by Dick Francis
‘You own seven shares in this racecourse.’
She nodded. ‘And you own eight. Your mother’s. I knew your mother quite well at one time.’
I paused with the drinks. ‘Did you really?’
‘Yes. Do get on. I’m thirsty.’
I filled her glass, which she emptied fast. ‘And how well,’ I asked, refilling it, ‘do you know Marjorie Binsham?’
‘I don’t exactly know her. I met her once, years ago. I know who she is. She knows who I am. You noticed, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I watched Penelope. Her skin looked smooth and enticing in the softly diffused peach light. I wanted to touch her cheek, stroke it, to kiss it, as I had with Amanda. For God’s sake, I told myself astringently, take a grip on things. Grow up, you fool.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ Mrs Faulds said. ‘We saw on the television about the grandstand being bombed, didn’t we, Pen? I got all curious. Then it was in Saturday’s papers of course, with your name and everything, and they said the races would go on as planned. They said you’d been in the stands when they blew up, and that you were a shareholder, and in hospital.’ She looked at the walking stick. ‘They got that wrong, obviously. Anyway, I phoned the office here to ask where you were and they said you’d be here today, and I thought I’d like to meet you, Madeline’s son, after all these years. So I told Pen I had some old shares in this place and asked if she would like to come with me, and here we are.’
I thought vaguely that there was much she’d left out, but Penelope held most of my attention.
‘Pen, darling,’ her mother said kindly. ‘This must be pretty boring for you, Mr Morris and I talking about old times, so why don’t you buzz off for a look at the horses?’
I said, ‘It’s too early for there to be any horses in the parade ring yet.’
‘Hop off, Pen,’ her mother said, ‘there’s a love.’
Penelope gave a resigned conspiratorial smile, sucked her glass dry, and amicably departed.
‘She’s a darling,’ her mother said. ‘My one and only. I was forty-two when I had her.’
‘Er… lucky,’ I murmured.
Perdita Faulds laughed. ‘Do I embarrass you? Pen says I’m embarrassing. She says I tell total strangers things I should never tell anyone. I do like to shock people a bit, to be honest. There are so many tight-lipped fuddy-duddies about. But secrets, they’re different.’
‘What secrets?’
‘What secret do you want to know?’ she bantered.
‘How you came by seven shares,’ I said.
She put down her glass and regarded me with eyes that were suddenly shrewd, besides being benign.
‘Now, there’s a question!’ She didn’t answer it at once. She said, ‘A couple of weeks ago the papers were saying the Strattons were rowing over the future of this racecourse.’
‘Yes, I read that too.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘Basically, I guess so, yes.’
She said, ‘I was brought up here, you know. Not here on the racecourse, but on the estate.’
I said, puzzled, ‘But the Strattons – except Marjorie – say they don’t know you.’
‘No, silly, they don’t. Years ago, my father was Lord Stratton’s barber.’
She smiled at the surprise I hadn’t hidden.
‘You don’t think I look like a barber’s daughter?’
‘Well, no, but then I don’t know any barbers’ daughters.’
‘My father rented a cottage on the estate,’ she explained, ‘and he had shops in Swindon, and Oxford and Newbury, but he used to go to Stratton Hays himself to cut Lord Stratton’s hair. We moved before I was fifteen and lived near the Oxford shop, but my father still went to Stratton Hays once a month.’
‘Do go on,’ I said. ‘Did Lord Stratton give your father the shares?’
She finished the pale liquid in her glass. I poured some more.
‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ She considered a little, but continued. ‘My father died and left me the barber business. You see, by that time I’d learned the whole beauty trade, got diplomas, everything. Lord Stratton just strolled into the Oxford shop one day when he was passing, to see how I was getting on without my father, and he stayed to have a manicure.’
She smiled. She drank. I asked no more.
