Mount!

by Jilly Cooper

  Dora Belvedon, thrilled with a new star to promote, had great plans.

  ‘Just think, if Mrs Wilkinson could accompany Quickly to all his races, it would give her adoring public a chance to see her again. She could become a cult – or, ha ha, colt – figure, like Andy Murray’s mother.’

  ‘Don’t be fatuous,’ snarled Rupert, who wanted Quickly out of the limelight. Nothing was more alarming for a young colt in his first race than screaming crowds and cameras flashing. He refused even to let Ed Whitaker, the Racing Post’s star photographer, take any pictures of Quickly.

  The press, however, revved up by Dora and remembering Mrs Wilkinson’s Grand National and Love Rat’s sprinting glories, were already flagging up Quickly’s date with destiny, and training their long lenses on the gallops.

  26

  Quickly’s first race, so he wouldn’t be stressed by a long journey, was a six-furlong sprint at nearby Rutminster, where back in the eighteenth century Rupert Black had triumphed on Sweet Azure.

  Since then, relations between the Campbell-Blacks and the Northfields had never been cordial. Lord Rutshire, who owned Rutminster Racecourse, was, for example, continually outraged that any attempt to cover parts of the land in houses had been blocked by action groups, their websites invariably adorned by words of support accompanied by a photograph of an arrogantly handsome Rupert Campbell-Black.

  This particularly infuriated Lord Rutshire’s younger brother Roddy Northfield, reminding him that forty years ago, his fiancée, now wife, Enid, had been seduced by Rupert at a hunt ball in a blue and green William Morris-curtained four-poster.

  Enid, although thoroughly taken in both senses, had been wise enough to appreciate no future lay with rackety Rupert, but her eyes softened at the mention of his name and she still dressed up more and attended meetings when Rupert’s horses were known to be running.

  Rupert had always pushed every rule to the limit, whether it was running a half-fit horse to keep its handicap down or applying team tactics to rein in an opponent, or even secretly persuading a clerk of the course to water it, if one of his horses needed less quick ground.

  Roddy, a keen horseman, had started life as a steward before rising to the position of Stipendiary Steward. These were paid professionals who moved around different enquiries, advising the resident stewards what to do.

  This invariably involved giving Rupert Campbell-Black and his jockeys a hard time. Recently Roddy had been appointed to the board of the British Racing Association, laughingly known as BRA, the governing body who attempted the almost impossible task of keeping a vast multi-faceted sport clean and in order, a sport that was, in addition, chronically underfunded and resistant to change.

  Neither Rupert nor Roddy missed an opportunity to take a swipe at one another. Rupert, taking delight in winning at Rutminster, felt it would be the ideal spot for Quickly to make a not too public debut.

  Having been abroad chasing winners, what he’d forgotten was that during an awards ceremony at Rutminster Racecourse three years ago, Quickly’s mother Mrs Wilkinson, nominated for Sports Personality of the Year, had been believed to have been killed when a bomb went off in the stable block. In fact, Mrs Wilkinson had been whisked away to a safe haven just beforehand, returning in glory to dry the tears on the faces of thousands of mourners at her memorial service in Rutminster Cathedral.

  The publicity team at Rutminster, aided by Dora, felt it would really pull in the crowds if Quickly’s first race coincided with his mother’s return to the racecourse to open the rebuilt stable block. Dora then wrote glowing press releases about the Debut of the Decade and Quickly combining Love Rat’s sprinting glory with Mrs Wilkinson’s stamina.

  Returning from America and discovering in addition that Cosmo’s star two-year-old I Will Repay had been entered in the same race, a furious Rupert ordered that Quickly be scratched.

  ‘Far too public, it’ll freak him out – and Touchy Filly,’ who was making her debut in an earlier race. Gav, however, talked him round.

  ‘He’s ready, Rupert. He really needs the race and Roddy Northfield will accuse you of being chicken.’

  ‘If you pull out,’ begged Dora, ‘think of the disappointment of people who’ve come miles to see him and Mrs Wilkinson, and how reassuring for Quickly to have a family member present.’

  ‘Don’t use that ghastly expression,’ snapped back Rupert.

  It was on an intensely cold June day, grey, foggy, with torrential rain and a vicious wind turning Rutminster’s lowering woods inside out, that Cosmo’s helicopter, bringing Tarqui McGall from Ireland to ride I Will Repay, was nearly blown off-course.

