Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘My dear lady, for you, anything,’ Calder said. ‘But you’d see nothing. You might stand for half an hour, and nothing would happen. It would be terribly boring. And I might, perhaps, be unable, you know, if someone was waiting and standing there.’

  Judith smiled understandingly and the tour continued, ending as before in the surgery.

  Pen stood looking about her with sociable blankness and then wandered over to the glass-fronted cabinets to peer myopically at the contents.

  Calder, happily ignoring her in favour of Judith, was pulling out his antique tablet-maker and demonstrating it with pride.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Judith said sincerely. ‘Do you use it much?’

  ‘All the time,’ he said. ‘Any herbalist worth the name makes his own pills and potions.’

  ‘Tim said you had a universal magic potion in the fridge.’

  Calder smiled and obligingly opened the refrigerator door, revealing the brown-filled plastic containers, as before.

  ‘What’s in it?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Trade secret,’ he said, smiling. ‘Decoction of hops and other things.’

  ‘Like beer?’ Judith said.

  ‘Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘Horses do drink beer,’ Gordon said. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’

  Pen bent down to pick up a small peach-coloured pill which was lying unobtrusively on the floor in the angle of one of the cupboards, and put it without comment on the bench.

  ‘It’s all so absorbing,’ Judith said. ‘So tremendously kind of you to show us everything. I’ll watch all your programmes with more fervour than ever.’

  Calder responded to her warmly as all men did and asked us into the house again for a drink before we left. Gordon however was still showing signs of fatigue and now also hiding both hands in his pockets which meant he felt they were trembling badly, so the rest of us thanked Calder enthusiastically for his welcome and made admiring remarks about his hospital and climbed into the car, into the same places as before.

  ‘Come back any time you like, Tim,’ he said; and I said thank you and perhaps I would. We shook hands, and we smiled, caught in our odd relationship and unable to take it further. He waved, and I waved back as I drove away.

  ‘Isn’t he amazing?’ Judith said. ‘I must say, Tim, I do understand why you’re impressed.’

  Gordon grunted and said that theatrical surgeons weren’t necessarily the best; but yes, Calder was impressive.

  It was only Pen, after several miles, who expressed her reservations.

  ‘I’m not saying he doesn’t do a great deal of good for the horses. Of course he must do, to have amassed such a reputation. But I don’t honestly think he does it all with herbs.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked, twisting round so as to see her better.

  Pen leaned forward, ‘I found a pill on the floor. I don’t suppose you noticed.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘You put it on the bench.’

  ‘That’s right. Well, that was no herb, it was plain straightforward warfarin.’

  ‘It may be plain straightforward war-whatever to you,’ Judith said. ‘But not to me.’

  Pen’s voice was smiling. ‘Warfarin is a drug used in humans, and I dare say in horses, after things like heart attacks. It’s a coumarin – an anticoagulant. Makes the blood less likely to clot and block up the veins and arteries. Widely used all over the place.’

  We digested the information in silence for a mile or two, and finally Gordon said ‘How did you know it was warfarin? I mean, how can you tell?’

  ‘I handle it every day,’ she said. ‘I know the dosages, the sizes, the colours, the manufacturers’ marks. You see all those things so often, you get to know them at a glance.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I said interestedly, ‘that if you saw fifty different pills laid out in a row you could identify the lot?’

  ‘Probably. If they all came from major drug companies and weren’t completely new, certainly, yes.’

  ‘Like a wine-taster,’ Judith said.

  ‘Clever girl,’ Gordon said, meaning Pen.

  ‘It’s just habit.’ She thought. ‘And something else in those cupboards wasn’t strictly herbal, I suppose. He had one or two bags of potassium sulphate, bought from Goodison’s Garden Centre, wherever that is.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Judith asked. ‘Isn’t potassium sulphate a fertiliser?’

  ‘Potassium’s just as essential to animals as to plants,’ Pen said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t one of the ingredients in that secret brew.’

