She parked the car but didn’t get out immediately, instead pulling on a becoming hat and adjusting the angle in the driving mirror.
‘I haven’t asked you how your arm is, dear,’ she said, ‘because it’s perfectly obvious it’s hurting you.’
‘Is it?’ I said, slightly dismayed.
‘When you move it, dear, you wince.’
‘Oh.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better in a sling, dear?’
‘Better to use it, I should think.’
The kind eyes looked my way. ‘You know, Tony dear, I think we should go first of all to the first aid room and borrow one of those narrow black wrist-supporting slings that the jumping jockeys use when they’ve broken things, and then you won’t have to shake hands with people, which I noticed you avoided doing with Tina yesterday, and other people won’t bang into you if they see they shouldn’t.’
She left me speechless. We went to the first aid room, where by a mixture of charm and bullying she got what she wanted, and I emerged feeling both grateful and slightly silly.
‘That’s better, dear,’ she said, nodding. ‘Now we can go up to Orkney’s box...’ All her decisiveness in the first aid room vanished. ‘Oh, dear... he makes me feel so stupid and clumsy and as if I’d never stepped out of the schoolroom.’
‘You look,’ I said truthfully, ‘poised, well-dressed and anybody’s match. Stifle all doubts.’
Her eyes however were full of them and her nervousness shortened her breath in the lift going up to the fourth floor.
The Martineau Park grandstands were among the best in the country, the whole lot having been designed and built at one time, not piecemeal in modernisation programmes as at many other courses. The old stands having decayed to dangerous levels around 1950, it had been decided to raze the lot and start again, and although one could find fault about wind tunnels (result of schools of architecture being apparently ignorant of elementary physics) the cost-cutting disasters of some other places had been avoided. One could nearly everywhere, for instance, if one wanted to, watch the races from under cover and sitting down, and could celebrate afterwards in bars large enough for the crush. There was a warmed (or cooled) glass walled gallery overlooking the parade ring and a roof above the unsaddling enclosures (as at Aintree) to keep all the back-slapping dry.
The two long tiers of high-up boxes were reached by enclosed hallways along which, when we came out of the lift, waitresses were pushing trolleys of food: a far cry from Ascot where they tottered with trays along open galleries, eclairs flying in the wind. Martineau Park, in fact, was almost too comfortable to be British.
Flora said, ‘This way,’ and went ahead of me with foreboding. Orkney Swale, I thought, simply couldn’t be as intimidating as she made out.
The door of his box stood open. Flora and I reached it together and looked in. A sideboard scarcely groaning with food and drink stood against the wall. Three small tables with attendant chairs filled the rest of the floor space, with glass doors to the viewing balcony beyond. To the right of the entrance door, a small serving pantry, clean and uncluttered. Orkney’s, unlike some of the boxes we’d passed, wasn’t offering lunch.
A man sat alone at one of the tables, head bent over a racing newspaper and form book, pen at the ready for making notes.
Flora cleared her throat, said ‘Orkney?’ waveringly and took three tentative steps into the box. The man at the table turned his head without haste, an enquiring expression raising his eyebrows. Even when he saw Flora and clearly knew her he was in no rush to stand up. He finally made it, but as if the politeness were something he’d belatedly thought of, not an instinctive act of greeting.
He was tall, sandy haired, wore glasses over pale blue eyes, smiled with reluctance.
‘This is Tony Beach, Orkney,’ Flora said.
Orkney looked me calmly up and down, gaze pausing briefly on the sling. ‘Jack’s assistant?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ Flora said, ‘a friend.’
‘How do you do?’ I said in my best Jimmy manner, and got a nod for it, which seemed to relieve Flora, although she still tended to shift from foot to foot.
‘Jack asked me to tell you he’d had good reports about Breezy Palm from the head lad,’ she said valiantly.
‘I talked to Jack myself,’ Orkney said. After a noticeable pause he added, ‘Would you care for a drink?’
I could sense Flora about to refuse so I said ‘Yes, why not?’ in a Jimmy drawl, because a stiffener might be just what Flora needed.
Orkney looked vaguely at the sideboard upon which stood a bottle of gin, a bottle of scotch, an assortment of mixers and several glasses. He picked up an empty glass which had been near him on the small table, transferred it to the sideboard and stretched out his hand to a Seagram’s bottle.
‘Gin and tonic, Flora?’ he offered.
‘That would be nice, Orkney.’
Flora bought gin from me to give to visiting owners, saying she didn’t much care for it herself. She watched apprehensively as Orkney poured two fingersworth and barely doubled it with tonic.
‘Ice? Lemon?’ he asked, and added them without waiting for an answer. He handed her the glass while looking at me. ‘And you... er... same for you?’
‘Scotch,’ I said. ‘Most kind.’
It was Teacher’s whisky, standard premium. He poured the two fingers and hovered a hand between ginger ale and soda, eyebrows elevated.
‘Just as it comes,’ I said. ‘No ice.’
The eyebrows rose higher. He gave me the glass, recapped the whisky and returned to the gin for himself. Two and a half fingers. Very little tonic. Two chunks of ice.
‘To luck,’ I said, taking a sip. To... ah... Breezy Palm.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Flora said. ‘Breezy Palm.’
The blended flavours trickled back over my tongue, announcing their separate presences, grain, malt and oakwood, familiar and vivid, fading slowly to aftertaste. I maybe couldn’t have picked Teacher’s reliably from a row of similar blends, but one thing was certain: what I was drinking wasn’t Rannoch.
‘Hurt your arm?’ Orkney asked.
‘Er...’ I said. ‘Had an accident with a door.’
Flora’s eyes widened but to my relief she refrained from rushing in with details. Orkney merely nodded, acknowledging life’s incidental perils. ‘Too bad,’ he said.
A waitress appeared at the doorway, pushing a trolley. A quick glance at Flora’s face showed me one couldn’t expect too much from this, and the reality turned out to be three moderately large plates bearing respectively crustless sandwiches, cheese with biscuits and strawberry tartlets, all tautly wrapped in transparent cling-film. The waitress asked if she could liberate the modest feast but Orkney said no, he would do it later, and there it all sat, mouthwateringly out of reach.
‘In the good old days,’ Flora told me later, ‘one used to be able to take one’s own food and drink to one’s box, but now the caterers have an absolute stranglehold and everyone has to buy everything from them, and for some things they are frightfully expensive, absolutely exorbitant my dear, and Orkney resents it so much that he buys the absolute minimum. He’s not really so mean as he looks today, it’s just his way... he told us once that the caterers charge bar prices in the boxes, whatever that means, and that it made him very angry.’
‘Bar prices?’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Is that so bad, dear?’
‘Judging from race meeting bar prices, about a hundred and fifty per cent profit on a bottle of scotch.’
Flora worked it out. ‘So Orkney has to pay in his box more than double what the same bottle costs in your shop?’
‘Yes, a good deal more than double.’