by Dick Francis
Rebecca sulked angrily. Marjorie’s disapproval grew vigorous runners in her direction, like a rampant strawberry plant.
‘I put forward a motion,’ Ivan said surprisingly, ‘that we continue to run the races as before, with Roger and Oliver in their normal roles.’
‘Seconded,’ Marjorie said crisply.
Keith scowled. Conrad, ignoring him, made a note on a pad in front of him. ‘The Board’s first decision is to continue without change, for now.’ He pursed his lips. ‘I suppose we ought to have a secretary to write the minutes.’
‘You could use Roger’s secretary,’ I suggested.
‘No!’ Rebecca jumped on it. ‘Everything we said would go straight to bloody Roger. And no one asked you to speak. You’re an outsider.’
Dart launched into verse, ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, an’ foolish notion.’
‘What?’ Rebecca demanded.
‘Robert Burns,’ Dart said. ‘To a Louse.’
I smothered the least appearance of a laugh. No one else seemed to think it funny.
I said to Rebecca mildly, ‘You could reposition the women jockeys’ changing room.’
‘Oh really?’ She was sarcastic. ‘Exactly where?’
‘I’ll show you. And,’ I went on speaking to Conrad, ‘you could double the take in the bars.’
‘Ye gods,’ Dart said comically, ‘what have we here?’
I asked Conrad, ‘Are there already detailed plans for new stands?’
‘We’re not having new stands!’ Marjorie was adamant.
‘We must,’ Conrad said.
‘We sell the land,’ Keith insisted.
Ivan dithered.
‘New stands,’ Rebecca said. ‘New management. New everything. Or sell.’
‘Sell, but later,’ Hannah repeated obstinately.
‘I agree,’ Forsyth nodded.
‘Not in my lifetime,’ Marjorie said.
CHAPTER 4
When the meeting broke up, it became apparent why it had been held impersonally on the racecourse, as none of the people attending lived with any of the others.
They walked out as individuals, each in a seeming barbed-wire enclosure of self righteousness, none of them anxious to acknowledge my continued presence.
Only Dart, halfway out of the door, looked back to where I stood watching the exodus.
‘Coming?’ he said. ‘The fun’s done.’
With a smile I joined him by the door as he thoughtfully looked me over.
‘Care for a jar?’ he said and, when I hesitated, added, ‘There’s a pub right outside the main gates that’s open all day. And, frankly, I’m curious.’
‘Curiosity’s a two-way street.’
He nodded. ‘Agreed, then.’ He led the way downstairs by a different route than the one I’d come up, and we emerged into an area, within the paddocks and near the unsaddling enclosures, that had been crowded with people on the race day but now contained only a number of parked cars. Into each car a single Stratton was climbing, none of the brothers, offspring or cousins grouping for friendly family chat.
Dart took it for granted and asked where my car was.
‘Down there.’ I pointed vaguely.
‘Oh? Hop in, then. I’ll drive you.’
Dart’s car, an old dusty economical runabout, was standing next to Marjorie’s chauffeur-driven blackly-gleaming Daimler, and she lowered her rear window as she glided slowly away, staring in disbelief at my acceptance by Dart. Dart waved to her cheerfully, reminding me vividly of my son Alan’s similar disregard of the power of dragons, a lack of perception as much as a matter of courage.
Car doors slammed, engines purred, brake lights went on and off; the Strattons dispersed. Dart put his own car into gear and steered us straight to the main entrance, where a few forlorn looking individuals were slowly walking up and down bearing placards saying ‘BAN STEEPLECHASING’ and ‘CRUELTY TO ANIMALS’.
‘They’ve been here trying to stop people coming in, ever since that horse died here last Saturday,’ Dart observed. ‘The woolly-head brigade, I call them.’
It was an apt enough description, as they wore a preponderance of knitted hats. Their placards were handwritten and amateurish, but their dedication couldn’t be doubted.
