4
SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS
Marlowe’s Pippet Favored by Majority …
Retired Jockey to Ride Rock Castle in the Golden …
Owner Insists that Mystery Horse Will Run …
The wind’s out of Slyter now; the hat’s on the back of Slyter’s head, all right all right. … Anyone got a drink? Anyone got a consoling word? Five pounds for the reader who sends me a bit of helpful information. … Because I took half a day to drive to the Manor House and return (if you know the uncharted moors on a summer day you know how desperately your Slyter drove). Arrived in time for tea — the little black cup you always suspect of being poisoned — and Lady Harvey-Harrow sent down to the empty stables for poor old Crawley. He came after a while, brushing through the cobwebs and removing his cap, and Lady Harvey-Harrow looked at him and said I was a gentleman from the Press. Still looking at him — mind you, not once my way — she asked him whether or not he agreed that the horse was dead, saying that it was her impression that the horse was dead but that if by chance the animal was still alive why those who had carried him off were welcome to such an old and useless horse. “What about it, now,” I said, “dead or alive?” And the old man leaned over and stared hard as he could into Lady Harvey-Harrow’s eyes and said — no more than a whisper — said that he had changed his mind and recollected having seen the horse not a fortnight ago in a shaded and gloomy place beneath the lone oak tree — the lightening tree he said — beside the river separating her Ladyship’s heath from Lord Henry’s land, and he remembered thinking how poorly the horse was looking at the time. I took up my hat and the old woman said she would not pursue the matter and suggested that I do the same. … How’s that for a story to tell an established journalist? So Sidney Slyter’s had it — for the moment — and Mrs. Laval is not in her accustomed room tonight. Unsatisfactory. But I’ll get our men to check the files, that’s what I’ll do. …
How many are going to St. Ives?
Lines of people filed among the tables in the Pavilion, long lines wound between the little metal folding chairs all taken. They were coming down from the stands, from the stable area, from amusement tents, tramping across the beds of flowers left crushed or covered with spittle. White faces, a hat or two, a hearing aid, all packed together, stranger against stranger, and making their voices shrill over winnings or poor luck. The weight of them tipped a table up now and then, and spoons, forks with pastry on the tips, glassware, slid and fell from the edge. Those seated at the tables tried to drink, eat, talk, but everyone in the queues was laughing, stood staring down at the little round metal tops and puddles of lemonade and burned matches. There was a fat woman who carried her own sweets in a bag, and a cream puff had exploded against her cheek leaving bits of chocolate and egg white on her rosy skin. She was laughing from a deep stomach and dabbing with a fistful of handkerchief.
With the bottom of his trousers wet, brown hat on the back of his head, shirt crumpled and pinched lips smashed together, there was no happiness of the throng for Michael Banks, and he struck out at an elbow, at a shoulder blade, as hard as he dared. He saw the young woman immediately and gave a whistle. But it was drowned in the noise and upset of a waiter’s tray.
She had a table to herself and had saved him a seat. She was drinking pink water and gin out of a tall glass and there was a second pink glass for him on the scratched metal table edge before his chair. A giant pair of binoculars lay between her glass and his and the long strap was bound safely round her wrist. Her red hair was like the orange of an African bird, and when she sipped, the jockey-pink rose water sent a delicate color up to a row of tiny pearls which she had sunk into the deepness of the hair.
“I’m Sybilline,” she said.
He looked at the tip of her tongue and smelled the gin. Suddenly in the midst of weak eyes, puffy shirts, wallets stuffed with photographs of dead mothers and home, and on his person carrying still the clamminess, he found himself thinking he could bear the crowds for this, and felt his feet dragging, his fingers pressing white against the sticky metal of the chair. Yet he was brief.
“You wanted a word with me?”
“Oh, come off it now,” she laughed. “Sit down and have a drink with Sybilline.”
He did not remove his hat. He kept his back straight and with both hands seized the frosted glass, drank heavily. Everyone else wanted fish and chips or onions, but the gin and pink water was enough for him. There were fine soft flaming hairs on the woman’s arms, freckles like little brown crystals out of the sea. The sun struck through the canvas and lighted her, here in the midst of a crowd which lifted his chair then allowed it again to settle. He hung on, swallowed, watched the way she breathed — there were holes cut in the tips of her brassière — and the way her fingers always curved round her windpipe when she brought her free hand to her throat. She was thin if anything and her skin was white as if it had taken all the skin’s pigmentation, flesh color, to tint the hair.
“What did you want of me then?” he asked, and the chair was inching about beneath him, man and chair pressed into motion by the crowd on the Ouija board of the Pavilion’s floor.
And quickly, brightening up: “I’m here for the weekend only and, fancy now, there’s you! I’ve had a look through these,” raising the strap of the binoculars, “and the fellow who owns them is gone. Aren’t you glad? Things just come to pass, for a girl. For you, too, if you can only manage a little cheer in your face! Here, you carry them.”
Slowly he put the strap over his shoulder. “But I haven’t heard of you before,” he said, and let the cold glass click against his teeth.
A small narrow man, appearing drunk and soldierly and wearing a red beret over an ear like a twist of leather, stumbled out of the queue and flung his arm round the woman’s shoulder, shoved his cheek against the woman’s cheek so that Banks saw the two heads together, the fair skin with its emulsion of cream and the scrap of the fellow’s jaw, the green eyes meant for a mirror and the other eyes good only for sighting at a game of darts, the little red beret crushed into the softness of her orange hair. The man’s breath stirred the pinkish curls and his short fingers were biting into the plain cloth above her breast. He was stooping, hugging her for balance, and Banks watched the two pairs of eyes, the twitching when movement came finally to the intruder’s lips:
“Catch her while you can, Tosh,” staring then, taking a breath too big for him, as if he himself had nobody in the world. “Stairways and stars, remember!” And Sybil-line laughed, and with a hand on the man’s thigh pushed him off so that he ducked quickly into the crowd.
Only her own eyes were left and Banks could not frown at them. “I’m a married man,” he said. But there was a waltz coming out of the speaker, and she was laughing, twisting a curl the color of nail polish round her finger.
When they stood up, binoculars falling now against his hip, the fat woman and three others began fighting for the chairs, and his glass, still half-filled with gin, toppled and splashed on anonymous shoes and socks dropped carelessly below the ankles. But already Sybil-line had him by the hand and Larry watched them going off through the crowd.
So Little Dora was left alone with Margaret. And Thick, driving the black van that had oil and sand smeared over the hand-painted name, was sent with Sparrow to the flat in the street at Dreary Station. Sparrow was agile now, climbed down from the cab and walked easily with the suitcase in his hand. Thick was grinning because he always liked a smashing. The sun lighted up the window boxes and the face of an old dog behind a fence; from far-off came the sounds of all the girls sewing in the factories.