by Dick Francis
I offered the visitors a drink but they had nothing to celebrate and murmured about the length of the drive home. I went with them into the softening sunlight and proffered polite apologies for their non-success. They nodded unhappily. I walked across with them to their car.
The three pirate-ambushers had de-materialised from the oak. The scarlet bicycle flashed in the distance. My visitors looked back at the long dark bulk of the barn, and Roger finally came out with a question.
‘What an interesting house,’ he said civilly. ‘How did you find it?’
‘I built it. The interior, that is. Not the barn itself, of course. That’s old. A listed building. I had to negotiate to be allowed windows.’
They looked at the neat dark oblongs of glass set unobtrusively into the timber cladding, the only outward indication of the dwelling within.
‘You had a good architect,’ Roger commented.
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s another thing the Strattons are fighting over. Some of them want to tear down the stands and rebuild, and they’ve engaged an architect to draw up plans.’
His voice was thick with disgust.
I said curiously, ‘Surely new stands would be a good thing? Crowd comfort, and all that?’
‘Of course, new stands would be good!’ Irritation finally swamped him. ‘I implored the old man for years to rebuild. He always said, yes, one day, one day, but he never meant to, not in his lifetime, and now his son Conrad, the new Lord Stratton, he’s invited this dreadful man to design new stands, and he’s been striding about the place telling me we need this and we need that, and it’s all rubbish. He’s never designed stands of any sort before and he knows bugger all about racing.’
His genuine indignation interested me a lot more than a fight about shares.
‘Building the wrong stands would bankrupt everybody,’ I said thoughtfully.
Roger nodded. ‘They’ll have to borrow the money, and racing people are fickle. The punters stay away if you don’t get the bars right, and if the owners and trainers aren’t pampered and comfortable, the buggers will run their horses somewhere else. This lunatic of an architect looked totally blank when I asked him what he thought the crowds did between races. Look at the horses, he said. I ask you! And if it’s raining? Shelter and booze, I told him, that’s what brings in the customers. He told me I was old fashioned. And Stratton Park will get a horrendously expensive white elephant that the public will shun. And, like you said, the place will go bust.’
‘Only if the sell-now or sell-later factions don’t get their way.’
‘But we need new stands,’ Roger insisted. ‘We need good new stands.’ He paused. ‘Who designed your house? Perhaps we need someone like him.’
‘He’s never designed any stands. Only houses… and pubs.’
‘Pubs,’ Roger pounced on it. ‘At least he’d understand the importance of good bars.’
I smiled. ‘I’m sure he would. But you need big-building specialists. Engineers. Your own input. A team.’
‘Tell that to Conrad.’ He shrugged dejectedly and slid behind his steering wheel, winding down the window and peering out for one more question. ‘Could I possibly ask you to let me know if or when the Stratton family contact you? I probably shouldn’t trouble you, but I care about the racecourse, you see. I know the old man believed it would carry on as before, and he wanted it that way, and perhaps there’s something I can do, but I don’t know what, do you see.’
He reached into his jacket again and produced a business card. I took it and nodded, making no promise one way or another, but he took the acknowledgement as assent.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said.
Oliver Wells sat impassively beside him, showing his certainty that their mission had been, as he’d all along expected, unproductive. He still failed to raise guilt in me. Everything I knew of the Strattons urged me strongly to stay away from them in every way I could.
Roger Gardner gave me a sad farewell and drove off, and I went back into my house hoping I wouldn’t see him again.
‘Who were those people?’ Amanda said. ‘What did they want?’
The fair-haired woman, my wife, lay at the far side of our seven foot square bed, emphasising as usual the distance between us.
‘They wanted a white knight act on Stratton Park racecourse.’
She worked it out. ‘A rescue job? You? Those old shares of yours? I hope you said no.’
‘I said no.’
‘Is that why you’re lying there wide awake in the moonlight, staring at the canopy?’
