To the Hilt (8 page)

I turned. She was carrying two tumblers with ice in and looking at the picture. “You’d signed it just Alexander,” she said.

I nodded. “I always do.”

“Nothing else?”

“Alexander’s long enough.”

“Anyway, he recognized it. I was very surprised, but he turned out to be some sort of art critic. He’d seen quite a lot of your work.”

“What was his name?”

She shrugged. “Can’t remember. I said you always painted golf, and he said no you didn’t, you painted the perseverance of the human spirit.”

God,
I thought, and I asked again, “What was his name?”

“I told you, I can’t remember. I didn’t know I was going to see you so soon, did I?” She walked over to the bottles and poured Campari and soda onto ice. “He also said you might be going to be a great painter one day. He said you had both the technique and the courage. The courage, I ask you! I said what courage did it take to paint golf and he said it took courage to succeed at
anything.
Like training horses, he said.”

“I wish you could remember his name.”

“Well, I can’t. He was a round little man. I told him I knew you and he went on a bit about how you’d got those tiny red flecks into the stems of the dry grass in the foreground.”

“Did he tell you how?”

“No.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I think someone asked me about a horse.”

She poured gin and tonic for herself, sat down and waved me to a sofa. It felt extraordinarily odd to be a guest where once I’d been host. The house had always been hers, as it had been her father’s, but it had felt like my home when I’d lived there.

“That art man,” Emily said after a large swallow of gin, “also said that your paintings were too attractive at present to be taken seriously.”

I smiled.

“Don’t you mind?” she asked.

“No. Ugly is
in.
Ugly is considered
real.”

“But I don’t want ugly paintings on my walls.”

“Well... in the art world I’m sneered at because my paintings sell. I can do portraits, I accept commissions, I can draw—all unforgivable.”

“You don’t seem bothered.”

“I paint what I like. I earn my bread. I’ll never be Rembrandt. I settle for what I can do, and if that is to give pleasure, well, it’s better than nothing.”

“You never said anything like that when you were here.”

“Too much emotion got in the way.”

“Actually”—she rose to her feet and crossed back to the picture—“since that Sunday morning I’ve been looking at the grass.... So how did you get those tiny red flecks on the stalks? And the brown flecks and the yellow flecks, come to that.”

“You’d be bored.”

“No, actually, I wouldn’t.”

Campari tasted sweet and bitter, a lot like life. I said, “Well, first I painted the whole canvas bright red.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I did,” I assured her. “Bright solid cadmium red, all over.” I rose and walked over to join her. “You can still see horizontal faint streaks of red in the silver of the sea. There’s even some red in the gray of the clouds. Red in those two figures. All the rest is overpainted with the colors you can see now. That’s the chief beauty of acrylic paint. It dries so fast you can paint layer on layer without having to wait days, like with oils. If you try to overpaint oils too soon, the layers can mix and go muddy. Anyway, that grass... I overpainted that once with raw umber, which is a dark yellowish brown, and on top of that I put mixtures of yellow ocher, and then I scratched through all the layers with a piece of metal comb.”

“With
what?
”

“Comb. I scratched the metal teeth through the layers right down to the red. The scratches lean as if with the wind... they are the stalks. The scratches show red flecks and brown flecks from the layers... and then I laid a very thin transparent glaze of purple over parts of the yellow, which is what gives it all that ripple effect that you get in long grass in a strong wind.”

She stared silently at the canvas that had hung on her wall for more than five years, and she said eventually, “I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“Why you left. Why you couldn’t paint here.”

“Em ...” The old fond abbreviation arose naturally.

“You did try to tell me. I was too hurt to understand. And too young.” She sighed. “And nothing’s changed, has it?”

“Not really.”

She smiled vividly, without pain. “For a marriage that lasted barely four months, ours wasn’t so bad.”

I felt a great and undeserved sense of release. I hadn’t wanted to come to Lambourn again: I’d avoided it from guilt and unwillingness to risk stirring Emily to an ill will she had in fact never shown. I had shied away habitually from the memory of her baffled eyes.

