Banker

The Third Year

APRIL

Alec had bought a bunch of yellow tulips when he went out for What’s Going On, and they stood on his desk in a beer mug, catching a shaft of spring sunshine and standing straight like guardsmen.
Gordon was making notes in a handwriting growing even smaller, and the two older colleagues were counting the weeks to their retirement. Office life: an ordinary day.
My telephone rang, and with eyes still bent on a letter from a tomato grower asking for more time to repay his original loan because of needing a new greenhouse (half an acre) right this minute, I slowly picked up the receiver.
‘Oliver Knowles,’ the voice said. ‘Is that you, Tim?’
‘Hello,’ I replied warmly. ‘Everything going well?’
‘No.’ The word was sickeningly abrupt, and both mentally and physically I sat up straighter.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Can you come down here?’ he asked, not directly answering. ‘I’m rather worried. I want to talk to you.’
‘Well… I could come on Sunday,’ I said.
‘Could you come today? Or tomorrow?’
I reviewed my work load and a few appointments. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, if you like,’ I said. ‘If it’s bank business.’
‘Yes, it is.’ The anxiety in his voice was quite plain, and communicated itself with much ease to me.
‘Can’t you tell me what’s the trouble?’ I asked. ‘Is Sandcastle all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when you come.’
‘But Oliver…’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Sandcastle is in good health and he hasn’t escaped again or anything like that. It’s too difficult to explain on the telephone. I want your advice, that’s all.’
He wouldn’t say any more and left me with the dead receiver in my hand and some horrid suspenseful question marks in my mind.
‘Sandcastle?’ Gordon asked.
‘Oliver says he’s in good health.’
‘That horse is insured against everything – those enormous premiums – so don’t worry too much,’ Gordon said. ‘It’s probably something minor.’
It hadn’t sounded like anything minor, and when I reached the stud farm the next day I found that it certainly wasn’t. Oliver came out to meet me as I braked to a standstill by his front door, and there were new deep lines on his face that hadn’t been there before.
‘Come in,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘I’m seriously worried. I don’t know what to do.’
He led the way through the house to the office-sitting room and gestured me to a chair. ‘Sit down and read this,’ he said, and gave me a letter.
There had been no time for ‘nice day’ or ‘how is Ginnie?’ introductory noises, just this stark command. I sat down, and I read, as directed.
The letter dated April 21st, said:
Dear Oliver,
I’m not complaining, because of course one pays one’s fee and takes one’s chances, but I’m sorry to tell you that the Sandcastle foal out of my mare Spiral Binding has been born with a half of one ear missing. It’s a filly, by the way, and I dare say it won’t affect her speed, but her looks are ruined.
So sad.
I expect I’ll see you one day at the sales.
Yours,
Jane.
‘Is that very bad?’ I asked, frowning.
In reply he wordlessly handed me another letter. This one said:
Dear Mr Knowles,
You asked me to let you know how my mare Girandette, whom you liked so much, fared on foaling. She gave birth safely to a nice colt foal, but unfortunately he died at six days. We had a post mortem, and it was found that he had malformed heart-valves, like hole-in-heart-babies.
This is a great blow to me, financially as well as all else, but that’s life I suppose.
Yours sincerely,
George Page.
‘And now this,’ Oliver said, and handed me a third.
The heading was that of a highly regarded and well-known stud farm, the letter briefly impersonal.
Dear Sir,
Filly foal born March 31st to Poppingcorn.
Sire: Sandcastle.
Deformed foot, near fore.
Put down.
I gave him back the letters and with growing misgiving asked, ‘How common are these malformations?’
Oliver said intensely, ‘They happen. They happen occasionally. But those letters aren’t all. I’ve had two telephone calls – one last night. Two other foals have died of holes in the heart. Two more! That’s five with something wrong with them.’ He stared at me, his eyes like dark pits. ‘That’s far too many.’ He swallowed. ‘And what about the others, the other thirty-five? Suppose… suppose there are more…’
‘If you haven’t heard, they’re surely all right.’
He shook his head hopelessly. ‘The mares are scattered all over the place, dropping Sandcastle’s foals where they are due to be bred next. There’s no automatic reason for those stud managers to tell me when a foal’s born, or what it’s like. I mean, some do it out of courtesy but they just don’t usually bother, and nor do I. I tell the owner of the mare, not the manager of the stallion.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘So there may be other foals with deformities… that I haven’t heard about.’
There was a long fraught pause in which the enormity of the position sank coldly into my banking consciousness. Oliver developed sweat on his forehead and a tic beside his mouth, as if sharing his anxiety had doubled it rather than halved.
The telephone rang suddenly, making us both jump.
‘You answer it,’ he said. ‘Please.’
I opened my mouth to protest that it would be only some routine call about anything else on earth, but then merely picked up the receiver.
‘Is that Oliver Knowles?’ a voice said.
‘No… I’m his assistant.’
‘Oh. Then will you give him a message?’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Tell him that Patrick O’Marr rang him from Limballow, Ireland. Have you got that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go ahead.’
‘It’s about a foal we had born here three or four weeks ago. I thought I’d better let Mr Knowles know that we’ve had to put it down, though I’m sorry to give him bad news. Are you listening?’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling hollow.
‘The poor little fellow was born with a sort of curled-in hoof. The vet said it might straighten out in a week or two, but it didn’t, so we had it X-rayed, and the lower pastern bone and the coffin bone were fused and tiny. The vet said there was no chance of them developing properly, and the little colt would never be able to walk, let alone race. A beautiful little fella too, in all other ways. Anyway, I’m telling Mr Knowles because of course he’ll be looking out for Sandcastle’s first crop to win for him, and I’m explaining why this one won’t be there. Pink Roses, that’s the mare’s name. Tell him, will you? Pink Roses. She’s come here to be bred to Dallaton. Nice mare. She’s fine herself, tell Mr Knowles.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘One of those things.’ The cultured Irish accent sounded not too despairing. ‘The owner of Pink Roses is cut up about it, of course, but I believe he’d insured against a dead or deformed foal, so it’s a case of wait another year and better luck next time.’
‘I’ll tell Mr Knowles,’ I said. ‘And thank you for letting us know.’
‘Sorry and all,’ he said. ‘But there it is.’
I put the receiver down slowly and Oliver said dully, ‘Another one? Not another one.’
I nodded and told him what Patrick O’Marr had said.
‘That’s six,’ Oliver said starkly. ‘And Pink Roses… that’s the mare you saw Sandcastle cover, this time last year.’
‘Was it?’ I thought back to that majestic mating, that moment of such promise. Poor little colt, conceived in splendour and born with a club foot.
‘What am I going to do?’ Oliver said.
‘Get out Sandcastle’s insurance policy.’
He looked blank. ‘No, I mean, about the mares. We have all the mares here who’ve come this year to Sandcastle. They’ve all foaled except one and nearly all of them have already been covered. I mean… there’s another crop already growing, and suppose those… suppose all of those…’ He stopped as if he simply couldn’t make his tongue say the words. ‘I was awake all night,’ he said.
‘The first thing,’ I said again, ‘is to look at that policy.’