‘Your mother used to come into the Swindon shop to have her hair done,’ she said. ‘I could have told her not to marry that vicious swine, Keith, but she’d done it by then. She used to come into the shop with bruises on her face and ask me personally to style her hair to hide them. I used to take her into a private cubicle, and she’d cling to me sometimes, and just cry. We were about the same age, you see, and we liked each other.’
‘I’m glad she had someone,’ I said.
‘Funny, isn’t it, what happens? I never thought I’d be sitting here talking to you.’
‘You know about me?’
‘Lord Stratton told me. During manicures.’
‘How long did you… look after his hands?’
‘Until he died,’ she said simply. ‘But things changed, of course. I met my husband and had Penelope, and William – I mean, Lord Stratton, of course – he got older and couldn’t… well… but he still liked to have his nails done, and we would talk. Like old, old friends, you see?’
I saw.
‘He gave me the shares at the same time he gave them to your mother. He gave them to his solicitors to look after for me. He said they might be worth something one day. It wasn’t a great big deal. Just a present. A loving present. Better than money. I didn’t ever want money from him. He knew that.’
‘He was a lucky man,’ I said.
‘Oh, you dear. You’re as nice as Madeline was.’
I rubbed a hand over my face, finding no answer.
‘Does Penelope know,’ I asked, ‘about you and Lord Stratton?’
‘Pen’s a child!’ she replied. ‘She’s eighteen. Of course she doesn’t know. Nor does her father. I never told anyone. Nor did William… Lord Stratton. He wouldn’t hurt his wife, and I didn’t want him to.’
‘But Marjorie guesses.’
She nodded. ‘She’s known all these years. She came to see me in the Oxford shop. She made a special appointment. I think it was just to see what I was like. We just talked a bit, not about anything much. She never said anything afterwards. She loved William, as I did. She wouldn’t have given him away. She didn’t, anyway. She still hasn’t, has she?’
‘No, she hasn’t.’
After a pause, Perdita changed gears with her voice, shedding nostalgia, taking on business, saying crisply, ‘So what are we going to do now, about William’s racecourse?’
‘If the course is sold for development,’ I said, ‘you’ll make a nice little capital gain.’
‘How much?’
‘You can do sums as well as anyone. Seventy thousand pounds for every million the land raises, give or take a little capital gain.’
‘And you?’ she asked frankly. ‘Would you sell?’
‘You can’t say it’s not tempting. Keith’s pushing for it. He’s actually trying to put people off coming here, so that there’s no profit in the course staying open.’
‘That puts me off selling, for a start.’
I smiled. ‘Me, too.’
‘So?’
‘So if we get a brilliant new stand built – and by brilliant, I don’t mean huge, but clever, so that the crowds like to come here – our shares should pay us more regular dividends than they have in the past.’
‘You think, then, that horse racing as such will go on?’
‘It’s lasted in England so far for more than three hundred years. It’s survived scandals and frauds and all sorts of accidental disasters. Horses are beautiful and betting’s an addiction. I’d build a new stand.’
‘You’re romantic!’ she teased.
‘I’m not deeply in debt,’ I said, ‘and Keith may be.’
I looked at her in sudden speculation, fifty questions rising like sharp rays of light; but before I could do anything constructive, a racecourse official came to my side and said Colonel Gardner would like me to go urgently to the office.
‘Don’t go away without telling me how to find you,’ I begged Perdita Faulds.
‘I’ll be here all afternoon,’ she reassured me. ‘If I miss you, this is the phone number of my Oxford shop. That’ll reach me.’ She gave me a business card. ‘And how do I find you?’
I wrote my mobile phone number and the Sussex house number on the back of another of her cards, and left her contentedly continuing with her champagne while I went to find out what crisis had overcome us.
The trouble, essentially, was the state of Rebecca’s nerves. She was pacing up and down outside the office and gave me an angry stare as I went past her and through the door, and I’d never seen her look more unstable.
Roger and Oliver were inside, steaming and grinding their teeth.
