To the hilt

by Дик Фрэнсис

  'Then,' Tobias went on, 'if the committee, acting with the brewery, can produce to me a budget and a forecast that will satisfy me as auditor that the brewery has a viable future, then I can sign the audited accounts, and it can continue to trade.'

  'Well…' I thought for a bit, then said, 'What are the chances?'

  'Fairly reasonable.'

  'No higher?'

  'It depends on the creditors.'

  'And… er… who are they?'

  'The usual. The bank. The Inland Revenue. The pension fund. The suppliers.'

  'The bank?'

  'The Finance Director organised a line of credit for expansion. The money's gone. There's no expansion and nothing in the bank to service the loan. To pay the interest, that is to say. The bank has given notice that they will not honour any more cheques.'

  'And the tax people?'

  'The brewery hasn't paid its employees' national insurance contributions for six months. The money's vanished. As for the pension fund, it's evaporated. The suppliers, in comparison, are small beer - if you'll excuse the dreadful pun - but the can suppliers are berserk.'

  'What a mess,' I said. 'Aren't there any… er… assets?

  'Sure. The brewery itself. But there's an outstanding loan on that too, and nothing left to service it with. The bank would foreclose at a loss.'

  'What about the pubs the brewery owns?' I asked.

  'The tied houses? The Finance Director mortgaged the lot. To put it briefly, that money's gone too.'

  'It sounds hopeless.'

  'I've known worse.'

  'And what about the King Alfred Cup?'

  'Ah.' He concentrated on his teeth. 'You might ask Sir Ivan where it is.'

  'At Cheltenham,' I said, puzzled. 'They run it at Cheltenham a month on Saturday.'

  'Ah,' he said again, 'you're talking about the race.'

  'Yes. What else?'

  The Cup itself,' he said earnestly. 'The King Alfred Gold Cup. The chalice. Medieval, I believe.'

  I rubbed a hand over my face. Bruises were catching up.

  'It's extremely valuable,' Tobias said. 'Sir Ivan should really consider selling it to offset some of the debt. But there is some doubt as to whether it belongs to the brewery or to Sir Ivan personally and… I say,' he broke off, 'are you feeling all right?'

  'Yes.'

  'You don't look it. Would you like some coffee?'

  'Very much.'

  He bustled about, organising what turned out to be tea.

  I took another of Keith Robbiston's pills and slowly stopped sweating. The tea was fine. I smiled feebly to allay Tobias's kind concern and explained I'd travelled all night on the train, which seemed to him reason enough for faintness in the afternoon, even without the rainbowed eye.

  'Actually,' I said, getting a better grip on things, 'I was wondering about the race itself, not the trophy. The race is part of the brewery's prestige. A sign of its success. Would… er… would the creditors agree to go ahead on the basis of keeping up public confidence in the brewery, even though the prize money will have to be found, and also the money for an entertaining tent and lunch and drinks for maybe a hundred guests? It's the brewery's best advertisement, that race. Cancelling it now, at this late stage, when the entries are already in, would send a massive message to all and sundry that the company's in a shaky state… and there's nothing like an ill wind for blowing a dicky house to rubble.'

  He gazed at me. 'You'll need to say all that to the committee.'

  'She… your insolvency angel, couldn't she say it?'

  His gaze wandered over my hair and down to my paint-marked jeans, and I could see him thinking that the race had a better chance of survival with a more conventional advocate.

  'You'll need to convince her.' He smiled briefly. 'You've convinced me.' He paused. 'Incidentally, among the brewery's possible assets there is a racehorse. That's to say, it's unclear again whether it belongs to the brewery or to Sir Ivan himself. I'd be glad if you could clarify it.'

  'I?'

  'You are in total charge. Your comprehensive powers of attorney make that unquestionably clear.'

  'Oh.'

  'Sir Ivan must have absolute faith in you.'

  'In spite of how I look?'

  'Well…' He gave me suddenly a broad grin. 'Since you mention it, yes.'

  'I'm a painter,' I explained, 'and I look like one. You don't find droves of painters in pinstripes.'

  'I suppose not.'

