‘Doone asked me if I’d left your jacket and boots in Harry’s car. Tricky bastard. I know now how Harry’s been feeling. You get that flatfoot looking to tie you in knots and it’s like being squeezed by coils and coils of a sodding boa constrictor. Everything you say, he takes it in the wrong way. And he looks so damned harmless. He got me so riled I lost a race this afternoon I should have won. Don’t say I said that. I don’t bloody know why we all tell you things. You don’t belong here.’
‘Perhaps that’s why.’
‘Yeah, perhaps.’
He seemed to have let out sufficient steam and resentment for the moment and turned to flirt obligingly with a middle-aged woman who touched his arm in pleased anticipation. Owners, Tremayne had said, either loved or hated Sam’s manner: the women loved it; the men put up with it in exchange for winners.
Nolan, glowering routinely at Sam from a few feet away, switched his ill-humour to me.
‘I don’t want you treading on my effing toes,’ he said forcefully. ‘Why don’t you clear off out of Shellerton?’
‘I will in a while.’
‘I told Tremayne there’ll be trouble if he gives you any of my rides.’
‘Ah.’
‘He has the effing gall to say I suggested it myself and he knows bloody well I was taking the piss.’ He glared at me. ‘I don’t understand what Fiona sees in you. I told her you’re just a bag of shit with a pretty face who needs his arse kicked. You keep away from her horses, understand?’
I understood that he like everyone else was suffering from the atmospheric blight cast by Angela Brickell; he perhaps most because the strain of his own trial and conviction was so recent. There was no way I was ever going to ride as well as he did and he surely knew it. Fiona would never jock him off, in racing’s descriptive phrase.
He stomped away, his place almost immediately taken by his brother, who gave me a malicious imitation of a smile and said, ‘Nolan doesn’t expletive like you, dear heart.’
‘You don’t say.’
Lewis was sober, so far. Also unaccompanied, like Nolan, though Harry had mentioned at one time that Lewis was married: his reclusive wife preferred to stay at home to avoid the fuss and fracas of Lewis drunk.
‘Nolan likes to be the centre of attention and you’ve usurped his pinnacle,’ Lewis said.
‘Rubbish.’
‘Fiona and Mackie look to you, now, not to him. And as for Tremayne, as for Gareth...’ He gave me a sly leer. ‘Don’t put your neck within my brother’s reach.’
‘Lewis!’ His lack of fraternal feeling shocked me more than his suggestion. ‘You stuck
‘Sometimes I hate him,’ he said with undoubted truth, and wheeled away as if he had said enough.
Glasses in hand, the chattering groups mixed and mingled, broke and re-formed, greeted each other with glad cries as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, not just that afternoon. Tremayne, large smile a permanence, received genuinely warm congratulations with believable modesty and Gareth, appearing eel-like at my elbow, said with gratification, ‘He deserves it, doesn’t he?’
‘He does.’
‘It makes you think a bit.’
‘What about?’
‘I mean, he’s just Dad.’ He struggled to get it right. ‘Everyone’s two people, aren’t they?’
I said with interest, ‘That’s profound.’
‘Get away.’ He felt awkward at the compliment. ‘I’m glad for him, anyway.’
He snaked off again and within minutes the throng began moving towards dinner, dividing into ten to a table, lowering bottoms onto inadequate chairs, fingering menus, peering at the print through candlelight, scanning their allotted neighbours. At table number six I found myself placed between Mackie and Erica Upton, who were already seated.
Erica was inevitable, I supposed, though I suspected Fiona had switched a few place cards before I reached there: a certain bland innocence gave her away.
‘I did ask to sit next to you,’ Erica remarked, as if reading my thoughts as I sat down, ‘once I knew you’d be here.’
‘Er... why?’
‘Do you have so little self-confidence?’
‘It depends who I’m with.’
‘And by yourself?’
‘In a desert, plenty. With pencil and paper, little.’
‘Quite right.’
‘And you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t answer that sort of question.’
I listened to the starch in her voice, observed it in the straightness of her backbone, recognised the ramrod will that made no concessions to hardship.
‘I could take you across a desert,’ I said.
She gave me a long piercing inspection. ‘I hope that’s not an accolade.’
‘An assessment,’ I said.
‘You’ve found your courage since I met you last.’
She had a way of leaving one without an answer. She turned away, satisfied, to talk to Nolan on her other side, and I, abandoned, found Mackie on my right smiling with enjoyment.
‘She’s met her match,’ she said.
I shook my head regretfully. ‘If I could write like her... or ride like Sam or Nolan... if I could do
Her smile sweetened. ‘Try cooking.’
‘Dammit...’
She laughed. ‘I hear the power of your bananas flambées made Gareth oversleep.’
