by Phillip Rock
The savage snarl of the machine coming up the drive brought some of the summer students running from the orchard to the front of the main building, to stand in awe as Derek brought the bike to a stop in a drifting haze of gravel dust and exhaust smoke. He pulled the helmet from his head and grinned broadly at the children.
“Hello! I remember some of you from last summer. Is that you, Bertie?”
Bertie nodded sullenly and scratched his thin, bare chest. “You didn’t show up this year. We have a blinkin’ girl. Blinkin’ Kate!”
“Lucky you.”
“May we carry your bags inside for you, Mr. Ramsay?” one of the older boys asked.
“I’m not staying, Clifton, but you might keep an eye on them for me.”
Bertie picked at his nose. “You going to take me for a ride on the bike?”
“No, Bertie. And stop that disgusting habit. You should have outgrown it by now.”
The boy glared in defiance. “Well, I haven’t, so there!”
Derek slipped his helmet over the handlebars and combed his hair with his fingers. Kate Wood-Lacy was coming out of the orchard with the rest of her group and he strode toward her.
“Well, well,” he said. “Kate the counselor!” He put his arms around her and gave her a quick hug. “My, my … not little Kate any longer. Like squeezing Mae West.”
She flushed scarlet and pulled away from him. “Oh, put a cork in it.”
“Such language.”
“Two months at this job and I’ve learned to swear like a trooper.”
“Bertie?”
“Very much Bertie. There are times when I could just kick the little beast.”
“Go ahead and do it. I set my hand across his rump ten minutes after I met him.”
“No corporal punishment at Burgate. Remember?”
“A smack on the backside is not punishment. It is a catharsis for the counselors.” They walked slowly across the drive toward the front doors of the school. “Outside of Bertie, are you enjoying being the teacher and not the taught?”
She nodded. “Very much. Charles said I can come back next summer if I’d like. Do you think you’ll work here again?”
“No, Kate. They keep me too busy at Pembroke. Study … and then the Cambridge air squadron most of August. No time for it.” He paused for a moment and looked up at the main house and then off across the gardens at the new building, all modern glass and brick. Christ, he thought, how the old place keeps growing. “Had some happy times here, though.”
Charles was in the hall talking to Colin when they strolled in. Colin, holding a suitcase in one hand and a canvas duffel bag in the other, was wearing his Levi Strauss pants, lizard boots, and a worn leather flying jacket with the emblem of the U.S. Navy over the breast pocket.
“Hello, Yank!” Derek said.
“Hi yourself.” He grinned at his friend and held up the bags. “You have room for these in that rattle wagon?”
“We’ll cram them in somehow.”
“Are you sure you won’t stay and have some lunch, Derek?” Charles asked.
“No, thank you, Mr. Greville. I had a whopping breakfast.”
“Are you going to stop over at my brother’s or go straight on?”
“Spend the night, sir, then head up to Scotland in the morning.”
“Two weeks at Gleneagles playing golf,” Colin said. “The lucky stiff.”
“I’d have preferred a run through the south of France, but the old boy is looking forward to my joining him.”
“Give your grandfather my best,” Charles said. “He seems to be enjoying his retirement.”
Derek laughed. “He is, sir. Playing more golf these days than Byron Nelson.”
They shoved and pushed Colin’s bags into the sidecar and tied them down with a leather strap. A semicircle of boys and girls stood watching, some of the boys hesitantly stroking the powerful machine. Kate plucked at Colin’s sleeve. “I … I’m sorry you’re going.”
He turned to face her and touched her shoulder awkwardly. “That’s how it goes.”
“Do you think you could find the time to drop me a line? When you start at Cambridge, I mean. How you’re getting on … that sort of thing.”
“Sure, Kate. Sure I will.”
“Cheltenhurst Girls’ School … Coombe, Dorset. You won’t forget?”
