To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  “Yes?”

  “How do I get from here to Lambourn nowadays, without a car?”

  “Taxi.”

  “And without much money.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Same as ever. Bus to Newbury. Bus from there to Lambourn.” He obligingly dug out time-tables and amplified, “Bus from Newbury to Lamboum leaves at five forty-five.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What you need,” he said, “is the outpatients department of the Royal Berks Hospital.”

  I caught the bus instead. I even had time at Newbury to spend some of my mother’s cash on a new pair of jeans and to discard the old paint-stained denims in the bus station’s men’s room. In a fractionally more respectable mode, therefore, I arrived on a Lamboum doorstep that I would have been happier to avoid.

  My stepfather’s horses—and that included Golden Malt—and also my uncle Robert “Himself’s” horses, were trained at the racing town of Lamboum by a young woman, Emily Jane Cox.

  She said at the sight of me, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Slumming.”

  “I hate you, Alexander.”

  The problem was that she didn’t, any more than what I felt for her could at worst be described as lust, and at best as unrealistic Round Table chivalry. Worse than hate or love, we had come near to apathy.

  I had walked, feet metaphorically dragging, from the bus stop to the stable on Upper Lambourn Road. I had arrived as she was completing her evening rounds of the stable, checking on the welfare of each of the fifty or so horses entrusted to her care.

  It was true, as jealous detractors pointed out, that she had inherited the yard as a going concern from a famous father, but it was her own skill that continued to turn out winners trained by Cox.

  She loved the life. She loved the horses. She was respected and successful. She might once also have loved Alexander Kinloch, but she was not going to dump a busy and fulfilled career for solitude on a bare cold mountain.

  “If you love me,” she’d said, “live in Lambourn.”

  I’d lived with her in Lambourn for nearly six months, once, and I’d painted nothing worth looking at.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she’d consoled me early on. “Marry me and be content.”

  I had married her and eventually left her. She’d never used my name, but had become simply Mrs. Cox.

  “What are you doing here?” she repeated.

  “Er... my stepfather had a heart attack.”

  She frowned. “Yes, I read it in the papers. But he’s all right, isn’t he? I telephoned. Your mother said not to worry.”

  “He’s not well.... He asked me to look after his horses.”

  “You? Look after them? You don’t know all that much about horses.”

  “He just said...”

  She shrugged. “Oh, all right then. You may as well set his mind at rest.”

  She turned away from me and walked back across her stable yard to an open door where a groom was positioning a bucket of water.

  She had dark hair cut like a cap and the sort of figure that looked good in trousers. We were the same age almost to the day, and at twenty-three had married without doubts.

  She’d always had a brisk authoritative way of talking that now had intensified with the years of responsibility and success. I had admired—loved—her positive energy, but it had drained my own. Even if I’d still loved her physically, I couldn’t have forever bowed to her natural habit of command. We would have quarreled if I’d stayed. We would have fought if I’d ever tried to return. We existed in a perpetual uncontested truce. We had met four times since I’d left, but never alone and never in Lambourn.

  Ivan had three horses in training in Emily’s yard. She showed me two unremarkable bays and one bright chestnut, Golden Malt. Somewhat to my dismay he had noticeably good looks, two white socks and a bright white blaze down his nose: great presence as an advertisement for a brewery, not such a good idea for disappearing without trace.

  “He’s entered for the King Alfred Gold Cup,” Emily said with pride, patting the horse’s glossy neck. “Ivan wants to win his own race.”

  “And will he?”

  “Win?” She pursed her lips. “Let’s say Golden Malt’s running for the news value. He won’t disgrace himself, can’t put it higher than that.”

  I said absently, “I’m sure he’ll do fine.”

  “What’s the matter with your eye?”

  “I got mugged.”

  She nearly laughed, but not quite. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Good idea.”

  I followed her into her house, where she led the way through the much-lived-in-kitchen, past her efficient office and into the larger sitting room where she entertained visiting owners and, it seemed, revenant husbands.

  “Still Campari?” she inquired, hands hovering over a tray of bottles and glasses.

  “Anything.”

  “I’ll get some ice.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said, but she went all the same to the kitchen.

  I walked across the unchanged room with its checked wool sofas and dark oak side tables and stood before a painting she’d hung on the wall. It showed a view of windswept links with a silver slit of sea in the background; with gray scudding clouds and two golfers doggedly leaning face against the gale, trudging and pulling their golf clubs behind them on carts. In the foreground, where long dry grass bent away from the wind, there lay a small white ball, invisible still to the players.

  I’d sent the painting as a sort of peace offering: it was one of the first I’d painted in the bothy after I’d left, and seeing it again brought sharply back not just the feel of the paint going onto the canvas but also all the guilt and joyous sense of freedom of that time.

  Emily said behind me, “One of my owners brought a friend with him a few weeks ago who spotted that painting from across the room and said, ‘I say, is that an Alexander?’ ”

  I turned. She was carrying two tumblers with ice in and looking at the picture. “You’d signed it just Alexander,” she said.

  I nodded. “I always do.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Alexander’s long enough.”