Her actual words to me had been tough. “All right then, if you want to live on a mountain, bugger off.” It had been her eyes that had begged me to stay.

She’d said, “If you care more for bloody paint than you do for me, bugger off.”

Now, more than five tranquilizing years later, she said, “I wouldn’t have given up training racehorses, not for anything.”

“I know.”

“And you couldn’t give up painting.”

“No.”

“So there we are. It’s OK now between us, isn’t it?”

“You’re generous, Em.”

She grinned. “I quite enjoy saintly forbearance. Do you want something to eat?”

It was she who made mushroom omelettes in the kitchen, though when I’d lived there I’d done most of the cooking. We ate at the kitchen table. She still had a passion for ice cream: strawberry, that evening.

She said, “Do you want a divorce? Is that why you came here?”

Startled, I said, “No. Hadn’t thought of it! Do you?”

“You can have one anytime.”

“Do you want one?”

“Actually,” she said calmly, “I find it quite useful sometimes to be able to mention a husband, even if he’s never around.” She sucked her ice cream spoon. “I’m used to being in charge. I no longer want a live-in husband, to be frank.”

She stacked our plates in the dishwasher, and said, “If you don’t want a divorce, why did you come?”

“Ivan’s horses.”

“That’s crap. You could have asked on the phone.”

The Emily I’d known had been forthrightly honest. She had rid herself of some of the owners she’d inherited from her father because they’d sometimes wanted her to instruct her jockeys not to win. There was a world of difference, she’d said, between giving a young horse an easy race to get him to like the game, and trying to cheat the racing public by stopping a horse from winning in order to come home next time out at better odds. “My horses run to win,” she’d said robustly; and the racing world, with clear-eyed judgment, gave her its trust.

It was tentatively, therefore, that I said, “Ivan wants me to make Golden Malt disappear.”

“What on earth are you talking about? Do you want some coffee?”

She made the coffee in a drip-feed pot, a new one since my days.

I explained about the brewery’s financial predicament.

“The brewery,” Emily said tartly, “owes me four months’ training fees for Golden Malt. I wrote to Ivan personally about it not long before his heart attack. I don’t like to bitch, but I want my money.”

“You’ll get it,” I promised. “But he wants me to take the horse away from here, so that it doesn’t get sucked in and sold prematurely.”

She frowned. “I can’t let you take it.”

“Well... yes you can.”

I stretched down the table to reach the folder I’d brought with me and handed her one of the certified copies of the power of attorney, explaining that it gave me authority to do as I thought best regarding Ivan’s property, which one way or another definitely included Golden Malt.

She read the whole thing solemnly and at the end said merely, “All right. What do you want to do?”

“To ride the horse away from here tomorrow morning, when the town and the Downs are alive with horses going in all directions.”

She stared. “Firstly,” she said, “he’s not an easy ride.”

“And I’d fall off?”

“You might. And secondly, where would you go?”

“If I tell you where, you’ll be involved more than maybe you’d want to be.”

She thought it over. She said, “I don’t see how you can do it without my help. At the very least you need me to tell the grooms not to worry when one of the horses goes missing.”

“Much easier with your help,” I agreed.

We drank the coffee, not talking.

“I like Ivan,” she said finally. “Technically he’s still my stepfather-in-law, same as Vivienne is still my mother-in-law. I see them at the races. We’re on good terms, though she’s never effusive. We send each other Christmas cards.”

I nodded. I knew.

“If Ivan wants the horse hidden,” Emily said, “I’ll help you. So where do you plan to go?”

“I bought a copy of
Horse and Hound
in Newbury,” I said, taking the magazine out of the folder and opening at the pages of classified advertisements. “There’s a man here, over the Downs from here, saying he looks after hunters at livery and prepares horses for hunters’ chases and point-to-points. I thought about phoning him and asking him to take my hack for a few weeks. For four weeks, in fact, until a day or two before the King Alfred Gold Cup. The horse would have to come back here, wouldn’t he, so he could run with you as trainer?”

