"Bonecrack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Francis Dick)

CHAPTER SIX

I sat for quite a long time turning the little model over in my hands, and its significance over in my mind, wondering whether Enso Rivera could possibly have organised the breaking of Moonrock's leg, or whether he was simply pretending that what had been a true accident was all his own work.

I did not on the whole believe that he had destroyed Moonrock. What did become instantly ominous, though, was his repeated choice of that word, destroy.

Almost every horse which broke a leg had to be destroyed, as only in exceptional cases was mending them practicable. Horses could not be kept in bed. They would scarcely ever even lie down. To take a horse's weight off a leg meant supporting him in slings. Supporting him in slings for the number of weeks that it took a major bone to mend incurred debility and gut troubles. Racehorses, always delicate creatures, could die of the inactivity, and if they survived were never as good afterwards; and only in the case of valuable stallions and brood mares was any attempt normally made to keep them alive.

If Enso Rivera broke a horse's leg, it would have to be destroyed. If he broke enough of them, the owners would remove their survivors in a panic, and the stable itself would be destroyed.

Alessandro had said his father had sent the tin as a promise of what he could do.

If he could break horses' legs, he could indeed destroy the stable.

But it wasn't as easy as all that, to break a horse's leg.

Fact or bluff.

I fingered the little maimed horse. I didn't know, and couldn't decide, which it represented. But I did decide at least to turn a bit of my own bluff into fact.

I wrote a full account of the abduction, embellished with every detail I could remember. I packed the little wooden horse back into its tin and wrote a short explanation of its possible significance. Then I enclosed everything in a strong manilla envelope, wrote on it the time honoured words, To be opened in the event of my death', put it into a larger envelope with a covering letter and posted it to my London solicitor from the main post office in Newmarket.

'You've done what? my father exclaimed.

Taken on a new apprentice.'

He looked in fury at all the junk anchoring him to his bed. Only the fact that he was tied down prevented him from hitting the ceiling.

'It isn't up to you to take on new apprentices. You are not to do it. Do you hear?'

I repeated my fabrication about Enso paying well for Alessandro's privilege. The news percolated through my father's irritation and the voltage went out of it perceptibly. A thoughtful expression took over, and finally a grudging nod.

He knows, I thought. He knows that the stable will before long be short of ready cash.

I wondered whether he were well enough to discuss it, or whether even if he were well enough he would be able to talk to me about it. We had never in our lives discussed anything: he had told me what to do, and I either had or hadn't done it. The divine right of kings had nothing on his attitude, which he applied also to most of the owners. They were all in varying degrees in awe of him and a few were downright afraid: but they kept their horses in his stable because year after year he brought home the races that counted.

He asked how the horses were working. I told him at some length and he listened with a sceptical slant to his mouth and eyebrows, intending to show doubt of the worth of any or all of my assessments. I continued without rancour through everything of any interest, and at the end he said, 'Tell Etty I want a list of the work done by each horse, and its progress.'

'All right,' I agreed readily. He searched my face for signs of resentment and seemed a shade disappointed when he didn't find any. The antagonism of an ageing and infirm father towards a fully grown healthy son was a fairly universal manifestation throughout nature, and I wasn't fussed that he was showing it. But all the same I was not going to give him the satisfaction of feeling he had scored over me; and he had no idea of how practised I was at taking the prideful flush out of people's ill-natured victories.

I said merely, 'Shall I take a list of the entries home, so that Etty will know which races the horses are to be prepared for?'

His eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened, and he explained that it had been impossible for him to do the entries: treatment and X-rays took up so much of his time and he was not left alone long enough to concentrate.

'Shall Etty and I have a go, between us?'

'Certainly not. I will do them- when I have more time.'

'All right,' I said equably. 'How is the leg feeling? You are certainly looking more your own self now-'

'It is less troublesome,' he admitted. He smoothed the already wrinkle-free bed clothes which lay over his stomach, engaged in his perennial habit of making his surroundings as orderly, as dignified, as starched as his soul.

I asked if there was anything I could bring him. 'A book,' I suggested. 'Or some fruit? Or some champagne?' Like most racehorse trainers he saw champagne as a sort of superior Coca Cola, best drunk in the mornings if at all, but he knew that as a pick-me-up for the sick it had few equals.

He inclined his head sideways, considering. 'There are some half bottles in the cellar at Rowley Lodge.'

'I'll bring some,' I said.

He nodded. He would never, whatever I did, say thank you. I smiled inwardly. The day my father thanked me would be the day his personality disintegrated.

