by Dick Francis
There seemed to be no answer to that so we just let him curse away, and he was still rumbling like distant thunder when the journey ended. Once home he hurried off to the stallion yard and Ginnie trenchantly said that if Nigel was as sloppy with discipline for animals as he was with the lads, it was no wonder any horse with spirit would take advantage.
‘Accidents happen,’ I said mildly.
‘Huh.’ She was scornful. ‘Dad’s right. That accident shouldn’t have happened. It was an absolute miracle that Sandcastle came to no harm at all. Even if he hadn’t got out on the road he could have tried to jump the paddock rails – loose horses often do – and broken his leg or something.’ She sounded as angry as her father, and for the same reason; the flooding release after fear. I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a quick hug, which seemed to disconcert her horribly. ‘Oh dear, you must think me so silly… and crying like that… and everything.’
‘I think you’re a nice dear girl who’s had a rotten morning,’ I said. ‘But all’s well now, you know; it really is.’
I naturally believed what I said, but I was wrong.
APRIL
Calder Jackson finally came to dinner with me while he was staying in London to attend a world conference of herbalists. He would be glad, he said, to spend one of the evenings away from his colleagues, and I met him in a restaurant on the grounds that although my flat was civilised my cooking was not.
I sensed immediately a difference in him, though it was hard to define; rather as if he had become a figure still larger than life. Heads turned and voices whispered when we walked through the crowded place to our table, but because of television this would have happened anyway. Yet now, I thought, Calder really enjoyed it. There was still no overt arrogance, still a becoming modesty of manner, but something within him had intensified, crystallised, become a governing factor. He was now, I thought, even to himself, the Great Man.
I wondered what, if anything, had specifically altered him, and it turned out to be the one thing I would have least expected: Ian Pargetter’s death.
Over a plateful of succulent smoked salmon Calder apologised for the abrupt way he’d brushed me off on the telephone on that disturbing night, and I said it was most understandable.
‘Fact is,’ Calder said, squeezing lemon juice, ‘I was afraid my whole business would collapse. Ian’s partners, you know, never approved of me. I was afraid they would influence everyone against me, once Ian had gone.’
‘And it hasn’t worked out that way?’
He shook his head, assembling a pink forkful. ‘Remarkably not. Amazing.’ He put the smoked salmon in his mouth and made appreciative noises, munching. I was aware, and I guessed he was, too, that the ears of the people at the tables on either side were almost visibly attuned to the distinctive voice, to the clear loud diction with its country edge. ‘My yard’s still full. People have faith, you know. I may not get quite so many racehorses, that’s to be expected, but still a few.’
‘And have you heard any more about Ian Pargetter’s death? Did they ever find out who killed him?’
He looked regretful. ‘I’m sure they haven’t. I asked one of his partners the other day, and he said no one seemed to be asking questions any more. He was quite upset. And so am I. I suppose finding his murderer won’t bring Ian back, but all the same one wants to know.’
‘Tell me some of your recent successes,’ I said, nodding, changing the subject and taking a slice of paper-thin brown bread and butter. ‘I find your work tremendously interesting.’ I also found it about the only thing else to talk about, as we seemed to have few other points of contact. Regret it as I might, there was still no drift towards an easy personal friendship.
Calder ate some more smoked salmon while he thought. ‘I had a colt,’ he said at last, ‘a two-year-old in training. Ian had been treating him, and he’d seemed to be doing well. Then about three weeks after Ian died the colt started bleeding into his mouth and down his nose and went on and on doing it, and as Ian’s partner couldn’t find out the trouble the trainer persuaded the owner to send the horse to me.’
‘And did you discover what was wrong?’ I asked.
‘Oh no.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t necessary. I laid my hands on him on three succeeding days, and the bleeding stopped immediately. I kept him at my place for two weeks altogether, and returned him on his way back to full good health.’
The adjacent tables were fascinated, as indeed I was myself.