The pleated silk canopy roofed our great four-poster like a mediaeval sleeping tent, the only way to achieve privacy in those days before separate bedrooms. The theatrical glamour of the tester, the tassels and the bed’s cosy promise beguiled friends: only Amanda and I understood the significance of its size. It had taken me two days of carpentry and stitching to construct, and it was understood by both of us to be a manifestation of a hard-won compromise. We would live in the same house, and also in the same bed, but apart.
‘The boys break up from school this week,’ Amanda said.
‘Do they?’
‘You said you’d take them somewhere for Easter.’
‘Did I?’
‘You know you did.’
I’d said it to de-fuse an argument. Never make rash promises, I told myself. An incurable failing.
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said.
‘And about this house…’
‘If you like it, we’ll stay here,’ I said.
‘Lee!’ It briefly silenced her. I knew she had a thousand persuasions ready: the scattered hints and sighs had been unmistakable for weeks, ever since the gravel had been laid in the drive and the building inspector had called for the last time. The house was freehold, finished and ready for sale, and we needed the money. Half my working capital lay cemented into its walls.
‘The boys need a more settled existence,’ Amanda said, not wanting to waste her reasons.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not fair to keep dragging them from school to school.’
‘No.’
‘They worry about leaving here.’
‘Tell them not to.’
‘I can’t believe it! Can we afford it? I thought you’d say you couldn’t afford it. What about the mansion near Oxford, with the tree growing in the drawing room?’
‘With luck I’ll get planning permission this week.’
‘But we’re not going there, are we?’ Despite my assurance, her anxiety rose sharply.
‘I’ll go there,’ I said. ‘You and the boys will stay here for as long as you want. For years. I’ll commute.’
‘You promise.’
‘Yes.’
‘No more mud? No more mess? No more tarpaulins for roofs and brick dust in the cornflakes?’
‘No.’
‘What made you decide?’
The mechanics of decision, I thought, were mysterious. I could have said it was indeed because it was time to settle down for the children’s sake, that the eldest had reached the examination time zone and needed continuity in teaching. I could have said that this area, the smiling countryside on the Surrey-Sussex border, was as wholesome as anywhere nowadays. I could have made the decision sound eminently logical.
Instead, I knew in my private mind that the decider had been the old oak. It had appealed to me powerfully, to the inner boy who had been brought up in London traffic, surrounded by landscapes of stone.
I’d seen the oak first a year earlier, fuzzy then as now with the promise of leaf. Mature, perfect, its boughs invited climbers, and as I’d gone there alone I climbed it without embarrassment, sitting at home in its ancient embrace, looking at the rotting great eyesore of a barn that the hard-up landowner had been forbidden to demolish. A historic tithe barn! A local landmark! It would have to stay there until it actually fell down.
A lot of crap, I’d thought, descending from the tree and walkin
g into the ruin through a creaking gap doing duty as a doorway. History-worship gone mad.
Parts of the roof far above were missing. Along the west side the timbers all leaned drunkenly at wild angles, their supports wholly weathered away. A rusted abandoned tractor and heaps of other assorted junk lay among saplings struggling up from the cracked concrete floor. A stiff breeze blew through the tangled desolation, unfriendly and cold.
I’d seen almost at once what could be built within there, almost as if the design had been hovering for a long time in my mind, awaiting life. It would be a house for children. Not necessarily for my own children, but for any. For the child I’d been. A house with many rooms, with surprises, with hiding places.
The boys had hated the place at first and Amanda, heavily pregnant, had burst into tears, but the local planners had been helpful and the landowner had sold me the barn with a surrounding acre of land as if he couldn’t believe his luck. When each son found he would be having a separate bedroom as a domain all his own, the objections miraculously ceased.
I’d brought in a conservationist to check the oak. A superb old specimen, he’d said. Three hundred years in the growing. It would outlive us all, he said; and its timeless strength seemed to give me peace.
