FOUR
Work a treat the bell might, but no one came in the small hours to tug it again to its sentinel duty. I slept undisturbed in jeans and sweater, ready for battle but not called, and Bobby went out and disconnected the string before the lads arrived for work in the morning.
He and Holly had written out the list of Flag recipients, and after coffee, when it was light, I set off in Holly’s car to seek them out.
I went first, though, as it was Sunday and early, to every newsagent, both in the town and within a fair radius of the outskirts, asking if they had sold a lot of copies of the Flag to any one person two days ago, on Friday, or if anyone had arranged for many extra copies to be delivered on that morning.
The answer was a uniform negative. Sales of the Flag on Friday had been the same as Thursday, give or take. None of the shops, big or small, had ordered more copies than usual, they said, and no one had sold right out of the Flag. The boys had done their regular delivery rounds, nothing more.
Dead end to the first and easiest trail.
I went next to seek out the feed-merchant, who was not the one who supplied my grandfather. I had been struck at once, in fact, by the unfamiliarity of all the names of Bobby’s suppliers, though when one thought about it, it was probably only to be expected. Bobby, taking over from his grandfather, would continue to use his grandfather’s suppliers: and never, it seemed, had the lifelong antagonists used the same blacksmith, the same vet, the same anything. Each had always believed the other would spy on him, given the slightest opportunity. Each had been right.
No feed-merchant in Newmarket, with several thousand horses round about, would find it strange to have his doorbell rung on his theoretical day of rest. The feed-merchant who waved me into the brick office annexe to his house was young and polished; and in an expensive accent and with crispness he told me it was not good business to allow accounts to run on overdue, he had his own cash-flow to consider, and Allardeck’s credit had run out.
I handed him Jermyn Graves’s cheque, duly endorsed by Bobby on the back.
‘Ah,’ said the feed-merchant, brightening. ‘Why ever didn’t you say so?’
‘Bobby hoped you might wait, as usual.’
‘Sorry. No can do. Cash on delivery from now on.’
‘That cheque is for more than your account,’ I pointed out.
‘So it is. Right then. Bobby shall be supplied until this runs out.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and asked him if he had seen his copy of the Flag delivered.
‘No. Why?’
I explained why. ‘This was a large scale and deliberate act of spite. One tends to want to know who.’
‘Ah.’
I waited. He considered.
‘It must have been here fairly early Friday morning,’ he said finally. ‘And it was delivered here to the office, not to the house, as the papers usually are. I picked it up with the letters when I came in. Say about eight-thirty.’
‘And it was open at the gossip page with the paragraph outlined in red?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Didn’t you wonder who’d sent it?’
‘Not really…’ He frowned. ‘I thought someone was doing me a good turn.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Do you take the Flag usually?’
‘No, I don’t. The Times and the Sporting Life.’
I thanked him and left, and took Holly’s winnings to the plumber, who greeted me with satisfaction and gave me some of the same answers as the feed-merchant. The Flag had been inside his house on the front door mat by seven o’clock, and he hadn’t seen who brought it. Mr Allardeck owed him for some pipework done way back in the summer, and he would admit, he said, that he had telephoned and threatened him pretty strongly with a county court action if he didn’t pay up at once.
Did the plumber take the Flag usually?
Yes, he did. On Friday, he got two.
‘Together?’ I asked. ‘I mean, were they both there on the mat at seven?’
‘Yes. They were.’
‘Which was on top of the other?’
He shrugged, thought, and said, ‘As far as I remember, the one marked in red was underneath. Funny, I thought it was, that the boy had delivered two. Then I saw the paragraph, and I reckoned one of my neighbours was tipping me off.’
I said it was all very hard on Bobby.
‘Yes, well, I suppose so.’ He sniffed. ‘He’s not the only bad payer, by a long shot.’ He gave me the beginnings of a sardonic smile. ‘They pay up pretty quick when their pipes burst. Come a nice heavy freeze.’
I tried three more creditors on the list. Still unpaid, they were more brusque and less helpful, but an overall pattern held good. The marked papers had been delivered before the newsboys did their rounds and no one had seen who delivered them.
I went back to the largest of the newsagents and asked the earliest time their boys set out.
‘The papers reach us here by van at six. We sort them into the rounds, and the boys set off on their bicycles before six-thirty.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
They nodded. ‘Any time.’
