Bonecrack

'You should never have taken on that apprentice.'

'No,' I said.

'The Jockey Club will be seriously displeased.'

'Yes.'

'The man must have been mad.'

'Sort of.'

'Absolutely mad to think he could get his son to ride Archangel by killing Tommy Hoylake.'

I had had to tell the police something, and I had told them that. It had seemed enough.

'Obsessed,' I agreed.

'Surely you must have noticed it before? Surely he gave some sign?'

'I suppose he did,' I agreed neutrally.

'Then surely you should have been able to stop him.'

'I did stop him- in a way.'

'Not very efficiently,' he complained.

'No,' I said patiently, and thought that the only one who had stopped Enso efficiently and finally had been Cal.

'What's the matter with your arm?'

'Broke my collar-bone,' I said.

'Hard luck.'

He looked down at his still suspended leg, almost but not quite saying aloud that a collar-bone was chicken feed compared with what he had endured. What was more, he was right.

'How soon will you be out?' I asked.

He answered in a smug satisfaction tinged with undisguisable malice. 'Sooner than you'd like, perhaps.'

'I couldn't wish you to stay here,' I protested.

He looked faintly taken aback: faintly ashamed.

'No- well- They say not long now.'

The sooner the better,' I said, and tried to mean it.

'Don't do any more work with Archangel. And I see from the Calendar that you have made entries on your own. I don't want you to do that. I am perfectly capable of deciding where my horses should run.'

'As you say,' I said mildly, and with surprisingly little pleasure realised that I now no longer had any reason for amending his plans.

'Tell Etty that she did very well with Archangel.'

'I will,' I said. 'In fact, I have.'

The corners of his mouth turned down. Tell her that I said so.'

'Yes,' I said.

Nothing much, after all, had changed between us. He was still what I had run away from at sixteen, and it would take me a lot less time to leave him again. I couldn't possibly have stayed on as his assistant, even if he had asked me to.

'He gave me everything,' Alessandro had said of his father. I would have said of mine that he gave me not very much. And I felt for him something that Alessandro had never through love or hate felt for his.

I felt- apathy.

'Go away, now,' he said. 'And on your way out, find a nurse. I need a bedpan. They take half an hour, sometimes, if I ring the bell. And I want it now, at once.'

The driver of the car I had hired in Newmarket was quite happy to include Hampstead in the itinerary.

'A couple of hours?' I suggested, when I had hauled myself out on to the pavement outside the flat.

'Sure,' he said. 'Maybe there's somewhere open for tea, even on Sunday.' He drove off hopefully, optimistic soul that he was.

Gillie said she had lost three pounds, she was painting the bathroom sludge green, and how did I propose to make love to her looking like a washed out edition of a terminal consumptive.

'I don't,' I said. 'Propose.'

'Ah,' she said wisely. 'All men have their limits.'

'And just change that description to looking like a racehorse trainer who has just won his first Classic.'

She opened her mouth and obviously was not going to come across with the necessary compliment.

'O. K.,' I interrupted resignedly. 'So it wasn't me. Everyone else, but not me. I do so agree. Wholeheartedly.'

'Self-pity is disgusting,' she said.

'Mm.' I sat gingerly down in a blue armchair, put my head back, and shut my eyes. Didn't get much sympathy for that, either.

'So you collected the bruises,' she observed.

'That's right.'

'Silly old you.'

'Yes.'

'Do you want some tea?'

'No thank you,' I said politely. 'No sympathy, no tea.'

She laughed. 'Brandy, then?'

'If you have some.'

She had enough for the cares of the world to retreat a pace: and she came across, in the end, with her own brand of fellow-feeling.

'Don't wince,' she said, 'When I kiss you.'

'Don't kiss so damned hard.'

After a bit she said, 'Is this shoulder the lot? Or will there be more to come?'

'It's the lot,' I said, and told her all that had happened. Edited, and flippantly; but more or less all.

'And does your own dear dad know all about this?'

'Heaven forbid,' I said.

'But he will, won't he? When you get this Alessandro warned off? And then he will understand how much he owes you?'

'I don't want him to understand,' I said. 'He would loathe it.'

'Charming fellow, your dad.'

'He is what he is,' I said.

'And was Enso what he was?'

I smiled lopsidedly. 'Same principle, I suppose.'

'You're a nut, Neil Griffon.'

I couldn't dispute it.

'How long before he gets out of hospital?' she asked.

'I don't know. He hopes to be on his feet soon. Then a week or two of physiotherapy and walking practice with crutches, or whatever. He expects to be home before the Derby.'

'What will you do then?'

'Don't know,' I said. 'But he'll be three weeks at least, and leverage no longer applies- so would you still like to come to Rowley Lodge?'

'Um,' she said, considering. 'There's a three-year-old Nigerian girl I'm supposed to be settling with a family in Dorset-'

I felt very tired. 'Never mind, then.'

'I could come on Wednesday.'

When I got back to Newmarket I walked round the yard before I went indoors. It all lay peacefully in the soft light of sundown, the beginning of dusk. The bricks looked rosy and warm, the shrubs were out in flower, and behind the green painted doors the six million quids' worth were safely chomping on their evening oats. Peace in all the bays, winners in many of the boxes, and an air of prosperity and timelessness over the whole.

I would be gone from there soon; and Enso had gone, and Alessandro. When my father came back it would be as if the last three months had never happened. He and Etty and Margaret would go on as they had been before; and I would read about the familiar horses in the newspapers.

I didn't yet know what I would do. Certainly I had grown to like my father's job, and maybe I could start a stable of my own, somewhere else. I wouldn't go back to antiques, and I knew by then that I wasn't going to work any more for Russell Arletti.

Build a new empire, Gillie had said.

Well, maybe I would.

I looked in at Archangel, now no longer guarded by men, dogs and electronics. The big brown colt lifted his head from his manger and turned on me an enquiring eye. I smiled at him involuntarily. He still showed the effects of his hard race the day before, but he was sturdy and sound, and there was a very good chance he would give the merchant banker his Derby.

I stifled a sigh and went indoors, and heard the telephone ringing in the office.

Owners often telephoned on Sunday evenings, but it wasn't an owner, it was the hospital.

I'm very sorry,' the voice said several times at the other end. 'We've been trying to reach you for some hours now. Very sorry. Very sorry.'

'But he can't be dead,' I said stupidly. 'He was all right when I left him. I was with him this afternoon, and he was all right.'

'Just after you left,' they said. 'Within half an hour.'

'But how?' My mind couldn't grasp it. 'He only had a broken leg- and that had mended.'

Would I like to talk to the doctor in charge, they said. Yes, I would.

'He was all right when I left him,' I protested. 'In fact he was yelling for a bedpan.'

'Ah. Yes. Well,' said a high pitched voice loaded with professional sympathy. 'That's- er- that's a very common preliminary to a pulmonary embolus. Calling for a bedpan- very typical. But do rest assured, Mr Griffon, your father died very quickly. Within a few seconds. Yes, indeed.'

'What,' I said with a feeling of complete unreality, 'is a pulmonary embolus?'