Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘Has recruitment been difficult?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I do it every spring. I keep the good ones on for the whole year, if they’ll stay, of course: these lads come and go as the whim takes them, the unmarried ones, that is. I keep the nucleus on and put them painting fences and such in the autumn and winter.’

  We strolled into the second yard, where the butty figure of Nigel could be seen peering over a half-door into a box.

  ‘You remember Nigel?’ Oliver said. ‘My stud manager?’

  Nigel, I noted, had duly been promoted.

  ‘And Ginnie,’ I asked, as we walked over, ‘is she home today?’

  ‘Yes, she’s somewhere about.’ He looked around as if expecting her to materialise at the sound of her name, but nothing happened.

  ‘How’s it going, Nigel?’ he asked.

  Nigel’s hairy eyebrows withdrew from the box and aimed themselves in our direction. ‘Floradora’s eating again,’ he said, indicating the inspected lady and sounding relieved. ‘And Pattacake is still in labour. I’m just going back there.’

  ‘We’ll come,’ Oliver said. ‘If you’d like to?’ he added, looking at me questioningly.

  I nodded and walked on with them along the path into the third, smaller quadrangle, the foaling yard.

  Here too, in this place that had been empty, there was purposeful life, and the box to which Nigel led us was larger than normal and thickly laid with straw.

  ‘Foals usually drop at night,’ Oliver said, and Nigel nodded. ‘She started about midnight. She’s just lazy, eh, girl ?’ He patted the brown rump. ‘Very slow. Same thing every year.’

  ‘She’s not come for Sandcastle, then?’ I said.

  ‘No. She’s one of mine,’ Oliver said. ‘The foal’s by Diarist.’

  We hovered for a few minutes but there was no change in Pattacake. Nigel, running delicately knowledgeable hands over the shape under her ribs, said she’d be another hour, perhaps, and that he would stay with her for a while. Oliver and I walked onwards, past the still closed breeding shed and down the path between the two small paddocks towards the stallion yard. Everything, as before, meticulously tidy.

  There was one four-legged figure in one of the paddocks, head down and placid. ‘Parakeet,’ Oliver said. ‘Getting more air than grass, actually. It isn’t warm enough yet for the new grass to grow.’

  We came finally to the last yard, and there he was, the gilt-edged Sandcastle, looking over his door like any other horse.

  One couldn’t tell, I thought. True there was a poise to the well-shaped head, and an interested eye and alertly pricked ears, but nothing to announce that this was the marvellous creature I’d seen at Ascot. No one ever again, I reflected, would see that arrow-like raking gallop, that sublime throat-catching valour: and it seemed a shame that he should be denied his ability in the hope that he would pass it on.

  A lad, broom in hand, was sweeping scatterings of peat off the concrete apron in front of the six stallion boxes, watched by Sandcastle, Rotaboy and Diarist with the same depth of interest as a bus queue would extend to a busker.

  ‘Lenny,’ Oliver said, ‘you can take Sandcastle down to the small paddock opposite to the one with Parakeet.’ He looked up at the sky as if to sniff the coming weather. ‘Put him back in his box when you return for evening stables.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lenny was well into middle age, small, leathery and of obviously long experience. He propped the broom against one of the empty boxes and disappeared into a doorway to reappear presently carrying a length of rope.

  ‘Lenny is one of my most trusted helpers,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Been with me several years. He’s good with stallions and much stronger than he looks. Stallions can be quite difficult to handle, but Lenny gets on with them better than with mares. Don’t know why.’

  Lenny clipped the rope onto the headcollar which Sandcastle, along with every other equine resident, wore at all times. Upon the headcollar was stapled a metal plate bearing the horse’s name, an absolute essential for identification. Shuffle all those mares together without their headcollars, I thought, and no one would ever sort them. I suggested the problem mildly to Oliver, who positively blenched. ‘God forbid! Don’t suggest such things. We’re very careful. Have to be. Otherwise, as you say, we could breed the wrong mare to the wrong stallion and never know it.’

