‘Flu,’ Michael said succinctly.
‘But he helps the children with the rabbits! Bother and damn. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.’
‘Do what?’ I incautiously asked.
‘Clean out the run and the hutches.’
‘Be careful,’ Michael teased, ‘or she’ll have you mucking out the wretched bunnies. Let the children do it, Maudie. They’re quite old enough.’
‘They’ll be dressed for school,’ she objected, and indeed her two younger children, boy and girl in tidy grey, came bouncing in with gleeful appetites and good morning hugs for their father. They were followed, to my severe surprise, by my own daughter, Cinders.
She wore the same grey clothes. I gathered from the chatter that she went to the same school and had stayed with the Watermeads overnight. Hugo, I reflected, couldn’t have reckoned on my coming to breakfast.
She said ‘Hi’ to me nonchalantly as someone she’d met in passing at lunch two days ago, as someone who knew her parents. Her attention reverted at once to the other children with whom she giggled, at ease.
I tried not to watch her, but I was as conscious of her as if I’d grown new antennae. She sat opposite me, dark haired, neat and vivacious, secure and loved. Not mine. Never mine. I ate toast and wished things were different.
Maudie’s daughter said, ‘If Lewis has flu, who’s doing the rabbits?’
‘Why not Ed?’ Maudie said, suggesting her elder son.
‘Mother! You know he won’t. He’s a dead loss as a brother. Lewis loves the bunnies. He strokes them, strokes their fur. They hop all over his hands. There’s no one as good with them as Lewis. I wish Lewis was my brother.’
Michael raised his eyebrows at Maudie, neither of them relishing the promotion of Lewis to son.
‘Who’s Lewis?’ Cinders asked.
‘One of Freddie’s drivers,’ the children told her, explaining the fleet of boxes, explaining they were mine.
‘Oh,’ she said, lacking much interest.
Michael said he would get one of the stable-lads to clean the hutches that afternoon and Maudie chivvied the three children like a flock of sparrows to finish their breakfast, bundle up in coats and scramble out to the car for her to drive them miles to reach school by eight-thirty.
The kitchen seemed quiet and empty after they’d gone. I finished my coffee and rose to my feet, thanking Michael for the company.
‘Any time,’ he said amiably.
My glance fell on one of John Tigwood’s ubiquitous round collecting tins standing on the window sill.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘One of my boxes is fetching a load of ancient steeplechasers from Yorkshire today. John Tigwood says you’re taking two of them in your bottom paddock. What shall I do about them? Do you want the whole lot to come here first? I mean, which two do you want?’
Not surprisingly he looked faintly exasperated. ‘Lorna talked me into it again. Let her and that wretched little man sort them out at that awful little place. But see if you can bring me two here that aren’t on the point of expiring. I told Tigwood to take the last two to the knackers to put them out of their misery. It’s a lot of sentimental rubbish, keeping those poor tottering wrecks on their feet, but of course I can’t say that in front of the children. They don’t understand the need for death.’
He came out into the stable yard to drive up to the Downs to watch his horses complete their morning exercise, and on an impulse asked if I would like to go with him, as Irkab Alhawa would be up there doing fast work.
I accepted at once, intensely pleased at what I knew to be a compliment and a gift. He drove us in his high-wheelbased Shogun and pulled up at a vantage point near the end of his upland all-weather exercise track. From there we had a clear view of horses galloping uphill towards us three abreast, and a closer look as they swept past us, to pull up a hundred yards further on.
I’d spent innumerable mornings most of my life riding training-gallops. I still did it, given the chance. There wasn’t going to be any chance I would exercise Watermead horses, though, as steeplechase jockeys of my size, whether retired or not, tended to be too heavy and too strong for young flat-racers.
‘How’s Irkab coming along?’ I asked tentatively.
‘Doing just great.’
Michael’s voice was full of satisfaction, the anxiety of training a horse fancied to win the Derby hovering well below sweat-level so early in the year. Come June he’d be insomniac.
We watched three or four trios of his string come past us in a prearranged order, and Michael said, ‘Irkab will be in the next three, on this side nearest to us. You’ll see the white blaze down his nose.’
‘Great.’
The three horses came into sight, moving easily, fast shadows on the brown track. Irkab Alhawa, with his awkward Arab name, had been a late-developing two-year-old, not revealing the extent of his athletic ability until the Middle Park Stakes in October the previous year. Lewis had driven him to Newmarket that autumn day as merely another Watermead runner and had returned with a revelation that had attracted newsmen to Pixhill like a flock of starlings.
The promise of the Middle Park had been confirmed two weeks later by a scintillating six-length victory in the Dewhurst Stakes, the final top two-year-old event of the season, slaughtering the best that Newmarket could muster on its own turf, with the result that during the peaceful inactive winter Irkab Alhawa had become almost a cult, the odd-sounding syllables part of his mystique. The press had translated the words into English as ‘Ride the Wind,’ which had caught the public’s imagination, though somewhere I’d heard that that rendering wasn’t quite right. Never mind; Irkab Alhawa was good news for Michael, for Pixhill, for Lewis, and not least for Freddie Croft.
The brown sensation with the narrow white blaze, recognisable afar off, swept effortlessly up the track towards us in the smooth coordination of muscle and mass that was nature’s gift to the lucky few, horses and humans, in whom grace of movement equalled speed.
I felt, as always in the presence of great horses, an odd sort of envy: not to be on their backs, but to be them, riding the wind. In rational terms it was nonsense, but after so many years of closeness with the marvellous creatures they were in a way extensions of myself, always hovering in the back of consciousness.
Not everyone had rejoiced with Michael over the emergence of a prodigy in his stable. Human nature being what it was, a certain portion of the racing world would have been happy to hear that ill had befallen the horse. Michael shrugged it off. ‘There will always be spite and envy. Look how some politicians encourage it! It’s not my problem if people grudge and bitch, it’s theirs.’ Michael, easy going and civilised, couldn’t understand the force of unprovoked hate.
Irkab Alhawa galloped past us, majestically strong. Michael turned to me with a glimmering smile and saw he needed to make no comment. For a horse like that, comment was inadequate, banal.
We drove back to the stables. I thanked him. He nodded, and in an odd way, because of that gallop, we’d come closer to a positive friendship, not just friendly business relations.
I took Lewis’s super-six back to the farmyard, its daily bustle embracing me, bringing my feet back to earth.
Aziz had reported for work, his vitality and flashing smile having already produced a sort of glaze in Harve’s less shiny eyes. Harve greeted my arrival with relief and told me he’d been trying to explain to Aziz, disappointed with his first assignment, that a job was a job was a job.
‘There’s a whole lot of no glamour in this business,’ I assured Aziz. ‘Some days you take seven terminal has-beens. One day, maybe, a Derby winner. Getting the cargo alive and well to journey’s end is all that matters.’