Banker

JUNE

Gordon telephoned three weeks later sounding thoroughly fit and well. I glanced across to where his desk stood mute and tidy, with all the paper action now transferred to my own.
‘Judith and I wanted to thank you…’ he was saying.
‘Really no need,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘Wasting time. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, we’ve been offered a half-share in a box at Ascot next Thursday. We thought it might be fun… We’ve six places. Would you like to come? As our guest, of course. As a thank-you.’
‘I’d love it,’ I said. ‘But…’
‘No buts,’ he interrupted. ‘If you’d like to, Henry will fix it. He’s coming himself. He agreed you’d earned a day off, so all you have to do is decide.’
‘Then I’d like to, very much.’
‘Good. If you haven’t a morning coat, don’t worry. We’re not in the Royal Enclosure.’
‘If you’re wearing one… I inherited my father’s.’
‘Ah. Good. Yes, then. One o’clock Thursday, for lunch. I’ll send the entrance tickets to you in the office. Both Judith and I are very pleased you can come. We’re very grateful. Very.’ He sounded suddenly half-embarrassed, and disconnected with a click.
I wondered how much he remembered about the white faces, but with Alec and Rupert and John all in earshot it had been impossible to ask. Maybe at the races he would tell me. Maybe not.
Going racing wasn’t something I did very often nowadays, although as a child I’d spent countless afternoons waiting around the Tote queues while my mother in pleasurable agony backed her dozens of hunches and bankers and third strings and savers and lost money by the ton.
‘I’ve won!’ she would announce radiantly to all about her, waving an indisputably winning ticket: and the bunch of losses on the same race would be thrust into a pocket and later thrown away.
My father at the same time would be standing drinks in the bar, an amiable open-fisted lush with more good nature than sense. They would take me home at the end of the day giggling happily together in a hired chauffeur-driven Rolls, and until I was quite old I never questioned but that this contented affluence was built on rock.
I had been their only child and they’d given me a very good childhood to the extent that when I thought of holidays it was of yachts on warm seas or Christmas in the Alps. The villain of those days was my uncle who descended on us occasionally to utter Dire Warnings about the need for his brother (my father) to find a job.
My father however couldn’t shape up to ‘money-grubbing’ and in any case had no real ability in any direction; and with no habit of working he had quietly scorned people who had. He never tired of his life of aimless ease, and if he earned no one’s respect, few detested him either. A weak, friendly, unintelligent man. Not bad as a father. Not good at much else.
He dropped dead of a heart attack when I was nineteen and it was then that the point of the Dire Warnings became apparent. He and mother had lived on the capital inherited from grandfather, and there wasn’t a great deal left. Enough just to see me through college; enough, with care, to bring mother a small income for life.
Not enough to finance her manner of betting, which she wouldn’t or couldn’t give up. A lot more of the Dire Warnings went unheeded, and finally, while I was trying to stem a hopeless tide by working (of all things) for a bookmaker, the bailiffs knocked on the door.
In twenty-five years, it seemed, my mother had gambled away the best part of half a million pounds; all gone on horses, fast and slow. It might well have sickened me altogether against racing, but in a curious way it hadn’t. I remembered how much she and father had enjoyed themselves: and who was to say that it was a fortune ill spent?
‘Good news?’ Alec said, eyeing my no doubt ambivalent expression.
‘Gordon’s feeling better.’
‘Hm,’ he said judiciously, ‘So he should be. Three weeks off for ‘flu’…’ He grinned. ‘Stretching it a bit.’
I made a non-committal grunt.
‘Be glad, shall we, when he comes back?’
I glanced at his amused, quizzical face and saw that he knew as well as I did that when Gordon reappeared to repossess his kingdom, I wouldn’t be glad at all. Doing Gordon’s job, after the first breath-shortening initial plunge, had injected me with great feelings of vigour and good health; had found me running up stairs and singing in the bath and showing all the symptoms of a love affair; and like many a love affair it couldn’t survive the return of the husband. I wondered how long I’d have to wait for such a chance again, and whether next time I’d feel as high.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed,’ Alec said, the eyes electric blue behind the gold-rimmed specs.
‘Noticed what?’ Rupert asked, raising his head above papers he’d been staring blindly at for ninety minutes.
Back from his pretty wife’s death and burial poor Rupert still wore a glazed otherwhere look and tended too late to catch up with passing conversations. In the two days since his return he had written no letters, made no telephone calls, reached no decisions. Out of compassion one had had to give him time, and Alec and I continued to do his work surreptitiously without him realising.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Rupert nodded vaguely and looked down again, an automaton in his living grief. I’d never loved anyone, I thought, as painfully as that. I think I hoped that I never would.
John, freshly returned also, but from his holidays, glowed with a still-red sunburn and had difficulty in fitting the full lurid details of his sexual adventures into Rupert’s brief absences to the washroom. Neither Alec nor I ever believed John’s sagas, but at least Alec found them funny, which I didn’t. There was an element lurking there of a hatred of women, as if every boasted possession (real of not) was a statement of spite. He didn’t actually use the word possession. He said ‘made’ and ‘screwed’ and ‘had it off with the little cow’. I didn’t like him much and he thought me a prig: we were polite in the office and never went together to lunch. And it was he alone of all of us who actively looked forward to Gordon’s return, he who couldn’t disguise his dismay that it was I who was filling the empty shoes instead of himself.
‘Of course, if I’d been here…’ he said at least once a day; and Alec reported that John had been heard telling Gordon’s almost-equal along the passage that now he, John, was back, Gordon’s work should be transferred from me to him.
‘Did you hear him?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Sure. And he was told in no uncertain terms that it was the Old Man himself who gave you the green light, and there was nothing John could do about it. Proper miffed was our Lothario. Says it’s all because you are who you are, and all that.’
‘Sod him.’
‘Rather you than me.’ He laughed gently into his blotter and picked up the telephone to find backers for a sewage and water purification plant in Norfolk.
‘Did you know,’ he said conversationally, busy dialling a number, ‘that there are so few sewage farms in West Berlin that they pay the East Berliners to get rid of the extra?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ I didn’t especially want to know, either, but as usual Alec was full of useless information and possessed by the urge to pass it on.
