Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Well now, let’s go get a drink and you fellows can tell us what to back.’ Wilmot was captivated by these decayed rogues. Like a small boy following a parade, he waddled behind them between the dwarf box hedges to the paddock bar.

  As I ambled along behind, Jane Stilwell gripped my arm and called me by my name.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, startled.

  ‘Your father’s friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re really interesting people, great characters.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But if I were you, well, perhaps it’s not for me to say this, but I wouldn’t spend too much time with them.’

  ‘They’re my father’s friends, not mine.’

  ‘You don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Great. I just thought.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  Her breath smelled of peppermint and something else – lavender was it? She looked pale in the sunlight, and her eyes were somehow bright and tired at the same time. If she had not gone on so, I would have told her that to spend more time with the three of them was the last thing on earth I wanted to do.

  ‘Will you take a glass of wine?’ Boy asked her.

  ‘Oh shampoo, great.’ She grasped the glass in her slender fingers. The timid fizz of the bubbles in the straw-coloured champagne seemed an infinite luxury.

  ‘What’s this? Pretty Poll? I prefer the Widow myself, doesn’t make my guts ache.’

  ‘I thought the only thing you minded, Cod, was, Is it a magnum?’

  ‘Now then, now then, I’m ’ere to enjoy myself, don’t want any aggravation.’ And it was with some serenity that Cod looked out across the course to the roofs of the little town and the sea beyond, his long coat flapping slightly in the breeze and him sighing, almost to himself, ‘This is the life.’

  Perhaps it was. The racing season had such a reassuring rhythm to it, as one meeting succeeded another, steeplechasing gave way to the flat, and two-year-olds became three-year-olds. The passing of time lost its terror – no, the passing of time was the point of it. Would this one train on, would promise be fulfilled, would it be as good as its parents? Such questions, so pregnant with sadness when you applied them to people, were part of the sport when it came to horses. Nothing tragic except sudden death, the little group that hid the vet taking out the humane killer. But that usually happened off in the country, well away from the stands.

  ‘We always come for the Grande Semaine. There’s no place like the Ville.’

  ‘Nowhere like it. I’m so sorry, I didn’t catch your name first time, but it’s wonderful you’ve come along, Mr Wilmot.’

  ‘Well isn’t that nice of you, sir. Dodo please, call me Dodo.’

  ‘Dodo, we need more chaps like you. This place –’ Boy paused for inspiration ‘– this place needs people who’ve got racing in their blood.’

  ‘You’re right, there, Boy, damned right. Now you know the form here, what are we going to do for the Grand Prix, what’s the word?’

  ‘Well, the talking horse is Cornichon but –’ and here Boy paused again, perhaps for dramatic effect ‘– I’ve got a feeling that this just might be the day for Ormolu.’

  ‘Ormolu . . .’ squinting at his racing paper – ‘they don’t rate it here.’

  ‘They’ve been holding it back for this race.’

  ‘Ormolu . . . OK you’re the professor.’

  ‘There may be some late money for it but I reckon it’ll still work out at fives or better.’

  As Wilmot hoicked out his wallet, Froggie gave Boy a fierce little punch in the ribs and whispered into his ear, a spluttery kind of whisper. Boy listened with his usual serenity and muttered something back which failed to satisfy Froggie who stumped off down to the Pari-Mutuel with his letterbox mouth clamped shut.

  ‘Hey,’ said Wilmot, flipping me a banknote in his huge hand, ‘you get yourself a piece of the action.’

  It was a ten thousand franc note.

  ‘Oh that’s too . . . thank you very much.’

  ‘Let’s go. I can see them coming out of the paddock.’

  I queued behind him to place the bet. He had taken his jacket off and fat spilled over his snakeskin belt like a heroic soufflé. As he waited, he sang to himself in a sweet, high Burl Ives voice.

  ‘Allez-vous en, milord . . .’

  After I had put the money on Ormolu, I stood on the little grassy rise behind the PM, watching Dodo waddle from queue to queue, placing the maximum each time I supposed, like some great beast moving along the water-hole in search of the sweetest water.