  I wondered, but privately, how often that in fact had happened, or whether indeed it was possible for two mares or two foals to be permanently swapped. The opportunities for mistakes, if not for outright fraud, put computer manipulation in the shade.

  Nigel arrived in the yard, and with his scarcely necessary help Lenny opened Sandcastle’s door and led the colt out; and one could see in all their strength the sleek muscles, the tugging sinews, the spring-like joints. The body that was worth its weight in gold pranced and scrunched on the hard apron, wheeling round impatiently and tossing its uncomprehending head.

  ‘Full of himself,’ Oliver explained. ‘We have to feed him well and keep him fairly fit, but of course he doesn’t get the exercise he used to.’

  We stepped to one side with undignified haste to avoid Sandcastle’s restless hindquarters. ‘Has he… er… started work yet?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Oliver said. ‘Only one of his mares has foaled so far. She’s almost through her foal-heat, so when she comes into use in fifteen or sixteen days time, she’ll be his first. After that there will be a pause – give him time to think! – then he’ll be busy until into June.’

  ‘How often…?’ I murmured delicately.

  Oliver fielded the question as if he, like Calder, had had to give the same answer countless times over.

  ‘It depends on the stallion,’ he said. ‘Some can cover one mare in the morning and another in the afternoon and go on like that for days. Others haven’t that much stamina or that much desire. Occasionally you get very shy and choosy stallions. Some of them won’t go near some mares but will mate all right with others. Some will cover only one mare a fortnight, if that. Stallions aren’t machines, you know, they’re individual like everyone else.’

  With Nigel in attendance Lenny led Sandcastle out of the yard, the long bay legs stalking in powerful strides beside the almost trotting little man.

  ‘Sandcastle will be all right with mares,’ Oliver said again firmly. ‘Most stallions are.’

  We stopped for Oliver to give two carrots and a pat each to Rotaboy and Diarist, so that we didn’t ourselves see the calamity. We heard a distant clatter and a yell and the thud of fast hooves, and Oliver went white as he turned to run to the disaster.

  I followed him, also sprinting.

  Lenny lay against one of the white painted posts of the small paddock’s rails, dazedly trying to pull himself up. Sandcastle, loose and excited, had found his way into one of the paths between the larger paddocks and from his bolting speed must have taken the rails to be those of a racecourse.

  Nigel stood by the open gate of the small paddock, his mouth wide as if arrested there by shock. He was still almost speechless when Oliver and I reached him, but had at least begun to unstick.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Oliver shouted. ‘Get going. Get the Land Rover. He can get out onto the road that way through the Watcherleys’. He ran off in the direction of his own house leaving a partially resurrected Nigel to stumble off towards the bungalow, half in sight beyond the stallion yard.

  Lenny raised himself and began his excuses, but I didn’t wait to listen. Unused to the problem and ignorant of how best to catch fleeing horses, I simply set off in Sandcastle’s wake, following his path between the paddocks and seeing him disappear ahead of me behind a distant hedge.

  I ran fast along the grassy path between the rails, past the groups of incurious mares in the paddocks, thinking that my brief January holiday ski-ing down the pistes at Gstaad might have its practical uses after all; there was currently a lot more muscle in my legs than was ever to be found by July.

>   Whereas on my last visit the hedge between Oliver Knowles’ farm and the Watcherleys’ run-down hospital for sick horses had been a thorny unbroken boundary, there were now two or three wide gaps, so that passing from one side to the other was easy. I pounded through the gap which lay straight ahead and noticed almost unconsciously that the Watcherleys’ dilapidation had been not only halted but partially reversed, with new fencing going up and repairs in hand on the roofs.

  I ran towards the stable buildings across a thistly field in which there was no sign of Sandcastle, and through an as yet unmended gate which hung open on broken hinges on the far side. Beyond there between piles of rubble and rusting iron I reached the yard itself, to find Ginnie looking around her with unfocussed anxiety and a man and a girl walking towards her enquiringly.

  Ginnie saw me running, and her first instinctively cheerful greeting turned almost at once to alarm.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is one of the mares out?’

  ‘Sandcastle.’

