‘If your father had sent the horse to Calder Jackson, I suppose he would still own it,’ I said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, he would, and don’t think he doesn’t know it, of course he does, but it’s as much as anyone’s life’s worth to say it.’
We trudged back over the thick grass, and I asked him how Calder or Dissdale had known that Indian Silk was ill.
He shrugged. ‘It was in the papers. He’d been favourite for the King George VI on Boxing Day, but of course he didn’t run, and the press found out why.’
We came again to the gate into the grandstand enclosure and went through it, and I asked where he lived.
‘Exning,’ he said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Newmarket. Just outside.’ He looked at me with slightly renewed apprehension. ‘You meant it, didn’t you, about not telling?’
‘I meant it,’ I said. ‘Only...’ I frowned a little, thinking of the hot-house effect of his living with his parents.
‘Only what?’ he asked.
I tried a different tack. ‘What are you doing now? Are you still at school?’
‘No, I left once I’d passed those exams. I really needed them, like. You can’t get a half-way decent job without those bits of paper these days.’
‘You’re not working for your father, then?’
He must have heard the faint relief in my voice because for the first time he fully smiled. ‘No, I reckon it wouldn’t be good for his temper, and anyway I don’t want to be a trainer, one long worry, if you ask me.’
‘What do you do, then?’ I asked.
‘I’m learning electrical engineering in a firm near Cambridge. An apprentice, like.’ He smiled again. ‘But not with horses, not me.’ He shook his head ruefully and delivered his young-solomon judgement of life. ‘Break your heart, horses do.’
November
To my great delight the cartoonist came up trumps, his twenty animated films being shown on television every weeknight for a month in the best time-slot for that sort of humour, seven in the evening, when older children were still up and the parents home from work. The nation sat up and giggled, and the cartoonist telephoned breathlessly to ask for a bigger loan.
‘I do need a proper studio, not this converted warehouse. And more animators, and designers, and recordists, and equipment.’
‘All right,’ I said into the first gap. ‘Draw up your requirements and come and see me.’
‘Do you realise,’ he said, as if he himself had difficulty, ‘That they’ll take as many films as I can make? No limit. They said just go on making them for years and years... they said please go on making them.’
‘I’m very glad,’ I said sincerely.
‘You gave me faith in myself,’ he said. ‘You’ll never believe it, but you did. I’d been turned down so often, and I was getting depressed, but when you lent me the money to start it was like being uncorked. The ideas just rushed out.’
‘And are they still rushing?’
‘Oh sure. I’ve got the next twenty films roughed out in drawings already and we’re working on those, and now I’m starting on the batch after that.’
‘It’s terrific,’ I said.
‘It sure is. Brother, life’s amazing.’ He put down his receiver and left me smiling into space.
‘The cartoonist?’ Gordon said.
I nodded. ‘Going up like a rocket.’
‘Congratulations.’ There was warmth and genuine pleasure in his voice. Such a generous man, I thought: so impossible to do him harm.
‘He looks like turning into a major industry,’ I said.
‘Disney, Hanna Barbera, eat your hearts out,’ Alec said from across the room.
‘Good business for the bank.’ Gordon beamed. ‘Henry will be pleased.’
Pleasing Henry, indeed, was the aim of us all.
‘You must admit, Tim,’ Alec said, ‘That you’re a fairish rocket yourself... so what’s the secret?’
‘Light the blue paper and retire immediately,’ I said good-humoredly, and he balled a page of jottings to throw at me, and missed.
At mid-morning he went out as customary for the six copies of What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t and having distributed five was presently sitting back in his chair reading our own with relish.
Ekaterin’s had been thankfully absent from the probing columns ever since the five-per-cent business, but it appeared chat some of our colleagues along the road weren’t so fortunate.
‘Did you know,’ Alec said conversationally, ‘That some of our investment manager chums down on the corner have set up a nice little fiddle on the side, accepting pay-offs from brokers in return for steering business their way?’
‘How do you know?’ Gordon asked, looking up from a ledger.
Alec lifted the paper. ‘The gospel according to this dicky bird.’
‘Gospel meaning good news,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so damned erudite.’ He grinned at me with mischief and went back to reading aloud, ‘Contrary to popular belief the general run of so-called managers in merchant banks are not in the princely bracket.’ He looked up briefly. ‘You can say that again.’ He went on, ‘We hear that four of the investment managers in this establishment have been cosily supplementing their middle-incomes by steering fund money to three stockbrokers in particular. Names will be revealed in our next issue. Watch this space.’
‘It’s happened before,’ Gordon said philosophically. ‘And will happen again. The temptation is always there.’ He frowned. ‘All the same, I’m surprised their senior managers and the directors haven’t spotted it.’
‘They’ll have spotted it now,’ Alec said.
‘So they will.’
‘It would be pretty easy,’ I said musingly, ‘To set up a computer programme to do the spotting for Ekaterin’s, in case we should ever find the pestilence cropping up here.’
‘Would it?’ Gordon asked.
‘Mm. Just a central programme to record every deal in the Investment Department with each stockbroker, with running totals, easy to see. Anything hugely unexpected could be investigated.’
‘But that’s a vast job, surely,’ Gordon said.
I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. I could get our tame programmer to have a go, if you like.’
‘We’ll put it to the others. See what they say.’
‘There will be screeches from Investment Management,’ Alec said. ‘Cries of outraged virtue.’
‘Guards them against innuendo like this, though,’ Gordon said, pointing to What’s Going On Where...
The board agreed, and in consequence I spent another two days with the programmer, building dykes against future leaks.
Gordon these days seemed no worse, his illness not having progressed in any visible way. There was no means of knowing how he felt, as he never said and hated to be asked, but on the few times I’d seen Judith since the day at Easter, she had said he was as well as could be hoped for.
The best of those times had been a Sunday in July when Pen had given a lunch party in her house in Clapham; it was supposed to have been a lunch-in-the-garden party, but like so much that summer was frustrated by chilly winds. Inside was to me much better, as Pen had written place-cards for her long refectory table and put me next to Judith, with Gordon on her right hand.
The other guests remained a blur, most of them being doctors of some sort or another, or pharmacists like herself. Judith and I made polite noises to the faces on either side of us but spent most of the time talking to each other, carrying on two conversations at once, one with voice, one with eyes; both satisfactory.