  ‘I stuck ten on the nose, Mother,’ he reported to his wife.

  ‘Oh Dodo, we’ll be washing dishes in the Crécy before the Semaine’s out.’

  ‘Ayez confiance en moi, chérie.’ His French had a nice throatiness to it, and when he turned to me, his whole mien had a winning docility, the glinting specs, the great loose linen suit and the little snakeskin shoes flickering out from under the flappy turn-ups. I was enchanted, by him, and by the ten thou.

  ‘Ormolu? You folks must be crazy. Cornichon will walk it.’ Jane Stilwell was amazed, and distressed too. ‘I’d better go get some of your money back.’

  ‘Honey, it’s too late. We had a tip.’ This was Mr Stilwell, a neat little fellow with a strange leathery skin and a mouth which pursed up before he spoke which wasn’t often. During the pauses which tended to follow his sparse remarks, his face would relax, look almost serene for a second, before tightening up when someone began to answer him. If someone, usually his wife, broke in before he had finished, he would frown even if the breaking-in was only to say yes, yes, I couldn’t agree more.

  But by then Jane Stilwell was back off down the grassy slope to the PM, her skirt swirling in the breeze and her high heels flicking out sideways as though she was trying to throw mud off them while she ran.

  ‘I reckon she’ll just about get home by a neck,’ Dodo said, and we laughed, all except Mr Stilwell who said, ‘It’s too late, she shouldn’t have gone,’ and pursed his lips after he had spoken as well as before, a sign of displeasure.

  There was something foal-like, awkward yet free about the impulse and the way she ran, the lollop of her hips and her arms and legs like sticks. And a furtive fondness for her came over me, a kindly feeling as though I was fifteen years older than she instead of the other way round.

  ‘I got a mille on,’ she panted in triumph.

  ‘Great girl,’ Dodo Wilmot said. ‘You’ll save our bacon’ – although judging by the size of the notes he had been thrusting through the window, she wouldn’t have saved a tenth of it.

  Cornichon’s jockey looked like a Chicago hood, even had a scar running across his swarthy cheek. ‘Hippo Rossi, he’s a Corsican, all the Corsican jockeys are bent,’ Froggie said as the squat little man in his yellow silks was given a leg up. ‘Looks like a sour lemon, don’t he?’

  ‘Is it a good idea to have a bent jockey?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Might be, might not. He must have jocked off Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude’s down to ride him in Ville-Sport.’ Froggie looked worried. ‘Cod, did you know about Hippo getting the ride on Cornichon?’

  ‘There was a bit of argy-bargy is my understanding of the matter.’

  ‘About what?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Never you mind, madam, it don’t signify. ’Ippo can ride a bit.’

  And as they came round the tight bend, their boots flicking the quickset hedges, it seemed as though Cornichon’s jockey was riding the hardest of any, his lemon cap burrowing into the big chestnut’s mane, his knees up to his chin and his elbows working like pistons. In the lead two furlongs out, he gave the horse half a dozen furious whacks, but it was no use. Out of the pack of following horses appeared the pink and green colours of Ormolu, and with a relentless, smooth motion passed Cornichon and ran out a comfortable winner. My father’s old companions threw their straw hats in the air, failed to catch them and then scrabbled f
or them on the ground, still chuckling their triumph.

  ‘It was a work of art. You’ll never see anything like it in all your born days and you can tell your dad I said so.’ Cod Chamberlayne was still chuckling as he clapped his old straw hat back on his sweating brow.

  ‘Formidable,’ said Dodo Wilmot. ‘Atta Boy. You’re a genius, sir.’ He bowed at Boy Kingsmill, who raised the hat he had just put back on.

  Boy looked intolerably beatific. His eyes were half-closed, his lips were moist and parted in something which was less like a smile than an expression of sexual rapture.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ Jane said. ‘That horse had no form at all. Dodo –’ But Dodo had gone off to collect his winnings. I could see him at the back of the queue on the payout side of the PM, a huge blob of contentment in cream linen. When he returned, he was still stuffing wads of notes into his deep pockets, so that his jacket bulged at the sides.

  ‘We’ll have some fun at the gala, I’m telling you. You folks coming along?’