He looked away from her anxious face. “I won’t forget.” He climbed onto the double seat behind Derek. “Maybe you could come to Cambridge next spring. During May Week. Jenny or Vicky could bring you if you can’t come by yourself. Derek told me it’s a lot of fun. Boat races on the river … dances … all sorts of things.”
She brightened instantly. “That sounds super.”
“May Week then. Is it a date?”
“Yes,” she said fiercely. “A … date.”
Derek brought a foot down hard on the starter. “We’re off!”
The engine sputtered, backfired, then caught with a roar. They moved away at high speed, the children running after them down the long drive, shouting and waving. Kate stood watching until the thin haze of the exhaust could no longer be seen above the hedgerows and the trees.
THEY TOOK THE Great North Road, out of London, through Hatfield and Welwyn and on into Bedfordshire—mile after mile with Derek hunched over the handlebars and Colin clinging to his back, the engine hammering beneath them. Colin finally pressed his mouth close to Derek’s ear and shouted that he was getting hungry and needed to piss. They turned off the road to Leicester and stopped at a pub set back from the road at the edge of a forest.
“Hard on the ears,” Derek said as he switched off the engine.
Colin nodded, shaking his head like a swimmer coming out of the water. “Tougher on the kidneys.”
They bought sandwiches and ginger beer and sat at a rickety table in a small garden.
“How are your grandparents, by the way?” Derek asked.
“Fine. They went up to Harrogate to take the waters, or something.” He finished his sandwich in two bites and reached for another. “I’ll tell you the truth, Derek, I’m not looking forward to this … Pembroke, I mean.”
“We’re a friendly bunch. You’ll fit in.”
“I hope so. When can I join the air squadron?”
“Not until your second year, I’m afraid.”
“Rats. You solo yet?”
“Of course. I have ten hours.”
“In what?”
“Tiger Moths.”
“Kid stuff.”
Derek bit into a pickled onion. “We can’t all have stepfathers who build ruddy big patrol bombers for the ruddy United States Navy. How is the plane? They let you fly it yet?”
“The Colorado’s a honey and, no, they won’t let me do anything except sit in it.”
“Sell many?”
“About thirty on order. Not enough to warrant expanding the plant just yet. Poor Jamie spends most of his time in Washington these days buttonholing congressmen.” He played absently with a crust of bread. “I saw you talking with Kate. She say anything about me?”
“Such as?”
“Oh … nothing, I guess. You know girls.”
“Ah, ha.” He leaned back with a knowing smile. “Kiss and tell?”
Colin nodded and flipped the crust from the plate with his thumb. “I don’t think she would.”
“And she didn’t, old man. Well, you have nice taste. Kate’s a smasher. When did all this take place?”
“All this was about ten minutes of petting in Grandpa’s old Rolls, for crissakes. It was dumb of me. She’s just a kid.”
“Is she? Doesn’t look like a kid to me.”
Colin peeled another crust from a sandwich and tossed it to a fluttering colony of sparrows. “There was a party last week at the Pryory. Kate came … in a dress that Marian had made for her. It was some dress. Sort of low in front and back. She looked swell in it. Older, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I get the picture.”
&nb
sp; “Anyway, we danced a few times and had some laughs and I offered to drive her back so that she didn’t have to leave early with Uncle Charles.”
“Very decent of you.”
“I had nothing in mind, and that’s the honest truth. I’ve known her since she was a baby.”
“All right, take the chip off your shoulder. What happened?”
“I took her for a drive and we talked about this and that. Went all the way to Ashdown and then started back. I parked on Leith Hill for the view and then … well … she looked so great in the moonlight in that dress, so I kissed her.”
“You would have been less than human had you not. And she, of course, fought you off like a tigress.”
“She kissed me back.”
“How surprising.”
“Shove it, Fat Chap!”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to sound facetious. Do go on.”
Colin glared at his plate. “One thing led to another damn fast. She started getting worked up and saying that she loved me. That’s when it hit me. Kate of all people. I slammed on the brakes.”