  I drank a second cup of tea and asked idly, 'What is the name of the horse?'

  'How do you hide a horse, Alexander…?'

  Hide a horse. Ye gods.

  'It's called Golden Malt,' Tobias said.

  Yesterday morning, I thought morosely, I was leading the peaceful if eccentric life of a chronicler of the equally eccentric compulsion to hit a small white ball a furlong or two and tap it over lovingly landscaped grass until it dropped into a small round hole. Yesterday morning's sensible madness now lay the other side of a violent robbery, an aching body, an edge-of-the-grave stepfather, his ordeal by domesticity and his shift onto my shoulders of ever-expanding troubles.

  Ivan, I saw, wanted me to keep his horse hidden away from the clutches of bankruptcy. Ivan had given me the legal right to commit an illegal act.

  'What are you thinking?' Tobias asked.

  'Um… um… How is the brewery going to pay its workers this week?'

  He sighed. 'You do have a way of cutting down to the essentials.'

  'Will the bank cough up?'

  'They say not. Not a penny more.'

  'Do I have to go to them on my knees?'

  He said with compassion, 'Yes.'

  It was by then Wednesday afternoon. Payroll day at the brewery, as in most business enterprises, was Friday. On the Tollright telephone I engaged the professional services of the lady negotiator and also made an appointment with the bank for the following morning.

  I asked Tobias how much was needed to keep the ship afloat until the creditors could set up the rescue operation - if they would - and he obligingly referred to King Alfred's ledgers and told me a sum that made Ivan's heart attack seem a reasonable response to the information.

  'You can only do your best,' Tobias observed, busy with a toothpick. 'None of this is your fault. It appears you've just been dumped into it up to the hilt.'

  I didn't know whether to wince or smile at the familiar phrase. Up to the hilt - in one particular way I'd been in jeopardy up to the hilt for the last five years. It had taken five years for the demons to arrive at my door.

  I said, 'About that horse - Golden Malt, did you say? - why is there a doubt about who owns it?'

  Tobias frowned. 'You'll have to ask Sir Ivan. The horse isn't listed as an actual asset of the brewery. There's been no annual claim for depreciation, as if it were office equipment, but the brewery has paid the training fees and claimed them against tax as an advertising expense. As I said, you'll need to sort it out.'

  For the next hour he tracked with me through the past year's accounts, item by item. I could see, as he demonstrated, that but for the perfidy of the man in charge of the cash flow, the beer business would have fermented its yeast to its usual profitable heights.

  'The head brewer's the best asset,' Tobias said. 'Don't lose him.'

  I said helplessly, 'I know nothing about brewing beer.'

  'You don't have to. You are the overall strategist. I'm simply advising you as an outsider, and I can tell you the brewery's share of the market has risen perceptibly since they appointed this particular brewmaster.'

  'Thank you.'

  'You do look exhausted,' he said.

  'I was never that good at maths.'

  'You're doing all right.'

  He produced papers for me to sign. I read them and did my best to understand, but trusted a lot to his good faith. As Ivan had trusted his Finance Director, no doubt.

  'Good luck with the bank tomorrow,' Tobias said, shuffling the papers together and sucking his
toothpick. 'Don't let them mug you.'

  They wouldn't be the first, I thought. 'Will you come with me?'

  He shook his head. 'It's your job, not mine. I wish you good luck.'

  I said, 'There's one other thing…'

  'Yes?'

  'How do I get from here to Lambourn nowadays, without a car?'

  'Taxi.'

  'And without much money.'

  'Ah,' he said. 'Same as ever. Bus to Newbury. Bus from there to Lambourn.' He summoned a timetable from reception. 'Bus from Newbury to Lambourn leaves at five forty-five.'

  'Thanks.'

  'What you need,' he said, 'is the out-patients department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital.'

  I caught the bus instead. I even had time at Newbury to spend some of my mother's cash on a new pair of jeans and to discard the old paint-stained denims in the bus station's gents. In fractionally more respectable mode, therefore, I arrived on a Lambourn doorstep that I would have been happier to avoid.

