Banker

NOVEMBER

Val Fisher said at lunch one day, ‘I’ve received a fairly odd request.’ (It was a Friday: grilled fish.)
‘Something new?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes. Chap wants to borrow five million pounds to buy a racehorse.’
Everyone at the table laughed except Val himself.
‘I thought I’d toss it at you,’ he said. ‘Kick it around some. See what you think.’
‘What horse?’ Henry said.
‘Something called Sandcastle.’
Henry, Gordon and I all looked at Val with sharpened attention; almost perhaps with eagerness.
‘Mean something to you three, does it?’ he said, turning his head from one to the other of us.
Henry nodded. ‘That day we all went to Ascot. Sandcastle ran there, and won. A stunning performance. Beautiful.’
Gordon said reminiscently, ‘The man whose box we were in saved his whole business on that race. Do you remember Dissdale, Tim?’
‘Certainly do.’
‘I saw him a few weeks ago. On top of the world. God knows how much he won.’
‘Or how much he staked,’ I said.
‘Yes, well,’ Val said. ‘Sandcastle. He won the 2,000 Guineas, as I understand, and the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot. Also the “Diamond” Stakes in July, and the Champion Stakes at Newmarket last month. This is, I believe, a record second only to winning the Derby or the Arc de Triomphe. He finished fourth, incidentally, in the Derby. He could race next year as a four-year-old, but if he flopped his value would be less than it is at the moment. Our prospective client wants to buy him now and put him to stud.’
The rest of the directors got on with their fillets of sole while listening interestedly with eyes and ears. A stallion made a change, I suppose, from chemicals, electronics and oil.
‘Who is our client?’ Gordon asked. Gordon liked fish. He could eat it right handed with his fork, in no danger of shaking it off between plate and mouth.
‘A man called Oliver Knowles,’ Val said. ‘He owns a stud farm. He got passed along to me by the horse’s trainer, whom I know slightly because of our wives being distantly related. Oliver Knowles wants to buy, the present owner is willing to sell. All they need is the cash.’ He smiled. ‘Same old story.’
‘What’s your view?’ Henry said.
Val shrugged his well-tailored shoulders. ‘Too soon to have one of any consequence. But I thought, if it interested you at all, we could ask Tim to do a preliminary look-see. He has a background, after all, a lengthy acquaintance, shall we say, with racing.’
There was a murmur of dry amusement round the table.
‘What do you think?’ Henry asked me.
‘I’ll certainly do it if you like.’
Someone down the far end complained that it would be a waste of time and that merchant banks of our stature should not be associated with the Turf.
‘Our own dear Queen,’ someone said ironically, ‘is associated with the Turf. And knows the Stud Book backwards, so they say.’
Henry smiled. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least look into it.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Go ahead, Tim. Let us know.’
I spent the next few working days alternately chewing pencils with the computer programmer and joining us to a syndicate with three other banks to lend twelve point four million pounds short term at high interest to an international construction company with a gap in its cash-flow. In between those I telephoned around for information and opinions about Oliver Knowles, in the normal investigative preliminaries to any loan for anything, not only for a hair-raising price for a stallion.
Establishing a covenant, it was called. Only if the covenant was sound would any loan be further considered.
Oliver Knowles, I was told, was a sane, sober man of forty-one with a stud farm in Hertfordshire. There were three stallions standing there with ample provision for visiting mares, and he owned the one hundred and fifty acres outright, having inherited them on his father’s death.
When talking to local bank managers one listened attentively for what they left out, but Oliver Knowles’ bank manager left out not much. Without in the least discussing his client’s affairs in detail he said that occasional fair-sized loans had so far been paid off as scheduled and that Mr Knowles’ business sense could be commended. A rave notice from such a source.
‘Oliver Knowles?’ a racing acquaintance from the long past said. ‘Don’t know him myself. I’ll ask around,’ and an hour later called back with the news. ‘He seems to be a good guy but his wife’s just buggered off with a Canadian. He might be a secret wife-beater, who can tell? Otherwise the gen is that he’s as honest as any horse-breeder, which you can take as you find it, and how’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine, thanks. She remarried last year. Lives in Jersey.’
‘Good. Lovely lady. Always buying us icecreams. I adored her.’
I put the receiver down with a smile and tried a credit rating agency. No black marks, they said: the Knowles credit was good.
I told Gordon across the room that I seemed to be getting nothing but green lights, and at lunch that day repeated the news to Henry. He looked around the table, collecting a few nods, a few frowns and a great deal of indecision.
‘We couldn’t carry it all ourselves, of course,’ Val said. ‘And it isn’t exactly something we could go to our regular sources with. They’d think us crackers.’
Henry nodded. ‘We’d have to canvas friends for private money. I know a few people here or there who might come in. Two million, I think, is all we should consider ourselves. Two and a half at the outside.’
‘I don’t approve,’ a dissenting director said. ‘It’s madness. Suppose the damn thing broke its leg?’
‘Insurance,’ Henry said mildly.
