‘Ivansky. My National runner. He’s gone up to Liverpool.’
I almost gaped like an idiot. I’d been out of touch with the normal world so much that I had completely forgotten that the Grand National was due that Saturday.
I cleared my throat. ‘He should... er... have a fair chance at the weights.’ It seemed a fairly safe comment, but he disagreed.
‘Ten twelve is far too much on his Haydock form. He’s badly in with Wasserman, don’t you think?’
I raked back for all the opinions I’d held in the safe and distant life of three weeks ago. Nothing much surfaced.
‘I’m sure he’ll do well,’ I said.
He nodded as if he hadn’t noticed the feebleness of the remark, and we went on. The horses were truly an impressive bunch, glowing with good feeding, thorough grooming and well-judged exercise. I ran out of compliments long before he ran out of horses.
‘Drink?’ he said, as the head lad shut the last door.
‘Great.’
We walked up to the house, and he led the way into a sitting-room-cum-office. Chintz-covered sofa and chairs, big desk, table with drinks and glasses, walls covered with framed racing photographs. Normal affluent trainer ambience.
‘Gin?’ he said.
‘Scotch, if you have it.’
He gave me a stiff one and poured gin like water for himself.
‘Your health,’ he said.
‘And yours.’
We drank the ritual first sip, and he gestured to me to sit down.
‘I’ve found that damned cash book for you,’ he said, opening a drawer in the desk. ‘There you are. Book, and file of petty cash receipts.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘And what about these Commissioners?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ve applied for a postponement.’
‘But will they grant it?’
‘Never refused us yet,’ I said. ‘They’ll set a new date about a month ahead, and we’ll do your accounts and audit before then.’
He relaxed contentedly over his draught of gin. ‘We can expect Trevor here next week, then? Counting hay bales and saddles?’ There was humour in his voice at the thoroughness ahead.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe at the end of the week, or the one after. He won’t be back until Wednesday or Thursday.’ Did ‘Returning Wednesday’, I wondered, mean travelling Wednesday, or turning up for work. ‘I’ll do a lot of the preliminary paperwork for him, to save time.’
Finch turned to the drinks table and unscrewed the gin. ‘I thought he was due back on Monday.’
‘His car’s broken down somewhere in France.’
‘That’ll please him.’ He drank deeply. ‘Still, if you make a start on things, the audit should get done in time.’
‘Don’t worry about the Commissioners,’ I said; but everyone did worry when the peremptory summons dropped through their door. If one neither asked for a postponement nor attended at the due hour, the Commissioners would fix one’s year’s tax at whatever figure they cared to, and to that assessment there was no appeal. As such assessments were customarily far higher than the amount of tax actually due, one avoided them like black ice.
To my pleasure, the swirly brown skirt and bouncy fair hair made a swooping entrance. She was holding a marmalade cat which was trying to jump out of her arms.
‘Damn thing,’ she said, ‘why won’t he be stroked.’
‘It’s a mouser,’ said her father, unemotionally.
‘You’d think it would be glad of a cuddle.’
The cat freed itself and bolted. Jossie shrugged. ‘Hello,’ she said to me. ‘So you got here.’
‘Mm.’
‘Well,’ she said to her father, ‘what did he say?’
‘Eh? Oh... I haven’t asked him yet.’
She gave him a fond exasperated smile and said to me, ‘He wants to ask you to ride a horse for him.’
Finch shook his head at her, and I said, ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Jossie said. ‘At Towcester.’
‘Er,’ I said, ‘I’m not really ultra fit.’
‘Nonsense. You won the Gold Cup a fortnight ago. You must be.’
‘Josephine,’ her father said. ‘Clam up.’ He turned to me. ‘I’m flying up to Liverpool in the morning, but I have this horse in at Towcester, and to be blunt he’s still entered there only because someone forgot to scratch him by the eleven o’clock deadline this morning...’
‘The chronically sick secretary,’ muttered Jossie.
‘So we’ve either got to run him after all or pay a fine, and I was toying with the idea of sending him up there, if I could get a suitable jockey.’
‘Most of them having gone to the National,’ Jossie added.
‘Which horse?’ I said.
‘Notebook. Novice hurdler. Four-year-old chestnut gelding, in the top yard.’
‘The one with the flaxen mane and tail?’
‘That’s right. He’s run a couple of times so far. Shows promise, but still green.’
‘Last of twenty-six at Newbury,’ Jossie said cheerfully. ‘It won’t matter a curse if you’re not fit.’ She paused. ‘I’ve been delegated to saddle it up, so you might do us a favour and come and ride it.’
‘Up to you,’ Finch said.
The delegated saddler was a powerful attraction, even if Notebook himself was nothing much.
‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘O.K.’
‘Good.’ Jossie gave me a flashing smile. ‘I’ll drive you up there, if you like.’
‘I would like,’ I said regretfully, ‘but I’ll be in London tonight. I’ll go straight to Towcester from there.’
‘I’ll meet you outside the weighing room, then. He’s in the last race, by the way. He would be.’
Novice hurdles were customarily first or last (or both), on a day’s programme: the races a lot of racegoers chose to miss through lunch or leaving early to avoid the crush. The poor-relation races for the mediocre majority, where every so often a new blazing star scorched out of the ruck on its way to fame.
Running horses in novice hurdles meant starting from home early or getting back late; but there were far more runners in novice hurdles than in any other type of race.
When I left it was Jossie who came back with me through the entrance hall to see me off. As we crossed a vast decrepit Persian rug I glanced at the large dark portraits occupying acres of wall-space.
‘Those are Nantuckets, of course,’ she said, following my gaze. ‘They came with the house.’
‘Po-faced lot,’ I said.
‘You did know that Dad doesn’t actually own all this?’
‘Yes, I actually did know.’ I smiled to myself, but she saw it.
She said defensively, ‘All right, but you’d be surprised how many people make up to me, thinking that they’ll marry the trainer’s daughter and step into all this when he retires.’
‘So you like to establish the ground rules first?’
‘O.K., greyhound-brain, I’d forgotten you’d know from Trevor.’
I knew in general that Axwood Stables Ltd. belonged to an American family, the Nantuckets, who rarely took much personal interest in the place except as a business asset. It had been bought and brought to greatness in the fifties by a rumbustious tycoon thrown up atypically from prudent banking stock. Old Naylor Nantucket had brought his energies and enterprise to England, had fallen in love with English racing, had built a splendid modern stable yard and filled it with splendid horses. He had engaged the young William Finch to train them for him, and the middle-aged William Finch was still doing it for his heirs, except that nowadays nine tenths of the horses belonged to other owners, and the young Nantuckets, faintly ashamed of Uncle Naylor, never crossed the Atlantic to see their own horses perform.
‘Doesn’t your father ever get tired of training for absent owners?’ I said.
‘No. They don’t argue. They don’t ring him up in the middle of the night. And when they lose, they don’t complain. He says training would be a lot easier if all owners lived in New York.’