Via the hospital telephone I checked whether I would be welcome at Hampstead, and having received a warming affirmative, headed the Jensen along the further eight miles south.

Gillie had finished painting the bedroom but its furniture was still stacked in the hall.

'Waiting for the carpet,' she explained. 'Like Godot.'

'Godot never came,' I commented.

'That,' she agreed with exaggerated patience, 'is what I mean.'

'Send up rockets, then.'

'Fire crackers have been going off under backsides since Tuesday.'

'Never mind,' I said soothingly. 'Come out to dinner.'

'I'm on a grapefruit day,' she objected.

'Well I'm not. Positively not. I had no lunch and I'm hungry.'

'I've got a really awfully nice grapefruit recipe. You put the halves in the oven doused in saccharine and Kirsch and eat it hot-'

'No,' I said definitely. 'I'm going to the Empress.'

That shattered the grapefruit programme. She adored the Empress.

'Oh well- it would be so boring for you to eat alone,' she said. 'Wait a mo while I put on my tatty black.'

Her tatty black was a long-sleeved St Laurent dress that made the least of her curves. There was nothing approaching tatty about it, very much on the contrary, and her description was inverted, as if by diminishing its standing she could forget her guilt over its price. She had recently developed some vaguely socialist views, and it had mildly begun to bother her that what she had paid for one dress would have supported a ten-child family throughout Lent.

Dinner at the Empress was its usual quiet, spacious, superb self. Gillie ordered curried prawns to be followed by chicken in a cream and brandy sauce, and laughed when she caught my ironic eye.

'Back to the grapefruit,' she agreed. 'But not until tomorrow.'

'How are the suffering orphans?' I asked. She worked three days a week for an adoption society which because of the Pill and easy abortion was running out of its raw materials.

'You don't happen to want two-year-old twins, Afro-Asian boys, one of them with a squint?' she said.

'Not all that much, no.'

'Poor little things.' She absent-mindedly ate a bread roll spread with enjoyable chunks of butter. 'We'll never place them. They don't look even averagely attractive-'

'Squints can be put right,' I said.

'Someone has to care enough first, to get it done.'

We drank a lesser wine than Gillie's but better than most.

'Do you realise,' Gillie said, 'that a family of ten could live for a week on what this dinner is costing?'

'Perhaps the waiter has a family of ten,' I suggested. 'And if we didn't eat it, what would they live on?'

'Oh- Blah,' Gillie said, but looking speculatively at the man who brought her chicken.

She asked how my father was. I said better, but by no means well.

'He said he would do the entries,' I explained, 'but he hasn't started. He told me it was because he isn't given time, but the Sister says he sleeps a great deal. He had a frightful shaking and his system hasn't recovered yet.'

'What will you do, then, about the entries? Wait until he's better?'

'Can't. The next lot have to be in by Wednesday.'

'What happens if they aren't?'

'The horses will go on eating their heads off in the stable when they ought to be out on a racecourse trying to earn their keep. It's now or never to put their names down for some of the races at Chester and Ascot and the Craven meeting at Newmarket.'

'So you'll do them yourself,' she said matter-of-factly, 'And they'll all go and win.'

'Almost any entry is better than no entry at all,' I sighed. 'And by the law of averages, some of them must be right.'

'There you are, then. No more problems.'

But there were two more problems, and worse ones, sticking up like rocks on the fairway. The financial problem, which I could solve if I had to; and that of Alessandro, which I didn't yet know how to.

The following morning, he arrived late. The horses for first lot were already plodding round the cinder track, while I stood with Etty in the centre as she changed the riders, when Alessandro appeared through the gate from the yard. He waited for a space between the passing horses and then crossed the cinder track and came towards us.

The finery of the week before was undimmed. The boots shone as glossily, the gloves as palely, and the ski jacket and jodhpurs were still immaculate. On his head, however, he wore a blue and white striped woolly cap with a pom-pom, the same as most of the other lads: but on Alessandro this cosy protection against the stinging March wind looked as incongruous as a bowler hat on the beach.

I didn't even smile. The black eyes regarded me with their customary chill from features that were more gaunt than delicate. The strong shape of the bones showed clearly through the yellowish skin, and more so, it seemed to me, than a week ago.

'What do you weigh?' I asked abruptly.

He hesitated a little. 'I will be able to ride at six stone seven when the races begin. I will be able to claim all the allowances.'

'But now? What do you weigh now?'

'A few pounds more. But I will lose them.'