Amanda repeated, ‘What made you decide?’
I said ‘The oak.’
‘What?’
‘Common sense,’ I said, which satisfied her.
*
On Wednesday I received two direction-changing letters. The first, from an Oxford District Council, turned down my third application for planning permission for restoring the mansion with the beech tree growing in its drawing room. I telephoned to discover why, as I’d understood the third plan had met with their unofficial approval. They now were of the opinion, a repressive voice told me, that the mansion should be restored as one dwelling, not divided into four smaller houses, as I’d suggested. Perhaps I would care to submit revised plans. Sorry, I said. Forget it. I phoned the mansion’s owner to say I was no longer a potential buyer, sending him into predictable orbital rage: but no planning permission, no sale, had been our firm agreement.
Sighing, I disconnected and dropped three months’ work into the wastepaper basket. Back, literally, to the drawing-board.
The second letter came from solicitors acting for the Stratton family, inviting me to a Stratton Park shareholders’ extraordinary meeting the following week.
I phoned the solicitors. ‘Do they expect me to go?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, Mr Morris. But as you are a shareholder, they were required to alert you to the meeting.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Entirely your decision, Mr Morris.’
The voice was cautious and non-committal, no help at all.
I asked if I held voting shares.
‘Yes, you do. Each share has one vote.’
On Friday I did the end-of-term school run, collecting the boys for their Easter break: Christopher, Toby, Edward, Alan and Neil.
What, they wanted to know, had I planned for their holidays?
‘Tomorrow,’ I said calmly, ‘we go to the races.’
‘Motor?’ Christopher asked hopefully.
‘Horses.’
They made vomiting noises.
‘And next week… a ruin hunt,’ I said.
Deafening disapproval lasted all the way home.
‘If I don’t find another nice ramshackle ruin, we’ll have to sell this house after all,’ I said, pulling up outside. ‘Take your pick.’
Sobered, they grumbled, ‘Why can’t you get a proper job?’ which I took as it was meant, resigned acceptance of the programme ahead. I’d always told them where the money came from for food and clothes and bicycles and because they’d suffered no serious shortage they had inexhaustible faith in ruins, and were apt to point them out to me unprompted.
Since the thumbs-down letter on the mansion, I’d checked through the file of replies I’d had to an advertisement I’d run in the Spectator three months earlier:
‘Wanted, an uninhabitable building. Anything from castle
to cowshed considered.’
I enquired of several interesting propositions to see if any were still available. As, owing to a recent severe slump in property prices, it seemed they all were, I promised an inspection and made a list.
I hardly admitted to myself that the uninhabitable buildings niggling away on the fringes of my mind were the grandstands at Stratton Park.
Only I knew the debt I owed to the third baron.
CHAPTER 2
It rained on Stratton Park’s steeplechase meeting, but my five elder sons – Christopher, fourteen, to Neil, seven – grumbled not so much about the weather as about having to wear tidy, unobtrusive clothing on a Saturday. Toby, twelve, the rider of the red bicycle, had tried to avoid the trip altogether, but Amanda had packed him firmly into the mini-van with the others, providing a picnic of Coca-Cola and ham omelettes in burger buns, which we dealt with in the car park on arrival.
‘OK, ground rules,’ I said, collecting the wrappings into a single bag. ‘First, no running about and banging into people. Second, Christopher looks after Alan, Toby takes Edward, Neil goes with me. Third, when we’ve chosen a rallying point, everyone turns up there immediately after each race.’
They nodded. The family crowd control measures were long established and well understood. The regular head counts reassured them rather than irked.
‘Fourth,’ I went on, ‘you don’t walk behind horses as they’re apt to kick, and fifth, notwithstanding the classless society, you’ll get on very well on a racecourse if you call every man “sir”.’
‘Sir, sir,’ Alan said, grinning, ‘I want to pee, sir.’
