'Ah, Douglas,' Fabian said as we reached the hotel, 'you have a long way to go, a long, long way.' He tapped me, old comrade, on the shoulder, as we went in. 'But you'll make it, I guarantee you'll make it.'
I went up to my room, looked at the bed, turned down for the night, and stared at the telephone. I remembered some of the scenes in the movie I had seen that evening and decided I wasn't sleepy. I went down to the bar and ordered a whiskey and soda. I drank slowly, then took out the slip of paper Priscilla Dean had put in my hand and spread it out before me on the bar. 'Is there a telephone here?' I asked the barman.
'Downstairs,' he said.
I went downstairs and gave the number to the girl who was on duty there and went into the booth she indicated to me and picked up the phone. There was a moment's silence, then à busy signal. I listened to the signal for thirty seconds, then replaced the phone. So be it, I thought.
I went back to the bar, paid for my drink. Ten minutes later I was in my bed. Alone.
The name of the horse was Rêve de Minuit. Lily, Fabian, and I were standing with Coombs, the trainer, in the morning mist at the head of one of the allées in the forest of Chantilly, watching the exercise boys gallop in pairs and trios. It was seven in the morning and cold. My shoes and the cuffs of my trousers were muddy and wet through. I was hunched in my old, sooty, greenish overcoat, the same one I had when I was at the St Augustine, and I felt citified and out of place in the dripping woods, with the smell of wet foliage and steaming horses all around me. Fabian, ready for any occasion, was wearing jodhpur boots and a smart, short, canvas hunting coat over his houndstooth jacket and corduroy pants. An Irish tweed cap sat squarely on his head and moisture glinted on his mustache. He looked as though dawn was his favorite time of day and as if he had owned a string of thoroughbreds all his life. Anyone seeing him there for the first time would be sure that no trainer would be able to pull any crafty trainer's tricks on him.
Lily, too, was dressed for the scene, in high brown boots and loose belted polo coat, her English complexion brought to its genetic perfection by the dank atmosphere of the forest. If I intended to remain in their company - and by now I would have been hard put to figure out how I could' disentangle myself -I would have to rethink my wardrobe.
Coombs, a booted, ruddy-faced, sly-looking, tiny old man with a gravelly outdoor voice, had pointed out our horse to us. He looked like every other brownish horse to me, with wild rolling eyes and what seemed to me dangerously thin legs. 'He's coming along nicely, the colt, nicely,' Coombs said. Then we all had to duck behind some trees as one of the other horses started running backward toward us, almost as fast as if it had been going forward. 'They're a little nervy these cold mornings,' Coombs said indulgently. "That one's only a wee two-year-old filly. Playful at that age.'
The exercise boy finally got the creature under control and we could come out from behind the trees. 'How are the splints, Jack?' Fabian asked. The connoisseur of paintings and sculpture who had led me around the Louvre and who had discoursed on Manet to the critic the night before was gone now, replaced by a knowing horseman, expert on the fine points and obscure ailments of the equine race.
'Ah, I wouldn't worry, man,' Coombs said. 'He's coming along something splendid.'
'When will he be ready to run?' I said, the first words I had uttered since I had been introduced to the trainer. 'I mean in a regular race?'
"Ah, man,' Coombs wagged his head ambiguously. 'Ah, man, that's another question altogether, isn't it? You wouldn't want to push the colt, now, would ye? You can see he's not totally hardened yet, can ye not?' He had the damndest Irish-English way of talking for a man whose family had lived in France since the Empress Josephine.
'He does look as though another couple of weeks of work wouldn't do him any harm,' Fabian said.
'He still seems to be favoring his off foreleg a bit,' Lily said.
'Ah, ye noticed, ma'am.' Coombs beamed at her. 'It's more psychological than anything else, you understand. After the firing.'
'Yes,' Lily said. 'I've seen it before.'
'Ah, and a pleasure it is not to be having to hold the hand of an anxious owner.' Coombs beamed more widely.
'Could you give us an estimate?' I asked stubbornly, remembering the six thousand dollars invested in Rêve de Minuit. 'Two weeks, three weeks, a month?'
'Ah, man,' Coombs said, head wagging again, 'I don't like to be pinned down. It's not my way to raise an owner's hopes and then have to disappoint the good man.'
'Still, you could make a guess,' I persisted.
Coombs looked at me steadily, his little gray eyes, set in a thousand wrinkles, suddenly winter-cold. 'Ay, I could guess. But I won't. He'll tell me when he's ready to run.' He smiled jovially, the ice in his eyes melting instantaneously. 'Well, we've seen enough for the morning, wouldn't ye say? Now let's go and have a bite of breakfast. Ma'am...' Gallantly, he offered Lily his arm and led the way out of the forest with her.
'You've got to be careful with these fellows, Douglas,' Fabian said in a low voice as we followed along a path through the woods. 'They can be touchy. He's one of the best in the business. We're lucky to have him. You've got to let these old boys make the pace themselves.'
'It's our horse, isn't it? Our six thousand bucks?'
'I wouldn't talk like that where he could hear you, old man. Ah, it's going to be a lovely day.' We were out of the forest by now and the sun was breaking through the mist,' shining on the coats of the horses that were ambling in slow strings back toward the barns. 'Doesn't this lift your heart?' Fabian said, throwing his arms wide in an expansive gesture. 'This ancient, glorious countryside in the fresh sunshine, these beautiful, delicate animals...'
'Delicate is the word,' I said ungraciously.
'I am full of confidence,' Fabian said firmly. 'What's more, I will make a prediction. Before we're through, we'll make our mark on the sport. And not with only one six-thousand-dollar reject. Wait until you come to Chantilly and see twenty horses working out and know they're all yours. Wait until you're sitting in an owner's box at Longchamps and see your colors parade by before a race.... Wait until...'
'I'll wait,' I said sourly. 'Happily,' but although I carefully kept from showing it, I, too, felt the attraction of the place and the horses and the canny old trainer. I couldn't go along With Fabian's manic optimism, but I felt the power of his dream.
If speculating in gold and risking huge sums on lunatic pornographic films written by an Iranian and starring a nymphomaniac Mid-western student of comparative literature at the Sorbonne could result in thirty mornings a year like this one, I would follow Fabian gratefully. Finally, the money I had stolen had achieved a concrete good. I breathed deeply of the sharp country air before I went into breakfast at a long table in the Coombses' dining room, where the shelves and walls were reassuringly covered with cups and plaques the stable had won through the years. The old man poured each of us a generous shot of Calvados before we sat down at the long table with his plump and rosy wife and eight or nine jockeys and exercise boys and girls. The aroma of coffee and bacon in the room was mixed with the smell of tack and boots. It was a simpler and heartier world than I had imagined still existed anywhere on the surface of the earth, and when Coombs winked at me across the table and said, 'He'll tell me when he wants to run, man,' I winked back at him and raised my mug of coffee to the old trainer in return.
14
I think it is time we thought of Italy,' Fabian said. 'What do you think of Italy, dear?'