Captain Oxon, whom I had not met before, though he said he knew me by sight, was a slender pleasant looking man of about fifty, with a long pointed chin and a slight tendency to watery eyes. The present offended obstinacy of his expression looked more like childishness than real strength. A colonel manque, I thought uncharitably, and no wonder.
‘I know it’s not really my business,’ I said, ‘but surely a bulldozer would shift what’s left of the burnt bit in a couple of hours? There isn’t time to settle new turf, but you could cover the whole area with some tons of tan and race over it quite easily, like that. You must be getting tan anyway, to cover the road surface. Surely you could just increase the order?’
Oxon looked at me with irritation. ‘We can’t afford it.’
‘You can’t afford another cancellation at the last minute,’ I corrected.
‘We are insured against cancellations.’
‘I doubt whether an insurance company would stand this one,’ I said. ‘They’d say you could have raced if you’d tried hard enough.’
‘It’s Monday now,’ remarked Lord Hagbourne thoughtfully. ‘Racing’s due on Friday. Suppose we call in a bulldozer tomorrow; the tan can be unloaded and spread on Wednesday and Thursday. Yes, that seems sound enough.’
‘But the cost…’ began Oxon.
‘I think the money must be found,’ said Lord Hagbourne. ‘Tell Mr Fotherton when he comes over that I have authorised the expenditure. The bills will be met, in one way or another. But I do think there is no case for not making an effort.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that if Oxon had arranged for the bulldozer on the first day he could have saved the price of casual labour for six hand-diggers for a week, but as the battle was already won, I nobly refrained. I continued to think, however, that Oxon was a fool. Usually the odd custom of giving the managerships of racecourses to ex-army and navy officers worked out well, but conspicuously not in this case.
The three of us walked back up to the stands, Lord Hagbourne pausing and pursing his lips at their dingy appearance. I reflected that it was a pity that Seabury had a Clerk of the Course whose heart and home were far away on the thriving course at Bristol. If I’d been arranging things, I’d have seen to it a year ago, when the profits turned to loss, that Seabury had a new Clerk entirely devoted to its own interests, someone moreover whose livelihood depended on it staying open. The bungle, delay, muddle, too much politeness and failure to take action showed by the Seabury executive had been of inestimable value to the quietly burrowing Kraye.
Mr Fotherton might have been worried, as he said, but he had done little except mention it in passing to Charles in his capacity as Steward at some other meeting. Charles, looking for something to divert my mind from my stomach, and perhaps genuinely anxious about Seabury, had tossed the facts to me. In his own peculiar way, naturally.
The casualness of the whole situation was horrifying. I basely wondered whether Fotherton himself had a large holding in Seabury shares and therefore a vested interest in its demise. Planning a much closer scrutiny of the list of shareholders, I followed Lord Hagbourne and Captain Oxon round the end of the stands, and we walked the three hundred yards or so through the racecourse gates and down the road to where Captain Oxon’s flat was situated above the canteen in the stable block.
On Lord Hagbourne’s suggestion he rang up a firm of local contractors while we were still there, and arranged for the urgent earth-moving to be done the following morning. His manner was still ruffled, and it didn’t improve things when I declined the well-filled ham and chutney sandwiches he offered, though I would have adored to have eaten them, had he but known. I had been out of hospital for a fortnight, but I had another fortnight to go before things like new bread, ham, mustard and chutney were due back on the agenda. Very boring.
After the sandwiches Lord Hagbourne decided on a tour of inspection, so we all three went first round the stable block, into the lads’ hostel, through the canteen to the kitchen, and into all the stable administrative offices. Everywhere the story was the same. Except for the rows of wooden boxes which had been thrown up cheaply after the old ones burned down, there was no recent maintenance and no new paint.
Then we retraced our steps up the road, through the main gate, and across to the long line of stands with the weighing room, dining-rooms, bars and cloakrooms built into the back. At one end were the secretary’s office, the press room and the Stewards’ room: at the other, the first-aid room and a store. A wide tunnel like a passage ran centrally through the whole length of the building, giving secondary access on one side to many of the rooms, and on the other to the steps of the stands themselves. We painstakingly covered the lot, even down to the boiler room and the oil bunkers, so I had my nostalgic look inside the weighing room and changing room after all.
The whole huge block was dankly cold, very draughty, and smelt of dust. Nothing looked new, not even the dirt. For inducing depression it was hard to beat, but the dreary buildings along in the cheaper rings did a good job of trying.
Captain Oxon said the general dilapidation was mostly due to the sea air, the racecourse being barely half a mile from the shore, and no doubt in essence he was right. The sea air had had a free hand for far too long.
Eventually we returned to where my car was parked inside the gate, and looked back to the row of stands: forlorn, deserted, decaying on a chilly early November afternoon, with a salt-laden drizzle just beginning to blur the outlines.
‘What’s to be done?’ said Lord Hagbourne glumly, as we drove through the rows of bungalows on our way home.
‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head.
‘The place is dead.’
I couldn’t argue. Seabury had suddenly seemed to me to be past saving. The Friday and Saturday fixtures could be held now, but as things stood the gate money would hardly cover expenses. No company could go on making a loss indefinitely. Seabury could plug the gap at present by drawing on their reserve funds, but as I’d seen from their balance sheets at Company House, the reserves only amounted to a few thousands. Matters were bound to get worse. Insolvency waited round a close corner. It might be more realistic to admit that Seabury had no future and to sell the land at the highest price offered as soon as possible. People were, after all, crying out for flat land at the seaside. And there was no real reason why the shareholders shouldn’t be rewarded for their long loyalty and recent poor dividends and receive eight pounds for each one they had invested. Many would gain if Seabury came under the hammer, and no one would lose. Seabury was past saving: best to think only of the people who would benefit.
My thoughts stopped with a jerk. This, I realised, must be the attitude of the Clerk, Mr Fotherton, and of the Manager, Oxon, and of all the executive. This explained why they had made surprisingly little attempt to save the place. They had accepted defeat easily and seen it not only to be harmless, but to many, usefully profitable. As it had been with other courses, big courses like Hurst Park and Birmingham, so it should be with Seabury.
What did it matter that yet another joined the century’s ghost ranks of Cardiff, Derby, Bournemouth, Newport? What did it matter if busy people like Inspector Cornish of Dunstable couldn’t go racing much because their local course had vanished? What did it matter if Seabury’s holiday makers went to the Bingo halls instead?
Chasing owners, I thought, should rise up in a body and demand that Seabury should be preserved, because no racecourse was better for their horses. But of course they wouldn’t. You could tell owners how good it was, but unless they were horsemen themselves, it didn’t register. They only saw the rotten amenities of the stands, not the splendidly sited well-built fences that positively invited their horses to jump. They didn’t know how their horses relished the short springy turf underfoot, or found the arc and cambers of the bends perfect for maintaining an even speed. Corners at many other racecourses threw horses wide and broke up their stride, but not those at Seabury. The original course builder had been brilliant, and regular visits from the Inspector of Courses had kept his work fairly intact. Fast, true run, unhazardous racing, that’s what Seabury gave.
Or had done, before Kraye.
Kraye and the executive’s inertia between them… I stamped on the accelerator in a surge of anger and the car swooped up the side of the South Downs like a bird. I didn’t often drive fast any more: I did still miss having two hands on the wheel. At the top, out of consideration for my passenger’s nerves, I let the speedometer ribbon slide back to fifty.
He said, ‘I feel like that about it too.’
I glanced at him in surprise.
