Longshot (16 page)

“You know so much,” he said.

“I went camping in my cradle. Literally.”

He methodically packed everything back as he’d found it and asked what it weighed altogether.

“About two pounds. Less than a kilo.”

A thought struck him. “You haven’t got a compass!”

“It’s not in there,” I agreed. I opened a drawer in the chest of drawers and found it for him: a slim liquid-filled compass set in a clear oblong of plastic which had inch and centimeter measures along the sides. I showed him how it aligned with maps and made setting a course relatively easy, and told him I always carried it in my shirt pocket to have it handy.

“But it was in the drawer,” he objected.

“I’m not likely to get lost in Shellerton.”

“You could up on the Downs,” he said seriously.

I doubted it, but said I would carry it to please him, which earned the sideways look it deserved.

Putting everything on top of the chest of drawers, I reflected how little time I’d spent in that room amid the mismatched furniture and faded fabrics. I hadn’t once felt like retreating to be alone there, though for one pretty accustomed to solitude it was odd to find myself living in the lives of all these people, as if I’d stepped into a play that was already in progress and been given a walk-on part in the action. I would spend another three weeks there and exit, and the play would go on without me as if I hadn’t been on stage at all. Meanwhile, I felt drawn in and interested and unwilling to miss any scene.

“This room used to be Perkin’s,” Gareth observed, as if catching a swirl of my thought. “He took all his own stuff with him when they divided the house. It used to be terrif in here.” He shrugged. “You want to see my room?”

“I’d love to.”

He nodded and led the way. He and I shared the bathroom which lay between us, and along the hallway lay Tremayne’s suite, into which he was liable to vanish with a brisk slam of the door.

Gareth’s room was all pre-adolescent. He slept on a platform with a pull-out desk below and there were a good many white space-age fitments liberally plastered with posters of pop stars and sportsmen. Prized objects filled shelves. Clothes adorned the floor.

I murmured something encouraging but he swept his lair with a disparaging scrutiny and said he was going to do the whole thing over, Dad willing, in the summer.

“Dad got this room done for me after Mum left, and it was top ace at the time. Guess I’m getting too old for it now.”

“Life’s like that,” I said.

“Always?”

“It looks like it.”

He nodded as if he’d already discovered that changes were inevitable and not always bad, and in undemanding accord we shut the door on his passing phase and went down to the family room, where we found Tremayne asleep.

Gareth retreated without disturbing him and beckoned me to follow him through to the central hall. There he walked across and knocked briefly on Mackie and Perkin’s door, which after an interval was opened slowly by Perkin.

“Can we come in for five mins?” Gareth said. “Dad’s asleep in his chair. You know what he’s like if I wake him.”

Perkin yawned and opened his door wider though without excessive willingness, particularly on my account. He led the way into his sitting room, where it was clear he and Mackie had been spending a lazy afternoon reading the Sunday newspapers.

Mackie started to get up when she saw me and then relaxed again as if to say I was now family, not a visitor, and could fend for myself. Perkin told Gareth there was Coke in the fridge if he wanted some. Gareth didn’t.

I remembered with a small jerk that it was in this room, Perkin and Mackie’s sitting room, that Olympia had died. I couldn’t help but glance around, wondering just where it had happened, where Mackie and Harry had found Nolan standing over the girl without underclothes in a scarlet dress, with Lewis—drunk or not—in a chair.

There was nothing left of that violent scene now in the pleasant big room, no residual shudder in the comfortable atmosphere, no regrets or grief. The trial was over, Nolan was free, Olympia was ashes.

Gareth, unconcerned, asked Perkin, “Can I show John your workroom?”

“Don’t touch anything. I mean
anything
.”

“Cross my heart.”

With me still obediently in tow he crossed Perkin and Mackie’s inner hall and opened a door which led into a completely different world, one incredibly fragrant with the scent of untreated wood.

The room where Perkin created his future antiques was of generous size, like all the rooms in the entire big house, but also no larger than the others. It was extremely tidy, which in a way I wouldn’t have expected, with a polished wood-block floor swept spotless, not a shaving or speck of sawdust in sight.