‘The East Berliners take the money and dump the stuff out in the open fields. Untreated, mind you.’
‘Do shut up,’ I said.
‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘And smelled it. Absolutely disgusting.’
‘It was probably fertilizer,’ I said, ‘and what were you doing in East Berlin?’
‘Calling on Nefertiti.’
‘She of the one eye?’
‘My God, yes, isn’t it a shock? Oh… hello…’ He got through to his prospective money-source and for far too long and with a certain relish explained the need for extra facilities to reverse the swamp of effluent which had been killing off the Broads. ‘No risk involved, of course, with a water authority.’ He listened. ‘I’ll put you in, then, shall I? Right.’ He scribbled busily and in due course disconnected. ‘Dead easy, this one. Ecology and all that. Good emotional stuff.’
I shuffled together a bunch of papers of my own that were very far from dead easy and went up to see Val Fisher, who happened to be almost alone in the big office. Henry Shipton, it seemed, was out on one of his frequent walkabouts through the other departments.
‘It’s a cartoonist,’ I said. ‘Can I consult?’
‘Pull up a chair.’ Val nodded and waved hospitably, and I sat beside him, spread out the papers, and explained about the wholly level-headed artist I had spent three hours with two weeks earlier.
‘He’s been turned down by his own local bank, and so far by three other firms like ourselves.’ I said. ‘He’s got no realisable assets, no security. He rents a flat and is buying a car on HP. If we financed him, it would be out of faith.’
‘Background?’ he asked. ‘Covenant?’
‘Pretty solid. Son of a Sales Manager. Respected at art school as an original talent: I talked to the Principal. His bank manager gave him a clean bill but said that his head office wouldn’t grant what he’s asking. For the past two years he’s worked for a studio making animated commercials. They say he’s good at the job; understands it thoroughly. They know he wants to go it alone, they think he’s capable and they don’t want to lose him.’
‘How old?’
‘Twenty-four.’
Val gave me an ‘Oh ho ho’ look, knowing, as I did, that it was the cartoonist’s age above all which had invited negative responses from the other banks.
‘What’s he asking?’ Val said, but he too looked as if he were already deciding against.
‘A studio, properly equipped. Funds to employ ten copying artists, with the expectation that it will be a year before any films are completed and can expect to make money. Funds for promotion. Funds for himself to live on. These sheets set out the probable figures.’
Val made a face over the pages, momentarily re-arranging the small neat features, slanting the tidy dark moustache, raising the arched eyebrows towards the black cap of hair.
‘Why haven’t you already turned him down?’ he asked finally.
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Look at his drawings.’ I opened another file and spread out the riotously coloured progression of pages which established two characters and told a funny story. I watched Val’s sophisticated world-weary face as he leafed through them: saw the awakening interest, heard the laugh.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘Hmph.’ He leaned back in his chair and gave me an assessing stare. ‘You’re not saying you think we should take him on?’
‘It’s an unsecured risk, of course. But yes, I am. With a string or two, of course, like a cost accountant to keep tabs on things and a first option to finance future expansion.’
‘Hm.’ He pondered for several minutes, looking again at the drawings which still seemed funny to me even after a fortnight’s close acquaintance. ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s too like aiming at the moon with a bow and arrow.’
‘They might watch those films one day on space shuttles,’ I said mildly, and he gave me a fast amused glance while he squared up the drawings and returned them to their folder.
‘Leave these all here, then, will you?’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Henry over lunch.’ And I guessed in a swift uncomfortable moment of insight that what they would discuss would be not primarily the cartoonist but the reliability or otherwise of my judgement. If they thought me a fool I’d be back behind John in the promotion queue in no time.
At four-thirty, however, when my inter-office telephone rang, it was Val at the other end.
‘Come up and collect your papers,’ he said. ‘Henry says this decision is to be yours alone. So sink or swim, Tim, it’s up to you.’
One’s first exposure to the Royal Ascot meeting was, according to one’s basic outlook, either a matter of surprised delight or of puritanical disapproval. Either the spirits lifted to the sight of emerald grass, massed flowers, bright dresses, fluffy hats and men elegant in grey formality, or one despised the expenditure, the frivolity, the shame of champagne and strawberries while some in the world starved.
I belonged, without doubt, to the hedonists, both by upbringing and inclination. The Royal meeting at Ascot was, as it happened, the one racing event from which my parents had perennially excluded me, children in any case being barred from the Royal Enclosure for three of the four days, and mother more interested on this occasion in socialising than betting. School, she had said firmly every year, must come first: though on other days it hadn’t, necessarily. So it was with an extra sense of pleasure that I walked through the gates in my father’s resurrected finery and made my way through the smiling throng to the appointed, high-up box.
‘Welcome to the charade,’ Gordon said cheerfully, handing me a bubbling glass, and ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Judith exclaimed, humming with excitement in yellow silk.
‘It’s great,’ I said, and meant it; and Gordon, looking sunburned and healthy, introduced me to the owner of the box.
‘Dissdale, this is Tim Ekaterin. Works in the bank. Tim – Dissdale Smith.’
We shook hands. His was plump and warm, like his body, like his face. ‘Delighted,’ he said. ‘Got a drink? Good. Met my wife? No? Bettina, darling, say hello to Tim.’ He put an arm round the thin waist of a girl less than half his age whose clinging white black-dotted dress was cut low and bare at neck and armholes. There was also a wide black hat, beautiful skin and a sweet and practised smile.
‘Hello, Tim,’ she said. ‘So glad you could come.’ Her voice, I thought, was like the rest of her: manufactured, processed, not natural top drawer but a long way from gutter.
The box itself was approximately five yards by three, most of the space being filled by a dining table laid with twelve places for lunch. The far end wall was of windows looking out over the green course, with a glass door opening to steps going down to the viewing balcony. The walls of the box were covered as if in a house with pale blue hessian, and a soft blue carpet, pink flowers and pictures lent an air of opulence far greater than the actual expense. Most of the walls of the boxes into which I’d peered on the way along to this one were of builders’ universal margarine colour, and I wondered fleetingly whether it was Dissdale or Bettina who had the prettying mind.
