Stud. Still going strong. I've a good eye for a horse still, though. I'll go on a trip with him, when he's buying. As long as he's buying.'
'No one is allowed to call F. X. Tyrrell Frank except Jackie,' said Sean Proby, the first coherent utterance he had made in my hearing.
'Well, no one does, at any rate, 'Jackie said. 'Maybe no one wants to.'
'How was Gowran today?' Miranda said to Proby.
'Not bad,' Proby said. 'Nothing like a small country meeting. Jack was working, of course; I was merely Mrs. Tyrrell's lunch companion. But we did all right.'
'The bookies always do,' snapped Jackie.
'The Tyrrell horses underperformed nicely,' Miranda said.
Jackie smiled thinly at this.
'Leopardstown's the main event,' she said. 'The ground was too firm today anyway.'
'Did Jack of Hearts place?' I said.
'Won the first by four lengths at six to one. Held up well,' Proby said.
'Why the interest?' Jackie said. I had the impression she was playing with me.
'It just caught my eye.'
'I thought it might be because of its owner. You know who owns it, of course.'
'Do I?'
'I think you do, Edward Loy. After all, when you're not writing books about horse racing in Ireland, which I would say is all of the time, you hire yourself out as a private detective. And a while back you had a hand in putting away Podge Halligan, the drug dealer, also the brother of George Halligan, who owns Jack of Hearts. Miranda, why did you think it necessary to fabricate an absurd identity for Mr. Loy? A writer, of all things. Everyone knows writers are all badly dressed overweight cantankerous faux-humble alcoholics with a chip on each shoulder and a grudge against the world. And that's just the women.'
Miranda looked like a schoolgirl hauled before the head mistress; she stared at her plate in silence, her face burning.
'It was my idea,' I said.
'And gallant too. Tall and gallant. We don't see many of you round here anymore. You're not gay, are you?'
Sean Proby shook his head.
'Absolutely not,' he said.
'Sean's my gaydar when it comes to men. Are you working, Ed Loy?'
'He's looking for Patrick,' Miranda said, her voice thick with emotion. She choked back what might have been a sob, then muttered an apology and fled to the loo. The waiter came and took our plates. I watched Jackie Tyrrell closely, but her expression was blank; she gave nothing away. When the table had been cleared, and Sean Proby had gone outside for a smoke, she smiled keenly at me.
'You know about Patrick Hutton and the Halligans?' she said.
I shook my head.
'Patrick and Leo-' she began, and then stopped as cutlery arrived for the main course. She repeated the names when the waiter had gone, her eyes dancing, then stopped again as Miranda came back to the table, eye makeup freshly and thickly applied.
'I'll tell him about that myself, Jackie, if it's all right with you,' Miranda said, quite sharply to my ears.
'But of course, my darling, of course,' Jackie said, all charm.
'He was my husband, and I think I'm best placed to know what's important and what's just rumor and innuendo, don't you?'
Jackie Tyrrell gave Miranda Hart what looked to me to be a very fond, warm smile, and leant across and touched her hand.
'I do,' she said softly. 'And you are. Nobody but you.'
Miranda blushed again, and nodded; in removing her hand from Jackie's, she managed to upset a full glass of white wine over both of us; by the time we had that cleared up, the main courses had arrived. I ate steak frites with bearnaise sauce, washed down with two slow glasses of red. I could drink a lot, and generally did, but I had no head for wine; in any case, I wanted to study these people at the periphery of the Tyrrell family closely: there was history between them, and I'd need my wits about me to pick up on it.
As we ate, Sean Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary's Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn't racing at all, he sniffed.
Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt's premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O'Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.
She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school's worth.
'No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their '06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding's an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing's wasted on them.'
Miranda beamed at her satirically.
'There speaks Jackie Tyrrell, who went to finishing school in Geneva. Dressmaking and deportment and Italian and place setting and flower arrangement.'
'Quite right too. Made a real woman of her,' Sean Proby said.
'Miranda doesn't agree. About the girls,' Jackie said, seemingly reveling in any exchange that approached the condition of a row.
Miranda shrugged wearily: this was evidently something they rehearsed on a regular basis.
'Girls were always interested in hair and makeup and clothes. They just didn't have the money to do anything about it back in our day. Now they do.'
'Too much money,' Jackie said severely. 'Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?'
'I'd always be in favor of wealth redistribution,' I said. 'The problem is, how to dole it out, and who decides?'
'I decide,' Jackie said, and then, straight-faced: 'Ed, do you think teenage girls should be taught to ride?'
Miranda and Proby burst out laughing at this, and Jackie Tyrrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honor at her own table. Champagne arrived, and we drank a toast to the riding school (in which Sean Proby had some kind of interest) against her protests, and to Christmas. Then Jackie, unprovoked and with no challenger, launched into a long and involved defense of the Irish Revenue Inspectors' tax exemption for the bloodstock industry, inviting my support on the grounds that, as a creative writer, I benefited from a similar dispensation. I tried to remind her that I wasn't, in fact, a writer, but she and Proby were drinking Calvados by now, impervious to any music but their own. Occasionally she would scribble something on a napkin, briefing herself for her rhetorical assault against illusory foes. It was after ten; it felt much later. I offered Miranda a lift home. She was on her feet before I'd finished speaking.
I offered Jackie Tyrrell some money for the dinner, but she forced it back into my hand and pulled me down until we were eye to eye. Her face was fixed in a comedy leer; her breath was a yeasty cloud of alcohol; I thought she was going to kiss me, and didn't see what I could do if she did, but when I looked her in the eye, she fixed me with an unexpectedly clear gaze.
'Call me. We need to talk,' she said quietly, urgently, and then pushed me from her and yelled with laughter as if she'd propositioned me. I waved good-bye to Proby from a distance, not wanting to risk giving him my hand again for fear I'd never get it back.
