Comeback (7 page)

“What a pig,” Vicky said indignantly.

Ken nodded. “Luckily I got him to sign a paper at the time, saying he understood an operation might save the horse but that he preferred to have it put down, so he hasn’t a chance of winning. He won’t sue in the end. But I guess I’ve lost a client”

Ronnie Upjohn, I thought.

I knew that name too. Couldn’t attach any immediate information to it, except that it was linked in my vague memory with another name: Travers.

Upjohn and Travers.

Who or what was Upjohn and Travers?

“We’re planning on running the horse here at Cheltenham in a couple of weeks,” Ken said. “I’m giving it to Belinda and it’ll run in her name, and if it wins it’ll be a nice wedding present for both of us.”

“What sort of race?” I asked, making conversation.

“A two-mile hurdle. Are you a racing man?”

“I go sometimes,” I said. “It’s years since I went to Cheltenham.”

“Peter’s parents met on Cheltenham racecourse,” Vicky said, and after Belinda’s and Ken’s exclamations of interest I gave them all a version of the facts that was not the whole truth but enough for the casual chat of a dinner party among people one didn’t expect to get close to.

“My mother was helping out with some secretarial work,” I said. “My father blew into her office with a question, and bingo, love at first sight”

“It wasn’t at first sight with us,” Belinda said, briefly touching Ken’s hand. “Fiftieth or sixtieth sight, more like.”

Ken nodded. “I had her under my feet for months and never really saw her.”

“You were getting over that frightful Eaglewood girl,” Belinda teased him.

“Izzy Eaglewood isn’t frightful,” Ken protested.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” his fiancée said; and of course, we did.

Izzy Eaglewood, I thought. A familiar name, but out of sync. Something different. Eaglewood was right, but not Izzy. Why not Izzy? What else?

I almost laughed aloud but from long training kept an unmoved face. Russet Eaglewood had been the name to giggle over in extremely juvenile smutty jokes. What color are Russet Eaglewood’s panties? No color, she doesn’t wear any. Russet Eaglewood doesn’t need a mattress; she is one. What does Russet Eaglewood do on Sundays? Same thing, twice. We had been ignorant of course, about what she actually did. We called it “IT,” and “IT” in fact applied to anybody. Are they doing IT? Giggle, giggle. One day—one unimaginable day—we would find out about IT ourselves. Meanwhile IT went on apace throughout the racing world, and indeed everywhere else, we understood.

Russet Eaglewood’s father had been one of the leading trainers of steeplechasers: it had been that fact, really, that had made the scurrilous stories funniest.

The knowledge came crowding back. The Eaglewoods had had their stables at the end of our village, half a mile from our little house. Their horses clattered through the village at dawn on their way up to the gallops, and I’d played in the stable yard often with Jimmy Eaglewood until he got hit by a lorry and died after three hushed weeks in a coma. I could remember the drama well, but not Jimmy’s face. I couldn’t clearly remember any of the faces; could dredge up only the sketchiest of impressions.

“Izzy Eaglewood ran off with a guitarist,” Belinda said disapprovingly.

“Nothing wrong with guitarists,” Vicky said. “Your father was a musician.”

“Exactly. Everything wrong with guitarists.”

Vicky looked as if defending the long-divorced husband from Belinda’s jokes was an unwelcome habit.

I said to Ken, “Have you heard Vicky and Greg sing? They’ve lovely voices.”

He said no, he hadn’t. He looked surprised at the thought.

“Mother,” Belinda said repressively, “I do wish you wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t sing?” Vicky asked. “But you know we enjoy it.”

“You’re too old for it” More than a gibe, it was a plea.

Vicky studied her daughter and said with sad enlightenment, “You’re embarrassed, is that it? You don’t like it that your mother brought you up by singing in nightclubs?”

“Mother!” Belinda cast a horrified glance at Ken, but Ken, far from being shocked, reacted with positive pleasure.

“Did you really?”

“Yes, until time put a stop to it”

“I’d love to hear you,” Ken said.

Vicky beamed at him.

“Mother, please don’t go around telling everyone,” Belinda said.