Henry Shipton and his wife were standing in the doorway to the balcony, alternately facing out and in, like a couple of Januses. Henry across the room lifted his glass to me in a gesture of acknowledgement, and Lorna as ever looked as if faults were being found.
Lorna Shipton, tall, over-assured, and dressed that frilly day in repressive tailored grey, was a woman from whom disdain flowed outward like a tide, a woman who seemed not to know that words could wound and saw no reason not to air each ungenerous thought. I had met her about the same number of times as I’d met Judith Michaels and mostly upon the same occasions, and if I smothered love for the one it was irritation I had to hide for the other. It was, I suppose, inevitable, that of the two it was Lorna Shipton I was placed next to at lunch.
More guests arrived behind me, Dissdale and Bettina greeting them with whoops and kisses and making the sort of indistinct introductions that one instantly forgets. Dissdale decided there would be less crush if everyone sat down and so took his place at the top of the table with Gordon, his back to the windows, at the foot. When each had arranged their guests around them there were two empty places, one next to Gordon, one up Dissdale’s end.
Gordon had Lorna Shipton on his right, with me beside her: the space on his left, then Henry, then Judith. The girl on my right spent most of her time leaning forward to speak to her host Dissdale, so that although I grew to know quite well the blue chiffon back of her shoulder, I never actually learned her name.
Laughter, chatter, the study of race cards, the refilling of glasses: Judith with yellow silk roses on her hat and Lorna telling me that my morning coat looked a size too small.
‘It was my father’s,’ I said.
‘Such a stupid man.’
I glanced at her face, but she was merely expressing her thoughts, not positively trying to offend.
‘A beautiful day for racing,’ I said.
‘You should be working. Your Uncle Freddie won’t like it, you know. I’m certain that when he bailed you out he made it a condition that you and your mother should both stay away from racecourses. And now look at you. It’s really too bad. I’ll have to tell him, of course.’
I wondered how Henry put up with it. Wondered, as one does, why he’d married her. He, however, his ear attuned across the table in a husbandly way, said to her pleasantly. ‘Freddie knows that Tim is here, my dear. Gordon and I obtained dispensation, so to speak.’ He gave me a glimmer of a smile. ‘The wrath of God has been averted.’
‘Oh.’ Lorna Shipton looked disappointed and I noticed Judith trying not to laugh.
Uncle Freddie, ex-vice chairman, now retired, still owned enough of the bank to make his unseen presence felt, and I knew he was in the habit of telephoning Henry two or three times a week to find out what was going on. Out of interest, one gathered, not from desire to meddle; as certainly, once he had set his terms, he never meddled with mother and me.
Dissdale’s last guest arrived at that point with an unseen flourish of trumpets, a man making an entrance as if well aware of newsworthiness. Dissdale leapt to his feet to greet him and pumped him warmly by hand.
‘Calder, this is great. Calder Jackson, everybody.’
There were yelps of delight from Dissdale’s end and polite smiles round Gordon’s. ‘Calder Jackson,’ Dissdale said down the table, ‘You know, the miracle-worker. Brings dying horses back to life. You must have seen him on television.’
‘Ah yes,’ Gordon responded. ‘Of course.’
Dissdale beamed and returned to his guest who was lapping up adulation with a show of modesty.
‘Who did he say?’ Lorna Shipton asked.
‘Calder Jackson,’ Gordon said.
‘Who?’
Gordon shook his head, his ignorance showing. He raised his eyebrows in a question to me, but I fractionally shook my head also. We listened, however, and we learned.
Calder Jackson was a shortish man with a head of hair designed to be noticed. Designed literally, I guessed. He had a lot of dark curls going attractively grey, cut short towards the neck but free and fluffy on top of his head and over his forehead; and he had let his beard grow in a narrow fringe from in front of his ears round the line of his jaw, the hairs of this being also bushy and curly but grey to white. From in front his weathered face was thus circled with curls: from the side he looked as if he were wearing a helmet. Or a coalscuttle, I thought unflatteringly. Once seen, in any case, never forgotten.
‘It’s just a gift,’ he was saying deprecatingly in a voice that had an edge to it more compelling than loudness: an accent very slightly of the country but of no particular region; a confidence born of acclaim.
The girl sitting next to me was ecstatic. ‘How divine to meet you. One has heard so much… Do tell us, now do tell us your secret.’
Calder Jackson eyed her blandly, his gaze sliding for a second beyond her to me and then back again. Myself he quite openly discarded as being of no interest, but to the girl he obligingly said, ‘There’s no secret, my dear. None at all. Just good food, good care and a few age-old herbal remedies. And, of course… well… the laying on of hands.’
‘But how,’ asked the girl, ‘how do you do that to horses?’
‘I just… touch them.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘And then sometimes I feel them quiver, and I know the healing force is going from me into them.’
‘Can you do it infallibly?’ Henry asked politely, and I noted with interest that he’d let no implication of doubt sound in his voice: Henry whose gullibility could be measured in micrograms, if at all.
Calder Jackson took his seriousness for granted and slowly shook his head. ‘If I have the horse in my care for long enough, it usually happens in the end. But not always. No, sadly, not always.’
‘How fascinating,’ Judith said, and earned another of those kind bland smiles. Charlatan or not, I thought, Calder Jackson had the mix just right: an arresting appearance, a modest demeanour, no promise of success. And for all I knew, he really could do what he said. Healers were an age-old phenomenon, so why not a healer of horses?
‘Can you heal people too?’ I asked in a mirror-image of Henry’s tone. No doubts. Just enquiry.
The curly head turned my way with more civility than interest and he patiently answered the question he must have been asked a thousand times before. Answered in a sequence of words he had perhaps used almost as often. ‘Whatever gift it is that I have is especially for horses. I have no feeling that I can heal humans, and I prefer not to try. I ask people not to ask me, because I don’t like to disappoint them.’
