by Jilly Cooper
‘Oh, Rupert, Rupert, Rupert.’
‘Rupert, Rupert, Rupert!’ Taggie’s voice had suddenly got deeper, and was accompanied, he realized, by someone hammering on the door, and then — good God — opening it.
‘Rupert, I’m really sorry to bother you. Oh, Christ!’ Lysander clapped his hands over his eyes. ‘I mean really sorry, but I think Arthur’s been nobbled. He keeps yawning and he hasn’t eaten his last feed.’
‘I’ll nobble you, you little fucker,’ howled Rupert, scooping up a shoe from the carpet and hurling it in Lysander’s direction. ‘Get out, get out. Arthur’s exhausted because you keep waking him up to see if he’s OK, and he’s not hungry because the entire Press have been stuffing him with Polos.’
In the end, chivvied by Taggie, Rupert tugged on a pair of jeans and ran barefoot across the parched lawn to the yard. In his box, he found Arthur lying flat out, waving a huge foot in the air, snoring loudly, one eye open. Seeing his tormentor, however, he lumbered up and hid behind Tiny shivering with terror in the corner, his newly washed coat, and particularly his mane, once more stained with green.
‘Oh dear,’ Lysander blushed. ‘He’s made a lightning recovery. I do think,’ he went on hastily, ‘Arthur ought to have a security guard tomorrow. Pridie’s got a guard and closed-circuit television in his box, and The Prince of Darkness’ll have all Rannaldini’s hoods around him.’
‘He’s got Tiny,’ said Rupert, avoiding the Shetland’s darting teeth and deciding not to blow his top. ‘Now will you please stop wasting my time.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Lysander hung his head. ‘I gather all this Isaac Lovell business has upset you. Bloody unfair. Can’t make head nor tail of it myself. Who is Isaac Lovell anyway?’
‘His father ran off with my first wife.’
‘Bastard!’
‘Like you want to run off with Kitty Rannaldini,’ said Rupert, bolting the half-door.
‘Not at all,’ said Lysander indignantly. ‘Rannaldini’s an utter shit, and a bully who beats up horses and women and never stops humiliating poor darling Kitty by screwing around. You were never like that.’
‘Hum, your faith in me is touching. You didn’t know me in the old days.’
‘Old days is old days.’ Lysander blushed again. ‘I used to be a bit of a stud myself in the past. But I want you to know you and Taggie have really restored my faith in marriage as an institution.’
‘Ta very much,’ said Rupert. ‘I had better go back and — er — institute it. What are you going to do with yourself this evening?’
‘Watch the video of last year’s Rutminster again, and then play poker with Danny and Dizzy. We’re teaching Tab.’
‘She’ll beat you all,’ said Rupert. ‘But I want you in bed early.’
Lysander slept fitfully and woke at a quarter-past three. In twelve hours exactly, if by some miracle he got to ride, they’d be lining up at the start. In twelve hours, ten minutes, it would all be over. And after tomorrow, would Rupert kick him out? Despite his misery over Kitty, he’d been happier living at Penscombe than anywhere else. Desperate for some sign of rain, he opened the window, and was mocked by a million stars. The lawn was lit by daffodils and a clump of white cherry trees already in bloom, it had been so mild.
The constellation of Leo the Lion was romping off to his lair in the west. But any moment Lysander expected his great shaggy face to appear back over the top of Rupert’s beechwood to bite the Great Bear in the bum. Longing as never before for Kitty’s arms, he collapsed into an armchair.
He must have drifted off again, for the next minute he was galloping up Rupert’s track, and Arthur was going gloriously, and he could hear, far more menacing than Rannaldini’s tympani, the thunder of hoofs behind him. But no-one was going to catch Arthur. The stands were rising to cheer him.
‘Go on, go on, go on,’ yelled Lysander.
‘Lysander, Lysander, wake up! It’s tipping down.’ It was a few seconds before he realized Tabitha was shaking him, and the thunder of hoofs was torrential rain, machine-gunning the roof.
Leaning out of the window into Niagara, he could see the downpour flattening the daffodils, stripping the white cherries, flooding the gutters, sluicing the valley.
‘Yippee, yippee, Arthur’s in with a chance.’ Lysander let out a great Tarzan howl, hugging Tab until she screamed for mercy and Jack began yapping with excitement.
‘When you come back to earth,’ announced Tab, ‘the tooth fairy’s been.’