  ‘Oh no…’ It was a wail of despair. ‘He can get on the road.’ She turned away, already running, and I ran after her; out of the Watcherleys’ yard, round their ramshackle house and down the short weedy gateless drive to the dangerous outside world where a car could kill a horse without even trying.

  ‘We’ll never catch him,’ Ginnie said as we reached the road. ‘It’s no use running. We don’t know which way he went.’ She was in great distress: eyes flooding, tears on her cheeks. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘I should think he’s out in his car, looking. And Nigel’s in a Land Rover.’

  ‘I heard a horse gallop through the Watcherleys’,’ she said. ‘I was in one of the boxes with a foal. I never thought… I mean, I thought it might be a mare…’

  A speeding car passed in front of us, followed closely by two others doing at least sixty miles an hour, one of them dicily passing a heavy articulated lorry which should have been home in its nest on a Sunday. The thought of Sandcastle loose in that battlefield was literally goose-pimpling and I began for the first time to believe in his imminent destruction. One of those charging monsters would be sure to hit him. He would waver across the road into their path, swerving, rudderless, hoplessly vulnerable… a five million pound traffic accident in the making.

  ‘Let’s go this way,’ I said, pointing to the left. A motorcyclist roared from that direction, head down in a black visor, going too fast to stop.

  Ginnie shook her head sharply. ‘Dad and Nigel will be on the road. But there’s a track over there…’ She pointed slantwise across the road. ‘He might just have found it. And there’s a bit of a hill and even if he isn’t up there at least we might see him from there… you can see the road in places… I often ride up there.’ She was off again, running while she talked, and I fell in beside her. Her face was screwed up with the intensity of her feelings and I felt as much sympathy for her as dismay about the horse. Sandcastle was insured – I’d vetted the policy myself – but Oliver Knowles’ prestige wasn’t. The escape and death of the first great stallion in his care would hardly attract future business.

  The track was muddy and rutted and slippery from recent rain. There were also a great many hoofprints, some looking new, some overtrodden and old. I pointed to them as we ran and asked Ginnie pantingly if she knew if any of those were Sandcastle’s.

  ‘Oh.’ She stopped running suddenly. ‘Yes. Of course. He hasn’t got shoes on. The blacksmith came yesterday, Dad said…’ She peered at the ground dubiously, ‘… he left Sandcastle without new shoes because he was going to make leather pads for under them… I wasn’t really listening.’ She pointed. ‘I think that might be him. Those new marks… they could be, they really could.’ She began running again up the track, impelled by hope now as well as horror, fit in her jeans and sweater and jodhpur boots after all that compulsory jogging.

  I ran beside her thinking that mud anyway washed easily from shoes, socks and trouser legs. The ground began to rise sharply and to narrow between bare-branched scratchy bushes; and the jumble of hoof marks inexorably led on and on.

  ‘Please be up here,’ Ginnie was saying. ‘Please, Sandcastle, please be up here.’ Her urgency pumped in her legs and ran in misery down her cheeks. ‘Oh please… please…’

  The agony of adolescence, I thought. So real, so overpowering… so remembered.

  The track curved through the bushes and opened suddenly into a wider place where grass grew in patches beside the rutted mud; and there stood Sandcastle, head high, nostrils twitching to the wind, a brown and black creature of power and beauty and majesty.

  Ginnie stopped running in one stride and caught my arm fiercely.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. You stay here. Keep still. Please keep still.’

  I nodded obediently, respecting her experience. The colt looked ready to run again at the slightest untimely movement, his sides quivering, his legs stiff with tension, his tail sweeping up and down restlessly.

  He’s frightened, I thought suddenly. He’s out here, lost, not knowing where to go. He’s never been free before, but his instinct is still wild, still against being caught. Horses were never truly tamed, only accustomed to captivity.

  Ginnie walked towards him making crooning noises and holding out her hand palm upwards, an offering hand with nothing to offer. ‘Come on, boy,’ she said. ‘Come on boy, there’s a good boy, it’s all right, come on now.’