  Stalking the course with Gavin, and a furiously striding Rupert, poor little Meerkat had to run to keep up, and was further humiliated when Roddy Northfield ordered him out of the weighing room because: ‘Children aren’t allowed in here.’

  Lark, who hadn’t slept, had spent yesterday’s break praying for Quickly to win. Her heart beat faster as the horseboxes of the great trainers, Isa Lovell, Tommy Westerham, Charles Norville and horrible Brute Barraclough, rolled into the lorry park. Quickly looked wonderful; a few new dapples had enabled her to get a shine on his silver coat. But to avoid stress, she’d forborne to plait his mane or stencil patterns on his quarters.

  Despite the vile weather, the crowds had turned out to see Mrs Wilkinson open the stable block and cheered tumultuously when she did a lap of honour with Chisolm at her heels. People were also fascinated to see how Quickly would respond to meeting his long-lost family again – with rapture like that programme about humans on television? But predictably when led out, Quickly flattened his ears and took a bite out of Mrs Wilkinson and lashed out with both barrels at Chisolm. So Lark and Dora hastily whisked them apart.

  Valent and Etta, in a stylish periwinkle-blue coat, had been asked to lunch in the Northfield Suite, which lay at the end of the stands.

  Roddy Northfield, despite a port-wine face and the bulging eyes and pouting lips of a predatory turbot, fancied himself with the ladies. He also regarded himself as a bit of a character, encouraging privileged acquaintances to call him ‘Rodders’ and celebrating his penchant for wearing too-tight red trousers.

  ‘So clever to match them to his face,’ bitched Rupert.

  Having heard rumours that Rupert and Etta were not bosom friends (and what a pretty bosom she had), ‘Rodders’ set out to charm her and Valent, who would make the ideal sponsor.

  ‘We’re thinking of naming a new race the Mrs Wilkinson Cup next year over our jumps course – wondered if you’d be interested in sponsoring it?’

  ‘Oh Valent, wouldn’t that be lovely?’ said Etta who, despite being sick with nerves about Quickly’s debut, was being cheered by several glasses of champagne.

  Looking out of the window, she could see Mrs Wilkinson, with Chisolm and Dora, going walkabout in the crowd and shaking hooves with her fans.

  ‘She does love these outings,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if she ought to race again?’

  ‘Why not let her have another foal,’ suggested Roddy, ‘and send her to Roberto’s Revenge. He loves greys.’

  ‘Rupert would have a coronary,’ muttered Valent.

  ‘Rupert not here?’ said a disappointed Enid Northfield, who was wearing a lot of scent and a willow-green wool dress with a label saying £350 still attached.

  ‘I think he’s walking the course,’ said Etta.

  Enid, who had put on weight and would have taken up most of the William Morris-curtained four-poster, if she and Rupert had re-enacted any romping, was also nicknamed ‘Damsire’ because she was always rabbiting on about horses’ pedigrees.

  In the same race as Quickly, she and Roddy had a two-year-old called Red Trousers, and she went into a long preamble tracing his genealogy back to the Ark.

  ‘He’s out of Scarlet Woman and by Happy Hipsters,’ she told Etta, ‘and has an excellent page.’

  ‘Like Good King Wenceslas,’ giggled Etta.

  ‘I a
ctually think I Will Repay will walk it,’ said Roddy. ‘Isa Lovell is such a good trainer, much more thorough than Rupert C-B.’ That should please Etta if she weren’t too keen on Rupert.

  Pretty woman, he couldn’t resist whisking her next door to the Royal Box where, amidst the portraits of famous horses was an oil painting of a man with dark red hair, fox-brown eyes slightly too close together, and a thin clever face. He was seated at a desk holding a book on painting. At his feet lay a white mastiff.

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Etta. ‘Lovely face, sweet dog.’

  ‘An elder son, James Northfield,’ said Roddy, ‘who was killed in a race back in the eighteenth century. The title passed to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Rufus Northfield, who became Lord Rutshire; the title has now been handed down to my elder brother, Rufus. That’s his portrait over there.’

  On the opposite wall, four times as large, was a splendid new oil of the Hon. Roddy in a white tie and a red hunting tail-coat. The artist had tactfully toned down the port-wine complexion, slightly narrowed the bulging cheeks, added shape to the turbot mouth and blended grey into the dark red hair, giving the face a distinction it didn’t possess.