He went unerringly to a neat row of files in a cupboard and pulled out the needed document, a many-paged affair, partly printed, partly typed. I spread it open and said to Oliver, ‘How about some coffee? This is going to take ages.’
‘Oh. All right.’ He looked around him vaguely. ‘There’ll be some put ready for me for dinner. I’ll go and plug it in.’ He paused. ‘Percolator,’ he explained.
I knew all the symptoms of a mouth saying one thing while the mind was locked on to another. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be fine.’ He nodded with the same unmeshed mental gears, and I guessed that when he got to the kitchen he’d have trouble remembering what for.
The insurance policy had been written for the trade and not the customer, a matter of jargon-ridden sentences full of words that made plain sense only to people who used them for a living. I read it very carefully for that reason; slowly and thoroughly from start to finish.
There were many definitions of the word ‘accident’, with stipulations about the number of veterinary surgeons who should be consulted and should give their signed opinions before Sandcastle (hereinafter called the horse) could be humanely destroyed for any reason whatsoever. There were stipulations about fractures, naming those bones which should commonly be held to be repairable, and about common muscle, nerve and tendon troubles which would not be considered grounds for destruction, unless of such severity that the horse couldn’t actually stand up.
Aside from these restrictions the horse was to be considered to be insured against death from any natural causes whatsoever, to be insured against accidental death occurring while the horse was free (such a contingency to be guarded against with diligence, gross negligence being a disqualifying condition) to be insured against death by fire should the stable be consumed, and against death caused maliciously by human hand. He was insured fully against malicious or accidental castration and against such accidental damage being caused by veterinarians acting in good faith to treat the horse. He was insured against infertility on a sliding scale, his full worth being in question only if he proved one hundred per cent infertile (which laboratory tests had shown was not the case).
He was insured against accidental or malicious poisoning and against impotence resulting from non-fatal illness, and against incapacitating or fatal injuries inflicted upon him by any other horse.
He was insured against death caused by the weather (storm, flood, lightning, etc.) and also, surprisingly, against death or incapacity caused by war, riot or civil commotion, causes usually specifically excluded from insurance.
He was insured against objects dropped from the sky and against being driven into by mechanical objects on the ground and against trees falling on him and against hidden wells opening under his feet.
He was insured against every foreseeable disaster except one. He was not insured against being put out of business because of congenital abnormalities among his progeny.
Oliver came back carrying a tray on which sat two kitchen mugs containing tea, not coffee. He put the tray on the desk and looked at my face, which seemed only very slightly to deepen his despair.
‘I’m not insured, am I,’ he said, ‘against possessing a healthy potent stallion to whom no one will send their mares.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes… I see you do.’ He was shaking slightly. ‘When the policy was drawn up about six people, including myself and two vets, besides the insurers themselves, tried to think of every possible contingency, and to guard against it. We threw in everything we could think of.’ He swallowed. ‘No one… no one thought of a whole crop of deformed foals.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I mean, breeders usually insure their own mares, if they want to, and the foal, to protect the stallion fee, but many don’t because of the premiums being high. And I… I’m paying this enormous premium… and the one thing… the one thing that happens is something we never… no one ever imagined… could happen.’
The policy, I thought, had been too specific. They should have been content with something like ‘any factor resulting in the horse not being considered fit for stud purposes’; but perhaps the insurers themselves couldn’t find underwriters for anything so open to interpretation and opinion. In any case, the damage was done. All-risk policies all too often were not what they said; and insurance companies never paid out if they could avoid it.
My own skin felt clammy. Three million pounds of the bank’s money and two million subscribed by private people were tied up in the horse, and if Oliver couldn’t repay, it was we who would lose.
I had recommended the loan. Henry had wanted the adventure and Val and Gordon had been willing, but it was my own report which had carried the day. I couldn’t have foreseen the consequences any more than Oliver, but I felt most horribly and personally responsible for the mess.
‘What shall I do?’ he said again.
‘About the mares?’
‘And everything else.’
I stared into space. The disaster that for the bank would mean a loss of face and a sharp dip in the profits and to the private subscribers just a painful financial set-back meant in effect total ruin for Oliver Knowles.
If Sandcastle couldn’t generate income, Oliver would be bankrupt. His business was not a limited company, which meant that he would lose his farm, his horses, his house; everything he possessed. To him too, as to my mother, the bailiffs would come, carrying off his furniture and his treasures and Ginnie’s books and toys….
I shook myself mentally and physically and said, ‘The first thing to do is nothing. Keep quiet and don’t tell anyone what you’ve told me. Wait to hear if any more of the foals are… wrong. I will consult with the other directors at Ekaterin’s and see what can be done in the way of providing time. I mean… I’m not promising… but we might consider suspending repayments while we look into other possibilities.’
He looked bewildered. ‘What possibilities?’
‘Well… of having Sandcastle tested. If the original tests of his fertility weren’t thorough enough, for instance, it might be possible to show that his sperm had always been defective in some way, and then the insurance policy would protect you. Or at least it’s a very good chance.’
The insurers, I thought, might in that case sue the laboratory that had originally given the fertility all-clear, but that wasn’t Oliver’s problem, nor mine. What did matter was that all of a sudden he looked a fraction more cheerful, and drank his tea absentmindedly.
‘And the mares?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘In fairness to their owners you’ll have to say that Sandcastle’s off colour.’
‘And repay their fees,’ he said gloomily.
‘Mm.’
‘He’ll have covered two today,’ he said. ‘I haven’t mentioned any of this to Nigel. I mean, it’s his job to organise the breeding sessions. He has a great eye for those mares, he knows when they are feeling receptive. I leave it to his judgement a good deal, and he told me this morning that two were ready for Sandcastle. I just nodded. I felt sick. I didn’t tell him.’
‘So how many does that leave, er, uncovered?’
He consulted a list, fumbling slightly. ‘The one that hasn’t foaled, and… four others.’
Thirty-five more mares, I thought numbly, could be carrying that seed.
‘The mare that hasn’t yet foaled,’ Oliver said flatly, ‘Was bred to Sandcastle last year.’
I stared. ‘You mean… one of his foals will be born here}’
‘Yes.’ He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Any day.’
There were footsteps outside the door and Ginnie came in, saying on a rising, enquiring inflection, ‘Dad?’
She saw me immediately and her face lit up. ‘Hello! How lovely. I didn’t know you were coming.’
I stood up to give her a customarily enthusiastic greeting, but she sensed at once that the action didn’t match the climate. ‘What’s the matter?’ She looked into my eyes and then at her father. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Dad, you’re lying.’ She turned again to me. ‘Tell me. I can see something bad has happened. I’m not a child any more. I’m seventeen.’
‘I thought you’d be at school,’ I said.
‘I’ve left. At the end of last term. There wasn’t any point in me going back for the summer when all I’m interested in is here.’
She looked far more assured, as if the schooldays had been a crysallis and she were now the imago, flying free. The beauty she had longed for hadn’t quite arrived, but her face was full of character and far from plain, and she would be very much liked, I thought, throughout her life.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
Oliver made a small gesture of despair and capitulation. ‘You’ll have to know sometime.’ He swallowed. ‘Some of Sandcastle’s foals… aren’t perfect.’
‘How do you mean, not perfect?’