I nodded my thanks, watched his head turn away and listened to him willingly answering the next question, from Bettina, as if it too had never before been asked. ‘No, the healing very seldom happens instantaneously. I need to be near the horse for a while. Sometimes for only a few days. Sometimes for a few weeks. One can never tell.’
Dissdale basked in the success of having hooked his celebrity and told us all that two of Calder’s ex-patients were running that very afternoon. ‘Isn’t that right, Calder?’
The curly head nodded. ‘Cretonne, in the first race, she used to break blood vessels, and Molyneaux, in the fifth, he came to me with infected wounds. I feel they are my friends now. I feel I know them.’
‘And shall we back them, Calder?’ Dissdale asked roguishly. ‘Are they going to win?’
The healer smiled forgivingly. ‘If they’re fast enough. Dissdale.’
Everyone laughed. Gordon refilled his own guests’ glasses. Lorna Shipton said apropos of not much that she had occasionally considered becoming a Christian Scientist and Judith wondered what colour the Queen would be wearing. Dissdale’s party talked animatedly among themselves, and the door from the corridor tentatively opened.
Any hopes I might have had that Gordon’s sixth place was destined for a Bettina-equivalent for my especial benefit were immediately dashed. The lady who appeared and whom Judith greeted with a kiss on the cheek was nearer forty than twentyfive and more solid than lissom. She wore a brownish pink linen suit and a small white straw hat circled with a brownish pink ribbon. The suit, I diagnosed, was an old friend: the hat, new in honour of the occasion.
Judith in her turn introduced the newcomer: Penelope Warner – Pen – a good friend of hers and Gordon’s. Pen Warner sat where invited, next to Gordon and made small-talk with Henry and Lorna. I half listened, and took in a few desultory details like no rings on the fingers, no polish on the nails, no grey in the short brown hair, no artifice in the voice. Worthy, I thought. Well-intentioned; slightly boring. Probably runs the church.
A waitress appeared with an excellent lunch, during which Calder could from time to time be heard extolling the virtues of watercress for its iron content and garlic for the treatment of fever and diarrhoea.
‘And of course in humans,’ he was saying, ‘garlic is literally a life saver in whooping-cough. You make a poultice and bind it onto the bottom of the feet of the child every night, in a bandage and a sock, and in the morning you’ll smell the garlic on the breath of the child, and the cough will abate. Garlic, in fact, cures almost anything. A truly marvellous life-giving plant.’
I saw Pen Warner lift her head to listen and I thought that I’d been wrong about the church. I had missed the worldliness of the eyes, the long sad knowledge of human frailty. A magistrate, perhaps? Yes, perhaps.
Judith leaned across the table and said teasingly, ‘Tim, can’t you forget you’re a banker even at the races?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘You look at everyone as if you’re working out just how much you can lend them without risk.’
‘I’d lend you my soul,’ I said.
‘For me to pay back with interest?’
‘Pay in love and kisses.’
Harmless stuff, as frivolous as her hat. Henry, sitting next to her, said in the same vein, ‘You’re second in the queue, Tim. I’ve a first option, eh, Judith? Count on me, dear girl, for the last drop of blood.’
She patted his hand affectionately and glowed a little from the deep truth of our idle protestations: and Calder Jackson’s voice came through with ‘Comfrey heals tissues with amazing speed and will cause chronic ulcers to disappear in a matter of days, and of course it mends fractures in half the time considered normal. Comfrey is miraculous.’
There was a good deal of speculation after that all round the table about a horse called Sandcastle that had won the 2,000 Guineas six weeks earlier and was hot favourite for the King Edward VII Stakes, the top Ascot race for three-year-old colts, due to be run that afternoon.
Dissdale had actually seen the Guineas at Newmarket and was enthusiastic. ‘Daisy-cutter action. Positively eats up the ground.’ He sprayed his opinions good naturedly to the furthest ear. ‘Big rangy colt, full of courage.’
‘Beaten in the Derby, though,’ Henry said, judiciously responding.
‘Well, yes,’ Dissdale allowed. ‘But fourth, you know. Not a total disgrace, would you say?’
‘He was good as a two-year-old,’ Henry said, nodding.
‘Glory, yes,’ said Dissdale fervently. ‘And you can’t fault his breeding. By Castle out of an Ampersand mare. You can’t get much better than that.’
Several heads nodded respectfully in ignorance.
‘He’s my banker,’ Dissdale said and then spread his arms wide and half laughed. ‘OK, we’ve got a roomful of bankers. But Sandcastle is where I’m putting my money today. Doubling him with my bets in every other race. Trebles. Accumulators. The lot. You all listen to your Uncle Dissdale. Sandcastle is the soundest banker at Ascot.’ His voice positively shook with evangelical belief. ‘He simply can’t be beaten.’
‘Betting is out for you, Tim,’ Lorna Shipton said severely in my ear.
‘I’m not my mother,’ I said mildly.
‘Heredity’ Lorna said darkly. ‘And your father drank.’
I smothered a bursting laugh and ate my strawberries in good humour. Whatever I’d inherited from my parents it wasn’t an addiction to their more expensive pleasures; rather a firm intention never again to lose my record collection to the bailiffs. Those stolid men had taken even the rocking horse on which at the age of six I’d ridden my fantasy Grand Nationals. They’d taken my books, my skis and my camera. Mother had fluttered around in tears saying those things were mine, not hers, and they should leave them, and the men had gone on marching out with all our stuff as if they were deaf. About her own disappearing treasures she had been distraught, her distress and grief hopelessly mixed with guilt.
I had been old enough at twenty-four to shrug off our actual losses and more or less replace them (except for the rocking horse) but the fury of that day had affected my whole life since: and I had been silent when it happened, white and dumb with rage.
Lorna Shipton removed her disapproval from me long enough to tell Henry not to have cream and sugar on his strawberries or she would have no sympathy if he put on weight, had a heart attack, or developed pimples. Henry looked resignedly at the forbidden delights which he wouldn’t have eaten anyway. God preserve me, I thought, from marrying a Lorna Shipton.
