He stood a little away from the horse so that he could see all three heads at once and said, ‘Rotaboy has been an outstanding stallion and still is, but one can’t realistically expect more than another one or two seasons. Diarist is successful, with large numbers of winners among his progeny, but none of them absolutely top rank like those of Rotaboy. Parakeet hasn’t proved as successful as I’d hoped. He turns out to breed better stayers than sprinters, and the world is mad nowadays for very fast two-year-olds. Parakeet’s progeny tend to be better at three, four, five and six. Some of his first crops are now steeplechasing and jumping pretty well.’
‘Isn’t that good?’ I asked, frowning, since he spoke with no great joy.
‘I’ve had to reduce his fee,’ he said. ‘People won’t send their top flat-racing mares to a stallion who breeds jumpers.’
‘Oh.’
After a pause he said ‘You can see why I need new blood here. Rotaboy is old, Diarist is middle rank, Parakeet is unfashionable. I will soon have to replace Rotaboy, and I must be sure I replace him with something of at least equal quality. The prestige of a stud farm, quite apart from its income, depends on the drawing-power of its stallions.’
‘Yes,’ I said, I see.’
Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet lost interest in the conversation and hope in the matter of carrots, and one by one withdrew into the boxes. The black retriever trotted around smelling unimaginable scents and Oliver Knowles began to walk me back towards the house.
‘On the bigger stud farms,’ he said, ‘you’ll find stallions which are owned by syndicates.’
‘Forty shares?’ I suggested.
He gave me a brief smile. ‘That’s right. Stallions are owned by any number of people between one and forty. When I first acquired Rotaboy it was in partnership with five others. I bought two of them out — they needed the money — so now I own half. This means I have twenty nominations each year, and I have ‘no trouble in selling all of them, which is most satisfactory.’ He looked at me enquiringly to make sure I understood, which, thanks to Ursula Young, I did.
‘I own Diarist outright. He was as expensive in the first place as Rotaboy, and as he’s middle rank, so is the fee I can get for him. I don’t always succeed in filling his forty places, and when that occurs I breed him to my own mares, and sell the resulting foals as yearlings.’
Fascinated, I nodded again.
‘With Parakeet it’s much the same. For the last three years I haven’t been able to charge the fee I did to begin with, and if I fill his last places these days it’s with mares from people who prefer steeplechasing, and this is increasingly destructive of his flat-racing image.’
We retraced our steps past the breeding shed and across the foaling yard.
‘This place is expensive to run,’ he said objectively. ‘It makes a profit and I live comfortably, but I’m not getting any further. I have the capacity here for another stallion — enough accommodation, that is to say, for the extra forty mares. I have a good business sense and excellent health, and I feel underextended. If I am ever to achieve more I must have more capital... and capital in the shape of a world-class stallion.’
‘Which brings us,’ I said, ‘to Sandcastle.’
He nodded. ‘If I acquired a horse like Sandcastle this stud would immediately be more widely known and more highly regarded.’
Understatement, I thought. The effect would be galvanic. ‘A sort of overnight stardom?’ I said.
‘Well, yes,’ he agreed with a satisfied smile. ‘I’d say you might be right.’
The big yard nearest the house had come moderately to life, with two or three lads moving about carrying feed scoops, hay nets, buckets of water and sacks of muck. Squibs with madly wagging tail went in a straight line towards a stocky man who bent to fondle his black ears.
‘That’s Nigel, my stud groom,’ Oliver Knowles said. ‘Come and meet him.’ And as we walked across he added, ‘If I can expand this place I’ll up-rate him to stud manager; give him more standing with the customers.’
We reached Nigel, who was of about my own age with crinkly light-brown hair and noticeably bushy eyebrows. Oliver Knowles introduced me merely as ‘a friend’ and Nigel treated me with casual courtesy but not as the possible source of future fortune. He had a Gloucestershire accent but not pronounced, and I would have placed him as a farmer’s son, if I’d had to.
‘Any problems?’ Oliver Knowles asked him, and Nigel shook his head.
‘Nothing except that Floating mare with the discharge.’
His manner to his employer was confident and without anxiety but at the same time diffident, and I had a strong impression that it was Nigel’s personality which suited Oliver Knowles as much as any skill he might have with mares. Oliver Knowles was not a man, I judged, to surround himself with awkward, unpredictable characters: the behaviour of everyone around him had to be as tidy as his place.
I wondered idly about the wife who had ‘just buggered off with a Canadian’, and at that moment a horse trotted into the yard with a young woman aboard. A girl, I amended, as she kicked her feet from the stirrups and slid to the ground. A noticeably curved young girl in jeans and heavy sweater with her dark hair tied in a pony tail. She led her horse into one of the boxes and presently emerged carrying the saddle and bridle, which she dumped on the ground outside the box before closing the bottom half of the door and crossing the yard to join us.
‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said.
‘Ginnie,’ added the girl, holding out a polite brown hand. ‘Are you the reason we didn’t go out to lunch?’
Her father gave an instinctive repressing movement and-Nigel looked only fairly interested.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘Oh, I would,’ she said. ‘Pa really doesn’t like parties. He uses any old excuse to get out of them, don’t you Pa?’
He gave her an indulgent smile while looking as if his thoughts were elsewhere.
‘I didn’t mind missing it,’ Ginnie said to me, anxious not to embarrass. ‘Twelve miles away and people all Pa’s age... but they do have frightfully good canapés, and also a lemon tree growing in their greenhouse. Did you know that a lemon tree has everything all at once — buds, flowers, little green knobbly fruit and big fat lemons, all going on all the time?’
‘My daughter,’ Oliver Knowles said unnecessarily, ‘talks a lot.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know about lemon trees.’
She gave me an impish smile and I wondered if she was even younger than I’d first thought: and as if by telepathy she said, ‘I’m fifteen.’
‘Everyone has to go through it,’ I said.
Her eyes widened. ‘Did you hate it?’
I nodded. ‘Spots, insecurity, a new body you’re not yet comfortable in, self-consciousness... terrible.’
Oliver Knowles looked surprised. ‘Ginnie isn’t self-conscious, are you, Ginnie?’
She looked from him to me and back again and didn’t answer. Oliver Knowles dismissed the subject as of no importance anyway and said he ought to walk along and see the mare with the discharge. Would I care to go with him?
I agreed without reservation and we all set off along one of the paths between the white-railed paddocks, Oliver Knowles and myself in front, Nigel and Ginnie following, Squibs sniffing at every fencing post and marking his territory. In between Oliver Knowles explaining that some mares preferred living out of doors permanently, others would go inside if it snowed, others went in at nights, others lived mostly in the boxes, I could hear Ginnie telling Nigel that school this term was a dreadful drag owing to the new headmistress being a health fiend and making them all do jogging.