all the locals putting their shirts on Rupert’s horses. In the village-store window was a poster advertising a British Legion cheese-and-wine party to raise money for the Gulf. Lysander knew he ought to take an interest. The radio banged on and on about the liberation of Kuwait, but he was only interested in liberating Kitty.
Below Rupert’s beautiful blond house, with its halo of magnificent beech trees, a long lake like mother of pearl in the falling sunshine was freezing at the edges. Across his rolling fields patches of snow lay like the spilt milk over which there was no use crying. All the birds were singing, trying to disguise the dull constant roar high above the clouds of B52s carrying bombs south from RAF Fairford.
Rupert was not surviving the recession and alarming set-backs at Lloyd’s by altruism alone. Although beguiled by Lysander in Monthaut, he had noticed the boy’s effortless extravagance. By smiling at the receptionist at the Hotel Versailles, Rupert had also ascertained that Lysander was picking up the massive bill for the President de Gaulle suite. The reason, therefore, that Rupert had offered to get Arthur sound was because he regarded Lysander as an engaging dolt awash with cash, who could easily be coaxed into buying other much younger horses for Rupert to train.
Rupert loathed droppers-in. Even the richest owners disturbed the horses’ routine. He was not running a Harley Street nursing home. But when Lysander rolled up shivering uncontrollably with Donald Duck glaring out between the lapels of his long, dark blue, dog-fur-matted overcoat, Rupert actually stopped placating Mr Pandopoulos, whose horse hadn’t been placed last week either. Leaving the apoplectic Greek to Dizzy, his extremely glamorous head girl, Rupert bore Lysander off to the yard kitchen for a cup of tea.
‘Put him down,’ said Rupert, as a pack of dogs swarmed round trying to reach a bristling Jack. ‘They’re quite safe, and the two Jack Russells are bitches.’
Enviously Lysander examined the photographs which crowded the walls of Rupert and his daughters, Perdita and Tabitha, winning world championships at show jumping, brandishing polo cups and leading in winners on the flat and over fences.
‘I’m really sorry not to ring first,’ he mumbled, ‘but my telephone’s stopped working.’
‘Hug the Aga,’ said Rupert, putting on the kettle. ‘You look frozen.’
You could tell when a horse was in pain by its eyes; Lysander’s were bright red, but the pupils and the irises were drab and lifeless. He was as pale as the Christmas roses Taggie had arranged in a dark green vase on the table. Jeans, skin-tight when he was skiing, were really baggy now.
‘How’s Arthur?’ asked Lysander.
‘King Arthur of the round belly,’ said Rupert. ‘God, he was cross when I cut down his rations. He ate every blade of straw, so I’ve put him on shredded newspaper. I expect he and Tiny are busily piecing together lurid stories about you and Mrs Rannaldini. How is she?’
‘Oh, Rupert!’ Once more, with all the egotism of heartbreak, Lysander launched into his tale of woe.
‘How can I convince her that I’m serious?’ he pleaded finally, as he dipped a fifth piece of shortbread into his tea before handing it to a slavering Jack. ‘I’d like to get a medal in the Gulf to show her I’m not just a cheap gigolo. The Yanks are paying people a thousand pounds a week just to put up tents.’
‘I thought you were paid ten times as much as that for erections in England,’ said Rupert, who’d been doing the entries for next week’s races and working out who was going to ride out which horse tomorrow morning as he listened. ‘All right, joke, joke,’ he added, as Lysander’s face blackened. ‘Anyway, I’ve got news for you. Bunny, the vet, and I think we’ve sussed Arthur’s problem.’
Rupert half-rose to look out of the window. ‘That’s her now.’
Arthur as usual was lying flat out snoring with his eyes wide open to get attention.
‘I ought to move Penscombe Pride from the next-door box,’ said Rupert as he opened the half-door. ‘He isn’t getting any sleep with that racket going on, but he’s got a bit of a crush on Arthur.’
