In the end Theo found a black suit that didn’t look too ridiculous. Corn dressed in corduroy and looked remarkably like a man born to hunt, only missing a shotgun under one arm. Bea found blue silk and a fur stole; Helen clucked and exclaimed how wonderful she was, and Bea blushed, and Corn very deliberately and carefully didn’t look at her, and grunted something about how yeah, you know, it was like, good yeah.
Helen rolled her eyes and chose a more conservative dress suit of chequered black and grey.
They took turns to change in the darkness of the van, doors closed, Corn and Theo, Bea and Helen, hunched over double, slipping and sliding through a sea of shirt and sock, trouser and skirt, squinting in the gloom. When they were done, Corn held out money to the man with the van, who tutted and shook his head.
“Blessed are her hands,” he grunted, throwing the words at the notes in Corn’s fist, a condemnation as well as a greeting. “Blessed are the ones who scream, for they have heard the truth and the thunder.”
Corn hesitated, nodded, shoved the money back into his pocket.
The van drove away, and they hid their bags in a yew hedge by a field where the crows hopped over turned-up earth, pecking at straw, and, dressed in their finest, headed towards the races.
Corn muttered, “We’re everywhere of course. We’re everywhere, we’re cleaning the toilets and mending the sewers and driving the buses and…”
“Blessed are her hands,” whispered Bea as they trudged down the hill, coat and skirts hitched high, nose blue, lips white. “Blessed are those who break the silence.”
“Half the people we ask don’t even know if the queen is real, they can’t imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing, like this up yours to the world and maybe it’ll make a difference, maybe they count. That’s all the queen really is. She makes people think stuff they do matters. If you take that away, we’re all just fucked really. Just totally fucked.”
With every step towards the wide grass of the racecourse, the towering central stands, white barriers herding humans like sheep, Helen seemed to grow a little brighter, warmer, louder. As she grew, Corn diminished, words shrinking, shoulders curling. Bea seemed to feed on the older woman’s confidence, slipping in closer and hooking her arm around Helen’s as they neared the gate, happy relations on a wintery adventure.
“These things are seasonal,” explained Helen brightly. “They do flats in summer, jumps in winter, and they also have the shows—the last one I went to with my husband was spectacular. We came away with more trinkets than sense, couldn’t fit everything in the car, but the atmosphere, the people! They come from Dubai, you know, from the UAE, they really love their racing out there, they know their horses, the horses they breed in that part of the world are just magnificent, incredible stock.” She paused, head turning a little to one side, looking back on memories, shifting through time. “Then again, maybe I just remember it that way because it was our last together. Maybe we make these things more important than they were.”
Bea said nothing and shuffled a little closer to Helen, holding her tight. Theo stared at his shoes, tight brown leather, someone else’s, stolen. It was only after he’d chosen his clothes and the van had driven away that he’d found the stain under his left armpit where once someone had bled into the cotton, which bleach and chemicals had managed to fade to a pale purple tideline in the fabric.
As they neared the racecourse, the crowds began to grow, pouring in from car parks and the private train, helicopters and the airstrips. The sound of music drifted over the honking of cars queuing for a place, wintery festivities, a promise of hot wine and wooden market stalls selling amber, silver, home-made candles and winter woollens.
The queue at the entrance gates was a sluggish shuffle, pressing in through a narrow entrance watched by Company security in fluorescent yellow and navy blue. Bea collected four tickets from a woman dressed in grey as they waited, huddled on the edge of cold and warm. Laughter and an indignant cry at an outrageous joke drew Theo’s ear. As his eye swept across the crowd he thought he saw, for a moment, a woman, tall with short light brown hair, familiar in every way, and he wondered if he should make like a heron, and looked again and wasn’t sure he’d seen her at all.
They entered the enclosures of the racecourse, Helen chatting merrily all the way as if she had not a care in the world.
Theo had never been to a countryside fair, let alone a race.
Bodies swayed and spun around each other between aisles of wooden stalls with slanted roofs, yellow bulbs twinkling brightly behind the counters, walls of gingerbread, candles, packets of scented lavender, twee teapots in the shape of penguins, kittens and puppy faces. Sizzling meat straight off the grill, waxed-cotton jackets, hats with duck feathers in them, walking sticks, shooting sticks, an enclosure where you could buy luxury cars, luxury holidays, luxury horses and donkey rides for the kids. The piping bellow of winter music, a merry-go-round where white-painted ponies rose and fell, pink and blue plastic manes rippling in the wind; steaming hot mulled wine and chilled champagne, eight different kinds of hot chocolate and a stall selling Baltic amber and Venetian glass.
A temporary miniature town of ye-olde-timey delights, of money laid out on a whim, shopping that wasn’t spending on trash, not at all, merely innocent delight in necessary things. A monument to another world where you still walked to church across the rolling English hills, dogs lapping at your ankles and the neighbours calling your name. A bubble in time fed on 240 volts had cropped up around the fences and walkways of Ascot, selling a dream that only money could buy.
On the sidelines a few reminders of quaint pleasures for the discerning customer. The duck-herding competition was more enthralling than Theo had expected. The sheep race seemed too peculiar to take seriously, especially for those runners who had teddy-bear jockeys sewn to their bibs.
Corn put a pound on a race, and lost when his sheep refused to budge, and was in a foul mood for an hour.
Helen gossiped with Bea as they entered the stands, and sat away from the most glamorous and beautiful of the crowds, the ones who knew everyone else and thought they were marvellous, just marvellous, in case there were those who knew her, and Theo watched, and waited as those shoppers who liked to be seen to care detached themselves from the wooden stalls and climbed the stairs to the wall of chairs that looked down towards the racetrack. Horses, coats polished to a reflective ebony or pristine autumn brown, tossed their heads and flicked their tails, impatient, ready to run, dwarfing their jockeys as they marched towards the starting line, unfazed by the cheering of the crowd as a favourite entered the lines, or the poles and hedges before them. Theo wondered how they trained the horses not to care about the gaze of the thousands who looked down on them. Maybe at night they played the roaring of crowds at the stables, a cascade of cheering to lull them to sleep?
When Philip Arnslade arrived, it was not subtle.
First, his helicopter came in low and loud across the site, attracting a fair share of glares from those who were claiming to enjoy the white-clad, bell-jangling, stick-clacking circle of morris dancers.
Then his security arrived, faces like breadboards, feet splayed as if struggling to contain their bodies or souls within the confines of their suits. Then Philip, chatting to a someone who is definitely something, perhaps in oil, whispering confidential somethings sure to set the crowd a-tittering.