By the coffee-brandy-cigar stage the tranquil seating pattern had broken up into people dashing out to back their hopes in the first race and I, not much of a gambler whatever Mrs Shipton might think, had wandered out onto the balcony to watch the Queen’s procession of sleek horses, open carriages, gold, glitter and fluttering feathers trotting like a fairy tale up the green course.
‘Isn’t it splendid,’ said Judith’s voice at my shoulder, and I glanced at the characterful face and met the straight smiling eyes. Damn it to hell, I thought, I’d like to live with Gordon’s wife.
‘Gordon’s gone to bet,’ she said, ‘so I thought I’d take the opportunity… He’s appalled at what happened… and we’re really grateful to you, you know, for what you did that dreadful day.’
I shook my head. ‘I did nothing, believe me.’
‘Well, that’s half the point. You said nothing. In the bank, I mean. Henry says there hasn’t been a whisper.’
‘But… I wouldn’t.’
‘A lot of people would,’ she said. ‘Suppose you had been that Alec’
I smiled involuntarily. ‘Alec isn’t unkind. He wouldn’t have told.’
‘Gordon says he’s as discreet as a town-crier.’
‘Do you want to go down and see the horses?’ I asked.
‘Yes. It’s lovely up here, but too far from life.’
We went down to the paddock, saw the horses walk at close quarters round the ring and watched the jockeys mount ready to ride out onto the course. Judith smelled nice. Stop it, I told myself. Stop it.
‘That horse over there,’ I said, pointing, ‘is the one Calder Jackson said he cured. Cretonne. The jockey in bright pink.’
‘Are you going to back it?’ she asked.
‘If you like.’
She nodded the yellow silk roses and we queued up in good humour to make the wager. All around us in grey toppers and frothy dresses the Ascot crowd swirled, a feast to the eye in the sunshine, a ritual in make-believe, a suppression of gritty truth. My father’s whole life had been a pursuit of the spirit I saw in these Royal Ascot faces; the pursuit and entrapment of happiness.
‘What are you thinking,’ Judith said, ‘so solemnly?’
‘That lotus-eaters do no harm. Let terrorists eat lotus.’
‘As a steady diet,’ she said, ‘it would be sickening.’
‘On a day like this one could fall in love.’
‘Yes, one could.’ She was reading her race-card over-intently. ‘But should one?’
After a pause I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Nor do I.’ She looked up with seriousness and understanding and with a smile in her mind. ‘I’ve known you six years.’
‘I haven’t been faithful,’ I said.
She laughed and the moment passed, but the declaration had quite plainly been made and in a way accepted. She showed no awkwardness in my continued presence but rather an increase of warmth, and in mutual contentment we agreed to stay in the paddock for the first short race rather than climb all the way up and find it was over by the time we’d reached the box.
The backs of the jockeys disappeared down the course as they cantered to the start, and I said, as a way of conversation, ‘Who is Dissdale Smith?’
‘Oh.’ She looked amused. ‘He’s in the motor trade. He loves co make a splash, as no doubt you saw, but I don’t think he’s doing as well as he pretends. Anyway, he told Gordon he was Looking for someone to share the expense of this box here and asked if Gordon would be interested in buying half the box for Today. He’s sold halves for the other days as well. I don’t think he’s supposed to, actually, so better say nothing to anyone else.’
‘No.’
‘Bettina’s his third wife,’ she said. ‘She’s a model.’
‘Very pretty.’
‘And not as dumb as she looks.’
I heard the dryness in her voice and acknowledged that I had myself sounded condescending.
‘Mind you,’ Judith said forgivingly, ‘his second wife was the most gorgeous thing on earth, but without two thoughts to rub together. Even Dissdale got tired of the total vacancy behind the sensational violet eyes. It’s all very well to get a buzz when all men light up on meeting your wife, but it rather kicks the stilts away when the same men diagnose total dimness within five minutes and start pitying you instead.’
‘I can see that. What became of her?’
‘Dissdale introduced her to a boy who’d inherited millions and had an IQ on a par with hers. The last I heard they were in a fog of bliss.’
From where we stood we couldn’t see much of the race, only a head-on view of the horses as they came up to the winning post. In no way did I mind that, and when one of the leaders proved to carry bright pink Judith caught hold of my arm and shook it.
‘That’s Cretonne, isn’t it?’ She listened to the announcement of the winner’s number. ‘Do you realise, Tim, that we’ve damned well won?’ She was laughing with pleasure, her face full of sunshine and wonder.
‘Bully for Calder Jackson.’
‘You don’t trust him,’ she said. ‘I could see it in all your faces, yours and Henry’s and Gordon’s. You all have the same way of peering into people’s souls: you too, though you’re so young. You were all being incredibly polite so that he shouldn’t see your reservations.’
I smiled. ‘That sounds disgusting.’
‘I’ve been married to Gordon for nine years,’ she said.
There was again a sudden moment of stillness in which we looked at each other in wordless question and answer. Then she shook her head slightly, and after a pause I nodded acquiescence: and I thought that with a woman so straightforwardly intelligent I could have been content for ever.
‘Do we collect our winnings now or later?’ she asked.
‘Now, if we wait awhile.’
Waiting together for the jockeys to weigh-in and the all clear to be given for the pay-out seemed as little hardship for her as for me. We talked about nothing much and the time passed in a flash; and eventually we made our way back to the box to find that everyone there too had backed Cretonne and was high with the same success. Calder Jackson beamed and looked modest, and Dissdale expansively opened more bottles of excellent Krug, champagne of Kings.
Escorting one’s host’s wife to the paddock was not merely acceptable but an expected civility, so that it was with a benign eye that Gordon greeted our return. I was both glad and sorry, looking at his unsuspecting friendliness, that he had nothing to worry about. The jewel in his house would stay there and be his alone. Unattached bachelors could lump it.
The whole party, by now markedly carefree, crowded the box’s balcony for the big race. Dissdale said he had staked his all on his banker, Sandcastle; and although he said it with a laugh I saw the tremor in his hands which fidgetted with the raceglasses. He’s in too deep, I thought. A bad way to bet.