Arthur lurched to his feet in delight when he heard his master’s voice. Whickering like Vesuvius, he nudged Lysander in the belly, grumbling about the dreadful starvation diet to which he’d been subjected. As usual he looked like nothing on earth, his face, back and quarters smeared with green, his mane and tail strewn with pieces of pink
‘He’s a terrible drip,’ said Lysander apologetically. ‘A programme seller in a white coat has him all of a tremble.’
Rounded, sweet and smiling, with long, soft brown hair and a gentle comforting voice, Bunny reminded Lysander for a fleeting agonizing moment of Kitty.
‘We’ve discounted navicular,’ she told Lysander. ‘It’s easy to make a mistake on an X-ray, but those lesions are actually normal synovial recesses.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Lysander, not knowing if that was good, and hanging tightly on to Arthur’s headcollar as he kept trying to edge away.
‘Will you trot him up now,’ asked Bunny.
Even Arthur’s delight at putting as many yards as possible between himself and Bunny soon disappeared as pain overwhelmed him. Miserably, he stumbled across the yard. Lysander could hardly bear to look. Arthur seemed worse than ever.
‘He’s certainly lame on both front legs,’ said Bunny, when they had both returned. ‘But I think the pain’s coming from his coffin joints. Arthur,’ she added, picking up his near-fore, ‘has abnormally shaped feet with very long toes.’
‘Sounds like Lady Chisleden,’ said Lysander, giggling out of nerves.
Bunny raised her eyes to heaven.
‘I have the misfortune to look after her lunatic Arabs,’ she sighed.
Having clipped back the hair and scrubbed both Arthur’s front feet, she filled a syringe with local anaesthetic: ‘I’m going to do a nerve block in the near-fore coffin joint,’ she explained as she plunged the needle into the front of a wincing Arthur’s foot.
In his brief stay at Penscombe, Arthur had endeared himself to everyone. Now all Rupert’s grooms left their charges, stopped sweeping up and cleaning tack to gather round. They were soon joined by farm workers, gardeners, the estate carpenter, a man delivering feed and Mr and Mrs Bodkin, the ancient couple who seemed to have always looked after Rupert.
Snow was drifting down as though it had all the time in the world. Even when Lysander lit a cigarette, which was strictly forbidden in the yard, the autocratic Rupert didn’t snap at him.
‘OK. It should be dead now. Trot him up,’ said Bunny.
Tail whisking, pleased to have an audience, Arthur once again shambled off up the yard after Lysander, who was running backwards in order to look down at his legs.
‘He’s only lame on the off-fore now,’ said Rupert. ‘Trot him back.’
It took all Lysander’s strength to stop Arthur taking off towards the house. He’d had enough of vets and his disapproval turned to megasulks when Bunny plunged another needle into his off-fore coffin joint.
‘If he trots out sound now,’ she told Lysander, ‘it means all the pain’s inside the joints and we can cure him with a combination of intra-articular injections and corrective shoeing.’
It seemed the longest ten minutes of Lysander’s life. Penscombe was very high up. In winter, Rupert’s horses wore dark blue hoods at night and often three rugs against the cold. Now, sensing something was up, like medieval chargers waiting for the start of Agincourt, they leant over their half-doors.
The yard had fallen silent, except for the sweet liquid carolling of a single robin and the occasional outraged protest of Tiny who was being held out of the way by a nervous stable lad. Lysander lit another cigarette. The girl grooms grew closer. Arthur’s master was even more adorable than Arthur. Rupert lounged deceptively still against the lichened wall of the tack room. Only Jack, oblivious for once of the tension, was wagging his little tail and raising his ginger ears as he stepped round Taggie’s black-and-white mongrel, Gertrude.
‘Please God, make Arthur sound,’ pleaded Lysander. ‘I promise I’ll get up in the morning and drink less — a lot less.’
Arthur, bored, tried to eat Bunny’s Rolex.
‘I need that to tell the time,’ she cuffed him gently on his green nose. ‘All right, if you’d like to trot him up the yard in a straight line.’
As Arthur set off, Jack streaked after him, and Tiny broke away from her stable lad. Like outriders, they flanked Arthur as he shambled through the snowflakes, first gingerly testing his off-fore, anticipating pain, then
