TWO
The Princess Casilia, Mme de Brescou (to give her her full style), had as usual asked a few friends to lunch with her to watch the races, and her box contained, besides herself and the Vaughnleys, a small assortment of furs and tweeds, all With inhabitants I’d formerly met on similar occasions.
‘You know everyone, don’t you?’ the princess said, and I nodded ‘Yes’, although I couldn’t remember half their names.
‘Tea?’ she asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’
The same waitress as usual smoothly gave me a full cup, smiling. No milk, no sugar, slice of lemon, as always.
The princess had had a designer decorate her boxes at the racecourses and they were all the same: pale peach hessian on the walls, coffee-coloured carpet and a glass-topped dining table surrounded by comfortable chairs. By late afternoon, my habitual visiting time, the table had been pushed to one side and bore not lunch but plates of sandwiches, creamy pastries, assorted alcohol, a box of cigars. The princess’s friends tended to linger long after the last races had been run.
One of the women guests picked up a plate of small delicious-looking cakes and offered it to me.
‘No, thank you,’ I said mildly. ‘Not this minute.’
‘Not ever,’ the princess told her friend. ‘He can’t eat those. And don’t tempt him. He’s hungry.’
The friend looked startled and confused. ‘My dear! I never thought. And he’s so tall.’
‘I eat a lot,’ I said. ‘But just not those.’
The princess, who had some idea at least of the constant struggle I had to stay down at a body weight of ten stone, gave me a glimmering look through her eyelashes, expressing disbelief.
The friend was straightforwardly curious. ‘What do you eat most of,’ she asked, ‘if not cake?’
‘Lobster, probably,’ I said.
‘Good heavens.’
Her male companion gave me a critical glance from above a large moustache and long front teeth.
‘Left it a bit late in the big race, didn’t you, what?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’
‘Couldn’t think what you were doing out there, fiddling about at the back. You nearly bungled it entirely, what? The princess was most uncomfortable, I can tell you, as we all had our money on you, of course.’
The princess said, ‘North Face can behave very badly, Jack. I told you. He has such a mind of his own. Sometimes it’s hard to get him to race.’
‘It’s the jockey’s job to get him to race,’ Jack said to me with a touch of belligerence. ‘Don’t you agree, what?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do agree.’
Jack looked fractionally disconcerted and the princess’s lips twitched.
‘And then you set him alight,’ said Lord Vaughnley, overhearing. ‘Gave us a rousing finish. The sort of thing a sponsor prays for, my dear fellow. Memorable. Something to talk about, to refer to. North Face’s finish in the Towncrier Trophy. Splendid, do you see?’
Jack saw, chose not to like it, drifted away. Lord Vaughn-ley’s grey eyes looked with bonhomie from his large bland face and he patted me with kindly meant approval on the shoulder.
‘Third time in a row,’ he said. ‘You’ve done us proud. Would you care, one Saturday night, to see the paper put to bed?’
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised. ‘Very much.’
‘We might print a picture of you watching a picture of yourself go through the presses.’
More than bonhomie, I thought, behind the grey eyes: a total newspaperman’s mentality.
He was the proprietor of the Towncrier by inheritance, the fiftyish son of one of the old-style newspaper barons who had muscled on to the scene in the nineteen thirties and brought new screaming life to millions of breakfasts. Vaughnley Senior had bought a dying provincial weekly and turned it into a lusty voice read nationwide. He’d taken it to Fleet Street, seen the circulation explode, and in due course had launched a daily version which still prospered despite sarcastic onslaughts from newer rivals.
The old man had been a colourful buccaneering entrepreneur. The son was quieter, a manager, an advertising man at heart. The Towncrier, once a raucous newsheet, had over the last ten years developed Establishment leanings, a remarkable testimony of the hand-over from the elder personality to the younger.
