Dilly glanced over her shoulder at me. ‘We’re in for some fireworks, by the look of things!’ she remarked happily. ‘What an awful-looking boy that is, surely he can’t be under fourteen? I’d be simply terrified to go in the ring with that!’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘so would I.’
The squadron leader announced over the public address system, which was holding up well, that due to a dearth of entrants for this particular event, this was not a heat, but the final.
I groaned. That was all we needed. A lot was at stake, and all concerned knew it. From the tail of my eyes I spotted Damon and Terry smoking and conferring behind the chief steward’s dormobile. At least that aspect of the day was proving unexpectedly hitch-free.
The half-dozen entrants lined up at the top of the field where Robbo was starter. He was flustered, poor man, by the unseemly conduct of the 2nd Bassets, and by the absence of Akela who had taken the cubs camping on the marshes north of Barford. Still, he did his best as always, requesting fair play and sportsmanship and encouraging the ponies and their riders to form something approximating to a line.
When his arm came down, it was the signal for a positive storm of encouragement and invective from both sides of the ring. From Gareth I distinctly heard a cry of ‘Kill, Stu, kill!’ and from Salmon and Shorts answering bellows of ‘Go it, Kirky boy, show ’em what you’re made of!’
They thundered down the field towards the furthest poles, upon each of which a King Edward balanced precariously.
‘Hell’s bells,’ said Dilly, and ducked beneath the rope, ‘ this is where I get off.’
Even if Sabina was not competitive, Stu was. With the bit firmly between her teeth she reached the first potato at the same time as Kirk and Sabina was just able to grab it as her mount cornered on two legs and set off on the uphill return journey to the blue plastic bucket where the potatoes had to be deposited. By the bucket Clara bounced up and down, fists clenched in an agony of frustration, under Robbo’s watchful gaze.
Three of the competitors missed the bucket altogether and had to dismount and take a second stab at it. Of the remaining three Kirk and the ashen-faced Sabina were out in front and neck-and-neck, with Stu perhaps marginally ahead. The difference in styles was most striking: Kirk crouched low over the palomino’s neck, whip flailing; Sabina was a mere passenger, grey-lipped and hollow-eyed, hanging on to the pommel for dear life. I was awfully worried about her, but my anxiety was tempered by glee at the distinct possibility that she might win.
‘Give ’ im some stick, Kirky darlin’!’ yelled Shorts. ‘Show the bastard who’s boss!’
‘Come on, Sabina!’ I cried, rising from the straw bale and brandishing a fist. ‘Do it for Magna!’ It was all most diverting.
‘You don’t care, do you, Harriet?’ asked Dilly admiringly.
By the time they turned at the start to fetch the final potato, there was a small but discernible increase in Stu’s lead. The scouts were already jubilant, in premature expectation of a famous victory, and quite a crowd of pot-hunting parents had assembled on the other side, jaws rotating and glasses slopping, to urge on their champion.
And all might have been well had not Clara, carried away by the élan of Stu’s performance and probably wishing to show the assembled throng that she was the true owner, lifted her crop and given Stu a tremendous thwack on the rump as she rounded the bucket.
She had displayed hubris, and tragedy followed. Stu, not understanding the spirit in which the blow had been dealt, was very properly affronted by this shoddy treatment. She reared, spun round on her axis, and as she came down, depositing Sabina nose-first in the mire, lashed out with her back legs and caught Kirk’s palomino a thunderous blow on the flank. The palomino squealed and leapt in the air and Kirk flew like a human cannonball over the ropes and almost into the arms of Salmon and Shorts. Even then the squadron leader, veteran of many such occasions, might have salvaged something, had not the iffy interface to which Damon had lately referred chosen this crucial moment to freak out.
The squadron leader, mildest of men, and not given to raising his voice, came over the airwaves like Jehovah on a bad day: ‘JUST KEEP QUIET, EVERYONE, AND SETTLE DOWN!’ he advised in a voice with all the calm and moderation of a 747 crashing on take-off. ‘IF WE’RE ALL PERFECTLY QUIET AND SENSIBLE WE CAN SORT THINGS OUT IN NO TIME—’
He must have realised, poor man, that something was amiss, but not what. Instead of shutting up, or switching off, or both, he did neither, but lost his usually well-maintained composure and snapped at Damon: ‘IN GOD’S NAME, MAN, WHAT THE BLAZES IS GOING ON HERE?’
