Decider

by Dick Francis

  I could see, as easily as she could, that it had never occurred to Dart that he had any responsibility for the state of the racecourse. It had never been his domain. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times but came up with no protest or defence.

  A frazzled looking Colonel drove up in a jeep and, springing out, assured Marjorie Binsham that he had already put in hand her requirement that spectators should be kept further away from the fences, to save them from injury henceforth.

  ‘It isn’t my job,’ she complained to Dart. ‘A few posts, and some rope, some instructions to stand back, that’s all it takes. You should have thought of it. The racecourse has had too much bad publicity. We cannot afford another debacle like last Saturday.’

  No one mentioned that it had been the horses, not the spectators, which had caused the grief.

  ‘Also,’ Marjorie continued, ‘you and your father must get rid of those people at the main gates. If you don’t, they will attract extremists from all over the place, and the race crowds will stay away because of the aggravation. The racecourse will be killed off as quickly as by any of the crackpot schemes of Keith and your father. And as for Rebecca! If you notice, there’s a woman just like her in that group at the gate. It’s only a group now. Make sure it doesn’t grow into a mob.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Marjorie,’ Dart said. The task was beyond him, perhaps beyond anybody.

  ‘Demonstrators don’t want to succeed,’ Marjorie pointed out. ‘They want to demonstrate. Go and tell them to demonstrate for better conditions for stable lads. The horses are pampered enough. The lads are not.’

  No one remarked that injured stable lads usually lived.

  ‘You, Mr Morris,’ she fixed me with a sharp gaze. ‘I want to talk to you.’ She pointed to her car. ‘In there.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And you children, clear this mess up at once. Colonel, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. This place is a tip.’

  She headed off vigorously towards her car and didn’t look round to make sure I followed, which I did.

  ‘Mark,’ she told her chauffeur, who was sitting behind the steering wheel. ‘Please take a walk.’

  He touched his chauffeur’s cap to her and obeyed her as if accustomed to the request, and his employer waited beside one of the rear doors until I opened it for her.

  ‘Good,’ she said, climbing into the spacious rear seat. ‘Get in beside me and sit down.’

  I sat where she pointed and closed the door.

  ‘Stratton Hays,’ she said, coming at once to the point, ‘was where your mother lived with Keith.’

  ‘Yes,’ I acknowledged, surprised.

  ‘Did you ask to see it?’

  ‘Dart offered, very kindly. I accepted.’

  She paused, inspecting me.

  ‘I never saw Madeline again, after she left,’ she said at length, ‘I disapproved of her leaving. Did she tell you?’

  ‘Yes, she told me, but after so many years she bore you no animosity. She said you had urged your brother to close family ranks against her, but she was fond of your brother.’

  ‘It was a long time,’ she said, ‘before I found out what sort of a man Keith is. His second wife killed herself, did you know? When I said to my brother that Keith was an unlucky picker, he told me it wasn’t bad luck, it was Keith’s own nature. He told me your mother couldn’t love or nurse the baby Hannah because of the way the child had been conceived. Your mother told my brother that touching the baby made her feel sick.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me that.’

  Marjorie said, ‘I am now offering you a formal apology for the way I behaved to your mother.’

  I paused only briefly to check what my parent would have wanted. ‘It’s accepted,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I thought that that must conclude the conversation, but it seemed not.

  ‘Keith’s third wife left him and divorced him for irretrievable breakdown of marriage. He now has a fourth wife, Imogen, who spends half of the time drunk.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she leave him too?’ I asked.

  ‘She won’t or can’t admit she made a mistake.’

  It was close enough to my own feelings to strike me dumb.

  ‘Keith,’ his aunt said, ‘is the only Stratton short of money. Imogen told me. She can’t keep her mouth shut after six glasses of vodka. Keith is in debt. That’s why he’s pushing to sell the racecourse. He needs the money.’