‘You are not going to believe this,’ Roger said tautly, when he saw me. ‘We have all the normal sort of troubles – we’ve caught a would-be nobbler in the stables, the lights on the Tote board have fused and there’s a man down in Tattersalls having a heart attack – and we also have Rebecca creating the father and mother of a stink because there are no hangers in the women jockeys’ changing tent.’
‘Hangers?’ I said blankly.
‘Hangers. She says they can’t be expected to hang their clothes and colours up on the floor. We gave her a table, a bench, a mirror, a basin, running water and a drain. And she’s creating about hangers.’
‘Er…’ I said helplessly. ‘How about a rope, for their clothes?’
Roger handed me a bunch of keys. ‘I wondered if you’d take the jeep down to my house – it’s locked, my wife’s somewhere here but I can’t find her – and bring back some hangers. Take the clothes off them. It’s madness, but do you mind? Can you do it? Will your legs be up to it?’
‘Sure,’ I said, relieved. ‘I thought it was serious, when you sent for me.’
‘She’s riding Conrad’s horse in the first race. It would be serious enough for him – and for all of us – if she went completely off her rocker.’
‘OK.’
Outside, I found Dart trying without success to pacify his sister. He gave it up when he saw me and walked with me to the jeep, asking where I was going. When I said to fetch some hangers he was at first incredulous and then offered to help, so I drove both of us on the errand.
‘She gets into states,’ Dart said, excusing her.
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose it’s a strain, risking your life every day.’
‘Perhaps she should stop.’
‘She’s just blowing off steam.’
We disunited Roger’s clothes from a whole lot of hangers and on the way back called at the bus, where I opened the door and stuck my head into a football roar, maximum decibels.
‘Toby,’ I yelled, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes, Dad.’ He turned the volume down slightly. ‘Dad, they had Stratton Park on the telly! They showed all the flags and the bouncing castle and everything. They said people should come here, the racing was going ahead and it was a real Bank Holiday day out.’
‘Great!’ I said. ‘Do you want to come up to the paddock?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘OK, see you later.’
I told Dart about the television coverage. ‘That was Oliver’s doing,’ he said. ‘I heard him screwing the arms off those camera guys to get them rolling. I must say, he and Roger and you, you’ve done a fantastic job here.’
‘And Henry.’
‘Father says the family got you wrong. He says they shouldn’t have listened to Keith.’
‘Good.’
‘He’s worried about Rebecca, though.’
So would I be, I thought, if she were my daughter.
Dart gave the hangers to his sister who stalked off with them, tight mouthed. He also, to save my legs, he said, took the jeep’s keys back into the office and told Roger and Oliver the big top had been news. Finally he suggested a beer and a sandwich in the bar so that he could skip the Stratton lunch. ‘Keith, Hannah, Jack and Imogen,’ he said. ‘Yuk.’ Then, ‘Did you know the police took my old wheels away for testing?’
‘No,’ I said, looking for signs of worry on Dart’s face, and finding none, I didn’t know.’
‘It’s a bloody nuisance,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to rent a car. I told the police I would send them the bill and they just sneered. I’m fed up with this bomb thing.’ He grinned at my walking stick. ‘You must be, too.’
Perdita Faulds had left the bar and was nowhere in sight when we reached it. Dart and I drank and munched and I told him I’d read a recipe once for curing falling hair.
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re taking the mickey.’
‘Well,’ I said judiciously, ‘it might be on a par with tearing off tree barks to cure malaria, or using mould growing on jelly to cure blood poisoning.’
‘Quinine,’ he said, nodding, ‘and penicillin.’
‘Right. So this cure for baldness came from a Mexican medicine-man’s handbook written in 1552.’
‘I’ll try anything,’ he said.
‘You grind up some soap plant,’ I said, ‘and you boil it in dog’s urine, and you throw in a tree frog or two and some caterpillars…’
‘You’re a shit,’ he said bitterly.
‘That’s what the book says.’
‘You’re a bloody liar.’