I thought of Hugh Vaughnley, the son, next in the line: the sweet-tempered young man without strength, at present at odds, it appeared, with his parents. In his hands, if it survived at all, the Towncrier would soften to platitude, waffle and syrup.
The Daily Flag, still at the brassiest stage, and among the Towncrier’s most strident opposition, had been recently bought, after bitter financial intrigues, by a thrusting financier in the ascendant, a man hungry, it was said, for power and a peerage, and taking a well-tried path towards both. The Flag was bustling, go-getting, stamping on sacrosanct toes and boasting of new readers daily.
Since I’d met Lord Vaughnley several times at various racing presentation dinners where annual honours were dished out to the fortunate (like champion jockeys, leading trainers, owners-of-the-year, and so on) and with Holly’s distress sharp in my mind, I asked him if he knew who was responsible for ‘Intimate Details’ in the Flag.
‘Responsible?’ he repeated with a hint of holier-than-thou distaste. ‘Irresponsible, more like.’
‘Irresponsible, then.’
‘Why, precisely?’ he asked.
‘They’ve made an unprovoked and apparently pointless attack on my brother-in-law.’
‘Hm,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘Too bad. But, my dear fellow, pointless attacks are what the public likes to read. Destructive criticism sells papers, back-patting doesn’t. My father used to say that, and he was seldom wrong.’
‘And to hell with justice,’ I said.
‘We live in an unkind world. Always have, always will. Christians to the lions, roll up, buy the best seats in the shade, gory spectacle guaranteed. People buy newspapers, my dear fellow, to see victims torn limb from limb. Be thankful it’s physically bloodless, we’ve advanced at least that far.’ He smiled as if talking to a child. ‘Intimate Details, as you must know, is a composite affair, with a whole bunch of journalists digging out nuggets and also a network of informants in hospitals, mortuaries, night clubs, police stations and all sorts of less savoury places, telephoning in with the dirt and collecting their dues. We at the Towncrier do the same sort of thing. Every paper does. Gossip columns would be non-starters, my dear fellow, if one didn’t.’
‘I’d like to know where the piece about my brother-in-law came from. Who told who, if you see what I mean. And why.’
‘Hm.’ The grey eyes considered. ‘The editor of the Flag is Sam Leggatt. You could ask him of course, but even if he finds out from his staff, he won’t tell you. Head against brick wall, I’m afraid, my dear fellow.’
‘And you approve,’ I said, reading his tone. ‘Closing ranks, never revealing sources, and all that.’
‘If your brother-in-law has suffered real positive harm,’ he nodded blandly, ‘he should get his solicitor to send Sam Leggatt a letter announcing imminent prosecution for libel unless a retraction and an apology are published immediately. It sometimes works. Failing that, your brother-in-law might get a small cash settlement out of court. But do advise him, my dear fellow, against pressing for a fully-fledged libel action with a jury. The Flag retains heavyweight lawyers and they play very rough. They would turn your brother-in-law’s most innocent secrets inside out and paint them dirty. He’d wish he’d never started. Friendly advice, my dear fellow, I do assure you.’
I told him about the paragraph being outlined in red and delivered by hand to the houses of tradespeople.
Lord Vaughnley frowned. ‘Tell him to look for the informant on his own doorstep,’ he said. ‘Gossip column items often spring from local spite. So do stories about vicars and their mistresses.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Good old spite. Whatever would the newspaper industry do without it!’
‘Such a confession!’ I said with mockery.
‘We clamour for peace, honesty, harmony, common sense and equal justice for all,’ he said. ‘I assure you we do, my dear fellow.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’
The princess touched Lord Vaughnley’s arm and invited him to go out on to the balcony to see the last race. He said however that he should return to the Towncrier’s guests whom he had temporarily abandoned in a sponsors’ hospitality room, and, collecting his wife, he departed.
‘Now, Kit,’ said the princess, ‘while everyone is outside watching the race, tell me about North Face.’