Into a small silence I said, ‘If you felt like going into it further I could get some expert views on Sandcastle’s breeding, and then arrange blood and fertility tests. And I know it’s not usual with loans, but I do think someone like Val should go and personally meet Oliver Knowles and look at his place. It’s too much of a risk to lend such a sum for a horse without going into it extremely carefully.’
‘Just listen to who’s talking,’ said the dissenter, but without ill-will.
‘Mm,’ Henry said, considering. ‘What do you think, Val?’
Val Fisher smoothed a hand over his always smooth face. ‘Tim should go,’ he said. ‘He’s done the groundwork, and all I know about horses is that they eat grass.’
The dissenting director almost rose to his feet with the urgency of his feelings.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘all this is ridiculous. How can we possibly finance a horse?’
‘Well, now,’ Henry answered. ‘The breeding of thoroughbreds is big business, tens of thousands of people round the world make their living from it. Look upon it as an industry like any other. We gamble here on shipbuilders, motors, textiles, you name it, and all of those can go bust. And none of them,’ he finished with a near-grin, ‘can pro-create in their own image.’
The dissenter heavily shook his head. ‘Madness. Utter madness.’
‘Go and see Oliver Knowles, Tim,’ Henry said.
Actually I thought it prudent to bone up on the finances of breeding in general before listening to Oliver Knowles himself, on the basis that I would then have a better idea of whether what he was proposing was sensible or not.
I didn’t myself know anyone who knew much on the subject, but one of the beauties of merchant banking was the ramification of people who knew people who knew people who could find someone with the information that was wanted. I sent out She question-mark smoke signal and from distant out-of-sight mountain tops the answer puff-puffed back.
Ursula Young, I was told, would put me right. ‘She’s a bloodstock agent. Very sharp, very talkative, knows her stuff. She used to work on a stud farm, so you’ve got it every whichway. She says she’ll tell you anything you want, only if you want to see her in person this week it will have to be at Doncaster races on Saturday, she’s too busy to spend the time else.’
I went north to Doncaster by train and met the lady at the racecourse, where the last Flat meeting of the year was being held. She was waiting as arranged by the entrance to the Members’ Club and wearing an identifying red velvet beret, and she swept me off to a secluded table in a bar where we wouldn’t be interrupted.
She was fifty, tough, good-looking, dogmatic and inclined to treat me as a child. She also gave me a patient and invaluable lecture on the economics of owning a stallion.
‘Stop me,’ she said to begin with, ‘if I say something you con’t understand.’
I nodded.
‘All right. Say you own a horse that’s won the Derby and you want to capitalise on your goldmine. You judge what you think you can get for the horse, then you divide that by forty and try to sell each of the forty shares at that price. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. It depends on the horse. With Troy, now, they were queuing up. But if your winner isn’t frightfully well bred or if it made little show except in the Derby you’ll get a cool response and have to bring the price down. OK so far?’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Why only forty shares?’
She looked at me in amazement. ‘You don’t know a thing, do you?’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘Well, a stallion covers forty mares in a season, and the season, incidentally, lasts roughly from February to June. The mares come to him, of course. He doesn’t travel, he stays put at home. Forty is just about average; physically I mean. Some can do more, but others get exhausted. So forty is the accepted number. Now, say you have a mare and you’ve worked out that if you mate her with a certain stallion you might get a top-class foal, you try to get one of those forty places. The places are called nominations. You apply for a nomination, either directly to the stud where the stallion is standing, or through an agent like me, or even by advertising in a breeders’ newspaper. Follow?’
‘Gasping,’ I nodded.
She smiled briefly. ‘People who invest in stallion shares sometimes have broodmares of their own they want to breed from.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps I should have explained more clearly that everyone who owns a share automatically has a nomination to the stallion every year.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Yes. So say you’ve got your share and consequently your nomination but you haven’t a mare to send to the stallion, then you sell your nomination to someone who has a mare, in the ways I already described.’
‘I’m with you.’
‘After the first three years the nominations may vary in price and in fact are often auctioned, but of course for the first three years the price is fixed.’
‘Why of course?’
She sighed and took a deep breath. ‘For three years no one knows whether the progeny on the whole are going to be winners or not. The gestation period is eleven months, and the first crop of foals don’t race until they’re two. If you work it out, that means that the stallion has stood for three seasons, and therefore covered a hundred and twenty mares, before the crunch.’
‘Right.’
‘So to fix the stallion fee for the first three years you divide the price of the stallion by one hundred and twenty, and that’s it. That’s the fee charged for the stallion to cover a mare. That’s the sum you receive if you sell your nomination.’
I blinked.
‘That means,’ I said, ‘that if you sell your nomination for three years you have recovered the total amount of your original investment?’
That’s right.’
‘And after that… every time, every year you sell your nomination, it’s clear profit?’
‘Yes. But taxed, of course.’
‘And how long does that go on?’
She shrugged. ‘Ten to fifteen years. Depends on the stallion’s potency.’
‘Butthat’s…’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One of the best investments on earth.’
The bar had filled up behind us with people crowding in, talking loudly, and breathing on their fingers against the chill of the raw day outside. Ursula Young accepted a warmer in the shape of whisky and ginger wine, while I had coffee.