“Not if you don’t like it, dear.”

Shout it from the rooftops, I wanted to say: Belinda should be proud of you. Stop indulging your daughter’s every selfish snobbish whim. Vicky’s sort of love, though, forgave all.

Ken called for the bill and settled it with a credit card but, before we could rise to go, a buzzer sounded insistently somewhere in his clothes.

“Damn,” he said, feeling under his jacket and unclipping a small portable telephone from his belt. “I’m on call. Sorry about this.”

He flipped open the phone, said his name and listened; and it was obviously no routine summons to a sick animal because the blood left his face and he stood up clumsily and fast and literally swayed on his feet, tall and toppling.

He looked wildly, unseeingly, at all of us sitting round the table.

“The hospital’s on fire,” he said.

 

 

 

 

T
he vets’ place was on fire, but actually not, as it turned out, the new hospital itself, which lay separately to the rear. All one could see from the road, though, was the entrance and office block totally in flames, scarlet tongues shooting far skywards from the roof with showers of golden sparks. It was a single-story building, square, extensive, dying spectacularly, at once a disaster and majestic.

Ken had raced off frantically from the restaurant alone, driving like the furies, leaving the rest of us to follow and thrusting Belinda into suffering fiercely from feelings of rejection.

“He might have waited for me.”

She said it four times aggrievedly but no one commented. I broke the speed limit into the town.

We couldn’t get the car anywhere near the vets’ place. Fire appliances, police cars and sightseers crowded the edges of the parking area and wholly blocked the roadway. The noise was horrendous. Spotlights, streetlights, headlights threw deep black shadows behind the milling helpers and the flames lent orange halos to the firemen’s helmets and shone on spreading sheets of water and on the transfixed faces outside the cordoned perimeter.

“Oh, God, the horses ...” Belinda, leaving us at a run as soon as our car came willy-nilly to a halt, pushed and snaked a path through to the front, where I briefly spotted her arguing unsuccessfully with a way-barring uniform. Ken was out of sight.

Great spouts of water rose in plumes from hoses and fell in shining fountains onto the blazing roof, seeming to turn to steam on contact and blow away to the black sky. The heat, even from a distance, warmed the night.

“Poor things,” Vicky said, having to shout to be heard.

I nodded. Ken had enough worry besides this.

There were the thuds of two explosions somewhere inside the walls, each causing huge spurts of flame to fly outwards through the melted front windows. Acrid smoke swirled after them, stinging the eyes.

“Back, back,” voices yelled.

Two more thuds. Through the windows, with a searing roar like flame throwers, sharp brilliant tongues licked across the parking space towards the spectators, sending them fleeing in panic.

Another thud. Another fierce jet-burst of flames. A regrouping among the firemen, heads together in discussion.

The whole roof fell in like a clap of thunder, seeming to squeeze more flames like toothpaste from the windows, and then, dramatically, the roaring inferno turned to black gritty billowing smoke and the pyrotechnics petered out into a wet and dirty mess, smelling sour.

Ash drifted in the wind, settling in gray flakes on our hair. One could hear the hiss of water dousing hot embers. Lungs coughed from smoke. The crowd slowly began to leave, allowing the three of us to get closer to the ruined building to look for Belinda and Ken.

“Do you think it’s safe?” Vicky asked doubtfully, stopping well short. “Weren’t those bombs going off?”

“More like tins of paint,” I said.

Greg looked surprised. “Does paint explode?”

Where had he lived, I wondered, that he didn’t know that, at his age?

“So does flour explode,” I said.

Vicky gave me a strange look in which I only just got the benefit of the doubt as to my sanity, but indeed air filled with flour would flash into explosion if ignited. Many substances diffused in a mist in air would combust. Old buddies, oxygen, fuel and fire.

“Why don’t you go back to the car,” I suggested to Vicky and Greg. “I’ll find the other two. I’ll tell them I’m driving you back to the house.”

They both looked relieved and went away slowly with the dispersing throng. I ducked a few officials, saw no immediate sign of Belinda and Ken but found on the right of the burnt building an extension of the parking area that led back into a widening space at the rear. Down there, movement, lights and more people.