‘SPOT OF BOTHER, MAJOR,’ confided Damon, fortissimo.
‘SPOT OF BOTHER?’ barked the squadron leader. ‘ WE’RE SHOT TO BUGGERY!’
‘STEADY ON, GRANDAD,’ advised Terry, whose presence, in all the bedlam, I had forgotten. ‘NO NEED TO GET OUT OF YOUR COT.’
‘STARING RUDDY IMBECILES!’ said the squadron leader. ‘CAN’T YOU DO SOMETHING?’
‘ACTCHERLY, YEAH,’ said Damon. ‘I GOT SOME INTERLUDE MATERIAL.’
Too late, I realised what he meant. An eardrum-rending avalanche of pop music poured forth from the speakers to bludgeon into a quaking pulp those of us who were not already deafened. Everything in George’s teak cassette-cabinet had been grist, it seemed, to Damon’s mill.
Every animal in sight shot several feet in the air as if electrocuted, galvanised by the torrent of unspeakable noise which spewed from each one of the half-dozen amplifiers around the meadow. Squadron Leader Mather’s festival of equitation had been transformed, at a stroke, into the kind of lavish pandemonium which Hollywood whizz-kids spend millions trying to reproduce for the silver screen. Ponies reared, bucked, kicked and bolted on all sides as though some hippophobe poltergeist had let loose a swarm of angry bees. From the pot-hunting camp whole quiches whizzed through the air like disintegrating frisbees … poles and potatoes hurtled skywards like giant exclamation marks … shrieks and oaths rose faint and distorted from amongst the horseboxes … pre-pubes stumbled and wailed amongst the debris like children recently orphaned in war … cocktail shakers and thermos flasks zoomed here and there like little Exocets to plummet, as often as not, into the piles of warm horse manure dropped in extremis by the panic-stricken animals. At the top end of the main ring, where a row of hitherto docile moorland ponies had been tethered to a rail, the fence was simply peeled from the ground like elastoplast as the ponies berserked in unison … family groups, blamelessly munching sandwiches on straw bales, were upended en masse, their mixed assortment of legs waving in the air like bizarre plants in a tropical breeze.
As Dilly Chittenden and I clung together with the holocaust raging round us and Art Garfunkel rendering ‘Bright Eyes’ as he had never done before, I achieved eye-brain co-ordination for just long enough to notice one thing. The chirpy green Ghikasmobile was bouncing over the turf towards the ringside and Constantine, as perfect a picture of dégagé amusement as I had ever seen, was looking about him, with one bare, suntanned arm resting on the open window. I found time to wonder, in my agony, whether he had ever before attended a gymkhana, or whether he supposed such an event always comprised horses wreaking wholesale havoc while humans took cover from a heavy flak of flying hardware and airborne picnics. Art Garfunkel roared his last, but the baton was immediately taken up by a voice—Damon’s, though strangely altered by the assumption of a nightmarish mid-Atlantic twang—babbling inanities at breakneck speed and at the same shattering volume.
‘WELL, ALL YOU MIDSUMMER MUSIC LOVERS! SUNTIME FUNTIME’S REALLY HERE! AND IF YOU WANT THE BEST, I MEAN THE BEST, SOUNDS FOR YOUR PARTY, BARBECUE OR DISCO, DISCO-OPERATIVE HAS THOSE SOUNDS! FIFTIES ROCK AND BALLADS, SIXTIES RHYTHM AND BLUES, SEVENTIES FUNK AND REGGAE OR THE NOW! CHART-TOPPERS, WE’VE GOT ’ EM ALL …!’
Yes, I thought murderously, and most of them mine and George’s. I’d had enough. Because I was the only person present in a position to understand what was going on, I was
also the first to make a positive move to end it. I disengaged from Dilly and charged, hands over ears, towards the squadron leader’s dormobile.
At the rear I found them, Damon and Terry, the authors of our misery, crouched together like black and midnight hags over a gently steaming knot of wires. As I towered over them, purple in the face and mouthing inaudible invective, I saw Damon lift a pair of pliers, grasp one of the wires and give it a savage tweak.