‘Don’t you drink?’ she asked with mild disapproval.
‘Not often in the daytime.’
She nodded vaguely, her eyes scanning the company, her mind already on her normal job. ‘Any more questions?’ she asked.
‘I’m bound to think of some the minute we part.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll be here until the end of racing. If you want me, you’ll see me near the weighing room after each race.’
We were on the point of standing up to leave when a man whose head one could never forget came into the bar.
‘Calder Jackson!’ I exclaimed.
Ursula casually looked. ‘So it is.’
‘Do you know him?’ I asked.
‘Everyone does.’ There was almost a conscious neutrality in her voice as if she didn’t want to be caught with her thoughts showing. The same response, I reflected, that he had drawn from Henry and Gordon and me.
‘You don’t like him?’ I suggested.
‘I feel nothing either way.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s part of the scene. From what people say, he’s achieved some remarkable cures.’ She glanced at me briefly. ‘I suppose you’ve seen him on television, extolling the value of herbs?’
‘I met him,’ I said, ‘at Ascot, back in June.’
‘One tends to.’ She got to her feet, and I with her, thanking her sincerely for her help.
‘Think nothing of it,’ she said. ‘Any time.’ She paused. ‘I suppose it’s no use asking what stallion prompted this chat?’
‘Sorry, no. It’s on behalf of a client.’
She smiled slightly. ‘I’m here if he needs an agent.’
We made our way towards the door, a path, I saw, which would take us close to Calder. I wondered fleetingly whether he would know me, remember me after several months. I was after all not as memorable as himself, just a standard issue six foot with eyes, nose and mouth in roughly the right places, dark hair on top.
‘Hello Ursula,’ he said, his voice carrying easily through the general din. ‘Bitter cold day.’
‘Calder.’ She nodded acknowledgement.
His gaze slid to my face, dismissed it, focussed again on my companion. Then he did a classic double-take, his eyes widening with recognition.
‘Tim,’ he said incredulously. ‘Tim…’ he flicked his fingers to bring the difficult name to mind, ‘… Tim Ekaterin!’
I nodded.
He said to Ursula, ‘Tim, here, saved my life.’
She was surprised until he explained, and then still surprised I hadn’t told her. ‘I read about it, of course,’ she said. ‘And congratulated you, Calder, on your escape.’
‘Did you ever hear any more,’ I asked him. ‘From the police, or anyone?’
He shook his curly head. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘The boy didn’t try again?’
‘No.’
‘Did you really have no idea where he came from?’ I said. ‘I know you told the police you didn’t know, but… well… you just might have done.’
He shook his head very positively however and said, ‘If I could help to catch the little bastard I’d do it at once. But I don’t know who he was. I hardly saw him properly, just enough to know I didn’t know him from Satan.’
‘How’s the healing?’ I said. ‘The tingling touch.’
There was a brief flash in his eyes as if he had found the question flippant and in bad taste, but perhaps mindful that he owed me his present existence he answered civilly. ‘Rewarding,’ he said. ‘Heartwarming.’
Standard responses, I thought. As before.
‘Is your yard full, Calder?’ Ursula asked.
‘Always a vacancy if needed,’ he replied hopefully. ‘Have you a horse to send me?’
‘One of my clients has a two-year-old which looks ill and half dead all the time, to the despair of the trainer, who can’t get it fit. She – my client – was mentioning you.’
‘I’ve had great success with that sort of general debility.’
Ursula wrinkled her forehead in indecision. ‘She feels Ian Pargetter would think her disloyal if she sent you her colt. He’s been treating him for weeks, I think, without success.’
Calder smiled reassuringly. ‘Ian Pargetter and I are on good terms, I promise you. He’s even persuaded owners himself sometimes to send me their horses. Very good of him. We talk each case over, you know, and act in agreement. After all, we both have the recovery of the patient as our prime objective.’ Again the swift impression of a statement often needed.
‘Is Ian Pargetter a vet?’ I asked incuriously.
They both looked at me.
‘Er… yes,’ Calder said.
‘One of a group practice in Newmarket,’ Ursula added. ‘Very forward-looking. Tries new things. Dozens of trainers swear by him.’
‘Just ask him, Ursula,’ Calder said, ‘Ian will tell you he doesn’t mind owners sending me their horses. Even if he’s a bit open-minded about the laying on of hands, at least he trusts me not to make the patient worse.’ It was said as a self-deprecating joke, and we all smiled. Ursula Young and I in a moment or two walked on and out of the bar, and behind us we could hear Calder politely answering another of the everlasting questions.
‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘one of my favourite remedies for a prolonged cough in horses is liquorice root boiled in water with some figs. You strain the mixture and stir it into the horse’s normal feed…’
The door closed behind us and shut him off.
‘You’d think he’d get tired of explaining his methods,’ I said. ‘I wonder he never snaps.’