‘Did you give him herbs?’ I asked.
‘Certainly. Of course. And alfalfa in his hay. Excellent for many ills, alfalfa.’
I had only the haziest idea of what alfalfa looked like, beyond it being some sort of grass.
‘The one thing you can’t do with herbs,’ he said confidently, ‘is harm.’
I raised my eyebrows with my mouth full.
He gave the nearest thing to a grin. ‘With ordinary medicines one has to be so careful because of their power and their side effects, but if I’m not certain what’s wrong with a horse I can give it all the herbal remedies I can think of all at once in the hope that one of them will hit the target, and it quite often does. It may he hopelessly unscientific, but if a trained vet can’t tell exactly what’s wrong with a horse, how can I?’
I smiled with undiluted pleasure. ‘Have some wine,’ I said.
He nodded the helmet of curls, and the movement I made towards the bottle in its ice-bucket was instantly forestalled by a watchful waiter who poured almost reverently into the healer’s glass.
‘How was the American trip,’ I asked, ‘way back in January?’
‘Mm.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Interesting.’ He frowned a little and went back to finishing the salmon, leaving me wondering whether that was his total answer. When he’d laid down his knife and fork however he sat back in his chair and told me that the most enjoyable part of his American journey had been, as he’d expected, his few days on the ski slopes; and we discussed ski-ing venues throughout the roast beef and burgundy which followed.
With the crepes suzette I asked after Dissdale and Bettina and heard that Dissdale had been to New York on a business trip and that Bettina had been acting a small part in a British movie, which Dissdale hadn’t known whether to be pleased about or not. ‘Too many gorgeous young studs around,’ Calder said, smiling. ‘Dissdale gets worried anyway, and he was away for ten days.’
I pondered briefly about Calder’s own seemingly nonexistent sex-life: but he’d never seen me with a girl either, and certainly there was no hint in him of the homosexual.
Over coffee, running out of subjects, I asked about his yard in general, and how was the right-hand-man Jason in particular.
Calder shrugged. ‘He’s left. They come and go, you know. No loyalty these days.’
‘And you don’t fear… well, that he’d take your knowledge with him?’
He looked amused. ‘He didn’t know much. I mean, I’d hand out a pill and tell Jason which horse to give it to. That sort of thing.’
We finished amiably enough with a glass of brandy for each and a cigar for him, and I tried not to wince over the bill.
‘A very pleasant evening,’ Calder said. ‘You must come out to lunch again one day.’
‘I’d like to.’
We sat for a final few minutes opposite each other in a pause of mutual appraisal: two people utterly different but bonded by one-tenth of a second on a pavement in Ascot. Saved and saver, inextricably interested each in the other; a continuing curiosity which would never quite lose touch. I smiled at him slowly and got a smile in return, but all surface, no depth, a mirror exactly of my own feelings.
In the office things were slowly changing. John had boasted too often of his sexual conquests and complained too often about my directorship, and Gordon’s almost-equal had tired of such waste of time. I’d heard from Val Fisher in a perhaps edited version that at a small and special seniors meeting (held in my absence and without my knowledge) Gordon�
�s almost-equal had said he would like to boot John vigorously over St Paul’s. His opinion was respected. I heard from Alec one day merely that the mosquito which had stung me for so long had been squashed, and on going along the passage to investigate had found John’s desk empty and his bull-like presence but a quiver in the past.
‘He’s gone to sell air-conditioning to Eskimos,’ Alec said, and Gordon’s almost-equal, smiling affably, corrected it more probably to a partnership with some brokers on the Stock Exchange.
Alec himself seemed restless, as if his own job no longer held him enthralled.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he said once. ‘You’ve the gift. You’ve the sight. I can’t tell a gold mine from a pomegranate at five paces, and it’s taken me all these years to know it.’
‘But you’re a conjuror,’ I said. ‘You can rattle up outside money faster than anyone.’