I trooped them in through the gates and acquired Club enclosure tickets all round. The white pasteboard badges fluttered on cords from the sliders of the zips on five blue-hooded anoraks. The five young faces looked serious and well intentioned, even Toby’s, and I went through a rare moment of being both fond and proud of my children.
The rallying point was established under shelter not far from the winner’s unsaddling enclosure and within sight of the gents. We then went all together through the entrance gate into the Club itself and round to the front of the stands and, once I was sure they all had the hang of the whereabouts, I let the paired elder ones go off on their own. Neil, brainy but timid when not in a crowd of brothers, slid his hand quietly into mine and left it there as if absentmindedly, transferring his hold to my trousers occasionally but running no risk of getting lost.
For Neil, as for imaginative Edward, getting lost was the ultimate nightmare. For Alan, it was a laughing matter; for Toby, an objective. Christopher, self-contained, never lost his bearings and habitually found his parents, rather than vice versa.
Neil, easy child, made no objection to walking around in the stands instead of going to see the horses currently plodding wetly round the parade ring before the first race. (‘What are the stands, Dad?’ ‘All those buildings.’) Neil’s agile little brain soaked up vocabulary and impressions like a sponge, and I’d grown accustomed to hearing observations from him that I would hardly have expected from adults.
We popped our heads into a bar that in spite of the rain was uncrowded, and Neil, wrinkling his nose, said he didn’t like the smell in there.
‘It’s beer,’ I said.
‘No, it smells like that pub we lived in before the barn, like it smelled when we first went there, before you changed it.’
I looked down at him thoughtfully. I’d reconstructed an ancient, unsuccessful and dying inn and turned its sporadic trade into a flood. There had been many factors – reorganised ground plan, colours, lighting, air management, car parks. I’d deliberately added smells, chiefly of bread baking, but I didn’t know what I’d taken away, beyond stale beer and old smoke.
‘What smell?’ I asked.
Neil bent his knees and put his face near the floor. ‘It’s that horrid cle
aning stuff in the water the pub man used to wash his lino tiles with, before you took them all up.’
‘Really?’
Neil straightened. ‘Can we go out of here?’ he asked.
We left hand in hand. ‘Do you know what ammonia is?’ I said.
‘You put it down drains,’ he explained.
‘Was it that smell?’
He thought it over. ‘Like ammonia but with scent in it.’
‘Disgusting,’ I said.
‘Absolutely.’
I smiled. Apart from the wondrous moment of Christopher’s birth I’d never been a good man for babies, but once the growing and emerging minds had begun expressing thoughts and opinions all their own, I’d been continuously entranced.
We watched the first race, with my lifting Neil up so that he could see the bright action over the hurdles.
One of the jockeys, I noticed in the racecard, was named Rebecca Stratton, and after the race, when the horses returned to be unsaddled, (R. Stratton unplaced), we happened to pass by while she was looping girths round her saddle and speaking over her shoulder to downcast owners before setting off back to the changing rooms.
‘He moved like a torpid stumblebum. Might try him in blinkers next time.’
She was tall with a flat body and a thin scrubbed face with high hard cheekbones, no compromise with femininity in sight. She walked not in a heel-down scurry like the male jockeys but in a sort of feline loping strut on her toes, as if she was not only aware of her own power but aroused by it. The only other woman I’d seen walk like that had been a lesbian.
‘What’s a torpid stumblebum?’ Neil asked, after she’d gone.
‘It means slow and clumsy.’
‘Oh.’
We met the others at the rallying point and I issued popcorn money all round.
‘Horse racing is boring,’ Toby said.
‘If you can pick a winner I’ll pay you Tote odds,’ I said.
‘What about me?’ Alan said.
‘Everyone.’
Brightening, they went off to look at the next race’s runners in the parade ring, with Christopher explaining to them how to read the form line in the racecard. Neil, staying close to me, said without hesitation that he would choose number seven.