As well as being a good friend, Duncan was also our GP at a doctors’ surgery in Didcot, and while he was always quick to recommend to his patients that they should consume fewer units of alcohol per week, he never seemed to follow his own advice.
‘Go on through to the terrace,’ I said, pointing the way. ‘It’s a beautiful evening, so we’re having drinks outside.’
More guests arrived, and I also ushered them onto the terrace.
‘Where are the damn kids?’ Georgina asked, coming into the hallway.
‘They’re still upstairs. James was coming out of the bathroom in his underpants when I came down. He told me that no decent party should start until at least nine o’clock, preferably ten, or even eleven.’
His mother looked appalled. ‘But we’re meant to be eating at eight thirty.’
‘So let’s hope they’re down by then.’
‘They’d bloody well better be.’
Maybe Darren had been right, and it had been stupid to mix the generations at the same party, but I wasn’t going to get stressed over it. Not now. Not today.
Yet more guests arrived, but there was still no sign of anyone young.
‘Congratulations, Chester, with Potassium,’ said a large man coming through the front door — his white dinner jacket a good two sizes too small for his expanding waistline.
‘Thank you, Malcolm,’ I replied.
Malcolm Galbraith was a local racehorse trainer. He claimed that he was originally from the rough end of Glasgow, but he had married a London girl called Barbara, and they now lived in a village over the hill from us. He trained jumpers almost exclusively, and had one of the Victrix steeplechase horses in his yard.
‘He just hung on nicely. Owen must be pleased.’ He said it without any great warmth.
The relationship between racehorse trainers was a strange mixture of camaraderie, rivalry, and envy. In some ways they were a tight knit group, bound together by their unique position between the owners on one side and their horses on the other, much like football managers sandwiched between the club’s directors and the players. But they were always in bitter competition with each other, and not just on the racetracks during the races. They also competed ferociously in the endless struggle to find owners prepared to send them enough horses to fill their stable yards.
‘Owen was very happy when I left him at Epsom,’ I said.
‘Isn’t he here tonight?’ Malcolm asked, looking around in surprise.
‘No. He decided that, win or lose, his job was to look after the horse this evening.’
‘Good for him,’ Malcolm said.
In the lives of the best racehorse trainers, the horses came first, second, and third. Any human considerations came way down the pecking order.
By about quarter to eight, most of Georgina’s and my guests had arrived and were drinking champagne out in the garden, but there was little sign of anyone under the age of thirty.
I was still in the hallway when James came down the stairs, now appropriately dressed.
‘You did tell your friends that the party started at seven?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘But they’re always late. Gary texted me that our uni group were all meeting at the Red Lion first for a beer.’
Gary was James’s best friend, Gary Shipman, a local lad who’d been at school with him in Didcot. They had then travelled the world together during their gap year and were now fellow students at Bristol University.
‘I’m sure they’ll be here soon,’ James said.
They’d better be, I thought. Or Georgina will explode.
‘How about Amanda and Darren? What are they doing?’
‘Bonking again, I expect,’ James said. ‘I heard them at it in her room before lunch.’
It was too much information. Especially in my own home.
I took my glass of champagne through to join everyone else outside. If the young weren’t here by half past eight, their food would just get cold. I wasn’t going to worry about it. Instead, I just smiled at my friends and sipped my drink, deciding that I would not worry about anything at all tonight.
Sadly, it didn’t quite turn out like that.
Chapter 4
We sat down to eat at twenty-five minutes to nine, by which time the young had finally arrived from the pub, and Amanda and Darren had also appeared from whatever they had been doing together upstairs.
Amanda was in a new white dress that, in my opinion, was much too short. She was also wearing a pair of sharply pointed white shoes with five-inch-high stiletto heels, on which she was having difficulty standing up straight. To top off her ensemble, she had a white silk scarf tied tightly around her neck.
Darren, meanwhile, was slightly less flamboyant in an ill-fitting dinner suit plus a bright scarlet bow tie.
But at least they were here and almost respectable.
The marquee looked wonderful. The four long tables were candlelit, and all the wineglasses were arranged in straight lines, at least to start with. And at the far end there was a black-and-white-checked dance floor under a starlight canopy attached to the tent roof.
I was placed at the end of my table, facing inwards towards the dance floor.
‘It all looks lovely,’ said the woman on my left. ‘You’ve done it so well.’
‘Thank you, Victoria. But that’s down to Georgina. I’ve been at the races all day.’
‘Of course you have,’ she said, laughing and laying a hand on my arm. ‘Well done with that too. Brian and I watched the race. And it was so exciting to see you interviewed on the television afterwards.’
Victoria and Brian Perry were our immediate neighbours on one side. He was a long-retired naval commander who now mostly busied himself with his garden while she arranged the flowers in the church every Sunday, and not much went on in the village without both of them knowing about it — and telling everyone else. It was that sort of place. Even the monthly village magazine was called The Gossip.
But they had both been very kind to Georgina and me when we had first arrived with two tiny children, ages one and three.
My mother and father had both died in a Thames boating accident when I’d still been a teenager, and Georgina’s folks lived north of Leeds, so Brian and Victoria had stepped in to be like an extra set of grandparents to our little ones and would often babysit at a moment’s notice, even overnight.
How angelic our kids were back then, I thought.
Clearly much had changed in the meantime.
The catering staff expertly served the first course — warm smoked trout with a dill sauce — and there was the reassuring sound of clinking cutlery and quiet murmurings as people ate. Even the young seemed to be behaving themselves — at least so far.
I reached forward for my glass of wine but opted to take the water instead. I didn’t want to get drunk. Not yet, anyway. I had a speech to make. After that... well... we’d see.
‘So what will Potassium do now?’ Victoria asked me. ‘Will he race again?’
‘Oh yes, I hope so,’ I said. ‘A few more times this year, provided he stays fit and well. The owning syndicate members would expect it. But we’re still to decide exactly where. Today showed that a mile and a half is his absolute limit in distance, so that will rule out the St Leger or the Melbourne Cup.’
The Derby course had been remeasured in 2017 and found to be six yards longer than a mile and a half — and those extra six yards had almost been Potassium’s undoing. The St Leger is run over two furlongs more, making it the longest of the five annual three-year-old ‘Classic’ races, while the Melbourne Cup — The Race That Stops the Nation — is the world’s richest two-mile handicap. I’d always wanted to have a runner in the Melbourne Cup, but it wouldn’t be Potassium.