by any member of the public who really wanted it. Perhaps I should be on the lookout for another unwelcome nighttime guest, one with shifty eyes, in search of bundles of blue-plastic-wrapped cash.
11
On Wednesday I went to Stratford Races. Whoever thought that jump racing in June was a good idea hadn’t envisaged racing at Stratford after a prolonged drought, when the river Avon was so low that the racetrack watering system hadn’t been able to keep up with the evaporation from the sunbaked earth. The ground for weeks had been as hard as concrete, and very few trainers were willing to run their steeplechasers in such conditions.
The overnight declared runners for Stratford had been so few that it was hardly worth the journey, even though Stratford was the second-nearest course to my home, Warwick being a few miles closer.
Add the fact that Mother Nature had decided that, on this day, the six-week drought would break with numerous thunderstorms moving north from France, and one could understand why the midweek race-day crowd was not really worthy of the name.
Only four bookmakers had bothered to turn up to try to wring a few pounds out of the miserable, rain-soaked gathering. Even Norman Joyner, who almost always came to Stratford, hadn’t bothered. And most of the public who had come had the good sense to stay dry in the tote-betting hall under the grandstand, leaving us four bookies to huddle under our large umbrellas with the raindrops bouncing back off the tarmac. Royal Ascot in the sunshine, it was not.
The first race was a two-mile novice hurdle. According to the morning papers, there were five declared runners, but one of them had been withdrawn. The reason given by the horse’s trainer was that the rain had affected the going, but that was a joke. The ground was so dry, it would have needed rain akin to the Noachian Deluge to make any noticeable difference.
The four remaining runners appeared on the course and went down to the two-mile start while a few hardy punters made a dash across the ring towards us to place bets, before hurrying back to the shelter of the grandstand.
“It’s not much fun today,” said Luca in my ear.
“It was your idea,” I said, turning to him. “I’d have been happy staying in bed on a day like this.”
After my disturbed night, staying in bed had sounded like an excellent plan, but Luca had called me twice during the morning to see if I was coming to Stratford that afternoon.
“You don’t have to come,” he’d said in the second call. “Betsy and I can cope on our own, if you want. We had a good night at Newbury without you.”
I had begun to feel I was being eased out of my own business, and that made me even more determined to be here. But now, as another rivulet of rainwater cascaded off the umbrella and down my neck, I wasn’t at all sure that it had been the right decision.
“We must be mad,” shouted Larry Porter, again our neighboring bookie.
“Bonkers,” I agreed.
I thought it was funny how we use certain words. Here were Larry and I, in full control of our mental capacities, using terms like “mad” and “bonkers” to describe each other, while the likes of Sophie, and worse, institutionalized in mental health facilities, were never any longer referred to in such terms even in private. And the terms “lunatic asylum” and “loony bin” were now as archaic and taboo as “spastic” and “cripple.”
The betting business was so slow that Betsy had complained about the rain and taken herself off to the drier conditions of the bar, and I was beginning to wish I could join her.
“Whose stupid idea was it to come to Stratford?” I said to Luca.
“Would you have preferred Carlisle?” he said.
Kenilworth to Carlisle was more than two hundred miles, while the distance from my house to Stratford-upon-Avon racetrack was less than twenty.
“No,” I said.
“Well, shut up, then,” said Luca with a grin. “You’ve got a waterproof skin, so what are you worrying about? As least it’s not cold.”
“It’s hardly hot,” I replied.
“No pleasing some people,” he said to the world in general.
“Why don’t you just go home and leave Betsy and me to make you a living.”
“But Betsy’s gone off in a strop,” I said.
“She’s only in a strop because she wants to do your job and she can’t because you’re doing it,” he said.
He said it with a smile, but he meant it nevertheless.
It