Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,21
said you’d come… Have you got time?’
‘For what?’ I asked.
‘Um… Tony dear, I don’t know how much I can ask of you, but would you… could you possibly… walk round the yard with me?”
‘Well, of course,’ I said, surprised. ‘If you want.’
‘It’s evening stables,’ she explained in a rush. ‘Jack was so insistent I walked round. He wants me to tell him how everything is, because we’ve a new head lad, he came only last week, and Jack says he’s not sure of him in spite of his references, and he made me promise I’d walk round. And he knows, he really does, that I don’t know enough about horses, but he wanted me to promise… and he was so depressed, that I did.’
‘No problem at all,’ I said. ‘We’ll walk round together, and we’ll both listen, and afterwards we’ll make notes for you to relay to Jack.’
She sighed with relief and looked at her watch. ‘It’s time now, I should think.’
‘O.K.’ I said, and we walked round the house to the stables and to the sixty or so equine inmates.
In Jack’s yard there were two big old quadrangles, built of wood mostly, with a preponderance of white paint. Some of the many doors stood wide open with lads carrying sacks and buckets in and out, and some were half closed with horses’ heads looking interestedly over the tops.
‘We’d better do the colts’ yard first,’ Flora said, ‘and the fillies’ yard after, like Jack does, don’t you think?’
“Absolutely,’ I agreed.
I knew about horses to the extent that I’d been brought up with them, as much after my father’s death as before. My mother, wholly dedicated, seldom talked of much else. She had in her time ridden in point-to-point races and also adored to go hunting, which filled her life whenever my father was away on duty, and his as well when he was at home and not that minute racing. I had seen day after day the glowing enjoyment in their faces and had tried hard to feel it myself, but whatever enthusiasm I’d shown had been counterfeit, for their sakes. Galloping after hounds across muddy November fields I had thought chiefly of how soon one could decently go home, and the only part of the ritual I had actually enjoyed had been the cleaning and feeding of the horses afterwards. Those great creatures, tired and dirty, were so uncritical. They never told one to keep one’s heels down, one’s elbows in, one’s head up, one’s spine straight. They didn’t expect one to be impossibly brave and leap the largest fences. They didn’t mind if one sneaked through gates instead. Closed into a box with a horse, humming while I brushed off dried mud and sweat, I’d felt a sort of dumb complete communion, and been happy.
After my father died my mother had hunted on with unfaltering zeal and had for the past ten years been joint master of the local hounds, to her everlasting fulfilment. It had been a relief to her, I often thought, when I had finally left home.
Jack Hawthorn’s lads were halfway through the late afternoon programme of mucking out, feeding and watering, a process known throughout the racing world as ‘evening stables’. It was the custom for the trainer to walk round, usually with the head lad, stopping at every box to inspect the racer within, feeling its legs for heat (bad sign) and looking for a bright eye (good).
Jack’s new head lad had greeted Flora’s appearance with an exaggerated obsequiousness which I found distasteful and which seemed also to make Flora even less sure of herself. She introduced him as Howard, and told him Mr Beach would be accompanying her on the rounds.
Howard extending the Uriah Heep manner to myself, we set off on what was clearly the normal pattern, and I listened attentively for Flora’s sake to every Howard opinion.
Very little, it seemed to me, could have been different from the morning before, when Jack himself had been there. One horse had trodden on a stone out at exercise and was slightly footsore. Another had eaten only half of his midday feed. A third had rubbed skin off a hock, which would need watching.
Flora said ‘I see,’ and ‘I’ll tell Mr Hawthorn,’ at regular intervals and Howard ingratiatingly said that Flora could safely leave everything to him, Howard, until Mr Hawthorn’s return.
We came in turn to the Sheik’s horses, still in residence, and also to Larry Trent’s, bursting with health. They had been