In time we walked back along by the edge of the sea and paused when we came level with the motel. She put her hand on my arm and simply stood there waiting. I kissed her forehead, and then her nose, and finally her mouth. It was all very gentle, and utterly unnerving.
‘This is no good,’ I said, taking my hands from her shoulders. ‘No good at all.’
‘I’ve been kissed before,’ she said anxiously. ‘I really have.’
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ I said, half laughing. ‘You’d qualify for a diploma. No... it’s just, little Lynnie, that we’re a long way from home... and I never kiss brunettes more than once on a Friday.’ I turned away towards the motel and jerked my head for her to follow. The best resolutions in the world would come a cropper faced with something like Lynnie, and immediate flight was the only course. It didn’t seem to be popular with Lynnie herself, but I couldn’t help that. I walked her briskly up the beach and made a joke about what Walt would be saying to Eunice, and we arrived in reasonable order to find that it was nothing: they were sitting across the table from each other in a miles-apart silence. Eunice gave us a long cool look and Walt one of disillusion, and Lynnie quite unnecessarily blushed, confirming their obvious suspicions. The harmless little walk hadn’t been a good idea from any one of four points of view.
Walt and I drove quietly into Orpheus Farm the following morning. He did the talking: a thoroughly professional piece of work, insurance patter at the double. A survey for new fire regulations, he glibly explained, necessitated us seeing over the entire establishment.
We saw. Every stall in every barn, every hay loft, every straw bale, every inch. We saw Moviemaker. We saw Centigrade. We made a great many notes.
Culham James Offen himself escorted us round the coolest barn containing his four prize stallions. A great deal of self satisfaction sat on his shoulders like an impervious duck‘s-back mantle. I considered this with uneasy suspicion.
Uncle Bark was not only a man in his fifties with white hair, but he had a grey station wagon in a third of his large garage. I saw Walt giving it a sidelong glance. Undoubtedly it was Uncle Bark who had delivered the Snail Express trailer to old Hagstrom’s boy at Rock Springs; and very likely Uncle Bark who had followed Sam Hengelman’s van along the turnpike. Impossible to prove, though, at this distance.
The colour of his hair was premature. Very few wrinkles marked the smooth suntanned face, from which white eyebrows stood out like a bracket of snow, nearly meeting over the nose. His eyelashes were also white, but the albino non-pigmentation stopped short of the eyes: not pink, but a clear pale blue.
He carried his head stiffly on a thick muscular neck, and the large body beneath the airy white shirt looked solid more than soft. Not a man to ignore in any company. A physique which teemed naturally with success: and success had given him an arrogance of expression where a decent humility would have been more fitting.
The whole farm had the high gloss of money-no-object. Mathematically precise white-painted wood railings ringed the paddocks, and the approach to the Spanish-style house was landscaped with watered lawns and palms and an occasional bed full of spiky red flowers with sharp purplish leaves. We didn’t penetrate the house: Walt’s fire insurance only stretched to the stabling.
After we’d seen the stallions Offen handed us over to his stud groom, a fair, surprisingly young man he called Kiddo, who had a drawling western voice and an air of having been born without urgency. Every second word was ‘uh’, and his walk was thirty-two frames a second; slow motion.
‘Been here long?’ I asked him, as he pointed out the spotless foaling stalls.
‘Five or six months,’ he said, showing no resentment at a personal question; good natured, unsuspicious, no sign of nerves.
‘You must be good, to get, a job like this so young,’ I congratulated him.
After a pause he said, ‘I got a feeling for horses, see? Mares, they foal down nearly always at night. Comes from having to give birth in the dark out in the wild, you understand?’
‘Why in the dark?’ asked Walt, puzzled.
Another pause. Not for a deliberate choice of what or what not to say, I realized, but just a moment of waiting while the instinctive knowledge coalesced into words.
‘They drop ’em by day, some hungry hyena comes along and kills the foal in the first half hour. Foals, now, they’re readier to run at birth than most other critturs, but you’ve got to give ‘em a half hour to dry off.’
‘But they don’t have to run, here,’ Walt protested.
‘Nature don’t know that,’ Kiddo pointed out reasonably. ‘Another thing, mares mostly drop their foals pretty quick. Don’t take some of them no time at all. And then, see, I always know when a mare’s ready, and most often I go to the stall and make sure she’s doing all right.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked, fascinated.
A much longer pause. Then he said, ‘I don’t know how I know, I got a feeling for it. I just wake up some nights and think, that Rose is about ready, and I go on out to her, and maybe there she is, not needing a bit of help, or maybe with the cord round the foal’s neck, strangling it. I bin with horses, see, all my life.’
‘Where were you before you came here?’ I asked.
‘Uh... all over. Had a job in Lexington a while back, but they said I didn’t keep good time turning up at work.’ He grinned suddenly, a big mischievous lighting-up of the passive patient face. ‘Then... uh... I was with a feller in Maryland... he had a barn was falling down and honeysuckle breaking his fences and creeping into his windows, but he sure had some pretty mares and one of them was the dam of the horse who won the Preakness a year back. Though I don’t go to the races, myself.’
‘Where after Maryland?’ I asked.
‘Uh... here. I seen this ad in the Blood Horse, and I wrote. It was a joke, mostly. I never expected to hear a word, knowing this was a big place and everything. But Mr Offen, it seems he didn’t want no great business man, just someone with a feeling for the mares... and he’s keeping me on, he says, though there was two before me he let go after they’d been here a month.’
It didn’t seem to worry him. He had the God-will-provide nature which doesn’t understand anxiety and never stores up winter nuts. Not that he had any need to. His ‘feeling for mares’ was in fact priceless: he would probably never cash in on it as he could but he’d never want for a job.
Kiddo watched us go in the same calm friendliness with which he’d shown us round. Walt and I agreed on the way back to Santa Barbara that he was only potentially an opponent. Loyalty might be given to Offen if he demanded it, but at present Kiddo had no idea what was going on.
‘Unless,’ Walt said thoughtfully, ‘he’s a brilliant actor.’
I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t acting. None of the signs.’
Walt looked at me curiously, taking his eyes too long off the road. ‘Can you always tell?’
I smiled. ‘That’s one of those unanswerable questions. I’ve a feeling for it, like Kiddo with his mares. But if it lets me down sometimes, how am I to know?’
‘You’d know soon enough when secrets started leaking to the other side,’ Walt pointed out. ‘Have you ever passed as clear anyone who turned out to be a spy?’
‘Yes.’
‘How often?’
‘Once.’
‘In your first year, I suppose,’ Walt said with mild sarcasm.
‘In my second year. He was the first serious spy I had to deal with, and I didn’t spot him. The counterespionage chaps turned him up six months later when he’d done a good deal of damage, and the press made the usual scathing remarks about the feebleness of our screening system.’