The following week, Alessandro rode in four races and won two of them, both against apprentices. On the second occasion he beat the previous season's star apprentice discovery on the home ground at Newmarket, and the Press began to ask questions. Four wins in three weeks had put him high on the apprentice list- Where had he come from, they wanted to know. One or two of them spoke to Alessandro himself, and to my relief he answered them quietly. Strictly eyes down, even if tongue in cheek. The old habitual arrogance was kept firmly out of sight.
He usually came to the races in the Jensen, but Carlo never gave up following. The arrangement had become routine.
He talked quite a lot on the journeys. Talked naturally, unselfconsciously, without strain. Mostly we discussed the horses and their form and possibilities in relation to the opposition, but sometimes I had another glimpse or two of his extraordinary home life.
He had not seen his mother since he was about six, when she and his father had had a last appalling row which had seemed to him to go on for days. He said he had been frightened because they were both so violent, and he hadn't understood what it was all about. She kept shouting one word at his father, taunting him, he said, and he had remembered it, though for years he didn't know what it meant. Sterile, he said. That had been the word. His father was sterile. He had had some sort of illness shortly after Alessandro's birth, to which his mother had constantly referred. He couldn't remember her features, only her voice beginning sentences to his father, bitterly and often, with, 'since your illness-'
He had never asked his father about it, he added. It would be impossible, he said, to ask.
I reflected that if Alessandro was the only son Enso could ever have, it explained in some measure the obsessive side of his regard for him. Alessandro was special to Enso in a psychologically disturbing way, and Enso, with well developed criminal characteristics, was not a normal character in the first place.
As Alessandro's riding successes became more than coincidences, Etty unbent to him a good deaclass="underline" and Margaret unbent even more. For a period of about four days there was an interval of peaceful, constructive teamwork in a friendly atmosphere.
Something which looking back to the day of his arrival one would have said was as likely as snow in Singapore.
Four days, it lasted. Then he arrived one morning with a look of almost apprehension, and said that his father was coming to England. Was flying over, that same afternoon. He had telephoned, and he hadn't sounded pleased.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Enso moved into the Forbury Inn and the very next day the prickles were back in Alessandro's manner. He refused to go to Epsom with me in the Jensen: he was going with Carlo.
'Very well,' I said calmly, and had a distinct impression that he wanted to say something, to explain, to entreat- perhaps something like that- but that loyalty to his father was preventing it. I smiled a bit ruefully at him and added, 'But any day you like, come with me.'
There was a flicker in the black eyes, but he turned away without answering and walked off to where Carlo was waiting: and when we arrived at Epsom I found that Enso had travelled with him as well.
Enso was waiting for me outside the weighing room, a shortish chubby figure standing harmlessly in the April sunshine. No silenced pistol. No rubberfaced henchmen. No ropes round my wrists, needles in my arm. Yet my scalp contracted and the hairs on my legs rose on end.
He held in his hand the letter I had written him, and the hostility in his puffy lidded eyes beat anything Alessandro had ever conjured up by a good twenty lengths.
'You have disobeyed my instructions,' he said, in the sort of voice which would have sent bolder men than I scurrying for shelter. 'I told you that Alessandro was to replace Hoylake. I find that he has not done so. You have given my son only crumbs. You will change that.'
'Alessandro,' I said, with as unmoved an expression as I could manage, 'has had more opportunities than most apprentices get in their first six months.'
The eyes flashed with a thousand kilowatt sizzle. 'You will not talk to me in that tone. You will do as I say. Do you understand? I will not tolerate your continued disregard of my instructions.'
I considered him. Where on the night he had abducted me he had been deliberate and cool, he was now fired by some inner strong emotion. It made him no less dangerous. More, possibly.
'Alessandro is riding a very good horse in the Dean Swift Handicap this afternoon,' I said.
'He tells me this race is not important. It is the Great Metropolitan which is important. He is to ride in that race as well.'
'Did he say he wanted to?' I asked curiously, because our runner in the Great Met was the runaway Traffic, and even Tommy Hoylake regarded the prospect without joy.
'Of course,' Enso insisted, but I didn't wholly believe him. I thought he had probably bullied Alessandro into saying it.
I'm afraid,' I said with insincere regret, 'That the owner could not be persuaded. He insists that Hoylake should ride. He is adamant.'
Enso smouldered, but abandoned the lost cause. He said instead, 'You will try harder in future. Today, I will overlook. But there is to be no doubt, no shadow of doubt, do you understand, that Alessandro is to ride this horse of yours in the Two Thousand Guineas. Next week he is to ride Archangel, as he wishes. Archangel.'
I said nothing. It was still as impossible for Alessandro to be given the ride on Archangel as ever it was, even if I wanted to, which I didn't. The merchant banker was never going to agree to replacing Tommy Hoylake with an apprentice of five weeks' experience, not on the starriest Derby prospect he had ever owned. And for my father's sake also, Archangel had to have the best jockey he could. Enso took my continuing silence for acceptance, began to look less angry and more satisfied, and finally turned his back on me in dismissal.
Alessandro rode a bad race in the Handicap. He knew the race was the Derby distance, and he knew I was giving him practice at the mile and a half because I hoped he would win the big apprentice race of that length two days later: but he hopelessly misjudged things, swung really wide at Tattenham Corner, failed to balance his mount in and out of the dip, and never produced the speed that was there for the asking.
He wouldn't meet my eyes when he dismounted, and after Tommy Hoylake won the Great Met (as much to Traffic's surprise as to mine) I didn't see him for the rest of the day.
Alessandro rode four more races that week, and in none of them showed his former flair. He lost the apprentices' race at Epsom by a glaringly obvious piece of mistiming, letting the whole field slip him half a mile from home and failing to reach third place by a neck, though travelling faster than anything else at the finish.
At Sandown on the Saturday the two owners he rode for both told me after he trailed in mid-field on their fancied and expensive three-year-olds that they did not agree that he was as good as I had made out, that my father would have known better, and that they would like a different jockey next time.
I relayed these remarks to Alessandro by sending into the changing room for him and speaking to him in the weigh-room itself. I was now given little opportunity to talk to him anywhere else. He was wooden in the mornings and left the instant he dismounted, and at the races he was continuously flanked by Enso and Carlo, who accompanied him everywhere like guards.
He listened to me with desperation. He knew he had ridden badly, and made no attempt to justify himself. All he said, when I had finished, was, 'Can I ride Archangel in the Guineas?'
'No,' I said.
His black eyes burned in his distressed face.
'Please,' he said with intensity, 'Please say I can ride him. I beg you.'
I shook my head.