He told her about all six and showed her the letters, and she went slowly, swaying, pale. ‘Oh Dad, no. No. It can’t be. Not Sandcastle. Not that beautiful boy.’
‘Sit down,’ I said, but she turned to me instead, burying her face against my chest and holding on to me tightly. I put my arms round her and kissed her hair and comforted her for an age as best I could.
I went to the office on the following morning, Friday, and with a slight gritting of teeth told Gordon the outcome of my visit to Oliver.
He said ‘My God,’ several times, and Alec came over from his desk to listen also, his blue eyes for once solemn behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, the blond eyelashes blinking slowly and the laughing mouth grimly shut.
‘What will you do?’ he said finally, when I stopped.
‘I don’t really know.’
Gordon stirred, his hands trembling unnoticed on his blotter in his overriding concern. ‘The first thing, I suppose,’ he said, ‘is to tell Val and Henry. Though what any of us can do is a puzzle. As you said, Tim, we’ll have to wait to assess quite how irretrievable the situation is, but I can’t imagine anyone with a top-class broodmare having the confidence to send her to Sandcastle in future. Can you, really, Tim? Would you?
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Well, there you are,’ Gordon said. ‘No one would.’
Henry and Val received the news with undisguised dismay and told the rest of the directors at lunch. The man who had been against the project from the beginning reacted with genuine anger and gave me a furious dressing-down over the grilled sole.
‘No one could foresee this,’ Henry protested, defending me.
‘Anyone could foresee,’ said the dissenting director caustically, ‘that such a scatterbrained scheme would blow up in our faces. Tim has been given too much power too soon, and it’s his judgement that’s at fault here, his alone. If he’d had the common nous to recognise the dangers, you would have listened to him and turned the proposal down. It’s certainly because of his stupidity and immaturity that the bank is facing this loss, and I shall put my views on record at the next board meeting.’
There were a few uncomfortable murmurs round the table, and Henry with unruffled geniality said, ‘We are all to blame, if blame there is, and it is unfair to call Tim stupid for not forseeing something that escaped the imaginations of all the various experts who drew up the insurance policy.’
The dissenter however repeated his ‘I told you so’ remarks endlessly through the cheese and coffee, and I sat there de-pressedly enduring his digs because I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me leave before he did.
‘What will you do next?’ Henry asked me, when at long last everyone rather silently stood up to drift back to their desks. ‘What do you propose?’
I was grateful that by implication he was leaving me in the position I’d reached and not taking the decisions out of my hands. ‘I’m going down to the farm tomorrow,’ I said, ‘to go through the financial situation. Add up the figures. They’re bound to be frightful.’
He nodded with regret. ‘Such a marvellous horse. And no one, Tim, whatever anyone says, could have dreamt he’d have such a flaw.’
I sighed. ‘Oliver has asked me to stay tomorrow night and Sunday night. I don’t really want to, but they do need support.’
‘They?’
‘Ginnie, his daughter, is with him. She’s only just seventeen. It’s very hard on them both. Shattering, in fact.’
Henry patted my arm and walked with me to the lift. ‘Do what you can,’ he said. ‘Let us know the full state of affairs on Monday.’
Before I left home that Saturday morning I had a telephone call from Judith.
‘Gordon’s told me about Sandcastle. Tim, it’s so terrible. Those poor, poor people.’
‘Wretched,’ I said.
‘Tim, tell Ginnie how sorry I am. Sorry… how hopeless words are, you say sorry if you bump someone in the supermarket. That dear child… she wrote to me a couple of times from school, just asking for feminine information, like I’d told her to.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes. She’s such a nice girl. So sensible. But this… this is too much. Gordon says they’re in danger of losing everything.’
‘I’m going down there today to see where he stands.’
‘Gordon told me. Do please give them my love.’
‘I will.’ I paused fractionally. ‘My love to you, too.’
‘Tim…’
‘I just wanted to tell you. It’s still the same.’
‘We haven’t seen you for weeks. I mean… I haven’t.’
‘Is Gordon in the room with you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
I smiled twistedly. ‘I do hear about you, you know,’ I said. ‘He mentions you quite often, and I ask after you… it makes you feel closer.’
‘Yes,’ she said in a perfectly neutral voice. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I feel the same about it exactly.’
‘Judith…’ I took a breath and made my own voice calm to match hers. ‘Tell Gordon I’ll telephone him at home, if he’d like, if there is anything that needs consultation before Monday.’
‘I’ll tell him. Hang on.’ I heard her repeating the question and Gordon’s distant rumble of an answer, and then she said, ‘Yes, he says please do, we’ll be at home this evening and most of tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps you’ll answer when the telephone rings.’
‘Perhaps.’
After a brief silence I said, ‘I’d better go.’
‘Goodbye then, Tim,’ she said. ‘And do let us know. We’ll both be thinking of you all day, I know we will.’
‘I’ll call,’ I said. ‘You can count on it.’
The afternoon was on the whole as miserable as I’d expected and in some respects worse. Oliver and Ginnie walked about like pale automatons making disconnected remarks and forgetting where they’d put things, and lunch, Ginnie version, had consisted of eggs boiled too hard and packets of potato crisps.
‘We haven’t told Nigel or the lads what’s happening,’ Oliver said. ‘Fortunately there is a lull in Sandcastle’s programme. He’s been very busy because nearly all his mares foaled in mid-March, close together, except for four and the one who’s still carrying.’ He swallowed. ‘And the other stallions, of course, their mares are all here too, and we have their foals to deliver and their matings to be seen to. I mean… we have to go on. We have to.’
Towards four o’clock they both went out into the yards for evening stables, visibly squaring their shoulders to face the stable hands in a normal manner, and I began adding the columns of figures I’d drawn up from Oliver’s records.
The tally when I’d finished was appalling and meant that Oliver could be an undischarged bankrupt for the rest of his life. I put the results away in my briefcase and tried to think of something more constructive; and Oliver’s telephone rang.
‘Oliver?’ a voice said, sounding vaguely familiar.
‘He’s out,’ I said. ‘Can I take a message?’
‘Get him to ring me. Ursula Young. I’ll give you the number.’
‘Ursula!’ I said in surprise. ‘This is Tim Ekaterin.’
‘Really?’ For her it was equally unexpected. ‘What are you doing there?’
‘Just staying the weekend. Can I help?’
She hesitated slightly but then said, ‘Yes, I suppose you can. I’m afraid it’s bad news for him, though. Disappointing, you might say.’ She paused. ‘I’ve a friend who has a small stud farm, just one stallion, but quite a good one, and she’s been so excited this year because one of the mares booked to him was in foal to Sandcastle. She was thrilled, you see, to be having a foal of that calibre born on her place.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, she rang me this morning, and she was crying.’ Ursula herself gulped: she might appear tough but other people’s tears always moved her. ‘She said the mare had dropped the Sandcastle foal during the night and she hadn’t been there. She said the mare gave no sign yesterday evening, and the birth must have been quick and easy, and the mare was all right, but…’
‘But what?’ I said, scarcely breathing.
‘She said the foal – a filly – was on her feet and suckling when she went to the mare’s box this morning, and at first she was overjoyed, but then… but then…’
‘Go on,’ I said hopelessly.
