FIVE
Bobby was dumbstruck.
Holly gave me a piercing look from the light brown eyes in which I read both alarm and stimulation.
‘Why did you say that?’ Bobby demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s only a short while overdue. We haven’t had any tests done yet,’ Bobby said; and to Holly, ‘You must have told him.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ She shook her head. ‘But I was thinking just then how happy I was first thing on Friday, when I woke up feeling sick. I was thinking how ironic it would be. All those months of trying, and the first time it may really have happened, we are in such trouble that the very last thing we need is a baby.’
Bobby frowned. ‘You must have told him,’ he repeated, and he sounded definitely upset, almost as if he were jealous.
‘Well, no, I didn’t,’ Holly said uncertainly.
‘On the way back here yesterday,’ he insisted.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget I said it. What does it matter?’
Bobby looked at me with resentment and then more forgivingly at Holly, as if some thought had struck him. ‘Is this the sort of thing you meant,’ he said doubtfully, ‘when you told me once about you and Kit reading each other’s minds when you were kids?’
She reluctantly nodded. ‘We haven’t done it for years, though.’
‘It doesn’t happen nowadays,’ I agreed. ‘I mean, this was just a once-off. A throw-back. I don’t suppose it will happen again.’
And if it did happen again, I thought, I would be more careful what I said. Stray thoughts would be sieved.
I understood Bobby’s jealousy perfectly well because I had felt it myself, extraordinarily strongly, when Holly first told me she had fallen in love. The jealousy had been quickly overlaid by a more normal dismay when she’d confessed just who it was she’d set her heart on, but I still remembered the sharpness of not wanting to share her, not wanting my status as her closest friend to be usurped by a stranger.
I’d been slightly shocked at my jealousy and done a fair amount of soul-searching, never before having questioned my feelings for my sister: and I’d made the reassuring but also rueful discovery that she could sleep with Bobby all she liked and leave me undisturbed: it was the mental intimacy I minded losing.
There had been sexual adventures of my own, of course, both before and after her marriage, but they had been shortlived affairs with no deep involvement, nothing anywhere approaching Holly’s commitment to Bobby. Plenty of time, I thought, and maybe, one of these days; and platitudes like that.
Bobby made at least a show of believing that telepathy between me and Holly wouldn’t happen again, although both she and I, giving each other the merest flick of a glance, guessed differently. If we chose to tune in, so to speak, the old habit would come back.
The three of us spent the evening trying not to return over and over to the central questions of who and why, and in the end went wearily to bed without any possible answers. I lay down again in jeans, jersey and socks in case Graves should return, but I reckoned that if he’d ever planned it, he had had second thoughts.
I was wrong.
The bell woke me with a clatter at three-thirty-five in the morning, and I was into my shoes, out of the house and running down the drive, in the strategy that Bobby and I had discussed the night before, almost before it stopped ringing.
Out of the open gateway, turn left; and sure enough, on a stretch of roadside grass that sometimes accommodated gypsies, stood the wherewithal for shifting horses. A car, this time, towing a two-horse trailer. A trailer with its rear ramp lowered; ready, but not yet loaded.
I ran straight up to the car and yanked open the driver’s door, but there was no one inside to be taken by surprise. Just keys in the ignition; unbelievable.
I lifted up the trailer’s ramp and bolted it shut, then climbed into the car, started up, and drove a couple of hundred yards to a side road. I turned into there, parked a short way along, left the keys in the ignition as before, and sprinted back to Bobby’s yard.
The scene was almost a repeat of the time before, at least as far as the lights, the shouting and obscenity went. Bobby and Jermyn Graves were standing outside the empty box where the alarm had been rigged and had all but come to blows. A thin boy of perhaps sixteen stood a short distance away, holding a large carrier bag, shifting from foot to foot and looking unhappy.
‘Give me my property,’ Graves yelled. ‘This is stealing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said in his ear. ‘Stealing is an intention permanently to deprive.’
‘What?’ He swung round to glare at me. ‘You again!’
‘If you’re talking law,’ I said, ‘it is within the law to withhold property upon which money is owed, until the debt is discharged.’