We sat, as so often, in two of the chairs, and I told her without reservation what had happened between her horse and myself.
‘I do wish,’ she said thoughtfully, at the end, ‘that I had your sense of what horses are thinking. I’ve tried putting my head against their heads,’ she smiled almost self-consciously, ‘but nothing happens. I get nothing at all. So how do you do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think head to head would work, anyway. It’s just when I’m riding them, I seem to know. It’s not in words, not at all. It’s just there. It just seems to come. It happens to very many riders. Horses are telepathic creatures.’
She looked at me with her head on one side. ‘But you, Kit, you’re telepathic with people as well as horses. Quite often you’ve answered a question I was just going to ask. Quite disconcerting. How do you do it?’
I was startled. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘But you know you do?’
‘Well… I used to. My twin sister Holly and I were telepathic between ourselves at one time. Almost like an extra way of talking. But we’ve grown out of it, these last few years.’
‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Such an interesting gift.’
‘It can’t logically exist.’
‘But it does.’ She patted my hand. ‘Thank you for today, although you and North Face between you almost stopped my heart.’
She stood up without haste, adept from some distant training at ending a conversation gracefully when she wished, and I stood also and thanked her formally for her tea. She smiled through the eyelashes, as she often did with everybody: not out of coquetry but in order, it seemed to me, to hide her private feelings.
She had a husband to whom she went home daily; Monsieur Roland de Brescou, a Frenchman of aristocratic lineage, immense wealth and advanced age. I had met him twice, a frail white-haired figure in a wheel-chair with an autocratic nose and little to say. I asked after his health occasionally: the princess replied always that he was well. Impossible ever to tell from her voice or demeanour what she felt about him: love, anxiety, frustration, impatience, joy… nothing showed.
‘We run at Devon and Exeter, don’t we?’ she said.
‘Yes, Princess. Bernina and Icicle.’
‘Good. I’ll see you there on Tuesday.’
I shook her hand. I’d sometimes thought, after a win such as that day’s, of planting a farewell kiss on her porcelain cheek. I liked her very much. She might consider it the most appalling liberty, though, and give me the sack, so in her own disciplined fashion I made her merely a sketch of a bow, and went away.
‘You’ve been a hell of a long time,’ Holly complained. ‘That woman treats you like a lap dog. It’s sickening.’
‘Yeah… well… here I am.’
She had been waiting for me on her feet outside the weighing room in the cold wind, not snugly in a chair in the bar. The triple gin anyway had been a joke because she seldom drank alcohol, but that she couldn’t even sit down revealed the intensity of her worry.
The last race was over, the crowds streaming towards the car parks. Jockeys and trainers, officials and valets and pressmen bade each other goodnight all around us although it was barely three-forty in the afternoon and not yet dusk. Time to go home from the office. Work was work, even if the end product was entertainment. Leisure was a growth industry, so they said.
‘Will you come home with me?’ Holly asked.
I had known for an hour that that was what she would want.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Her relief was enormous but she tried to hide it with a cough, a joke and a jerky laugh. ‘Your car or mine?’
I’d thought it over. ‘We’ll both go to the cottage. I’ll drive us in your car from there.’
‘OK.’ She swallowed. ‘And Kit…’
‘Save it,’ I said.
She nodded. We’d had an ancient pact: never say thank you out loud. Thanks came in help returned, unstintingly and at once, when one needed it. The pact had faded into abeyance with her marriage but still, I felt, existed: and so did she, or she wouldn’t have come.
Holly and I were more alike in looks than many fraternal twins, but nowhere near identical Viola and Sebastian: Shakespeare, most rarely, got it wrong. We each had dark hair, curly. Each, lightish brown eyes. Each, flat ears, high foreheads, long necks, easily tanned skin. We had different noses and different mouths, though the same slant to the bone above the eye socket. We had never had an impression of looking into a mirror at the sight of the other, although the other’s face was more familiar to us than our own.