Etty fumed at him but forbore to point out to him that he wouldn't get any rides if he weren't good enough. She looked down at her list to see which horse she had allotted him, opened her mouth to tell him, and then shut it again, and I literally saw the impulse take hold of her.

'Ride Traffic,' she said. 'You can get up on Traffic.'

Alessandro stood very still.

'He doesn't have to,' I said to Etty; and to Alessandro, 'You don't have to ride Traffic. Only if you choose.'

He swallowed. He raised his chin and his courage, and said, 'I choose.'

With a stubborn set to her mouth Etty beckoned to Andy, who was already mounted on Traffic, and told him of the change.

'Happy to oblige,' Andy said feelingly, and gave Alessandro a leg-up into his unrestful place. Traffic lashed out into a few preliminary bucks, found he had a less hard-bitten customer than usual on his back, and started off at a rapid sideways trot across the paddock.

Alessandro didn't fall off, which was the best that could be said. He hadn't the experience to settle the sour colt to obedience, let alone to teach him to be better, but he was managing a great deal more efficiently than I could have done.

Etty watched him with disfavour and told everyone to give him plenty of room.

'That nasty little squirt needs taking down a peg,' she said in unnecessary explanation.

'He isn't doing too badly,' I commented.

'Huh.' There was a ten ton lorry-load of scorn in her voice. 'Look at the way he's jabbing him in the mouth. You wouldn't catch Andy doing that in a thousand years.'

'Better not let him out on the Heath,' I said.

'Teach him a lesson,' Etty said doggedly.

'Might kill the goose, and then where would we be for golden eggs?'

She gave me a bitter glance. 'The stable doesn't need that sort of money.'

'The stable needs any sort of money it can get.'

But Etty shook her head in disbelief. Rowley Lodge had been in the top division of the big league ever since she had joined it, and no one would ever convince her that its very success was leading it into trouble.

I beckoned to Alessandro and he came as near as his rocking-horse permitted.

'You don't have to ride him on the Heath,' I said.

Traffic turned his quarters towards us and Alessandro called over his shoulder: 'I stay here. I choose.'

Etty told him to ride fourth in the string and everyone else to keep out of his way. She herself climbed into Indigo's saddle, and I into Cloud Cuckoo-land's, and George opened the gates. We turned right on to the walking ground, bound for the canter on Warren Hill, and nothing frantic happened on the way except that Traffic practically backed into an incautious tout when crossing Moulton Road. The tout retreated with curses, calling the horse by name. The Newmarket touts knew every horse on the Heath by sight. A remarkable feat, as there were about two thousand animals in training there, hundreds of them two-year-olds which altered shape as they developed month by month. Touts learned horses like headmasters learned new boys, and rarely made a mistake. All I hoped was that this one had been too busy getting himself to safety to take much notice of the rider.

We had to wait our turn on Warren Hill as we were the fourth stable to choose to work there that morning. Alessandro walked Traffic round in circles a little way apart-or at least tried to walk him. Traffic's idea of walking would have tired a bucking bronco.

Eventually Etty sent the string off up the hill in small clusters, with me sitting half way up the slope on Cloud Cuckoo-land, watching them as they swept past. At the top of the hill they stopped, peeled off to the left, and went back down the central walking ground to collect again at the bottom. Most mornings each horse cantered up the hill twice, the sharpish incline getting a lot of work into them in a comparatively short distance.

Alessandro started up the hill in the last bunch, one of only four.

Long before he drew level with me I could see that of the two it was the horse who had control. Galloping was hard labour up Warren Hill, but no one had given Traffic the message.

As he passed me he was showing all the classic signs of the bolter in action: head stretched horizontally forward, bit gripped between his teeth, eyes showing the whites. Alessandro, with as much hope of dominating the situation as a virgin in a troop ship, hung grimly on to the neckstrap and appeared to be praying.

The top of the rise meant nothing to Traffic. He swerved violently to the left and set off sideways towards Bury Hill, not even having the sense to make straight for the stable but swinging too far north and missing it by half a mile. On he charged, his hooves thundering relentlessly over the turf, carrying Alessandro inexorably away in the general direction of Lowestoft.

Stifling the unworthy thought that I wouldn't care all that much if he plunged straight on into the North Sea, I reflected with a bit more sense that if Traffic damaged himself, Rowley Lodge's foundations would feel the tremor. I set off at a trot after him as he disappeared into the distance, but when I reached the Bury St Edmunds Road there was no sign of him. I crossed the road and reined in there, wondering which direction to take.

A car came slowly towards me with a shocked looking driver poking his head out of the window.