‘I’ll ruin you,’ he said vindictively. ‘I’ll ruin you both.’
‘Be sensible, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘You’re in the wrong.’
‘Who the shit cares. I won’t have some pipsqueak jockey and some bankrupt little trainer get the better of me, I’ll tell you that.’
The attendant boy said nervously, ‘Uncle…’
‘You shut up,’ Graves snapped.
The boy dropped the carrier and fell over his feet picking it up.
‘Go away, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Calm down. Think it over. Come and fetch your horses when your cheque’s been cleared, and that’ll be the end of it.’
‘No, it won’t.’
‘Up to you,’ I said, shrugging.
Bobby and I watched him try to extricate himself without severe loss of face, which could hardly be done. He delivered a few more threats with a good deal of bluster, and then finally, saying ‘Come on, come on’ irritably to his nephew, he stalked away down the drive.
‘Did you immobilise his horsebox?’ Bobby asked.
‘It was a car and a trailer, and the key was in it. I just drove it out of sight round the nearest corner. Wonder if they’ll find it.’
‘I suppose we needn’t have bothered,’ Bobby said. ‘As Graves went to the alarm box first.’
We had thought he might go to his other horse’s box first, find it empty, think he had the wrong place, and perhaps remove one of the horses from either side. We thought he might have brought more men. In the event, he hadn’t done either. But the precaution, all the same, might have been worth it.
We closed the empty stable and Bobby kicked against something on the ground. He bent to pick it up, and held it out for me to see: a large piece of thick felt with pieces of velcro attached. A silencer for a hoof. Fallen out of the carrier, no doubt.
‘Not leather boots,’ Bobby said, grimly. ‘Home-made.’
He switched off the yard lights and we stood for a while near the kitchen door, waiting. We would hear the car and trailer drive off, we thought, in the quiet night. What we heard instead, however, were hesitant footsteps coming back into the yard.
Bobby turned the lights on again, and the boy stood there, blinking and highly embarrassed.
‘Someone’s stolen Uncle’s car,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Jasper.’
‘Graves?’
He nodded and swallowed. ‘Uncle wants me to ring the police and get a taxi.’
‘If I were you,’ I said, ‘I’d go out of the gate here, turn left, take the first turn to the left along the road a bit, and use the public telephone box you’ll find down there.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He looked at us almost beseechingly. ‘It was only supposed to be a lark,’ he said. ‘It’s all gone wrong.’
We gave him no particular comfort, and after a moment he turned and went away again down the drive, his footsteps slowly receding.
‘What do you think?’ Bobby said.
‘I think we should rig the bell so that anyone coming up the drive sets it off.’
‘So do I. And I’ll disconnect it first thing when I get up.’
We began to run a blackened string tightly across the drive at knee level, and heard Graves’s car start up in the distance.
‘He’s found it,’ Bobby said. He smiled. ‘There’s no telephone box down that road, did you know?’
We finished the elementary alarm system and went yawning indoors to sleep for another couple of hours, and I reflected, as I lay down, about the way a feud could start, as with Graves, and continue through centuries, as with Allardecks and Fieldings, and could expand into political and religious persecutions on a national scale, permanently persisting as a habit of mind, a destructive hatred stuck in one groove. I would make a start in my own small corner, I thought sardonically, drifting off, and force my subconscious to love the Allardecks, of which my own sister, God help her, was one.
Persistence raised its ugliest head first thing in the morning.
I answered the telephone when it rang at eight-thirty because Bobby was out exercising his horses and Holly was again feeling sick: and it was the feed-merchant calling in his Etonian accent to say that he had received a further copy of the Daily Flag.
‘I’ve just picked it up,’ he said. ‘It’s today’s paper. Monday. There’s another piece outlined in red.’
‘What does it say?’ I asked, my heart sinking.
‘I think… well… you can come and fetch it, if you like. It’s longer, this time. And there’s a picture of Bobby.’
‘I’ll be there.’
I drove straight round in Holly’s car and found the feed-merchant in his office as before. Silently he handed me the paper, and with growing dismay I looked at the picture which made Bobby seem a grinning fool, and read the damage in Intimate Details.
