set them winning.
He always invited me to his celebrations, either formally or not, partly no doubt so that I should be on the spot to solve any booze-flow problems immediately, but also because I had myself been born into a section of the racing world and was still considered part of it, despite my inexplicable defection into retail liquor.
‘Not his father’s son,’ was how the uncharitable put it. Or more plainly, ‘Lacks the family guts.’
My father, a soldier, had won both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Gold Cup, dashing as valiantly into steeplechase fences as he had into enemy territory. His bravery on all battlefields had been awe-inspiring, and he died from a broken neck on Sandown Park racecourse when I was eleven, and watching.
He had been forty-seven at the time and remained, of course, at that age in the racing world’s memory, a tall, straight, laughing, reckless man, untouched, it still seemed to me, by the world’s woes. No matter that he was not an ideal shape for jockeyship, he had resolutely followed in the wake of his own father, my grandfather, a distant Titan who had finished second one year in the Grand National before covering himself with military glory in World War One. My grandfather’s Victoria Cross lay beside my father’s DSO in the display case I had inherited. It was their dash, their flair, their dare-devilment that they had not passed on.
‘Are you going to grow up like your father, then?’ had been said to me in friendly, expectant fashion countless times through my childhood, and it had only slowly dawned on everyone, as on me, that no, I wasn’t. I learned to ride, but without distinction. I went to Wellington, the school for soldiers’ sons, but not in turn to Sandhurst to put on uniform myself. My mother too often said, ‘Never mind, dear,’ suffering many disappointments nobly; and I developed deep powerful feelings of inferiority, which still lingered, defying common sense.
Only with Emma had they retreated to insignificance, but now that she had gone, faint but persistent, they were back. A discarded habit of mind insidiously creeping into unguarded corners. Miserable.
Jimmy, the secretary, never helped. He sauntered out of the house, hands in pockets, and watched as I lugged three galvanised wash tubs from the rear of my van.
‘What are those for?’ he said. He couldn’t help looking down that nose, I supposed, as he topped six feet four. It was just that his tone of voice matched.
‘Ice,’ I said.
He said, ‘Oh,’ or rather ‘Ay-oh,’ as a dipthong.
I carried the tubs into the tent, which contained a row of trestle tables with tablecloths near one end and clusters of potted chrysanthemums round the bases of the two main supporting poles. The living grass of the lawn had been covered with serviceable fawn matting, and bunches of red and gold ribbons decorated the streaky greyish canvas walls at regular intervals. In one far corner stood a blower-heater, unlit. The day was marginally not cold enough. The tent was almost festive. Almost. Jack and Flora, and who could blame them, never wasted good cash on unnecessaries.
There was no tremble in the air. No shudder. No premonition at all of the horror soon to happen there. All was quiet and peaceful; expectant certainly, but benign. I remembered it particularly, after.
Jimmy continued to watch while I carted in a case of champagne and unpacked the bottles, standing them upright in one of the tubs on the floor by the tent wall behind the tables. I didn’t actually have to do this part of the job, but for Jack Hawthorn, somehow, it was easy to give service beyond contract.
I was working in shirtsleeves, warmed by a pale blue V-necked sleeveless pullover (typical racing world clothes) with my jacket waiting in the van for the metamorphosis to guest. Jimmy was understatedly resplendent in thin fawn polo-necked sweater under a navy blue blazer; plain brass buttons, no crests, no pretentions. That was the trouble. If he’d had any pretentions I could perhaps have despised him instead of suspecting it was the other way round.
I fetched a second box of champagne and began unpacking it. Jimmy bent from his great height and picked up one of the bottles, staring at the foil and the label as if he’d never seen such things before.
‘What’s this muck?’ he said. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s the real thing,’ I said mildly. ‘It comes from Epernay.’
‘So I see.’
‘Flora’s choice,’ I said.
He said ‘Ah-oh’ in complete