There followed a serpentine hiss, a sulphurous stench and a series of sounds like a firework display over the public address system, terminating in Damon’s reverential: ‘SHIT A BRICK …’
Then, silence. Or at least what passed for silence to our deafened ears, but was actually the muted sound of ponies kicking hell out of family saloons and pre-pubes having hysterics.
‘Damon,’ I thundered. ‘What have you done?’
‘Bit loud, eh?’ he conceded. ‘Bit of a dodgy connection, there.’
‘How could you? It was awful! Awful!’
‘Just got away from us for a moment. It’s cool now.’
The ‘us’ reminded me of Terry. I turned the harsh searchlight of my attention on to him.
‘Terry, for heaven’s sake, what happened?’
‘Hallo again,’ said Terry, his eyes swivelling wildly behind the eighty pound giglamps. ‘Ole girl did all right there.’
I wondered for a moment to whom he was referring—Sabina? Clara?—but then realised that of course it was Stu he was talking about. In the chaos and uproar of the last few minutes I had completely forgotten about the race but Terry, as ever, had a firm grasp on the essentials. My fine fury seeped away. It was altogether too late to impress upon Damon the dangers inherent in employing a partner who could inspect his nose for blackheads without the aid of a mirror. My blood congealed when I thought of Terry, more accustomed to banging large nails into dinner-plate-sized hooves (and that mainly by instinct), bringing his talents to bear on a mass of delicate electrical wiring.
The squadron leader appeared, whey-faced, at our sides, his mouth thin as a stray hair on a bowl of porridge.
An awful sense of responsibility came over me. It was my son who had led the barracking … my daughter who had struck the fatal blow … my pony who had kicked Kirk’s … and my employee who had reduced this years’ gymkhana to a haymaking shambles.
‘Everything under control, Reg?’ I asked.
The squadron leader very properly ignored this enquiry.
‘There are injured people out there,’ he said, extending an arm in the direction of the main ring, but never taking his eyes from Damon’s face, ‘panic, confusion, damage, and mayhem.’
‘Could be worse then, Major, right?’ said Damon, treading the rim of the volcano like a blind man.
‘Ole local girl did all right there,’ asserted Terry. ‘Makes a change.’
‘I think,’ said the squadron leader evenly, ‘that both of you should pack up your palsied equipment and leave. For your own and everyone else’s safety.’
‘Pronto!’ I cried, unscrupulously shrugging off all taint of shared responsibility and aligning myself with the establishment.
With justifiably poor grace Damon and Terry began reeling in their blackened wires and cables. The squadron leader and I turned, with awful apprehension, to view the scene in and around the main ring.
‘Well,’ said Reg Mather. ‘At least things seem to be quietening down.’
It was all relative. The scene which met our eyes resembled the battlefield after some bloody and terrible rout. The ponies who had recovered were grazing on the spoils of war, in the form of lumps of paté de la campagne, poppyseed rolls and pork pie; those who had not were still careering and cat-jumping around the perimeter of the meadow, reins flying and stirrups flapping, with their owners in pursuit, screaming and cajoling by turns. Around the arena itself, scouts, stewards and members of the public grouped, milled and re-grouped amongst the debris with an air of distracted good intention. At least three people, though, were taking positive and effective forms of action. These were Clara, whom I saw riding the disgraced Stu out of the top gate at a brisk trot; Gareth, who was giving first aid to Sabina Langley with what I considered to be excessive zeal; and Constantine, who was moving from child to wailing child, in my direction, presumably checking for fatalities and distributing words of comfort and advice as he went.
‘Grrnnyash!’ The squadron leader emitted a strange explosive sound indicative of strong emotions forcing their way through a tiny chink in the armour of iron control. ‘ Who the hell is this Johnnie?’
‘This,’ I said, as Constantine reached our sides, ‘Is Dr Constantine Ghikas. Constantine, this is Squadron-Leader Mather, the organiser of the gymkhana.’
‘How do you do,’ said Constantine. ‘Is it normally like this, or did I just strike lucky?’
I had an idea that Reg Mather would regard this levity with the keenest disfavour, and stepped in quickly to deflect it.
‘Something went wrong with the public address system,’ I explained.
‘Oh?’ Constantine spotted Damon and Terry with their wires in the background. ‘Ah.’
‘How fortuitous that you were here, doctor,’ said the squadron leader, ‘I’m really afraid we may have some serious injuries.’
