by Dick Francis
‘I’m here,’ I pointed out, kissing her again.
‘For one night in seven. And only then because you had to come most of the way to see your father.’
‘My father gets visited because he’s on the way to you.’
‘Liar,’ she said equably. ‘The best you can say is that it’s two cats with one stone.’
‘Birds.’
‘Well, birds, then.’
‘Let’s go eat,’ I said; opened the front door and closed it behind us, and packed her into the Jensen.
‘Did you know that Aristotle Onassis had earned himself a whole million by the time he was twenty-eight?’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said.
‘He beat you,’ she said. ‘By four times as much.’
‘He’s four times the man.’
Her eyes slid sideways towards me and a smile hovered in the air. ‘He may be.’
We stopped for a red light and then turned left beside a church with a notice board saying, ‘These doth the Lord hate: a proud look, a lying tongue. Proverbs 6.16–17.’
‘Which proverb do you think is the most stupid?’ she asked.
‘Um … Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’
‘Why ever?’
‘Because if you build a cage round the bush you get a whole flock.’
‘As long as the two birds aren’t both the same sex.’
‘You think of everything,’ I said admiringly.
‘Oh, I try. I try.’
We went up to the top of the Post Office Tower and revolved three and a half times during dinner.
‘It said in The Times today that that paper firm you advised last autumn has gone bust,’ she said.
‘Well …’ I grinned. ‘They didn’t take my advice.’
‘Silly old them … What was it?’
‘To sack ninety per cent of the management, get some new accountants, and make peace with the unions.’
‘So simple, really.’ Her mouth twitched.
‘They said they couldn’t do it, of course.’
‘And you said?’
‘Prepare to meet thy doom.’
‘How biblical.’
‘Or words to that effect.’
‘Think of all those poor people thrown out of work,’ she said. ‘It can’t be funny when a firm goes bust.’
‘The firm had hired people all along in the wrong proportions. By last autumn they had only two productive workers for every one on the clerical, executive and maintenance staff. Also, the unions were vetoing automation, and insisting that every time a worker left another should be hired in his place.’
She pensively bit into paté and toast. ‘It doesn’t sound as if it could have been saved at all.’
‘Yes, it could,’ I said reflectively, ‘but it often seems to me that people in a firm would rather see the whole ship sink than throw out half of the crew and stay afloat.’
‘Fairer to everyone if they all drown?’
‘Only the firm drowns. The people swim off and make sure they overload someone else’s raft.’
She licked her fingers. ‘You used to find sick firms fascinating.’
‘I still do,’ I said, surprised.
She shook her head. ‘Disillusion has been creeping in for a long time.’
I looked back, considering. ‘It’s usually quite easy to see what’s wrong. But there’s often a stone-wall resistance on both sides to putting it right. Always dozens of reasons why change is impossible.’
‘Russell Arletti rang me up yesterday,’ she said casually.
‘Did he really?’
She nodded. ‘He wanted me to persuade you to leave Newmarket and do a job for him. A big one, he said.’
‘I can’t,’ I said positively.
‘He’s taking me out to dinner on Tuesday evening to discuss, as he put it, how to wean you from the gee-gees.’
‘Tell him to save himself the price of a meal.’
‘Well, no …’ she wrinkled her nose. ‘I might just be hungry again by Tuesday. I’ll go out with him. I like him. But I think I’ll spend the evening preparing him for the worst.’
‘What worst?’
‘That you won’t ever be going back to work for him.’
‘Gillie …’
‘It was only a phase,’ she said, looking out of the window at the sparkle of the million lights slowly sliding by below us. ‘It was just that you’d cashed in your antique chips and you weren’t exactly starving, and Russell netted you on the wing, so to speak, with an interesting diversion. But you’ve been getting tired of it recently. You’ve been restless, and too full of … I don’t know … too full of power. I think that after you’ve played with the gee-gees you’ll break out in a great gust and build a new empire … much bigger than before.’
‘Have some wine?’ I said ironically.
‘ … and you may scoff, Neil Griffon, but you’ve been letting your Onassis instinct go to rust.’
‘Not a bad thing, really.’
‘You could be creating jobs for thousands of people, instead of trotting round a small town in a pair of jodhpurs.’
‘There’s six million quids’ worth in that stable,’ I said slowly; and felt the germ of an idea lurch as it sometimes did across the ganglions.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she demanded, later.
‘What are you thinking about at this moment?’
‘The genesis of ideas.’
She gave a sigh that was half a laugh. ‘And that’s exactly why you’ll never marry me, either.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You like the Times crossword more than sex.’
‘Not more,’ I said. ‘First.’
‘Do you want me to marry you?’
She kissed my shoulder under the sheet.
‘Would you?’
‘I thought you were fed up with marriage.’ I moved my mouth against her forehead. ‘I thought Jeremy had put you off it for life.’
‘He wasn’t like you.’
He wasn’t like you … She said it often. Any time her husband’s name cropped up. He wasn’t like you.
The first time she said it, three months after I met her, I asked the obvious question.
‘What was he like?’
