I nodded, and we followed Pat and the other two horses across the yard and round the corner from which Peter had originally appeared.
Behind a ramshackle barn stood a neat row of six well-kept wooden horse boxes with shingle roofs and newly painted black doors. However run down the rest of the farm might be, the stable department was in tip top shape. No difficulty in seeing where the farmer’s heart lay: with his treasure.
‘Well now,’ Roncey said. ‘We’ve only the one other racehorse, really, and that’s Klondyke, that I was riding just now. He ran in hunter chases in the spring. Didn’t do much good, to be honest.’ He walked along to the second box from the far end, led the horse in and tied it up. When he took the saddle off I saw that Klondyke was a better shape than Tiddely Pom, which was saying little enough, but the health in his coat was conspicuous.
‘He looks well,’ I commented.
‘Eats his head off,’ said Roncey dispassionately, ‘and he can stand a lot of work, so we give it him.’
‘One-paced,’ observed Pat regretfully over my shoulder. ‘Can’t quicken. Pity. We won just the two point-to-points with him. No more.’
There was the faintest glimmer of satisfaction in the laconic voice, and I glanced at him sideways. He saw me looking and wiped the expression off his face but not before I had seen for certain that he had mixed feelings about the horses’ successes. While they progressed to National Hunt racing proper, he didn’t. Older amateur riders had been engaged, and then professionals. The father-son relationship had needles in it.
‘What do you have in the other boxes?’ I asked Roncey, as he shut Klondyke’s door.
‘My old grey hunter at the end, and two hunter mares here, both in foal. This one, Piglet, she’s the dam of Tiddely Pom of course; she’s in foal to the same sire again.’
Unlikely, I thought, that lightning would strike twice.
‘You’ll sell the foal,’ I suggested.
He sniffed. ‘She’s in the farm accounts.’
I grinned to myself. Farmers could train their horses and lose the cost in the general farm accounts, but if they sold one it then came under the heading of income and was taxed accordingly. If Roncey sold either Tiddely Pom or his full brother, nearly half would go to the Revenue.
‘Turn the mares out, Joe,’ he said to his third rider, a patient looking old man with skin like bark, and we watched while he set them loose in the nearest field. Peter was standing beside the gate with Pat: bigger, more assured, with far fewer knots in his personality.
‘Fine sons,’ I said to Roncey.
His mouth tightened. He had no pride in them. He made no reply at all to my fishing compliment, but instead said, ‘We’ll go into the house and you can ask me anything you want to know. For a magazine, you said?’
I nodded.
‘Pat,’ he shouted. ‘You give these three horses a good strapping and feed them and let Joe get on with the hedging. Peter, you’ve got work to do. Go and do it.’
Both his boys gave him the blank acquiescing look which covers seething rebellion. There was a perceptible pause before they moved off with their calm accepting faces. Lids on a lot of steam. Maybe one day Roncey would be scalded.
He led the way briskly back across the yard and into the kitchen. The meat still lay there dripping. Roncey by-passed it and gestured me to follow him through the far door into a small dark hall.
‘Madge?’ he shouted. ‘Madge?’
Father had as little success as son. He shrugged in the same way and led me into a living room as well worn and untidy as the rest of the place. Drifts of clutter, letters, newspapers, clothing, toys and indiscriminate bits of junk lay on every flat surface, including the chairs and the floor. There was a vase of dead and desiccated chrysanthemums on a window sill, and some brazen cobwebs networked the ceiling. Cold ash from the day before filled the grate. A toss-up I thought, whether one called the room lived-in or squalid.
‘Sit down if you can find somewhere,’ Roncey said. ‘Madge lets the boys run wild in the house. Not firm enough. I won’t have it outside, of course.’
‘How many do you have?’
‘Boys? Five.’
‘And a daughter?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘Five boys.’
The thought didn’t please him. ‘Which magazine?’
‘Tally.’ I said. ‘They want background stories to the Lamplighter, and I thought I would give the big stables a miss and shine a bit of the spotlight on someone else for a change.’
‘Yes, well,’ he said defensively, ‘I’ve been written up before, you know.’
‘Of course,’ I said soothingly.
‘About the Lamplighter, too. I’ll show you.’ He jumped up and went over to a knee-hole desk, pulled out one of the side drawers bodily, and brought it across to where I sat at one end of the sofa. He put the drawer in the centre, swept a crumpled jersey, two beaten up dinky cars and a gutted brown paper parcel on to the floor, and seated himself in the space.
The drawer contained a heap of clippings and photographs all thrust in together. No careful sticking into expensive leather folders, like the Huntersons.
My mind leapt to Gail. I saw Roncey talking to me but I was thinking about her body. Her roundnesses. Her fragrant pigmented skin. Roncey was waiting for an answer and I hadn’t heard what he’d asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I asked if you know Bert Checkov.’ He was holding a lengthy clipping with a picture alongside and a bold headline, ‘Back Tiddely Pom NOW.’
‘Yes... and no,’ I said uncertainly.
‘How do you mean?’ he said brusquely. ‘I should have thought you would have known him, being in the same business.’
‘I did know him. But he died. Last Friday.’
I took the clipping and read it while Roncey went through the motions of being shocked, with the indifference uppermost in his voice spoiling the effect.
Bert Checkov had gone to town with Tiddely Pom’s chances in the Lamplighter. The way he saw it, the handicapper had been suffering from semi-blindness and mental blocks to put Tiddely Pom into the weights at ten stone seven, and all punters who didn’t jump on the band-wagon instantly needed to be wet nursed. He thought the ante-post market would open with generous odds, but urged everyone to hurry up with their shirts, before the bookmakers woke up to the bonanza. Bert’s pungent phraseology had given Roncey’s horse more boost than a four stage rocket.
‘I didn’t know he’d written this,’ I admitted. ‘I missed it.’
‘He rang me up only last Thursday and this was in the paper on Friday. That must have been the day you said he died. In point of fact I didn’t expect it would appear. When he telephoned he was, to my mind, quite drunk.’
‘It’s possible,’ I conceded.
‘I wasn’t best pleased about it either.’
‘The article?’
‘I hadn’t got my own money on, do you see? And there he went, spoiling the price. When I rang up my bookmaker on Friday he wouldn’t give me more than a hundred to eight, and today they’ve even made him favourite at eight to one, and there’s still nearly three weeks to the race. Fair enough he’s a good horse, but he’s not Arkle. In point of fact I don’t understand it.’
‘You don’t understand why Checkov tipped him?’
He hesitated. ‘Not to that extent, then, let’s say.’
‘But you do hope to win?’
‘Hope,’ he said. ‘Naturally, I hope to win. But it’s the biggest race we’ve ever tried... I don’t expect to win, do you see?’
‘You’ve as good a chance as any,’ I said. ‘Checkov had his column to fill. The public won’t read half-hearted stuff, you have to go all out for the positive statement.’