  I looked at the appearance Marjorie presented to the world: the little old lady well into her eighties with wavy white hair, soft pink and white skin and hawk-like dark eyes. The pithy, forceful mind, and the sinewy vocabulary were, I imagined, the nearest in quality in the Stratton family to the financial genius who had founded them.

  ‘I was furious with my brother for giving Madeline those shares,’ she said. ‘He could be obstinate sometimes. Now, all these years later, I’m glad that he did. I am glad,’ she finished slowly, ‘that someone outside the family can bring some sense of proportion into the Stratton hothouse.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can.’

  ‘The point,’ she said, ‘is whether you want to. Or rather, how much you want to. If you hadn’t been in the least bit interested, you wouldn’t have turned up here today.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You could oblige me,’ she said, ‘by finding out how much money Keith owes, and to whom. And by finding out what relationship Conrad has with the architect he’s committed to, who Colonel Gardner tells me knows nothing about racing and is designing a monstrosity. The Colonel tells me we need an architect more like the one who built your own house, but that your architect only designs on a small scale.’

  ‘The Colonel told you he’d visited me?’

  ‘Most sensible thing he’s done this year.’

  ‘You amaze me.’

  ‘I want you as an ally,’ she said. ‘Help me make the racecourse prosper.’

  I tried to sort out my own jumbled responses, and it was out of the jumble and not from thought through reasons that I gave her my answer.

  ‘All right, I’ll try.’

  She held out a small hand to formalise the agreement, and I shook on it, a binding commitment.

  Marjorie was driven away without returning to the gutted garage, which was just as well as I found the mess unchanged and the boys, the Gardners and Dart all in the Gardners’ kitchen with their attention on cake. Warm fragrant palecoloured fruit cake, that minute baked. Christopher asked for the recipe ‘so that Dad can make it in the bus’.

  ‘Dad can cook?’ Dart asked ironically.

  ‘Dad can do anything,’ Neil said, munching.

  Dad, I thought to myself, had probably just impulsively set himself on a high road to failure.

  ‘Colonel –’ I started.

  He interrupted. ‘Call me Roger.’

  ‘Roger,’ I said, ‘can I?… I mean, may the architect of my house come here tomorrow and make a thorough survey of the grandstands as they are at present? I’m sure you have professional advisers about the state of the fabric and so on, but could we take a fresh detached survey with a view to seeing whether new stands are or are not essential for a profitable future?’

  Dart’s cake came to a standstill in mid-chew and Roger Gardner’s face lost some of its habitual gloom.

  ‘Delighted,’ he said, ‘but not tomorrow. I’ve got the course-builders coming, and the full complement of groundsmen will be here getting everything in shape for next Monday’s meeting.’

  ‘Friday, then?’

  He said doubtfully, ‘That’ll be Good Friday. Easter, of course. Perhaps your man won’t want to work on Good Friday.’

  ‘He’ll do what I tell him,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

  Both Dart and Roger were surprised.

  ‘I am,’ I said gently, ‘a qualified architect. I did five arduous years at the Architectural Association, one of the most thorough schools in the world. I do choose houses in preference to high ri
ses, but that’s because horizontal lines that fit in with nature please me better. I’m a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, not a Le Corbusier, if that means anything to you.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ Dart said. ‘Who hasn’t?’

  ‘Frank Lloyd Wright,’ I said, ‘developed the cantilever roof you see on all new grandstands everywhere.’

  ‘We don’t have a cantilever,’ Roger said thoughtfully.

  ‘No, but let’s see what you do have, and what you can get away with not having.’

  Dart’s view of me had changed a little. ‘You said you were a builder,’ he accused.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  Dart looked at the children. ‘What does your father do?’ he asked.

  ‘Builds houses.’

  ‘With his own hands, do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ Edward amplified, ‘with spades and trowels and a saw and everything.’

  ‘Ruins,’ Christopher explained. ‘We’re on a ruin hunt for our Easter holidays.’

