Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

‘Afraid not.’

‘Nor am I.’

‘So we stand here,’ I said, ‘watching your sister.’

Dart said, ‘You have such a damned clear way of looking at things.’

The signal was given for the jockeys to mount. Rebecca, wearing the distinctive Stratton colours of green and blue checks on the body with mismatched orange and scarlet sleeves and cap, swung her thin lithe shape into the saddle as softly as thistledown landing. The excessive strain brought on by the trivial annoyance of a lack of hangers had vanished: she looked cool, concentrated, a star on her stage, in command of her performance.

Dart watched her with all his ambivalent feelings showing; the female sibling whose prowess outshone him, whom he admired and resented, understood but couldn’t love.

Conrad’s runner, Tempestexi, a chestnut gelding, looked, by comparison with some of the others in the ring, to have a long back and short legs. The two-mile hurdle race, according to the card, was for horses that hadn’t won a hurdle race before January 1st. Tempestexi, who had won one since, carried a 71b penalty for doing so, but had, all the same, been made favourite.

I asked Dart how many racehorses his father had in training and he said five, he thought, though they came and went a bit, he said, according to their legs.

‘Tendons,’ he said succinctly. ‘Horses’ tendons are as temperamental as violin strings. Tempestexi is Father’s current white-hot hope. No leg problems, so far.’

‘Does Conrad bet?’

‘No. Mother does. And Keith. He’d have put the Dower House on this one, if he’d owned it — the Dower House, that is. He’ll have bet anything he can lay his hands on. If Rebecca doesn’t win, Keith will kill her.’

‘That wouldn’t help.’

Dart laughed. ‘You of all people must know that logic never interferes with instinct, in Keith.’

The horses streamed out of the parade ring on their way to the course, and Dart and I went to watch the race from the makeshift stands Henry had bolted together from the circus tiers.

The steps were packed to the point that I hoped Henry’s boast of infallible safety would hold up. Crowds, in fact, had poured through the gates like a river during the past hour and had spread over the tarmac and into the big top and down to the betting rings in chattering thousands. The dining rooms were full, with customers waiting. There were crushes in all the bars and long lines at the Tote, and the booths by the entrance had sold out of regular racecards. The big office copier was churning out paper substitutes and running red-hot. Oliver, glimpsed briefly, sweated ecstatically.

‘The television did it,’ he said, gasping.

‘Yes, your work, well done.’

Waiting for the race to start I said to Dart, ‘Perdita Faulds is here at the races.’

‘Oh? Who is she?’

‘The other non-Stratton shareholder.’

He showed minimal interest. ‘Didn’t someone mention her at the family board meeting the other day? Why did she come?’

‘Like me, to see what was happening about her investment.’

Dart cast it out of his mind. ‘They’re off!’ he said. ‘Now, come on, Rebecca.’

It looked an uneventful race from the stands, though no doubt not from the saddle. The runners stayed bunched throughout the first circuit, clattered safely over the flights of hurdles, swept in an overlapping ribbon past the winning post for the first time and set off again into the country.

Down the far side the less fit, the less speedy, fell back, leaving Rebecca in third place round the last bend. Dart’s genuine wish for his sister to win couldn’t be doubted. He made scrubbing, encouraging movements with his whole body, and when she reached second place coming towards the last flight he raised his voice like the rest and yelled to her to win.

She did. She won by less than a length, accelerating, a thin streak of neat rhythmic muscle against an opponent who flapped his elbows and his whip but couldn’t hang onto his lead.

The crowd cheered her. Dart oozed reflected glory. Everyone streamed down towards the winner’s unsaddling enclosure where Dart joined his parents and Marjorie in a kissing and back-slapping orgy. Rebecca, pulling off the saddle, ducked the sentiment and dived purposefully into the Portakabin weighing room to sit on the scales. Very professional, fairly withdrawn; rapt in her own private world of risk, effort, metaphysics and, this time, success.

I took myself over to the office door and found four boys faithfully reporting there.

‘Did you have lunch OK?’ I asked.

They nodded. ‘Good job we went early. There were no tables left, pretty soon.’

‘Did you see Rebecca Stratton win that race?’

Christopher said reproachfully, ‘Even though she called us brats, we wanted to back her with you, but we couldn’t find you.’

I reflected. ‘I’ll pay you whatever the Tote pays on a minimum bet.’

Four grins rewarded me. ‘Don’t lose it,’ I said.

Perdita Faulds and Penelope, passing, stopped by my side, and I introduced the children.

‘All yours?’ Perdita asked. ‘You don’t look old enough.’

‘Started young.’

The boys were staring at Penelope, wide-eyed.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Have I got mud on my nose?’

‘No,’ Alan said frankly, ‘you look like Mummy.’

‘Like your mother?’

They all nodded, and they moved off with her, as if it were natural, to go and look at the horses walking round for the next race.

‘Like your wife, is she, my Pen?’ Perdita said.

I dragged my gaze back. Heart thudded. Idiotic.

‘Like she was then,’ I said.

‘And now?’

I swallowed. ‘Yes, like now, too.’

Perdita gave me a look born of long, knowing experience. ‘You can never go back,’ she said.

I would do it again, I thought helplessly. I’d marry with my eyes and find an unsuspected stranger inside the package. Did one never grow up?

I wrenched my mind away from it and said to Perdita, ‘Did Lord Stratton happen to know — and tell you — what it was that Forsyth Stratton did that has tied the whole family into knots?’

Her generous red mouth formed an O of amused surprise.

‘You don’t mess about, do you? Why should I tell you?’

‘Because if we’re going to save his racecourse, we have to unravel the strings that work the family. They all know things about each other that they use as threats. They blackmail each other to make them do — or not do — what they want.’

Perdita nodded.

‘And as a part of that,’ I said, ‘they pay people off, to keep the Stratton name clean.’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘Starting with my own mother,’ I said.

‘No, before that.’

‘So you do know!’

‘William liked to talk,’ she said. ‘I told you.’

‘And... Forsyth?’

Penelope and the boys were on their way back. Perdita said, ‘If you come to see me in my Swindon shop tomorrow morning, I’ll tell you about Forsyth... and about the others, if you think up the questions.’

Keith’s rage, when he discovered that the runners in the second race would be jumping the open ditch as scheduled, verged on the spectacular.

Henry and I happened to be walking along behind the caterers’ tents when the eruption occurred (Henry having had to deal with a leak in the new water main) and we hurried down a caterer’s passage towards the source of vocal bellowing and crockery-smashing noises; into the Strattons’ private dining room.

The whole family had clearly returned, after their victory, to finish their lunch and toast the winner, and typically, but perhaps luckily, had invited no outsiders to join them.