‘They don’t understand horses,’ Dart said. ‘Horses run and jump because they want to. Horses try their damnedest to get to the front of the herd. Racing wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for horses naturally busting their guts to get out in front and win.’ The grin came and went. ‘I don’t have the instincts of a horse.’
But his sister had, I thought.
Dart by-passed the demonstrators and drove across the road into the car park of the Mayflower Inn opposite, which looked as if it had never seen Plymouth let alone sailed the Atlantic.
Inside, it was resolutely decorated with 1620 imitation memorabilia, but not too bad for all that. Murals of pilgrim fathers in top hats (an anachronism) and white beards (wrong, the pilgrims were young) were reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln two hundred years later, but who cared? The place was warm and welcoming and had at least tried.
Dart bought us two unadventurous half-pints and put them carefully on a small dark oak table, settling us into wooden armed, reasonably comfortable old oak chairs.
‘So why,’ he said, ‘did you come?’
‘Eight shares in a racecourse.’
He had steel grey eyes: unusual. Unlike his sister, he hadn’t honed his bone structure to angular leanness. Not for him the agonies and bad-temper-inducing deprivations of an unremitting battle with weight. Thirty or thereabouts, Dart already showed the roundness which could develop into the all-over weightiness of his father. Unlike his father he was also showing early signs of baldness, and this did, I slowly discovered, upset him radically.
‘I’d heard about you,’ Dart said, ‘but you were always cast as a villain. You don’t look villainous in the least.’
‘Who cast me as a villain?’
‘Hannah, mostly, I suppose. She’s never got over being rejected by her mother. I mean, mothers aren’t supposed to dump infants, are they? Fathers do, regularly, male prerogative. Rebecca would kill me for saying that. Anyway, your mother dumped Hannah but not you. I’d look out for knives between the shoulder blades, if I were you.’
His voice sounded light and frivolous but I had the impression I’d received a serious warning.
‘What do you do?’ I asked neutrally. ‘What do you all do?’
‘Do? I farm. That is to say, I look after the family estates.’ Perhaps he read polite surprise on my face because he grimaced self-deprecatingly and said, ‘As it happens, we have a farm manager who runs the land and also an agent who sees to the tenants, but I make the decisions. That is to say, I listen to what the manager wants to do and to what the agent wants to do, and then I decide that that’s what I want them to do, so they do it. Unless Father has different ideas. Unless Grandfather had different ideas, in the old days. And, of course, unless they’ve all been listening to my Great Aunt Marjorie whose ideas are ultimate.’ He paused quite cheerfully. ‘The whole thing’s bloody boring, and not what I’d like to do at all.’
‘Which is?’ I asked, entertained.
‘Fantasy land,’ he said. ‘Private property. Keep out.’ He meant no offence. The same words in Keith’s mouth would have been a curse. ‘What do you do, yourself?’ he asked.
‘I’m a builder,’ I said.
‘Really? What of?’
‘Houses, mostly.’
It didn’t interest him greatly. He trotted briefly through the occupations of the other Strattons, or at least the ones I’d met.
‘Rebecca’s a jockey, I suppose you guessed? She’s been besotted with horses all her life. She’s two years younger than me. Our papa owns a racehorse or two and goes hunting. He used to do my own job until he decided I was too idle, so now he does even less. But to be fair, he does no harm
, which in these days invests him with sainthood. My Uncle Keith… heaven knows. He’s supposed to be in finance, whatever that means. My Uncle Ivan has a garden centre, all ghastly gnomes and things. He potters about there some days and trusts his manager.’
He paused to drink and gave me a glimmering inspection over the glass’s rim.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Hannah,’ he nodded. ‘She’s never done a hard day’s work. My grandfather poured money over her to make up for her mother – your mother – rejecting her, but he never seemed to love her… I suppose I shouldn’t say that. Anyway, Hannah’s not married but she has a son called Jack who’s a pain in the arse. Who else is there? Great Aunt Marjorie. Apart from Stratton money, she married a plutocrat who did the decent thing by dying fairly early. No children.’ He considered. ‘That’s the lot.’