‘Then she saw. She says it’s dreadful.’
‘Ursula…’
‘The foal has only one eye.’
Oh my God, I thought: dear God.
‘She says there’s nothing on the other side,’ Ursula said, ‘No proper socket.’ She gulped again. ‘Will you tell Oliver? I thought he’d better know. He’ll be most disappointed. I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘These things happen, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But it’s so upsetting when they happen to your friends.’
‘You’re very right.’
‘Goodbye then, Tim. See you soon, I hope, at the races.’
I put down the receiver and wondered how I would ever tell them, and in fact I didn’t tell Ginnie, only Oliver, who sat with his head in his hands, despair in every line of his body.
‘It’s hopeless,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ I said encouragingly, though I wasn’t as certain as I sounded. ‘There are still the tests to be done on Sandcastle.’
He merely slumped lower. ‘I’ll get them done, but they won’t help. The genes which are wrong will be minute. No one will see them, however powerful the microscope.’
‘You can’t tell. If they can see DNA, why not a horse’s chromosomes?’
He raised his head slowly. ‘Even then… it’s such a long shot.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I think I’ll ask the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket to have him there, to see what they can find. I’ll ring them on Monday.’
‘I suppose,’ I said tentatively, ‘Well, I know it sounds silly, but I suppose it couldn’t be anything as simple as something he’d eaten? Last year, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘I thought of that. I’ve thought of bloody well everything, believe me. All the stallions had the same food, and none of the others’ foals are affected… or at least we haven’t heard of any. Nigel feeds the stallions himself out of the feed room in that yard, and we’re always careful what we give them because of keeping them fit.’
‘Carrots?’ I said.
‘I give carrots to every horse on the place. Everyone here does. Carrots are good food. I buy them by the hundredweight and keep them in the first big yard where the main feed room is. I put handfuls in my pockets every day. You’ve seen me. Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet all had them. It can’t possibly be anything to do with carrots.’
‘Paint: something like that? Something new in the boxes, when you put in all the security? Something he could chew?’
He again shook his head. ‘I’ve been over it and over it. We did all the boxes exactly the same as each other. There’s nothing in Sandcastle’s box that wasn’t in the others. They’re all exactly alike.’ He moved restlessly. ‘I’ve been down there to make sure there’s nothing Sandcastle could reach to lick if he put his head right over the half-door as far as he could get. There’s nothing, nothing at all.’
‘Drinking pails?’
‘No. They don’t always have the same pails. I mean, when Lenny fills them he doesn’t necessarily take them back to the particular boxes they come from. The pails don’t have the stallions’ names on, if that’s what you mean.’
I didn’t mean anything much: just grabbing at straws.
‘Straw…’ I said. ‘How about an allergy? An allergy to something around him? Could an allergy have such an effect?’
‘I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’ll ask the Research people, though, on Monday.’
He got up to pour us both a drink. ‘It’s good to have you here,’ he said. ‘A sort of net over the bottomless pit.’ He gave me the glass with a faint half-smile, and I had a definite impression that he would not in the end go to pieces.
I telephoned then to the Michaels’ house and Gordon answered at the first ring as if he’d been passing nearby. Nothing good to report, I said, except that Ginnie sent Judith her love. Gordon said Judith was in the garden picking parsley for supper, and he would tell her. ‘Call tomorrow,’ he said, ‘if we can help.’
Our own supper, left ready in the refrigerator by Oliver’s part-time housekeeper, filled the hollows left by lunch, and Ginnie went to bed straight afterwards, saying she would be up at two o’clock and out with Nigel in the foal yard.
‘She goes most nights,’ Oliver said. ‘She and Nigel make a good team. He says she’s a great help, particularly if three or four mares are foaling at the same time. I’m often out there myself, but with all the decisions and paperwork as well I get very tired if I do it too much. Fall asleep over meals, that sort of thing.’
We ourselves went to bed fairly early, and I awoke in the large high-ceilinged guest room while it was still blackly dark. It was one of those fast awakenings which mean that sleep won’t come back easily, and I got out of bed and went to the window, which looked out over the yard.
I could see only roofs and security lights and a small section of the first yard. There was no visible activity, and my watch showed four-thirty.
I wondered if Ginnie would mind if I joined her in the foaling yard; and got dressed and went.
They were all there, Nigel and Oliver as well as Ginnie, all in one open-doored box where a mare lay on her side on the straw. They all turned their heads as I approached but seemed unsurprised to see me and gave no particular greeting.
‘This is Plus Factor,’ Oliver said. ‘In foal to Sandcastle.’
His voice was calm and so was Ginnie’s manner, and I guessed that they still hadn’t told Nigel about the deformities. There was hope, too, in their faces, as if they were sure that this one, after all, would be perfect.
‘She’s coming,’ Nigel said quietly. ‘Here we go.’
The mare gave a grunt and her swelling sides heaved. The rest of us stood silent, watching, taking no part. A glistening half-transparent membrane with a hoof showing within it appeared, followed by the long slim shape of the head, followed very rapidly by the whole foal, flopping out onto the straw, steaming, the membrane breaking open, the fresh air reaching the head, new life beginning with the first fluttering gasp of the lungs.
Amazing, I thought.
‘Is he all right?’ Oliver said, bending down, the anxiety raw, unstifled.
‘Sure,’ Nigel said. ‘Fine little colt. Just his foreleg’s doubled over…’
He knelt beside the foal who was already making the first feeble efforts to move his head, and he stretched out both hands gently to free the bent leg fully from the membrane, and to straighten it. He picked it up… and froze.
We could all see.
The leg wasn’t bent. It ended in a stump at the knee. No cannon bone, no fetlock, no hoof.
Ginnie beside me gave a choking sob and turned abruptly towards the open door, towards the dark. She took one rocky pace and then another, and then was running: running nowhere, running away from the present, the future, the unimaginable. From the hopeless little creature on the straw.
I went after her, listening to her footsteps, hearing them on gravel and then losing them, guessing she had reached the grass. I went more slowly in her wake down the path to the breeding pen, not seeing her, but sure she was out somewhere in the paths round the paddocks. With eyes slowly acclimatising I went that way and found her not far off, on her knees beside one of the posts, sobbing with the deep sound of a wholly adult desperation.
‘Ginnie,’ I said.
She stood up as if to turn to me was natural and clung to me fiercely, her body shaking from the sobs, her face pressed hard against my shoulder, my arms tightly round her. We stood like that until the paroxysm passed; until, dragging a handkerchief from her jeans, she could speak.
‘It’s one thing knowing it in theory,’ she said, her voice full of tears and her body still shaking spasmodically from after-sobs. ‘I read those letters. I did know. But seeing it… that’s different.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it means…’ She took gulps of air, trying hard for control. ‘It means, doesn’t it, that we’ll lose our farm. Lose everything?’
‘I don’t know yet. Too soon to say that.’
‘Poor Dad.’ The tears were sliding slowly down her cheeks, but like harmless rain after a hurricane. ‘I don’t see how we can bear it.’
‘Don’t despair yet. If there’s a way to save you, we’ll find it.’
‘Do you mean… your bank?’