Money troubles abound for Robertson (Bobby) Allardeck (32), still training a few racehorses in his grandfather’s once-bustling stables in Newmarket. Local traders threaten court action over unpaid bills. Bobby weakly denies the owners of the remaining horses should be worried, although the feed-merchant has stopped deliveries. Where will it end?
Not with manna from heaven from Daddy.
Maynard ‘Moneybags’ Allardeck (50), cross with Bobby for marrying badly, won’t come to the rescue.
Maynard, known to be fishing for a knighthood, gives all his spare cash to charity.
Needy Bobby’s opinion? Unprintable.
Watch this space for more.
‘If Bobby doesn’t sue for libel,’ I said, ‘his father surely will.’
‘Greater the truth, greater the libel,’ the feed-merchant said dryly, and added, ‘Tell Bobby his credit’s good with me again. I’ve been thinking it over. He’s always paid me regularly, even if always late. And I don’t like being manipulated by muck like that.’ He pointed to the paper. ‘So tell Bobby I’ll supply him as before. Tell him to tell his owners.’
I thanked him and went back to Bobby’s house, and read Intimate Details again over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Then I pensively telephoned the feed-merchant.
‘Did you,’ I said, ‘actually tell anyone that you intended to stop making deliveries to Bobby?’
‘I told Bobby.’ He sounded equally thoughtful. ‘No one else.’
‘Sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘Not even your secretary? Or your family?’
‘I admit that on Friday I was very annoyed and wanted my money immediately, but no one overheard my giving Bobby a talking to about it, I’m quite certain. My secretary doesn’t come in until eleven on Fridays, and as you know, my office is an annexe. I was alone when I telephoned him, I assure you.’
‘Well, thanks,’ I said.
‘The informant must be at Bobby’s end,’ he insisted.
‘Yes. I think you’re right.’
We disconnected and I began to read the Daily Flag from start to finish, which I’d never done before, seeking enlightenment perhaps on what made a newspaper suddenly attack an inoffensive man and aim to destroy him.
The Flag’s overall and constant tone, I found, was of self-righteous spite, its message a sneer, its aftertaste guaranteed to send a reader belligerently out looking for an excuse to take umbrage or to spread ill-will.
Any story that would show someone in a poor light was in Praise was out. The put-down had been developed to a minor art, so that a woman, however prominent or successful, did not ‘say’; instead she ‘trilled’, or she ‘shrilled’, or she ‘wailed’. A man ‘chortled’, or he ‘fumed’, or he ‘squeaked’.
The word ‘anger’ appeared on every single page. All sorts of things were ‘slammed’, but not doors. People were reported as denying things in a way that interpreted ‘deny’ as ‘guilty but won’t own up’; and the word ‘claims’, in the Flag’s view, as, for instance, in ‘He claims he saw…’ was synonymous with ‘He is lying when he says he saw…’
The Flag thought that respect was unnecessary, envy was normal, all motives were sleazy and only dogs were loved; and presumably it was what people wanted to read, as the circulation (said the Flag) was increasing daily.
On the premise that a newspaper ultimately reflected the personality of its owner, as the Towncrier did Lord Vaughnley’s, I thought the proprietor of the Daily Flag to be destructive, calculating, mean-spirited and dangerous. Not a good prospect. It meant one couldn’t with any hope of success appeal to the Flag’s better nature to let up on Bobby, because a better nature it didn’t have.
Holly came downstairs looking wan but more cheerful, Bobby returned from the Heath with reviving optimism, and I found the necessity of demolishing their fragile recovery just one more reason to detest the Flag.
Holly began to cry quietly and Bobby strode about the kitchen wanting to smash things, and still there was the unanswerable question: Why?
‘This time,’ I said, ‘you consult your lawyer, and to hell with the cost. Also this time we are going to pay all your worst bills at once, and we are going to get letters from all your creditors saying they have been paid, and we’ll get those letters photocopied by the dozen, and we’ll send a set of them out to everyone who got a copy of the Flag, and to the Flag itself, to Sam Leggatt, the editor, special delivery, and to all the owners, and to anyone else we can think of, and we’ll accompany these with a letter of your own saying you don’t understand why the Flag is attacking you but the attacks have no foundation, the stable is in good shape and you are certainly not going out of business.’