Most of the others, fired by Dissdale’s certainty, happily clutched tickets doubling Sandcastle every which-way. Even Lorna Shipton, with a pink glow on each bony cheekbone, confessed to Henry that just for once, as it was a special day, she had staked five pounds in forecasts.
‘And you, Tim?’ Henry teased. ‘Your shirt?’
Lorna looked confused. I smiled. ‘Buttons and all,’ I said Cheerfully.
‘No, but…’ Lorna said.
‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘I’ve dozens more shirts at home.’
Henry laughed and steered Lorna gently away, and I found myself standing next to Calder Jackson.
‘Do you gamble?’ I asked, for something to say.
‘Only on certainties.’ He smiled blandly in the way that scarcely warmed his eyes. ‘Though on certainties it’s hardly a gamble.’
‘And is Sandcastle a certainty?’
He shook his curly head. ‘A probability. No racing bet’s a certainty. The horse might feel ill. Might be kicked at the start.’
I glanced across at Dissdale who was faintly sweating, and hoped for his sake that the horse would feel well and come sweetly out of the stalls.
‘Can you tell if a horse is sick just by looking at him?’ I enquired. ‘I mean, if you just watched him walk round the parade ring, could you tell?’
Calder answered in the way that revealed it was again an often-asked question. ‘Of course sometimes you can see at once, but mostly a horse as ill as that wouldn’t have been brought to the races. I prefer to look at a horse closely. To examine for instance the colour inside the eyelid and inside the nostril. In a sick horse, what should be a healthy pink may be pallid.’ He stopped with apparent finality, as if that were the appointed end of that answer, but after a few seconds, during which the whole huge crowd watched Sandcastle stretch out in the sun in the canter to the post, he said almost with awe, ‘That’s a superb horse. Superb.’ It sounded to me like his first spontaneous remark of the day and it vibrated with genuine enthusiasm.
‘He looks great,’ I agreed.
Calder Jackson smiled as if with indulgence at the shallowness of my judgement compared with the weight of his inside knowledge. ‘He should have won the Derby,’ he said. ‘He got shut in on the rails, couldn’t get out in time.’
My place at the great man’s side was taken by Bettina, who threaded her arm through his and said, ‘Dear Calder, come down to the front, you can see better than here at the back.’ She gave me a photogenic little smile and pulled her captive after her down the steps.
In a buzz that rose to a roar the runners covered their mile and a half journey; longer than the 2,000 Guineas, the same length as the Derby. Sandcastle in scarlet and white was making no show at all to universal groans and lay only fifth as the field swept round the last bend, and Dissdale looked as if he might have a heart attack.
Alas for my shirt, I thought. Alas for Lorna’s forecasts. Bang goes the banker that can’t lose.
Dissdale, unable to watch, collapsed weakly onto one of the small chairs which dotted the balcony, and in the next-door boxes people were standing on top of theirs and jumping up and down and screaming.
‘Sandcastle making his move…’ the commentator’s voice warbled over the loudspeakers, but the yells of the crowd drowned the rest.
The scarlet and white colours had moved to the outside. The daisy-cutter action was there for the world to see. The superb horse, the big rangy colt full of courage was eating up his ground.
Our box in the grandstand was almost a furlong down the course from the winning post, and when he reached us Sandcastle still had three horses ahead. He was flying, though, like a streak, and I found the sight of this fluid valour, this all-out striving, most immensely moving and exciting. I grabbed Dissdale by his despairing shoulder and hauled him forcefully to his feet.
‘Look,’ I shouted in his ear. ‘Watch. Your banker’s going to win. He’s a marvel. He’s a dream.’
He turned with a gaping mouth to stare in the direction of the winning post and he saw… he saw Sandcastle among the tumult going like a javelin, free now of all the others, aiming straight for the prize.
‘He’s won,’ Dissdale’s mouth said slackly, though amid the noise I could hardly hear him. ‘He’s bloody won.’
I helped him up the steps into the box. His skin was grey and damp and he was stumbling.
‘Sit down,’ I said, pulling out the first chair I came to, but he shook his head weakly and made his shaky way to his own place at the head of the table. He almost fell into it, heavily, and stretched out a trembling hand to his champagne.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘I’ll never do that again. Never on God’s earth.’
‘Do what?’
He gave me a flickering glance over his glass and said, ‘All on one throw.’
All. He’d said it before. ‘All on the banker…’ He surely couldn’t, I thought, have meant literally all; but yet not much else could have produced such physical symptoms.
Everyone else piled back into the room with ballooning jollity. Everyone without exception had backed Sandcastle, thanks to Dissdale. Even Calder Jackson, when pressed by Bettina, admitted to ‘a small something on the Tote. I don’t usually, but just this once.’ And if he’d lost, I thought, he wouldn’t have confessed.
Dissdale, from near fainting, climbed rapidly to a pulsethrobbing high, the colour coming back to his plump cheeks in a hectic red. No one seemed to have noticed his near-collapse, certainly not his wife, who flirted prettily with the healer and got less than her due response. More wine easily made its way down every throat, and there was no doubt that for the now commingled party the whole day was a riotous success.
In a while Henry offered to take Judith to the paddock. Gordon to my relief invited Lorna, which left me with the mystery lady, Pen Warner, with whom I’d so far exchanged only the thrilling words ‘How do you do.’
‘Would you like to go down?’ I asked.
‘Yes, indeed. But you don’t need to stay with me if it’s too much bother.’
‘Are you so insecure?’
There was a quick widening of the eyes and a visible mental shift. ‘You’re damned rude,’ she said. ‘And Judith said you were nice.’
I let her go past me out onto the landing and smiled as she went. ‘I should like to stay with you,’ I said, ‘if it’s not too much bother.’
She gave me a dry look, but as we more or less had to walk in single file along the narrow passageway owing to people going in the opposite direction she said little more until we had negotiated the lifts, the escalators and the pedestrian tunnel and had emerged into the daylight of the paddock.
It was her first time at Ascot, she said. Her first time, in fact, at the races.
‘What do you think of it?’
‘Very beautiful. Very brave. Quite mad.’