‘Fair, not dark. Willowy, not compact. A bit taller: six feet two. Outwardly more fun; inwardly, infinitely more boring. He didn’t want a wife so much as an admiring audience … and I got tired of the play.’ She paused. ‘And when Jennifer died …’
She had not talked about her ex-husband before, and had always shied painfully away from the thought of her daughter. She went on in a careful emotionless quiet voice, half muffled against my skin.
‘Jennifer was killed in front of me … by a youth in a leather jacket on a motorcycle. We were crossing the road. He came roaring round the corner doing sixty in a built-up area. He just … ploughed into her …’ A long shuddering pause. ‘She was eight … and super.’ She swallowed. ‘The boy had no insurance … Jeremy raved on and on about it, as if money could have compensated … and we didn’t need money, he’d inherited almost as much as I had …’ Another pause. ‘So, anyway, after that, when he found someone else and drifted off, I was glad, really …’
Though passing time had done its healing, she still had dreams about Jennifer. Sometimes she cried when she woke up, because of Jennifer.
I smoothed her shining hair. ‘I’d make a lousy husband.’
‘Oh …’ She took a shaky breath. ‘I know that. Two and a half years I’ve known you, and you’ve blown in every millennium or so, to say hi.’
‘But stayed a while.’
‘I’ll grant you.’
‘So what do you want?’ I asked. ‘Would you rather be married?’
She smiled contentedly. ‘We’ll go on as we are … if you like.’
‘I do like,’ I switched off the light.
‘As long as you prove it now and again,’ she added unnecessarily.
‘I wouldn’t let anyone else’, I said, ‘hang pink and green curtains against ochre walls in my bedroom.’
‘My bedroom. I rent it.’
‘You’re in arrears. By at least eighteen months.’
‘I’ll pay up tomorrow … Hey, what are you doing?’
‘I’m a businessman,’ I murmured. ‘Getting down to business.’
Neville Knollys Griffon did not make it easy for me to start a new era in father–son relationships.
He told me that as I did not seem to be making much progress in engaging someone else to take over the stable, he was going to find someone himself. By telephone.
He said he had done some of the entries for the next two weeks, and that Margaret was to type them out and send them off.
He said that Pease Pudding was to be taken out of the Lincoln.
He said that I had brought him the ’64 half bottles of Bollinger, and he preferred the ’61.
‘You are feeling better, then,’ I said into the first real gap of the monologue.
‘What? Oh yes, I suppose I am. Now did you hear what I said? Pease Pudding is not to go in the Lincoln.’
‘Why ever not?’
He gave me an irritated look. ‘How do you expect him to be ready?’
‘Etty is a good judge. She says he will be.’
‘I will not have Rowley Lodge made to look stupid by running hopelessly under-trained horses in important races.’
‘If Pease Pudding runs badly, people will only say that it shows how good a trainer you are yourself.’
‘That is not the point,’ he said repressively.
I opened one of the half bottles and poured the golden bubbles into his favourite Jacobean glass, which I had brought for the purpose. Champagne would not have tasted right to him from a tooth mug. He took a sip and evidently found the ’64 was bearable after all, though he didn’t say so.
‘The point’, he explained as if to a moron, ‘is the stud fees. If he runs badly, his future value at stud is what will be affected.’
‘Yes, I understand that.’
‘Don’t be silly, how can you? You know nothing about it.’
I sat down in the visitors’ armchair, leant back, crossed my legs, and put into my voice all the reasonableness and weight which I had learned to project into industrial discussions, but which I had never before had the sense to use on my father.
‘Rowley Lodge is heading for some financial rocks,’ I said, ‘and the cause of it is too much prestige-hunting. You are scared of running Pease Pudding in the Lincoln because you own a half share in him, and if he runs badly it will be your own capital investment, as well as Lady Vector’s, that will suffer.’
He spilled some champagne on his sheet, and didn’t notice it.
I went on, ‘I know that it is quite normal for people to own shares in the horses they train. At Rowley Lodge just now, however, you own too many part shares for safety. I imagine you collected so many because you could not bear to see rival stables acquiring what you judged to be the next crop of world beaters, so that you probably said to your owners something like, “If Archangel goes for forty thousand at auction and that’s too much for you, I’ll put up twenty thousand towards it.” So you’ve gathered together one of the greatest strings in the country, and their potential stud value is enormous.’
He gazed at me blankly, forgetting to drink.
‘This is fine,’ I said, ‘as long as the horses do win as expected. And year after year, they do. You’ve been pursuing this policy in moderation for a very long time, and it’s made you steadily richer. But now, this year, you’ve over-extended. You’ve bought too many. As all the part owners only pay part training fees, the receipts are not now covering the expenses. Not by quite a long way. As a result the cash balance at the bank is draining away like bathwater, and there are still three weeks to go before the first race, let alone the resale of the unsuccessful animals for stud. This dicey situation is complicated by your broken leg, your assistant being still in a coma from which he is unlikely to recover, and your stable apparently stagnating in the hands of a son who doesn’t know how to train the horses; and all that is why you are scared silly of running Pease Pudding in the Lincoln.’
