abruptly, ‘Your mother says too damned much. Can’t you think for yourself?’
He was offended, as he would be. He hooked his arms through those of Debs and Serena and made an announcement. ‘We three are going to have a drink and a sandwich. If you fall off and kill yourself, no one will miss you.’
I smiled at him, though his tone had held no joke.
‘And don’t be so bloody forgiving,’ he said.
He whirled the girls away from me and marched them off. I wondered how he’d got the day off from work, though I supposed most people could if they tried. He was a statistician, studying to be an actuary in his insurance company. What were the probabilities, I wondered, of a thirty-two-year-old statistician whose wife had purple fingernails being present when his brother broke his neck at Sandown Park?
Donald and Helen said that they too would run a sandwich to earth (Donald’s words) and Helen added earnestly that she would care that I finished the race safely, whatever Ferdinand said.
‘Thanks,’ I said, hoping I could believe her, and went back into the changing-room for an interval of thought.
Lucy and Edwin might leave before the end of the afternoon, and so might Donald and Helen, but Ferdinand wouldn’t. He liked going racing. He’d said on one mellow occasion that he’d have been quite happy being a bookmaker; he was lightning fast at working out relative odds.
The problem of how to extract Malcolm unseen from the racecourse didn’t end, either, with those members of the family I’d talked to. If they were all so certain I knew where Malcolm was, one of the others, more cunning, could be hiding behind trees, waiting to follow me when I left.
There were hundreds of trees in Sandown Park.
The first race came and went, and in due course I went out to partner Young Higgins in the second.
Jo as usual had red cheeks from pleasure and hope. George was being gruffly businesslike, also as usual, telling me to be especially careful at the difficult first fence and to go easy up the hill past the stands the first time.
I put Malcolm out of my mind, and also murder, and it wasn’t difficult. The sky was a clear distant blue, the air crisp with the coming of autumn. The leaves on all those trees were yellowing, and the track lay waiting, green and springy, with the wide fences beckoning to be flown. Simple things; and out there one came starkly face to face with oneself, which I mostly found more exhilarating than frightening. So far, anyway.
Jo said, ‘Only eight runners, just a perfect number,’ and George said, as he always did, ‘Don’t lie too far back coming round the last long bend.’
I said I would try not to.
Jo’s eyes were sparkling like a child’s in her sixty-year-old face, and I marvelled that she had never in all that time lost the thrill of expectation in moments like these. There might be villains at every level in horse racing, but there were also people like Jo and George whose goodness and goodwill shone out like searchlights, who made the sport overall good fun and wholesome.
Life and death might be serious in the real world, but life and death on a fast steeplechaser on a Friday afternoon in the autumn sunshine was a lighthearted toss-up, an act of health on a sick planet.
I fastened the strap of my helmet, was thrown up on Young Higgins and rode him out onto the track. Perhaps if I’d been a professional and ridden up to ten times as often I would have lost the swelling joy that that moment always gave me: one couldn’t grin like a maniac, even to oneself, at a procession of bread-and-butter rides on cold days, sharp tracks, bad horses.
Young Higgins was living up to his name, bouncing on his toes and tossing his head in high spirits. We lined up with the seven others, all of whose riders 1 happened to know from many past similar occasions. Amateurs came in all guises: there was a mother, an aunt and a grandfather riding that afternoon, besides a journalist, an earl’s son, a lieutenant-colonel, a show-jumper and myself. From the stands, only a keen eye could have told one from the other without the guidance of our colours, and that was what amateur racing was all about: the equality, the levelling anonymity of the starting gate.
The tapes went up and we set off with three miles to go,