In the event, I hardly had to look. On my way to the saddling boxes, a young man touched me on the arm.
‘I say,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you Edward Lincoln?’
I nodded and half smiled, and kept on walking.
‘Guess I’d better introduce myself. Danilo Cavesey. I believe you know my aunt.’
That stopped me, all right. I put out my hand, and he shook it warmly.
‘I heard you were coming, of course. Aunt Nerissa cabled Greville you were on your way out here for some film premiere, and would he look out for you at the races. So I was kind of expecting you, you see.’
His accent was a slow Californian drawl full of lazy warmth. It was instantly clear why Nerissa had liked him: his sun-tanned, good-looking face, his open, pleasant expression, his clean, casual, blond-brown hair, all were in the best tradition of American youth.
‘She didn’t say you were in South Africa,’ I commented, surprised.
‘Well, no.’ He wrinkled his nose disarmingly. ‘I don’t believe she knows. I only flew out here a few days ago, on a vacation. Say, how is the old girl? She wasn’t all that sprightly when I last visited with her.’
He was smiling happily. He didn’t know.
I said, ‘She’s pretty ill, I’m afraid.’
‘Is that so? I’m sure sorry to hear that. I must write her, tell her I’m out here, tell her I’m taking a look-see into the state of the horses.’
‘The state of the horses?’ I echoed.
‘Oh sure. Aunt Nerissa’s horses out here are not running good. Stinking bad, to be accurate.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘I shouldn’t bet on number eight in the fourth race, if you want to die rich.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘She did mention to me that they were not doing so well just now.’
‘I’ll bet she did. They wouldn’t win if you gave them ten minutes start and nobbled the others.’
‘Is there any reason for it, do you know?’
‘Search me,’ he shrugged. ‘Greville’s real chewed up about it. Says he hasn’t had anything like this happen before.’
‘Not a virus?’ I suggested.
‘Can’t be. Otherwise all the others would get it too, not just Aunt Nerissa’s. We’ve been talking it over, you see. Greville just hasn’t an idea.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ I said casually.
‘Oh sure. Yes, indeed. But say, why don’t we get out of this wind and have ourselves a beer or something? Greville has this starter right now, but he’ll be happy to see us later on.’
‘All right,’ I agreed, and we went and had ourselves the beer. Danilo was right: the south wind was cold and spring was still a hint and a memory.
Danilo, I judged, was about twenty years old. He had bright blue eyes and blond-brown eyelashes, and his teeth were California-straight. He had the untouched air of one to whom the rigours of life had not yet happened; a boy not necessarily spoilt, but to whom much had been given.
He was at Berkeley University studying Political Science, he said, with one more year to do. ‘This time next summer I’ll be all through with college...’
‘What do you plan to do after that?’ I asked, making conversation.
There was a flash of amusement in the blue eyes. ‘Oh, I guess I’ll have to think of something, but I’ve nothing lined up right now.’
The future could take care of itself, I thought, and reflected that for golden boys like Danilo it usually did.
We watched the next race together. Greville’s starter finished third, close up.
‘Too bad,’ Danilo sighed. ‘I just had it on the nose, not across the boards.’
‘Did you lose much?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘I guess not. Just a few rand.’
Rands came just under two to the pound sterling, or about two and a half to the dollar. He couldn’t have done himself much harm.
We walked down from the stands and over towards the unsaddling enclosures. ‘Do you know something?’ he said. ‘You’re not a bit what I expected.’
‘In what way?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Oh, I guess... For a big movie star, I expected some sort of, well, presence. You know?’
‘Off the screen, movie actors are as dim as anyone else.’
He glanced at me suspiciously, but I wasn’t laughing at him. I meant it. He had a much more naturally luminous personality than I had. I might have been an inch or two taller, an inch or two broader across the shoulders, but the plus factor has nothing to do with size.
The man stalking round the horse which had finished third, peering judiciously at its legs and running a probing hand along its loin, was a burly thickset man with an air of dissatisfaction.
‘That’s Greville,’ Danilo nodded, following my gaze.
The trainer spoke briefly to a woman Danilo identified to me as the horse’s owner. His manner, from twenty feet away, looked brusque and far from conciliatory. I knew trainers had to grow hard skins if they were to stay sane: one could not for ever be apologising to owners if their horses got beaten, one had to make them realise that regardless of the oats and exercise crammed into them, maybe other people’s horses could actually run faster: but Greville Arknold appeared plainly disagreeable.
After a while the horses were led away and the crowd thinned out. Arknold listened, with a pinched mouth and a stubborn backward tilt of the head, to what looked almost like apologies from the woman owner. She came to a stop, got no melting response from him, shrugged, turned slowly, and walked away.
Arknold’s gaze rose from down his nose and fastened on Danilo. He stared for a moment, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. Danilo very slightly jerked his head in my direction, and Arknold transferred his attention to me.
Again the slow appraisal. Then he came across.
Danilo introduced us with an air of what fun it was for us to know each other. A mutual privilege.
Great.
I didn’t take to Greville Arknold, neither then nor ever after. Yet he was pleasant enough to me: smiled, shook hands, said he was glad to meet me, said that Mrs Cavesey had cabled to say I might be coming to the races, and to look after me if I did.
He had a flat-sounding Afrikaaner accent, and like many South Africans he was, I discovered later, trilingual in English, Afrikaans and Zulu. He had a face formed of thick slabs of flesh, lips so thin that they hardly existed, the scars of old acne over his chin and down his neck, and a bristly ginger moustache one inch by two below his nose. And for all the smiling and the welcoming chat, he had cold eyes.
‘Your horse ran well just then,’ I suggested conversationally.
The recent anger reappeared at once in his manner. ‘That stupid woman insisted that her horse ran today when I wanted to run it Saturday instead. He had a hard race at Turffontein last Saturday. He needed another three days’ rest.’
‘She looked as if she were apologising,’ I said.
‘]a. She was. Too late, of course. She should have had more sense. Decent colt, that. Would have won on Saturday. No sense. Owners always ought to do what a trainer says. They pay for expert knowledge, don’t they? So they always ought to do what the experts say.’
I smiled vaguely, non-committally. As an owner myself, even of only one moderate steeplechasing gelding, I disagreed with him about always. Sometimes, even usually, yes. But always, no. I knew of at least one Grand National winner which would never have gone to the start if the owner had paid attention to the trainer’s advice.