Disturbed by the stealth and thoroughness of the operation I drove finally to see my grandfather in the house where I’d been brought up: a large brick-built place with gables like comic eyebrows peering down at a barbed-wire-topped boundary fence.
The yard was deserted when I drove in, all the horses in their boxes with the top doors closed against the cold. On the day after the last day of the Flat season, no one went out to gallop on the Heath. Hibernation, which my grandfather hated, was already setting in.
I found him in his stable office, typing letters with concentration, the result, I surmised, of the departure of yet another beleaguered secretary.
‘Kit!’ he said, glancing up momentarily. ‘I didn’t know you were coming. Sit down. Get a drink.’ He waved a thin hand. ‘I won’t be long. Damned secretary walked out. No consideration, none at all.’
I sat and watched while he hammered the keys with twice the force necessary, and felt the usual slightly exasperated affection for him, and the same admiration.
He loved horses beyond all else. He loved Grandmother next best and had gone very silent for a while the winter she’d died, the house eerily quiet after the years they’d spent shouting at each other. Within a few months he had begun shouting at Holly and me instead, and later, after we’d left, at the secretaries. He didn’t intend to be unkind. In an imperfect world he was a perfectionist irritated by minor incompetencies, which meant most of the time.
The typing stopped. He stood up, the same height as myself, white-haired, straight and trim in shirt, tie and excellently cut tweed jacket. Casual my grandfather was not, not in habits or manners or dress, and if he was obsessive by nature it was probably just that factor which had brought him notable success over almost sixty years.
‘There’s some cheese,’ he said, ‘for lunch. Are you staying tonight?’
‘I’m, er, staying with Holly.’
His mouth compressed sharply. ‘Your place is here.’
‘I wish you’d make it up with her.’
‘I talk to her now,’ he said, ‘which is more than can be said for that arrogant Maynard with his rat of a son. She comes up here some afternoons. Brings me stews and things sometimes. But I won’t have him here and I won’t go there, so don’t ask.’ He patted my arm, the ultimate indication of approval. ‘You and I, we get along all right, eh? That’s enough.’
He led the way to the dining room where two trays lay on the table, each covered with a cloth. He removed one cloth to reveal a carefully laid single lunch: cheeses, biscuits under clingfilm, pats of butter, dish of chutney, a banana and an apple with a silver fruit knife. The other tray was for dinner.
‘New housekeeper,’ he said succinctly. ‘Very good.’
Long may she last, I thought. I removed the clingfilm and brought another knife and plate, and the two of us sat there politely eating very little, he from age, I from necessity.
I told him about the paragraph in the Flag and knew at once with relief that he’d had no hand in it.
‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Mind you, my old father could have done something like that, if he’d thought of it. Might have done it myself,’ he chuckled, ‘long ago. To Allardeck.’ Allardeck, to Grandfather, was Bobby’s grandfather, Maynard’s father, the undear departed. Grandfather had never in my hearing called him anything but plain Allardeck.
‘Not to Holly,’ my grandfather said. ‘Couldn’t do it to Holly. Wouldn’t be fair.’
‘No.’
He looked at me searchingly. ‘Did she think it might be me?’
‘She said it couldn’t be, and also that she very much didn’t want it to be you.’
He nodded, satisfied and unhurt. ‘Quite right. Little Holly. Can’t think what possessed her, marrying that little rat.’
‘He’s not so bad,’ I said.
‘He’s like Allardeck. Just the same. Smirking all over his face when his horse beat mine at Kempton two weeks ago.’
‘But you didn’t lodge an objection, I noticed.’
‘Couldn’t. No grounds. No bumping, boring or crossing. His horse won by three lengths.’ He was disgusted. ‘Were you there? I didn’t see you.’
‘Read it in the paper.’
‘Huh.’ He chose the banana. I ate the apple. ‘I saw you win the Towncrier yesterday on television. Rotten horse, full of hate. You could see it.’
‘Mm.’
‘You get people like that, too,’ he observed. ‘Chockful of ability and too twisted up to do anything worthwhile.’
‘He did win,’ I pointed out.
‘Just. Thanks to you. And don’t argue about that, it’s something I enjoy, watching you ride. There never was an Allardeck anywhere near your class.’
‘And I suppose that’s what you said to Allardeck himself?’
