Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘That basically means,’ I insisted, ‘That you’d have to receive getting on for eight million in that five years, even allowing for paying off some of the loan every year with consequently diminishing interest. It’s a great deal of money…. Are you sure you understand how much is involved?’

  ‘Of course I understand,’ he said. ‘Even allowing for interest payments and the ridiculously high insurance premiums on a horse like Sandcastle, I’d be able to repay the loan in five years. That’s the period I’ve used in planning.’

  He spread out his sheets of neatly written calculations on his desk, pointing to each figure as he explained to me how he’d reached it. ‘A stallion fee of forty thousand pounds will cover it. His racing record justifies that figure, and I’ve been most carefully into the breeding of Sandcastle himself, as you can imagine. There is absolutely nothing in the family to alarm. No trace of hereditary illness or undesirable tendencies. He comes from a healthy blue-blooded line of winners, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t breed true.’ He gave me a photocopied genealogical table. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to advance a loan without getting an expert opinion on this. Please do take it with you.’

  He gave me also some copies of his figures, and I packed them all into the brief case I’d taken with me.

  ‘Why don’t you consider halving your risk to twenty-one shares?’ I asked. ‘Sell nineteen. You’d still outvote the other owners – there’d be no chance of them whisking Sandcastle off somewhere else – and you’d be less stretched.’

  With a smile he shook his head. ‘If I found for any reason that the repayments were causing me acute difficulty, I’d sell some shares as necessary. But I hope in five years time to own Sandcastle outright, and also as I told you to have attracted other stallions of that calibre, and to be numbered among the world’s top-ranking stud farms.’

  His pleasant manner took away any suggestion of megalomania, and I could see nothing of that nature in him.

  Ginnie came into the office carrying two mugs with slightly anxious diffidence.

  ‘I made some tea. Do you want some, Dad?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said immediately, before he could answer, and she looked almost painfully relieved. Oliver Knowles turned what had seemed like an incipient shake of the head into a nod, and Ginnie, handing over the mugs, said that if I wanted sugar she would go and fetch some. ‘And a spoon, I guess.’

  ‘My wife’s away,’ Oliver Knowles said abruptly.

  ‘No sugar,’ I said. ‘This is great.’

  ‘You won’t forget, Dad, will you, about me going back to school?’

  ‘Nigel will take you.’

  ‘He’s got visitors.’

  ‘Oh… all right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In half an hour, then.’

  Ginnie looked even more relieved, particularly as I could clearly sense the irritation he was suppressing. ‘The school run,’ he said as the door closed behind his daughter, ‘was one of the things my wife always did. Does…’ He shrugged. ‘She’s away indefinitely. You might as well know.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t be helped.’ He looked at the tea-mug in my hand. ‘I was going to offer you something stronger.’

  ‘This is fine.’

  ‘Ginnie comes home on four Sundays a term. She’s a boarder, of course.’ He paused. ‘She’s not yet used to her mother not being here. It’s bad for her, but there you are, life’s like that.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.

  He gave me a glance in which I read both love for his daughter and a blindness to her needs. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘That you go anywhere near High Wycombe on your way home?’

  ‘Well,’ I said obligingly, ‘I could do.’

  I consequently drove Ginnie back to her school, listening on the way to her views on the new headmistress’s compulsory jogging programme (‘all our bosoms flopping up and down, bloody uncomfortable and absolutely disgusting to look at’) and to her opinion of Nigel (‘Dad thinks the sun shines out of his you-know-what and I dare say he is pretty good with the mares, they all seem to flourish, but what the lads get up to behind his back is nobody’s business. They smoke in the feed sheds, I ask you! All that hay around… Nigel never notices. He’d make a rotten school prefect’) and to her outlook on life in general (‘I can’t wait to get out of school uniform and out of dormitories and being bossed around, and I’m no good at lessons; the whole thing’s a mess. Why has everything changed? I used to be happy, or at least I wasn’t unhappy, which I mostly seem to be nowadays, and no, it isn’t because of Mum going away, or not especially, as she was never a lovey-dovey sort of mother, always telling me to eat with my mouth shut and so on… and you must be bored silly hearing all this.’)

  ‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I’m not bored.’

  ‘I’m not even beautiful,’ she said despairingly. ‘I can suck in my cheeks until I faint but I’ll never look pale and bony and interesting.’

  I glanced at the still rounded child-woman face, at the peach-bloom skin and the worried eyes.

  ‘Practically no one is beautiful at fifteen,’ I said. ‘It’s too soon.’

  ‘How do you mean – too soon?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘say at twelve you’re a child and flat and undeveloped and so on, and at maybe seventeen or eighteen you’re a full-grown adult, just think of the terrific changes your body goes through in that time. Appearance, desires, mental outlook, everything. So at fifteen, which isn’t much more than halfway, it’s still too soon to know exactly what the end product will be like. And if it’s of any comfort to you, you do now look as if you may be beautiful in a year or two, or at least not unbearably ugly.’

  She sat in uncharacteristic silence for quite a distance, and then she said, ‘Why did you come today? I mean, who are you? If it’s all right to ask?’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m a sort of financial adviser. I work in a bank.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sounded slightly disappointed but made no further comment, and soon after that gave me prosaic and accurate directions to the school.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said, politely shaking hands as we stood beside the car.

  ‘A pleasure.’

  ‘And thanks…’ she hesitated. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  I nodded, and she half-walked, half-ran to join a group of other girls going into the buildings. Looking briefly back she gave me a sketchy wave, which I acknowledged. Nice child, I thought, pointing the car homewards. Mixed up, as who wasn’t at that age. Middling brains, not quite pretty, her future a clean stretch of sand waiting for footprints.

  DECEMBER

  It made the headlines in the Sporting Life (OLIVER KNOWLES, KING OF THE SANDCASTLE) and turned up as the lead story under less fanciful banners on the racing pages of all the other dailies.

  SANDCASTLE TO GO TO STUD, SANDCASTLE TO STAY IN BRITAIN, SANDCASTLE SHARES NOT FOR SALE, SANDCASTLE BOUGHT PRIVATELY FOR HUGE SUM. The story in every case was short and simple. One of the year’s top stallions had been acquired by the owner of a heretofore moderately-ranked stud farm. ‘I am very happy,’ Oliver Knowles was universally reported as saying. ‘Sandcastle is a prize for British bloodstock.’

  The buying price, all the papers said, was ‘not unadjacent to five million pounds,’ and a few of them added ‘the financing was private.’

  ‘Well,’ Henry said at lunch, tapping the Sporting Life, ‘not many of our loans make so much splash.’

  ‘It’s a belly-flop,’ muttered the obstinate dissenter, who on that day happened to be sitting at my elbow.

  Henry didn’t hear and was anyway in good spirits. ‘If one of the foals run in the Derby we’ll take a party from the office. What do you say, Gordon? Fifty people on open-topped buses?’

  Gordon agreed with the sort of smile which hoped he wouldn’t actually be called upon to fulfil his promise.

  ‘Forty mares,’ Henry said musingly. ‘Forty foals. Surely one of them might be D
erby material.’

  ‘Er,’ I said, from new-found knowledge. ‘Forty foals is stretching it. Thirty-five would be pretty good. Some mares won’t “take”, so to speak.’

  Henry showed mild alarm. ‘Does that mean that five or six fees will have to be returned? Doesn’t that affect Knowles’ programme of repayment?’

  I shook my head. ‘For a horse of Sandcastle’s stature the fee is all up in front. Payable for services rendered, regardless of results. That’s in Britain, of course, and Europe. In America they have the system of no foal, no fee, even for the top stallions. A live foal, that is. Alive, on its feet and suckling.’

  Henry relaxed, leaning back in his chair and smiling. ‘You’ve certainly learnt a lot, Tim, since this all started.’

  ‘It’s absorbing.’

  He nodded. ‘I know it isn’t usual, but how do you feel about keeping an eye on the bank’s money at close quarters? Would Knowles object to you dropping in from time to time?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Not out of general interest.’

  ‘Good. Do that, then. Bring us progress reports. I must say I’ve never been as impressed with any horse as I was that day with Sandcastle.’