‘But,’ Holly said, gulping, ‘the bank manager won’t honour our cheques.’
‘Get the worst bills,’ I said to Bobby, ‘and let’s have a look at them.’ Specially the blacksmith, the vets and the transport people. We’ll pay those and any others that are vital.’
‘What with?’ he said irritably.
‘With my money.’
They were both suddenly still, as if shocked, and I realised with a thrust of pleasure that that plain solution simply hadn’t occurred to them. They were not askers, those two.
Holly couldn’t disguise her upsurge of hope, but she said doubtfully, ‘Your new house, though. It must be taking you all you’ve saved. You haven’t been paid for the cottage yet.’
‘There’s enough,’ I assured her. ‘And let’s get started because I’ll have to be off to Plumpton pretty soon.’
‘But we can’t…’ Bobby said.
‘Yes, you must. Don’t argue.’
Bobby looked pole-axed but he fetched the bunch of accounts and I made out several cheques.
‘Take these round yourself this morning and get watertight receipts, and in a minute we’ll write the letter to go with them,’ I said. ‘And see if you can get them all photocopied and clipped into sets in time to catch this afternoon’s post. I know it’s a bit of a job, but the sooner very much the better, don’t you think?’
‘And one set to Graves?’ Bobby asked.
‘Certainly to Graves.’
‘We’ll start immediately,’ Holly said.
‘Don’t forget the feed-merchant,’ I said. ‘He’ll write you something good. He didn’t like being made use of by the Flag.’
‘I don’t like to mention it…’ Holly began slowly.
‘The bank?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘Leave the bank for now. Tomorrow maybe you can go to the manager with a set of letters and see if he will reinstate you. He darned well ought to. His bank’s making enough out of you in interest, especially on the yearling loans. And you do still have the yearlings as security.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Bobby said.
‘One step at a time,’ I said.
‘I’ll telephone my solicitor straight away,’ he said, picking up the receiver and looking at his watch. ‘He’ll be in by now.’
‘No, I shouldn’t,’ I said.
‘But you said…’
‘You’ve got an informant right inside this house.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your telephone,’ I said, ‘I should think.’
He looked at it with disgusted understanding and in a half-groan said, ‘Oh, God.’
‘It’s been done before,’ I said: and there had in fact been a time in Lambourn when everyone had been paranoid about being overheard and had gone to elaborate lengths to avoid talking on their home telephones. Illegal it might well be to listen uninvited, but it was carried on nevertheless, as everyone knew.
Without more ado we unscrewed all the telephones in the house, but found no limpet-like bugs inside. Horses, however, not electronics, were our speciality, and Bobby said he would go out to a public box and ring up the telephone company and ask them to come themselves to see what they could find.
It happened at one point that Bobby was on his knees by the kitchen wall screwing together the telephone junction there and Holly and I were standing side by side in the centre of the room, watching him, so that when the newcomer suddenly arrived among us unannounced it was my sister and I that he saw first.
A tall man with fair hair fading to grey, immensely well brushed. Neat, good-looking features, smoothly shaven rounded chin; trim figure inside a grey City suit of the most impeccable breeding. A man of fifty, a man of power whose very presence filled the kitchen, a man holding a folded copy of the Daily Flag and looking at Holly and me with open loathing.
Maynard Allardeck; Bobby’s father.
Known to me, as I to him, as the enemy. Known to each other by frequent sight, by indoctrination, by professional repute. Ever known, never willingly meeting.
‘Fieldings,’ he said with battering hate; and to me directly, ‘What do you think you’re doing in this house?’
‘I asked him,’ Bobby said, straightening up.
His father turned abruptly in his direction, seeing his son for the first time closely face to face for more than four years.
They stared at each other for a long moment as if frozen, as if re-learning familiar features, taking physical stock. Seeing each other perhaps as partial strangers, freshly. Whatever any of us might have expected or wished for in the way of reconciliation, it turned out to be the opposite of what Maynard had in mind. He had come neither to help nor even to commiserate, but to complain.