‘Yes, of course. He hated it.’ Grandfather sighed. ‘It’s not the same since he’s gone. I thought I’d be glad, but it’s taken some of the point out of life. I used to enjoy his sour looks when I got the better of him. I got him barred from running his horse in the St Leger once, because my spies told me it had ringworm. Did I tell you that? He would have killed me that day if he could. But he’d stolen one of my gullible lady owners with a load of lies about me never entering her horses where they could win. They didn’t win for him either, as I never let him forget.’ He cut the peeled banana into neat pieces and sat looking at them. ‘Maynard, now,’ he said, ‘Maynard hates my guts too, but he’s not worth the ground Allardeck stood on. Maynard is a power-hungry egomaniac, just the same, but he’s also a creeper, which his father never was, for all his faults.’
‘How do you mean, a creeper?’
‘A bully to the weak but a boot-licker to the strong. Maynard boot-licked his way up every ladder, stamping down on all the people he passed. He was a hateful child. Smarmy. He had the cheek to come up to me once on the Heath and tell me that when he grew up he was going to be a lord, because then I would have to bow to him, and so would everyone else.’
‘Did he really?’
‘He was quite small. Eight or nine. I told him he was repulsive and clipped his ear. He snitched to his father, of course, and Allardeck sent me a stiff letter of complaint. Long ago, long ago.’ He ate a slice of banana without enthusiasm. ‘But that longing for people to bow to him, he’s still got it, I should think. Why else does he take over all those businesses?’
‘To win,’ I said. ‘Like we win, you and I, if we can.’
‘We don’t trample on people doing it. We don’t want to be bowed to.’ He grinned. ‘Except by Allardecks, of course.’
We made some coffee and while we drank I telephoned some of Grandfather’s traditional suppliers, and his vet and blacksmith and plumber. All were surprised at my question, and no, none of them had received a marked copy of the Flag.
‘The little rat’s got a traitor right inside his camp,’ Grandfather said without noticeable regret. ‘Who’s his secretary?’
‘No one. He does everything himself.’
‘Huh. Allardeck had a secretary.’
‘You told me about fifty times Allardeck had a secretary only because you did. You boasted in his hearing that you needed a secretary as you had so many horses to train, so he got one too.’
‘He never could bear me having more than he did.’
‘And if I remember right,’ I said, ‘you were hopping up and down when he got some practice starting stalls, until you got some too.’
‘No one’s perfect.’ He shrugged dismissively. ‘If the little rat hasn’t got a secretary, who else knows his life inside out?’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is indeed the question.’
‘Maynard,’ Grandfather said positively. ‘That’s who. Maynard lived in that house, remember, until long after he was married. He married at eighteen… stupid, I thought it, but Bobby was on the way. And then he was in and out for at least another fifteen years, when he was supposed to be Allardeck’s assistant, but was always creeping off to London to do all those deals. Cocoa! Did you ever hear of anyone making a fortune out of cocoa? That was Maynard. Allardeck smirked about it for weeks, going on and on about how smart his son was. Well, my son was dead, as I reminded him pretty sharply one day, and he shut up after that.’
‘Maynard wouldn’t destroy Bobby’s career,’ I said.
‘Why not? He hasn’t spoken to him since he took up with Holly. Holly told me if Maynard wants to say anything to Bobby he gets his tame lawyer to write, and all the letters so far have been about Bobby repaying some money Maynard lent him to buy a car when he left school. Holly says Bobby was so grateful he wrote his father a letter thanking him and promising to repay him one day, and now Maynard’s holding him to it.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Absolutely true.’
‘What a bastard.’
‘The one thing Maynard is actually not,’ Grandfather said dryly, ‘is a bastard. He’s got Allardeck’s looks stamped all over him. The same sneer. The same supercilious smirk. Lanky hair. No chin. The little rat’s just like them, too.’
Bobby, the little rat, was to any but a Fielding eye a man with a perfectly normal chin and a rather pleasant smile, but I let it pass. The sins and shortcomings of the Allardecks, past and present, could never be assessed impartially in a Fielding house.
I stayed with Grandfather all afternoon and walked round the yard with him at evening stables at four-thirty, the short winter day already darkening and the lights in the boxes shining yellow.
The lads were busy, as always, removing droppings, carrying hay and water, setting the boxes straight. The long-time head-lad (at whom Grandfather never shouted) walked round with us, both of them briefly discussing details of each of the fifty or so horses. Their voices were quiet, absorbed and serious, and also in a way regretful, as the year’s expectations and triumphs were all over, excitement put away.