  ‘I’m not much of a one for dressing up,’ Froggie said. ‘I’d better look after this old fool.’

  ‘Now, now then, who was it ’ad to carry you all the way from the Silver Ring bar to the car-park at ‘Aydock?’

  ‘I’d love to come,’ Boy said.

  ‘Minna and Farfar will be there. It’ll be a swell party.’

  The weather set fair from that day on. Helen and I met daily at the cage after Monsieur had done his worst and walked on a couple of hundred yards with our charges to where the sands spread and the shingle shrank back towards the road and the villas beyond and the big hotels.

  When the children were bored with digging holes and flicking sand at one another, Helen showed them the flora and fauna of the beach which she had collected while her charge was with Monsieur. She spoke to them in her serious way, as if they were on a school trip, making no concessions. They imitated the seriousness, squatting either side of her like assistants on an important scientific project. Sometimes Timmy would stand behind her to get a better view, idly pinging the strap of her green swimsuit against her pale shoulder. She showed them how to tell the seaweeds apart: the stubby fronds of the oar-weed, the twin pods of the bladderwrack, the single pods of the knotted wrack, the great flat leaves of the Laminaria saccharina (so-called because you could get sugar out of it), and the red dulse which poor people in Scotland ate, and the Irish moss or carragheen which you could make jelly out of. And then the living things, the mussels, the cuttlefish, the limpets, and winkles and periwinkles, which Brainerd collected in one of his tins and then had difficulty getting them out again.

  I lolled on my side, only half-listening, affecting boredom, or rather genuinely bored as I had always been in botany, biology whatever this was, yet unable to stop listening and even taking in a good deal. Brainerd and Timmy somehow sensed my fractiousness and disapproved of it, sending little frowning looks in my direction when I idly popped the pods on the bladderwrack. How priggish children were when it suited them, as her sternness did. I liked her sternness too. She seemed out of place in that easy decade. ‘I can see you’re not a 60s person,’ she said, but she wasn’t either. It turned out I was a year and a bit older, nineteen to her eighteen, but it could have been five years the other way round, just the opposite of Jane in fact. Even then I knew about girls maturing earlier in every department, but in the years since that first summer I never seem to have made up the deficit. There she is, coming out of the mist towards me, quite thick mist sometimes and she’s not always as calm as she was then, far from it, but somehow she’s still ahead, further into life, and her hair still the same milky gold.

  In the evening on the beach, the shore wind brought down the scent of the little grove of pines to the rise beyond the harbour. Through the hexagon in the middle of the stained glass I saw the sea turn grey and violet as the dusk gathered and the lights came on along the promenade. My hands struggled to tuck the end of the bow tie behind the loop. How easy it had seemed when my father stood behind me and guided my hands. Through the thin wall with the clumpy nosegays on it I could hear the Stilwells bickering as they dressed – or rather the bubbly stream of her talking with occasional dry little responses from him. You might think they complemented each other perfectly, except that they were not happy.

  I gave Brainerd his supper: french fries and a cheeseburger, with two scoops of pistachio and chocolate ice-cream to follow.

  ‘You look like a real waiter.’

  ‘Don’t spill, Brainerd.’

  ‘You look neat. If you’re good, I’ll give you a tip.’

  The air outside the Casino was full of the smell of the pines, and the scent of the women getting out of their limos. It was a starry summer night, one of those nights when the fullness of the skies overwhelms you and you twist your neck to look for the Plough or the Pole Star.

  ‘Look, there’s Farfar and Minna. Don’t they look great? And there’s your friend.’

  The three of them glowed like fireflies as they got out of the Mercedes and clunked the doors behind them. For a moment, they stood apart from each other, as the chauffeur drove off down the ramp. Farid Farhadi was nearest the great glass doors of the Casino, his brown face gleaming with impatience, his burly body almost bursting out of his dinner jacket, sleek and jumpy as a sealion at feeding time. His wife and Helen were outlined against the sea, Mrs Farhadi in a glistening silk dress, rose or purple – it was hard to tell in the half-light – and scintillating with jewels. Helen in a plain dark-blue dress with a ballet skirt. She looked like a severe fairy.