  Henry’s direct admiration of the colt had led in the end to Ekaterin’s advancing three of the five million to Oliver Knowles, with private individuals subscribing the other two. The fertility tests had been excellent, the owner had been paid, and Sandcastle already stood in the stallion yard in Hertforc-shire alongside Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet.

  December was marching along towards Christmas, with trees twinkling all over London and sleet falling bleakly in the afternoons. On an impulse I sent a card embossed with tasteful robins to Calder Jackson, wishing him well, and almost by return of post received (in the office) a missive (Stubbs reproduction) thanking me sincerely and asking if I would be interested some time in looking round his place. If so, he finished, would I telephone – number supplied.

  I telephoned. He was affable and far more spontaneous than usual. ‘Do come,’ he said, and we made a date for the following Sunday.

  I told Gordon I was going. We were working on an interbank loan of nine and a half million for five days to a competitor, a matter of little more than a few telephone calls and a promise. My hair had almost ceased to rise at the size and speed of such deals, and with only verbal agreement from Val and Henry I had recently on my own lent seven million for forty-eight hours. The trick was never to lend for a longer time than we ourselves were able to borrow the necessary funds: if we did, we ran the risk of having to pay a higher rate of interest than we were receiving on the loan, a process which physically hurt Val Fisher. There had been a time in the past when owing to a client repaying late he had had to borrow several million for eighteen days at twenty-five per cent, and he’d never got over it.

  Most of our dealings weren’t on such a heavy scale, and next on my agenda was a request for us to lend fifty-five thousand pounds to a man who had invented a waste-paper basket for use in cars and needed funds for development. I read the letter out to Gordon, who made a fast thumbs-down gesture.

  ‘Pity,’ I said. ‘It’s a sorely needed object.’

  ‘He’s asking too little.’ He put his left hand hard between his knees and clamped it there. ‘And there are far better inventions dying the death.’

  I agreed with him and wrote a brief note of regret. Gordon looked up from his pages shortly after, and asked me what I’d be doing at Christmas.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said.

  ‘Not going to your mother in Jersey?’

  ‘They’re cruising in the Caribbean.’

  ‘Judith and I wondered…’ he cleared his throat, ‘… if you’d care to stay with us. Come on Christmas Eve, stay three or four days? Just as you like, of course. I daresay you wouldn’t find us too exciting… but the offer’s there, anyway.’

  Was it wise, I wondered, to spend three or four days with Judith when three or four hours at Ascot had tempted acutely? Was it wise, when the sight of her aroused so many natural urges, to sleep so long – and so near – under her roof?

  Most unwise.

  ‘I’d like to,’ I said, ‘very much’; and I thought you’re a bloody stupid fool, Tim Ekaterin, and if you ache it’ll be your own ridiculous fault.

  ‘Good,’ Gordon said, looking as if he meant it. ‘Judith will be pleased. She was afraid you might have younger friends to go to.’

  ‘Nothing fixed.’

  He nodded contentedly and went back to his work, and I thought about Judith wanting me to stay, because if she hadn’t wanted it I wouldn’t have been asked.

  If I had any sense I wouldn’t go: but I knew I would.

  Calder Jackson’s place at Newmarket, seen that next Sunday morning, was a gem of public relations, where everything had been done to please those visiting the sick. The yard itself, a three-sided quadrangle, had been cosmetically planted with central grass and a graceful tree, and brightly painted tubs, bare now of flowers, stood at frequent intervals outside the boxes. There were park-bench type seats here and there, and ornamental gates and railings in black iron scroll-work, and a welcoming archway labelled ‘Comfort Room This Way.’

  Outside the main yard, and to one side, stood a small separate building painted glossy white. There was a large prominent red cross on the door, with, underneath it, the single word ‘Surgery’.

  The yard and the surgery were what the visitor first saw: beyond and screened by trees stood Calder Jackson’s own house, more private from prying eyes than his business. I parked beside several other cars on a stretch of asphalt, and walked over to ring the bell. The front door was opened to me by a manservant in a white coat. Butler or nurse?

  ‘This way, sir,’ he said deferentially, when I announced my name. ‘Mr Jackson is expecting you.’

