver said.
‘And will that foal win the Derby?’ Gordon asked, smiling.
Oliver smiled in return. ‘You never know. He has the breeding.’ He breathed deeply, expanding his chest. ‘I’ve never been able to say anything like that before this year. No foal born or conceived here has in the past won a classic, but now…’ he gestured widely with his arm,‘… one day, from these…’ he paused. ‘It’s a whole new world. It’s… tremendous.’
‘As good as you hoped?’ I asked.
‘Better.’
He had a soul after all, I thought, under all that tidy martial efficiency. A vision of the peaks, which he was reaching in reality. And how soon, I wondered, before the glossy became commonplace, the Classic winners a routine, the aristocrats the common herd. It would be what he’d aimed for; but in a way it would be blunting.
We left the foal and went on down the path past the breeding shed, where the main door was today wide open, showing the floor thickly covered with soft brown crumbly peat. Beyond succinctly explaining what went on there when it was inhabited, Oliver made no comment, and we all walked on without stopping to the heart of the place, to the stallions.
Lenny was there, walking one of the horses round the small yard and plodding with his head down as if he’d been doing it for some time. The horse was dripping with sweat, and from the position of the one open empty box I guessed he would be Rotaboy.
‘He’s just covered a mare,’ Oliver said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s always like that afterwards.’
Judith and Gordon and Pen all looked as if the overt sex of the place was earthier than they’d expected, even without hearing, as I had at one moment, Oliver quietly discussing a vaginal disinfectant process with Nigel. They rallied valiantly however and gazed with proper awe at the head of Sandcastle which swam into view from the inside-box shadows.
He held himself almost imperiously, as if his new role had basically changed his character; and perhaps it had. I had myself seen during my renewed interest in racing how constant success endowed some horses with definite ‘presence’, and Sandcastle, even lost and frightened up on top of the hill, had perceptibly had it; but now, only two months later, there was a new quality one might almost call arrogance, a fresh certainty of his own supremacy.
‘He’s splendid,’ Gordon exclaimed. ‘What a treat to see him again after that great day at Ascot.’
Oliver gave Sandcastle the usual two carrots and a couple of pats, treating the King with familiarity. Neither Judith nor Pen, nor indeed Gordon or myself, tried even to touch the sensitive nose: afraid of getting our fingers bitten off at the wrist, no doubt. It was all right to admire, but distance had virtue.
Lenny put the calming-down Rotaboy back in his box and started mucking out Diarist next door.
‘We have two lads looking after the stallions full time,’ Oliver said. ‘Lenny, here, and another much trusted man, Don. And Nigel feeds them.’
Pen caught the underlying thought behind his words and asked, ‘Do you need much security?’
‘Some,’ he said, nodding. ‘We have the yard wired for sound, so either Nigel or I, when we’re in our houses, can hear if there are any irregular noises.’
‘Like hooves taking a walk?’ Judith suggested.
‘Exactly.’ He smiled at her. ‘We also have smoke alarms and massive extinguishers.’
‘And brick-built boxes and combination locks on these door bolts at night and lockable gates on all the ways out to the roads,’ Ginnie said, chattily. ‘Dad’s really gone to town on security.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Gordon said.
I smiled to myself at the classic example of bolting the stable door after the horse had done likewise, but indeed one could see that Oliver had learned a dire lesson and knew he’d been lucky to be given a second chance.
We began after a while to walk back towards the house, stopping again in the foaling yard to look at the new baby colt, who was now shakily on his feet and searching round for his supper.
Oliver drew me to one side and asked if I would like to see Sandcastle cover a mare, an event apparently scheduled for a short time hence.
‘Yes, I would,’ I said.
‘I can’t ask them all – there isn’t room,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Ginnie to show them the mares and foals in the paddocks and then take them indoors for tea.’
No one demurred at this suggested programme, especially as Oliver didn’t actually mention where he and I were going: Judith, I was sure, would have preferred to join us. Ginnie took them and Squibs off, and I could hear her saying ‘Over there, next door, there’s another yard. We could walk over that way if you like.’
Oliver, eying them amble along the path that Sandcastle had taken at a headlong gallop and I at a sprint, said, ‘The Watcherleys look after any delicate foals or any mares with infections. It’s all worked out most satisfactorily. I rent their place and they work for me, and their expertise with sick animals comes in very useful.’
‘And you were mending their fences for them, I guess, when I came in February.’