'Some bloody madman nearly ploughed straight into me,' he yelled. 'Some bloody madman on the road on a mad horse.'

'How very upsetting,' I shouted back sympathetically, but he glared at me balefully and nearly ran into a tree.

I went on along the road, wondering whether it would be a dumped-off Alessandro I saw first, and if so, how long it would take to find and retrieve the wayward Traffic.

From the next rise there was no sign of either of them: the road stretched emptily ahead. Beginning to get anxious, I quickened Cloud Cuckoo-land until we were trotting fast along the soft ground edging the tarmac.

Past the end of the Limekilns, still no trace of Alessandro. The road ran straight, down and up its inclines. No Alessandro. It was a good two miles from the training ground that I finally found him.

He was standing at the cross roads, dismounted, holding Traffic's reins. The colt had evidently run himself to a standstill, as he drooped there with his head down, his sides heaving, and sweat streaming from him all over. Flecks of foam spattered his neck, and his tongue lolled exhaustedly out.

I slid down from Cloud Cuckoo-land and ran my hand down Traffic's legs. No tenderness. No apparent strain. Sighing with relief, I straightened up and looked at Alessandro. His face was stiff, his eyes expressionless.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

He lifted his chin. 'Of course.'

'He's a difficult horse,' I remarked.

Alessandro didn't answer. His self-pride might have received a body blow, but he was not going to be so soft as to accept any comfort.

'You'd better walk back with him,' I said, 'Walk until he's thoroughly cooled down. And keep him out of the way of the cars.'

Alessandro tugged the reins and Traffic sluggishly turned, not moving his legs until he absolutely had to.

'What's that?' Alessandro said, pointing to a mound in the grass at the corner of the cross roads where he had been standing. He shoved Traffic further away so that I could see; but I had no need to.

'It's the boy's grave,' I said.

'What boy?' He was startled. The small grave was known to everyone in Newmarket, but not to him. The mound, about four feet long, was outlined with overlapping wire hoops, like the edges of lawns in parks. There were some dirty looking plastic daffodils entwined in the hoops, and a few dying flowers scattered in the centre. Also a white plastic drinking mug which someone had thrown there. The grave looked forlorn, yet in a futile sort of way, cared for.

'There are a lot of legends,' I said. The most likely is that he was a shepherd boy who went to sleep in charge of his flock. A wolf came and killed half of them, and when he woke up he was so remorseful that he hanged himself.'

They used to bury suicides at cross roads,' Alessandro said, nodding. 'It is well known.'

There didn't seem to be any harm in trying to humanise him, so I went on with the story.

The grave is always looked after, in a haphazard sort of way. It is never overgrown, and fresh flowers are often put there- No one knows exactly who puts them there, but it is supposed to be the gypsies. And there is also a legend that in May the flowers on the grave are in the colours that will win the Derby.'

Alessandro stared down at the pathetic little memorial.

There are no black flowers,' he said slowly: and Archangel 's colours were black, pale blue, and gold.

'The gypsies will solve that if they have to,' I said dryly: and thought that they would opt for an easier-to-stage nap selection.

I turned Cloud Cuckoo-land in the direction of home and walked away. When presently I looked back, Alessandro was walking Traffic quietly along the side of the road, a thin straight figure in his clean clothes and bright blue and white cap. It was a pity, I thought, that he was as he was. With a different father, he might have been a different person.

But with a different father, so would I. And who wouldn't.

I thought about it all the way back to Rowley Lodge. Fathers, it seemed to me, could train, feed or warp their young plants, but they couldn't affect their basic nature. They might produce a stunted oak or a luxuriant weed, but oak and weed were inborn qualities, which would prevail in the end. Alessandro, on such a horticultural reckoning, was like a cross between holly and deadly nightshade; and if his father had his way the red berries would lose out to the black.

Alessandro bore Etty's strongly implied scorn with a frozen face, but few of the other lads teased him on his return, as they would have done to one of their own sort. Most of them seemed to be instinctively afraid of him, which to my mind showed their good sense, and the other, less sensitive types had drifted into the defence mechanism of ignoring his existence.

George took Traffic off to his box, and Alessandro followed me into the office. His glance swept over Margaret, sitting at her desk in a neat navy blue dress with the high curls piled as elaborately as ever, but he saw her as no bar to giving me the benefit of the thoughts that he, evidently, had also had time for on the way back.

'You should not have made me ride such a badly trained horse,' he began belligerently.

'I didn't make you. You chose to.'

'Miss Craig told me to ride it to make a fool of me.'

True enough.

'You could have refused,' I said.