  My stepfather's horses - and that included Golden Malt - and also my uncle Robert 'Himself's' horses, were trained at the racing town of Lambourn by a young woman, Emily Jane Cox.

  She said at the sight of me, 'What the hell are you doing here?'

  'Slumming.'

  'I hate you, Alexander.'

  The problem was that she didn't, any more than what I felt for her could at worst be described as lust, and at best as unrealistic Round Table chivalry. Worse than hate or love, we had come near to apathy.

  I had walked, feet metaphorically dragging, from the bus stop to the stable on Upper Lambourn Road. I had arrived as she was completing her evening rounds of the stable, checking on the welfare of each of the fifty or so horses entrusted to her care.

  It was true, as jealous detractors pointed out, that she had inherited the yard as a going concern from a famous father, but it was her own skill that continued to turn out winners trained by Cox.

  She loved the life. She loved the horses. She was respected and successful. She might once also have loved Alexander Kinloch, but she was not going to dump a busy and fulfilled career for solitude on a bare cold mountain.

  'If you love me,' she'd said, 'live in Lambourn.'

  I'd lived with her in Lambourn for nearly six months, once, and I'd painted nothing worth looking at.

  'It doesn't matter,' she'd consoled me early on. 'Marry me and be content.'

  I had married her and after a while left her. She'd never used my name, but had become simply Mrs Cox.

  'What are you doing here?' she repeated.

  'Er… Ivan has had a heart attack.'

  She frowned. 'Yes, I read about it in the papers. But he's all right, isn't he? I telephoned. Your mother said not to worry.'

  'He's not well. He asked me to look after his horses.'

  'You? Look after them? You don't know all that much about horses.'

  'He just said…'

  She shrugged. 'Oh, all right then. You may as well set his mind at rest.'

  She turned away from me and walked back across her stable yard to an open door where a lad was positioning a bucket of water.

  She had dark hair cut like a cap and the sort of figure that looked good in trousers. We were the same age almost to the day, and at twenty-three had married without doubts.

  She'd always had a brisk authoritative way of talking that now had intensified with the years of responsibility and success. I had admired - loved - her positive energy, but it had drained my own. Even if I'd still loved her physically, I couldn't have forever bowed to her natural habit of command. We would have quarrelled if I'd stayed. We would have fought if I'd ever tried to return. We existed in a perpetual uncontested truce. We had met four times since I'd left, but never alone and never in Lambourn.

  Ivan had three horses in training in Emily's yard. She showed me two unremarkable bays and one bright chestnut, Golden Malt. Somewhat to my dismay he had noticeably good looks, two white socks and a bright white blaze down his nose: great presence as an advertisement for a brewery, not such a good idea for disappearing without trace.

  'He's entered for the King Alfred Gold Cup,' Emily said with pride, patting the horse's glossy neck. 'Ivan wants to win his own race.'

  'And will he?'

  'Win?' She pursed her lips. 'Let's say Golden Malt's running for the news value. He won't disgrace himself, can't put it higher than that.'

  I said absently, 'I'm sure he'll do fine.'

  'What's the matter with your eye?'

  'I got mugged.'

  She nearly laughed, but not quite. 'Do you want a drink?'

  'Good idea.'

  I followed her into her house, where she led the way through the much lived-in kitchen, past her efficient office and into the larger sitting-room where she entertained visiting owners and, it seemed, revenant husbands.

  'Still Campari?' she enquired, hands hovering over a tray of bottles and glasses.

  'Anything.'

  'I'll get some ice.'

  'Don't bother,' I said, but she went all the same to the kitchen.

  I walked across the unchanged room with its checked wool sofas and dark oak side tables and stood before a painting she'd hung on the wall. It showed a view of windswept links with a silver slit of sea in the background; with grey scudding clouds and two golfers doggedly leaning face-against the gale, trudging and pulling their golf clubs behind them on trolleys. In the foreground, where long dry grass bent away from the wind, there lay a small white ball, invisible still to the players.

  I'd sent the painting as a sort of peace offering: it was one of the first I'd painted in the bothy after I'd left, and seeing it again brought sharply back not just the feel of the paint going onto the canvas but also all the guilt and joyous sense of freedom of that tune.

