To the Hilt (23 page)

“Probably not,” I said. “But just in case.” I paused. “What happened when I left?”

Emily almost laughed. “The grooms came for evening stables and let us all out. Xenia’s tantrums turned to tears. Surtees was purple with fury and phoned the police, who arrived with a siren wailing that upset all the horses. Surtees told them that you’d stolen Golden Malt but fortunately the police had been to my yard before when we had a lot of saddles and bridles stolen, and they believed me when I said the horse was Ivan’s and you had absolute authority to look after it in any way you thought best. I showed them the copy you gave me of the power of attorney and they told Surtees they wouldn’t start a police hunt for you, which sent him practically berserk. He was yelling at the police which did him no good at all with them, but I begged them to stay until he had gone because he was so violent I was afraid he would attack me or some of the horses. So they tried to quieten him and finally got him to drive his trailer away, but Xenia was crying out of control, and if Surtees reached home without causing an accident it will have been a miracle.”

“He’s a fool.”

“He’s a dangerous fool,” Emily said. “All that silly-ass front of his has changed to pure poison. So take care, Al. I’m serious. You made him look stupid and he’ll never forgive you.”

I said lightly, “I’m engaging a bodyguard.”

“Al!” She sounded exasperated. “Look out for Surtees. I mean it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I want to talk to you, though, about Golden Malt.”

“Where is he?”

“Safe enough, but it will be better if I move him again, and I need your knowledge and advice. I’ve borrowed Ivan’s copy of Horses
in Training
and sorted out four trainers who look possible, so if I tell you who they are, will you give me your opinion?”

“Fire away.”

I named the four trainers and again asked what she thought.

“Two of them would be OK,” she said slowly, “but look up Jimmy Jenkins.”

I looked him up and objected, “He has too many horses.” I counted. “Thirty-six.”

“Not anymore. He’s been ill. He’s halved his yard ... told some of the owners to take their horses away temporarily, but it looks as if it might be forever. He and I are good friends. The real advantage of going to him is that he has two yards, and one of them is now standing empty. Tell me his phone number and I’ll see what he says.”

I read out the phone number and asked, “Would the horse be able to race from there in your own name as its trainer?”

“Well, Jimmy’s a licensed trainer himself; no problem there. The horse could detour to my yard in Lambourn on the day of the race to pick up the colors and tack and his usual groom. I could inform the Jockey Club in advance, and as the owner, Ivan, is a member, I can’t see there being any difficulty.” She thought briefly. “From the secrecy point of view it’s always the grooms that are the leaky sieves. It’s not deliberate disloyalty, they just talk in the pubs.”

“And one of your grooms talks to Surtees.”

She sighed. “If I knew which one, I would give him disinformation.”

“That’s a thought.”

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll phone you back.”

 

 

I waited quite a while by the phone, loitering and repelling a resentful woman who wanted to use the end instrument of the row, not one of the vacant others. She had fierce words to say. When Emily at last rang, the resentful woman still hovered, black beady eyes full of ill will.

“It’s all fixed,” Emily said. “Sorry I was so long. I told Jimmy the whole situation. He’s a hundred percent trustable if you trust him first. He says he’ll put Golden Malt in his empty yard, and to avoid the chatty groom business, the horse will be cared for and exercised by Jimmy’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who’s already an amateur jockey and knows when to keep quiet. There’s no need for his regular grooms even to know Golden Malt is there; the yards are at opposite ends of the village. What’s more, it’s not a busy training area. Jimmy’s gallops aren’t the best, though it hasn’t stopped him training a lot of winners in his time. I said you’d get there sometime this afternoon, and ... er ... I promised the training fee would be inflated. Jimmy didn’t want to hear of it, but I insisted. He could do with a bit extra, though he’s too proud to ask.”

“He’ll get it,” I said.

“Yes. I knew you would agree.”

She gave me directions to the village and said Jimmy had said I should look for a square white house with bronze flaming-torch gateposts, and I should ring the front doorbell, not go round to the back.

“OK.”

“I’ll phone Jimmy later for news. Don’t worry, I won’t do it from home. And I told him not to phone me.”

“Brilliant.”

“Do you really think my phone is bugged?”

“Don’t take the risk.”

We said goodbye and the baleful old witch shouldered me out of the way to reach her preferred public phone. Everyone to their own obsession, I supposed. Impossible to dislodge fixed ideas. There were six unoccupied instruments she could have used.

I returned to Ivan’s house, detouring to a newsagent’s for a copy of Horse
and Hound
and an up-to-date road map, and to my mother’s and stepfather’s bemusement I told them in detail about the shenanigans in Emily’s yard and my travels with Golden Malt.

I said, “Emily has arranged for a trainer friend of hers to look after your horse and keep him fit so he can run in the King Alfred Gold Cup. If you agree with what we’ve planned, I’ll transfer Golden Malt to the trainer this afternoon. The horse will be in very good hands and it would be only by exceptionally bad luck that Surtees would discover where he is.”

Ivan said slowly, “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

“Well ... the horse is yours. You asked me to look after your affairs, so ... er ... I try.”

“For your mother’s sake.” A statement, not a question.

“Yes ... but for yours, also. You don’t approve of the way I live, but you have never been ungenerous to me, and you would have taken me into the brewery, and I don’t forget that.”

He looked at his hands and I couldn’t read his thoughts; but when I asked if I could borrow his car for the afternoon, he agreed without conditions.

Via the classified advertisements in the Horse and Hound and the road map and the telephone, I arranged to meet a four-horse traveling horse van (the smallest of a prestigious firm) in Phil’s yard in East Ilsley, and there loaded Golden Malt for the last leg of his journey.