'I could not.'

'You could have said that you thought you needed more practice before taking on the worst ride in the yard.'

His nostrils flared. So self-effacing an admission would have been beyond him.

'Anyway,' I went on. 'I personally don't think riding Traffic is going to teach you much. So you won't be put on him again.'

'But I insist,' he said vehemently.

'You insist what?'

'I insist I ride Traffic again.' He gave me the haughtiest of his selection of stares, and added, 'Tomorrow.'

'Why?'

'Because if I do not, everyone will think it is because I cannot, or that I am afraid to.'

'So you do care,' I said matter-of-factly, 'what the others think of you.'

'No, I do not.' He denied it strongly.

'Then why ride the horse?'

He compressed his strong mouth stubbornly. 'I will answer no more questions. I will ride Traffic tomorrow.'

'Well, O.K.,' I said casually. 'But I'm not sending him on the Heath tomorrow. He'll hardly need another canter. Tomorrow he'll only be walking round the cinder track in the paddock, which will be very boring for you.'

He gave me a concentrated, suspicious, considering stare, trying to work out if I was meaning to undermine him. Which I was, if one can call taking the point out of a Grand Gesture, undermining.

'Very well,' he said grudgingly. 'I will ride him round the paddock.'

He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. Margaret watched him go with a mixed expression I couldn't read.

'Mr Griffon would never stand for him talking like that,' she said.

'Mr Griffon doesn't have to.'

'I can see why Etty can't bear him,' she said. 'He's insolent. There's no other word for it. Insolent.' She handed me three opened letters across the desk. These need your attention, if you don't mind.' She reverted to Alessandro: 'But all the same, he's beautiful.'

'He's no such thing,' I protested mildly. 'If anything, he's ugly.'

She smiled briefly. 'He's absolutely loaded with sex appeal.'

I lowered the letters. 'Don't be silly. He has the sex appeal of a bag of rusty nails.'

'You wouldn't notice,' she said judiciously, 'Being a man.'

I shook my head. 'He's only eighteen.'

'Age has nothing to do with it,' she said. 'Either you've got it, or you haven't got it, right from the start. And he's got it.'

I didn't pay much attention: Margaret herself had so little sex appeal that I didn't think her a reliable judge. When I'd read through the letters and agreed with her how she should answer them, I went along to the kitchen for some coffee.

The remains of the night's work lay littered about: the various dregs of brandy, cold milk, coffee, and masses of scribbled-on bits of paper. It had taken me most of the night to do the entries; a night I would far rather have spent lying warmly in Gillie's bed.

The entries had been difficult, not only because I had never done them before, and had to read the conditions of each race several times to make sure I understood them, but also because of Alessandro. I had to make a balance of what I would have done without him, and what I would have to let him ride if he were still there in a month's time.

I was taking his father's threats seriously. Part of the time I thought I was foolish to do so; but that abduction a week ago had been no playful joke, and until I was certain Enso would not let loose a thunderbolt it was more prudent to go along with his son. I still had nearly a month before the Flat season started, still nearly a month to see a way out. But, just in case, I had put down some of the better prospects for apprentice races, and had duplicated the entries in many open races, because if two ran there would be one for Alessandro. Also I entered a good many in the lesser meetings, particularly those in the north: because whether he liked it or not, Alessandro was not going to start his career in a blaze of limelight. After all that I dug around in the office until I found the book in which old Robinson had recorded all the previous years' entries, and I checked my provisional list against what my father had done. After subtracting about twenty names, because I had been much too lavish, and shuffling things around a little, I made the total number of entries for that week approximately the same as those for the year before, except that I still had more in the north. But I wrote the final list on to the official yellow form, in block letters as requested, and double checked again to make sure I hadn't entered two-year-olds in handicaps, or fillies in colts-only, and made any other such giveaway gaffs.

When I gave the completed form to Margaret to record and then post, all she said was, 'This isn't your father's writing.'

'No,' I said. 'He dictated the entries. I wrote them down.'

She nodded non-comittally, and whether she believed me or not I had no idea.

Alessandro rode Pullitzer competently next day at first lot, and kept himself to himself. After breakfast he returned with a stony face that forbade comment, and when the main string had started out for the Heath, was given a leg-up on to Traffic. Looking back from the gate I saw the fractious colt kicking away at shadows as usual, and noticed that the two other lads detailed to stay in and walk their charges were keeping well away from him.

When we returned an hour and a quarter later, George was holding Traffic's reins, the other lads had dismounted, and Alessandro was lying on the ground in an unconscious heap.