Without any form of greeting he said, ‘How dare you drag me into your sordid little troubles.’ He waved his copy of the Flag. ‘I won’t have you whining to the Press about something that’s entirely your own fault. If you want to marry into a bunch of crooks, take your consequences and keep me out of it.’
I imagine we all blinked, as Bobby was doing. Maynard’s voice was thick with anger and his sudden onslaught out of all proportion, but it was his reasoning above all which had us stunned.
‘I didn’t,’ Bobby said, almost rocking on his feet. ‘I mean, I haven’t talked to the Press. I wouldn’t. They just wrote it.’
‘And this part about me refusing you money? How else would they know, if you hadn’t told them? Answer me that.’
Bobby swallowed. ‘You’ve always said… I mean, I thought you meant it, that you wouldn’t.’
‘Of course I mean it.’ His father glared at him. ‘I won’t. That’s not the point. You’ve no business snivelling about it in public and I won’t have it. Do you hear?’
‘I haven’t,’ Bobby protested, but without conviction.
I thought how much father and son resembled each other in looks, and how little in character. Maynard had six times the force of Bobby but none of his sense of fair play. Maynard could make money work for him, Bobby worked to be paid. Maynard could hold a grudge implacably for ever, Bobby could waver and crumble and rethink. The comparative weaknesses in Bobby, I thought, were also his strength.
‘You must have been blabbing.’ Maynard was uncompromisingly offensive in his tone, and I thought that if Bobby ever wanted to announce to the whole world that his father would let him sink, he would have every provocation and every right.
Bobby said with a rush, ‘We think someone may have been tapping our telephone.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’ Maynard said ominously, casting an angry look at the silent instrument. ‘So it’s on the telephone you’ve been bleating about me, is it?’
‘No,’ Bobby said, half stuttering. ‘I mean, no I haven’t. But one or two people said ask your father for money, and I told them I couldn’t.’
‘And this bit,’ Maynard belted the air furiously with the newspaper, ‘about me fishing for a knighthood. I won’t have it. It’s a damned lie.’
It struck me forcibly at that point, perhaps because of an undisguisable edge of fear in his voice, that it was the bit a bout the knighthood which lay at the real heart of Maynard’s rage.
It was no lie, I thought conclusively. It was true. He must indeed be trying actively to get himself a title. Grandfather had said that Maynard at nine had wanted to be a lord. Maynard at fifty was still the same person, but now with money, with influence, with no doubt a line to the right ears. Maynard might be even then in the middle of delicate but entirely unlawful negotiations.
Sir Maynard Allardeck. It certainly rolled well off the tongue. Sir Maynard. Bow down to me, you Fieldings. I am your superior, bow low.
‘I didn’t say anything about a knighthood,’ Bobby protested with more force. ‘I mean, I didn’t know you wanted one. I never said anything about it. I never thought of it.’
‘Why don’t you sue the newspaper?’ I said.
‘You keep quiet,’ he said to me vehemently. ‘Keep your nose out.’ He readdressed himself to Bobby. ‘If you didn’t mention a knighthood on the telephone, how did they get hold of it? Why did they write that… that damned lie? Answer me that.’
‘I don’t know,’ Bobby said, sounding bewildered. ‘I don’t know why they wrote any of it.’
‘Someone has put you up to stirring up trouble against me,’ Maynard said, looking hard and mean and deadly in earnest.
We all three stared at him in amazement. How anyone could think that was beyond me.
Bobby said with more stuttering, ‘Of course not. I mean, that’s stupid. It’s not you that’s in trouble because of what they wrote, it’s me. I wouldn’t stir up trouble against myself. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Three people telephoned me before seven this morning to tell me there was another paragraph in today’s Flag,’ Maynard said angrily. ‘I bought a copy on my way here. I was instantly certain it was your poisonous brother-in-law or his pig of a grandfather who was at the back of it, it’s just their filthy sort of thing.’
‘No,’ Holly said.
Maynard ignored her as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘I came in here to tell you it served you right,’ he said to Bobby, ‘and to insist on your forcing the Fieldings to get a full retraction printed in the paper.’
‘But,’ Bobby said, shaking his head as if concussed, ‘it wasn’t Kit. He wouldn’t do that. Nor his grandfather.’
