Kris and Bell advanced and retreated all afternoon in a complicated mating dance. Caspar Harvey watched them with a scowl. George Loricroft strode past, head in air, his wife Glenda scuttling after him with endless complaints of ‘Baden-Baden.’
Oliver Quigley trembled from owner to owner, excusing his losers before they’d lined up to run.
People in clusters asked Kris for his autograph. ‘Don’t you mind,’ Bell asked me, ‘that they’re asking him more than you?’
‘He’s welcome.’ As so often on 6 November, I’d collected more of a mournful battery of young reproachful eyes than an onslaught of enthusiastic name collectors. The day it worried me, I would resign.
I looked around and said to Bell, ‘Did you come with your father and Robin Darcy? I haven’t seen Robin anywhere.’
‘They came by car together,’ Bell said briefly. ‘They said they wanted to talk. I came with Glenda and she’s driving me mad. Of course, George didn’t go to Baden-Baden, why ever should he when the races are here? And as for all the other places! She never stops.’
‘What other places?’ I asked her absentmindedly, watching horses walk round the parade ring and admiring as always their loose-limbed natural beauty.
Bell dug a roughly torn memo square of pink paper out of her green coat pocket and squinted at it in the bright light.
‘Glenda says George has excuses for Budapest, where he says it was snowing, ditto heavy snow at Pardubice in the Czech Republic, more snow in Berlin, and it was freezing in Warsaw and Hamburg, and he wasn’t at any of those places, she’s sure of it. So what’s going on?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘If Glenda comes this way,’ Bell said, ‘don’t leave me.’
Bell’s pink eyelids fluttered over a thoroughly enticing smile. Kris finished signing autographs instantly and edged his long spine between myself and his (possibly) future wife.
They went off contentedly, for once, for a sandwich, nicely asking me to join them, but relaxed that I didn’t. I stayed near the weighing-room looking out unhurriedly for Robin the Round. I wished after all I’d gone for the sandwich when Glenda and her loud Lancashire voice advanced like a storm surge and smothered me with her theories.
Her dyed-blonde shiny hair was of Andy Warhol explicit brashness. Forty-eight identical Glendas haunted one’s nightmare of an art gallery.
Oliver Quigley, of all people, came to my aid, or seemed to, stuttering at my shoulder while giving Glenda a stare of quite extraordinary ill will.
I’d seldom paid Oliver’s quivering voice or problems much genuinely caring attention, and it was with similar make-believe that I asked earnestly after the sick filly’s health. Glenda suspended her animation suddenly and stood with her mouth open wide, as if waiting for Oliver’s answer; and suddenly it was as if this encounter were between two much deeper personalities than I’d superficially seen earlier. There were glints in the Lancashire eyes that were far from funny, and I began to wonder whether all the Quigley shivering was a way of camouflaging the stronger inner man, of hiding the iron foundations that he didn’t want recognised.
I looked back to the lunch party, to the day I’d met all these Newmarket people, those strangers who now seemed familiar. Perhaps they’d showed to the world that day only their outsides, and perhaps, as with Robin Darcy, it was the inside that mattered.
‘It’s because of yow,’ Glenda said suddenly with venom, closing her lips together with pinching force. ‘It’s you that’s taking George to Baden-Baden, and don’t you deny it.’ She was accusing Oliver. She seemed oblivious of myself.
Oliver Quigley certainly looked blank, but not, to my fresh vision, from ignorance, but rather from the shock of having Glenda put into public words what should have lived in secrecy and silence.
‘And,’ continued Glenda spitefully, ‘it’s no good trying to tell me you didn’t go with him to Poland and Germany and all those places, it was snowing a lot of the time and Perry could prove it if he could only be bothered...’
‘Glenda!’ Oliver interrupted with straightforward warning and obvious menace, wiping out in one word all the dithery presentation of ages.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Glenda said dismissively. ‘You’re all angry because of the filly.’
She swivelled on her high-heeled shiny boots and marched away, her weight forward on her toes, leaving Oliver Quigley speechless and aghast, as if he’d lost both his sword and his shield at one stroke.
He switched his gaze back to me and, although it was far too late in reality, he chose to believe I’d seen and heard nothing. The quakes came back into his manner. He stuttered a good deal, but no intelligible words came out. After a while, as if he’d resumed his habitual role, he nodded vaguely in my direction and as his own personal quiver counter was more or less back to normal he unglued himself from my vicinity and was soon to be seen talking with jerkily disturbed hand movements to the filly’s owner, Caspar Harvey. Neither man looked even reasonably calm, let alone happy.
Kris, further away, bent his height down to accommodate the size of a short plump man that I with a faint shock saw to be Robin Darcy. Though I knew he had arrived at Doncaster with Caspar Harvey, Robin Darcy in actual living presence was somehow disturbing.
The last time I’d seen him had been on Trox Island, when he’d been dressed in disguising overalls and helmet, and had watched Michael carry the folder from hut to aircraft, when Michael had transported before my eyes the same sort of ultra-sensitive package that I’d been told had brought finis to a careless man from Mexico.
I watched Robin Darcy amiably pat Kris on the arm without in any way being repulsed. Normally Kris jerked away from any affectionate touch, even from Bell, though if he himself were the toucher, that was different.
Kris, I reflected without excitement, had been determined to please Robin by having us detour to Trox. Kris liked pleasing Robin, and I would do well not to forget it.
The two of them spoke intensely for a short while with Kris nodding assent. When they parted, they shook hands. I watched and wondered if Kris would tell me what they’d said. On past form, I supposed with a shrug, quite probably not.
I leaned against the rails round the weighing-room and the winner’s unsaddling enclosure and did my best to pretend that the comings and goings of other trainers and jockeys were of far greater interest than anything Glenda had said. I stood with laziness in the bright air and, as quite often, simply let random thoughts drift with disorganisation, until ‘Baden-Baden’ and ‘Poland’ and ‘snow’ announced themselves to me insistently as somehow meaningful, and meaningful because of Glenda and the filly.
Glenda was tit-tupping away in the distance. Glenda was jealous of Quigley and of Harvey...
Nonsense, I thought. As a result of the filly’s illness, Harvey had transferred his other horses from Quigley to her own husband, Loricroft, and I doubted if that outcome was what she’d intended.
Unexpectedly, with one of those inexplicable shifts in the drifting brain that delivers a revelation to a vacuum, a word arrived in my mind with such clarity that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it earlier. The word had been part of the heading on one of the letters in the folder on Trox. I’d thought I could remember only Hippostat, but now I knew there was another — and probably more significant — address, though it still lacked pin-point direction.
Rennbahn.
Baden-Baden Rennbahn.
Turn titty turn turn.
Rennbahn, in German script.
I did what half an hour earlier I would have classed as-impossible, and deliberately moved into Glenda’s path. Her own thoughts were elsewhere. She tripped over my foot with her fancy boots.