I was flippant. ‘Haven’t met the one and only. Don’t want five.’
‘Don’t you trust yourself?’ he said.
Christ, I thought, that was sharp, that was penetrating. That was unfair. It was because of him that I didn’t trust myself: because in inconstancy, I felt I was very much his son.
His imprint, for better or worse, was on us all.
Eighteen
On Wednesday, the Beverly Wilshire came alive as Ramsey had prophesied and Ramsey himself blew in with gusto and plans. We would go to parties. We would go round the horse barns. We would go to a Hollywood Gala Ball.
The Breeders’ Cup organisers opened their reception room where everyone concerned with the races could have breakfast and cocktails (together if they liked) and talk about horses, could arrange cars and rickets and talk about horses, could meet the people they’d met at Epsom and Longchamp and talk about horses. Well-mannered people in good suits and silk dresses, owners whose enthusiasm prompted and funded the sport. Big bucks, big business, big fun.
Malcolm adored it. So did I. Life in high gear. Early on Friday, we went out to the racecourse to see Blue Clancy in his barn and watch him breeze round the track in his last warm-up before the big one. His English trainer was with him, and his English lad. There was heady excitement, a lot of anxiety. The orderly bustle of stable life, the smells, the swear words, the earthy humour, the pride, the affection, the jealousies, the injustices, the dead disappointments, all the same the world over.
Blue Clancy looked fine, worked well, threw Malcolm and Ramsey into back-slapping ecstasies. ‘Wait until, tomorrow,’ the trainer said cautiously, watching them. ‘We’re taking on the best in the world, don’t forget. The hot money is for a California-bred horse.’
‘What’s hot money?’ Malcolm demanded.
‘The bets made by people in the know. People with inside information.’
Who cared, Malcolm said. He couldn’t remember ever having more fun in his life: and I thought his euphoria was at least partly due to his three close approaches to losing it.
Along with a thousand others, we went to the ball, though in the stretch-limo, not a converted pumpkin, and in the vast sound stage which had lately held a split-open aeroplane for filming cabin dramas, Malcolm danced with several ladies he’d known well for two days. He spent his time laughing. He was infectious. Everyone around him lit up like nightlights, banishing gloom.
We slept, we ate breakfast, we went to the races. The smog that all week had covered the mountains everyone swore were there on the far side of the track, relented and evaporated and disclosed a sunlit rocky backdrop worthy of the occasion. Tables with tablecloths had appeared overnight throughout the Club stands, and overworked black-coated waiters sweated under huge trays of food, threading through ever-moving racegoers, never dropping the lot.
There were seven Breeders’ Cup races; various distances, variously aged horses. The first five each offered a total purse (for first, second, third and so on) of one million dollars. Blue Clancy’s race, the one-and-a-half-mile Turf, had a purse of two million, and the climactic event, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, promised three. They weren’t racing for peanuts. The owner of the winner of Blue Clancy’s race would be personally richer by six hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars, enough to keep him in Bollinger for weeks.
We cheered home the first five winners. We went down to the saddling stalls and saw Blue Clancy prepared. We went up to the stands and bit our nails.
Five of the seven races were run on the dirt track, two on grass, of which this was the second; and most of the European horses were running on grass, the green stuff of home. Blue Clancy was taking on the Epsom Derby winner, the Arc de Triomphe winner and the winner of the Italian Derby. On paper, he looked to have an outside chance of coming fourth. In Malcolm’s and Ramsey’s eyes, he was a shoo-in. (Malcolm had learned the local jargon.)
Blue Clancy broke cleanly from the gate away on the far side of the course and his English jockey held him handily in sixth place all down the far side. Ramsey and Malcolm were looking through binoculars and muttering encouragements. Blue Clancy, not hearing them, swung into the long left-hand bottom bend in no better position and was still lying sixth when the