  Emily said behind me, 'One of my owners brought a friend with him a few weeks ago who spotted that painting from across the room and said, "I say, is that an Alexander?"'

  I turned. She was carrying two tumblers with ice in and looking at the picture. 'You'd signed it just Alexander,' she said.

  I nodded. 'I always do, as you know.'

  'Nothing else?'

  'Alexander's long enough.'

  'Anyway, he recognised it. I was very surprised, but he turned out to be some sort of art critic. He'd seen quite a lot of your work.'

  'What was his name?'

  She shrugged. 'Can't remember. I said you always painted golf, and he said no you didn't, you painted the perseverance of the human spirit.'

  God, I thought, and I asked again, 'What was his name?'

  'I told you, I can't remember. I didn't know I was going to see you so soon, did I?' She walked over to the bottles and poured Campari and soda onto ice. 'He also said you might be going to be a great painter one day. He said you had both the technique and the courage. The courage, I ask you! I said what courage did it take to paint golf and he said it took courage to succeed at anything. Like training horses, he said.'

  'I wish you could remember his name.'

  'Well, I can't. He was a round little man. I told him I knew you and he went on a bit about how you'd got those tiny red flecks into the stems of the dry grass in the foreground.'

  'Did he tell you how?'

  'No.' She wrinkled her forehead. 'I think the owner asked me about his horse.'

  She poured gin and tonic for herself, sat down and waved me to a sofa. It felt extraordinarily odd to be a guest where once I'd been host. The house had always been hers, as it had been her father's, but it had felt like my home when I'd lived there.

  'That art man,' Emily said after a large swallow of gin, 'also said that your paintings were too attractive at present to be taken seriously.'

  I smiled.

  'Don't you mind?' she asked.

  'No. Ugly is in. Ugly is considered real.'

  'But I don't want ugly paintings on my walls.'

  'Well… in the art world I'm sneered at because my paintings sell. I can do portraits, I accept commiss
ions, I can draw - all unforgivable.'

  'You don't seem bothered.'

  'I paint what I like. I earn my bread. I'll never be Rembrandt. I settle for what I can do, and if that is to give pleasure, well, it's better than nothing.'

  'You never said anything like that when you were here.'

  'Too much emotion got in the way.'

  'Actually,' she rose to her feet and crossed back to the picture, 'since that Sunday morning I've been looking at the grass. So how did you get those tiny red flecks on the stalks? And the brown flecks and the yellow flecks, come to that.'

  'You'd be bored.'

  'No, actually, I wouldn't.'

  Campari tasted sweet and bitter, a lot like life. I said, 'Well, first I painted the whole canvas bright red.'

  'Don't be silly.'

  'I did,' I assured her. 'Bright solid cadmium red, all over.' I rose and walked over to join her. 'You can still see horizontal faint streaks of red in the silver of the sea. There's even some red in the grey of the clouds. Red in those two figures. All the rest is overpainted with the colours you can see now. That's the chief beauty of acrylic paint. It dries so fast you can paint layer on layer without having to wait days, like with oils. If you try to overpaint oils too soon the layers can mix and go muddy. Anyway, that grass… I over-painted that once with raw umber, which is a dark yellowish brown, and on top of that I put mixtures of yellow ochre, and then I scratched through all the layers with a piece of metal comb.'

  'With what?

  'A comb. I scratched the metal teeth through the layers right down to the red. The scratches lean as if with the wind… they are the stalks. The scratches show red flecks and brown flecks from the layers. And then I laid a very thin transparent glaze of purple over parts of the yellow, which is what gives it all that ripple effect that you get in long grass in a strong wind.'

  She stared silently at the canvas that had hung on her wall for more than five years, and she said eventually, 'I didn't know.'

  'What didn't you know?'

  'Why you left. Why you couldn't paint here.'

  'Em…' The old fond abbreviation arose naturally.

  'You did try to tell me. I was too hurt to understand. And too young.' She sighed. 'And nothing's changed, has it?'

  'Not really.'

  She smiled vividly, without pain. 'For a marriage that lasted barely four months, ours wasn't so bad.'