Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,6

takes Edward, Neil goes with me. Third, when we’ve chosen a rallying point, everyone turns up there immediately after each race.’

They nodded. The family crowd control measures were long established and well understood. The regular head counts reassured them rather than irked.

‘Fourth,’ I went on, ‘you don’t walk behind horses as they’re apt to kick, and fifth, notwithstanding the classless society, you’ll get on very well on a racecourse if you call every man “sir”.’

‘Sir, sir,’ Alan said, grinning, ‘I want to pee, sir.’

I trooped them in through the gates and acquired Club enclosure tickets all round. The white pasteboard badges fluttered on cords from the sliders of the zips on five blue-hooded anoraks. The five young faces looked serious and well intentioned, even Toby’s, and I went through a rare moment of being both fond and proud of my children.

The rallying point was established under shelter not far from the winner’s unsaddling enclosure and within sight of the gents. We then went all together through the entrance gate into the Club itself and round to the front of the stands and, once I was sure they all had the hang of the whereabouts, I let the paired elder ones go off on their own. Neil, brainy but timid when not in a crowd of brothers, slid his hand quietly into mine and left it there as if absentmindedly, transferring his hold to my trousers occasionally but running no risk of getting lost.

For Neil, as for imaginative Edward, getting lost was the ultimate nightmare. For Alan, it was a laughing matter; for Toby, an objective. Christopher, self-contained, never lost his bearings and habitually found his parents, rather than vice versa.

Neil, easy child, made no objection to walking around in the stands instead of going to see the horses currently plodding wetly round the parade ring before the first race. (‘What are the stands, Dad?’ ‘All those buildings.’) Neil’s agile little brain soaked up vocabulary and impressions like a sponge, and I’d grown accustomed to hearing observations from him that I would hardly have expected from adults.

We popped our heads into a bar that in spite of the rain was uncrowded, and Neil, wrinkling his nose, said he didn’t like the smell in there.

‘It’s beer,’ I said.

‘No, it smells like that pub we lived in before the barn, like it smelled when we first went there, before you changed it.’

I looked down at him thoughtfully. I’d reconstructed an ancient, unsuccessful and dying inn and turned its sporadic trade into a flood. There had been many factors – reorganised ground plan, colours, lighting, air management, car parks. I’d deliberately added smells, chiefly of bread baking, but I didn’t know what I’d taken away, beyond stale beer and old smoke.

‘What smell?’ I asked.

Neil bent his knees and put his face near the floor. ‘It’s that horrid cleaning stuff in the water the pub man used to wash his lino tiles with, before you took them all up.’

‘Really?’

Neil straightened. ‘Can we go out of here?’ he asked.

We left hand in hand. ‘Do you know what ammonia is?’ I said.

‘You put it down drains,’ he explained.

‘Was it that smell?’

He thought it over. ‘Like ammonia but with scent in it.’

‘Disgusting,’ I said.

‘Absolutely.’

I smiled. Apart from the wondrous moment of Christopher’s birth I’d never been a good man for babies, but once the growing and emerging minds had begun expressing thoughts and opinions all their own, I’d been continuously entranced.

We watched the first race, with my lifting Neil up so that he could see the bright action over the hurdles.

One of the jockeys, I noticed in the racecard, was named Rebecca Stratton, and after the race, when the horses returned to be unsaddled, (R. Stratton unplaced), we happened to pass by while she was looping girths round her saddle and speaking over her shoulder to downcast owners before setting off back to the changing rooms.

‘He moved like a torpid stumblebum. Might try him in blinkers next time.’

She was tall with a flat body and a thin scrubbed face with high hard cheekbones, no compromise with femininity in sight. She walked not in a heel-down scurry like the male jockeys but in a sort of feline loping strut on her toes, as if she was not only aware of her own power but aroused by it. The only other woman I’d seen walk like that had been a lesbian.

‘What’s a torpid stumblebum?’ Neil asked, after she’d gone.

‘It means slow and clumsy.’

‘Oh.’

We met the others at the rallying point