The lady said judiciously, ‘Calder depends on television fame, good public relations and medical success, roughly in that order. He owns a yard with about thirty boxes on the outskirts of Newmarket – it used to be a regular training stables before he bought it – and the yard’s almost always full. Short-term and long-term crocks, all sent to him either from true belief or as a last resort. I don’t pretend to know anything about herbalism, and as for supernatural healing powers…’ she shook her head. ‘But there’s no doubt that whatever his methods, horses do usually seem to leave his yard in a lot better health than when they went in.’
‘Someone at Ascot said he’d brought dying horses back to life.’
‘Hmph.’
‘You don’t believe it?’
She gave me a straight look, a canny businesswoman with a lifetime’s devotion to thoroughbreds.
‘Dying,’ she said, ‘Is a relative term when it doesn’t end in death.’
I made a nod into a slight bow of appreciation.
‘But to be fair,’ she said, ‘I know for certain that he totally and permanently cured a ten-year-old broodmare of colitis X, which has a habit of being fatal.’
‘They’re not all horses in training, then, that he treats?’
‘Oh no, he’ll take anybody’s pet from a pony to an event horse. Showjumpers, the lot. But the horse has to be worth it, to the owner, I mean. I don’t think Calder’s hospital is terribly cheap.’
‘Exorbitant?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. Fair, I suppose, if you consider the results.’
I seemed to have heard almost more about Calder Jackson than I had about stallion shares, but I did after all have a sort of vested interest. One tended to want a life one had saved to be of positive use in the world. Illogical, I dare say, but there it was. I was pleased that it was true that Calder cured horses, albeit in his own mysterious unorthodox ways: and if I wished that I could warm to him more as a person, that was unrealistic and sentimental.
Ursula Young went off about her business, and although I caught sight of both her and Calder during the afternoon, I didn’t see them again to speak to. I went back to London on the train, spent two hours of Sunday morning on the telephone, and early Sunday afternoon drove off to Hertfordshire in search of Oliver Knowles.
He lived in a square hundred-year-old stark red brick house which to my taste would have been friendlier if softened by trailing creeper. Blurred outlines, however, were not in Oliver Knowles’ soul: a crisp bare tidy ness was apparent in every corner of his spread.
His land was divided into a good number of paddocks of various sizes, each bordered by an immaculate fence of white rails; and the upkeep of those, I judged, as I pulled up on the weedless gravel before the front door, must alone cost a fortune. There was a scattering of mares and foals in the distance in the paddocks, mostly heads down to the grass, sniffing out the last tender shoots of the dying year. The day itself was cold with a muted sun dipping already towards distant hills, the sky quiet with the greyness of coming winter, the damp air smelling of mustiness, wood smoke and dead leaves.
There were no dead leaves as such to be seen. No flower beds, no ornamental hedges, no nearby trees. A barren mind, I thought, behind a business whose aim was fertility and the creation of life.
Oliver Knowles himself opened his front door to my knock, proving to be a pleasant lean man with an efficient, cultured manner of authority and politeness. Accustomed to command, I diagnosed. Feels easy with it; second nature. Positive, straightforward, self-controlled. Charming also, in an understated way.
‘Mr Ekaterin?’ he shook hands, smiling. ‘I must confess I expected someone… older.’
There were several answers to that, such as ‘time will take care of it’ and ‘I’ll be older tomorrow’, but nothing seemed appropriate. Instead I said ‘I report back’ to reassure him, which it did, and he invited me into his house.
Predictably the interior was also painfully tidy, such papers and magazines as were to be seen being squared up with the surface they rested on. The furniture was antique, well polished, brass handles shining, and the carpets venerably from Persia. He led me into a sitting room which was also office, the walls thickly covered with framed photographs of horses, mares and foals, and the window giving on to a view of, across a further expanse of gravel, an archway leading into an extensive stable yard.
‘Boxes for mares,’ he said, following my eyes. ‘Beyond them, the foaling boxes. Beyond those, the breeding pen, with the stallion boxes on the far side of that again. My stud groom’s bungalow and the lads’ hostel, those roofs you can see in the hollow, they’re just beyond the stallions.’ He paused. ‘Would you care perhaps to look round?’
‘Very much,’ I said.
‘Come along, then.’ He led the way to a door at the back of the house, collecting an overcoat and a black retriever from a mud room on the way. ‘Go on then, Squibs, old fellow,’ he said, fondly watching his dog squeeze ecstatically through the opening outside door. ‘Breath of fresh air won’t hurt you.’
We walked across to the stable arch with Squibs circling and zig-zagging nose-down to the gravel.
‘It’s our quietest time of year, of course,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘We have our own mares here, of course, and quite a few at livery.’ He looked at my face to see if I understood and decided to explain anyway. ‘They belong to people who own broodmares but have nowhere of their own to keep them. They pay us to board them.’
I nodded.
‘Then we have the foals born to the mares this past spring and of course the three stallions. Total of seventy-eight at the moment.’
‘And next spring,’ I said, ‘the mares coming to your stallions will arrive?’
‘That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘They come here a month or five weeks before they’re due to give birth to the foals they are already carrying, so as to be near the stallion within the month following. They have to foal here, because the foals would be too delicate straight after birth to travel.’
‘And… how long do they stay here?’