Under Lysander’s pillow, still in its polythene wrapping, lay a vast blue rug, braided with emerald green and with the initials RC-B which always brought bookmakers out in a cold sweat, embroidered in the corner.
‘Daddy had it made up specially. Any of the normal rugs look like saddle blankets on Arthur.’ Then, as Lysander buried the balls of his thumbs in his eyes, ‘It’s OK, Daddy really likes you, Lysander.’
Few would have thought it later in the morning, as Rupert shouted at everyone in the yard. Danny was throwing up in the 100. Even Bluey was silent and preoccupied during the gallops, on which Rupert had insisted, to give an air of normality to the day. Only Arthur was unmoved, as he breakfasted on carrots, oats and a handful of dandelions newly picked by Taggie.
‘Have you got Arthur’s passport and your medical card?’ nagged Tabitha.
Lysander was packing his bag, putting in pain killers because his shoulder was still giving him hell, and his own beautiful colours, which he’d chosen himself: white sleeves, black-and-white body and brown cap, because they were the same colours as Jack. He was wearing his Donald Duck jersey, which Taggie had finally dragged off his back yesterday and hand washed.
The morning seemed endless, but at last the lorry containing Penscombe Pride, Arthur, Tiny and three younger horses splashed down the drive, splitting the pack of Press outside the gates with their Barbours over their cameras.
‘Charlie’s going to do a runner,’ said Tabitha, as they passed Penscombe’s betting shop. ‘Everyone’s put so much money on Pridie, and on Arthur for a place, his odds have shortened from 200 to 100-1, and you should see the champagne they’ve got on ice for a mega piss-up this evening at The Goat and Boots.’
‘I’m going to be sick again.’ Hanging out of the window, Danny came back inside absolutely drenched. ‘If it rains any more it’s going to be too wet for Pridie.’
Water was pouring in a tidal wave down the High Street.
‘Ouch,’ grumbled Lysander, as he bit his cheek instead of his chewing gum. ‘I’m injured before I get to the course.’
He felt even worse as he read the horoscopes in the Sun.
‘Arthur’s going to have a good day for shopping.’
‘I hope that isn’t a misprint for stopping,’ said Tab.
61
The ancient town of Rutminster, with its splendid cathedral and russet Queen Anne close, lay in a bowl of hills covered in thick, rain-drenched woodland. In a sensible marriage of secular and ecclesiastical, the racecourse was only divided from the cathedral water meadows by the River Fleet, which was rising steadily as Rupert and Lysander walked the course.
Despite the relentless downpour and the lurking fog, it was very mild and the ground was already filling up. Helicopters were constantly landing and the bookies were doing excellent business under their coloured umbrellas. Lysander never dreamt the fences would be so huge. Not for nothing was the Rutminster called the Grand National of the South.
Down by the start Rupert turned up the collar of his Barbour: ‘You must push Arthur on. No-one misses the beat. You’ve got a very short run up to the first fence. If you’re not at the front at this stage, you can get boxed in or squeezed out.
‘From then on your best bet is to hunt Arthur round in the middle, letting the leaders exhaust themselves trying to pass Pridie. This is a sod,’ he went on, as they stopped at five foot of closely stacked birch and gorse with a huge ditch on the other side. ‘If you hit it below six inches, Arthur’ll turn over. If he drops
his legs in the water, it’ll slow him up. Meet it right, and you won’t know he’s jumped it.’
‘I wish Arthur were walking the course,’ sighed Lysander. ‘He’s got a better memory than me.’
‘Give him a breather here,’ said Rupert as they climbed a steep hill to a fence Lysander could hardly see over, ‘and you must stand back at this one. It’s known as The Ambush because there’s a terrific drop on the other side. Yummy Yuppy unshipped his jockey here last year. He tried to pop over on a short stride and bellied into it. Piss off,’ he snapped as two men approached with a camera.
‘Could you take a picture of us beside this fence?’ said the first in a strong Irish accent.
‘No, we can’t.’ As Lysander reached out for the camera, Rupert hustled him on. ‘Concentrate, for Christ’s sake.’
They had reached the top of the course now and three-quarters of a mile away could see the stands and the cathedral spire soaring above its scaffolding.
‘If a favourite moves up here, you can hear a great cheer from the crowd. It’s quite eerie.’
‘And I’ve got to go round twice,’ said Lysander in a hollow voice as they squelched down to the bottom of the hill.