‘Does sanity lie in ugliness and cowardice?’ I asked.
‘Life does, pretty often,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
‘And some aren’t happy unless they’re desperate.’
She quietly laughed. ‘Tragedy inspires, so they say.’
‘They can stick it,’ I said. ‘I’d rather lie in the sun.’
We stood on the raised tiers of steps to watch the horses walk round the ring, and she told me that she lived along the road from Judith in another house fronting the common. ‘I’ve lived there all my life, long before Judith came. We met casually, as one does, in the local shops, and just walked home together one day several years ago. Been friends ever since.’
‘Lucky,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you live alone?’ I asked conversationally.
Her eyes slid my way with inner amusement. ‘Yes, I do. Do you?’
I nodded.
‘I prefer it,’ she said.
‘So do I.’
Her skin was clear and still girlish, the thickened figure alone giving an impression of years passing. That and the look in the eyes, the ‘I’ve seen the lot’ sadness.
‘Are you a magistrate?’ I asked.
She looked startled. ‘No, I’m not. What an odd thing to ask.’
I made an apologetic gesture. ‘You just look as if you might be.’
She shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t have time, even if I had the urge.’
‘But you do do good in the world.’
She was puzzled. ‘What makes you say so?’
‘I don’t know. The way you look.’ I smiled to take away any seriousness and said, ‘Which horse do you like? Shall we choose one and bet?’
‘What about Burnt Marshmallow?’
She liked the name, she said, so we queued briefly at a Tote window and invested some of the winnings from Cretonne and Sandcastle.
During our slow traverse of the paddock crowds on our way back towards the box we came towards Calder Jackson, who was surrounded by respectful listeners and didn’t see us.
‘Garlic is as good as penicillin,’ he was saying. ‘If you scatter grated garlic onto a septic wound it will kill all the bacteria…’
We slowed a little to hear.
’… and comfrey is miraculous,’ Calder said. ‘It knits bones and cures intractable skin ulcers in half the time you’d expect.’
‘He said all that upstairs,’ I said.
Pen Warner nodded, faintly smiling. ‘Good sound herbal medicine,’ she said. ‘You can’t fault him. Comfrey contains allantoin, a well-known cell proliferant.’
‘Does it? I mean… do you know about it?’
‘Mm.’ We walked on, but she said nothing more until we were high up again in the passageway to the box. ‘I don’t know whether you’d think I do good in the world… but basically I dole out pills.’
‘Er…?’ Isaid.
She smiled. ‘I’m a lady in a white coat. A pharmacist.’
I suppose I was in a way disappointed, and she sensed it.
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘we can’t all be glamorous. I told you life was ugly and frightening, and from my point of view that’s often what it is for my customers. I see fear every day… and I know its face.’
‘Pen,’ I said, ‘forgive my frivolity. I’m duly chastened.’
We reached the box to find Judith alone there, Henry having loitered to place a bet.
‘I told Tim I’m a pharmacist,’ Pen said. ‘He thinks it’s boring.’
I got no further than the first words of protestation when Judith interrupted.
‘She’s not just “a” pharmacist,’ she said. ‘She owns her own place. Half the medics in London recommend her. You’re talking to a walking gold-mine with a heart like a wet sponge.’
She put her arm round Pen’s waist and the two of them together looked at me, their eyes shining with what perhaps looked like liking, but also with the mischievous feminine superiority of being five or six years older.
‘Judith!’ I said compulsively. ‘I… I…’ I stopped. ‘Oh damn it,’ I said. ‘Have some Krug.’
Dissdale’s friends returned giggling to disrupt the incautious minute and shortly Gordon, Henry and Lorna crowded in. The whole party pressed out onto the balcony to watch the race, and because it was a time out of reality Burnt Marshmallow romped home by three lengths.
The rest of the afternoon slid fast away. Henry at some point found himself alone out on the balcony beside me while inside the box the table was being spread with a tea that was beyond my stretched stomach entirely and a temptation from which the ever-hungry Henry had bodily removed himself.
‘How’s your cartoonist?’ he said genially. ‘Are we staking him, or are we not?’
‘You’re sure… I have to decide… all alone?’
‘I said so. Yes.’
‘Well… I got him to bring some more drawings to the bank. And his paints.’
‘His paints?’
‘Yes. I thought if I could see him at work, I’d know…’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, I took him into the private interview room and asked him to paint the outline of a cartoon film while I watched; and he did it, there and then, in acrylics. Twenty-five outline sketches in bright colour, all within an hour. Same characters, different story, and terrifically funny. That was on Monday. I’ve been… well… dreaming about those cartoons. It sounds absurd. Maybe they’re too much on my mind.’
‘But you’ve decided?’
After a pause I said, ‘Yes.’
‘And?’
With a sense of burning bridges I said, ‘To go ahead.’
‘All right.’ Henry seemed unalarmed. ‘Keep me informed.’
‘Yes, of course.’
He nodded and smoothly changed the subject. ‘Lorna and I have won quite a bit today. How about you?’
‘Enough to give Uncle Freddie fits about the effect on my unstable personality.’
Henry laughed aloud. ‘Your Uncle Freddie,’ he said, ‘knows you better than you may think.’
At the end of that splendid afternoon the whole party descended together to ground level and made its way to the exit; to the gate which opened onto the main road, and across that to the car park and to the covered walk which led to the station.
Calder just ahead of me walked in front, the helmet of curls sent kindly over Bettina, the strong voice thanking her and Dissdale for ‘a most enjoyable time.’ Dissdale himself, not only fully recovered but incoherent with joy as most of his doubles, crebles and accumulators had come up, patted Calder plumply on the shoulder and invited him over to ‘my place’ for the weekend.
Henry and Gordon, undoubtedly the most sober of the party, were fiddling in their pockets for car keys and throwing their racecards into wastebins. Judith and Pen were talking to each other and Lorna was graciously unbending to Dissdale’s friends. It seemed to be only I, with unoccupied eyes, who saw at all what was about to happen.
We were out on the pavement, still in a group, half-waiting for a chance to cross the road, soon to break up and scatter. All talking, laughing, busy; except me.
