Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,57
to hold your shoulders back if you’re round shouldered and sonic buzzers that don’t actually say what they’re for, and all sorts of amazing things. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘No,’ I said, smiling.
‘I think sometimes of all the people who buy all those things,’ she said. ‘How different everyone’s lives are.’
I glanced at her benign and rounded face, at the tidy greying hair and the pearl earstuds, and reflected not for the first time that the content of what she said was a lot more acute than her manner of saying it.
‘I did tell you, dear, didn’t I, that Orkney has a box at the races? So we’ll be going up there when we get there and of course after the race for ages and ages; he does go on so. He’ll probably have a woman there… I’m just telling you dear, because she’s not his wife and he doesn’t like people to ask about that either, dear, so don’t ask either of them if they’re married, will you dear?’
‘There’s an awful lot he doesn’t like talking about,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, dear, he’s very awkward, but if you stick to horses it will be all right, that’s all he likes to talk about and he’ll do that all night, and of course that’s just what I can’t do, as you know.’
‘Any other bricks I might drop?’ I asked. ‘Religion, politics, medical history?’
‘Yes, well, Tony dear, you’re teasing me…’ She turned into the entrance of Martineau Park, where the gateman waved her through with welcoming recognition. ‘Don’t forget his horse is called Breezy Palm and it’s a two-year-old colt, and it’s run nine times this season and won twice, and once it smashed its way out of the stalls and nearly slaughtered the assistant starter so maybe you’d better not mention that too much either.’
She parked the car but didn’t get out immediately, instead pulling on a becoming hat and adjusting the angle in the driving mirror.
‘1 haven’t asked you how your arm is, dear,’ she said, ‘because it’s perfectly obvious it’s hurting you.’
‘Is it?’ I said, slightly dismayed.
‘When you move it, dear, you wince.’
‘Oh.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better in a sling, dear?’
‘Better to use it, I should think.’
The kind eyes looked my way. ‘You know, Tony dear, I think we should go first of all to the first aid room and borrow one of those narrow black wrist-supporting slings that the jumping jockeys use when they’ve broken things, and then you won’t have to shake hands with people, which I noticed you avoided doing with Tina yesterday, and other people won’t bang into you if they see they shouldn’t.’
She left me speechless. We went to the first aid room, where by a mixture of charm and bullying she got what she wanted, and I emerged feeling both grateful and slightly silly.
‘That’s better, dear,’ she said, nodding. ‘Now we can go up to Orkney’s box…’ All her decisiveness in the first aid room vanished. ‘Oh dear… he makes me feel so stupid and clumsy and as if I’d never stepped out of the schoolroom.’
‘You look,’ I said truthfully, ‘poised, well-dressed and anybody’s match. Stifle all doubts.’
Her eyes however were full of them and her nervousness shortened her breath in the lift going up to the fourth floor.
The Martineau Park grandstands were among the best in the country, the whole lot having been designed and built at one time, not piecemeal in modernisation programmes as at many other courses. The old stands having decayed to dangerous levels around 1950, it had been decided to raze the lot and start again, and although one could find fault about wind tunnels (result of schools of architecture being apparently ignorant of elementary physics) the cost-cutting disasters of some other places had been avoided. One could nearly everywhere, for instance, if one wanted to, watch the races from under cover and sitting down, and could celebrate afterwards in bars large enough for the crush. There was a warmed (or cooled) glass walled gallery overlooking the parade ring and a roof above the unsaddling enclosures (as at Aintree) to keep all the back-slapping dry.
The two long tiers of high-up boxes were reached by enclosed hallways along which, when we came out of the lift, waitresses were pushing trolleys of food: a far cry from Ascot where they tottered with trays along open galleries, eclairs flying in the wind. Martineau Park, in fact, was almost too comfortable to be British.
Flora said, ‘This way,’ and went ahead of me with foreboding. Orkney