‘What about Forsyth?’ I asked
A shutter came down fast on his easy loquacity.
‘Grandfather divided his seventy-five shares of Stratton Park among all of us,’ he stated. ‘Twenty-one shares each to his three sons, and three shares each to his four grandchildren. Forsyth gets his three like the rest of us.’ He stopped, his expression carefully non-committal. ‘Whatever Forsyth does isn’t my business.’ He left the clear implication that it wasn’t mine, either.
‘What will you all do,’ I asked, ‘about the racecourse?’
‘Besides quarrel? In the short term, nothing, as that’s what the great aunt is set on. Then we’ll get some hopeless new stands at enormous cost, then we’ll have to sell the land to pay for the stands. You may as well tear up your shares right away.’
‘You don’t seem unduly worried.’
His quick grin shone and vanished. ‘To be honest, I don’t give a toss. Even if I get myself disinherited by doing something diabolical, like voting to abolish hunting, I can’t help but get richer as time goes by. Grandfather gave me millions nine years ago, for a start. And my father has his good points. He’s already given me a chunk of his own fortune, and if he lives another three years it’ll be clear of tax.’ He stared at me, frowning. ‘Why do I tell you that?’
‘Do you want to impress me?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t care a bugger what you think.’ He blinked a bit. ‘I suppose that’s not true.’ He paused. ‘I have irritating holes in my life.’
‘Like what?’
‘Too much money. No motivation. And I’m going bald.’
‘Marry,’ I said.
‘That wouldn’t grow hair.’
‘It might stop you minding.’
‘Nothing stops you minding. And it’s damned unfair. I go to doctors who say I can’t do a bugger about it, it’s in the genes, and how did it get there, I’d like to know? Father’s OK and Grandfather had the full thatch, even though he was eighty-eight last birthday, and look at Keith with enough to brush back with his hands all the time like a ruddy girl. I hate that mannerism. And even Ivan has no bare patches, he’s going thin all over but that’s not as bad.’ He looked balefully at my head. ‘You’re about my age, and yours is thick.’
‘Try snake oil,’ I suggested.
‘That’s typical. People like you have no idea what it’s like to find hair all over the place. Washbasin. Pillow. Hairs which ought to stay growing in my scalp, dammit. How did you know I wasn’t married, anyway? And don’t give me the stock answer that I don’t look worried. I am worried, dammit, about my hair.’
‘You could try implants.’
‘Yes. Don’t laugh, I’m going to.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘I bet you are, inside. Everybody thinks it’s hilarious, someone else going bald. But when it’s you, it’s tragic.’
There were irretrievable disasters, I saw, that could only get worse. Dart drank deep as if beer would irrigate the failing follicles and asked if I were married, myself.
‘Do I look it?’
‘You look stable.’
Surprised, I said yes, I was married.
‘Children?’
‘Six sons.’
‘Six!’ He seemed horrified. ‘You’re not old enough.’
‘We married at nineteen, and my wife likes having babies.’
‘Good Lord.’ Other words failed him, and I thought back, as I did pretty often, to the heady student days when Amanda and I had taken to each other with excitement. Friends around us were pairing and living together: it was accepted behaviour.
‘Let’s get married,’ I said impulsively. ‘No one gets married,’ Amanda said. ‘Then let’s be different,’ I said.
So we married, giggling happily, and I paid no attention to my mother, who tried to tell me I was marrying Amanda with my eyes, marrying a half-grown woman I didn’t really know. ‘I married Keith Stratton for his beauty,’ she told me, ‘and it was a dreadful mistake. It’s always a mistake.’
‘But Amanda’s lovely.’
‘She’s lovely to look at and she’s kind and she clearly loves you, but you’re both so young, you’ll change as you grow older and so will she.’
‘Mum, are you coming to the wedding?’
‘Of course.’
I married Amanda for her long legs and her blonde hair and her name, Amanda, which I loved. It took ten years for me to face a long repressed recognition that my mother had been right about changes.
