‘But how,’ asked the girl, ‘how do you do that to horses?’
‘I just... touch them.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘And then sometimes I feel them quiver, and I know the healing force is going from me into them.’
‘Can you do it infallibly?’ Henry asked politely, and I noted with interest that he’d let no implication of doubt sound in his voice: Henry whose gullibility could be measured in micrograms, if at all.
Calder Jackson took his seriousness for granted and slowly shook his head. ‘If I have the horse in my care for long enough, it usually happens in the end. But not always. No, sadly, not always.’
‘How fascinating,’ Judith said, and earned another of those kind bland smiles. Charlatan or not, I thought, Calder Jackson had the mix just right: an arresting appearance, a modest demeanour, no promise of success. And for all I knew, he really could do what he said. Healers were an age-old phenomenon, so why not a healer of horses?
‘Can you heal people too?’ I asked in a mirror-image of Henry’s tone. No doubts. Just enquiry.
The curly head turned my way with more civility than interest and he patiently answered the question he must have been asked a thousand times before. Answered in a sequence of words he had perhaps used almost as often. ‘Whatever gift it is that I have is especially for horses. I have no feeling that I can heal humans, and I prefer not to try. I ask people not to ask me, because I don’t like to disappoint them.’
I nodded my thanks, watched his head turn away and listened to him willingly answering the next question, from Bettina, as if it too had never before been asked. ‘No, the healing very seldom happens instantaneously. I need to be near the horse for a while. Sometimes for only a few days. Sometimes for a few weeks. One can never tell.’
Dissdale basked in the success of having hooked his celebrity and told us all that two of Calder’s ex-patients were running that very afternoon. ‘Isn’t that right, Calder?’
The curly head nodded. ‘Cretonne, in the first race, she used to break blood vessels, and Molyneaux, in the fifth, he came to me with infected wounds. I feel they are my friends now. I feel I know them.’
‘And shall we back them, Calder?’ Dissdale asked roguishly. ‘Are they going to win?’
The healer smiled forgivingly. ‘If they’re fast enough. Dissdale.’
Everyone laughed. Gordon refilled his own guests’ glasses. Lorna Shipton said apropos of not much that she had occasionally considered becoming a Christian Scientist and Judith wondered what colour the Queen would be wearing. Dissdale’s party talked animatedly among themselves, and the door from the corridor tentatively opened.
Any hopes I might have had that Gordon’s sixth place was destined for a Bettina-equivalent for my especial benefit were immediately dashed. The lady who appeared and whom Judith greeted with a kiss on the cheek was nearer forty than twenty-five and more solid than lissome. She wore a brownish pink linen suit and a small white straw hat circled with a brownish pink ribbon. The suit, I diagnosed, was an old friend: the hat, new in honour of the occasion.
Judith in her turn introduced the newcomer: Penelope Warner — Pen — a good friend of hers and Gordon’s. Pen Warner sat where invited, next to Gordon and made small-talk with Henry and Lorna. I half listened, and took in a few desultory details like no rings on the fingers, no polish on the nails, no grey in the short brown hair, no artifice in the voice. Worthy, I thought. Well-intentioned; slightly boring. Probably runs the church.
A waitress appeared with an excellent lunch, during which Calder could from time to time be heard extolling the virtues of watercress for its iron content and garlic for the treatment of fever and diarrhoea.
‘And of course in humans,’ he was saying, ‘garlic is literally a life saver in whooping-cough. You make a poultice and bind it onto the bottom of the feet of the child every night, in a bandage and a sock, and in the morning you’ll smell the garlic on the breath of the child, and the cough will abate. Garlic, in fact, cures almost anything. A truly marvellous life-giving plant.’
I saw Pen Warner lift her head to listen and I thought that I’d been wrong about the church. I had missed the worldliness of the eyes, the long sad knowledge of human frailty. A magistrate, perhaps? Yes, perhaps.
Judith leaned across the table and said teasingly, ‘Tim, can’t you forget you’re a banker even at the races?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘You look at everyone as if you’re working out just how much you can lend them without risk.’
‘I’d lend you my soul,’ I said.
‘For me to pay back with interest?’
‘Pay in love and kisses.’
Harmless stuff, as frivolous as her hat. Henry, sitting next to her, said in the same vein, ‘You’re second in the queue, Tim. I’ve a first option, eh, Judith? Count on me, dear girl, for the last drop of blood.’
She patted his hand affectionately and glowed a little from the deep truth of our idle protestations: and Calder Jackson’s voice came through with ‘Comfrey heals tissues with amazing speed and will cause chronic ulcers to disappear in a matter of days, and of course it mends fractures in half the time considered normal. Comfrey is miraculous.’
There was a good deal of speculation after that all round the table about a horse called Sandcastle that had won the 2,000 Guineas six weeks earlier and was hot favourite for the King Edward VII Stakes, the top Ascot race for three-year-old colts, due to be run that afternoon.
Dissdale had actually seen the Guineas at Newmarket and was enthusiastic. ‘Daisy-cutter action. Positively eats up the ground.’ He sprayed his opinions good naturedly to the furthest ear. ‘Big rangy colt, full of courage.’
‘Beaten in the Derby, though,’ Henry said, judiciously responding.
‘Well, yes,’ Dissdale allowed. ‘But fourth, you know. Not a total disgrace, would you say?’
‘He was good as a two-year-old,’ Henry said, nodding.
‘Glory, yes,’ said Dissdale fervently. ‘And you can’t fault his breeding. By Castle out of an Ampersand mare. You can’t get much better than that.’
Several heads nodded respectfully in ignorance.
‘He’s my banker,’ Dissdale said and then spread his arms wide and half laughed. ‘OK, we’ve got a roomful of bankers. But Sandcastle is where I’m putting my money today. Doubling him with my bets in every other race. Trebles. Accumulators. The lot. You all listen to your Uncle Dissdale. Sandcastle is the soundest banker at Ascot.’ His voice positively shook with evangelical belief. ‘He simply can’t be beaten.’
‘Betting is out for you, Tim,’ Lorna Shipton said severely in my ear.
‘I’m not my mother,’ I said mildly.
‘Heredity’ Lorna said darkly. ‘And your father drank.’
I smothered a bursting laugh and ate my strawberries in good humour. Whatever I’d inherited from my parents it wasn’t an addiction to their more expensive pleasures; rather a firm intention never again to lose my record collection to the bailiffs. Those stolid men had taken even the rocking horse on which at the age of six I’d ridden my fantasy Grand Nationals. They’d taken my books, my skis and my camera. Mother had fluttered around in tears saying those things were mine, not hers, and they should leave them, and the men had gone on marching out with all our stuff as if they were deaf. About her own disappearing treasures she had been distraught, her distress and grief hopelessly mixed with guilt.
I had been old enough at twenty-four to shrug off our actual losses and more or less replace them (except for the rocking horse) but the fury of that day had affected my whole life since: and I had been silent when it happened, white and dumb with rage.