Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

“Did you believe all that stuff you were spouting back there?” I asked. “About Nadine and Manet and so on?”

Fabian laughed. “Not at the start maybe,” he said. “I was just giving in to my normal reaction when I hear a Frenchman start orating about Racine and Molière and Victor Hugo. But by the end I damn near had myself convinced that I was a patron of the arts. That includes you, of course,” he added hastily.

“You’re not going to put your name – our name – on it, are you?” I said, alarmed.

“No.” Fabian sounded almost regretful. “I suppose that would be going too far. We’ll have to find a company name. Have you any ideas. Lily? You’ve always been the clever girl.”

“Up, Down, and Over Productions,” Lily said. “Don’t be vulgar, dear,” Fabian said prissily. “Remember, we want a review in The Times. We’ll have to put our minds to it in the calm light of day. Oh, by the way, Douglas, get a good night’s sleep. We’ll be up at five. We have to drive out to Chantilly for the workouts.”

“What workouts?” I had no idea where Chantilly was and for a moment I thought that it was a special place where actors in pornographic movies kept in shape. From what I had seen that evening, a day’s shooting involved as much physical expenditure for man and woman alike as ten fast rounds with a bantamweight prize-fighter.

“Our horse,” Fabian said. “There was a cable waiting for me at the desk when we got back from the Louvre this afternoon – by the way, you did enjoy the Louvre, didn’t you?” “Yes. What about our horse?” “The cable was from my friend in Kentucky. Somehow, he found out about the splints. He’s not ready to buy at the moment…”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Not to fret, dear boy,” Fabian said. “My friend in Kentucky wants the animal to run in one decent race before he puts his money down. You can’t blame the man, can you?”

“No. But I can blame you.”

“I’m afraid you’re starting our relationship on the wrong note, Douglas,” Fabian said, hurt. “We just have to explain matters to the trainer. He has great faith in the horse, great faith. All he has to do is to make sure the horse is fit and pick the appropriate race to enter him in. The trainer’s name is Coombs. An English name, but his family’s been in Chantilly since the Empress Josephine. He’s a wizard at picking appropriate races, an absolute wizard. He’s won races with animals they were about to sell to pull junk wagons. Anyway, you’ll love Chantilly. No lover of horses should come to Paris without seeing Chantilly.”

“I’m no lover of horses,” I said. “I hate horses. I’m scared stiff of them.”

“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.