'If you want the job, yes. It's tough, but as far as I can see, fair.'
That had been eight months ago. I had come home to widespread and understandable disbelief that such a plum should have fallen my way. I had survived Nonie Marsh's resentment and Warrington 's incoherent unhelpfulness; had sold several of Luke's unpromising two-year-olds without great loss, had cajoled the trainers into provisionally accepting me and done nothing sweat-makingly disastrous. Despite all the decisions and responsibility, I'd enjoyed every minute.
Cassie appeared in the doorway.
'Aren't you going to get out of that bath?' she demanded. 'Just sitting there smiling.'
'Life's good.'
'And you'll be late.'
I stood up in the water and as she watched me straighten she said automatically, 'Mind your head.' I stepped out onto the floor, and kissed her, dripping down her neck.
'For God's sake, get dressed,' she said. 'And you need a shave.' She gave me a towel. 'The coffee's hot, and we're out of milk.'
I flung on a few clothes and went downstairs, dodging beams and low doorways on the way. The cottage we'd rented in the village of Six Mile Bottom (roughly six miles south of Newmarket) had been designed for seventeenth-century man, who hadn't suffered the dietetic know-how of the twentieth. And would seven feet, I wondered, ducking into the kitchen, be considered normal in the twenty-fifth?
We had lived in the cottage all summer and in spite of its low ceilings it suited us fine. There were apples now in the garden, and mists in the mornings, and sleepy wasps trying to find warm cracks in the eaves. Red tiled floors and rugs downstairs, dining-room surrendered to office, sitting-room cosy round an as yet untried hearth; red-checked curtains, rocking chairs, corn dollies and soft lights. A townspeople's country toy, but enough, I sometimes thought, to make one want to put down roots.
Bananas Frisby had found it for us. Bananas, long-time friend, who kept a pub in the village. I'd called in there one day on my way back to Newmarket and told him I was stuck for somewhere to live.
'What's wrong with your old boat?'
'I've grown out of it.'
He gave me a slow glance. 'Mentally?'
'Yeah. I've sold it. And I've met a girl.'
'And this one,' he suggested, 'isn't ecstatic about rubbing down dead varnish?'
'Far from.'
'I'll keep it in mind,' he said, and indeed he called me a week later at Warrington's house and said there was a tarted-up cottage down the road from him that I could go and look at: the London-based owners didn't want to sell but could do with some cash, and they'd be willing to let it to someone who wouldn't stay for ever.
'I told them you'd the wanderlust of an albatross,' he said. 'I know them, they're nice people, don't let me down.'
Bananas personally owned his almost equally old pub, which was very slowly crumbling under his policy of neglect. Bananas had no family, no heirs, no incentive to preserve his worldly goods; so when each new patch of damp appeared inside his walls he bought a luxurious green potted plant to hide it. Since I'd known him, the shiny-leafed camouflage had multiplied from three to eight: and there was a vine climbing now through the windows. If anyone ever remarked about the dark patches on the walls, Bananas said the plants had caused them, and strangers never realised it was the other way round.
Bananas' main pride and joy was the small restaurant, next door to the bar, in which he served cuisine minceur of such perfection that half the passing jockeys of England ate there religiously. It had been over his dried, crisp, indescribable roast duck that I'd first met him, and like a mark well hooked had become an addict. Couldn't count the delices I'd paid for since.
He was already up as usual when I waved to him on my way to the gallops: sweeping out, cleaning up, opening his windows wide to get rid of the overnight fug. A fat man himself, he nonetheless had infinite energy, and ran the whole place with the help of two women, one in the bar and one in the kitchen, both of whom he bossed around like a feudal lord. Betty in the kitchen cooked stolidly under his eagle eye and Bessie in the bar served drinks with speed bordering on sleight-of-hand. Bananas was head-waiter and every other sort of waiter, collecting orders, delivering food, presenting bills, cleaning and relaying tables, all with a deceptive show of having all day to chat. I'd watched him at it so often that I knew his system; he practically never wasted time by going into the kitchen. Food appeared from Betty through a vast serving hatch shielded from the public view, and dirty dishes disappeared down a gentle slide.
'Who washes up?' I'd said once in puzzlement.
'I do,' Bananas said. 'After closing time I feed it all through the washer.'
'Don't you ever sleep?'
'Sleep's boring.'
He needed, it seemed, only four hours a night.
'And why work so hard? Why not have more help?'
He looked at me pityingly. 'Staff cause as much work as they do,' he said. And I'd found out later that he closed the restaurant every year towards the end of November and took off to the West Indies, returning in late March when the Flat racing stirred back to life. He hated the cold, he said: worked at a gallop for eight months for four months' palm trees and sun.
That morning on the Limekilns, Simpson Shell was working his best young prospect and looking smug. The eldest of Luke Houston's five trainers, he had been resigned to me least and still had hang-ups which showed on his face every day.
'Morning, William,' he said, frowning.
'Morning, Sim.' I watched him with the rangy colt upon whom the Houston hope of a classic next season was faintly pinned. 'He's moving well,' I said.
'He always does.' The voice was slighting and impatient. I smiled to myself. Neither compliments nor soft soap, he was saying, were going to change his opinion of the upstart who had overruled him in the matter of selling two two-year-olds. He had told me he disagreed strongly with my weeding-out policy, even though I'd put it to him beforehand and discussed every dud to be discarded. ' Warrington never did that,' he'd thundered, and he'd warned me he was writing to Luke to complain.
I never heard the result. Either he'd never written or Luke had backed me up; but it had consolidated his Derry-wards hostility, not least because although I had saved Luke Houston a stack of pointless training fees I had at the same time deprived Simpson Shell. He was waiting, I knew, for the duds to win for their new owners so that he could crow, and it was my good luck that so far they hadn't.
Like all Luke's trainers, he trained for many other owners besides. Luke's horses at present constituted about a sixth of his string, which was too high a percentage for him to risk losing them altogether: so he was civil to me, but only just.
I asked him about a filly who had had some heat in her leg the previous evening, and he grumpily said it was better. He hated me to take a close interest in his eight Houston horses, yet I guessed that if I didn't, another letter would be winging to California complaining that I was neglecting my duties. Sim Shell, I thought ruefully, couldn't be pleased.
Over in the Bury Road, Mort Miller, younger, neurotic, fingers snapping like firecrackers, told me that Luke's ten darlings were eating well and climbing the walls with eagerness to slaughter the opposition. Mort had considered the sale of three no-gooders a relief, saying he hated the lazy so-and-sos and grudged them their oats. Mort's horses were always as strung up as he was, but they certainly won when it mattered.
I dropped in on Mort most days because it was he, for all his positive statements, who in fact asked my opinion most.
Once a week, usually fitting in with race meetings, I visited the other two trainers, Thompson and Sandlache, who lived thirty miles from each other on the Berkshire Downs, and about once a month I spent a couple of days with Donavan in Ireland. With them all, I had satisfactory working arrangements, they on their part admitting that the two-year-olds I'd got rid of were of no benefit to themselves, and I promising that I would spend the money I'd saved on the training fees on extra yearlings in October.
I would be sorry, I thought, when my year was over.