  ‘What else would you put in it, if you were making it?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Oh heavens.’ She pondered. ‘Any sort of tonic. Perhaps liquorice root, which he once mentioned. Maybe caffeine. All sorts of vitamins. Just a pepping-up mish-mash.’

  The hardest part of the day had been to find somewhere decent to have lunch, and the place I’d chosen via the various gourmet guides turned out, as so often happens, to have changed hands and chefs since the books were written. The resulting repast was slow to arrive and disappointing to eat, but the mood of my guests forgave all.

  ‘You remember,’ Gordon said thoughtfully over the coffee, ‘that you told us on the way to Newmarket that Calder was worried about his business when that vet was killed?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was, at the time.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible,’ Gordon said, ‘that the vet was letting Calder have regular official medicines, like warfarin, and Calder thought his supplies would dry up, when the vet died?’

  ‘Gordon!’ Judith said. ‘How devious you are, darling.’

  We all thought about it however, and Pen nodded. ‘He must have found another willing source, I should think.’

  ‘But,’ I protested, ‘would vets really do that?’

  ‘They’re not particularly brilliantly paid,’ Pen said. ‘Not badly by my standards, but they’re never rich.’

  ‘But Ian Pargetter was very much liked,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pen said. ‘Nothing to stop him passing on a few pills and advice to Calder in return for a fat untaxed fee.’

  ‘To their mutual benefit,’ Gordon murmured.

  ‘The healer’s feet of clay,’ Judith said. ‘What a shame.’

  The supposition seemed slightly to deflate the remembered pleasure of the morning, but the afternoon’s visit put the rest o f the day up high.

  We went this time to Oliver Knowles’ stud farm and found the whole place flooded with foals and mares and activity.

  ‘How beautiful,’ Judith said, looking away over the stretches of white railed paddocks with their colonies of mothers and babies. ‘How speechlessly great.’

  Oliver Knowles, introduced, was as welcoming as Calder and told Gordon several times that he would never, ever, be out of his debt of gratitude to Paul Ekaterin’s, however soon he had paid off his loan.

  The anxiety and misgivings to be seen in him on my February visit had all disappeared: Oliver was again, and more so, the capable and decisive executive I had met first. The foals had done well, I gathered. Not one from the mares coming to Sandcastle had been lost, and none of those mares had had any infection, a triumph of care. He told me all this within the first ten minutes, and also that Sandcastle had proved thoroughly potent and fertile and was a dream of a stallion. ‘He’s tireless,’ he said. ‘Forty mares will be easy.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ I said, and meant it from the bottom of my banking heart.

  With his dog Squibs at his heels he showed us all again through the succession of yards, where since it was approximately four o’clock the evening ritual of mucking out and feeding was in full swing.

  ‘A stud farm is not like a racing stable, of course,’ Oliver was explaining to Gordon. ‘One lad here can look after far more than three horses, because they don’t have to be ridden. And here we have a more flexible system because the mares are sometimes in, sometimes out in the paddocks, and it would be impossible t
o assign particular mares to particular lads. So here a lad does a particular section of boxes, regardless of which animals are in them.’

  Gordon nodded, genially interested.

  ‘Why are some foals in the boxes and some out in the paddocks?’ Judith asked, and Oliver without hesitation told her it was because the foals had to stay with their dams, and the mares with foals in the boxes were due to come into heat, or were already in heat, and would go from their boxes to visit the stallion. When their heat was over they would go out into the paddocks, with their foals.

  ‘Oh,’ Judith said, blinking slightly at this factory aspect. ‘Yes, I see.’

  In the foaling yard we came across Nigel and also Ginnie, who ran across to me when she saw me and gave me a great hug and a smacking kiss somewhere to the left of the mouth. Quite an advance in confidence, I thought, and hugged her back, lifting her off her feet and whirling her round in a circle. She was laughing when I put her down, and Oliver watched in some surprise.

  ‘I’ve never known her so demonstrative,’ he said.

