“Mr. Anonymous Lover Wyvern,” she said, “received a lovely last-minute invitation to play golf in the county’s top pro-am event of the year, an offer he’d have to have been ice to refuse. So off he was due to go with his precious clubs, and that was him out of the way.”
“How did you manage it?” my father asked admiringly.
“Inducements,” she said darkly. “And, shortly afterwards, Orinda got invited to the stewards’ box at the races...”
“That’s where we’re going too!” exclaimed my father.
“You don’t say!” Polly teased him. “Benedict,” she admonished me, “I’m giving you Orinda without the lover, so don’t waste the day.”
“But what can he do?” my father protested. “He knows,” Polly said. “How he’ll do it, I can’t tell, but trust your son.” She switched her attention back to me. “Orinda knows bugger all about racing. She’s going today for the snob value of a duke, who’s one of the stewards. You’ll have to contend with that. Think you can do it?”
I said a bit helplessly, “I don’t know.” Polly’s forthright language always disconcerted me, although everyday lurid stable talk passed my ears unnoticed.
“Go for shit,” she said.
Orinda was already into lobster mousse with diced cucumber when we reached the stewards’ luncheon room, and although she looked outraged at our arrival she could do little but choke and recover with sips of wine, patted delicately on the back by the duke at her side.
The duke rose and gave Polly a conspiratorial kiss on the cheek, and I saw how Orinda had been hooked and reeled in.
Orinda wore a white linen suit with a green silk scarf tied and floating from a black lizard handbag that swung from the back of her chair. Sleek, matte-skinned, her presence easily eclipsed every other woman in the room, especially Polly, who had dressed as usual, as if not sure of the event or the season.
My father shook hands all around, his innate, unmistakable power turning every head his way, even in a roomful of powerful men. Orinda hated him.
“My son, Benedict,” he said, introducing me: but it was he who claimed their eyes.
The duke, hesitantly, said to me, “Haven’t I met you before? Haven’t you ridden against my son Edward?”
“Yes, sir. At Towcester last Easter. He won.” The duke had a remembering smile. “You finished third! It was Eddie’s birthday. We had an impromptu party to celebrate. You were there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nothing like racing, is there? Best thing on earth, Eddie says.”
My father looked sharply at my face.
“Best thing,” I said.
“Mind you,” the duke said to my father, “for all these young men, it’s only a hobby. Amateurs can’t make a living at it. The best amateurs used to be able to turn pro but for some reason it’s hardly ever done these days. Eddie needs a job. Amateurs can’t ride forever. I expect your Benedict knows all that. A good fellow, your Benedict, Eddie says. Sit down, Mr. Juliard. It’s an excellent lunch.”
He seated my father on the other side of him from Orinda, whose enjoyment of the day had waned to twilight, even though the sun outside shone brightly. She pushed away her unfinished mousse as if she could no longer taste it and had difficulty, with rigid facial muscles, in smiling at her host.
A stocky man of perhaps sixty, the duke looked less patrician than industrious, a worldly-wise business-man, a managing director more than a figurehead chairman. His son Eddie, a good fellow himself, had once said he envied the time I could give to racing: his own father insisted he work for his living. Well, I thought ruefully, Vivian Durridge and my own father had more than evened us up. Eddie’s father owned horses, which the son could ride in races, and mine didn’t.
Polly and I were seated several places down the lengthy, white-clothed dining table on the other side from the uncomfortable Orinda, and placidly ate our mousse and cucumber, which was, as the duke said, excellent, even though, now I’d been let off near-starvation, I would have preferred a large salami pizza.
There was some sort of curried chicken next. As time ran out towards the first race, the duke, looking at his watch, told my father that as chief steward for the day, he (the duke) would have to leave the party now in order to carry out his duties. As if by accident he saw the near panic on Orinda’s face at being left without a buffer zone between herself and her beastly usurper, and found an irresistible and apparently spur-of-the-moment solution.
With a flick of a glance at Polly, who was looking particularly bland, the duke said to Orinda kindly, “Now, Mrs. Nagle, I am truly concerned that you should enjoy and understand our splendid sport of steeplechasing, and as I’ll be busily occupied I can think of no one better to entrust you to than young Benedict there. He knows all about racing, in spite of his age, and he will take you ‘round and show you everything, and we will all meet up here again after, say, the second race. So, Benedict,” he spoke to me loudly down the table, “be a good fellow and take Mrs. Nagle down to see the horses walk ’round the parade ring. Watch the race with her. Answer her questions, right?”
I said “Yes, sir” faintly, and the duke, nodding benignly, more or less pushed Orinda into my arms. I sensed her begin to stiffen and refuse but the duke made urging motions towards the door as if there were no possibility of a change of his plans, and over my shoulder, as I followed the white linen suit into the passage outside, I caught glimpses of astonishment on my father’s face and a wide grin on Polly’s.
Orinda marched along the passage and down the stairs at the end into the open air, and there she stopped dead and said, “This is ridiculous.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”
“I mean, you’re not going to listen to me because you hate my father, which is pretty unreasonable when you look at it, but I’d probably feel the same way, so if you like I’ll just leave you here and go and look at the horses, which is actually what I want to do anyhow.”
She said irritably, inconsequentially, “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Easily,” I said. Hardly tactful.
In spite of her fury she almost laughed. “You’re supposed to say I couldn’t be.”
“Sorry.”
“Mervyn says you’re only seventeen.”
“I’ll be eighteen in two weeks.”
“What will I do, if you just dump me here?”
“Well,” I said, “I won’t dump you. But if you want me to vanish, well, ‘round that corner you’ll find the parade ring, where the horses walk ’round before the race so that everyone can see what they’re putting their money on.”
“What if I want to bet?”
“Bookmakers or the Tote?”
“What’s going to win?”
I smiled at her with real goodwill. “If I knew, if anyone knew, I’d be rich.”
“And if you were rich?”
“I’d buy a string of racehorses, and ride them.”
I hadn’t expected the question, and the answer I’d given her came straight from the honesty of childhood. I wasn’t yet used to being adult. My mind, and also my voice and physical coordination, could switch disconcertingly sometimes back to fifteen, even in dreams to thirteen. Some days I could ski downhill with sharp turning certainty: other days I’d crash out on the first bend. Some days I’d move in total harmony with a horse’s gallop: other days I’d have gawky arms and legs. Always, so far always, I could shoot and hit the inner or the bull, a two-inch spot at a hundred yards.
Orinda said formally, “I’d be grateful if you’d accompany me to the parade ring.”
I nodded as if she were conceding nothing, and with minute body signs steered her to where the horses plodded around the ring, the sun shining on their coats, the smell and sound of them piercing my senses, the last four days setting up in me such an acute sense of loss that I wished myself anywhere on earth but on a racecourse.