Neither Amanda nor I had known at nineteen that she would almost at once develop a hunger for babies. Neither of us could possibly have envisaged that she would ecstatically enjoy the actual birth process, or that she would plan the next pregnancy as soon as the last was accomplished.
Both Christopher and Toby had been born by the time I’d struggled through my qualifying exams, and feeding and housing the four of us had seemed an impossible task. It was then, in my first week out of college, that I’d gone to drown my sorrows in a depressing old pub and found the landlord weeping bankrupt tears into warm beer amid the crash of his own personal dream. The place had been condemned as unfit to live in, he owed money everywhere, his wife had left him and his licence to sell liquor would run out the next day.
We negotiated a rock-bottom price. I went to the council to get a stay of demolition. I begged and borrowed and mortgaged my soul, and Amanda, the two boys and I moved into our first ruin.
I began to make it habitable while I looked round for a job, and I found a lowly position in a large firm of architects, an existence I disliked but stuck to grimly for the pay packets.
Unlike Dart, I knew well what it was like to sweat at night over which bill to pay next, over how to pay any bill next, over which did I need most, electricity or a telephone (electricity) and do I pay the plumber (yes, but I learn his job) or do I pay first for roof tiles (yes) or new bricks (no).
I’d carted away free rubble and improvised and sanded old mortar off by the bucketful and given glamour to old stones and built a chimney that never smoked. The ruin came to life again, and I left the firm of architects and irrevocably grew and changed.
I hadn’t known at nineteen that I would be unsuited to work as part of a team, or that my true métier was hands-on construction, not simply the drawing-board. Amanda hadn’t imagined that life with an architect could mean dirt, upheaval and months without income; but to the extent that we’d settled for what we hadn’t expected, she had coped with the ruins and I had agreed to the babies, and each of us had had what we needed for our own private fulfilment, even if we’d grown apart until even our sexual interest in each other had become perfunctory and sporadic, an effort, not a joy.
After Neil’s birth, during a patch when nothing had seemed to go right, we had nearly split finally asunder, but the economics of feeding the nestlings had prevailed. I took to sleeping alone under the tarpaulins while the rest slept in the bus. I worked eighteen hours a day as a form of escape. After four increasingly prosperous but unhappy years, when neither of us had met anyone to supplant the other, we’d made a great effort to ‘start again’. Jamie had been the result. He sti
ll kept Amanda happy and, even though the new start had slowly fizzled, we had, because of it, achieved a sort of tolerant to-our-mutual-advantage stand-off which I reckoned enough for the foreseeable future, at least until the boys were grown.
So where was free choice in all of that? I chose to marry to be different and to stick to what it brought me because of an inability to admit failure. I’d chosen to work alone because I hadn’t the qualities needed for a team. Every choice a result of given factors. No free choice at all.
‘I choose to be what I am,’ I said.
Dart, startled, said, ‘What?’
‘Nothing. Only a theory. Was it inevitable that Conrad, Keith, Ivan and the rest of you should make the choices you all have about the future of the racecourse?’
He looked at his beer for answers and glanced up at me briefly. ‘Too deep for me,’ he said.
‘Would you ever have expected your father to want to sell? Or Keith to potter along as things are?’
‘Or Rebecca to love men?’ He grinned. ‘No, in all three cases, I wouldn’t.’
‘What do you yourself want for the racecourse?’ I asked.
‘You tell me,’ he said amiably, ‘you’re the expert.’
I felt in him an encompassing lassitude. Not the sort of thing to say to a virtual stranger.
‘Another half?’ I suggested, indicating our almost empty glasses.
‘No, don’t bother. What about totally random choice? Pick a card, that sort of thing. What about rational choices? Like do I take an umbrella because it’s raining.’
‘Many people don’t.’
‘Because it isn’t in their natures? Because they think it wimpish?’
‘More or less.’
‘How did we get into this?’ He seemed to tire of the subject. ‘Go back to the meeting. When you asked Father if he already had detailed plans of the new stands he’s set on, was it because you’re a builder?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded.
‘Well… if you could see the proposals, would you have an opinion?’