“And that’s it?”
“It’s enough. Now she has a hot for me. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I don’t feel the same way. I’ve got to let her down easy.”
“That might be harder than you think. In the words of old Tommy Moore … And when once the heart of a maiden is stolen, the maiden herself will steal after it soon. Unquote.”
“The heck with that.”
“Absence, as they say, makes the heart grow even fonder. Frankly, old chap, inviting her up for May Week was not a sound idea. She’ll be counting the months and days.”
Colin tossed bits of bread to the flock of sparrows darting along the ground. “Maybe she’ll meet another guy. One her own age.”
“At Cheltenhurst Girls’ School? Hardly. And as for her age, she’ll be seventeen by May. A marriageable woman in most cultures.”
“You can really make a guy feel swell all over.”
Derek stood up and put on his flying helmet. “Come on, young Lochinvar. Back on the steed. There may be countless eager virgins waiting beyond the next hill.”
Colin gave him a withering scowl. “You know something, Fat Chap. You could become a number-one arsehole if you worked at it.”
THE BISCUIT TIN Farm covered nearly seven hundred acres of rich pasture and woodland on the edge of the Peak District. Shallow, clear streams meandered across the meadows imparting a richness to the grass. It was an ideal place for raising thoroughbred horses, as the profusion of cups and ribbons in a small trophy building next to the stables bore out. The mighty Halbedier, four-time winner of the Queen Alexandra Stakes at Ascot, stood at stud there, as did several other celebrated stallions along with a harem of high-born brood mares. The Earl of Stanmore had inherited the land from an uncle in 1895 and had given it to his youngest son in 1921. The Hon. William Greville had done well with the property over the years, building miles of fences, paddocks, ultramodern stables and foaling barns, a half-mile training track and a fine stone-walled, slate-roofed house. As a trainer of international renown, William had spent as much time in France, Ireland, and the United States as he had in Derbyshire. Not so his wife. Dulcie loved the horse farm as she would have loved a child and rarely left the place for more than a week or two at a time.
Colin could understand why, as could Derek.
“Like a small piece of paradise,” Derek murmured. He stood by his motorbike in the early morning, putting on his leather helmet and gloves and watching the yearlings race across a meadow after their mothers. Banks of white clouds drifted over the dales and the distant peaks of the mountains. “I wish I were staying on.”
“Scotland should be fun,” Colin said, placing his friend’s bags in the sidecar. “Shoot a hole in one for me.”
“I’ll give it a try.” He held out a gloved hand. “Well, old boy, see you in three weeks’ time at jolly old Pembroke. Leave your cowboy suit in the trunk though. We don’t want you to be too conspicuously Yankee.”
Colin grinned. “Maybe I’ll wear a Comanche war bonnet and paint my face yellow.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Nothing you did would surprise me.” They shook hands. “Keep the old pecker up, that’s the good chap.”
“As the showgirl said to the bishop.”
He stood in front of the house watching Derek ride away, the backfire of the engine cracking like gunshots across the dale but not disturbing the horses in the slightest.
“Nice chap,” William Greville said, coming out of the house and standing beside him. “If he’d stayed the day Dulcie would have tuned that motor for him.”
Colin laughed. “Is there anything she can’t do, Uncle Willie?”
William shrugged his massive shoulders. “Not too much. And what she can’t do isn’t worth doing.” He stretched his arms and yawned. “We foaled a colt in the night. Care to see him?”
“Yes. I wish you’d woken me. I would have liked to see it happening.”
“It was Ronay’s Queen Bess. Her seventh, and the old girl gets terribly windy around strangers. Just Dulcie, me, and the vet allowed. Sorry.”
They walked down a gravel path toward the foaling barns, William limping slightly, the knee stiff in the morning chill.
“God, it’s beautiful,” Colin said.