A boy stood there on the pavement, watchful and still. I noticed first the fixed, burning intent in the dark eyes, and quickly after that the jeans and faded shirt which contrasted sharply with our Ascot clothes, and then finally with incredulity the knife in his hand.
I had almost to guess at whom he was staring with such deadly purpose, and no time even to shout a warning. He moved across the pavement with stunning speed, the stab already on its upward travel.
I jumped almost without thinking; certainly without assessing consequences or chances. Most unbankerlike behaviour.
The steel was almost in Calder’s stomach when I deflected it. I hit the boy’s arm with my body in a sort of flying tackle and in a flashing view saw the weave of Calder’s trousers, the polish on his shoes, the litter on the pavement. The boy fell beneath me and I thought in horror that somewhere between our bodies he still held that wicked blade.
He writhed under me, all muscle and fury, and tried to heave me off. He was lying on his back, his face just under mine, his eyes like slits and his teeth showing between drawn-back lips. I had an impression of dark eyebrows and white skin and I could hear the breath hissing between his teeth in a tempest of effort.
Both of his hands were under my chest and I could feel him trying to get space enough to up-end the knife. I pressed down onto him solidly with all my weight and in my mind I was saying ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, you bloody fool’; and I was saying it for his sake, which seemed crazy to me at the time and even crazier in retrospect. He was trying to do me great harm and all I thought about was the trouble he’d be in if he succeeded.
We were both panting but I was taller and stronger and I could have held him there for a good while longer but for the two policemen who had been out on the road directing traffic. They had seen the melee; seen as they supposed a man in morning dress attacking a pedestrian, seen us struggling on the ground. In any case the first I knew of their presence was the feel of vice-like hands fastening onto my arms and pulling me backwards.
I resisted with all my might. I didn’t know they were policemen. I had eyes only for the boy: his eyes, his hands, his knife.
With peremptory strength they hauled me off, one of them anchoring my upper arms to my sides by encircling me from behind. I kicked furiously backwards and turned my head, and only then realised that the new assailants wore navy blue.
The boy comprehended the situation in a flash. He rolled over onto his feet, crouched for a split second like an athlete at the blocks and without lifting his head above waist-height slithered through the flow of the crowds still pouring out of the gates and disappeared out of sight inside the racecourse. Through there they would never find him. Through there he would escape to the cheaper rings and simply walk out of the lower gate.
I stopped struggling but the policemen didn’t let go. They had no thought of chasing the boy. They were incongruously calling me ‘sir’ while treating me with contempt, which if I’d been calm enough for reflection I would have considered fairly normal.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said finally to one of them, ‘what do you think that knife’s doing on the pavement?’
They looked down to where it lay; to where it had fallen when the boy ran. Eight inches of sharp steel kitchen knife with a black handle.
‘He was trying to stab Calder Jackson,’ I said. ‘All I did was stop him. Why do you think he’s gone?’
By this time Henry, Gordon, Laura, Judith and Pen were standing round in an anxious circle continually assuring the law that never in a million years would their friend attack anyone except out of direst need, and Calder was looking dazed and fingering a slit in the waistband of his trousers.
The farce slowly resolved itself into duller bureaucratic order. The policemen relinquished their hold and I brushed the dirt off the knees of my father’s suit and straightened my tangled tie. Someone picked up my tumbled top hat and gave it to me. I grinned at Judith. It all seemed such a ridiculous mixture of death and bathos.
The aftermath took half of the evening and was boring in the extreme: police station, hard chairs, polystyrene cups of coffee.
No, I’d never seen the boy before.
Yes, I was sure the boy had been aiming at Calder specifically.
Yes, I was sure he was only a boy. About sixteen, probably.
Yes, I would know him again. Yes, I would help with an Identikit picture.
No. My fingerprints were positively not on the knife. The boy had held onto it until he ran.
Yes, of course they could take my prints, in case.
Calder, wholly mystified, repeated over and over that he had no idea who could want to kill him. He seemed scandalised, indeed, at the very idea. The police persisted: most people knew their murderers, they said, particularly when as seemed possible in this case the prospective killer had been purposefully waiting for his victim. According to Mr Ekaterin the boy had known Calder. That was quite possible, Calder said, because of his television appearances, but Calder had not known him.
Among some of the police there was a muted quality, among others a sort of defiant aggression, but it was only Calder who rather acidly pointed out that if they hadn’t done such a good job of hauling me off, they would now have the boy in custody and wouldn’t need to be looking for him.
‘You could have asked first,’ Calder said, but even I shook my head.
If I had indeed been the aggressor I could have killed the boy while the police were asking the onlookers just who was fighting whom. Act first, ask questions after was a policy full of danger, but getting it the wrong way round could be worse.
Eventually we both left the building, Calder on the way out trying his best with unrehearsed words. ‘Er… Tim… Thanks are in order… If it hadn’t been for you… I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say nothing,’ I said. ‘I did it without thinking. Glad you’re OK.’
I had taken it for granted that everyone else would be long gone, but Dissdale and Bettina had waited for Calder, and Gordon, Judith and Pen for me, all of them standing in a group by some cars and talking to three or four strangers.
‘We know you and Calder both came by train,’ Gordon said, walking towards us, ‘but we decided we’d drive you home.’
‘You’re extraordinarily kind,’ I said.
‘My dear Dissdale…’ Calder said, seeming still at a loss for words. ‘So grateful, really.’
They made a fuss of him; the endangered one, the lion delivered. The strangers round the cars turned out to be gentlemen of the press, to whom Calder Jackson was always news, alive or dead. To my horror they announced themselves, producing notebooks and a camera, and wrote down everything anyone said, except they got nothing from me because all I wanted to do was shut them up.
As well try to stop an avalanche with an outstretched palm. Dissdale and Bettina and Gordon and Judith and Pen did a diabolical job, which was why for a short time afterwards I suffered from public notoriety as the man who had saved Calder Jackson’s life.
No one seemed to speculate about his assailant setting out for a second try.
I looked at my photograph in the papers and wondered if the boy would see it, and know my name.