  Together they described the pattern of their lives to an ever more astonished audience. Their matter-of-fact acceptance of not every child’s experience seemed especially to amaze.

  ‘But we’re going to keep the last one he did. Aren’t we, Dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise.’

  I promised for roughly the twentieth time, which was an indication of the depth of their anxiety, as I’d always kept the promises I’d made them.

  ‘You must all be so tired of moving on,’ Mrs Gardner said sympathetically.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Christopher told her, ‘it’s the house. It’s brilliant.’ Brilliant in his teenage vocabulary meant only the opposite of awful (pronounced off-al, ironically).

  Roger nodded and agreed, however. ‘Brilliant. Hell to heat, I should think, though, with all that space.’

  ‘It has a hypocaust,’ Neil said, licking his fingers.

  The Gardners and Dart gazed at him.

  ‘What,’ Dart asked, giving in, ‘is a hypocaust?’

  ‘Central heating invented by the Romans,’ said my seven-year-old composedly. ‘You make hollow spaces and runways under a stone floor and drive hot air through, and the floor stays warm all the time. Dad thought it would work and it does. We ran about without shoes all winter.’

  Roger turned his head my way.

  ‘Come on Friday, then,’ he said.

  When I drove the bus back to the same spot on a sunny morning two days later, the ground outside the garage was cluttered not with the debris of decades but with horses.

  My sons gazed out of their safe windows at a moving clutch of about six large quadrupeds and decided not to climb down among the hooves, even though every animal was controlled by a rider.

  The horses, to my eyes, weren’t fine-boned enough to be racehorses, nor were the riders as light as the average stable lad, and when I swung down from the cab Roger came hurrying across from his house, side stepping round massive hindquarters, to tell me these were Conrad’s working hunters out for their morning exercise. They were supposed to be out on the road, Roger said, but they’d been practically attacked by the six or seven woollen hats still stubbornly picketing the main gates.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ I asked, looking around.

  ‘The horses? Conrad keeps them here on the racecourse in a yard down near the back entrance, where you came in.’

  I nodded. I’d seen the back of what could well have been the stables.

  ‘They’re trotting up and down the inner road instead,’ Roger said. ‘It’s not ideal, but I won’t let them out on the course, where they sometimes go, because everything is ready for Monday’s meeting. Wouldn’t your boys like to get out and see them?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Since the slaughter at the open ditch last Saturday they are a bit afraid of them. They were very shocked, you know, by that dead spectator’s injuries.’

  ‘I’d forgotten they’d seen him, poor man. Will they just stay in the bus, then, while you and I go over the stands? I’ve spread out some of the original drawings in my office. We’ll look at those first, if you like.’

  I suggested driving bus and boys as near to the office as possible, which resulted in our parking where the Stratton family’s cars had been gathered two days earlier. The boys, relieved by the arrangement, asked if they could play a hide-and-seek game in the stands, if they promised not to do any damage.

  Roger gave assent doubtfully. ‘You’ll find many of the doors are locked,’ he told them. ‘And the whole place was cleaned yesterday, ready for Monday, so don’t make any mess.’

  They promised not to. Roger and I left them beginning to draw up rules for their game and made our way to a low white-painted wooden building on the far side of the parade ring.

  ‘Is it pirates again?’ Roger asked, amused.

  ‘I think it’s storming the Bastille this time. That’s to say, rescuing a prisoner without being captured yourself. Then the rescued prisoner has to hide and not be recaptured.’

  I looked back as Roger unlocked his office door. The boys waved. I waved back and went in, and began to sort my way through ancient building plans that had been rolled up so long that straightening them out was like six bouts with an octopus.

  I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, so as to come to grips with things more easily, and Roger made a comment about the warmth of the spring day and hoped the sunshine would last until Monday.

  Most of the plans were in fact working drawings, which gave detailed specifications for every nut and bolt. They were thorough, complete and impressive, and I commented on it.