  “Anyway, he recognized it. I was very surprised, but he turned out to be some sort of art critic. He’d seen quite a lot of your work.”

  “What was his name?”

  She shrugged. “Can’t remember. I said you always painted golf, and he said no you didn’t, you painted the perseverance of the human spirit.”

  God, I thought, and I asked again, “What was his name?”

  “I told you, I can’t remember. I didn’t know I was going to see you so soon, did I?” She walked over to the bottles and poured Campari and soda onto ice. “He also said you might be going to be a great painter one day. He said you had both the technique and the courage. The courage, I ask you! I said what courage did it take to paint golf and he said it took courage to succeed at anything. Like training horses, he said.”

  “I wish you could remember his name.”

  “Well, I can’t. He was a round little man. I told him I knew you and he went on a bit about how you’d got those tiny red flecks into the stems of the dry grass in the foreground.”

  “Did he tell you how?”

  “No.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I think someone asked me about a horse.”

  She poured gin and tonic for herself, sat down and waved me to a sofa. It felt extraordinarily odd to be a guest where once I’d been host. The house had always been hers, as it had been her father’s, but it had felt like my home when I’d lived there.

  “That art man,” Emily said after a large swallow of gin, “also said that your paintings were too attractive at present to be taken seriously.”

  I smiled.

  “Don’t you mind?” she asked.

  “No. Ugly is in. Ugly is considered real.”

  “But I don’t want ugly paintings on my walls.”

  “Well... in the art world I
’m sneered at because my paintings sell. I can do portraits, I accept commissions, I can draw—all unforgivable.”

  “You don’t seem bothered.”

  “I paint what I like. I earn my bread. I’ll never be Rembrandt. I settle for what I can do, and if that is to give pleasure, well, it’s better than nothing.”

  “You never said anything like that when you were here.”

  “Too much emotion got in the way.”

  “Actually”—she rose to her feet and crossed back to the picture—“since that Sunday morning I’ve been looking at the grass.... So how did you get those tiny red flecks on the stalks? And the brown flecks and the yellow flecks, come to that.”

  “You’d be bored.”

  “No, actually, I wouldn’t.”

  Campari tasted sweet and bitter, a lot like life. I said, “Well, first I painted the whole canvas bright red.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I did,” I assured her. “Bright solid cadmium red, all over.” I rose and walked over to join her. “You can still see horizontal faint streaks of red in the silver of the sea. There’s even some red in the gray of the clouds. Red in those two figures. All the rest is overpainted with the colors you can see now. That’s the chief beauty of acrylic paint. It dries so fast you can paint layer on layer without having to wait days, like with oils. If you try to overpaint oils too soon, the layers can mix and go muddy. Anyway, that grass... I overpainted that once with raw umber, which is a dark yellowish brown, and on top of that I put mixtures of yellow ocher, and then I scratched through all the layers with a piece of metal comb.”

  “With what?”

  “Comb. I scratched the metal teeth through the layers right down to the red. The scratches lean as if with the wind... they are the stalks. The scratches show red flecks and brown flecks from the layers... and then I laid a very thin transparent glaze of purple over parts of the yellow, which is what gives it all that ripple effect that you get in long grass in a strong wind.”

  She stared silently at the canvas that had hung on her wall for more than five years, and she said eventually, “I didn’t know.”

  “What didn’t you know?”

  “Why you left. Why you couldn’t paint here.”

  “Em ...” The old fond abbreviation arose naturally.

  “You did try to tell me. I was too hurt to understand. And too young.” She sighed. “And nothing’s changed, has it?”

  “Not really.”

  She smiled vividly, without pain. “For a marriage that lasted barely four months, ours wasn’t so bad.”

  I felt a great and undeserved sense of release. I hadn’t wanted to come to Lambourn again: I’d avoided it from guilt and unwillingness to risk stirring Emily to an ill will she had in fact never shown. I had shied away habitually from the memory of her baffled eyes.

  Her actual words to me had been tough. “All right then, if you want to live on a mountain, bugger off.” It had been her eyes that had begged me to stay.

  She’d said, “If you care more for bloody paint than you do for me, bugger off.”

  Now, more than five tranquilizing years later, she said, “I wouldn’t have given up training racehorses, not for anything.”

  “I know.”

  “And you couldn’t give up painting.”

  “No.”

  “So there we are. It’s OK now between us, isn’t it?”

  “You’re generous, Em.”

  She grinned. “I quite enjoy saintly forbearance. Do you want something to eat?”

  It was she who made mushroom omelettes in the kitchen, though when I’d lived there I’d done most of the cooking. We ate at the kitchen table. She still had a passion for ice cream: strawberry, that evening.

  She said, “Do you want a divorce? Is that why you came here?”

  Startled, I said, “No. Hadn’t thought of it! Do you?”

  “You can have one anytime.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “Actually,” she said calmly, “I find it quite useful sometimes to be able to mention a husband, even if he’s never around.” She sucked her ice cream spoon. “I’m used to being in charge. I no longer want a live-in husband, to be frank.”