I dreaded the prospect of those excitements being put away for ever: of Grandfather ill or dying. He wouldn’t retire before he had to, because his job was totally his life, but it was expected that at some point not too very far ahead I would return to live in that house and take over the licence. Grandfather expected it, the owners were prepared for it, the racing world in general thought it a foregone conclusion; and I knew that I was far from ready. I wanted four more years, or five, at the game I had a passion for. I wanted to race for as long as my body was fit and uninjured and anyone would pay me. Jump jockeys never went on riding as long as flat jockeys because crunching to the ground at thirty miles an hour upwards of thirty times a year is a young man’s sport, but I’d always thought of thirty-five as approximately hanging-up-the-boots time.
By the time I was thirty-five, Grandfather would be eighty-seven, and even for him… I shivered in the cold air and thrust the thought away. The future would have to be faced, but it wasn’t upon me yet.
To Grandfather’s great disgust I left him after stables and went back to the enemy house, to find the tail end of the same evening ritual still in progress. Graves’s horses were still in the fillies’ yard, and Bobby was feeling safer because Nigel had told him that Graves had at least twice mistaken other horses for his own when he’d called to see them on Sunday mornings.
I watched Bobby with his horses as he ran his hand down their legs to feel for heat in strained tendons, and peered at the progress of minor skin eruptions, and slapped their rumps as a friendly gesture. He was a natural-born horseman, there was no doubt, and the animals responded to him in the indefinable way that they do to someone they feel comfortable with.
I might find him a bit indecisive sometimes, and not a razor-brain, but he was in truth a good enough fellow, and I could see how Holly could love him. He had, moreover, loved her enough himself to turn his back on his ancestors and estrange himself from his powerful father, and it had taken strength, I reckoned, to do that.
He stood up from feeling a leg and saw me watching him, and with an instinct straight from the subconscious stretched to his full height and gave me a hawk-like look of vivid antagonism.
‘Fielding,’ he said flatly, as if the word itself was an accusation and a curse: a declaration of continuing war.
‘Allardeck,’ I replied, in the same way. I grinned slightly. ‘I was thinking, as a matter of fact, that I liked you.’
‘Oh!’ He relaxed as fast as he’d tensed, and looked confused. ‘I don’t know… for a moment… I felt…’
‘I know,’ I said, nodding. ‘Hatred.’
‘Your eyes were in shadow. You looked… hooded.’
It was an acceptable explanation and a sort of apology; and I thought how irrational it was that the deep conditioning raised itself so quickly to the surface, and in myself on occasions just the same, however I might try to stop it.
He finished the horses without comment and we walked back towards the house.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said then, with a touch of awkwardness. ‘Back there…’ He waved a hand. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
I asked curiously, ‘Do you ever think of Holly in that way? As a Fielding? If her eyes are in shadow, does she seem a menace?’
‘No, of course not. She’s different.’
‘How is she different?’
He glanced at my face and seemed to find it all right to explain. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are strong. I mean, in your mind, not just muscles. No one who’s talked to you much could miss it. It makes you… I don’t know… somehow people notice when you’re there, like in the weighing room, or somewhere. People would be able to say if you’d been at a particular race meeting or not, or at a party, even though you don’t try. I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s what’s made you a champion jockey, I should think, and it’s totally Fielding. Well, Holly’s not like that. She’s gentle and calm and she hasn’t an ounce of aggressiveness or ambition, and she doesn’t want to go out and beat the world on horses, so she isn’t really a Fielding at heart.’
‘Mm.’ It was a dry noise from the throat more than a word. Bobby gave me another quick glance. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll plead guilty to my inheritance, and also exonerate her from it. But she does have ambition.’
‘No.’ He shook his head positively.
‘For you,’ I said. ‘For you to be a lasting success. For you both to be. To prove you were right to get married.’
He paused with his hand on the knob of the door which led from the yard to the kitchen. ‘You were against it, like all the others.’
‘Yes, for various reasons. But not now.’
‘Not on the actual day,’ he said with fairness. ‘You were the only one that turned up.’
‘She couldn’t walk up that aisle by herself, could she?’ I said. ‘Someone had to go with her.’
He smiled as instinctively as before he’d hated.
‘A Fielding giving a Fielding to an Allardeck,’ he said. ‘I wondered at the time if there would be an earthquake.’
