Bananas' main pride and joy was the small restaurant, next door to the bar, in which he served cuisine minceur of such perfection that half the passing jockeys of England ate there religiously. It had been over his dried, crisp, indescribable roast duck that I'd first met him, and like a mark well hooked had become an addict. Couldn't count the delices I'd paid for since.
He was already up as usual when I waved to him on my way to the gallops: sweeping out, cleaning up, opening his windows wide to get rid of the overnight fug. A fat man himself, he nonetheless had infinite energy, and ran the whole place with the help of two women, one in the bar and one in the kitchen, both of whom he bossed around like a feudal lord. Betty in the kitchen cooked stolidly under his eagle eye and Bessie in the bar served drinks with speed bordering on sleight-of-hand. Bananas was head-waiter and every other sort of waiter, collecting orders, delivering food, presenting bills, cleaning and relaying tables, all with a deceptive show of having all day to chat. I'd watched him at it so often that I knew his system; he practically never wasted time by going into the kitchen. Food appeared from Betty through a vast serving hatch shielded from the public view, and dirty dishes disappeared down a gentle slide.
'Who washes up?' I'd said once in puzzlement.
'I do,' Bananas said. 'After closing time I feed it all through the washer.'
'Don't you ever sleep?'
'Sleep's boring.'
He needed, it seemed, only four hours a night.
'And why work so hard? Why not have more help?'
He looked at me pityingly. 'Staff cause as much work as they do,' he said. And I'd found out later that he closed the restaurant every year towards the end of November and took off to the West Indies, returning in late March when the Flat racing stirred back to life. He hated the cold, he said: worked at a gallop for eight months for four months' palm trees and sun.
That morning on the Limekilns, Simpson Shell was working his best young prospect and looking smug. The eldest of Luke Houston's five trainers, he had been resigned to me least and still had hang-ups which showed on his face every day.
'Morning, William,' he said, frowning.
'Morning, Sim.' I watched him with the rangy colt upon whom the Houston hope of a classic next season was faintly pinned. 'He's moving well,' I said.
'He always does.' The voice was slighting and impatient. I smiled to myself. Neither compliments nor soft soap, he was saying, were going to change his opinion of the upstart who had overruled him in the matter of selling two two-year-olds. He had told me he disagreed strongly with my weeding-out policy, even though I'd put it to him beforehand and discussed every dud to be discarded. ' Warrington never did that,' he'd thundered, and he'd warned me he was writing to Luke to complain.
I never heard the result. Either he'd never written or Luke had backed me up; but it had consolidated his Derry-wards hostility, not least because although I had saved Luke Houston a stack of pointless training fees I had at the same time deprived Simpson Shell. He was waiting, I knew, for the duds to win for their new owners so that he could crow, and it was my good luck that so far they hadn't.
Like all Luke's trainers, he trained for many other owners besides. Luke's horses at present constituted about a sixth of his string, which was too high a percentage for him to risk losing them altogether: so he was civil to me, but only just.
I asked him about a filly who had had some heat in her leg the previous evening, and he grumpily said it was better. He hated me to take a close interest in his eight Houston horses, yet I guessed that if I didn't, another letter would be winging to California complaining that I was neglecting my duties. Sim Shell, I thought ruefully, couldn't be pleased.
Over in the Bury Road, Mort Miller, younger, neurotic, fingers snapping like firecrackers, told me that Luke's ten darlings were eating well and climbing the walls with eagerness to slaughter the opposition. Mort had considered the sale of three no-gooders a relief, saying he hated the lazy so-and-sos and grudged them their oats. Mort's horses were always as strung up as he was, but they certainly won when it mattered.
I dropped in on Mort most days because it was he, for all his positive statements, who in fact asked my opinion most.
Once a week, usually fitting in with race meetings, I visited the other two trainers, Thompson and Sandlache, who lived thirty miles from each other on the Berkshire Downs, and about once a month I spent a couple of days with Donavan in Ireland. With them all, I had satisfactory working arrangements, they on their part admitting that the two-year-olds I'd got rid of were of no benefit to themselves, and I promising that I would spend the money I'd saved on the training fees on extra yearlings in October.
I would be sorry, I thought, when my year was over.
Driving home from Mort's, I stopped in the town to collect a radio I'd been having repaired, and again to fill up with petrol, and again at Bananas' pub to pick up some beer.
Bananas was in the kitchen prodding some marinating veal. Opening time still lay an hour ahead. Everything in the place was gleaming and fresh and the plants grew damply in their pots.
'There was a fellow looking for you,' Bananas said.
'What sort of fellow?'
'Big man. Didn't know him. I told him where your cottage was.'
He scowled at Betty, who was obliviously peeling grapes. 'I told him you were out.'
'Did he say what he wanted?'
'Nope.'
He shed an apron and took his bulk into the bar. 'Too early for you?' he said, easing behind the counter.
'Sort of.'
He nodded and methodically assembled his usual breakfast; a third of a tumbler of brandy topped up with two scoops of vanilla-walnut ice cream.
'Cassie went off to work,' he said, reaching for a spoon.
'You don't miss much.'
He shrugged. 'You can see that yellow car a mile off, and I was out front cleaning the windows.' He stirred the ice cream into the brandy and with gourmand enjoyment shovelled the first instalment into his mouth. 'That's better,' he said.
'It's no wonder you're fat.'
He merely nodded. He didn't care. He told me once that his size made his fat customers feel better and spend more, and that his fat customers in search of a miracle outnumbered the thin.
He was a natural eccentric, himself seeing nothing unusual in anything he did. In various late-night sessions, he'd unbuttoned a little of his inner self, and under the surface geniality I'd had glimpses of a deep pessimism, a moroseness which looked with despair at the inability of the human race to live harmoniously on the beautiful earth. He had no politics, no god, no urge to agitate. People, he said, were known to starve on rich fertile tropical earth; people stole their neighbours' lands; people murdered people from racial hate; people tortured and murdered in the name of freedom. It sickened him, he said. It had been going on from pre-history, and it would go on until the vindictive ape was wiped out.
'But you yourself seem happy enough,' I'd once said.
He looked at me darkly. 'You're a bird. Always on the wing. You'd be a sparrowhawk if you hadn't such long legs.'
'And you?'
'The only option is suicide,' he said. 'But right now it's not necessary.' He'd deftly poured himself another brandy, and lifted the glass in a sort of salute. 'Here's to civilisation, damn it.'
His real fore-names, written over the pub doorway, were John James, but his nickname was a pudding. 'Bananas Frisby', a hot fluffy confection of eggs, rum, bananas and orange, was an item nearly always on his menu, and 'Bananas' he himself had become. It suited his outer persona well, but his inner, not at all.
'You know what?' he said.
'What?'
'I'm growing a beard.'
I looked at the faint shadow on the dark jaw. 'It needs compost,' I said.