‘This is where you fork right for the final run in,’ explained Rupert. ‘And the horse sees the crowd in all its yelling glory for the first time. Paddywack lost the race here last year. His head came up, he saw the crowd and Jimmy Jardine felt him coming back. Pridie passed him and it cost Jimmy the race, so keep a hold of Arthur.’
‘Arthur loves crowds. He’ll accelerate if he gets this far.’
‘This is a tricky fence,’ said Rupert as they rounded the bend into the home straight. ‘If you go flat out, you’ll turn over; take a pull and you lose momentum; jump it wide and you’ll lose a few vital yards that could cost you the race. Bluey’ll be taking the paint off the rails. From now on, if Arthur’s still on his big feet, it’s a chance of surviving home.
‘Bluey’s so experienced, he’ll be on automatic pilot now, but you’re likely to tense up with nerves and miss a vital gap. If Bluey comes to a bottleneck, he just pushes his way through, freeze for a second and you’ve had it, and if you come up on the inside, even Bluey’ll squeeze you out.’
Glancing at Lysander’s vacant stare, the shadows under his eyes, the pale translucent skin not even tinged with pink by the lashing rain, Rupert was worried he’d pushed him too hard.
‘What have I just said?’
‘That even a mate like Bluey will try and squeeze Arthur out.’
‘Good boy. For eleven thousand pounds in his pocket, any jockey will kill his mother. All that matters from here is to get your whip out and your head down and go like hell. You’ll hear a roar like you’ve never heard, you’ll ride into a tunnel of yelling faces, and you’ll think the post will never come, but don’t let up till you’re past the post. When you hear Tab screaming with relief in the stable-lads’ stand, you’ll know you’re OK.’
‘Thank you, Rupert.’ Lysander felt overwhelmed with gratitude that Rupert should take the whole thing so seriously. ‘We won’t let you down.’ Then, as an ambulance screeched by, ‘When I was at the dentist’s the other day, I popped into a solicitor’s and made a will. It’s in my bedroom drawer. If I don’t come back, I’d like Tab to have Arthur, and you to have Jack. He’s had such a ball since he’s been at Penscombe.’
‘As long as you leave Tiny to Rannaldini,’ said Rupert.
Rannaldini had a household staying for the Rutminster, including the chairman of the board of the New World Phil, a squat, jolly businessman called Graydon Gluckstein, whom he was determined to impress. As a result Kitty had hardly had a moment to think. Having bought a Donald Duck good-luck card for Lysander, she had torn it up. It was immoral to send it if she were trying to save her marriage. Having not been allowed to see The Scorpion, she hadn’t realized the connection between Rupert and the pale, watchful jockey, Isaac Lovell, whom Rannaldini had singled out to wrestle with The Prince of Darkness. He had dropped in for a drink last night.
‘All that matters is that you annihilate Bluey Charteris and Penscombe Pride,’ she heard Rannaldini saying as he shut the door on them both.
Kitty longed to look her best on the day of the race, but as she’d been wracked with morning sickness worse than Danny, and the rain that suited Arthur only crinkled the hair she’d blow-dried straight, there wasn’t much hope.
Although Rutminster was only fifteen miles away, Rannaldini insisted on ferrying his party, which also included Hermione and Bob, Meredith and Rachel and Guy and Georgie, by helicopter. Terrified of throwing up over the dove-grey suede upholstery, Kitty pleaded last-minute shopping in Rutminster for the celebration party the utterly confident Rannaldini was planning for that evening, when everyone would drink Krug out of the Rutminster Cup.
Having bought some home-made pâté and a side of smoked salmon from a delicatessen in the High Street, Kitty drove past the russet houses of the Close, peering out behind their fans of magnolia grandiflora, and, parking her car, popped in to the cathedral.
The numbers of the hymns were up for Palm Sunday tomorrow. In a side chapel, pinned to a green baize screen, Kitty noticed children’s drawings of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on donkeys even more outlandishly shaped than Arthur.
Would the baby inside her, which could so easily be Lysander’s, one day draw pictures like that? she thought despairingly, as she sunk to her knees on a faded crimson hassock.
‘Please, please, dear God,’ pleaded Kitty, ‘let him get round, I don’t care if he wins. Just let him come back safe, he’s so brave and reckless.’
Surely it wasn’t adultery to pray for someone’s safety?
Through the clear-glass lattice window to her right, fringes of rain were falling out of dark purple clouds on to the palest green leaves, just emerging from the chestnut trees.