  She stacked our plates in the dishwasher, and said, “If you don’t want a divorce, why did you come?”

  “Ivan’s horses.”

  “That’s crap. You could have asked on the phone.”

  The Emily I’d known had been forthrightly honest. She had rid herself of some of the owners she’d inherited from her father because they’d sometimes wanted her to instruct her jockeys not to win. There was a world of difference, she’d said, between giving a young horse an easy race to get him to like the game, and trying to cheat the racing public by stopping a horse from winning in order to come home next time out at better odds. “My horses run to win,” she’d said robustly; and the racing world, with clear-eyed judgment, gave her its trust.

  It was tentatively, therefore, that I said, “Ivan wants me to make Golden Malt disappear.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? Do you want some coffee?”

  She made the coffee in a drip-feed pot, a new one since my days.

  I explained about the brewery’s financial predicament.

  “The brewery,” Emily said tartly, “owes me four months’ training fees for Golden Malt. I wrote to Ivan personally about it not long before his heart attack. I don’t like to bitch, but I want my money.”

  “You’ll get it,” I promised. “But he wants me to take the horse away from here, so that it doesn’t get sucked in and sold prematurely.”

  She frowned. “I can’t let you take it.”

  “Well... yes you can.”

  I stretched down the table to reach the folder I’d brought with me and handed her one of the certified copies of the power of attorney, explaining that it gave me authority to do as I thought best regarding Ivan’s property, which one way or another definitely included Golden Malt.

  She read the whole thing solemnly and at the end said merely, “All right. What do you want to do?”

  “To ride the horse away from here tomorrow morning, when the town and the Downs are alive with horses going in all directions.”

  She stared. “Firstly,” she said, “he’s not an easy ride.”

  “And I’d fall off?”

  “You might. And secondly, where would you go?”

  “If I tell you where, you’ll be involved more than maybe you’d want to be.”

  She thought it over. She said, “I don’t see how you can do it without my help. At the very least you need me to tell the grooms not to worry when one of the horses goes missing.”

  “Much easier with your help,” I agreed.

  We drank the coffee, not talking.

  “I like Ivan,” she said finally. “Technically he’s still my stepfather-in-law, same as Vivienne is still my mother-in-law. I see them at the races. We’re on good terms, though she’s never effusive. We send each other Christmas cards.”

  I nodded. I knew.

  “If Ivan wants the horse hidden,” Emily said, “I’ll help you. So where do you plan to go?”

  “I bought a copy of Horse and Hound in Newbury,” I said, taking the magazine out of the folder and opening at the pages of classified advertisements. “There’s a man here, over the Downs from here, saying he looks after hunters at livery and prepares horses for hunters’ chases and point-to-points. I thought about phoning him and asking him to take my hack for a few weeks. For four weeks, in fact, until a day or two before the King Alfred Gold Cup. The horse would have to come back here, wouldn’t he, so he could run with you as trainer?”

  She nodded absently, looking where my finger pointed.

  “I’m not sending Golden Malt to him,” she announced. “That man’s a bully, horses go sour on him, and he thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

  “Oh.”

  She thought briefly. “I have a friend, a woman, who offers the same
service and is a damn sight better.”

  “Is she within riding distance?”

  “About eight miles across the Downs. You’d get lost on the Downs, though.”

  “Er . . . you used to have a map of the tracks and gallops.”

  “Yes, the Ordnance Survey map. But my maps must be seven years old. There are a lot of new roads.”

  “Roads may change, but the tracks are seven thousand years old. They’ll still be there.”

  She laughed and fetched the map from the office, spreading it out on the kitchen table. “Her yard is west of here,” Emily said, pointing. “She’s quite a good way away from Mandown, where most people exercise the Lambourn strings. She’s there, see, outside the village of Foxhill.”

  “I could find that,” I said.

  Emily looked doubtful, but phoned her friend.

  “My yard’s so full,” she said. “Could you take an overflow for me for a week or two? Keep him fit. He’ll be racing later on.... You can? Good.... I’ll send one of my grooms over with him in the morning.... The horse’s name? Oh ... just call him Bobby. Send me the bills. How are your kids?”

  After the chitchat she put down the receiver.

  “There you are,” she said. “One conjuring trick done to order.”

  “You’re brilliant.”

  “Absolutely right. Where are you sleeping?”

  “I’ll find a room in Lamboum.”

  “Not unless you want to advertise your presence. Don’t forget you lived here for six months. People know you. We got married in Lambourn church. I don’t want tongues wagging that you’ve come back to me. You can sleep here, on a sofa, out of sight.”

  “How about,” I said impulsively, “in your bed?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t try to persuade her. Instead, I borrowed her telephone for two calls, one to my mother to tell her I would be away for the night but hoped to have good news for Ivan the next day, and one to Jed Parlane in Scotland.

  “How are you?” he said anxiously.

  “Living at a flat-out gallop.”

  “I meant ... Anyway, I took the police to the bothy. What a mess. ”

  “Mm.”

  “I gave them your drawings. The police haven’t had any other complaints about hikers robbing people around here.”