When we were two years old our young and effervescent parents left us with our grandparents, went for a winter holiday in the Alps, and skied into an avalanche. Our father’s parents, devastated, had kept us and brought us up and couldn’t in many ways have been better, but Holly and I had turned inward to each other more than might have happened in a normal family. We had invented and spoken our own private language, as many such children do, and from there had progressed to a speechless communication of minds. Our telepathy had been more a matter of knowing what the other was thinking rather than of deliberately planting thoughts in the other’s head. More reception than transmission, one might say: and it happened also without us realising it, as over and over again when we’d been briefly apart we had done things like writing in the same hour to our Australian aunt, getting the same book out of the library, and buying identical objects on impulse. We had both, for instance, one day gone separately home with roller skates as a surprise birthday present for the other and hidden them in our grandmother’s wardrobe. Grandmother herself by that time hadn’t found it strange as we’d done similar things too often, and she’d said that right from when we could talk if she asked, ‘Kit, where’s Holly?’ or, ‘Holly, where’s Kit?’ we would always know, even if logically we couldn’t.
The telepathy between us had not only survived the stresses and upheavals of puberty and adolescence but had actually become stronger: also we were more conscious of it, and used it purposely when we wanted, and grew in young adulthood into a new dimension of friendship. Naturally we put up a front to the world of banter, sarcasm and sibling rivalry, but underneath we were solid, never doubting our private certainty.
When I’d left our grandparents’ house to buy a place of my own with my earnings, Holly had from time to time lived there with me, working away in London most of the time but returning as of right whenever she wished, both of us taking it for granted that my cottage was now her home also.
That state of affairs had continued until she fell in love with Bobby Allardeck and married him.
Even before the wedding the telepathy had begun to fade and fairly soon afterwards it had more or less stopped. I wondered for a while if she had shut down deliberately, and then realised it had been also my own decision: she was off on a new life and it wouldn’t have been a good idea to try to cling to her, or to intrude.
Four years on, the old habit had vanished to such an extent that I hadn’t felt a flicker of her present distress, where once I would somehow have had it in my mind and would have telephoned to find out if she was all right.
On our way out to the car park I asked her how much she’d won on North Face.
‘My God,’ she said, ‘you left that a bit late, didn’t you?’
‘Mm.’
‘Anyway, I went to put my money on the Tote but the queues were so long I didn’t bother and I went down on to the lawn to watch the race. Then when you were left so far behind I was glad I hadn’t backed you. Then those bookies on the rails began shouting five to one North Face. Five to one! I mean, you’d started at odds-on. There was a bit of booing when you came past the stands and it made me cross. You always do your best, they didn’t have to boo. So I walked over and got one of the bookies to take all my money at fives. It was a sort of gesture, I suppose. I won a hundred and twenty-five, which will pay the plumber, so thanks.’
‘Did the plumber get Intimate Details?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Someone knows your life pretty thoroughly,’ I said.
‘Yes. But who? We were awake half the night wondering.’ Her voice was miserable. ‘Who could hate us that much?’
‘You haven’t just kicked out any grievance-laden employees?’
‘No. We’ve a good lot of lads this year. Better than most.’
We arrived at her car and she drove me to where mine was parked.
‘Is that house of yours finished yet?’ she asked.
‘Getting on.’
‘You’re bizarre.’
I smiled. Holly liked things secure, settled and planned in advance. She thought it crazy that I’d bought on impulse the roofless shell of a one-storey house from a builder who was going broke. He’d been in the local pub one night when I’d gone in for a steak: leaning on the bar and morosely drowning his sorrows in beer. He’d been building the house for himself, he said, but he’d no money left. All work on it had stopped.
I’d ridden horses for him in his better-off days and had known him for several years, so the next morning I’d gone with him to see the house; and I’d liked its possibilities and bought it on the spot, and engaged him to finish it for me, paying him week by week for work done. It was going to be a great place to live and I was going to move into it, finished or not, well before Christmas, as I’d already exchanged contracts on my old cottage and would have to leave there willy nilly.