When I commented on it Gareth said it was always like that. Perkin would use one tool at a time and put it away before he used another. Chisels, spokeshaves, things like that.

“Dead methodical,” Gareth said. “Very fussy.”

There was surprisingly a gas cooker standing against one wall. “He heats glue on that,” Gareth said, seeing me looking, “and other sorts of muck like linseed oil.” He pointed across the room. “That’s his lathe, that’s his saw-bench, that’s his sanding machine. I haven’t seen him working much. He doesn’t like people watching him, says it interferes with the feeling for what he’s doing.”

Gareth’s voice held disbelief, but I thought if I had to write with people watching I’d get nothing worthwhile done either.

“What’s he making at the moment?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

He wandered around the room looking at sheets of veneer stacked against a wall and at little orderly piles of square-cut lengths from exotic black to golden walnut. “He makes legs with those,” Gareth said, pointing.

He stopped by a long solid worktop like a butcher’s block and said to me over his shoulder, “I should think he’s just started on this.”

I went across to look and saw a pencil drawing of a display cabinet of sharply spare and unusual lines, a piece designed to draw the eye to its contents, not itself.

The drawing was held down by two blocks of wood, one, I thought, cherry, the other bleached oak, though I was better at living trees than dead.

“He often slats one sort of wood into the other,” Gareth said. “Makes a sort of stripe. His things don’t actually look bad. People buy them all the time.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Aren’t you?” He seemed pleased, as if he’d been afraid I wouldn’t be impressed, but I was, considerably.

As we turned to leave I said, “Was it in their sitting room that that poor girl died?”

“Gruesome,” Gareth said, nodding. “I didn’t see her. Perkin did, though. He went in just after Mackie and Harry and found it all happening. And, I mean, disgusting ... there was a mess on the carpet where she’d been lying and by the time they were allowed to clean it up, they couldn’t. So they got a new carpet from insurance but Perkin acts as if the mess is still there and he’s moved a sofa to cover the place. Bonkers, I think.”

I thought I might easily have done the same. Whoever would want to walk every day over a deathbed? We went back to the sitting room and one could see, if one knew, just which of the three chintz-covered sofas wasn’t in a logical place.

We stayed only a short while before returning to the family room, where Tremayne was safely awake and yawning, getting ready to walk around his yard at evening stables. He invited me to go with him, which I did with pleasure, and afterwards I made cauliflower cheese for supper which Tremayne ate without a tremor.

When he went out at bedtime for a last look around, he came back blowing on his hands cheerfully and smiling broadly.

“It’s thawing,” he said. “Everything’s dripping. Thank God.”

The world indeed turned from white to green during the night, bringing renewed life to Shellerton and racing.

 

 

OUT IN THE melting woodlands, Angela Brickell spent her last night in the quiet undergrowth among the small scavenging creatures that had blessedly cleaned her bones. She was without odor and without horror, weather-scrubbed, long gone into everlasting peace.

T
remayne promoted me from Touchy to a still actively racing steeplechaser that Monday morning, a nine-year-old gelding called Drifter. I was also permitted to do a regular working gallop and by great good fortune didn’t fall off. Neither Tremayne nor Mackie made any comment on my competence or lack of it, only on the state of fitness of the horse. They were taking me for granted, I realized, and was flattered and glad of it.

When we returned from the newly greenish-brownish Downs there was a strange car in the yard and a strange man drinking coffee in the kitchen; but strange to me only. Familiar to everyone else.

He was young, short, thin, angular and bold, wearing self-assurance as an outer garment. He was also, I soon found, almost as foul-mouthed as Nolan but, unlike him, funny.

“Hello, Sam,” Tremayne said. “Ready for work?”

“Too sodding right. I’m as stiff as a frigging virgin.”

I wondered idly how many virgins he had personally introduced to frigging: there was something about him that suggested it.

Tremayne said to me, “This is Sam Yaeger, our jockey.” To Sam Yaeger he explained my presence and said I’d been riding out.