‘I mean everybody.’
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and finally moved away a pace, out of my arms, strong enough to leave shelter. We went slowly back to the foaling yard and found nobody there except horses. I undid the closed top half of Plus Factor’s box and looked inside; looked at the mare standing there patiently without her foal and wondered if she felt any fretting sense of loss.
‘Dad and Nigel have taken him, haven’t they?’ Ginnie said.
‘Yes.’
She nodded, accepting that bit easily. Death to her was part of life, as to every child brought up close to animals. I closed Plus Factor’s door and Ginnie and I went back to the house while the sky lightened in the east to the new day, Sunday.
The work of the place went on.
Oliver telephoned to various owners of the mares who had come to the other three stallions, reporting the birth of foals alive and well and one dead before foaling, very sorry. His voice sounded strong, civilised, controlled, the competent captain at the helm, and one could almost see the steel creeping back, hour by hour, into his battered spirit. I admired him for it; and I would fight to give him time, I thought, to come to some compromise to avert permanent ruin.
Ginnie, showered, breakfasted, tidy in sweater and shirt, went off to spend the morning at the Watcherleys’ and came back smiling; the resilience of youth.
‘Both of those mares are better from their infections,’ she reported, ‘and Maggie says she’s heard Calder Jackson’s not doing so well lately, his yard’s half empty. Cheers Maggie up no end, she says.’
For the Watcherleys too, I thought briefly, the fall of Oliver’s business could mean a return to rust and weeds, but I said, ‘Not enough sick horses just now, perhaps.’
‘Not enough sick horses with rich owners, Maggie says.’
In the afternoon Ginnie slept on the sofa looking very childlike and peaceful, and only with the awakening did the night’s pain roll back.
‘Oh dear…’ The slow tears came. ‘I was dreaming it was all right. That that foal was a dream, only a dream…’
‘You and your father,’ I said. ‘Are brave people.’
She sniffed a little, pressing against her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Do you mean,’ she said slowly, ‘that whatever happens, we musn’t be defeated?’
‘Mm.’
She looked at me, and after a while nodded. ‘If we have to, we’ll start again. We’ll work. He did it all before, you know.’
‘You both have the skills,’ I said.
‘I’m glad you came.’ She brushed the drying tears from her cheeks. ‘God knows what it would have been like without you.’
I went with her out into the yards for evening stables, where the muck-carrying and feeding went on as always. Ginnie fetched the usual pocketful of carrots from the feed room and gave them here and there to the mares, talking cheerfully to the lads while they bent to their chores. No one, watching and listening, could ever have imagined that she feared the sky was falling.
‘Evening, Chris, how’s her hoof today?’
‘Hi, Danny. Did you bring this one in this morning?’
‘Hello, Pete. She looks as if she’ll foal any day now.’
‘Evening, Shane. How’s she doing?’
‘Hi, Sammy, is she eating now OK?’
The lads answered her much as they spoke to Oliver himself, straightforwardly and with respect, and in most cases without stopping what they were doing. I looked back as we left the first big yard for the second, and for a moment took one of the lads to be Ricky Barnet.
‘Who’s that?’ I said to Ginnie.
She followed my gaze to where the lad walked across to the yard tap, swinging an empty bucket with one hand and eating an apple with the other.
‘Shane. Why?’
‘He reminded me of someone I knew.’
She shrugged. ‘He’s all right. They all are, when Nigel’s looking, which he doesn’t do often enough.’
‘He works all night,’ I said mildly.
‘I suppose so.’
The mares in the second yard had mostly given birth already and Ginnie that evening had special eyes for the foals. The lads hadn’t yet reached those boxes and Ginnie didn’t go in to any of them, warning me that mares with young foals could be protective and snappy.
‘You never know if they’ll bite or kick you. Dad doesn’t like me going in with them alone.’ She smiled. ‘He still thinks I’m a baby.’
We went on to the foaling yard, where a lad greeted as Dave was installing a heavy slow-walking mare into one of the boxes.
‘Nigel says she’ll foal tonight,’ he told Ginnie.
‘He’s usually right.’
We went on past the breeding pen and came to the stallions, where Larry and Ron were washing down Diarist (who appeared to have been working) in the centre of the yard, using a lot of water, energy and oaths.
‘Mind his feet,’ Larry said. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’
Ginnie gave carrots to Parakeet and Rotaboy, and we came finally to Sandcastle. He looked as great, as charismatic as ever, but Ginnie gave him his tit-bit with her own lips compressed.
‘He can’t help it all, I suppose,’ she said sighing. ‘But I do wish he’d never won any races.
‘Or that we’d let him die that day on the main road?’
‘Oh no!’ She was shocked. ‘We couldn’t have done that, even if we’d known…’
Dear girl, I thought; many people would personally have mown him down with a truck.
We went back to the house via the paddocks, where she fondled any heads that came to the railings and parted with the last of the crunchy orange goodies. ‘I can’t believe that this will all end,’ she said, looking over the horse-dotted acres, ‘I just can’t believe it.’
I tentatively suggested to both her and Oliver that they might prefer it if I went home that evening, but they both declared themselves against.
‘Not yet,’ Ginnie said anxiously and Oliver nodded forcefully. ‘Please do stay, Tim, if you can.’
I nodded, and rang the Michaels’, and this time got Judith.
‘Do let me speak to her,’ Ginnie said, taking the receiver out of my hand. ‘I do so want to.’
And I, I thought wryly, I too want so much to talk to her, to hear her voice, to renew my own soul through her: I’m no one’s universal pillar of strength, I need my comfort too.
I had my crumbs, after Ginnie. Ordinary words, all else implied; as always.
‘Take care of yourself,’ she said finally.
‘You, too,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ The word was a sigh, faint and receding, as if she’d said it with the receiver already away from her mouth. There was the click of disconnection, and Oliver was announcing briskly that it was time for whisky, time for supper; time for anything perhaps but thinking.
Ginnie decided that she felt too restless after supper to go to bed early, and would go for a walk instead.
‘Do you want me to come?’ I said.
‘No. I’m all right. I just thought I’d go out. Look at the stars.’ She kissed her father’s forehead, pulling on a thick cardigan for warmth. ‘I won’t go off the farm. You’ll probably find me in the foal yard, if you want me.’
He nodded to her fondly but absentmindedly, and with a small wave to me she went away. Oliver asked me gloomily, as if he’d been waiting for us to be alone, how soon I thought the bank would decide on his fate, and we talked in snatches about his daunting prospects, an hour or two sliding by on possibilities.
Shortly before ten, when we had probably twice repeated all there was to say, there came a heavy hammering on the back door.
‘Whoever’s that?’ Oliver frowned, rose to his feet and went to find out.
I didn’t hear the opening words, but only the goose-pimpling urgency in the rising voice.
‘She’s where?’ Oliver said loudly, plainly, in alarm. ‘Where?’
I went quickly into the hallway. One of the lads stood in the open doorway, panting for breath, wide-eyed and looking very scared.
Oliver glanced at me over his shoulder, already on the move.
‘He says Ginnie’s lying on the ground unconscious.’