‘Gift of the old gab, you mean.’ He looked uncharacteristically gloomy. ‘Syrup with a chisel in it.’ He waved his hand towards the desks of our new older colleagues, who had both gone out to lunch. ‘I’ll end up like them, still here, still smooth-talking, part of the furniture, coming up to sixty.’ His voice held disbelief that such an age could be achieved. ‘That isn’t life, is it? That’s not all?’
I said that I supposed it might be.
‘Yes, but for you it’s exciting,’ he said. ‘I mean, you love it. Your eyes gleam. You get your kicks right here in this room. But I’ll never be made a director, let’s face it, and I have this grotty feeling that time’s slipping away, and soon it will be too late to start anything else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like being an actor. Or a doctor. Or an acrobat.’
‘It’s been too late for that since you were six.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lousy, isn’t it?’ He put his heart and soul ten minutes later, however, into tracking down a source of a hundred thousand for several years and lending it to a businessman at a profitable rate, knitting together such loan packages all afternoon with diligence and success.
I hoped he would stay. He was the yeast of the office: my bubbles in the dough. As for myself, I had grown accustomed to being on the board and had slowly found I’d reached a new level of confidence. Gordon seemed to treat me unreservedly as an equal, though it was not until he had been doing it for some time that I looked back and realised.
Gordon’s hitherto uniformly black hair had grown a streak or two of grey. His right hand now trembled also, and his handwriting had grown smaller through his efforts to control his fingers. I watched his valiant struggles to appear normal and respected his privacy by never making even a visual comment: it had become second nature to look anywhere but directly at his hands. In the brain department he remained energetic, but physically over all he was slowing down.
I had only seen Judith once since Christmas, and that had been in the office at a retirement party given for the head of Corporate Finance, a golden-handshake affair to which all managers’ wives had been invited.
‘How are you?’ she said amid the throng, holding a glass of wine and an unidentifiable canapé and smelling of violets.
‘Fine. And you?’
‘Fine.’
She was wearing blue, with diamonds in her ears. I looked at her with absolute and unhappy love and saw the strain it put into her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She shook her head and swallowed. ‘I thought… it might be different… here in the bank.’
‘No.’
She looked down at the canapé, which was squashy and yellow. ‘If I don’t eat this damned thing soon it’ll drop down my dress.’
I took it out of her fingers and deposited it in an ashtray. ‘Invest in a salami cornet. They stay rock-hard for hours.’
‘What’s Tim telling you to invest in?’ demanded Henry Shipton, turning to us a beaming face.
‘Salami,’ Judith said.
‘Typical. He lent money to a seaweed processor last week. Judith, my darling, let me freshen your glass.’
He took the glass away to the bottles and left us again looking at each other with a hundred ears around.
‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘When it’s warmer, could I take you and Gordon, and Pen if she’d like it, out somewhere one Sunday? Somewhere not ordinary. All day.’
She took longer than normal politeness to answer, and I understood all the unspoken things, but finally, as Henry could be seen returning, she said, ‘Yes. We’d all like it. I’d like it… very much.’
‘Here you are,’ Henry said. ‘Tim, you go and fight for your own refill, and leave me to talk to this gorgeous girl.’ He put his arm round her shoulders and swept her off, and although I was vividly aware all evening of her presence, we had no more moments alone.
From day to day when she wasn’t around I didn’t precisely suffer: her absence was more of a faint background ache. When I saw Gordon daily in the office I felt no constant envy, nor hated him, nor even thought much of where he slept. I liked him for the good clever man he was, and our office relationship continued unruffled and secure. Loving Judith was both pleasure and pain, delight and deprivation, wishes withdrawn, dreams denied. It might have been easier and more sensible to have met and fallen heavily for some young glamorous unattached stranger, but the one thing love never did have was logic.
‘Easter,’ I said to Gordon one day in the office. ‘Are you and Judith going away?’
‘We had plans – they fell through.’
‘Did Judith mention that I’d like to take you both somewhere – and Pen Warner – as a thank you for Christmas?’
