‘This is a two-year-old filly,’ Calder said, peering over a half-door. ‘She’d had an infected ulcer on her withers for six weeks before she came here. Antibiotics had proved useless Now the ulcer’s dry and healing. Most satisfactory.’
We went on down the row.
‘This is someone’s favourite hunter, came all the way from, Gloucestershire. I don’t know what I can do for him, though of course I’ll try. His trouble, truthfully, is just age.’
Further on: ‘Here’s a star three-day-eventer. Came to me with intermittent bleeding in the urine, intractable to antibiotics. He was clearly in great pain, and almost dangerous to deal with on account of it. But now he’s fine. He’ll be staying here for a while longer but I’m sure the trouble is cured.
‘This is a three-year-old colt who won a race back in July but then started breaking blood vessels and went on doing it despite treatment. He’s been here a fortnight. Last resort, of course!’
By the next box he said, ‘Don’t look at this one if you’re squeamish. Poor wretched little filly, she’s so weak she can’t hold her head up and all her bones are sharp under the skin. Some sort of wasting sickness. Blood tests haven’t shown what it is. I don’t know if I can heal her. I’ve laid my hands on her twice so far, but there’s been nothing. No... feeling. Sometimes it takes a long time. But I’m not giving up with her, and there’s always hope.’
He turned his curly head and pointed to another box further ahead. ‘There’s a colt along there who’s been here two months and is only just responding. His owners were in despair, and so was I, privately, but then just three days ago when I was in his box I could feel the force flowing down my arms and into him, and the next day he was mending.’
He spoke with a far more natural fluency on his home ground and less as if reciting from a script, but all the same I felt the same reservations about the healing touch as I had at Ascot. I was a doubter, I supposed. I would never in my life have put my trust in a seventh son of a seventh son, probably because the only direct knowledge I had of any human seeking out ‘the touch’ had been a close friend of mine at college who’d had hopeless cancer and had gone to a woman healer as a last resort, only to be told that he was dying because he wanted to. I could vividly remember his anger, and mine on his behalf: and standing in Calder’s yard I wondered if that same woman would also think that horses got sick to death because they wanted to.
‘Is there anything you can’t treat?’ I asked. ‘Anything you turn away?’
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘There are some things, like advanced laminitis, with which I feel hopeless, and as for coryne...’ he shook his head,’... it’s a killer.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.
‘So sorry. Well, laminitis is a condition of the feet where the bone eventually begins to crumble, and horses in the end can’t bear the pain of standing up. They lie down, and horses can’t live for more than a few days lying down.’ He spoke with regret. ‘And coryne,’ he went on, ‘is a frightful bacterial infection which is deadly to foals. It induces a sort of pneumonia with abcesses in the lungs. Terribly contagious. I know of one stud farm in America which lost seventy foals in one day.’
I listened in horror. ‘Do we have it in England?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes, in pockets, but not widespread. It doesn’t affect older horses. Foals of three months or over are safe.’ He paused. ‘Some very young foals do survive, of course, but they’re likely to have scar tissue in the lungs which may impair their breathing for racing purposes.’
‘Isn’t there a vaccine?’ I said.
He smiled indulgently. ‘Very little research is done into equine diseases, chiefly because of the cost but also because horses are so large, and can’t be kept in a laboratory for any controlled series of tests.’
I again had the impression that he had said all this many times before, but it was understandable and I was getting used to it. We proceeded on the hospital round (four-year-old with general debility, show-jumper with festering leg) and came at length to a box with an open door.
‘We’re giving this one sun treatment,’ Calder said, indicating that I should look; and inside the box a thin youth was adjusting the angle of an ultra-violet lamp set on a head-high, wall-mounted bracket. It wasn’t at the dappled grey that I looked, however, but at the lad, because in the first brief glimpse I thought he was the boy who had tried to attack Calder.
I opened my mouth... and shut it again.
He wasn’t the boy. He was of the same height, same build, same litheness, same general coloring, but not with the same eyes or jawline or narrow nose.
Calder saw my reaction and smiled. ‘For a split second, when I saw that boy move at Ascot, I thought it was Jason here. But it wasn’t, of course.’
I shook my head. ‘Alike but different.’
Calder nodded. ‘And Jason wouldn’t want to kill me, would you, Jason?’ He spoke with a jocularity to which Jason didn’t: respond.
‘No, sir,’ he said stolidly.
‘Jason is my right-hand man,’ said Calder heartily. ‘Indispensable.’
The right-hand man showed no satisfaction at the flattery and maintained an impassive countenance throughout. He touched the grey horse and told it to shift over a bit in the manner of one equal talking to another, and the horse obediently shifted.
‘Mind your eyes with that lamp,’ Calder said. ‘Where are your glasses?’
Jason fished into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced some ultra-dark sun-shades. Calder nodded. ‘Put them on,’ he said, and Jason complied. Where before there had already been a lack of mobility of expression, there was now, with the obscured eyes, no way at all of guessing Jason’s thoughts.
‘I’ll be finished with this one in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else after that, sir?’
Calder briefly pondered and shook his head. ‘Just the evening rounds at four.’
‘Your invalids get every care,’ I said, complimenting them.
Jason’s blacked-out eyes turned my way, but it was Calder who said ‘Hard work gets results.’ And you’ve said that a thousand times, I thought.
We reached the last box in the yard, the first one which was empty.
‘Emergency bed,’ Calder said, jokingly, and I smiled and asked how much he charged for his patients.
He replied easily and without explanation or apology. ‘Twice the training fees currently charged for horses in the top Newmarket stables. When their rates go up, so do mine.’
‘Twice...?’
He nodded. ‘I could charge more, you know. But if I charged less I’d be totally swamped by all those “last resort” people, and I simply haven’t the room or the time or the spiritual resources to take more cases than I do.’
I wondered how one would ever get to the essence of the man behind the temperate, considerate public face, or indeed if the public face was not a façade at all but the essence itself. I looked at the physical strength of the shoulders below the helmet head and listened to the plain words describing a mystical force, considered the dominating voice and the mild manner, and still found him a man to admire rather than like.
‘The surgery,’ he said, gesturing towards it as we walked that way. ‘My drug store!’ He smiled at the joke (how often, I wondered, had he said it?) and produced a key to unlock the door. ‘There’s nothing dangerous or illegal in here, of course, but one has to protect against vandals. So sad, don’t you think?’
The surgery, which had no windows, was basically a large brick-built hut. The internal walls, like the outer, were painted white, and the floor was tiled in red. There were antiseptic-looking glass-fronted cabinets along the two end walls and a wide bench with drawers underneath along the wall facing the door. On the bench, a delicate-looking set of scales, a pestle and mortar and a pair of fine rubber gloves: behind the glass of the cabinets, rows of bottles and boxes. Everything very business-like and tidy: and along the wall which contained the doer stood three kitchen appliances, refrigerator, cooker and sink.