‘Foals usually drop at night,’ Oliver said, and Nigel nodded. ‘She started about midnight. She’s just lazy, eh, girl?’ He patted the brown rump. ‘Very slow. Same thing every year.’
‘She’s not come for Sandcastle, then?’ I said.
‘No. She’s one of mine,’ Oliver said. ‘The foal’s by Diarist.’
We hovered for a few minutes but there was no change in Pattacake. Nigel, running delicately knowledgeable hands over the shape under her ribs, said she’d be another hour, perhaps, and that he would stay with her for a while. Oliver and I walked onwards, past the still closed breeding shed and down the path between the two small paddocks towards the stallion yard. Everything, as before, meticulously tidy.
There was one four-legged figure in one of the paddocks, head down and placid. ‘Parakeet,’ Oliver said. ‘Getting more air than grass, actually. It isn’t warm enough yet for the new grass to grow.’
We came finally to the last yard, and there he was, the gilt-edged Sandcastle, looking over his door like any other horse.
One couldn’t tell, I thought. True there was a poise to the well-shaped head, and an interested eye and alertly pricked ears, but nothing to announce that this was the marvellous creature I’d seen at Ascot. No one ever again, I reflected, would see that arrow-like raking gallop, that sublime throat-catching valour: and it seemed a shame that he should be denied his ability in the hope that he would pass it on.
A lad, broom in hand, was sweeping scatterings of peat off the concrete apron in front of the six stallion boxes, watched by Sandcastle, Rotaboy and Diarist with the same depth of interest as a bus queue would extend to a busker.
‘Lenny,’ Oliver said, ‘you can take Sandcastle down to the small paddock opposite to the one with Parakeet.’ He looked up at the sky as if to sniff the coming weather. ‘Put him back in his box when you return for evening stables.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Lenny was well into middle age, small, leathery and of obviously long experience. He propped the broom against one of the empty boxes and disappeared into a doorway to reappear presently carrying a length of rope.
‘Lenny is one of my most trusted helpers,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Been with me several years. He’s good with stallions and much stronger than he looks. Stallions can be quite difficult to handle, but Lenny gets on with them better than with mares. Don’t know why.’
Lenny clipped the rope onto the head collar which Sandcastle, along with every other equine resident, wore at all times. Upon the head collar was stapled a metal plate bearing the horse’s name, an absolute essential for identification. Shuffle all those mares together without their head collars, I thought, and no one would ever sort them. I suggested the problem mildly to Oliver, who positively blenched. ‘God forbid! Don’t suggest such things. We’re very careful. Have to be. Otherwise, as you say, we could breed the wrong mare to the wrong stallion and never know it.’
I wondered, but privately, how often that in fact had happened, or whether indeed it was possible for two mares or two foals to be permanently swapped. The opportunities for mistakes, if not for outright fraud, put computer manipulation in the shade.
Nigel arrived in the yard, and with his scarcely necessary help Lenny opened Sandcastle’s door and led the colt out; and one could see in all their strength the sleek muscles, the tugging sinews, the spring-like joints. The body that was worth its weight in gold pranced and scrunched on the hard apron, wheeling round impatiently and tossing its uncomprehending head.
‘Full of himself,’ Oliver explained. ‘We have to feed him well and keep him fairly fit, but of course he doesn’t get the exercise he used to.’
We stepped to one side with undignified haste to avoid Sandcastle’s restless hindquarters. ‘Has he... er... started work yet?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ Oliver said. ‘Only one of his mares has foaled so far. She’s almost through her foal-heat, so when she comes into use in fifteen or sixteen days time, she’ll be his first. After that there will be a pause — give him time to think! — then he’ll be busy until into June.’
‘How often...?’ I murmured delicately.
Oliver fielded the question as if he, like Calder, had had to give the same answer countless times over.
‘It depends on the stallion,’ he said. ‘Some can cover one mare in the morning and another in the afternoon and go on like that for days. Others haven’t that much stamina or that much desire. Occasionally you get very shy and choosy stallions. Some of them won’t go near some mares but will mate all right with others. Some will cover only one mare a fortnight, if that. Stallions aren’t machines, you know, they’re individual like everyone else.’
With Nigel in attendance Lenny led Sandcastle out of the yard, the long bay legs stalking in powerful strides beside the almost trotting little man.
‘Sandcastle will be all right with mares,’ Oliver said again firmly. ‘Most stallions are.’
We stopped for Oliver to give two carrots and a pat each to Rotaboy and Diarist, so that we didn’t ourselves see the calamity. We heard a distant clatter and a yell and the thud of fast hooves, and Oliver went white as he turned to run to the disaster.
I followed him, also sprinting.
Lenny lay against one of the white painted posts of the small paddock’s rails, dazedly trying to pull himself up. Sandcastle, loose and excited, had found his way into one of the paths between the larger paddocks and from his bolting speed must have taken the rails to be those of a racecourse.
Nigel stood by the open gate of the small paddock, his mouth wide as if arrested there by shock. He was still almost speechless when Oliver and I reached him, but had at least begun to unstick.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Oliver shouted. ‘Get going. Get the Land Rover. He can get out onto the road that way through the Watcherleys’. He ran off in the direction of his own house leaving a partially resurrected Nigel to stumble off towards the bungalow, half in sight beyond the stallion yard.
Lenny raised himself and began his excuses, but I didn’t wait to listen. Unused to the problem and ignorant of how best to catch fleeing horses, I simply set off in Sandcastle’s wake, following his path between the paddocks and seeing him disappear ahead of me behind a distant hedge.
I ran fast along the grassy path between the rails, past the groups of incurious mares in the paddocks, thinking that my brief January holiday skiing down the pistes at Gstaad might have its practical uses after all; there was currently a lot more muscle in my legs than was ever to be found by July.
Whereas on my last visit the hedge between Oliver Knowles’ farm and the Watcherleys’ run-down hospital for sick horses had been a thorny unbroken boundary, there were now two or three wide gaps, so that passing from one side to the other was easy. I pounded through the gap which lay straight ahead and noticed almost unconsciously that the Watcherleys’ dilapidation had been not only halted but partially reversed, with new fencing going up and repairs in hand on the roofs.
I ran towards the stable buildings across a thistly field in which there was no sign of Sandcastle, and through an as yet unmended gate which hung open on broken hinges on the far side. Beyond there between piles of rubble and rusting iron I reached the yard itself, to find Ginnie looking around her with unfocused anxiety and a man and a girl walking towards her enquiringly.
Ginnie saw me running, and her first instinctively cheerful greeting turned almost at once to alarm.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is one of the mares out?’
‘Sandcastle.’
‘Oh no...’ It was a wail of despair. ‘He can get on the road.’ She turned away, already running, and I ran after her; out of the Watcherleys’ yard, round their ramshackle house and down the short weedy gateless drive to the dangerous outside world where a car could kill a horse without even trying.