  Ginnie looked at him apprehensively and held onto my sleeve. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked me worriedly.

  ‘I’m flattered,’ I said, meaning it and also thinking that her father would kill off her spontaneity altogether if he wasn’t careful.

  Ginnie, reassured, tucked her arm into mine and said ‘Come and look at the newest foal. It was born only about twenty minutes ago. It’s a colt. A darling.’ She tugged me off, and I caught a fleeting glance of Judith’s face which was showing a mixture of all sorts of unreadable thoughts.

  ‘Oliver’s daughter,’ I said in explanation over my shoulder, and heard Oliver belatedly introducing Nigel.

  They all came to look at the foal over the half-door; a glistening little creature half-lying, half-sitting on the thick straw, all long nose, huge eyes and folded legs, new life already making an effort to balance and stand up. The dam, on her feet, alternately bent her head to the foal and looked up at us warily.

  ‘It was an easy one,’ Ginnie said. ‘Nigel and I just watched.

  ‘Have you seen many foals born?’ Pen asked her.

  ‘Oh, hundreds. All my life. Most often at night.’

  Pen looked at her as if she, as I did, felt the imagination stirred by such an unusual childhood: as if she, like myself, had never seen one single birth of any sort, let alone a whole procession by the age of fifteen.

  ‘This mare has come to Sandcastle,’ Oliver said.

  ‘And will that foal win the Derby?’ Gordon asked, smiling.

  Oliver smiled in return. ‘You never know. He has the breeding.’ He breathed deeply, expanding his chest. ‘I’ve never been able to say anything like that before this year. No foal born or conceived here has in the past won a classic, but now…’ he gestured widely with his arm,‘… one day, from these…’ he paused. ‘It’s a whole new world. It’s… tremendous.’

  ‘As good as you hoped?’ I asked.

  ‘Better.’

  He had a soul after all, I thought, under all that tidy martial efficiency. A vision of the peaks, which he was reaching in reality. And how soon, I wondered, before the glossy became commonplace, the Classic winners a routine, the aristocrats the common herd. It would be what he’d aimed for; but in a way it would be blunting.

  We left the foal and went on down the path past the breeding shed, where the main door was today wide open, showing the floor thickly covered with soft brown crumbly peat. Beyond succinctly explaining what went on there when it was inhabited, Oliver made no comment, and we all walked on without stopping to the heart of the place, to the stallions.

  Lenny was there, walking one of the horses round the small yard and plodding with his head down as if he’d been doing it for some time. The horse was dripping with sweat, and from the position of the one open empty box I guessed he would be Rotaboy.

  ‘He’s just covered a mare,’ Oliver said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s always like that afterwards.’

  Judith and Gordon and Pen all looked as if the overt sex of the place was earthier than they’d expected, even without hearing, as I had at one moment, Oliver quietly discussing a vaginal disinfectant process with Nigel. They rallied valiantly however and gazed with proper awe at the head of Sandcastle which swam into view from the inside-box shadows.

  He held himself almost imperiously, as if his new role had basically changed his character; and perhaps it had. I had myself seen during my renewed interest in racing how constant success endowed some horses with definite ‘presence’, and Sandcastle, even lost and frightened up on top of the hill, had perceptibly had it; but now, only two months later, there was a new quality one might almost call arrogance, a fresh certainty of his own supremacy.

  ‘He’s splendid,’ Gordon exclaimed. ‘What a treat to see him again after that great day at Ascot.’

  Oliver gave Sandcastle the usual two carrots and a couple of pats, treating the King with familiarity. Neither Judith nor Pen, nor indeed Gordon or myself, tried even to touch the sensitive nose: afraid of getting our fingers bitten off at the wrist, no doubt. It was all right to admire, but distance had virtue.

  Lenny put the calming-down Rotaboy back in his box and started mucking out Diarist next door.

  ‘We have two lads looking after the stallions full time,’ Oliver said. ‘Lenny, here, and another much trusted man, Don. And Nigel feeds them.’