The lad turned and ran off, with Oliver following and myself close behind: and the lad’s breathlessness, I soon found, was owing to Ginnie’s being on the far side of the farm, away down beyond Nigel’s bungalow and the lads’ hostel, right down on the far drive, near the gate to the lower road.
We arrived there still running, the lad now doubling over in his fight for breath, and found Ginnie lying on her side on the hard asphalt surface with another of the lads on his knees beside her, dim figures in weak moonlight, blurred outlines of shadow.
Oliver and I too knelt there and Oliver was saying to the lads, ‘What happened, what happened? Did she fall?’
‘We just found her,’ the kneeling lad said. ‘We were on our way back from the pub. She’s coming round, though, sir, she’s been saying things.’
Ginnie in fact moved slightly, and said ‘Dad.’
‘Yes, Ginnie, I’m here.’ He picked up her hand and patted it. ‘We’ll soon get you right.’ There was relief in his voice, but short-lived.
‘Dad,’ Ginnie said, mumbling. ‘Dad.’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Dad…’
‘She isn’t hearing you,’ I said worriedly.
He turned his head to me, his eyes liquid in the dark of his face. ‘Get an ambulance. There’s a telephone in Nigel’s house. Tell him to get an ambulance here quickly. I don’t think we’ll move her…. Get an ambulance.’
I stood up to go on the errand but the breathless lad said, ‘Nigel’s out. I tried there. There’s no one. It’s all locked.’
‘I’ll go back to the house.’
I ran as fast on the way back and had to fight to control my own gulping breaths there to make my words intelligible. ‘Tell them to take the lower road from the village… the smaller right fork… where the road divides. Nearly a mile from there… wide metal farm gate, on the left.’
‘Understood,’ a man said impersonally. ‘They’ll be on their way.’
I fetched the padded quilt off my bed and ran back across the farm and found everything much as I’d left it. ‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘How is she?’
Oliver tucked the quilt round his daughter as best he could. ‘She keeps saying things. Just sounds, not words.’
‘Da—’ Ginnie said.
Her eyelids trembled and slightly opened.
‘Ginnie,’ Oliver said urgently. ‘This is Dad.’
Her lips moved in a mumbling unformed murmur. The eyes looked at nothing, unfocussed, the gleam just reflected moonlight, not an awakening.
‘Oh God,’ Oliver said. ‘What’s happened to her? What can have happened?’
The two lads stood there, awkward and silent, not knowing the answer.
‘Go and open the gate,’ Oliver told them. ‘Stand on the road. Signal to the ambulance when it comes.’
They went as if relieved; and the ambulance did come, lights flashing, with two brisk men in uniform who lifted Ginnie without much disturbing her onto a stretcher. Oliver asked them to wait while he fetched the Land Rover from Nigel’s garage, and in a short time the ambulance set off to the hospital with Oliver and me following.
‘Lucky you had the key,’ I said, indicating it in the ignition. Just something to say: anything.
‘We always keep it in that tin on the shelf.’
The tin said ‘Blackcurrant Coughdrops. Take as Required.’
Oliver drove automatically, following the rear lights ahead. ‘Why don’t they go faster?’ he said, though their speed was quite normal.
‘Don’t want to jolt her, perhaps.’
‘Do you think it’s a stroke?’ he said.
‘She’s too young.’
‘No. I had a cousin… an aneurysm burst when he was sixteen.’
I glanced at his face: lined, grim, intent on the road.
The journey seemed endless, but ended at a huge bright hospital in a sprawling town. The men in uniform opened the rear doors of the ambulance while Oliver parked the Land Rover and we followed them into the brightly lit emergency reception area, seeing them wheel Ginnie into a curtained cubicle, watching them come out again with their stretcher, thanking them as they left.
A nurse told us to sit on some nearby chairs while she fetched a doctor. The place was empty, quiet, all readiness but no bustle. Ten o’clock on Sunday night.
A doctor came in a white coat, stethoscope dangling. An Indian, young, black-haired, rubbing his eyes with forefinger and thumb. He went behind the curtains with the nurse and for about a minute Oliver clasped and unclasped his fingers, unable to contain his anxiety.
The doctor’s voice reached us clearly, the Indian accent making no difference.
‘They shouldn’t have brought her here,’ he said. ‘She’s dead.’
Oliver was on his feet, bounding across the shining floor, pulling back the curtains with a frantic sweep of the arm.
‘She’s not dead. She was talking. Moving. She’s not dead.’
In dread I followed him. She couldn’t be dead, not like that, not so fast, not without the hospital fighting long to save her. She couldn’t be.
The doctor straightened up from bending over her, withdrawing his hand from under Ginnie’s head, looking at us across the small space.
‘She’s my daughter,’ Oliver said. ‘She’s not dead.’
A sort of weary compassion drooped in the doctor’s shoulders. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Very sorry. She is gone.’
‘No!’ The word burst out of Oliver in an agony. ‘You’re wrong. Get someone else.’
The nurse made a shocked gesture but the young doctor said gently, ‘There is no pulse. No heartbeat. No contraction of the pupils. She has been gone for perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty. I could get someone else, but there is nothing to be done.’
‘But why?’ Oliver said. ‘She was talking.’
The dark doctor looked down to where Ginnie was lying on her back, eyes closed, brown hair falling about her head, face very pale. Her jerseys had both been unbuttoned for the stethoscope, the white bra showing, and the nurse had also undone the waistband of the skirt, pulling it loose. Ginnie looked very young, very defenceless, lying there so quiet and still, and I stood numbly, not believing it, unable, like Oliver, to accept such a monstrous change.
‘Her skull is fractured,’ the doctor said. ‘If she was talking, she died on the way here, in the ambulance. With head injuries it can be like that. I am sorry.’
There was a sound of an ambulance’s siren wailing outside, and sudden noise and rushing people by the doors where we had come in, voices raised in a jumble of instructions.
‘Traffic accident,’ someone shouted, and the doctor’s eyes moved beyond us to the new need, to the future, not the past.
‘I must go,’ he said, and the nurse, nodding, handed me a flat white plastic bottle which she had been holding.
‘You may as well take this,’ she said. ‘It was tucked into the waistband of her skirt, against the stomach.’
She made as if to cover Ginnie with a sheet, but Oliver stopped her.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I want to be with her.’
The young doctor nodded, and he and I and the nurse stepped outside the cubicle, drawing the curtains behind us. The doctor looked in a brief pause of stillness towards the three or four stretchers arriving at the entrance, taking a breath, seeming to summon up energy from deep reserves.
‘I’ve been on duty for thirty hours,’ he said to me. ‘And now the pubs are out. Ten o’clock, Sundays. Drunk drivers, drunk pedestrians. Always the same.’
He walked away to his alive and bleeding patients and the nurse pinned a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign onto the curtains of Ginnie’s cubicle, saying she would be taken care of later.
I sat drearily on a chair, waiting for Oliver. The white plastic bottle had a label stuck onto one side saying ‘Shampoo’. I put it into my jacket pocket and wondered if it was just through overwork that the doctor hadn’t asked how Ginnie’s skull had been fractured, asked whether she’d fallen onto a rock or a kerb… or been hit.