  ‘The only problem is,’ Roger said, with a twisting smile, ‘that the builder didn’t stick to the specs. Concrete that should be six inches thick with the reinforcing bars well covered has recently proved to be barely four and a half inches and we’re having endless trouble with the private balcony boxes with water getting in through cracks and rusting the bars, which then of course expand because of the rust and crack the concrete more. Crumble the concrete, in some places.’

  ‘Spalling,’ I nodded. ‘Can be dangerous.’

  ‘And,’ Roger went on, ‘if you look at the overall design of the water inlets and outlets and sewer lines, the drawings make very good sense, but the water and drain pipes don’t actually go where they should. We had one set of ladies’ lavatories backing up for no reason we could think of and flooding the floor, but the drain seemed clear, and then we found we were checking the wrong drain, and the one from the lavatories went in an entirely different direction and was blocked solid.’

  It was familiar territory. Builders had minds of their own and often ignored the architect’s best instructions, either because they truly thought they knew better or because they could make a fatter profit by shaving the quality.

  We uncurled a dozen more sheets and tried to hold them flat with pots of pens for paperweights, a losing battle. I acquired, all the same, an understanding of what should have been built, with some picture of stress points and weaknesses to look for. I’d studied ancient plans a great deal less trustworthy than these, and these grandstands weren’t ruins after all: they’d withstood gales and rot for well over half a century.

  Basically, the front of the stands, the viewing steps themselves, were of reinforced concrete supported by steel girders, which also held up the roof. Backing the concrete and steel, solid brick pillars formed the weight-bearers for the bars, dining rooms and private rooms for the owners and stewards. Centrally there was a stairway stretching upwards through five storeys giving access outwards and inwards throughout. A simple effective design, even if now out of date.

  The door of the office was suddenly flung open, and Neil catapulted himself inside.

  ‘Dad,’ he said insistently, ‘Dad…’

  ‘I’m busy, Neil.’

  ‘But it’s urgent. Really really urgent.’

  I let a set of drawings recurl by accident. ‘How urgent?’ I aske
d, trying to open them again.

  ‘I found some white wires, Dad, going in and out of some walls.’

  ‘What wires?’

  ‘You know when they blew up the chimney?’

  I left the plans to their own devices and paid full attention to my observant son. My heart jumped a beat. I did indeed remember the blowing up of the chimney.

  ‘Where are the wires?’ I asked, trying for calmness.

  Neil said, ‘Near that bar with the smelly floor.’

  ‘What on earth is he talking about?’ Roger demanded.

  ‘Where are your brothers?’ I said briefly.

  ‘In the stands. Hiding. I don’t know where.’ Neil’s eyes were wide. ‘Don’t let them be blown up, Dad.’

  ‘No.’ I turned to Roger. ‘Can you switch on a public address system that can be heard everywhere in the stands?’

  ‘What on earth –’

  ‘Can you?’ I felt my own panic rising: fought it down.

  ‘But –’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I half yelled at him, quite unfairly. ‘Neil’s saying he’s seen det cord and demolition charges in the stands.’

  Roger’s own face went taut. ‘Are you serious?

  ‘Same as the factory chimney?’ I asked Neil, checking.

  ‘Yes, Dad. Exactly the same. Do come on.’

  ‘Public address system,’ I said with dreadful urgency to Roger. ‘I have to get those children out of there at once.’

  He gave me a dazed look but at last went into action, hurrying out of his office and half running across the parade ring towards the weighing room, sorting through his bunch of keys as he went. We came to a halt beside the door into Oliver Wells’ office, the lair of the Clerk of the Course.

  ‘We tested the system yesterday,’ Roger said, fumbling slightly. ‘Are you sure? This child’s so young. I’m sure he’s mistaken.’

  ‘Don’t risk it,’ I said, practically ready to shake him.

  He got the door open finally and went across to unlatch a metal panel which revealed banks of switches.

  ‘This one,’ he said, pressing down with a click. ‘You can speak direct from here. Let me plug in the microphone.’