‘About three months altogether, by which time we hope the mare is safely in foal again.’
‘There isn’t much pause then,’ I said. ‘Between… er… pregnancies?’
He glanced at me with civil amusement. ‘Mares come into use nine days after foaling, but normally we would think this a bit too soon for breeding. The oestrus – heat you would call it – lasts six days, then there’s an interval of fifteen days, then the mare comes into use again for six days, and this time we breed her. Mind you,’ he added, ‘Nature being what it is, this cycle doesn’t work to the minute. In some mares the oestrus will last only two days, in some as much as eleven. We try to have the mare covered two or three times while she’s in heat, for the best chance of getting her in foal. A great deal depends on the stud groom’s judgement, and I’ve a great chap just now, he has a great feel for mares, a sixth sense, you might say.’
He led me briskly across the first big oblong yard where long dark equine heads peered inquisitively from over half-open stable doors, and through a passage on the far side which led to a second yard of almost the same size but whose doors were fully shut.
‘None of these boxes is occupied at the moment,’ he said, waving a hand around. ‘We have to have the capacity, though, for when the mares come.’
Beyond the second yard lay a third, a good deal smaller and again with closed doors.
‘Foaling boxes,’ Oliver Knowles explained. ‘All empty now, of course.’
The black dog trotted ahead of us, knowing the way. Beyond the foaling boxes lay a wide path between two small paddocks of about half an acre each, and at the end of the path, to the left, rose a fair sized barn with a row of windows just below its roof.
‘Breeding shed,’ Oliver Knowles said economically, producing a heavy key ring from his trouser pocket and unlocking a door set into a large roll-aside entrance. He gestured to me to go in, and I found myself in a bare concrete-floored expanse surrounded by white walls topped with the high windows, through which the dying sun wanly shone.
‘During the season of course the floor in here is covered with peat,’ he said.
I nodded vaguely and thought of life being generated purposefully in that quiet place, and we returned prosaically to the outer world with Oliver Knowles locking the door again behind us.
Along another short path between two more small paddocks we came to another small stable yard, this time of only six boxes, with feed room, tack room, hay and peat storage alongside.
‘Stallions,’ Oliver Knowles said.
Three heads almost immediately appeared over the half-doors, three sets of dark liquid eyes turning inquisitively our way.
‘Rotaboy,’ my host said, walking to the first head and producing a carrot unexpectedly. The black mobile lips whiffled over the outstretched palm and sucked the goodie in: strong teeth crunched a few times and Rotaboy nudged Oliver Knowles for a second helping. Oliver Knowles produced another carrot, held it out as before, and briefly patted the horse’s neck.
‘He’ll be twenty next year,’ he said. ‘Getting old, eh, old fella?’
He walked along to the next box and repeated the carrot routine. ‘This one is Diarist, rising sixteen.’
By the third box he said, ‘This is Parakeet,’ and delivered the treats and the pat. ‘Parakeet turns twelve on January 1st.’
He stood a little away from the horse so that he could see all three heads at once and said, ‘Rotaboy has been an outstanding stallion and still is, but one can’t realistically expect more than another one or two seasons. Diarist is successful, with large numbers of winners among his progeny, but none of them absolutely top rank like those of Rotaboy. Parakeet hasn’t proved as successful as I’d hoped. He turns out to breed better stayers than sprinters, and the world is mad nowadays for very fast two-year-olds. Parakeet’s progeny tend to be better at three, four, five and six. Some of his first crops are now steeplechasing and jumping pretty well.’
‘Isn’t that good?’ I asked, frowning, since he spoke with no great joy.
‘I’ve had to reduce his fee,’ he said. ‘People won’t send their top flat-racing mares to a stallion who breeds jumpers.’
‘Oh.’
After a pause he said ‘You can see why I need new blood here. Rotaboy is old, Diarist is middle rank, Parakeet is unfashionable. I will soon have to replace Rotaboy, and I must be sure I replace him with something of at least equal quality. The prestige of a stud farm, quite apart from its income, depends on the drawing-power of its stallions.’
‘Yes,’ I said, I see.’
Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet lost interest in the conversation and hope in the matter of carrots, and one by one withdrew into the boxes. The black retriever trotted around smelling unimaginable scents and Oliver Knowles began to walk me back towards the house.
‘On the bigger stud farms,’ he said, ‘you’ll find stallions which are owned by syndicates.’
‘Forty shares?’ I suggested.
He gave me a brief smile. ‘That’s right. Stallions are owned by any number of people between one and forty. When I first acquired Rotaboy it was in partnership with five others. I bought two of them out – they needed the money – so now I own half. This means I have twenty nominations each year, and I have ‘no trouble in selling all of them, which is most satisfactory.’ He looked at me enquiringly to make sure I understood, which, thanks to Ursula Young, I did.
‘I own Diarist outright. He was as expensive in the first place as Rotaboy, and as he’s middle rank, so is the fee I can get for him. I don’t always succeed in filling his forty places, and when that occurs I breed him to my own mares, and sell the resulting foals as yearlings.’
Fascinated, I nodded again.