  Butler.

  Interesting to see the dramatic hair-cut in its home setting, which was olde-worlde cottage on a grand scale. I had an impression of a huge room, oak rafters, stone flagged floor, rugs, dark oak furniture, great brick fireplace with burning logs… and Calder advancing with a broad smile and outstretched arm.

  ‘Tim!’ he exclaimed, shaking hands vigorously. ‘This is a pleasure, indeed it is.’

  ‘Been looking forward to it,’ I said.

  ‘Come along to the fire. Come and warm yourself. How about a drink? And… oh… this is a friend of mine…’ he waved towards a second man already standing by the fireplace, ‘… Ian Pargetter.’

  The friend and I nodded to each other and made the usual strangers-meeting signals, and the name tumbled over in my mind as something I’d heard somewhere before but couldn’t quite recall.

  Calder Jackson clinked bottles and glasses and upon consultation gave me a Scotch of noble proportions.

  ‘And for you, Ian,’ he said. ‘A further tincture?’

  Oh yes, I thought. The vet. Ian Pargetter, the vet who didn’t mind consorting with unlicensed practitioners.

  Ian Pargetter hesitated but shrugged and held out his glass as one succumbing to pleasurable temptation.

  ‘A small one, then, Calder,’ he said. ‘I must be off.’

  He was about forty, I judged; large and reliable-looking, with sandy greying hair, a heavy moustache and an air of being completely in charge of his life. Calder explained that it was I who had deflected the knife aimed at him at Ascot, and Ian Pargetter made predictable responses about luck, fast reactions and who could have wanted to kill Calder?

  ‘That was altogether a memorable day,’ Calder said, and I agreed with him.

  ‘We all won a packet on Sandcastle,’ Calder said. ‘Pity he’s going to stud so soon.’

  I smiled. ‘Maybe we’ll win on his sons.’

  There was no particular secret, as far as I knew, about where the finance for Sandcastle had come from, but it was up to Oliver Knowles to reveal it, not me. I thought Calder would have been interested, but bankers’ ethics as usual kept me quiet.

  ‘A superb hor
se,’ Calder said, with all the enthusiasm he’d shown in Dissdale’s box. ‘One of the greats.’

  Ian Pargetter nodded agreement, then finished his drink at a gulp and said he’d be going. ‘Let me know how that pony fares, Calder.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Calder moved with his departing guest towards the door and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for dropping in, Ian. Appreciate it.’

  There were sounds of Pargetter leaving by the front door, and Calder returned rubbing his hands together and saying that although it was cold outside, I might care to look round before his other guests arrived for lunch. Accordingly we walked across to the open-sided quadrangle, where Calder moved from box to box giving me a brief resumé of the illness and prospects of each patient.

  ‘This pony only came yesterday… it’s a prize show pony supposedly, and look at it. Dull eyes, rough coat, altogether droopy. They say it’s had diarrhoea on and off for weeks. I’m their last resort, they say.’ He smiled philosophically. ‘Can’t think why they don’t send me sick horses as a first resort. But there you are, they always try regular vets first. Can’t blame them, I suppose.’

  We moved along the line. ‘This mare was coughing blood when she came three weeks ago. I was her owner’s last resort.’ He smiled again. ‘She’s doing fine now. The cough’s almost: gone. She’s eating well, putting on condition.’ The mare blinked at us lazily as we strolled away.

  ‘This is a two-year-old filly,’ Calder said, peering over a half-door. ‘She’d had an infected ulcer on her withers for six weeks before she came here. Antibiotics had proved useless Now the ulcer’s dry and healing. Most satisfactory.’

  We went on down the row.

  ‘This is someone’s favourite hunter, came all the way from, Gloucestershire. I don’t know what I can do for him, though of course I’ll try. His trouble, truthfully, is just age.’

  Further on: ‘Here’s a star three-day-eventer. Came to me with intermittent bleeding in the urine, intractable to antibiotics. He was clearly in great pain, and almost dangerous to deal with on account of it. But now he’s fine. He’ll be staying here for a while longer but I’m sure the trouble is cured.