“Not uphill, you mean?”
“No, there are hills on flat courses. Some are very hilly, like Epsom, for instance. But it’s called ‘flat racing’ because there are no jumps or hurdles.”
The tone of Carole’s “Ah” suggested Jude wasn’t getting her message across. “National Hunt races are run over jumps or hurdles. The horses not only have to run fast, but they also have to negotiate a series of obstacles. These might be fences in a steeplechase, or in a hurdle race, as the name suggests, they’d be hurdles. Then there are different sorts of races within those categories and…”
The expression on her neighbour’s face for a moment dried up Jude’s supply of words.
“Never mind.” She picked up again. “The details aren’t important. The main thing is that it’s fun. The element of chance, having a flutter. You know, there are very few things to beat that moment when your fancy is nearly winning and on the next few seconds depend your chances of making some huge multiple of your stake and…”
Carole’s expression had the same dehydrating effect once again.
“Have you ever actually gambled, Carole?”
“Good heavens, no.”
Carole thought they were rather expensive, but Jude insisted they buy tickets for the premier enclosure. They didn’t know whereabouts on the course Donal was going to be, and that way they’d have access to the whole area.
Walking across the mud from where they’d parked to the enclosures, Carole stepped fastidiously, wishing she hadn’t put on the least sensible shoes she possessed, but looked around at the crowd with diminishing anxiety. She had been expecting to spend the afternoon surrounded by clones of the men in the Cheshire Cheese; to her relief, however, the crowds ambling cheerfully in the same direction seemed, well, middle class. And from the occasional Sloaney squawk she heard, some of them were very definitely upper class. Camilla Parker-Bowles seemed to have been cloned many times over.
For all the crowd members, what they were doing seemed completely natural. For them, going to the races was clearly a regular occurrence. They had the accoutrements-old-fashioned trench coats and Barbours against the weather, green Wellingtons, soft dark olive trilbies (for women as well as men). Many carried battered binoculars on whose straps hung the coloured strings of former day badges. From the lapels of the hardened race-goers dangled the metal badges of life members. Though Carole could not suppress the thought that not many of these people had any work to go to, she could not deny that they comprised one of the least threatening crowds she had ever encountered.
Inside the premier enclosure there was another expense to be dealt with. “We’ve got to get race cards,” Jude insisted.
“But we’re here to look for Donal, not waste the afternoon watching horses.”
“Carole, we’re here at the races. It would be sacrilege for us not to have a bet.”
The look prompted by that suggested there were many things in life more sacrilegious, but the race cards were duly bought.
“Hm. First race is a two-mile-six and a half-hurdle, so we’ll watch from the grandstand.”
“I’m sorry? What do you mean?”
“Fontwell’s got two courses. The hurdles go round in an oval; the steeplechase course is a figure-of-eight. On the chases, it’s quite fun to go and watch from the middle. You can get very close to the jumps.”
Carole looked at Jude in bewilderment. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I have been racing before.”
“Yes, but not here.”
“Of course here.”
“Why?”
“Well, you move into an area, you look around for things. You want to see what the place has to offer, don’t you?”
Carole didn’t reply. When she’d first arrived in Fethering, she had looked around for a supermarket, a doctor, a dentist, and left it at that. The idea of checking out the local racecourse was completely alien to her.
“Anyway, let’s go and look at the runners.”
“Why?”
“Because we want to know what they look like. Might get an idea of which one will win.”
“Do you actually know anything about racehorses, Jude?”
“I know as much as the average punter does.”
“Which is?”
“I know if I like the look of one; I know if I like its name, or the colours it’s wearing, or its jockey’s bottom.”
“And you actually bet according to that kind of…whim?”
“Yes. That’s what most people do. And you have as good a chance of winning as by any other method.”
“It doesn’t sound very logical.”
“Carole, logic and gambling are two words that don’t fit in the same sentence.”
All that got was a sniff.
“And another reason for going to the parade ring is that it’s exactly the kind of place where we might see Donal.”
As Jude knew, Fontwell Park was a small racecourse, with its parade ring to the left just inside the entrance. Behind it were the large stalls where the horses were saddled before being led round the brick oval, in the grassy centre of which their owners and “connections” stood and speculated. All of them dreamed of winning, but a convention amongst them dictated that no one ever said anything more optimistic than, “So long as the horse gets round all right-that’s the only thing I’m worried about.”
Carole and Jude wriggled through the growing crowds around the parade ring to find a foothold on the paved viewing steps. For a while, Carole scanned the jovial sea of faces for the elusive Donal, but soon she found that her eyes were drawn to the horses. Someone who had rarely been near to a real horse could not fail to be impressed by the sheer size and elegance of the creatures. In a few moments all but three of them would be condemned by the punters as useless donkeys, but now, clip-clopping beside their stable lads (mostly female), they did look truly beautiful.
And it was a nice sharp day, whose thin sun suggested spring wasn’t that far away. The fact that they were now into March was comforting; it was so much more optimistic a month than February. Carole, as she had done so many times since she had moved to Fethering, thawed a little. Maybe going to the races wasn’t such a pointless pastime, after all.
“Well, I’m Random Missile,” said Jude.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Random Missile. Number Four. Going to walk it.”
“Do you know something? Do you have inside information?” asked Carole, like a character out of early Le Carre.
“No, I told you. There’s no science to it. I just like the look of the horse.”
“I’m sure there could be science applied to it. If you assessed all the variables-you know, the horse’s fitness, where it had run before, who it had beaten, who it had lost to…”
“Carole, don’t go down that road. The world is full enough already of people who’ve worked out infallible systems for getting winners, and let me tell you, none of them work.”
“But if one were going to bet”-doing one’s supermarket shopping on Mars sounded a likelier option-“wouldn’t it be better to do it in an informed manner?”
“Depends on how you get your thrills. What I like about betting is that it’s random. That’s why I’m going to back Random Missile.”
“Just because of the name?”
“Yes, and the fact that I like the look of him…and the fact that his stable girl has a nice-coloured scrunchy in her hair.”