  The horse watched her as if he’d never seen a human before, his alarm proclaimed in a general volatile trembling. The rope hung down from his headcollar, its free end curling on the ground; and I wondered whether Ginnie would be able to control the colt if she caught him, where Lenny with all his strength had let him go.

  Ginnie came to within a foot of the horse’s nose, offering her open left hand upwards and bringing her right hand up slowly under his chin, reaching for the headcollar itself, not the rope: her voice made soothing, murmuring sounds and my own tensed muscles began to relax.

  At the last second Sandcastle would have none of it. He wheeled away with a squeal, knocking Ginnie to her knees; took two rocketing strides towards a dense patch of bushes, wheeled again, laid back his ears and accelerated in my direction. Past me lay the open track, down hill again to the slaughtering main road.

  Ginnie, seen in peripheral vision, was struggling to her feet in desperation. Without thinking of anything much except perhaps what that horse meant to her family, I jumped not out of his way but at his flying head, my fingers curling for the headcollar and missing that and fastening round the rope.

  He nearly tore my arms out of their sockets and all the skin off my palms. He yanked me off my feet, pulled me through the mud and trampled on my legs. I clung all the same with both hands to the rope and bumped against his shoulder and knee, and shortly more by weight than skill hauled him to the side of the track and into the bushes.

  The bushes, indeed, acted as an anchor. He couldn’t drag my heaviness through them, not if I kept hold of the rope; and I wound the rope clumsily round a stump of branch for leverage, and that was roughly that. Sandcastle stood the width of the bush away, crossly accepting the inevitable, tossing his head and quivering but no longer trying for full stampede.

  Ginnie appeared round the curve in the track, running and if possible looking more than ever distraught. When she saw me she stumbled and half fell and came up to me uninhibitedly crying.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad, so glad, and you should never do that, you can be killed, you should never do it, and I’m so grateful, so glad… oh dear.’ She leant against me weakly and like a child wiped her eyes and nose on my sleeve.

  ‘Well,’ I said pragmatically, ‘what do we do with him now?’

  What we decided, upon consideration, was that I and Sandcastle should stay where we were, and that Ginnie should go and find Nigel or her father, neither she nor I being confident of leading our prize home without reinforcements.

  While she was gone I made an inventory of da
mage, but so far as my clothes went there was nothing the cleaners couldn’t see to, and as for the skin, it would grow again pretty soon. My legs though bruised were functioning, and there was nothing broken or frightful. I made a ball of my handkerchief in my right palm which was bleeding slightly and thought that one of these days a habit of launching oneself at things like fleeing stallions and boys with knives might prove to be unwise.

  Oliver, Ginnie, Nigel and Lenny all appeared in the Land Rover, gears grinding and wheels spinning in the mud. Sandcastle, to their obvious relief, was upon inspection pronounced sound, and Oliver told me forcefully that no one, should ever, repeat ever, try to stop a bolting horse in that way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You could have been killed.’

  ‘So Ginnie said.’

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you?’ He sounded almost angry; the aftermath of fright. ‘Didn’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just did it.’

  ‘Never do it again,’ he said, ‘And thanks,’ he paused and swallowed and tried to make light of his own shattered state. ‘Thanks for taking care of my investment.’

  Lenny and Nigel had brought a different sort of headcollar which involved a bit in the mouth and a fierce looking curb chain, and with these in place the captive (if not chastened) fugitive was led away. There seemed to me to be a protest in the stalking hindquarters, a statement of disgust at the injustices of life. I smiled at that fanciful thought; the pathetic fallacy, the ascribing to animals of emotions one felt only oneself.

  Oliver drove Ginnie and me back in the Land Rover, travelling slowly behind the horse and telling how Nigel and Lenny had allowed him to go free.

  ‘Sheer bloody carelessness,’ he said forthrightly. ‘Both of them should know better. They could see the horse was fresh and jumping out of his skin yet Lenny was apparently holding the rope with only one hand and stretching to swing the gate open with the other. He took his eyes off Sandcastle so he wasn’t ready when Nigel made some sharp movement or other and the horse reared and ran backwards. I ask you! Lenny! Nigel! How can they be so bloody stupid after all these years?’