He opened the door and we went in. Holly, who bound us together, had lit the log fire in the sitting room and was trying determinedly to be cheerful.
We sat in armchairs and I told them about my morning travels, and also assured them of Grandfather’s non-involvement.
‘The marked copies of the Flag were on people’s mats at least by six,’ I said, ‘and they came from outside, not from Newmarket. I don’t know what time the papers get to the shops in Cambridge, but not a great deal before five, I shouldn’t think, and there couldn’t have been much time for anyone to buy twenty or so papers in Cambridge and deliver them, folded and marked, to addresses all over Newmarket, twenty miles away, before the newsboys here started on their rounds.’
‘London?’ Holly said. ‘Do you think someone brought them up direct?’
‘I should think so,’ I nodded. ‘Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t someone from here who arranged it, or even did it personally, so we’re not much further ahead.’
‘It’s all so pointless,’ Holly said.
‘No one seems to have been looking out of their windows by six,’ I went on. ‘You’d think someone would be, in this town. But no one that I asked had seen anyone walking up to anyone’s door with a newspaper at that time. It was black dark, of course. They said they hardly ever see the newsboys themselves, in winter.’
The telephone on the desk beside Bobby’s chair rang, and Bobby stretched out a hand to pick up the receiver with a look of apprehension.
‘Oh… hello, Seb,’ he said. There was some relief in his voice, but not much.
‘Friend,’ Holly said to me. ‘Has a horse with us.’
‘You saw it, did you?’ Bobby made a face. ‘Someone sent you a copy…’ He listened, then said, ‘No, of course I don’t know who. It’s sheer malice. No, of course it’s not true. I’m here in business to stay, and don’t worry, your mare is very well and I was just now feeling her tendon. It’s cool and firm and doing fine. What? Father? He won’t guarantee a penny, he said so. Yes, you may well say he’s a ruthless swine… No, there’s no hope of it. In fact on the contrary he’s trying to squeeze out of me some money he lent me to buy a car about fourteen years ago. Yes, well… I suppose it’s that sort of flint that’s made him rich. What? No, not a fortune, it was a second-hand old banger, but my first. I suppose I’ll have to pay him in the end just to get his lawyers off my back.Yes, I told you, everything’s fine. Pay no attention to the Flag. Sure, Seb, any time. Bye.’
He put down the receiver, his air nowhere near as confident as his telephone voice.
‘Another owner full of doubt. Load of rats. Half of them are thinking of leaving without waiting to see if the ship will sink. Half of them, as well, haven’t paid their last month’s bills.’
‘Has Seb?’ asked Holly.
Bobby shook his head.
‘He’s got a cheek, then.’
‘That wretched paragraph reached him by post yesterday: just the Intimate Details column. A clipping, he said, not the whole paper. In an ordinary brown envelope, typed. From London, like the others.’
‘Did all the owners get a clipping?’ I asked.
‘It looks like it. Most of them have been on the phone. I haven’t exactly rung the rest to ask.’
We sat around for a while, and I borrowed the telephone to pick up my messages from the answering machine in the cottage, and to call in return a couple of trainers who’d offered rides during the week, and to talk to a couple of jockeys who lived in Newmarket, asking for a lift down to Plumpton in Sussex for racing the next day. Two of them were already going together, they said, and would take me.
‘Will you come back here?’ Holly said, when all was fixed.
I looked at the anxiety in her face and the lack of opposition in Bobby’s. I wouldn’t have expected him to want me even in the first place, but it seemed I was wrong.
‘Stay,’ he said briefly, but with invitation, not grudge.
‘I haven’t been much help.’
‘We feel better,’ Holly said, ‘with you here.’
I didn’t much want to stay because of practical considerations. I was due to ride in Devon on the Tuesday, and one reason I preferred to live in Lambourn, not Newmarket, was that from Lambourn one could drive to every racecourse in England and return home on the same day. Lambourn was central.
I said apologetically, ‘I’ll have to get a lift back to Lambourn from Plumpton, because I need my car to go to Devon on Tuesday. When I get back to Lambourn on Tuesday evening, we’ll see how things are here.’
Holly said, ‘All right’ dispiritedly, not attempting to persuade.
I looked at her downcast face, more beautiful, as often, in sorrow than in joy. A thought came unexpectedly into my head and I said without reflection, ‘Holly, are you pregnant?’