‘With Parakeet it’s much the same. For the last three years I haven’t been able to charge the fee I did to begin with, and if I fill his last places these days it’s with mares from people who prefer steeplechasing, and this is increasingly destructive of his flat-racing image.’
We retraced our steps past the breeding shed and across the foaling yard.
‘This place is expensive to run,’ he said objectively. ‘It makes a profit and I live comfortably, but I’m not getting any further. I have the capacity here for another stallion – enough accommodation, that is to say, for the extra forty mares. I have a good business sense and excellent health, and I feel underex-tended. If I am ever to achieve more I must have more capital… and capital in the shape of a world-class stallion.’
‘Which brings us,’ I said, ‘to Sandcastle.’
He nodded. ‘If I acquired a horse like Sandcastle this stud would immediately be more widely known and more highly regarded.’
Understatement, I thought. The effect would be galvanic. ‘A sort of overnight stardom?’ I said.
‘Well, yes,’ he agreed with a satisfied smile. ‘I’d say you might be right.’
The big yard nearest the house had come moderately to life, with two or three lads moving about carrying feed scoops, hay nets, buckets of water and sacks of muck. Squibs with madly wagging tail went in a straight line towards a stocky man who bent to fondle his black ears.
‘That’s Nigel, my stud groom,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Come and meet him.’ And as we walked across he added, ‘If I can expand this place I’ll up-rate him to stud manager; give him more standing with the customers.’
We reached Nigel, who was of about my own age with crinkly light-brown hair and noticeably bushy eyebrows. Oliver Knowles introduced me merely as ‘a friend’ and Nigel treated me with casual courtesy but not as the possible source of future fortune. He had a Gloucestershire accent but not pronounced, and I would have placed him as a farmer’s son, if I’d had to.
‘Any problems?’ Oliver Knowles asked him, and Nigel shook his head.
‘Nothing except that Floating mare with the discharge.’
His manner to his employer was confident and without anxiety but at the same time diffident, and I had a strong impression that it was Nigel’s personality which suited Oliver Knowles as much as any skill he might have with mares. Oliver Knowles was not a man, I judged, to surround himself with awkward, unpredictable characters: the behaviour of everyone around him had to be as tidy as his place.
I wondered idly about the wife who had ‘just buggered off with a Canadian’, and at that moment a horse trotted into the yard with a young woman aboard. A girl, I amended, as she kicked her feet from the stirrups and slid to the ground. A noticeably curved young girl in jeans and heavy sweater with her dark hair tied in a pony tail. She led her horse into one of the boxes and presently emerged carrying the saddle and bridle, which she dumped on the ground outside the box before closing the bottom half of the door and crossing the yard to join us.
‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said.
‘Ginnie,’ added the girl, holding out a polite brown hand. ‘Are you the reason we didn’t go out to lunch?’
Her father gave an instinctive repressing movement and-Nigel looked only fairly interested.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘Oh, I would,’ she said. ‘Pa really doesn’t like parties. He uses any old excuse to get out of them, don’t you Pa?’
He gave her an indulgent smile while looking as if his thoughts were elsewhere.
‘I didn’t mind missing it,’ Ginnie said to me, anxious not to embarrass. ‘Twelve miles away and people all Pa’s age… but they do have frightfully good canapés, and also a lemon tree growing in their greenhouse. Did you know that a lemon tree has everything all at once – buds, flowers, little green knobbly fruit and big fat lemons, all going on all the time?’
‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said unnecessarily, ‘talks a lot.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know about lemon trees.’
She gave me an impish smile and I wondered if she was even younger than I’d first thought: and as if by telepathy she said, ‘I’m fifteen.’
‘Everyone has to go through it,’ I said.
Her eyes widened. ‘Did you hate it?’
I nodded. ‘Spots, insecurity, a new body you’re not yet comfortable in, self-consciousness… terrible.’
Oliver Knowles looked surprised. ‘Ginnie isn’t self-conscious, are you, Ginnie?’
She looked from him to me and back again and didn’t answer. Oliver Knowles dismissed the subject as of no importance anyway and said he ought to walk along and see the mare with the discharge. Would I care to go with him?
I agreed without reservation and we all set off along one of the paths between the white-railed paddocks, Oliver Knowles and myself in front, Nigel and Ginnie following, Squibs sniffing at every fencing post and marking his territory. In between Oliver Knowles explaining that some mares preferred living out of doors permanently, others would go inside if it snowed, others went in at nights, others lived mostly in the boxes, I could hear Ginnie telling Nigel that school this term was a dreadful drag owing to the new headmistress being a health fiend and making them all do jogging.
‘How do you know what mares prefer?’ I asked.
Oliver Knowles looked for the first time nonplussed.‘Er…’ he said. ‘I suppose… by the way they stand. If they feel cold and miserable they put their tails to the wind and look hunched. Some horses never do that, even in a blizzard. If they’re obviously unhappy we bring them in. Otherwise they stay out. Same with the foals.’ He paused. ‘A lot of mares are miserable if you keep them inside. It’s just… how they are.’