The rest of the night and all the next day were in their own way worse, a truly awful series of questions, answers, forms and officialdom, with the police slowly taking over from the hospital and Oliver trying to fight against a haze of grief.
It seemed to me wicked that no one would leave him alone. To them he was just one more in a long line of bereaved persons, and although they treated him with perfunctory sympathy, it was for their own paperwork and not for his benefit that they wanted signatures, information and guesses.
Large numbers of policemen descended on the farm early in the morning, and it gradually appeared that that area of the country was being plagued by a stalker of young girls who jumped out of bushes, knocked them unconscious and sexually assaulted them.
‘Not Ginnie…’ Oliver protested in deepening horror.
The most senior of the policemen shook his head. ‘It would appear not. She was still wearing her clothing. We can’t discount, though, that it was the same man, and that he was disturbed by your grooms. When young girls are knocked unconscious at night, it’s most often a sexual attack.’
‘But she was on my own land,’ he said, disbelieving.
The policeman shrugged. ‘It’s been known in suburban front gardens.’
He was a fair-haired man with a manner that was not exactly brutal but spoke of long years of acclimatisation to dreadful experiences. Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold, he’d said, introducing himself. Forty-fivish, I guessed, sensing the hardness within him at sight and judging him through that day more dogged than intuitive, looking for results from procedure, not hunches.
He was certain in his own mind that the attack on Ginnie had been sexual in intent and he scarcely considered anything else, particularly since she’d been carrying no money and had expressly said she wouldn’t leave the farm.
‘She could have talked to someone over the gate,’ he said, having himself spent some time on the lower drive. ‘Someone walking along the road. And there are all your grooms that we’ll need detailed statements from, though from their preliminary answers it seems they weren’t in the hostel but down at the village, in the pubs.’
He came and went and reappeared again with more questions at intervals through the day and I lost track altogether of the hours. I tried, in his presence and out, and in Oliver’s the same, not to think much about Ginnie herself. I thought I would probably have wept if I had, of no use to anyone. I thrust her away into a defensive compartment knowing that later, alone, I would let her out.
Some time in the morning one of the lads came to the house and asked what they should do about one of the mares who was having difficulty foaling, and Lenny also arrived wanting to know when he should take Rotaboy to the breeding pen. Each of them stood awkwardly, not knowing where to put their hands, saying they were so shocked, so sorry, about Ginnie.
‘Where’s Nigel?’ Oliver said.
They hadn’t seen him, they said. He hadn’t been out in the yards that morning.
‘Didn’t you try his house?’ Oliver was annoyed rather than alarmed: another burden on a breaking back.
‘He isn’t there. The door’s locked and he didn’t answer.’
Oliver frowned, picked up the telphone and pressed the buttons: listened: no reply.
He said to me, ‘There’s a key to his bungalow over there on the board, third hook from the left. Would you go and look… would you mind?’
‘Sure.’
I walked down there with Lenny who told me repeatedly how broken up the lads were over what had happened, particularly Dave and Sammy, who’d found her. They’d all liked her, he said. All the lads who lived in the hostel were saying that perhaps if they’d come back sooner, she wouldn’t have been attacked.
‘You don’t live in the hostel, then?’ I said.
‘No. Down in the village. Got a house. Only the ones who come just for the season, they’re the ones in the hostel. It’s shut up, see, all winter.’
We eventually reached Nigel’s bungalow where I rang the doorbell and banged on the knocker without result. Shaking my head slightly I fitted the key in the lock, opened the door, went in.
Curtains were drawn across the windows, shutting out a good deal of daylight. I switched on a couple of lights and walked into the sitting room, where papers, clothes and dirty cups and plates were strewn haphazardly and the air smelled faintly of horse.
There was no sign of Nigel. I looked into the equally untidy kitchen and opened a door which proved to be that of a bathroom and another which revealed a room with bare-mattressed twin beds. The last door in the small inner hall led into Nigel’s own bedroom… and there he was, face down, fully clothed, lying across the counterpane.
Lenny, still behind me, took two paces back.
I went over to the bed and felt Nigel’s neck behind the ear Felt the pulse going like a steam-hammer. Heard the rasp of air in the throat. His breath would have anaesthetised a crocodile, and on the floor beside him lay an empty bottle of gin. I shook his shoulder unsympathetically with a complete lack of result.
‘He’s drunk,’ I said to Lenny. ‘Just drunk.’
Lenny looked all the same as if he was about to vomit. ‘I thought… I thought.’
‘I know,’ I said: and I’d feared it also, instinctively, the one because of the other.
‘What will we do, then, out in the yard?’ Lenny asked.
‘I’ll find out.’
We went back into the sitting room where I used Nigel’s telephone to call Oliver and report.
‘He’s flat out,’ I said. ‘I can’t wake him. Lenny wants instructions.’
After a brief silence Oliver said dully, ‘Tell him to take Rotaboy to the breeding shed in half an hour. I’ll see to things in the yards. And Tim?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask you… would you mind… helping me here in the office?’
‘Coming straight back.’
The disjointed, terrible day wore on. I telephoned to Gordon in the bank explaining my absence and to Judith also, a: Gordon’s suggestion, to pass on the heartbreak, and I took countless incoming messages as the news spread. Outside on the farm nearly two hundred horses got fed and watered, and birth and procreation went inexorably on.
Oliver came back stumbling from fatigue at about two o’clock, and we ate some eggs, not tasting them, in the kitchen. He looked repeatedly at his watch and said finally, ‘What’s eight hours back from now? I can’t even think.’
‘Six in the morning,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I suppose I should have told Ginnie’s mother last night.’ His face twisted. ‘My wife… in Canada…’ He swallowed. ‘Never mind, let her sleep. In two hours I’ll tell her.’
I left him alone to that wretched task and took myself upstairs to wash and shave and lie for a while on the bed. It was in taking my jacket off for those purposes that I came across the plastic bottle in my pocket, and I took it out and stood it on the shelf in the bathroom while I shaved.
An odd sort of thing, I thought, for Ginnie to have tucked into her waistband. A plastic bottle of shampoo; about six inches high, four across, one deep, with a screw cap on one of the narrow ends. The white label saying ‘Shampoo’ had been handwritten and stuck on top of the bottle’s original dark brown, white-printed label, of which quite a bit still showed round the edges.
‘Instructions,’ part of the underneath label said. ‘Shake well. Be careful not to get the shampoo in the dog’s eyes. Rub well into the coat and leave for ten or fifteen minutes before rinsing.’
At the bottom, below the stuck-on label, were the words, in much smaller print, ‘Manufactured by Eagle Inc., Michigan, U.S.A. List number 29931.
When I’d finished shaving I unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle gently over the basin.
A thick greenish liquid appeared, smelling powerfully of soap.
Shampoo: what else.
The bottle was to all intents full. I screwed on the cap again and put it on the shelf, and thought about it while I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head.
Shampoo for dogs.
After a while I got up and went down to the kitchen, and in a high cupboard found a small collection of empty, washed, screw-top glass jars, the sort of thing my mother had always saved for herbs and picnics. I took one which would hold perhaps a cupful of liquid and returned upstairs, and over the washbasin I shook the bottle well, unscrewed the cap and carefully poured more than half of the shampoo into the jar.