‘You’re soft,’ Maynard said contemptuously. ‘You’ve never understood that someone can smile into your face while they shove a knife through your ribs.’
‘Because of Holly,’ Bobby insisted, ‘they wouldn’t.’
‘You’re a naive fool,’ his father said. ‘Why shouldn’t they try to break up your marriage? They never wanted it, any more than I did. They’re a wily, shifty, vengeful family, the whole lot of them, and if you trust any one of them, you deserve what you get.’
Bobby gave me a quick glance in which I read only discomfort, not doubt. Neither Holly nor I offered any sort of defence because mere words wouldn’t dent the opinions that Maynard had held all his life, and nor would hitting him. Moreover we had heard the same sort of invective too often from Grandfather on the subject of the Allardecks. We were more or less immune, by then, to violent reaction. It was Bobby, interestingly, who protested.
‘Kit and Holly care what becomes of me,’ he said. ‘You don’t. Kit came to help, and you didn’t. So I’ll judge as I find, and I don’t agree with what you say.’
Maynard looked as if he could hardly believe his ears, and nor, to be honest, could I. It wasn’t just that what Bobby was expressing was a heretical defection from his upbringing, but that he also had the courage to stand up to his father and say it to his face.
He looked, as a matter of fact, slightly nervous. Maynard, it was said, inspired wholesale nervousness in the boardroom of any business his eye fell on, and as of that morning I understood why. The unyielding ruthlessness in him, clearly perceptible to all three of us, was central to his success, and for us at least he made no attempt to disguise it or dress it with a fa?ade of charm.
Bobby made a frustrated gesture with both hands, walked over to the sink and began to fill the kettle.
‘Do you want any coffee?’ he said to his father.
‘Of course not.’ He spoke as if he’d been insulted. ‘I’ve a committee meeting at the Jockey Club.’ He looked at his watch, and then at me. ‘You,’ he said, ‘have attacked me. And you’ll suffer for it.’
I said calmly but distinctly, ‘If I hear you have said in the Jockey Club that a Fielding is responsible for what has appeared in the Flag, I will personally sue you for slander.’
Maynard glared. He said, ‘You’re filth by birth, you’re not worth the fuss that’s made of you, and I’d be glad to see you dead.’
I felt Holly beside me begin to spring forward in some passionate explosion of feeling and gripped her wrist tight to stop her. I was actually well satisfied. I had read in Maynard’s eyes that he was inclined to take me seriously, but he didn’t want me to know it, and I understood also, for the first time, and with unease, that the very fact of my being successful, of being champion, was to him, in his obsession, intolerable.
Along at the Jockey Club, which had its ancient headquarters in Newmarket’s main street, and where he had been one of its members for four or five years, Maynard would with luck now pass off the whole Flag thing with a grouchy joke. There, in the organisation which ruled the racing industry, he would show all courtesy and hide the snarl. There, where he served on dogsbody committees while he made his determined way up that particular ladder, aiming perhaps to be a Steward, one of the top triumvirate, before long, he would now perhaps be careful to say nothing that could get back to my ears.
There were no active professional jockeys in the Jockey Club, nor any licensed trainers, though a few retired practitioners of both sorts sprinkled the ranks. There were many racehorse owners, among whom I had real friends. The approximately 140 members, devoted to the welfare of racing, were self-perpetuating, self-elected. If Maynard had ever campaigned quietly to be chosen for membership it might have helped him to be a member of an old-established racing family, and it might have helped him to be rich, but one thing was certain: he would never have unsheathed for the civilised inspection of his peers the raw, brutal anti-Fielding prejudice he had given spleen to in the kitchen. Nothing alienated the courteous members more than ill-mannered excess.
The preserving of Maynard’s public good manners was very much my concern.
He went as he’d come, private manners non-existent, walking out of the kitchen without a farewell. We listened to the firm footsteps recede and to the distant slam of a car door, and his engine starting.
‘Do you realise,’ Bobby said to me slowly, ‘that if he’s made a Steward and you’re still a jockey… you’d be horribly vulnerable…?’
‘Mm,’ I said dryly. ‘Very nasty indeed.’