He seemed dissatisfied with the loose ends of his answer, but I found them reassuring. The one thing he had seemed to me to lack had been any emotional contact with the creatures he bred: even the carrots for the stallions had been slightly mechanical.
The mare with the discharge proved to be in one of the paddocks at the boundary of the farm, and while Oliver Knowles and Nigel peered at her rump end and made obscure remarks like ‘With any luck she won’t slip,’ and ‘It’s clear enough, nothing yellow or bloody,’ I spent my time looking past the last set of white rails to the hedge and fields beyond.
The contrast from the Knowles land was dramatic. Instead of extreme tidiness, a haphazard disorder. Instead of short green grass in well-tended rectangles, long unkempt brownish stalks straggling through an army of drying thistles. Instead of rectangular brick-built stable yards, a ramshackle collection of wooden boxes, light grey from old creosote and with tarpaulins tied over patches of roof.
Ginnie followed my gaze. ‘That’s the Watcherleys’ place,’ she said. ‘I used to go over there a lot but they’re so grimy and gloomy these days, not a laugh in sight. And all the patients have gone, practically, and they don’t even have the chimpanzees any more, they say they can’t afford them.’
‘What patients?’ I said.
‘Horse patients. It’s the Watcherleys’ hospital for sick horses. Haven’t you ever heard of it?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s pretty well known,’ Ginnie said. ‘Or at least it was until that razzamatazz man Calder Jackson stole the show. Mind you, the Watcherleys were no great shakes, I suppose, with Bob off to the boozer at all hours and Maggie sweating her guts out carrying muck sacks, but at least they used to be fun. The place was cosy, you know, even if bits of the boxes were falling off their hinges and weeds were growing everywhere, and all the horses went home blooming, or most of them, even if Maggie had her knees through her jeans and wore the same jersey for weeks and weeks on end. But Calder Jackson, you see, is the in thing, with all those chat shows on television and the publicity and such, and the Watcherleys have sort of got elbowed out.’
Her father, listening to the last of these remarks, added his own view. ‘They’re disorganised,’ he said. ‘No business sense. People liked their gypsy style for a while, but, as Ginnie says, they’ve no answer to Calder Jackson.’
‘How old are they?’ I asked, frowning.
Oliver Knowles shrugged. ‘Thirties. Going on forty. Hard to say.’
‘I suppose they don’t have a son of about sixteen, thin and intense, who hates Calder Jackson obsessively for ruining his parents’ business?’
‘What an extraordinary question,’ said Oliver Knowles, and Ginnie shook her head. ‘They’ve never had any children,’ she said. ‘Maggie can’t. She told me. They just lavish all that love on animals. It’s really grotty, what’s happening to them.’
It would have been so neat, I thought, if Calder Jackson’s would-be assassin had been a Watcherley son. Too neat, perhaps. But perhaps also there were others like the Watch-erleys whose star had descended as Calder Jackson’s rose. I said, ‘Do you know of any other places, apart from this one and Calder Jackson’s, where people send their sick horses?’
‘I expect there are some,’ Ginnie said. ‘Bound to be.’
‘Sure to be,’ said Oliver Knowles, nodding. ‘But of course we don’t send away any horse which falls ill here. I have an excellent vet, great with mares, comes day or night in emergencies.’
We made the return journey, Oliver Knowles pointing out to me various mares and foals of interest and distributing carrots to any head within armshot. Foals at foot, foals in utero; the fertility cycle swelling again to fruition through the quiet winter, life growing steadily in the dark.
Ginnie went off to see to the horse she’d been riding and Nigel to finish his inspections in the main yard, leaving Oliver Knowles, the dog and myself to go into the house. Squibs, poor fellow, got no further than his basket in the mud room, but Knowles and I returned to the sitting room-office from which we’d started.
Thanks to my telephone calls of the morning I knew what the acquisition and management of Sandcastle would mean in the matter of taxation, and I’d also gone armed with sets of figures to cover the interest payable should the loan be approved. I found that I needed my knowledge not to instruct but to converse: Oliver Knowles was there before me.
‘I’ve done this often, of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to arrange finance for buildings, for fencing, for buying the three stallions you saw, and for another two before them. I’m used to repaying fairly substantial bank loans. This new venture is of course huge by comparison, but if I didn’t feel it was within my scope I assure you I shouldn’t be contemplating it.’ He gave me a brief charming smile. ‘I’m not a nut case, you know. I really do know my business.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One can see.’
I told him that the maximum length of an Ekaterin loan (if one was forthcoming at all) would be five years, to which he merely nodded.
‘That basically means,’ I insisted, ‘That you’d have to receive getting on for eight million in that five years, even allowing for paying off some of the loan every year with consequently diminishing interest. It’s a great deal of money…. Are you sure you understand how much is involved?’
‘Of course I understand,’ he said. ‘Even allowing for interest payments and the ridiculously high insurance premiums on a horse like Sandcastle, I’d be able to repay the loan in five years. That’s the period I’ve used in planning.’