I screwed the caps onto both the bottle and the jar, copied what could be seen on the original label into the small engagement diary I carried with me everywhere, and stowed the now half full round glass container from Oliver’s kitchen inside my own sponge-bag: and when I went downstairs again I took the plastic bottle with me.
‘Ginnie had it?’ Oliver said dully, picking it up and squinting at it. ‘Whatever for?’
‘The nurse at the hospital said it was tucked into the waistband of her skirt.’
A smile flickered. ‘She always did that when she was little. Plimsols, books, bits of string, anything. To keep her hands free, she said. They all used to slip down into her little knickers, and there would be a whole shower of things sometimes when we undressed her.’ His face went hopelessly bleak at this memory, I can’t believe it, you know,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll walk through the door.’ He paused. ‘My wife is flying over. She says she’ll be here tomorrow morning.’ His voice gave no indication as to whether that was good news or bad. ‘Stay tonight, will you?’
‘If you want.’
‘Yes.’
Chief Inspector Wyfold turned up again at that point and we gave him the shampoo bottle, Oliver explaining about Ginnie’s habit of carrying things in her clothes.
‘Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?’ he asked me.
‘I forgot I had it. It seemed so paltry at the time, compared with Ginnie dying.’
The Chief Inspector picked up the bottle by its serrated cap and read what one could see of the label, and to Oliver he said, ‘Do you have a dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would this be what you usually use, to wash him?’
‘I really don’t know. I don’t wash him myself. One of the lads does.’
‘The lads being the grooms?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Which lad washed your dog?’ Wyfold asked.
‘Um… any. Whoever I ask.’
The Chief Inspector produced a thin white folded paper bag from one of his pockets and put the bottle inside it. ‘Who to your knowledge has handled this, besides yourselves?’ he asked.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘the nurse at the hospital… and Ginnie.’
‘And it spent from last night until now in your pocket?’ He shrugged. ‘Hopeless for prints, I should think, but we’ll try.’ He fastened the bag shut and wrote on a section of it with a ball pen. To Oliver, almost as an aside, he said, i came to ask you about your daughter’s relationship with men.’
Oliver said wearily, ‘She didn’t have any. She’s only just left school.’
Wyfold made small negative movements with head and hands as if amazed at the naiveté of fathers. ‘No sexual relationship to your knowledge?’
Oliver was too exhausted for anger. ‘No,’ he said.
‘And you sir?’ he turned to me. ‘What were your relations with Virginia Knowles?’
‘Friendship.’
‘Including sexual intercourse?’
‘No.’
Wyfold looked at Oliver who said tiredly, ‘Tim is a business friend of mine. A financial adviser, staying here for the weekend, that’s all.’
The policeman frowned at me with disillusion as if he didn’t believe it. I gave him no amplified answer because I simply couldn’t be bothered, and what could I have said? That with much affection I’d watched a child grow into an attractive young woman and yet not wanted to sleep with her? His mind ran on carnal rails, all else discounted.
He went away in the end taking the shampoo with him, and Oliver with immense fortitude said he had better go out into the yards to catch the tail end of evening stables. ‘Those mares,’ he said. ‘Those foals… they still need the best of care.’
‘I wish I could help,’ I said, feeling useless.
‘You do.’
I went with him on his rounds, and when we reached the foaling yard, Nigel, resurrected, was there.
His stocky figure leaned against the doorpost of an open box as if without its support he would collapse, and the face he slowly turned towards us had aged ten years. The bushy eyebrows stood out starkly over charcoal shadowed eyes, puffiness in his skin swelling the eylids and sagging in deep bags on his cheeks. He was also unshaven, unkempt and feeling ill.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Heard about Ginnie. Very sorry.’ I wasn’t sure whether he was sympathising with Oliver or apologising for the drunkenness. ‘A big noise of a policeman came asking if I’d killed her. As if I would.’ He put a shaky hand on his head, almost as if physically to support it on his shoulders. ‘I feel rotten. My own fault. Deserve it. This mare’s likely to foal tonight. That shit of a policeman wanted to know if I was sleeping with Ginnie. Thought I’d tell you… I wasn’t.’
Wyfold, I reflected, would ask each of the lads individually the same question. A matter of time, perhaps, before he asked Oliver himself; though Oliver and I, he had had to concede, gave each other a rock-solid alibi.
We walked on towards the stallions and I asked Oliver if Nigel often got drunk, since Oliver hadn’t shown much surprise.
‘Very seldom,’ Oliver said. ‘He’s once or twice turned out in that state but we’ve never lost a foal because of it. I don’t like it, but he’s so good with the mares.’ He shrugged. ‘I overlook it,’
He gave carrots to all four stallions but scarcely glanced at Sandcastle, as if he could no longer bear the sight.
‘I’ll try the Research people tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Forgot about it, today.’
From the stallions he went, unusually, in the direction of the lower gate, past Nigel’s bungalow and the hostel, to stand for a while at the place where Ginnie had lain in the dark on the night before.
The asphalt driveway showed no mark. Oliver looked to where the closed gate sixty feet away led to the road and in a drained voice said, ‘Do you think she could have talked to someone out there?’
‘She might have, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’ He turned to go back. ‘It’s all so senseless. And unreal. Nothing feels real.’
Exhaustion of mind and body finally overtook him after dinner and he went grey-faced to bed, but I in the first quiet of the long day went out again for restoration: for a look at the stars, as Ginnie had said.
Thinking only of her I walked slowly along some of the paths between the paddocks, the way lit by a half-moon with small clouds drifting, and stopped eventually at the place where on the previous morning I’d held her tight in her racking distress. The birth of the deformed foal seemed so long ago, yet it was only yesterday: the morning of the last day of Ginnie’s life.
I thought about that day, about the despair in its dawn and the resolution of its afternoon. I thought of her tears and her courage, and of the waste of so much goodness. The engulfing, stupefying sense of loss which had hovered all day swamped into my brain until my body felt inadequate, as if it wanted to burst, as if it couldn’t hold in so much feeling.
When Ian Pargetter had been murdered I had been angry on his behalf and had supposed that the more one loved the dead person the greater one’s fury against the killer. But now I understood that anger could simply be crowded out by something altogether more overwhelming. As for Oliver, he had displayed shock, daze, desolation and disbelief in endless quantities all day, but of anger, barely a flicker.
It was too soon to care who had killed her. The fact of her death was too much. Anger was irrelevant, and no vengeance could give her life.
I had loved her more than I’d known, but not as I loved Judith, not with desire and pain and longing. I’d loved Ginnie as a friend; as a brother. I’d loved her, I thought, right back from the day when I’d returned her to school and listened to her fears. I’d loved her up on the hill, trying to catch Sand castle, and I’d loved her for her expertise and for her growing adult certainty that here, in these fields, was where her future lay.
I’d thought of her young life once as being a clear stretch of sand waiting for footprints, and now there would be none, now only a blank, chopping end to all she could have been and done, to all the bright love she had scattered around her.
‘Oh… Ginnie,’ I said aloud, calling to her hopelessly in tearing body-shaking grief. ‘Ginnie… little Ginnie… come back.’
But she was gone from there. My voice fled away into darkness, and there was no answer.