Owners bored Rupert, but Taggie was always ready with a sympathetic ear, a cup of tea and home-made chocolate cake.
This led to problems. Checking on Arthur one afternoon, Lysander was amazed to discover Taggie cringing at the back of the box, stroking an outraged Tiny.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Hush!’ Taggie went scarlet. ‘Mr Pandopoulos is here, and he keeps groping me. If Rupert found out he’d hit him across the yard and tell him to take his horses away, and we really can’t afford it at the moment.’
Lysander’s face fell. ‘And Rupert’s keeping me and Arthur and Tiny for nothing. Oh, when’s he going to let me race ride, so I can start earning my keep?’
‘You’re doing that already. Rupert’s really pleased with the way the horses have improved. Being tough is the only way he feels he can get results.’
Lysander had never met a couple so aware of each other, as they drifted together, watching, touching, like each other’s shadows. Their love filled Lysander with envy. But Rupert was very tricky. Lysander had to be careful not to be too friendly to Taggie. The only thing male and beautiful Rupert really wanted in his yard was horses.
Lysander hardly noticed the war, as bulletins came and went on the tack-room radio, but, reeling from one of Rupert’s tongue-lashings, he often felt like Baghdad after a night’s bombardment.
In the second week in February he was just schooling a vastly improved but still cussed Meutrier over a row of fences. The setting sun, like an exploding ball of flame rising into a thick black nuclear cloud, seemed to symbolize everyone’s worries over the approaching land war.
Planes had roared overhead all day. Rupert, who was in a particularly foul mood because King Hussein, a fellow old Harrovian, appeared to be supporting the Iraqis, called Lysander over.
‘Why the fuck don’t you use your whip?’
‘My Uncle Alastair said it was a lazy way of riding,’ said Lysander, quaking but defiant. ‘Meutrier was really trying, so it’s stupid to hit him. And when horses are exhausted, it only slows them down. Honestly, Rupert, it makes me sick to see jockeys flogging horses. There’s no need to hit them so hard.’
This was an oblique reference to Jimmy Jardine, Rupert’s second jockey, who’d just begun a fortnight’s suspension for excessive use of the whip — probably at Rupert’s instructions.
‘So, you think Jimmy’s had nearly ninety winners this season just by feeding his horses sugar lumps. If you ride for me, you use your whip.’
For a second they glared at each other. Lysander lowered his eyes first. He couldn’t face that cold dismissive contempt. Swinging Meutrier round, he rode wearily back to the yard. Overtaking them in the Land-Rover, Rupert was on the tack-room telephone when Lysander got back.
‘OK, Marcia, Jimmy’s been suspended, but I’m not sure he and Hopeless were twin souls. Anyway, I’m putting a new boy, Lysander Hawkley, up on him. You’ll like him, Marcia, he’s better-looking than Jimmy. Yes, the 2.30 tomorrow, Maiden Hurdle, Worcester.’
Putting back the telephone, Rupert saw Lysander mouthing helplessly in the doorway, hanging for support from Meutrier’s sweating chestnut neck.
‘You heard me,’ said Rupert. ‘And you’d better take a whip or you won’t get Hopeless off the starting line.’
Unplaced in her last eight races, Hopeless was an appropriately named chestnut mare with spindly legs, wild eyes and a punk mane, too sparse even to plait. Her owner, Marcia Melling, a glamorous but ageing divorcée, only kept the horse in training because she had a massive crush on Rupert, who in turn only trained the horse, and then with minimum effort, because he charged Marcia three times as much as any other owner.
It was not with any hopes of victory that Lysander set out with Samantha and Maura, two of the girl grooms, in Rupert’s lorry on the thirty-five mile drive to Worcester the following morning. To distract him from his desperate nerves, Rupert had given him the responsibility of loading the five runners and their tack.
It was a beautiful day, with soft brown trees sunlit against the khaki fields, catkins hanging like golden Tiffany lamps, and coltsfoot exploding in a sulphur haze on the verges.
‘Arthur always enjoys being read to,’ said Lysander, as he turned the lorry towards the motorway. ‘He likes the Sun better than the Independent, but he likes Dear Deirdre best.’
‘Dear Deirdre, I am in love with a married woman who will not leave her husband, Arthur must be quite sick of that one,’ said Samantha, handing Lysander her last cigarette. ‘You can’t stop here,’ she said in horror as Lysander screeched to a halt to much honking and fist-waving.
‘I’ve got to. I took half a bottle of Cascara last night to lose the last three pounds and I’m about to explode. Open the fucking door.’ Lysander leapt across them out of the lorry and bounded up the hard shoulder.
Rupert and Taggie were flying to Worcester from London with Mr Pandopoulos and Freddie Jones, the co-owner of Penscombe Pride. Tabitha, back for half-term, was being given a lift by Dizzy, Rupert’s tough, blond, glamorous head girl, who had recently returned to work for him after getting a divorce.
Racing into the yard, Tabitha greeted her own ponies, then, armed with a Twix, rushed off to see Arthur. Coming out of his box, just avoiding Tiny’s teeth, she gave a gasp, for in the next box, rugged, bandaged, plaited up and fast asleep was Penscombe Pride.
‘Dizzy,’ screamed Tab, banging on the groom’s flat window.
‘What is it?’ said Dizzy, who rather fancied Mr Pandopoulos as a sugar daddy, turning off the hair drier.
‘Isn’t Pridie running in the 3.15?’
‘Certainly is. He should be halfway to Worcester by now.’
‘The hell he is, he’s still in his box.’
‘Jesus.’ Dizzy dropped the hairdrier. ‘That stupid fucker must have forgotten to load him. Sam and Maura are so in love with him, they wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘We’ve got to get him there,’ said Tabitha in panic. ‘Daddy’ll boot Lysander straight out if he finds out.’
One of Rupert’s lorries was in for a service, the other had gone to Folkestone. There only remained the trailer used for ferrying pigs, calves and Tab’s ponies around — transport ill-fitting the winner of the Cotchester Gold Cup two years running and the yard’s biggest earner.
‘I daren’t risk it,’ said Dizzy. ‘We could borrow one of Ricky France-Lynch’s lorries.’
‘Ten miles in the wrong direction,’ urged Tab. ‘Pridie’ll enjoy the fresh air and at least his tack’s gone on already.’
‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Tabitha, hanging out of the window as the speedometer hit sixty miles an hour along the narrow, winding high-banked country lanes.
‘I’m going to be sacked,’ said Dizzy. ‘Is Pridie still there?’
‘He’s fine.’ Leaning round Tabitha could see his lovely dark bay head, with the instantly recognizable zigzag blaze, and large, wide-set eyes looking over the top of the trailer at the russet cottages and orchards.
As they rattled through Pershore, two women with shopping bags cheered in amazed excitement. As they hit race-day traffic, more and more people started laughing and waving to see little Pridie so close.
‘Like the Pope in his Popemobile,’ giggled Tab.
‘I’ve backed that horse in the 3.15, so get a move on,’ said a man in a Jaguar drawing alongside them at some traffic-lights. ‘What are you two doing for dinner tonight?’
‘Someone’s bound to tell Daddy,’ said Tab despairingly.