He spread out his sheets of neatly written calculations on his desk, pointing to each figure as he explained to me how he’d reached it. ‘A stallion fee of forty thousand pounds will cover it. His racing record justifies that figure, and I’ve been most carefully into the breeding of Sandcastle himself, as you can imagine. There is absolutely nothing in the family to alarm. No trace of hereditary illness or undesirable tendencies. He comes from a healthy blue-blooded line of winners, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t breed true.’ He gave me a photocopied genealogical table. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to advance a loan without getting an expert opinion on this. Please do take it with you.’
He gave me also some copies of his figures, and I packed them all into the brief case I’d taken with me.
‘Why don’t you consider halving your risk to twenty-one shares?’ I asked. ‘Sell nineteen. You’d still outvote the other owners – there’d be no chance of them whisking Sandcastle off somewhere else – and you’d be less stretched.’
With a smile he shook his head. ‘If I found for any reason that the repayments were causing me acute difficulty, I’d sell some shares as necessary. But I hope in five years time to own Sandcastle outright, and also as I told you to have attracted other stallions of that calibre, and to be numbered among the world’s top-ranking stud farms.’
His pleasant manner took away any suggestion of megalomania, and I could see nothing of that nature in him.
Ginnie came into the office carrying two mugs with slightly anxious diffidence.
‘I made some tea. Do you want some, Dad?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said immediately, before he could answer, and she looked almost painfully relieved. Oliver Knowles turned what had seemed like an incipient shake of the head into a nod, and Ginnie, handing over the mugs, said that if I wanted sugar she would go and fetch some. ‘And a spoon, I guess.’
‘My wife’s away,’ Oliver Knowles said abruptly.
‘No sugar,’ I said. ‘This is great.’
‘You won’t forget, Dad, will you, about me going back to school?’
‘Nigel will take you.’
‘He’s got visitors.’
‘Oh… all right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In half an hour, then.’
Ginnie looked even more relieved, particularly as I could clearly sense the irritation he was suppressing. ‘The school run,’ he said as the door closed behind his daughter, ‘was one of the things my wife always did. Does…’ He shrugged. ‘She’s away indefinitely. You might as well know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Can’t be helped.’ He looked at the tea-mug in my hand. ‘I was going to offer you something stronger.’
‘This is fine.’
‘Ginnie comes home on four Sundays a term. She’s a boarder, of course.’ He paused. ‘She’s not yet used to her mother not being here. It’s bad for her, but there you are, life’s like that.’
‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.
He gave me a glance in which I read both love for his daughter and a blindness to her needs. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘That you go anywhere near High Wycombe on your way home?’
‘Well,’ I said obligingly, ‘I could do.’
I consequently drove Ginnie back to her school, listening on the way to her views on the new headmistress’s compulsory jogging programme (‘all our bosoms flopping up and down, bloody uncomfortable and absolutely disgusting to look at’) and to her opinion of Nigel (‘Dad thinks the sun shines out of his you-know-what and I dare say he is pretty good with the mares, they all seem to flourish, but what the lads get up to behind his back is nobody’s business. They smoke in the feed sheds, I ask you! All that hay around… Nigel never notices. He’d make a rotten school prefect’) and to her outlook on life in general (‘I can’t wait to get out of school uniform and out of dormitories and being bossed around, and I’m no good at lessons; the whole thing’s a mess. Why has everything changed? I used to be happy, or at least I wasn’t unhappy, which I mostly seem to be nowadays, and no, it isn’t because of Mum going away, or not especially, as she was never a lovey-dovey sort of mother, always telling me to eat with my mouth shut and so on… and you must be bored silly hearing all this.’)
‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I’m not bored.’
‘I’m not even beautiful,’ she said despairingly. ‘I can suck in my cheeks until I faint but I’ll never look pale and bony and interesting.’
I glanced at the still rounded child-woman face, at the peach-bloom skin and the worried eyes.
‘Practically no one is beautiful at fifteen,’ I said. ‘It’s too soon.’
‘How do you mean – too soon?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘say at twelve you’re a child and flat and undeveloped and so on, and at maybe seventeen or eighteen you’re a full-grown adult, just think of the terrific changes your body goes through in that time. Appearance, desires, mental outlook, everything. So at fifteen, which isn’t much more than halfway, it’s still too soon to know exactly what the end product will be like. And if it’s of any comfort to you, you do now look as if you may be beautiful in a year or two, or at least not unbearably ugly.’
She sat in uncharacteristic silence for quite a distance, and then she said, ‘Why did you come today? I mean, who are you? If it’s all right to ask?’
‘It’s all right. I’m a sort of financial adviser. I work in a bank.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded slightly disappointed but made no further comment, and soon after that gave me prosaic and accurate directions to the school.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said, politely shaking hands as we stood beside the car.
‘A pleasure.’
‘And thanks…’ she hesitated. ‘Thanks anyway.’
I nodded, and she half-walked, half-ran to join a group of other girls going into the buildings. Looking briefly back she gave me a sketchy wave, which I acknowledged. Nice child, I thought, pointing the car homewards. Mixed up, as who wasn’t at that age. Middling brains, not quite pretty, her future a clean stretch of sand waiting for footprints.