  Farid Farhadi greeted us as we climbed the shallow semicircle of steps to the glass doors, swooping at each of us in turn with a moment of intense cordiality, kissing or shaking hands at a terrible rate as though some appalling fate would engulf us all if any greeting took longer than two seconds.

  ‘You’, he said, ‘must be the tutor,’ looking at me with marvelling eyes, with the voice of one who has discovered some secret too rare to be credited.

  ‘Well, more of a nanny really.’

  ‘How wonderful, quelle chance. The opportunities . . .’ With one sweep of his arm he brought Helen into the circle. ‘You know our Helen, of course. She is –’ he paused for an instant to convey the impossibility of finding the words – ‘we just love her’ – this descent into a fine simplicity undercut only fractionally by Helen’s businesslike Hallo again, the sort of Hallo again you give someone who has come for a second job interview.

  ‘Avanti, avanti.’ He shooed us into the high marble salon with a frantic urgency, leading the way with quick little steps, not quite a strut. Nobody else in the huge room seemed to share this bright hurry. The other diners moved at a leaden pace with a thick glaze of tedium on their faces, and also a peculiar modesty such as you might put on at a funeral while trooping out to the graveside and taking care not to trip over a tombstone or crowd your fellow-mourners. We passed through the gaming-rooms, the deadened hush broken only by the weary calls of the croupier and the faint rattle of the wheel spinning, more suffocating than any funeral.

  ‘It’s all fixed,’ Helen hissed to me.

  ‘Is it? How do you know?’

  ‘It’s run by the Corsican Syndicate.’

  ‘Surely you don’t need to fix roulette. The house wins anyway.’

  ‘It’s fixed,’ she said fiercely. ‘Farid told me.’

  We came into a smaller room which had girls in skimpy gold and white dresses off one shoulder selling exquisite trinkets from behind little gilt tables: tiny leopards and elephants sculpted in semi-precious stones, sprays of flowers in gilt and enamel, miniature crystal phials of Dior and Chanel scent, exquisite corsages of real flowers. When a guest pointed to one of these confections, the salesgirl would hold it against her bare shoulder so that the purchaser could see how it sparkled against the flushed ivory of her skin.

  ‘Oh Dodo, handbag-fillers.’

  ‘Your handbag is too damn full already, Mother.’

 
; As we regrouped in this fragrant saloon, Farhadi came up to Helen and with an almost explosive empressement, as though this might well be his final action before he was carried off by a thrombosis, said: ‘There, please, for the darling of all our hearts.’

  He thrust something at her and she took it with the resigned manner of a nurse receiving a scalpel from the surgeon.

  ‘What is it, Helen, do let’s look.’

  She held it up with the same dutiful mien and we stared.

  It was an orchid, a waxy exotic bloom with purple and yellow spots on its recurved trumpet. The pale fleshy stalk disappeared into a brown rubber bulb.

  ‘There, it will keep for a fortnight. You simply refill the bulb.’ Farid took it back from her and then pinned it at the vee of her dress, so that the bulb was out of sight down her front.

  ‘It’s lovely, thank you.’ It was impossible to tell whether she genuinely liked it or thought it an evil monstrosity.

  ‘Farfar, you are too much,’ Jane said.

  ‘And where is my orchid?’ Mrs Farhadi asked.

  ‘My darling, at Chantilly you have a whole conservatory.’

  We came into the dining-room which looked even larger than it was because of the long gilt mirrors between the windows. The waitresses were standing at attention beside the tables. They were dressed as jockeys with miniature peaked caps perching on top of their bubble curls, like Harpo in A Day at the Races.

  ‘There you see, the Wildenstein colours, and Aly’s and the old Boussac silks and those, I think, must be Jeanne Schlumberger’s. It’s so enchanting, isn’t it?’

  ‘They do it every year,’ Jane Stilwell said, ‘last year they still had Ed Pereira’s colours although he shot himself two months before.’

  Till quite recently, I had kept the menu, then lost it in some move or other, but even now I can almost recite it by heart:

  Timbale de queues de langoustines