In the distance, over on the far side, one could see the line of stands, grey and lifeless at that time of day. All around us, where the morning action lay, horses and men trudged about their business and paid no attention to us at all.
‘It’s staggering,’ Stephen said, looking around. ‘You practically can’t get into anywhere in the Soviet Union without talking your way past some sort of guard, and we just drove straight in here.’
‘People who work with horses are anti-bureaucratic.’
‘Are you?’ he said.
‘Every inch. Stick to essentials, and make your own decisions.’
‘And to hell with committees?’
‘The question nowadays is whether it’s possible.’ I watched some horses without saddles being led by on their way from a stable block out towards the track, their feet plopping splashily in the wet. ‘You know something? These are not racehorses.’
‘It’s a racecourse,’ he said, as if I were crazy.
‘They’re trotters.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Trotting races. The driver sits on a little chariot thing called a sulky, and the horse pulls it along at a fast trot. Like that,’ I added pointing, as a horse and sulky came into view on the track.
It wheeled up speedily to the entrance of the stables, and there the handlers unfastened the harness which held the shafts of the sulky, and led the horse away. The sulky was harnessed to the next horse to be exercised, and the driver took up the reins and got on with his job.
‘Don’t you think we ought to look for Mr Kropotkin?’ Stephen suggested.
‘Not really. We’re still a few minutes early. If we just stand here, maybe he will come and find us.’
Stephen looked as if life were full of surprises but not altogether bad ones, and several more horses slopped past. The stable hands leading them all seemed to be small weatherbeaten men with unshaven chins and layers of uncoordinated clothes. None of them wore gloves. None of them even looked our way, but shambled on with stolid unsmiling faces.
A new and larger string of horses appeared, coming not from one of the stable blocks, but across the road we had arrived by, and in through the unguarded, ungated entrance. Instead of being led, these were ridden; and the riders were neatly dressed in jodhpurs and quilted jackets. On their heads they wore not leather caps but crash helmets, with the chin-straps meticulously fastened.
‘What are those?’ Stephen said, as they approached.
‘They’re not thoroughbreds... not racehorses. I should think those might be the eventers.’
‘How can you tell they’re not racehorses?’
‘Thicker bones,’ I said. ‘The more solid shape of the head. And more hair round the fetlocks.’
Stephen said ‘Oh’ as if he wasn’t much wiser, and we noticed that behind the horses walked a purposeful man in a dark overcoat and a fur hat. His gaze had fallen upon us, and he changed course ten degrees to starboard and came our way.
Stephen went a step to meet him.
‘Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin?’ he said.
‘Da,’ said the newcomer. ‘That is so.’
His voice was as deep as chocolate and the Russian intonation very pronounced. He looked at me closely. ‘And you are Randall Drew,’ he said, carefully stressing each word separately.
‘Mr Kropotkin, I am very pleased to meet you,’ I said.
He clasped my outstretched hand and gave it a good pump with both of his own.
‘Randall Drew. Pardubice. You are three.’
‘Third,’ I said, nodding.
Words failed him in English and he rumbled away in his own language.
‘He is saying,’ Stephen said, his eyes grinning, ‘that you are a great horseman with a bold heart and hands of silk, and he is honoured to see you here.’
Mr Kropotkin broke off the exaggerations to shake hands in a perfunctory way with Stephen, giving him the fast head-to-toe inspection of a horseman for a horse. He said something to him abruptly which Stephen said afterwards was ‘Do you ride?’ and on receiving a negative treated him henceforth merely as a translating machine, not as a valued friend.
‘Please tell Mr Kropotkin that the Russian team rode with great courage and skill at the International Trials, and the fitness of his horses here today does his management great credit.’
Mr Kropotkin’s appreciation of the compliments showed in a general aura of pleased complacency. He was a big man of about sixty, carrying a good deal of excess weight but still light on his feet. A heavy greying moustache overhung his upper lip, and he had a habit of smoothing the outer edges downwards with his forefinger and thumb.
‘You watch horses,’ he said, his way with English putting the words half way between a command and an invitation. I would be pleased to, I said, and we walked forward on to the track.
His five charges were circling there, waiting for the instructions which he gave decisively but briefly in his rolling bass. The riders stopped circling and divided into two groups.
‘Horses canter,’ Kropotkin said, sweeping out an arm. ‘Round.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He and I stood side by side in the manner of horse-watchers the world over and eyed the training exercises. There was a lot of muscle, I thought, and all five had good free-flowing actions; but it was impossible to tell how good each was at Eventing, because speed alone had little to do with it.
Kropotkin launched into several sentences and waited impatiently for Stephen to translate.
‘These are a few of the Olympic possibles. It is too soon to decide yet. There are other horses in the south, where it is warmer. All the flat racehorses from the track have gone south to the Caucasus for the winter. Some horses are training there for the Olympics also, but he will have them back in Moscow next summer.’
‘Tell him I am very interested.’
Kropotkin received the news with what I took to be satisfaction. He too had the inexpressive face and unsmiling eyes which were the Moscow norm. Mobility of features, I supposed, was something one did or didn’t learn in childhood from the faces all round; and the fact that they didn’t show, didn’t conclusively prove that admiration and contempt and hate and glee weren’t going on inside. It had become, I dared say, imprudent to show them. The unmoving countenance was the first law of survival.
The horses came back from circling the mile-long track without a flutter of the nostril. The riders dismounted and spoke to Kropotkin with respect. They didn’t look to me like Olympic material either on horseback or on their feet: nothing of the self-confident presence of Boris: but I asked all the same.
‘Niet,’ Kropotkin said. ‘Misha is young. Is good.’
He pointed at a boy of about nineteen who was, like the others, leading his horse round in a circle under Kropotkin’s stony gaze. Kropotkin added more in Russian, and Stephen translated.
‘He says they are all grooms, but he is teaching Misha, because he is brave and has good hands and can get horses to jump.’
A dark green horse box drove in through the stable area behind us, its engine making an untuned clatter which stirred up the horses. Kropotkin stolidly watched while it made a bad job of reversing down between the two rows of stable blocks, its old-fashioned wooden sides rattling from the vibration of the engine. The noise abated slightly once it was out of sight on the other side of a concrete barn, and when Kropotkin could once again make himself heard, he said a good deal to Stephen.
‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen said, ‘that Misha went to the International Trials in September as a groom, and perhaps you would like to talk to him also. Mr Kropotkin said that when a man from the British Embassy came to ask him some questions about Lord Farringford and Hans Kramer, he said he knew nothing, and that was true. But he has remembered since then that Misha does know something about Hans Kramer, but not Lord Farringford, and he arranged for Misha to be riding this morning in case you should wish to see him.’