It was not too difficult to see, if one looked really closely. The leather reins were stitched on to the rings at each side of the bit, and the stitches on the off-side rein had nearly all been severed.
Three miles and twenty fences at bucketing speed with just two strands of thread holding my right-hand rein.
‘Britten!’
I gave a jerking tug, and the remaining stitches came apart in my hand. I pulled the rein off the ring and waved the free end in the air.
‘Sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I need another bridle.’
‘What? Oh very well...’ He used his telephone to call the weighing room to send a replacement out quickly. Tapestry’s lad appeared, looking worried, to help change the headpiece, and I pointed out to him, as I gave him Binny’s bridle, the parted stitching.
‘I don’t know how it could have got like that,’ he said anxiously. ‘I didn’t know it was like that, honest. I cleaned it yesterday, and all.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Yes, but...’
‘Give me a leg-up,’ I said, ‘and don’t worry.’
He continued all the same to look upset. Good lads took it grievously to heart if anything was proved lacking in the way they turned out their horses, and Tapestry’s lad was as good as the horse deserved. Binny, I thought not for the first time, was an all-out one-man disaster area, a blight to himself and everyone around.
‘Line up,’ shouted the starter, with his hand on the lever. ‘We’re five minutes late.’
Tapestry did his best to put that right two seconds later with another arm-wrenching departure, but owing to one or two equally impetuous opponents I thankfully got him anchored in mid-field; and there we stayed for all of the first circuit. The pace, once we’d settled down, was nothing like as fast as the Gold Cup, and I had time to worry about the more usual things, like meeting the fences right, and not running out altogether, which was an added hazard at Kempton where the wings leading to the fences were smaller and lower than on other courses, and tended to give tricky horses bad ideas.
During the second circuit my state of unfitness raised its ugly head in no uncertain way, and it would be fair to say that for the last mile Tapestry’s jockey did little except cling on. Tapestry truly was, however, a great performer, and in consequence of the cheers and acclaim in the unsaddling enclosure after the Gold Cup, he seemed, like many much-feted horses, to have become conscious of his own star status. It was the extra dimension of his new pride which took us in a straight faultless run over the last three fences in the straight, and his own will to win which extended his neck and his stride on the run-in. Tapestry won the Oasthouse Cup by four lengths, and it was all the horse’s doing, not mine.
Moira kissed her horse with tears running down her cheeks, and kissed me as well, and everyone else within mouth-shot, indiscriminately. There was nothing uptight or inhibited about the Longerman joy, and the most notable person not there to share it was the horse’s trainer. Binny Tomkins was nowhere to be seen.
‘Drink,’ Moira shrieked at me. ‘Owners and trainers bar.’
I nodded, speechless from exertion and back-slapping, and struggled through the throng with my saddle to be weighed in. It was fabulous, I thought dazedly; fantastic, winning another big race. More than I’d ever reckoned possible. A bursting delight like no other on earth. Even knowing how little I’d contributed couldn’t dampen the wild inner rejoicing. I’d never be able to give it up, I thought. I’d still be struggling round in the mud and the rain at fifty, chasing the marvellous dream. Addiction wasn’t only a matter of needles in the arm.
Moira in the bar was dispensing champagne and bright laughs in copious quantities, and had taken Jossie closely in tow.
‘Ro, darling Ro,’ Moira said, ‘have you seen Binny anywhere?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Wasn’t it odd, the bridle breaking like that?’ Her innocent-seeming eyes stared up into my own. ‘I talked to the lad, you see.’
‘These things do happen,’ I said.
‘You mean, no one can prove anything?’
‘Roughly that.’
‘But aren’t you the teeniest bit angry?’
I smiled from the glowing inner pleasure. ‘We won the race. What else matters?’
She shook her head. ‘It was a wicked thing to do.’
Desperation, I thought, could spawn deeds the doers wouldn’t sanely contemplate. Like cutting loose a rein. Like kidnapping the enemy. Like whatever else lay ahead before we were done. I shut out the shadowy devils and drank to life and the Oasthouse Cup.
Jossie, too, had a go at me when we wandered later out to the carpark.
‘Is Moira right?’ she demanded. ‘Did Binny rig it for you to come to grief?’
‘I should think so.’
‘She says you ought to report it.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s programmed to self-destruct before the end of the season.’
‘Do you mean suicide?’ she said.
‘You’re too literal. I meant he’ll go bust to the bookies with a reverberating bang.’
‘You’re drunk.’
I shook my head, grinning. ‘High. Quite different. Care to join me on my cloud?’
‘A puff of wind,’ she said, ‘and you’d evaporate.’
15
Jossie drove off to some party or other in London, and I, mindful of earlier unscheduled destinations after racing, took myself circumspectly down the road to the nearest public telephone box. No one followed, that I could see.
Hilary Margaret Pinlock answered at the twentieth ring, when I had all but given up, and said breathlessly that she had only that second reached home; she’d been out playing tennis.
‘Are you busy this evening?’ I said.
‘Nothing special.’
‘Can I come and see you?’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated a fraction. ‘What do you want? Food? A bed?’
‘An ear,’ I said. ‘And baked beans, perhaps. But no bed.’
‘Right,’ she said calmly. ‘Where are you? Do you need directions?’
She told me clearly how to find her, and I drew up forty minutes later outside a large Edwardian house in a leafy road on the outskirts of a sprawling Surrey town. Hilary, it transpired, owned the ground floor, a matter of two large high-ceilinged rooms, modern kitchen, functional bathroom, and a pleasant old fashioned conservatory with plants, cane armchairs, and steps down to an unkempt garden.
Inside, everything was orderly and organised, and comfortable in an uninspired sort of way. Well-built easy chairs in dim covers, heavy curtains in good velvet but of a deadening colour somewhere between brown and green, patterned carpet in olive and fawn. The home of a vigorous academic mind with no inborn response to refracted light. I wondered just how much she would wear the alien scarlet cloak.
The evening sun still shone into the conservatory, and there we sat, in the cane armchairs, drinking sherry, greenly surrounded by palms and rubber plants and Monstera deliciosa.
‘I don’t mind watering,’ Hilary said. ‘But I detest gardening. The people upstairs are supposed to do the garden, but they don’t.’ She waved disgustedly towards the view of straggly bushes, unpruned roses, weedy paths, and dried coffee-coloured stalks of last-year’s unmown grass.
‘It’s better than concrete,’ I said.
‘I’ll use you as a parable for the children,’ she said, smiling.
‘Hm?’
‘When things are bad, you endure what you must, and thank God it’s not worse.’
I made a protesting sound in my throat, much taken aback. ‘Well,’ I said helplessly, ‘what else is there to do?’