To say I was surprised is to get nowhere near the queer excitement which rose sharply and unexpectedly in my brain. I'd had years of practice in sorting the genuine from the phoney, and what Alessandro had said rang of pure sterling.
'O. K.,' I said casually. 'That sounds all right. You ride him just like that. And how about Buckram- you'll be riding him in the apprentice race at Liverpool the day after Pullitzer. Also you can ride Lancat at Teesside two days later, on the Saturday.'
'I'll look them up, and think about them,' he said seriously.
'Don't bother with Lancat's form,' I reminded him. 'He was no good as a two-year-old. Work from what you learned during the trial.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I see.'
His eagerness had come back, but more purposefully, more controlled. I understood to some degree his hunger to make a start: he was reaching out to race riding as a starving man to bread, and nothing would deflect him. I found, moreover, that I no longer needed to deflect him, that what I had said about helping him to become a jockey was more true than I had known when I had written it.
As far as Enso was concerned, and as far as Alessandro was concerned, they were both still forcing me to give him opportunities against my will. It privately and sardonically began to amuse me that I was beginning to give him opportunities because I wanted to.
The battle was about to shift to different ground. I thought about Enso, and about the way he regarded his son- and I could see at last how to make him retract his threats. But it seemed to me that very likely the future would be more dangerous than the past.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Every evening during the week before the Lincoln I spent hours answering the telephone. One owner after another rang up, and without exception sounded depressed. This, I discovered, after the fourth in a row had said in more or less identical words, 'can't expect much with your father chained to his bed', was because the invalid in question had been extremely busy on the blower himself.
He had rung them all up, apologised for my presence, told them to expect nothing, and promised them that everything would be restored to normal as soon as he got back. He had also told his co-owner of Pease Pudding, a Major Barnette, that in his opinion the horse was not fit to run; and it had taken me half an hour of my very best persuasive tongue to convince the Major that as my father hadn't seen the horse for the past six weeks, he didn't actually know.
Looking into his activities more closely, I found that my father had also written privately every week to Etty for progress reports and had told her not to tell me she was sending them. I practically bullied this last gem out of her on the morning before the Lincoln, having cottoned on to what was happening only through mentioning that my father had told all the owners the horses were unfit. Something guilty in her expression had given her away, but she fended off my bitterness by claiming that she hadn't actually said they were unfit: that was just the way my father had chosen to interpret things.
I went into the office and asked Margaret if my father had telephoned or written to her for private reports. She looked embarrassed and said that he had.
When I spoke about race tactics to Tommy Hoylake that Friday, he said not to worry, my father had rung him up and given him his instructions.
'And what were they?' I asked, with a great deal more restraint than I was feeling.
'Oh- just to keep in touch with the field and not drop out of the back door when he blows up.'
'Um- If he hadn't rung you up, how would you have planned to ride?' I said.
'Keep him well up all the time,' he said promptly. 'When he's fit, he's one of those horses who likes to make the others try to catch him. I'd pick him up two furlongs out, take him to the front, and just pray he'd stay there.'
'Ride him like that, then,' I said. 'I've got a hundred pounds on him, and I don't usually bet.'
His mouth opened in astonishment. 'But your father-'
'Promise you'll ride the horse to win,' I said pleasantly, 'or I'll put someone else up.'
I was insulting him. No one ever suggested replacing Tommy Hoylake. He looked uncertainly at my open expression and came to the conclusion that because of my inexperience I didn't realise the enormity of what I'd said.
He shrugged. 'All right. I'll give it a whirl. Though what your father will say-'
My father had not finished saying, not by six or more calls, mostly, it appeared, to the Press. Three papers on the morning of the Lincoln quoted his opinion that Pease Pudding had no chance. He'd have me in before the Stewards, I grimly reflected, if the horse did any good.
Among all this telephonic activity he rang me only once. Although the overpowering bossiness had not returned to his voice, he sounded stilted and displeased, and I gathered that the champagne truce had barely seen me out of the door.
He rang on the Thursday evening after I got back from Doncaster, and I told him how helpful everyone had been.
'Hmph,' he said, 'I'll ring the Clerk of the Course tomorrow, and ask him to keep an eye on things.'
'Have you entirely cornered the telephone trolley?' I asked.
'Telephone trolley? Could never get hold of it for long enough. Too many people asking for it all the time. No, no. I told them I needed my own private extension, here in this room, and after a lot of fuss and delay they fixed one up. I insisted, of course, that I had a business to run.'
'And you insisted often?'
'Of course,' he said without humour, and I knew from long experience that the hospital had had as much chance as an egg under a steamroller.
'The horses aren't as backward as you think,' I told him. 'You don't really need to be so pessimistic.'
'You're no judge of a horse,' he said dogmatically; and it was the day after that that he talked to the Press.
Major Barnette gloomed away in the parade ring and poured scorn and pity on my hefty bet.
'Your father told me not to throw good money after bad,' he said. 'And I can't think why I let you persuade me to run.'
'You can have fifty of my hundred, if you like.' I offered it with the noblest of intentions, but he took it as a sign that I wanted to get rid of some of my losses.
'Certainly not,' he said resentfully.
He was a spare, elderly man of middle height, who stood at the slightest provocation upon his dignity. Sign of basic failure, I diagnosed uncharitably, and remembered the old adage that some owners were harder to train than their horses.
The twenty-nine runners for the Lincoln were stalking long-leggedly round the parade ring, with all the other owners and trainers standing about in considering groups. Strong, cold north-west winds had blown the clouds away and the sun shone brazenly from a brilliant high blue sky. When the jockeys trickled through the crowd and emerged in a sunburst into the parade ring, their glossy colours gleamed and reflected the light like children's toys.
The old-young figure of Tommy Hoylake in bright green bounced towards us with a carefree aura of play-it-as-it-comes, which did nothing to persuade Major Barnette that his half share of the horse would run well.
'Look,' he said heavily to Tommy, 'Just don't get tailed off. If it looks as if you will be, pull up and jump off, for God's sake, and pretend the horse is lame or the saddle's slipped. Anything you like, but don't let it get around that the horse is no good, or its stud value will sink like a stone.'