I stopped for reactions. There weren’t any. Just shock.
‘You can, on the whole, stop worrying,’ I said, and knew that things would never again be quite as they had been between us. Thirty-four, I thought ruefully; I had to be thirty-four before I entered this particular arena on equal terms. ‘I could sell your half share before the race.’
Wheels slowly began to turn again behind his eyes. He blinked. Stared at his sloping champagne and straightened the glass. Tightened the mouth into an echo of the old autocracy.
‘How … how did you know all this?’ There was more resentment in his voice than anxiety.
‘I looked at the account books.’
‘No … I mean, who told you?’
‘No one needed to tell me. My job for the last six years has involved reading account books and doing sums.’
He recovered enough to take some judicious sips.
‘At least you do understand why it is imperative we get an experienced trainer to take over until I can get about again.’
‘There’s no need for one,’ I said incautiously. ‘I’ve been there for three weeks now …’
‘And do you suppose that you can learn how to train racehorses in three weeks?’ he asked with reviving contempt.
‘Since you ask,’ I said, ‘yes.’ And before he turned purple, tacked on, ‘I was born to it, if you remember … I grew up there. I find, much to my own surprise, that it is second nature.’
He saw this statement more as a threat than as a reassurance. ‘You’re not staying on after I get back.’
‘No.’ I smiled. ‘Nothing like that.’
He grunted. Hesitated. Gave in. He didn’t say in so many words that I could carry on, but just ignored the whole subject from that point.
‘I don’t want to sell my half of Pease Pudding.’
‘Draw up a list of those you don’t mind selling, then,’ I said. ‘About ten of them, for a start.’
‘And just who do you think is going to buy them? New owners don’t grow on trees, you know. And half shares are harder to sell … owners like to see their names in the race cards and in the press.’
‘I know a lot of businessmen,’ I said, ‘who would be glad to have a racehorse but who actively shun the publicity. You pick out ten horses, and I’ll sell your half shares.’
He didn’t say he would, but he did, then and there. I ran my eye down the finished list and saw only one to disagree with.
‘Don’t sell Lancat,’ I said.
He bristled. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘He’s going to be good as a three-year-old,’ I said. ‘I see from the form book that he was no great shakes at two, and if you sell now you’ll not get back what you paid. He’s looking very well, and I think he’ll win quite a lot.’
‘Rubbish. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘All right … how much would you accept for your half?’
He pursed his lips, thinking about it. ‘Four thousand. You should be able to get four, with his breeding. He cost twelve, altogether, as a yearling.’
‘You’d better suggest prices for all of them,’ I said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
He didn’t mind. I folded the list, put it in my pocket, picked up the entry forms he had written on, and prepared to go. He held out to me the champagne glass, empty.
‘Have some of this … I can’t manage it all.’
I took the glass, refilled it, and drank a mouthful. The bubbles popped round my teeth. He watched. His expression was as severe as ever, but he nodded, sharply, twice. Not as symbolic a gesture as a pipe of peace, but just as much of an acknowledgement, in its way.
On Monday morning, tapping away, Margaret said, ‘Susie’s friend’s mum says she has just happened to see Aless
andro’s passport.’
‘Which just happened’, I said drily, ‘to be well hidden away in Alessandro’s bedroom.’
‘Let us not stare at gift horses.’
‘Let us not,’ I agreed.
‘Susie’s friend’s mum says that the address on the passport was not in Italy, but in Switzerland. A place called Bastagnola. Is that any use?’
‘I hope Susie’s friend’s mum won’t lose her job.’
‘I doubt it,’ Margaret said. ‘She hops into bed with the manager, when his wife goes shopping in Cambridge.’
‘How do you know?’
Her eyes laughed. ‘Susie’s friend told me.’
I telephoned to an importer of cameras who owed me a favour and asked him if he had any contacts in the town of Bastagnola.
‘Not myself. But I could establish one, if it’s important.’
‘I want any information anyone can dig up about a man called Enso Rivera. As much information as possible.’
He wrote it down and spelled it back. ‘See what I can do,’ he said.
He rang two days later and sounded subdued.
‘I’ll be sending you an astronomical bill for European phone calls.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘An awful lot of people didn’t want to talk about your man. I met an exceptional amount of resistance.’
‘Is he Mafia, then?’ I asked.
‘No. Not Mafia. In fact, he and the Mafia are not on speaking terms. On stabbing terms, maybe, but not speaking. There seems to be some sort of truce between them.’ He paused.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Well … As far as I can gather … and I wouldn’t swear to it … he is a sort of receiver of stolen property. Most of it in the form of currency, but some gold and silver and precious stones from melted-down jewellery. I heard … and it was at third hand from a high-up policeman, so you can believe it or not as you like … that Rivera accepts the stuff, sells or exchanges it, takes a large commission, and banks the rest in Swiss accounts which he opens up for his clients. They can collect their money any time they like … and it is believed that he has an almost worldwide connection. But all this goes on behind a supposedly legitimate business as a dealer in watches. They’ve never managed to bring him to court. They can never get witnesses to testify.’