Dick Francis - Enquiry

‘You look beautiful,’ I said.

Her mouth opened. ‘Hughes!’

‘Is your father here?’

‘No,’ she said disgustedly. ‘He wouldn’t face it. Nor would Mother. I came with a party of neighbours but I can’t say I was enjoying it much until you turned up.’

‘Why not?’

‘You must be joking. Just look around. At a rough guess fifty people are rubber-necking at you. Doesn’t it make you cringe inside? Anyway, I’ve had quite enough of it myself this evening, and I didn’t even see the damned race, let alone get myself warned off.’ She stopped. ‘Come and dance with me. If we’re hoisting the flag we may as well do it thoroughly.’

‘On one condition,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You stop calling me Hughes.’

‘What?’

‘Cranfield, I’m tired of being called Hughes.’

‘Oh!’ It had obviously never occurred to her. ‘Then... Kelly... how about dancing?’

‘Enchanted, Roberta.’

She gave me an uncertain look. ‘I still feel I don’t know you.’

‘You’ve never bothered.’

‘Nor have you.’

That jolted me. It was true. I’d disliked the idea of her. And I didn’t really know her at all.

‘How do you do?’ I said politely. ‘Come and dance.’

We shuffled around in one of those affairs which look like formalised jungle rituals, swaying in rhythm but never touching. Her face was quite calm, remotely smiling. From her composure one would have guessed her to be entirely at ease, not the target of turned heads, assessing glances, half hidden whispers.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said.

‘Do what?’

‘Look so... so matter of fact.’

‘I was thinking exactly the same about you.’

She smiled, eyes crinkling and teeth gleaming, and incredibly in the circumstances she looked happy.

We stuck it for a good ten minutes. Then she said we would go back to her table, and made straight off to it without waiting for me to agree. I didn’t think her party would be pleased to have me join them, and half of them weren’t.

‘Sit down and have a drink, my dear fellow,’ drawled her host, reaching for a champagne bottle with a languid hand. ‘And tell me all about the bring-back-Cranfield campaign. Roberta tells me you are working on a spot of reinstatement.’

‘I haven’t managed it yet,’ I said deprecatingly.

‘My dear chap...’ He gave me an inspecting stare down his nose. He’d been in the Guards, I thought. So many ex-Guards’ officers looked at the world down the sides of their noses: it came of wearing those blinding hats. He was blond, in his forties, not unfriendly. Roberta called him Bobbie.

The woman the other side of him leaned over and drooped a heavy pink satin bosom perilously near her brimming glass.

‘Do tell me,’ she said, giving me a thorough gaze from heavily made up eyes, ‘What made you come?’

‘Natural cussedness,’ I said pleasantly.

‘Oh.’ She looked taken aback. ‘How extraordinary.’

‘Joined to the fact that there was no reason why I shouldn’t.’

‘And are you enjoying it?’ Bobbie said. ‘I mean to say, my dear chap, you are somewhat in the position of a rather messily struck off doctor turning up four days later at the British Medical Association’s grandest function.’

I smiled. ‘Quite a parallel.’

‘Don’t needle him Bobbie,’ Roberta protested.

Bobbie removed his stare from me and gave it to her instead. ‘My dear Roberta, this cookie needs no little girls rushing to his defence. He’s as tough as old oak.’

A disapproving elderly man on the far side of the pink bosom said under his breath ‘Thick skinned, you mean.’

Bobbie heard, and shook his head. ‘Vertebral,’ he said. ‘Different altogether.’ He stood up. ‘Roberta, my dear girl, would you care to dance?’

I stood up with him.

‘No need to go, my dear chap. Stay. Finish your drink.’

‘You are most kind,’ I said truthfully. ‘But I really came tonight to have a word with one or two people... If you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to find them.’

He gave me an odd formal little inclination of the head, halfway to a bow. ‘Come back later, if you’d care to.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘Very much.’

He took Roberta away to dance and I went up the stairs to the balcony which encircled the room. There were tables all round up there too, but in places one could get a good clear view of most people below. I spent some length of time identifying them from the tops of their heads.

There must have been about six hundred there, of whom I knew personally about a quarter. Owners, trainers, jockeys, Stewards, pressmen, two or three of the bigger bookmakers, starters, judges, Clerks of Courses and all the others, all with their wives and friends and chattering guests.

Kessel was there, hosting a party of twelve almost exactly beneath where I stood. I wondered if his anger had cooled since Monday, and decided if possible not to put it to the test. He had reputedly sent Squelch off to Pat Nikita, a trainer who was a bitter rival of Cranfield’s, which had been rubbing it in a bit. The report looked likely to be true, as Pat Nikita was among the party below me.

Cranfield and Nikita regularly claimed each other’s horses in selling races and were apt to bid each other up spitefully at auctions. It was a public joke. So in choosing Nikita as his trainer, Kessel was unmistakably announcing worldwise that he believed Cranfield and I had stopped his horse. Hardly likely to help convince anyone that we hadn’t.

At one of the most prominent tables, near the dancing space, sat Lord Ferth, talking earnestly to a large lady in pale blue ostrich feathers. All the other chairs round the table were askew and unoccupied, but while I watched the music changed to a latin rhythm, and most of the party drifted back. I knew one or two of them slightly, but not well. The man I was chiefly looking for was not among them.

Two tables away from Lord Ferth sat Edwin Byler, gravely beckoning to the waiter to fill his guests’ glasses, too proud of his home-made wealth to lift the bottle himself. His cuddly little wife on the far side of the table was loaded with half the stock of Hatton Garden and was rather touchingly revelling in it.

Not to be going to ride Edwin Byler’s string of super horses... The wry thrust of regret went deeper than I liked.

There was a rustle behind me and the smell of Roberta’s fresh flower scent. I turned towards her.

‘Kelly...?’

She really looked extraordinarily beautiful.

‘Kelly... Bobbie suggested that you should take me in to supper.’

‘That’s generous of him.’

‘He seems to approve of you. He said...’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Well, never mind what he said.’

We went down the stairs and through an archway to the supper room. The light there was of a heartier wattage. It didn’t do any damage to Roberta.

Along one wall stretched a buffet table laden with aspic-shining cold meats and oozing cream gateaux. Roberta said she had dined at Bobbie’s before coming on to the dance and wasn’t hungry, but we both collected some salmon and sat down at one of the twenty or so small tables clustered into half of the room.

Six feet away sat three fellow jockeys resting their elbows among a debris of empty plates and coffee cups.

‘Kelly!’ One of them exclaimed in a broad northern voice. ‘My God. Kelly. Come over here, you old so and so. Bring the talent with you.’

The talent’s chin began its familiar upward tilt.

‘Concentrate on the character, not the accent,’ I said.

She gave me a raw look of surprise, but when I stood up and picked up her plate, she came with me. They made room for us, admired Roberta’s appearance, and didn’t refer to anyone being warned off. Their girls, they explained, were powdering their noses, and when the noses reappeared, immaculate, they all smiled goodbye and went back to the ballroom.