Sam Yaeger nodded to me, visibly assessing what threat or benefit I might represent to him, running a glance over my jodhpurs and measuring my height. I imagined that because of my six feet alone he might put away fears that I could annex any of his racing territory.

He himself wore jodhpurs also, along with a brilliant yellow sweatshirt. A multicolored anorak, twin of Gareth’s, hung over the back of his chair, and he had brought his own helmet, bright turquoise, with YAEGER painted large in red on the front. Nothing shy or retiring about Sam.

Dee-Dee, appearing for her coffee, brightened by fifty watts at the sight of him.

“Morning, lover-boy,” she said.

Lover-boy made a stab at pinching her bottom as she passed behind him, which she seemed not to mind. Well, well, well, I thought, there was a veritable pussycat lurking somewhere inside that self-contained touch-me-not secretarial exterior. She made her coffee and sat at the table beside the jockey, not overtly flirting but very aware of him.

I made the toast, which had become my accepted job, and put out the juice, butter, marmalade and so on. Sam Yaeger watched with comically raised eyebrows.

“Didn’t Tremayne say you were a writer?” he asked.

“Most of the time. Want some toast?”

“One piece, light brown. You don’t look like a bloody writer.”

“So many people aren’t.”

“Aren’t what?”

“What they look like,” I said. “Bloody or not.”

“What do I look like?” he demanded, but with, I thought, genuine curiosity.

“Like someone who won the Grand National among eighty-nine other races last year and finished third on the jockeys’ list.”

“You’ve been peeking,” he said, surprised.

“I’ll be interviewing you soon for your views of your boss as a trainer.”

Tremayne said with mock severity, “And they’d better be respectful.”

“They bloody well would be, wouldn’t they?”

“If you have any sense,” Tremayne agreed, nodding.

I dealt out the toast and made some more. Sam’s extremely physical presence dominated breakfast throughout and I wondered briefly how he got on with Nolan, the dark side of the same coin.

I asked Dee-Dee that question after Sam and Tremayne had gone out with the second lot; asked her in the office while I checked some facts in old form books.

“Get on?” she repeated ironically. “No, they do not.” She paused, considered whether to tell me more, shrugged and continued. “Sam doesn’t like Nolan riding so many of the stable’s horses. Nolan rides most of Fiona’s runners, he accepts that, but Tremayne runs more horses in amateur races than most trainers do. Wins more, too, of course. The owners who bet, they like it, because whatever else you can say about Nolan, no one denies he’s a brilliant jockey. He’s been top of the amateurs’ list for years.”

“Why doesn’t he turn professional?” I asked.

“The very idea of that scares Sam rigid,” Dee-Dee said calmly, “but I don’t think it will happen. Especially not now, since the conviction. Nolan prefers his amateur status, anyway. He thinks of Sam as blue collar to his white. That’s why ...” She stopped abruptly as if blocking a revelation that was already on its way from brain to mouth, stopped so sharply that I was immediately interested, but without showing it asked, “Why what?”

She shook her head. “It’s not fair to them.”

“Do go on,” I said, not pressing too much. “I won’t repeat it to anyone.”

“It wouldn’t help you with the book,” she said.

“It might help me to understand the way the stable works and where its success comes from, besides Tremayne’s skill. It might come partly, for instance, from rivalry between two jockeys who each wants to prove himself better than the other.”

She gazed at me. “You have a twisty mind. I’d never have thought of that.” She paused for decision and I simply waited. “It isn’t just riding,” she said finally. “It’s women.”

“
Women?
”

“They’re rivals there, too. The night Nolan—I mean, the night Olympia died . . .”

They all said, I’d noticed, “when Olympia died,” and never “when Nolan killed Olympia,” though Dee-Dee had just come close.

“Sam set out to seduce Olympia,” Dee-Dee said, as if it were only to be expected. “Nolan brought her to the party and of course Sam made a beeline for her.” Somewhere in her calm voice was indulgence for Sam Yaeger, censure for Nolan, never mind that Nolan seemed to be the loser.

“Did he... er ... know Olympia?”