  ‘Who painted that?’ asked Etta.

  ‘A conservationist,’ drawled a voice, as Rupert drifted in, wet from walking the course. ‘Make the perfect poster for Save the Hippopotamus.’

  Whereupon Roddy turned magenta and Enid went into gales of laughter.

  ‘Naughty Rupert,’ she said, then, holding her scented cheek up to be kissed, ‘we’re so looking forward to seeing Master Quickly. Who was his damsire?’

  ‘Peppy Koala,’ said Rupert. ‘Bloody cold out, I need a drink.’

  So did Master Quickly, who was livid at being deprived of food and water before his race, and when Lark tried to compensate by sponging his mouth, tried to eat the sponge. Lark, on the other hand, hadn’t touched the sandwich Gav had bought her, insisting she eat something. Not to appear ungrateful, she’d shoved it in her jacket pocket. She mustn’t transmit her nerves to Quickly.

  In his jockey’s bag, Meerkat stole a look at the Good Luck card from Gee Gee. If he came in the first three, he’d ask her out.

  Back at Penscombe, Gala watched the race with Old Eddie and Young Eddie.

  ‘God, those woods are sinister. Were they the ones through which Rupert Black and James Northfield raced?’ asked Gala. ‘You wouldn’t be able to see a thing.’

  ‘Can’t see much today,’ said Eddie, who was eating his way through Old Eddie’s huge box of chocolates.

  The runners were circling the paddock, some horses controlled by a stable lad on either side. Quickly was led only by Lark. Gav felt he’d fret less and feel freer with just one person.

  ‘Pretty girl that,’ said Old Eddie.

  ‘Very,’ said Young Eddie. ‘I Will Repay looks bloody good too – he’s twice the size of Quickly.’

  And here was Meerkat walking out with the other jockeys, a rainbow of colours on such a dark day.

  It should’ve been me, thought Eddie bitterly, scooping up a couple more chocolates. Without rides he had lost his incentive to lose weight.

  Nice to see Etta and Valent, such an attractive man, holding hands, thought Gala, as the couple joined Gav, who was chewing gum, and Rupert to brief Meerkat. The draw wasn’t brilliant, with Quickly furthest away from the rail.

  ‘Stay on the outside – he hates being hemmed in,’ Rupert told Meerkat. ‘Keep him as balanced as possible, and let him loose at the furlong pole.’

  As Gav legged up Meerkat, Quickly took the opportunity to tug Gav’s cheese sandwich out of Lark’s pocket and wolf it down before she could grab it back. Lark went crimson, but catching Gav’s eye, they couldn’t stop laughing.

  ‘I’ll try and get a word with Rupert Campbell-Black,’ said Sean Boyce from At the Races, adding, ‘Well, perhaps not,’ when Rupert told him to ‘beat it’.

  Down at the start, it was even colder, the woods beetle-browed, glowering down on the water meadows. The spire of Rutminster Cathedral waved an admonitory finger.

  Quickly had been led away from the other horses, as one by one they were loaded. Perhaps the ghost of James Northfield’s horse Spartan was putting a hex on him as, shivering ostentatiously, he lashed out at the loaders in their dark-green jackets, lifted his tail and crapped lengthily into the television camera, then refused to budge.

  ‘Come on, Quickly,’ begged Meerkat.

  To fox him, the loaders unearthed an orange and black hood to put over his eyes, and circled him to kid him he wasn’t going into the stalls. But Quickly was not to be fooled.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, move it, Meerkat,’ yelled Tarqui McGall. He was trying to calm I Will Repay who, like the other horses, was stamping and plunging to get out of his stall.

  Outraged at Meerkat tugging at his tail, having been lifted off his feet by the entire six-strong loader team into a stall, which turned out to be much wider than those at home, Quickly pondered, then calmly lay down, stretching out on his belly, until Meerkat’s feet were resting on the ground.

  There was an aghast pause.

  ‘At last you’ve got a horse the right size for you,’ mocked Tarqui.

  ‘Get up, Quickly!’ screamed Meerkat.

  Jockeys and loaders were crying with laughter as Quickly took a pick of grass, decided it was muddy and, closing his eyes, pretended to go to sleep. The only answer was to open the gates and let the other runners go.

  The dark-brown I Will Repay bounded away to finish four lengths in front of Roddy Northfield’s Red Trousers, and notching up yet another win for Roberto’s Revenge. Valent was livid. Etta, who’d had several glasses of champagne, got the giggles.