Phil and I shook hands again, mutually pleased, and, asking the van driver of the top-class transport firm to follow Ivan’s car as arranged, I led him southwards and eastwards along secondary roads until we arrived somewhere near Basingstoke in a village that looked as if it had never seen a racehorse. But there, in the village’s main street, stood a square white house with copper ftaming torches on the gateposts.

I stopped the car, the horse van braking to a halt behind me, and went to ring the front doorbell, as instructed.

A thin, smiling middle-aged man opened the door in welcome. His skin had the gray tautness of terminal illness but his handshake was strong. A pace or two behind him stood a short fine-boned girl whom he introduced as his daughter, saying she would drive through the village in the horse van and settle Golden Malt into his new home. He watched approvingly as she climbed into the high cab beside the driver for the journey, and he invited me into his house, eyeing Ivan’s expensive car with reassurance and telling me that Emily had said she was sending her “special groom” to ensure the safe transit of a special horse.

Jimmy Jenkins asked why I was smiling. Was I not Emily’s “special groom”?

“I’m married to her,” I said.

“Really?”
He looked me up and down. “Are you that painter feller who ran off and left her?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Good Lord! Come this way. Come this way.”

He hurried down a hallway, beckoning me to follow, and led me into his office, furnished, like most trainers’ such rooms, with ranks of framed photographs on the walls. He stood and pointed in silence, but I didn’t need his directing finger: among the clutter hung a painting I’d done and sold four or more years earlier.

As always when I saw my own work freshly after an interval, I felt a mixture of excitement and shock. The picture was of a jockey plodding back to the stands after a fall, disappointment in his shoulders, a tear in his grass-stained breeches. I remembered the intensity of feeling in the brushstrokes, the stoicism and the loneliness of that man’s defeat.

“Feller I trained for couldn’t pay his bill,” Jimmy Jenkins explained. “He offered me that picture instead. He swore it would be worth a fortune one day, but I took it because I liked it. Whether you realize it or not, that picture just about sums up a jump jockey’s life. Endurance. Courage. Persistence. All those things. Do you see?”

I said lamely, “I’m glad you like it.”

He thrust out his chin, a defiant gesture against an imminent and inevitable fate.

“That picture keeps me going,” he said.

I drove back to London, having briefly checked on Golden Malt in his isolated splendor, Jimmy Jenkins’s daughter tending him with years of experience showing.

The horse van driver had already unloaded and gone, as agreed with his firm. The hiding of Ivan’s horse should, barring accidents, be complete.

I left Ivan’s car in its underground lair and returned to his house to learn that Patsy had spent the afternoon with him complaining that I had attacked Surtees so murderously as to leave him concussed, that I had committed child abuse against Xenia, and had brazenly stolen Golden Malt for my own illegal ends, such as holding him for ransom.

“I listened to her,” Ivan said judiciously. “Is my horse safe?”

“Yes.”

“And a ransom?”

I said tiredly, “Don’t be silly.”

He actually laughed. “I listened to her, and she’s my daughter, but when she went on and on about how devious and dishonest you are, I slowly realized that I’ve truly been trusting you all along, that my inner instinct has held firm, even though to you I may sometimes have shown indecision. I love my daughter, but I think she’s wrong. I said once impulsively that I wished you were my son. I didn’t think I meant it when I said it. I do mean it now.”

My mother embraced him with uncharacteristic delight and he stroked her arm happily, content to have pleased her. I saw in both of them the youthful faces they had left behind, and thought I might paint that perception, one day soon.

There was time after that for the three of us to eat dinner calmly before I left for the night train. We drank wine in friendship, Ivan and I, and had come nearer than ever before to an appreciative and lasting understanding. I did believe, against all previous experience, that Patsy could not henceforth sow overthrowing doubts of me in his decent mind.

He insisted on returning to my care the unopened envelope containing the codicil to his will.

“Don’t argue, Alexander,” he said. “It will be safest with you.”

“We won’t need it for years. By then it will be out of date.”

“Yes. Perhaps. Anyway, I’ve decided to tell you what’s in it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I need to,” he said, and told me.

I smiled and hugged him for the first time ever.

I hugged my mother, and went to Scotland.

To my surprise Jed was waiting at Dalwhinnie in the dawn. Himself had telephoned my mother late the previous evening, he said, and she’d told him I was on the train. Himself wanted me to go directly from train to castle, a command automatically to be obeyed.

On the way Jed told me that I now had a new bed and a new armchair in the bothy (chosen by Jed, paid for by Himself) and I was to write a list of other things I would need. My uncle would foot the bill unconditionally.

“But he doesn’t have to,” I protested.

“If you ask me, he feels guilty. Let him atone.”

I glanced at Jed sideways.

“A shrink, are you?” I asked.

“He told me you wouldn’t think, let alone suggest that he ought to make good your losses. I explained that you’d cleared out the bothy and he had me get that pile of muck removed. I hope to God the Hilt wasn’t hidden in it.”

“Your prayers are answered. Where’s the painting, the one in the sheet?”

“In my house, with all the other things you gave me.”

I sighed with relief.

“Flora looked at it,” he said. “She says it’s the portrait of a ghost.”

Flora, his wife, had “the sight,” the ability deep in the Scottish gene pool of being able sometimes to see the future.

“The word ‘ghost’ means spirit,” I said. “If Flora sees a spirit, that’s what I painted.”

“You make it sound so prosaic.”

“It isn’t finished,” I said.