‘I... er... I just wondered.’ Dennis Kinser’s throat felt glued together.
‘Don’t mess with him,’ the racing writer said with half-solemn warning. ‘He may look small and harmless but he strikes like a rattlesnake when he’s angry.’
Swallowing, feeling light-headed, Dennis Kinser spoke next to the food columnist who’d given his Aunt Pauline the puff that had sent her soufflés soaring.
‘Williams?’ the food man said. ‘He used to like me to do recipes. The new editor’s got a chips and ketchup complex. Bill Williams asked me — well, he was probably joking, but he asked me where to take three business people to dinner who could make or break his whole future, so I said your aunt’s place, and I know he phoned up straight away.’
Dennis Kinser put down the receiver with his whole brain repeating ‘Oh my God’, ‘Oh my God’, like a mantra.
‘What’s the matter?’ his aunt asked. ‘You’ve gone white.’
‘That man Williams...’ Dennis Kinser sounded strangled. ‘What did you say to him to put things right?’
Pauline Kinser wrinkled her forehead. ‘I gave him some coffee.’
‘Coffee! And an abject apology? And his money back? And the grovel of the century?’
Confused, she shook her head. ‘Just coffee.’
Her nephew, frightened, screamed at her, ‘You stupid bitch. You bloody stupid bitch. That man will find a way of bankrupting us both. He writes for newspapers. And I owe him... God, I owe him... and he’ll ruin us for last night.’
His aunt said mulishly, ‘It’s all your fault. It was you who said to turn away boats.’
In London that afternoon the Lionheart News Group held a monthly progress meeting consisting of the three warring proprietors, the business managers of all the Group’s many newspapers and periodicals, and sundry financial advisers. No editors or journalists were ever invited to this sort of affair: to Mrs Robin Dawkins — acting as Chairman — they were merely the below-stairs hired help.
Mrs Dawkins treated the urgent need for a replacement editor for the Daily Troubadour — fourth on the agenda — as if she were lacking a butler. As long as he knew his place and was metaphorically good at keeping the silver untarnished, she could overlook an afternoon fondness for port. The dismayed managers tactfully tried to point out that the present editor’s fondness for afternoon port was three-quarters of the trouble.
Russell Maudsley forcefully reported that Absalom Williams, ex-editor of the Cotswold Voice, whom they had at first considered, need not now be borne in mind, and F. Harold Field declared with even more emphasis that Absalom Williams at thirty-three was too young, had too many academic degrees and couldn’t insist on getting his own way.
Several of the managers held their breath, not least a competent but thwarted woman from the Daily Troubadour who knew from experience that when Field and Maudsley agreed against a course of action Mrs Robin Dawkins would suddenly be for. As the majority shareholder she would insist, and the two men would shrug and give in.
The Daily Troubadour manager knew that most great editors hit the top in their middle thirties: that like orchestral conductors they either did or didn’t have the flair. She listened to Mr Field complaining to Mrs Dawkins that moreover Williams couldn’t even write, and then she read a portion of only one of the photocopied sheets that F. Harold had been lackadaisically distributing all round the table from a folder, and felt the instant impact of the fizzing Williams’ talent on the page. Not write? This was Gettysburg stuff.
Looking up, she saw F. Harold Field watching her. He smiled. He wants this Absalom, she thought.
That same afternoon Dennis Kinser’s first explosive rage against his aunt had deepened painfully like mustard-gas burns. He sat leaning his elbows on her desk with his head in his hands, seeking a way out of a quicksand of debt.
His aunt grumbled repetitively, ‘It was you who said no boats.’
‘Shut up.’
‘But—’
‘Bugger the boats,’ Dennis Kinser said violently, and his aunt, regally distinguished in a blue, silver and purple kaftan of Dennis’s choosing, retired hurt and wept in the tiny sitting-room that held all that was left of her former home. She’d given Dennis everything else. She couldn’t bear his anger. She didn’t like horses. She hated the man in the punt.
Dennis Kinser’s wheeler-dealing relied entirely on Mainstream Mile flourishing as the rave of the region. In spite of the Voice racing writer’s golden superlatives there hadn’t so far been enough promises of response to the couch potato gambling syndicates to fill even a short row of boxes, let alone the whole sparkling stable he craved. To bamboozle the horse-racing licensing department into believing that he had the qualifying dozen horses in his yard, he’d invented a few and brought in others limping from their retirement fields; and in a burst of typical hubris he’d promised to sponsor a two-mile hurdle at Marl-borough races — the Kinser Cup. Fame would follow. Rich owners, impressed, would eat at his restaurant and send him horses galore. Fame and riches attracted fame and riches. He’d seen it. He, Dennis Kinser, would have both.
His trouble was, he was in too much of a hurry. He had that very morning sent out press releases to every publication even distantly aware that racing existed. His invitations to every influential pen couldn’t be retrieved from the Royal Mail. He would in effect be shouting ‘Look at me, I’m great’, and the rattlesnake in the punt could print and publish, ‘Look at him, he’s a fraud’, and the write-ups he’d get would be mocking instead of admiring.
Dennis Kinser groaned aloud.
Bill (Absalom Elvis etc.) Williams bought a copy of the Cotswold Voice the next day, Saturday, and winced his way from the headlines onwards.
On the racing page, his racing writer, now demoted to halfway down the space available, was happy to let readers know that their very own syndicate-forming trainer was sponsoring a race at Marlborough the following Saturday ‘Be there!’ encouraged the Voice. ‘Kinser can win.’
‘Race to Mainstream Mile!’ admonished the food column. ‘A brilliant Kinser double!’
As he had always done to dilute disappointment and make frustration bearable, Bill Williams stretched for a ball-point and paper and wrote the knots out of his system.
He wrote with vigour, and unforgiving fire. He wrote from the sharp memory of humiliation and from an unappeased lust for revenge. He ridiculed Pauline Kinser for the pretension of her kaftans and the snobbery of her no-boats ban. He savagely pulverised the multiple lies of the make-believe glamorous racing stable and he jeered at Dennis Kinser himself for being a conceited humbug, a fast-talking trickster, a self-deluding sham. It was a piece designed and calculated to trample and destroy. It would probably never see public print.
One of Dennis Kinser’s gaudy press releases ended up in the Lionheart News Group’s little-used office of F. Harold Field. F. Harold, his hand hovering over the shredder, caught a glimpse of the words ‘Mainstream Mile’ and briefly glanced at the come-hither.
‘Warm Welcome’, he read, and smiled grimly. Not his lasting impression of the head waiter.
‘Hurdle race sponsored by trainer Dennis Kinser, co-owner of Mainstream Mile. Buffet lunch. Restaurant chef. Chance to buy a share in a Syndicate!’