‘I’ll follow you to the cottage,’ Holly said. ‘And don’t drive like you won the Towncrier.’
We proceeded in sedate convoy to the racehorse-training village of Lambourn on the Berkshire Downs, leaving my car in its own garage there and setting off together on the hundred miles plus to the Suffolk town of Newmarket, headquarters of the racing industry.
I liked the informality of little Lambourn. Holly and Bobby swam easily in the grander pond. Or had done, until a pike came along to snap them up.
I told her what Lord Vaughnley had said about demanding a retraction from the Flag’s editor but not suing, and she said I’d better tell Bobby. She seemed a great deal more peaceful now that I was actually on the road with her, and I thought she had more faith in my ability to fix things than I had myself. This was a lot different from beating up a boy who pinched her bottom twice at school. A little more shadowy than making a salesman take back the rotten car he’d conned her into buying.
She slept most of the way to Newmarket and I had no idea at all what I was letting myself in for.
We drove into the Allardeck stableyard at about eight o’clock and found it ablaze with lights and movement when it should have been quiet and dark. A large horsebox was parked in the centre, all doors open, loading ramp down. Beside it stood an elderly man watching a stable-lad lead a horse towards the ramp. The door of the place where the horse had been dozing the night away shone as a wide open oblong of yellow behind him.
A few steps away from the horsebox, lit as on a stage, were two men arguing with fists raised, arms gesticulating, voices clearly shouting.
One of them was my brother-in-law, Bobby. The other…?
‘Oh my God,’ Holly said. ‘That’s one of our owners. Taking his horses. And he owes us a fortune.’
She scrambled out of the car almost before I’d braked to a halt, and ran towards the two men. Her arrival did nothing, as far as I could see, to cool the flourishing row, and to all intents they simply ignored her.
My calm-natured sister was absolutely no good at stalking into any situation and throwing her weight about. She thought privately that it was rather pleasant to cook and keep house and be a gentle old-fashioned woman: but then she was of a generation for whom that way was a choice, not a drudgery oppressively imposed.
I got out of the car and walked across to see what could be done. Holly ran back to meet me.
‘Can you stop him?’ she said urgently. ‘If he takes the horses, we’ll never get his money.’
I nodded.
The lad leading the horse had reached the ramp but the horse was reluctant to board. I walked over to the lad without delay, stood in his way, on the bottom of the ramp, and told him to put the horse back where he’d brought it from.
‘What?’ he said. He was young, small, and apparently astonished to see anyone materialise from the dark.
‘Put it back in the box, switch off the light, close the door. Do it now.’
‘But Mr Graves told me…’
‘Just do it,’ I said.
He looked doubtfully across to the two shouting men.
‘Do you work here?’ I said. ‘Or did you come with the horsebox?’
‘I came with the horsebox.’ He looked at the elderly man standing there who had so far said and done nothing. ‘What should I do, Jim?’
‘Who are you?’ I asked him.
‘The driver,’ he said flatly. ‘Keep me out of it.’
‘Right,’ I said to the lad. ‘The horse isn’t leaving. Take it back.’
‘Are you Kit Fielding?’ he said doubtfully.
‘That’s right. Mrs Allardeck’s brother. Get going.’
‘But Mr Graves…’
‘I’ll deal with Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘His horse isn’t leaving tonight.’
‘Horses,’ the boy said, correcting me. ‘I loaded the other one already.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘They’re both staying here. When you’ve put back the one you’re loading, unload the first one again.’
The boy gave me a wavering look, then turned the horse round and began to plod it back towards its rightful quarters.
The change of direction broke up the slanging match at once. The man who wasn’t Bobby broke away and shouted to the lad across the yard, ‘Hey, you, what the shit do you think you’re doing? Load the horse this minute.’