‘Rain’s good for Arfur, God, but please don’t let him slip.’
Beside her lay the stone effigy of Robert, Lord Rutminster, who died in the crusades. He had pudding-basin hair and his nose broken off, but he was flanked by stone angels, with a little dog like Jack at his feet. Kitty ran a finger down his pale battered translucent face.
Oh, let angels ride on Lysander’s shoulders, too. Wiping away the tears, she quickly lit a candle for him. Walking towards the door, she saw a man standing beneath the tattered colours of the local regiments. He looked vaguely familiar, so she smiled, then went absolutely scarlet as she realized the last time she’d seen him she’d been in her bra and knickers, bopping in the rain. As she scuttled out, however, she looked round.
‘Good luck,’ she stammered.
‘Good luck, Kitty,’ said David Hawkley.
Any comfort she might have felt evaporated as Clive slid forward out of nowhere to open the door of the Mini to take her to the races.
Rutminster racecourse on the final day of the meeting had never been fuller. Anticipating victory for Rupert, who was a huge local hero, and forgetting the recession, the multitude were drowning their sorrows. Penscombe Pride would get them out of trouble, pay their mortgage arrears, their poll tax and their daughter’s wedding. As the beautiful little bay with his bright questing eyes and his zig zag blaze, who had never fallen in his life, or lost in his last eight races, strutted round the paddock like a bantam cock, no-one would have thought he carried top weight and the expectation of hundreds of thousands of punters. Ten-deep, they gathered round the rails to admire him.
He was followed at a respectable distance by The Prince of Darkness, who was a hand bigger. He looked magnificent with his blood-red rug rolled back to show rippling muscle worthy of a black middle-weight champion. But his evil eye rolled and his jaws strained against his muzzle and everyone kept clear of his hoofs because he could lash out with all four of them.
Of the thirty other runners, the most serious contenders were Camomile Lawn, a fleet chestnut mare so flashy Tab said she ought to wear an ankle bracelet, Male Nurse, a stocky brown
gelding who jumped and stayed well, Yummy Yuppy, the handsome dark bay who had fallen last year, Blarney Stone, who had won the Irish Grand National, Paddywack, who was third to Penscombe Pride and The Prince of Darkness last year and Fräulein Mahler, Rannaldini’s second horse, whom Lysander had ridden into the lake last summer.
A ripple of delighted laughter ran through the crowd as Arthur entered the paddock. A hand bigger than any other horse, shambling round like a great circus elephant, his coat gleaming like an iceberg, he was plainly delighted at the attention he was causing. The crowd, particularly the men, admired his slim blond stable-girl with her exquisite bone structure and arrogant eyes, and, seeing RC-B on Arthur’s new blue rug, made the connection and nodded wisely.
‘That horse couldn’t win if it started last week,’ yelled a wag on the steps.
‘Don’t be so fucking sure,’ yelled back Tabitha.
The crowd roared, in no doubt now that she was Rupert’s daughter, and they were delighted when Georgie Maguire, ravishing in a suit of grass-green silk, sheltered by a pink peony-patterned umbrella gave Tab the two-hundred-pound prize for the best turned-out horse.
Up in the private boxes, after excellent lunches, the rich and sometimes famous and their satellite freeloaders looked down on the runners. The noisiest, most glamorous, throng inhabited the Venturer Television box. They included Freddie Jones, Pridie’s co-owner, as plump and as jolly as his writer wife, Lizzie, and Taggie’s parents, Declan and Maud O’Hara, who hadn’t forgiven Rupert for his crack about Arthur staying longer than she did. Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s old show-jumping crony, who was doing the commentary for Venturer, and his wanton, blond wife, Janey, who was covering the race for the Daily Post, and finally Ricky France-Lynch, polo captain of England, who’d had Lysander’s ponies at livery, and his adorably pretty, painter wife, Daisy, who was busy sketching everything in sight.
By ghastly irony, Rannaldini’s box was bang next door, and Rannaldini ignored them icily. But he couldn’t stop Freddie Jones gossiping to Larry about the way the recession had stymied the electronics business, nor Meredith and Hermione, radiant in squashy blond furs, casting covetous eyes at Rupert, nor the chairman of the New World Phil, who was enjoying the hospitality more than the horses, gazing at Taggie, who echoed Rupert’s colours in a dark blue suit with an emerald-green turban, and whose navy-blue-stockinged legs were longer than any of the horses’.