Constantine shook his head. ‘I’ve had a look round. Mostly shock and bruises, the St John’s people are doing a good job.’
Reg Mather put his hand to his brow and squeezed his temples. ‘In all the years that I have been organising this event, such a thing has never happened before.’
‘Why don’t you go and get some tea?’ enquired Constantine sympathetically. ‘There’s nothing you can do for the moment, I’m sure.’
‘What a good idea,’ I agreed enthusiastically.
‘Perhaps you’re right. Then perhaps in a few minutes we could consider a fresh start.’
‘Absolutely.’
We watched the poor man stumble away in the direction of the tea tent.
‘Your Gareth is being a perfect gentleman and a model scout,’ remarked Constantine.
I glanced over at Gareth, who was now clasping an apparently recovered Sabina round the waist and assisting her to walk.
‘Hm.’ I grunted gracelessly. ‘I don’t think somehow that his actions are as selfless as you imagine.’
‘I should jolly well hope not, at his age,’ said Constantine. ‘Speaking of which, do you fancy a walk?’
He escorted me to the far corner of the field where a mighty spreading oak tree provided shade and shelter for the portaloos. There was no one about and he placed himself between me and the rest of the field and laid my hand on his gratifyingly rigid crotch.
‘You look gorgeous in that dress,’ he said. ‘So wonderfully inappropriate.’
‘Is that a compliment?’ I murmured.
‘A fact.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘I’ll be at the hotel in Fartenwald. We can do it in the lift.’
Shakily, I responded in kind. ‘Only if the bar’s too crowded.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
As we walked back to the ringside I realised, with an awful thrill, that there had been no joke intended.
That night Maria, cheeks still flushed from her encounter with the peremptory Jamie, reached Bradbury, there to be dealt with exceedingly roughly by the Royalist troops. Until, of course, they discovered she was not what she seemed, when they dealt with her even more roughly and with many cries of ‘ ’Sblood, ’tis a maid!’ and ‘You go first, Sir Murrayne!’ She came through all this with her usual aplomb and was finally manhandled before the King’s general, who took wine with her and told her she had put up a damn fine show and must surely be the best man the Hawkhursts had got. I, too, sailed through these scenes with my customary fluency. It was a piece of piss. The only problem was restraining Maria from jumping the rude soldiery before they jumped her. My heroines were traditionally spirited when roused, but not accustomed to
take the initiative, sexually speaking. Hidden fires was the watchword, and at present, if I wasn’t careful, Maria would be roaring up every chimney in sight to the consternation of my regular readers. Regaining my presence of mind I bedded her down, tired, well content, and blamelessly alone, in a spare tent, with a guard outside to protect her from the importunings of the rank and file. It only remained for the handsome, frosty-eyed camp surgeon to examine her for any injuries she might have incurred during her mission …
At the Toms’ disco, Constantine was a ‘ succés fou’. In fact, it was enough to make you sick. While he preened in the limelight, doing all the things which I had primed him to do in order that the Tomahawks would take him to their collective bosom, I myself was obliged to remain in the shadows, both literally and figuratively, behind insurmountable barriers of junk food.
Constantine turned his considerable hand to everything from rock ’n’ roll to robotics, and with partners as diverse as Baba Moorcroft and Akela. He put himself about to a quite uncalled-for extent. Indeed, in his efforts not to single me out for preferential treatment, I considered that he was subjecting me to positive discrimination. I ground my teeth as Nita Nutkin was whirled away from my side in a flurry of leatherette fringes and given the Ghikas treatment to the strains of Dolly Parton’s ‘Here I Go Again’. For two interminable hours he never came near me. Even the male members of the Toms’ administration were not overlooked, for Constantine closed the first half of the disco by persuading Eric, Robbo, Stan and Trevor to join him in Greek dancing. As a display of Zorba-style male pride this exercise left something to be desired, for Trevor had no sense of rhythm and kept involuntarily sabotaging the ensemble, so that the five of them bobbed and jerked crazily and threatened to dislocate each other’s shoulders. But it served to establish beyond a shadow of doubt that the doctor was a good chap at a do, and the very man to raise the Tomahawks Under Fourteens to the uttermost pinnacle of the Basset League where they belonged. He even handed out the end-of-season awards with an air of unimpeachable benign respectability which I found almost unbearably titillating.
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