‘Easter Monday, then?’
He seemed pleased at the idea and reported the next day that Judith had asked Pen, and everyone was poised. ‘Pen’s bringing her kite,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s a day trip to Manchester.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tell her it won’t be raining.’
What I did eventually think of seemed to please them all splendidly and also to be acceptable to others concerned, and I consequently collected Gordon and Judith and Pen (but not the kite) from Clapham at eight-thirty on Easter Bank Holiday morning. Judith and Pen were in fizzing high spirits, though Gordon seemed already tired. I suggested abandoning what was bound to be a fairly taxing day for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I want to go,’ he said. ‘Been looking forward to it all week. But I’ll just sit in the back of the car and rest and sleep some of the way.’ So Judith sat beside me while I drove and touched my hand now and then, not talking much but contenting me deeply by just being there. The journey to Newmarket lasted two and a half hours and I would as soon it had gone on for ever.
I was taking them to Calder’s yard, to the utter fascination of Pen. ‘But don’t tell him I’m a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘He might clam up if he knew he had an informed audience.’
‘We won’t tell,’ Judith assured her. ‘It would absolutely spoil the fun.’
Poor Calder, I thought: but I wouldn’t tell him either.
He greeted us expansively (making me feel guilty) and gave us coffee in the huge oak-beamed sitting room where the memory of Ian Pargetter hovered peripherally by the fireplace.
‘Delighted to see you again,’ Calder said, peering at Gordon, Judith and Pen as if trying to conjure a memory to fit their faces. He knew of course who they were by name, but Ascot was ten months since, and although it had been an especially memorable day for him he had met a great many new people between then and now. ‘Ah yes,’ he said with relief, his brow clearing. ‘Yellow hat with roses.’
Judith laughed. ‘Well done.’
‘Can’t forget anyone so pretty.’
She took it as it was meant, but indeed he hadn’t forgotten: as one tended never to forget people whose vitality brought out the sun.
‘I see Dissdale and Bettina quite often,’ he said, making conversation, and Gordon agreed that he and Judith, also, sometimes saw Dissdale, though infrequently. As a topic it was hardly riveting, but served as an acceptable unwinding interval between the long car journey and the Grand Tour.
The patients in the boxes were all different but their ailments seemed the same; and I supposed surgeons could be excused their impersonal talk of ‘the appendix in bed 14’, when the occupants changed week by week but the operation didn’t.
‘This is a star three-day-eventer who came here five weeks ago with severe muscular weakness and no appetite. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t be ridden. He goes home tomorrow, strong and thriving. Looks well, eh?’ Calder patted the glossy brown neck over the half-stable door. ‘His owner thought he was dying, poor girl. She was weeping when she brought him here. It’s really satisfying, you know, to be able to help.’
Gordon said civilly that it must be.
‘This is a two-year-old not long in training. Came with an intractably infected wound on his fetlock. He’s been here a week, and he’s healing. It was most gratifying that the trainer sent him without delay, since I’d treated several of his horses in the past.’
‘This mare,’ Calder went on, moving us all along, ‘came two or three days ago in great discomfort with blood in her urine. She’s responding well, I’m glad to say.’ He patted this one too, as he did them all.
‘What was causing the bleeding?’ Pen asked, but with only an uninformed-member-of-the-public intonation.
Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know. His vet diagnosed a kidney infection complicated by crystalluria, which means crystals in the urine, but he didn’t know the type of germ and, every antibiotic he gave failed to work. So the mare came here. Last resort.’ He gave me a wink, ‘I’m thinking of simply re-naming this whole place “Last Resort”.’
‘And you’re treating her,’ Gordon asked, ‘with herbs?’
‘With everything I can think of,’ Calder said. ‘And of course... with hands.’
‘I suppose,’ Judith said diffidently, ‘that you’d never let anyone watch...?’
‘My dear lady, for you, anything,’ Calder said. ‘But you’d see nothing. You might stand for half an hour, and nothing would happen. It would be terribly boring. And I might, perhaps, be unable, you know, if someone was waiting and standing there.’
Judith smiled understandingly and the tour continued, ending as before in the surgery.
Pen stood looking about her with sociable blankness and then wandered over to the glass-fronted cabinets to peer myopically at the contents.
Calder, happily ignoring her in favour of Judith, was pulling out his antique tablet-maker and demonstrating it with pride.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Judith said sincerely. ‘Do you use it much?’
‘All the time,’ he said. ‘Any herbalist worth the name makes his own pills and potions.’
‘Tim said you had a universal magic potion in the fridge.’
Calder smiled and obligingly opened the refrigerator door, revealing the brown-filled plastic containers, as before.
‘What’s in it?’ Judith asked.
‘Trade secret,’ he said, smiling. ‘Decoction of hops and other things.’
‘Like beer?’ Judith said.
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘Horses do drink beer,’ Gordon said. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’
Pen bent down to pick up a small peach-coloured pill which was lying unobtrusively on the floor in the angle of one of the cupboards, and put it without comment on the bench.
‘It’s all so absorbing,’ Judith said. ‘So tremendously kind of you to show us everything. I’ll watch all your program with more fervour than ever.’
Calder responded to her warmly as all men did and asked us into the house again for a drink before we left. Gordon however was still showing signs of fatigue and now also hiding both hands in his pockets which meant he felt they were trembling badly, so the rest of us thanked Calder enthusiastically for his welcome and made admiring remarks about his hospital and climbed into the car, into the same places as before.
‘Come back any time you like, Tim,’ he said; and I said thank you and perhaps I would. We shook hands, and we smiled, caught in our odd relationship and unable to take it further. He waved, and I waved back as I drove away.
‘Isn’t he amazing?’ Judith said. ‘I must say, Tim, I do understand why you’re impressed.’
Gordon grunted and said that theatrical surgeons weren’t necessarily the best; but yes, Calder was impressive.
It was only Pen, after several miles, who expressed her reservations.
‘I’m not saying he doesn’t do a great deal of good for the horses. Of course he must do, to have amassed such a reputation. But I don’t honestly think he does it all with herbs.’
‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked, twisting round so as to see her better.
Pen leaned forward, ‘I found a pill on the floor. I don’t suppose you noticed.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘You put it on the bench.’
‘That’s right. Well, that was no herb, it was plain straightforward warfarin.’
‘It may be plain straightforward war-whatever to you,’ Judith said. ‘But not to me.’
Pen’s voice was smiling. ‘Warfarin is a drug used in humans, and I dare say in horses, after things like heart attacks. It’s a coumarin — an anticoagulant. Makes the blood less likely to clot and block up the veins and arteries. Widely used all over the place.’