“Your mother loved this spot. We spent a couple of summers here when we were kids. It wasn’t anything like it is now … just an old farmhouse, a few horses, and lots of sheep. A cousin of some sort lived here. An eccentric but harmless chap. He thought he was Napoleon or Wellington, not sure which. Alex and I adored him.”
Dulcie was in the stall with mare and foal, the mare standing calmly, neck bent to the feeding bin, the colt, all wobbly legs and great staring eyes, standing shakily under Dulcie’s arm as she rubbed his still glistening coat with a towel.
“Isn’t he a love?” Dulcie said, smiling at Colin. “I’m going to name him California Collie, after you.”
Dulcie Greville was thirty-six and had the figure of a young girl, leggy and slim in her jodhpurs and riding boots. Her red hair reached the small of her back in tight braids, like the tail of a chestnut mare in a show ring. Her age showed only in her face, in a network of fine lines caused by sun and wind and the hard Derbyshire winters. Colin had seen her only rarely during the many summers he had spent in England. He had known of her, of course, Uncle William’s wife, the bishop’s daughter who had become an activist in all kinds of radical causes. He had once spent a few days at the farm when he had been thirteen, and Dulcie had spent an occasional weekend at Abingdon Pryory—reluctantly, because she did not like the place. Uniformed footmen and other displays of great wealth offended her. She thought it feudal. And although Hanna loved her because she had made her youngest son happy, she dreaded having her as a guest. Dulcie was apt to say the most outrageous things with the candor of a precocious child. Once, at a tea party, the vicar, while discussing with Charles the varied problems inherent in running a school, had foolishly remarked that young boys must be shielded against the “temptations of Onan.” Dulcie had picked up the man’s fatuous inaccuracy. “But onanism does not mean masturbation, Vicar,” she had said in her high, clear voice. “It means ejaculation outside of the vagina … a rapid withdrawal of the penis before orgasm takes place. Quite an effective, if personally unsatisfying, method of birth control.”
Neither the vicar nor Hanna had been amused.
“CALIFORNIA COLLIE,” COLIN said, grinning across the breakfast table at Dulcie. “I hope he turns out to be a winner.”
“He will.”
William grunted and stirred sugar in his tea. “All one can do is hope. Breed the best to the best and pray like hell.”
“I could feel his heart,” Dulcie said. “Strong and steady. Not a drop of fear in the little thing. An Ascot winner for certain.”
William slurped his tea and then glanced at his watch. “I’d better start getting packed.”
“Just get yourself shaved and dressed,” Dulcie said, “and leave the packing to me, if you don’t mind.” She shook her head in bemusement as she watched her husband leave the room. “With all the traveling that man’s done he still can’t pack properly. Tosses in shirts any which way.”
“Why aren’t you going with him, Aunt Dulcie? Paris should be lovely this time of year.”
“Oh, Paris is all right in its way. It’s the people he has to meet I can’t stomach. A bloated old rajah with pockets full of diamonds and a head filled with straw, and a French count who wears a black ribbon in his buttonhole to mourn the passing of the Bourbons. Now, I ask you, can you see me hobnobbing with that sort?”
“No.” He laughed. “Why does Uncle Willie?”
“Business. They want to buy one of the colts. Some utterly staggering sum so he really must go I suppose. An unraced, untried yearling worth thousands of pounds, and skilled men a few miles from here trying to raise their families on pennies. Odd sort of world, Colin.”
They drove into Chesterfield, where William would take the train to London.
“How long will you be gone, Uncle Willie?”
“About a week in Paris. And then over to Ireland. There are some horses I’d like to take a look at in Killarney and Limerick.”
“The Goliath filly among them?” Dulcie asked.
He nodded as he got out of the car, motioning to a porter to take his bags. “I hope I can persuade Merrivale to sell. We’ll see.”
Dulcie tilted her face to be kissed. “Good luck.”
William kissed her, then winked at Colin in the back seat. “Look out for her, Colin, old man. Keep her out of mischief.”