‘That’s right.’ He sighed ruefully. ‘Another week and the gates would have been up in the hedge and across their driveway, and Sandcastle would never have got out.’
‘No harm done,’ I said.
‘Thanks to you, no.’
We went slowly back towards the breeding shed. ‘Have you seen a stallion at work before?’ he asked.
‘No, I haven’t.’
After a pause he said, ‘It may seem strong to you. Even violent. But it’s normal to them. Remember that. And he’ll probably bite her neck, but it’s as much to keep himself in position as an expression of passion.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘This mare, the one we’re breeding, is receptive, so there won’t be any trouble. Some mares are shy, some are slow to arouse, some are irritable, just like humans.’ He smiled faintly. ‘This little lady is a born one-nighter.’
It was the first time I’d heard him make anything like a joke about his profession and I was almost startled. As if himself surprised at his own words he said more soberly, ‘We put her to Sandcastle yesterday morning, and all went well.’
‘The mares go more than once then, to the stallion?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘It depends of course on the stud farm, but I’m very anxious as you can guess that all the mares here shall have the best possible chance of conceiving. I bring them all at least twice to the stallion during their heat, then we put them out in the paddocks and wait, and if they come into heat again it means they haven’t conceived, so we repeat the breeding process.’
‘And how long do you go on trying?’
‘Until the end of July. That means the foal won’t be born until well on in June, which is late in the year for racehorses. Puts them at a disadvantage as two-year-olds, racing against March and April foals which have had more growing time.’ He smiled. ‘With any luck Sandcastle won’t have any late June foals. It’s too early to be complacent, but none of the mares he covered three weeks or more ago has come back into use.’
We reached and entered the breeding shed where the mare already stood, held at the head in a loose twitch by one lad and being washed and attended to by another.
‘She can’t wait, sir,’ that lad said, indicating her tail, which she was holding high, and Oliver replied rather repressively, ‘Good.’
Nigel and Lenny came with Sandcastle, who looked eagerly aware of where he was and what for. Nigel closed the door to keep the ritual private; and the mating which followed was swift and sure and utterly primaeval. A copulation of thrust and grandeur, of vigour and pleasure, not without tenderness: remarkably touching.
‘They’re not all like that,’ Oliver remarked prosaically, as Sandcastle slid out and backwards and brought his forelegs to earth with a jolt. ‘You’ve seen a good one.’
I thanked him for letting me be there, and in truth I felt I understood more about horses then than I’d ever imagined I would.
We walked back to the house with Oliver telling me that with the four stallions there were currently six, seven or eight matings a day in the breeding shed, Sundays included. The mind stuttered a bit at the thought of all that rampaging fertility, but that, after all, was what the bank’s five million pounds was all about. Rarely, I thought, had anyone seen Ekaterin’s money so fundamentally at work.
We set off homewards fortified by tea, scones and whisky, with Oliver and Gordon at the end competing over who thanked whom most warmly. Ginnie gave me another but more composed hug and begged me to come again, and Judith kissed her and offered female succour if ever needed.
‘Nice child,’ she said as we drove away. ‘Growing up fast.’
‘Fifteen,’ I said.
‘Sixteen. She had a birthday last week.’
‘You got on well with her,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She looked round at Pen and Gordon, who were again sitting in the back. ‘She told us about your little escapade here two months ago.’
‘She didn’t!’
‘She sure did,’ Pen said, smiling. ‘Why ever didn’t you say?’
‘I know why,’ Gordon said dryly. ‘He didn’t want it to be known in the office that the loan he’d recommended had very nearly fallen under a lorry.’
‘Is that right?’ Judith asked.
‘Very much so,’ I admitted wryly. ‘Some of the board were against the whole thing anyway, and I’d have never heard the end of the horse getting out.’
‘What a coward,’ Pen said, chuckling.
We pottered slowly back to Clapham through the stop-go end-of-Bank-Holiday traffic, and Judith and Pen voted it the best day they’d had since Ascot. Gordon dozed, I drove with relaxation and so we finally reached the tall gates by the common.
I went in with them for supper as already arranged, but all of them, not only Gordon, were tired from the long day, and I didn’t stay late. Judith came out to the car to see me off and to shut the gates after I’d gone.
We didn’t really talk. I held her in my arms, her head on my shoulder, my head on hers, close in the dark night, as far apart as planets.
We stood away and I took her hand, lingering, not wanting all contact lost.
‘A great day,’ she said, and I said ‘Mm’, and kissed her very briefly.
Got into the car and drove away.