  ‘Quickly reminds me of a lovely children’s book by Beverly Nichols called The Tree That Sat Down,’ she said, and got a murderous look from Rupert. Turning on Gavin, he snarled: ‘I thought you said that horse needed the run.’

  Roddy Northfield was in heaven.

  ‘Pity Campbell-Black let the day down. He shouldn’t spend so much time abroad – loses track of things.’

  Everyone else thought it hilarious. The press had a field day.

  ‘Great White Hype,’ said the Sunday Times.

  ‘Belly Flop,’ said the Racing Post, adding that ‘Master Quickly enhanced neither the reputation of his sire nor his dam when he refused to start at Rutminster.’

  Lark was in despair; Gav, hiding his bitter disappointment, resisted having a drink and went back to the drawing board.

  27

  In his second race at nearby Bath, in front of a much smaller crowd, and having bitten several loaders, Quickly decided to run. Meerkat had been told to stay at the back and move up slowly, using Quickly’s turn of foot to pick off the leaders.

  This time, an over-excited Quickly, battling for his head, fighting an impotently hauling Meerkat, set off like a rocket, until the rocket ran out of fuel at the furlong pole and Quickly out of puff. Stopping dead, shooting Meerkat over his head and on to the rails, he started to graze as all the other runners overtook him.

  ‘Don’t you ever feed him?’ tweeted Cosmo.

  With poor Meerkat sidelined with a cracked wrist, and constant pleading from Gala and Taggie, Rupert agreed to let Eddie ride Quickly at an evening meeting on the All-Weather track at Wolverhampton.

  The journey was worthwhile because in later races were entered Touchy Filly, who was no longer a maiden, and a two-year-old called Dick the Second, whose chestnut coat had a roan tinge like King Richard II’s horse Barbary. Rupert would miss the race because he was in America.

  Lark was thrilled. At last she would lead up Prince Charming on his white charger. Frogmarched into Cheltenham by Marketa, she had been persuaded into the skinniest jeans and a clinging turquoise T-shirt.

  After a sleepless night, she rose at four to wash her hair. In the lorry, Dora, Marketa, Lark and Eddie, who’d had a row with Trixie because she’d forgotten it was his big day and asked him to pick up H
ereward from nursery, sat behind Gav, who was reading War and Peace, and the yard driver, Bobby Walker.

  Lark dropped off the moment the lorry left Penscombe, falling across Eddie, and only waking as they approached Wolverhampton to find him laughing down at her and stroking her face.

  ‘If I win, will you sleep with me?’ he murmured.

  ‘Shut up, Eddie!’ snapped Gav, Dora and Bob in unison as a horribly embarrassed Lark shot bolt upright.

  A glorious day cheered them all up. Wolverhampton is a much prettier course than it looks on television. The leaves of the cherry trees, lining the course, danced in the June sunshine. At the top of the course was a large pale-blue factory which evidently cleaned trains.

  ‘Pity it can’t clean trainers,’ said Dora, glaring at dodgy Brute Barraclough, who was running a very ugly liver chestnut colt called Geoffrey, which Brute had managed to flog to some dotty old lady, Mrs Ford-Winters, when he’d visited her at the same care home that had kicked out Old Eddie for pouncing on residents. Brute’s sweet-faced wife, Rosaria, who did all the work at the yard, was devoted to Geoffrey and believed he had great potential. Brute, who bullied Rosaria and cheated on her the whole time, was a lover both of Janey Lloyd-Foxe and Bethany Latton.

  Will I ever go to the races and find someone who’s not slept with Bethany? Gav thought wearily.

  The entrance to Wolverhampton Racecourse lay through the foyer of a big hotel, and in the lift to the various racecourse boxes, restaurants and trainer and owners stands, one passed floors full of bedrooms. These were often occupied by professional punters, but it was also where Brute Barraclough was alleged to have pleasured Celeste several times. Tonight he was planning a romp with his Head Lad, Alison.

  Valent had also booked a room for himself and Etta, so they could either celebrate or drown their sorrows, depending on the result of the race.

  On the way in, Gav saw a loader from Quickly’s second race who turned pale at the thought of loading him again. Lark, who had groomed Quickly earlier, had only to give him a brief body brush and rub him over with a wet tea-towel to make his coat gleam like glass.