He digested this with a stubborn look which gradually softened into plain thoughtfulness. I deemed I might as well take advantage of a receptive mood, so I went on with the pearls of wisdom.
'Don't despair if you make a right mess of any race. Everyone does, sometime. Just admit it to yourself. Never fool yourself, ever. Don't get upset by criticism- and don't get swollen-headed from praise- and keep your temper on a racecourse, all of the time. You can lose it as much as you like on the way home.'
After a while he said, 'You have given me more instructions on behaviour than on how to win races.'
'I trust your social manners less than your horsemanship.'
He worked it out, and didn't know whether to be pleased or not.
After the glitter of Doncaster, Catterick Bridge racecourse disappointed him. His glance raked the simple stands, the modest weighing room, the small-meeting atmosphere, and he said bitterly, 'Is this- all?'
'Never mind,' I said, though I hadn't myself known what to expect. 'Down there on the course are seven important furlongs, and they are all that matters.'
The parade ring itself was attractive with trees dotted all around. Alessandro came out there in yellow and blue silks, one of a large bunch of apprentices, most of whom looked slightly smug or self-conscious or nervous, or all of them at once.
Alessandro didn't. His face held no emotion whatsoever. I had expected him to be excited, but he wasn't. He watched Pullitzer plod round the parade ring as if he were of no more interest to him than a herd of cows. He settled into the saddle casually, and without haste gathered the reins to his satisfaction. Vic Young stood holding Pullitzer's rug and gazing up at Alessandro doubtfully.
'Jump him off, now,' he said admonishingly. 'You've got to keep him up there as long as you can.'
Alessandro met my eyes over Vic's head. 'Ride the way you've planned,' I said, and he nodded.
He went away without fuss on to the course and Vic Young, watching him go, exclaimed to me, 'I never did like that snooty little sod, and now he doesn't look as though he's got his heart in the job.'
'Let's wait and see,' I said soothingly. And we waited. And we saw.
Alessandro rode the race exactly as he'd said he would. Drawn number five of sixteen runners he made his way over to the rails in the first two furlongs, stayed steadfastly in fifth or sixth place for the next three, moved up slightly after that, and in the last sixty yards found an opening and some response from Pullitzer, and shot through the leading pair of apprentices not more than ten strides from the post. The colt won by a length and a half, beginning to waver.
He hadn't been backed and he wasn't much cheered, but Alessandro didn't seem to need it. He slid off the horse in the unsaddling enclosure and gave me a cool stare quite devoid of the arrogant self-satisfaction I had been expecting. Then suddenly his face dissolved into the smile I'd only seen him give that once to Margaret, a warm, confident, uncomplicated expression of delight.
'I did it,' he said, and I said, 'You did it beautifully,' and he could certainly see that I was as pleased as he was.
Pullitzer's win was not popular with the lads. No one had had a penny on it, and when Vic got back and reported that the old horse must have developed a lot with age as Alessandro hadn't ridden to instructions, they were all quick to deny him any credit. As he seldom talked to any of them, however, I doubted whether he knew.
He was highly self-contained when he came to Rowley Lodge the following morning. Etty had gone down to the Flat on Racecourse side with the first lot to give them some longish steady canters, which because of the distance I had to drive, I couldn't stay to watch. She seemed content to be left in charge for the three days, and had assured me that Lancat and Lucky Lindsay, (bound for a two-year-old five furlongs with an experienced northern jockey), would arrive safely at Teesside on the Saturday.
Alessandro came with me in the Jensen, with Carlo following as before. On the way we mostly discussed the tactics he would need on Buckram and Lancat, and again there was that odd lack of excitement, only this time more marked. Where I would have expected him to be strung up and passionate, he was totally relaxed. Now that he was actually racing, it seemed as if his impatient fever had evaporated.
Buckram didn't win for him, but not because he didn't ride the race he had meant to. Buckram finished third because two other horses were faster, and Alessandro accepted it with surprising resignation.
'He did his best,' he explained simply. 'But we couldn't get there.'
'I saw,' I said; and that was that.
During the rest of the three day meeting I came to know a great many more racing people and began to get the feel of the industry. I saddled our other four runners, which Tommy Hoylake rode, and congratulated him when one of them won.
'Funny thing,' he said, 'The horses are as forward this year as I've ever known them.'
'Is that good or bad?' I asked.
'Are you kidding? But the next trick will be to keep them going till September.'
'My father will be back to do that,' I assured him.
'Oh- yes. I suppose he will,' Tommy said without the enthusiasm I would have expected, and took himself off to weigh out for the next race.
On Saturday Lancat cruised home by four lengths at Teesside at twenty-five to one, which increased my season's winnings from two thousand to four thousand five hundred. And that, I imagined, would be the last of the easy pickings: Lancat was the third winner from the stable out of nine runners, and no one was any longer going to suppose that Rowley Lodge was in the doldrums.
Alessandro's and Vic Young's accounts of what had happened at Teesside were predictably different.
Alessandro said, 'You remember, in the trial, that I made up a lot of ground- but I did it too soon, because I had been left behind, and then he got tired- well, he did produce that burst of speed again, just as we thought, and it worked well. I got him going a little before the last furlong pole and he simply zoomed past the others. It was terrific.'
But Vic Young said, 'He left it nearly too late. Got shut in. The others could ride rings round him, of course. That Lancat must be something special, winning in spite of being ridden by an apprentice having only his third race.'
During the next week we had eight more runners, of which Alessandro rode three. Only one of his was in an apprentice race, and none of them won. In one race he was quite clearly outridden in a tight finish by the champion jockey, but all he said about that was that he would improve, he supposed, with practice.
The owners of all three horses turned up to watch, and raised not a grumble between them. Alessandro behaved towards them with sense and civility, though I gathered from an unguarded sneer that he let loose when he thought no one was looking, that he was acting away like crazy.
One of the owners was an American who turned out to be one of the subscribers to the syndicate which had bought out my shops. It amused him greatly to find I was Neville Griffon's son, and he spent some time in the parade ring before the race telling Alessandro that this young fellow here, meaning me, could teach everyone he knew a thing or two about how to run a business.
'Never forgot how you summed up your recipe for success, when we bought you out. Put an eyecatcher in the window, and deal fair. We'd asked you, remember? And we were expecting a whole dose of the usual management-school jargon, but that was all you said. Never forgot it.'
It was his horse on which Alessandro lost by a head, but he had owned racehorses for a long time and knew what he was seeing, and he turned to me on the stands immediately they had passed the post, and said, 'Never a disgrace to be beaten by the champion- and that boy of yours, he's going to be good.'