Ernest Moriarty sat in the sitting-room all the morning. It was Saturday.
I put your notes in the case, she said, poking in her head. Now you’re not still sulking about that egg?
People started going down the street to the races, wearing their best clothes.
She put in her head and said:
Do you want any lunch before I go? There’s a nice piece of cold pork. But you’ll have to hurry up, she said. You don’t want to miss that truck.
No, he said.
He sat there. He heard her heels going down the path. I am going to Moorang, he said, she said the key under the mat, and not to miss the truck. He got up, felt along the wall, because it was time, it was time to take the case, his notes and his pyjamas, she said.
Vic Moriarty hung over the fence and watched the horses sidle out. Voices picked the winner, invited to a drink, and little Bernard Schmidt dropped his toffee-apple in the mud. The poor kid and how he cried. His nose ran down his cheek. Sound swallowed up, ran along the fence to the grand-stand, or splintered into rain, the hissing of rain on canvas. The flag laboured on its pole. Vic Moriarty looked back over her shoulder, a ten-shilling note crumpled in her hand, and wondered if Spider Boy, if Hagan, stuck up there in the stand perhaps or holding an umbrella for someone to make a bet, the way some people can skite. But wait, she said, wait. She did not know for what exactly, and that was what made her sore, and the water coming through her shoes. The world was very unjust.
Over at the stalls Arthur Quong rubbed the hocks of the bay colt, his hands running brown and nervous along the skin that sensed his touch, he could feel the skin moving with his hands. What price Arthur’s colt, they said. But Arthur smiled. The horse seemed fretful in what was not the brownish gloom of the stable at the back of Quongs’ yard. He kicked at the earth floor with his hoof. He picked at Arthur’s sleeve and worried it gently with his teeth. All right, all right, Arthur said, not exactly to the horse, as the sigh of the crowd following the second race, from the stand or the fence, penetrated through rain and stopped short at Arthur Quong. Like the children playing down the street, looking at Arthur and stopping short. Perhaps it was his eyes, those white circles, that enclosed not only the iris, but the whole secret being of Arthur Quong. The colt whinnied into the rain, where a kind of depreciating mumble announced the finish of the second race.
Mr Belper watched his economic assurance flutter with the fragments of two torn cards, Comeagain and Rosabelle, down from the stand. Though after all the second race was only the second race, was not the Cup, was Interview was still a cert. Mr Belper’s first chin rested on the red flap of the one immediately below. His eye, no less bilious than the night before, fixed itself on the reminder of Comeagain and Rosabelle, now lying in the mud. Mind you, Mr Belper often liked to say, punting at a country meeting, then allowing a pause for a change of key and the attention of his audience, punting at a country meeting, he would say, is nothing but a fool’s game. This did not, however, prevent Mr Belper from playing the fool. He sat on the stand now and a sickly little tune came trickling out from between his teeth. Because what was a fiver here and there. Cissie said, you’ve got a liver, Joe, gave him something out of a glass. He wanted to think this. He went into Moorang and they talked about the Crisis as if it were some new kind of disease. Only the trouble was you couldn’t take anything out of a glass. You said that Things Would Pick Up, or the Tide was on the Turn, or even Every Cloud, not that this was much of a comfort. The fact was that Mr Belper, in spite of his taste for generalization, those evenings at Moriartys’ when he talked with gusto on natural resources and the canalization of energy, found that Brighter Slogans were no longer in his line. He sat and stuck out his lower lip. Joe, said his wife, you give me the creeps, we’re All in the Same Boat, she said. But how well, or in which boat, was something Mrs Belper did not know. He had not mentioned Deucar Steel or Newcastle Incorporated Coal and Iron. It was this that made her husband poke out his lip and stare at the fragments of a bookie’s card.
Hagan brushed past Mr Belper, that heap of troubled mackintosh, on his way downstairs. He did not stop to speak to Belper, had seen that hat on its way down, and a face. Hagan hurried after a face. He would perhaps have called out, only in this case you couldn’t, a bit of class. So instead he jostled, and what did he think he was at, they said, unimpressed by the contortions of a man trying to be recognized. A face turned in the rain. It looked past Hagan’s head, resting casually not on Hagan, those eyes, looking for what in the rain. It made you want to swear. He bumped out of the crowd and went into the bar.
Walter Quong was giggling. He was already rather drunk.
Hello, Hagan, said Walter, quaking like a gin-something that he held in a yellow hand.
A double Scotch, Hagan said.
Then I said, said Walter Quong, it isn’t far to the cemetery. Oh, she said, you’re telling me. Nettles sting. It was the Sunday after they buried old Mrs Falconer. She was covered with dead flowers.
Walter sighed. There was a bubble on his mouth.
Hagan drank his whisky. It had the limp, watered flavour of the whisky you get in country bars, not worth spitting out even. He felt, like the whisky, kind of flat, clenched the glass that did not, would not break, splinter into the hand. He wanted to break her. She danced round, and you put your arm round her waist, she was that small, and bent back, the sort of face that came just a certain distance and said that Mother was going home. She looked past, you might have been air, or something she didn’t want to touch, even if last night you could have sworn, against your face, and Mrs Moriarty’s gone, she said. He had forgotten Vic, was whisky standing too long in the glass, was time to throw out and go sober, you wouldn’t get drunk on vinegar.
Furlow’s mare’s in form, said the barman.
Furlow? he said. Not a chance.
He slammed down his glass.
Too full of tricks, he said.
She looked past his face in the rain. He wanted to lam that girl.
Arthur’s won the Cup, said Walter Quong.
The Cup? said the barman. Listen to Walter. The Cup hasn’t been run.
Walter’s mouth plunged on a glass.
Oh well, he said, Arthur’s going to win the Cup. She was covered with dead flowers.
Hagan was feeling wild. To listen to a randy, drunken Chow made you feel — white. He went outside.
Oh, said Vic Moriarty, it’s you!
She sauntered over to Oswald Spink and began to inquire the odds. Because that will fix you, she said. And Sir Galahad, Mr Spink, she said, no, I’m not taken by the name. Looked back to see if Clem, if Clem had stood. She could feel the water soaking through her shoes. Didn’t it make you cry, the races, when back turned said nothing, and you wanted to say you didn’t mean it, really, Clem, whether the horses went out or stuck in the mud or what, because who cared if a horse. Vic Moriarty crumpled ten shillings in her hand. I’ve got to get hold of him, she said, listen, I’ll say, honest, Clem, you don’t know what it means, and he’s going to Moorang, just to-night, because then I won’t care any more. Vic Moriarty’s face was crumbling under its beauty hints.
Even money Interview, they called.
The horses were going out. That glint is steel is eye turned is his first race Stevie Everett and shirt sticks to the skin the orange conjunction with green where the barrier stirs a nerve and Furlow’s mare with all that weight treads mud said Interview the paper said balancing a cloud on flagpole feels his stirrups stretch to what depth to what underneath whether muscle or air or Quong’s colt keeps the store the awful twisters these Chows in a country of possibilities and ideals at 2 or 5 to 1 the collar sticks on a lozenge from shouting from stretching the neck to see the starter’s two-day importance lead into place a bridle when the balloon goes up.