‘The Aztecs swore by it.’
‘I’ll throw you to Keith,’ he said. ‘I’ll stamp on you myself.’
‘The book’s called The Barberini Codex. It was all serious medicine five hundred years ago.’
‘What is soap plant, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘if it works.’
We leaned on the parade ring rails before the first race, Dart and I, watching his father and mother, Conrad and Victoria, talking to their jockey-daughter, Rebecca, in a concerned little group that also included the horse’s trainer. Other concerned little groups similarly eyed their four-legged performers stalking patiently around them, and hid their wild hopes under judicious appraisals.
‘He won last time out,’ Dart said, appraising judiciously from his own sidelines. ‘She can ride well, you know, Rebecca.’
‘She must do, to get so high on the list.’
‘She’s two years younger than me, and I can’t remember when she wasn’t besotted by ponies. I got kicked by one once, and that was enough for me, thanks very much, but Rebecca…’ his voice held the familiar mix of exasperation and respect, ‘she’s broken her bones as if they were fingernails. I can’t imagine ever wanting anything as much as she wants to win.’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that all top achievers are like that, at least for a while.’
He turned his head, assessing me. ‘Are you?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Nor am I.’
‘So we stand here,’ I said, ‘watching your sister.’
Dart said, ‘You have such a damned clear way of looking at things.’
The signal was given for the jockeys to mount. Rebecca, wearing the distinctive Stratton colours of green and blue checks on the body with mismatched orange and scarlet sleeves and cap, swung her thin lithe shape into the saddle as softly as thistledown landing. The excessive strain brought on by the trivial annoyance of a lack of hangers had vanished: she looked cool, concentrated, a star on her stage, in command of her performance.
Dart watched her with all his ambivalent feelings showing; the female sibling whose prowess outshone him, whom he admired and resented, understood but couldn’t love.
Conrad’s runner, Tempestexi, a chestnut gelding, looked, by comparison with some of the o
thers in the ring, to have a long back and short legs. The two-mile hurdle race, according to the card, was for horses that hadn’t won a hurdle race before January 1st. Tempestexi, who had won one since, carried a 71b penalty for doing so, but had, all the same, been made favourite.
I asked Dart how many racehorses his father had in training and he said five, he thought, though they came and went a bit, he said, according to their legs.
‘Tendons,’ he said succinctly. ‘Horses’ tendons are as temperamental as violin strings. Tempestexi is Father’s current white-hot hope. No leg problems, so far.’
‘Does Conrad bet?’
‘No. Mother does. And Keith. He’d have put the Dower House on this one, if he’d owned it – the Dower House, that is. He’ll have bet anything he can lay his hands on. If Rebecca doesn’t win, Keith will kill her.’
‘That wouldn’t help.’
Dart laughed. ‘You of all people must know that logic never interferes with instinct, in Keith.’
The horses streamed out of the parade ring on their way to the course, and Dart and I went to watch the race from the makeshift stands Henry had bolted together from the circus tiers.
The steps were packed to the point that I hoped Henry’s boast of infallible safety would hold up. Crowds, in fact, had poured through the gates like a river during the past hour and had spread over the tarmac and into the big top and down to the betting rings in chattering thousands. The dining rooms were full, with customers waiting. There were crushes in all the bars and long lines at the Tote, and the booths by the entrance had sold out of regular racecards. The big office copier was churning out paper substitutes and running red-hot. Oliver, glimpsed briefly, sweated ecstatically.
‘The television did it,’ he said, gasping.
‘Yes, your work, well done.’
Waiting for the race to start I said to Dart, ‘Perdita Faulds is here at the races.’
‘Oh? Who is she?’
‘The other non-Stratton shareholder.’
He showed minimal interest. ‘Didn’t someone mention her at the family board meeting the other day? Why did she come?’
‘Like me, to see what was happening about her investment.’
Dart cast it out of his mind. ‘They’re off!’ he said. ‘Now, come on, Rebecca.’