The lad stopped. I walked fast over to him, took hold of the horse’s head-collar and led the bemused animal back into its own home. The lad made no move at all to stop me. I came out. Switched off the light. Shut and bolted the door.
Mr Graves (presumably) was advancing fast with flailing arms and an extremely belligerent expression.
‘Who the shit do you think you are?’ he shouted. ‘That’s my horse. Get it out here at once!’
I stood, however, in front of the bolted door, leaning my shoulders on it, crossing one ankle over the other, folding my arms. Mr Graves came to a screeching and disbelieving halt.
‘Get away from there,’ he said thunderously, stabbing the night air with a forefinger. ‘That’s my horse. I’m taking it, and you can’t stop me.’
His pudgy face rigid with obstinacy, he stood about five feet five from balding crown to polished toecaps. He was perhaps fifty, plump, already out of breath. There was no way whatever that he was going to shift my five feet ten by force.
‘Mr Graves,’ I said calmly, ‘you can take your horses away when you’ve paid your bill.’
His mouth opened speechlessly. He took a step forward and peered at my face, which I dare say was in shadow.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Kit Fielding. Holly’s brother.’
The open mouth snapped shut. ‘And what the shit has all this to do with you? Get out of my way.’
‘A cheque,’ I said. ‘You do have your chequebook with you?’
His gaze grew calculating. I gave him little time to slide out.
I said, ‘The Daily Flag is always hungry for tit-bits for its Intimate Details. Owners tying to sneak their horses away at dead of night without paying their bills would be worth a splash, don’t you think?’
‘That’s a threat!’ he said furiously.
‘Quite right.’
‘You wouldn’t do that.’
‘Oh yes, I certainly would. I might even suggest that if you can’t pay this one bill, maybe you can’t pay others. Then all your creditors would be down like vultures in a flash.’
‘But that’s… that’s…’
‘That’s what’s happening to Bobby, yes. And if Bobby has a cash-flow problem, and I’m only saying if, then it’s partly due to you yourself and others like you who don’t pay when you should.’
‘You can’t talk to me like that,’ he said furiously.
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘I’ll report you to the Jockey Club.’
‘Yes, you do that.’
He was blustering, his threat a sham. I looked over his shoulder towards Bobby and Holly, who had been near enough to hear the whole exchange.
‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘go and fetch Mr Graves’s account. Make sure every single item he owes is on it, as you may not have a second chance.’
Bobby went at a half-run, followed more tentatively by Holly. The lad who had come with the horsebox retreated with the driver into the shadows. Mr Graves and I stood as if in a private tableau, waiting.
While a horse remained in a trainer’s yard the trainer had a good chance of collecting his due, because the law firmly allowed him to sell the horse and deduct from the proceeds what he was owed. With the horse whisked away his prospects were a court action and a lengthy wait, and if the owner went bankrupt, nothing at all.
Graves’s horses were Bobby’s security, plain and simple.
Bobby eventually returned alone bringing a lengthy bill which ran to three sheets.
‘Check it,’ I said to Graves, as he snatched the pages from Bobby’s hand.
Angrily he read the bill through from start to finish and found nothing to annoy him further until he came to the last item. He jabbed at the paper and again raised his voice.
‘Interest? What the shit do you mean, interest?’
‘Um,’ Bobby said, ‘on what I’ve had to borrow because you hadn’t paid me.’
There was a sudden silence. Respectful, on my part. I wouldn’t have thought my brother-in-law had it in him.
Graves suddenly controlled his anger, pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, and delved into an inner pocket for his chequebook. Without any sign of fury or haste he carefully wrote a cheque, tore it out, and handed it to Bobby.
‘Now,’ he said to me. ‘Move.’
‘Is it all right?’ I asked Bobby.
‘Yes,’ he said as if surprised. ‘All of it.’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘then go and unload Mr Graves’s other horse from the horsebox.’