  Pen caught the underlying thought behind his words and asked, ‘Do you need much security?’

  ‘Some,’ he said, nodding. ‘We have the yard wired for sound, so either Nigel or I, when we’re in our houses, can hear if there are any irregular noises.’

  ‘Like hooves taking a walk?’ Judith suggested.

  ‘Exactly.’ He smiled at her. ‘We also have smoke alarms and massive extinguishers.’

  ‘And brick-built boxes and combination locks on these door bolts at night and lockable gates on all the ways out to the roads,’ Ginnie said, chattily. ‘Dad’s really gone to town on security.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Gordon said.

  I smiled to myself at the classic example of bolting the stable door after the horse had done likewise, but indeed one could see that Oliver had learned a dire lesson and knew he’d been lucky to be given a second chance.

  We began after a while to walk back towards the house, stopping again in the foaling yard to look at the new baby colt, who was now shakily on his feet and searching round for his supper.

  Oliver drew me to one side and asked if I would like to see Sandcastle cover a mare, an event apparently scheduled for a short time hence.

  ‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t ask them all – there isn’t room,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Ginnie to show them the mares and foals in the paddocks and then take them indoors for tea.’

  No one demurred at this suggested programme, especially as Oliver didn’t actually mention where he and I were going: Judith, I was sure, would have preferred to join us. Ginnie took them and Squibs off, and I could hear her saying ‘Over there, next door, there’s another yard. We could walk over that way if you like.’

  Oliver, eying them amble along the path that Sandcastle had taken at a headlong gallop and I at a sprint, said, ‘The Watcherleys look after any delicate foals or any mares with infections. It’s all worked out most satisfactorily. I rent their place and they work for me, and their expertise with sick animals comes in very useful.’

  ‘And you were mending their fences for them, I guess, when I came in February.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He sighed ruefully. ‘Another week and the gates would have been up in the hedge and across their driveway, and Sandcastle would never have got out.’

  ‘No harm done,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks to you, no.’

  We went slowly back towards the breeding shed. ‘Have you seen a stallion at work before?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  After a pause he said, ‘It may seem s
trong to you. Even violent. But it’s normal to them. Remember that. And he’ll probably bite her neck, but it’s as much to keep himself in position as an expression of passion.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘This mare, the one we’re breeding, is receptive, so there won’t be any trouble. Some mares are shy, some are slow to arouse, some are irritable, just like humans.’ He smiled faintly. ‘This little lady is a born one-nighter.’

  It was the first time I’d heard him make anything like a joke about his profession and I was almost startled. As if himself surprised at his own words he said more soberly, ‘We put her to Sandcastle yesterday morning, and all went well.’

  ‘The mares go more than once then, to the stallion?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘It depends of course on the stud farm, but I’m very anxious as you can guess that all the mares here shall have the best possible chance of conceiving. I bring them all at least twice to the stallion during their heat, then we put them out in the paddocks and wait, and if they come into heat again it means they haven’t conceived, so we repeat the breeding process.’

  ‘And how long do you go on trying?’

  ‘Until the end of July. That means the foal won’t be born until well on in June, which is late in the year for racehorses. Puts them at a disadvantage as two-year-olds, racing against March and April foals which have had more growing time.’ He smiled. ‘With any luck Sandcastle won’t have any late June foals. It’s too early to be complacent, but none of the mares he covered three weeks or more ago has come back into use.’

  We reached and entered the breeding shed where the mare already stood, held at the head in a loose twitch by one lad and being washed and attended to by another.

  ‘She can’t wait, sir,’ that lad said, indicating her tail, which she was holding high, and Oliver replied rather repressively, ‘Good.’

  Nigel and Lenny came with Sandcastle, who looked eagerly aware of where he was and what for. Nigel closed the door to keep the ritual private; and the mating which followed was swift and sure and utterly primaeval. A copulation of thrust and grandeur, of vigour and pleasure, not without tenderness: remarkably touching.