‘Yes, I believe she did.’
‘Easter Monday, then?’
He seemed pleased at the idea and reported the next day that Judith had asked Pen, and everyone was poised. ‘Pen’s bringing her kite,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s a day trip to Manchester.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tell her it won’t be raining.’
What I did eventually think of seemed to please them all splendidly and also to be acceptable to others concerned, and I consequently collected Gordon and Judith and Pen (but not the kite) from Clapham at eight-thirty on Easter Bank Holiday morning. Judith and Pen were in fizzing high spirits, though Gordon seemed already tired. I suggested abandoning what was bound to be a fairly taxing day for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I want to go,’ he said. ‘Been looking forward to it all week. But I’ll just sit in the back of the car and rest and sleep some of the way.’ So Judith sat beside me while I drove and touched my hand now and then, not talking much but contenting me deeply by just being there. The journey to Newmarket lasted two and a half hours and I would as soon it had gone on for ever.
I was taking them to Calder’s yard, to the utter fascination of Pen. ‘But don’t tell him I’m a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘He might clam up if he knew he had an informed audience.’
‘We won’t tell,’ Judith assured her. ‘It would absolutely spoil the fun.’
Poor Calder, I thought: but I wouldn’t tell him either.
He greeted us expansively (making me feel guilty) and gave us coffee in the huge oak-beamed sitting room where the memory of Ian Pargetter hovered peripherally by the fireplace.
‘Delighted to see you again,’ Calder said, peering at Gordon, Judith and Pen as if trying to conjure a memory to fit their faces. He knew of course who they were by name, but Ascot was ten months since, and although it had been an especially memorable day for him he had met a great many new people between then and now. ‘Ah yes,’ he said with relief, his brow clearing. ‘Yellow hat with roses.’
Judith laughed. ‘Well done.’
‘Can’t forget anyone so pretty.’
She took it as it was meant, but indeed he hadn’t forgotten: as one tended never to forget people whose vitality brought out the sun.
‘I see Dissdale and Bettina quite often,’ he said, making conversation, and Gordon agreed that
he and Judith, also, sometimes saw Dissdale, though infrequently. As a topic it was hardly rivetting, but served as an acceptable unwinding interval between the long car journey and the Grand Tour.
The patients in the boxes were all different but their ailments seemed the same; and I supposed surgeons could be excused their impersonal talk of ‘the appendix in bed 14’, when the occupants changed week by week but the operation didn’t.
‘This is a star three-day-eventer who came here five weeks ago with severe muscular weakness and no appetite. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t be ridden. He goes home tomorrow, strong and thriving. Looks well, eh?’ Calder patted the glossy brown neck over the half-stable door. ‘His owner thought he was dying, poor girl. She was weeping when she brought him here. It’s really satisfying, you know, to be able to help.’
Gordon said civilly that it must be.
‘This is a two-year-old not long in training. Came with an intractably infected wound on his fetlock. He’s been here a week, and he’s healing. It was most gratifying that the trainer sent him without delay, since I’d treated several of his horses in the past.’
‘This mare,’ Calder went on, moving us all along, ‘came two or three days ago in great discomfort with blood in her urine. She’s responding well, I’m glad to say.’ He patted this one too, as he did them all.
‘What was causing the bleeding?’ Pen asked, but with only an uninformed-member-of-the-public intonation.
Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know. His vet diagnosed a kidney infection complicated by crystalluria, which means crystals in the urine, but he didn’t know the type of germ and, every antibiotic he gave failed to work. So the mare came here. Last resort.’ He gave me a wink, ‘I’m thinking of simply re-naming this whole place “Last Resort”.’
‘And you’re treating her,’ Gordon asked, ‘with herbs?’
‘With everything I can think of,’ Calder said. ‘And of course… with hands.’
‘I suppose,’ Judith said diffidently, ‘that you’d never let anyone watch…?’