Seeing Ken briefly and distantly as he hurried in and out of a patch of light, I set off to go down there despite warning shouts from behind. The heat radiating from the brick wall on my left proved to be of roasting capacity, which accounted for the shouts, and I did hope as I sped past that the whole edifice wouldn’t collapse outwards and cook me where I fell.

Ken saw me as I hurried towards him and stood still briefly with his mouth open, looking back where I’d come.

“Good God,” he said, “did you come along there? It isn’t safe. There’s a back way in.” He gestured behind him and I saw that indeed there was access from another road, as evidenced by a fire engine standing there that had been dealing with the flames from the rear.

“Can I do anything?” I said.

“The horses are all right,” Ken said. “But I need ... I need—” He stopped suddenly and began shaking, as if the enormity of the disaster had abruptly overwhelmed him once the need for urgent action had diminished. His mouth twisted and his whole face quivered.

“God help me,” he said.

It sounded like a genuinely desperate prayer, applying to much more than the loss of a building. I was no great substitute for the deity, but one way or another I’d helped deal with a lot of calamities. Crashed busloads of British tourists for instance, ended up, figuratively speaking, on embassy doorsteps, and I’d mopped up a lot of personal tragedies.

“I’ll take Vicky and Greg back to the house, and then come back,” I said.

“Will you?” He looked pathetically grateful even for the goodwill. He went on shaking, disintegration not far ahead.

“Just hold on,” I said, and, without wasting time, left by the rear gate, hurrying along the narrow road there and getting back to the main road via an alley, finding that by luck I’d come out only a few steps from the car. Vicky and Greg made no objections to being taken home and left. They hoped Belinda would forgive them, but they were going to bed to sleep for a week, and please would I ask her not to wake them.

I glanced at them affectionately as they stood drooping in the polished hall of Thetford Cottage. They’d had a rough time, and when I thought of it, looking back, they hadn’t seriously complained once. I said I’d see them in the morning and took the front door key with me at their request, leaving them to shut the door behind me.

Finding a way round to the back road, I returned to the vets’ place from the rear and smelled freshly again the pervading ashy smoke that stung in the throat like tonsillitis. The rear fire engine had wound in its hoses and departed, leaving one man in yellow oilskins and helmet trudging around to guard against the ruins heating up to renewed spontaneous life.

I took brief stock of what lay in the unburnt area: a new-looking one-story building with electric lights shining from every window, a row of stable boxes set back under an overhanging roof, all empty, with their doors open, and a glass-walled thirty-yard passage connecting the burnt and unburnt buildings. That last was, extraordinarily, mostly untouched, only the big panes nearest the heat having shattered.

A good many people were still hurrying about, as if walking slowly would have been inappropriate. The first urgency, however, was over: what was left was the usual travail of getting rid of the debris. No bodies to go into bags this time, though, it seemed. Look on the bloody bright side.

As Ken was nowhere to be seen and a door to the new building stood open, I went inside to look for him and found myself in an entrance hall furnished as a waiting room with about six flip-up chairs and minimum creature comfort.

Everything, including the tiled floor and a coffee machine in a corner, was soaking wet. A man trying to get sustenance from that machine gave it a smart kick of frustration as if its demise after all else was insupportable.

“Where’s Ken?” I asked him.

He pointed through an open door and attacked the machine again, and I went where directed, which proved to be into a wide passage with doors down each side, one of them open with light spilling out. I found Ken in a smallish office along there, a functional room already occupied by more people than the architect had intended.

Ken was standing by the uncurtained window, still trembling as if with cold. A gray-haired man sat gloomily behind a metal desk. A woman with a dirt-smudged face stood beside him, stroking his shoulder. Two more men and another woman perched on office furniture or leaned against walls. The room smelled of the smoke trapped in their clothes and it was chilly enough to make Ken’s shivers reasonably physical in origin.

The heads all turned my way when I appeared in the doorway, all except Ken’s own. I said his name, and he turned and saw me, taking a second or two to focus.