She nodded absently, looking where my finger pointed.

“I’m not sending Golden Malt to
him,”
she announced. “That man’s a bully, horses go sour on him, and he thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

“Oh.”

She thought briefly. “I have a friend, a woman, who offers the same service and is a damn sight better.”

“Is she within riding distance?”

“About eight miles across the Downs. You’d get lost on the Downs, though.”

“Er . . . you used to have a map of the tracks and gallops.”

“Yes, the Ordnance Survey map. But my maps must be seven years old. There are a lot of new roads.”

“Roads may change, but the tracks are seven
thousand
years old. They’ll still be there.”

She laughed and fetched the map from the office, spreading it out on the kitchen table. “Her yard is west of here,” Emily said, pointing. “She’s quite a good way away from Mandown, where most people exercise the Lambourn strings. She’s
there,
see, outside the village of Foxhill.”

“I could find that,” I said.

Emily looked doubtful, but phoned her friend.

“My yard’s so full,” she said. “Could you take an overflow for me for a week or two? Keep him fit. He’ll be racing later on.... You can? Good.... I’ll send one of my grooms over with him in the morning.... The horse’s name? Oh ... just call him Bobby. Send me the bills. How are your kids?”

After the chitchat she put down the receiver.

“There you are,” she said. “One conjuring trick done to order.”

“You’re brilliant.”

“Absolutely right. Where are you sleeping?”

“I’ll find a room in Lamboum.”

“Not unless you want to advertise your presence. Don’t forget you lived here for six months. People know you. We got married in Lambourn church. I don’t want tongues wagging that you’ve come back to me. You can sleep here, on a sofa, out of sight.”

“How about,” I said impulsively, “in your bed?”

“No.”

I didn’t try to persuade her. Instead, I borrowed her telephone for two calls, one to my mother to tell her I would be away for the night but hoped to have good news for Ivan the next day, and one to Jed Parlane in Scotland.

“How are you?” he said anxiously.

“Living at a flat-out gallop.”

“I meant ... Anyway, I took the police to the bothy. What a
mess.
”

“Mm.”

“I gave them your drawings. The police haven’t had any other complaints about hikers robbing people around here.”

“Not surprising.”

“Himself wants to see you as soon as you return. He says I’m to meet you off the train and take you straight to the castle. When are you coming back?”

“With luck on tomorrow night’s Highlander. I’ll let you know.”

“How is Sir Ivan?”

“Not good.”

“Take care, then,” he said. “So long.”

Emily, deep in thought, said, as I put down the receiver, “I’ll send my head groom out with the first lot, as usual, but I’ll tell him not to take Golden Malt. I’ll tell the head groom that the horse is going away for a bit of remedial treatment to his legs. There’s nothing wrong with his legs, actually, but my grooms know better than to argue.”

They always had, I reflected. Also, they faithfully stayed. She trained winners; the grooms prospered, and did as she said.

She wrote, as she always did, a list of which groom would ride which horse when the first lot of about twenty horses pulled out for exercise at seven o’clock the next morning, and which groom would ride which horse in the second lot, after breakfast, and which groom would go out again later in the morning with every horse not yet exercised. She employed about twenty grooms—men and women—for the horses, besides two secretaries, a housekeeper and a yardman. Jockeys came for breakfast and to school the horses over jumps. Veterinarians called. People delivered hay and feed and removed manure. Owners visited. I’d learned to ride, but not well. The telephone trilled incessantly. Messages whizzed in and out by computer. No one ever for long sat still.

I had been absorbed into the busy scenery as general cook/dogsbody, and runner of errands: and although I’d fitted in as best I could, and for a while happily, my own internal life had shriveled to zero. There had been weeks and weeks of self-doubt, of wondering if my compulsion to paint was mere selfishness, if the belief in talent was a delusion, if I should deny the promptings of my nature and be forever the lieutenant that Emily wanted.