In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,37

had made a reassessment and put her mind to work on her emotions. She greeted me with an attempted smile and an outstretched hand. I shook the hand lightly and also gave her a token kiss on the cheek. She took it as it was meant.

Truce made, terms agreed, pact signed. Jik the mediator stood around looking smug.

‘Take a look at him,’ he said, flapping a hand in my direction. ‘The complete stockbroker. Suit, tie, leather shoes. If he isn’t careful they’ll have him in the Royal Academy.’

Sarah looked bewildered. ‘I thought that was an honour.’

‘It depends,’ said Jik, sneering happily. ‘Passable artists with polished social graces get elected in their thirties. Masters with average social graces, in their forties; masters with no social graces, in their fifties. Geniuses who don’t give a damn about being elected are ignored as long as possible.’

‘Putting Todd in the first category and yourself in the last?’ Sarah said.

‘Of course.’

‘Stands to reason,’ I said. ‘You never hear about Young Masters. Masters are always Old.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Sarah said. ‘Let’s go to the races.’

We went slowly, on account of a continuous stream of traffic going the same way. The car park at Flemington racecourse, when we arrived, looked like a giant picnic ground, with hundreds of full-scale lunch parties going on between the cars. Tables, chairs, cloths, china, silver, glass. Sun umbrellas optimistically raised in defiance of the rain-clouds threatening above. A lot of gaiety and booze and a giant overall statement that ‘This Was The Life’.

To my mild astonishment Jik and Sarah had come prepared. They whipped out table, chairs, drinks and food from the rented car’s boot and said it was easy when you knew how, you just ordered the whole works.

‘I have an uncle,’ Sarah said, ‘who holds the title of Fastest Bar in the West. It takes him roughly ten seconds from putting the brakes on to pouring the first drink.’

She was really trying, I thought. Not just putting up with an arrangement for Jik’s sake, but actually trying to make it work. If it was an effort, it didn’t show. She was wearing an interesting olive green linen coat, with a broad brimmed hat of the same colour, which she held on from time to time against little gusts of wind. Overall, a new Sarah, prettier, more relaxed, less afraid.

‘Champagne?’ Jik offered, popping the cork. ‘Steak and oyster pie?’

‘How will I go back to cocoa and chips?’

‘Fatter.’

We demolished the goodies, repacked the boot, and with a sense of taking part in some vast semi-religious ritual, squeezed along with the crowd through the gate to the Holy of Holies.

‘It’ll be much worse than this on Tuesday,’ observed Sarah, who had been to these junkets several times in the past. ‘Melbourne Cup day is a public holiday. The city has three million inhabitants and half of them will try to get here.’ She was shouting above the crowd noises and holding grimly on to her hat against the careless buffeting all around.

‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay at home and watch it on the box,’ I said breathlessly, receiving a hefty kidney punch from the elbow of a man fighting his way into a can of beer.

‘It won’t be on the television in Melbourne, only on the radio.’

‘Good grief. Why ever not?’

‘Because they want everyone to come. It’s televised all over the rest of Australia, but not on its own doorstep.’

‘Same with the golf and the cricket,’ Jik said with a touch of gloom. ‘And you can’t even have a decent bet on those.’

We went through the bottleneck and, by virtue of the inherited badges, through a second gate and round into the calmer waters of the green oblong of Members’ lawn. Much like on many a Derby Day at home, I thought. Same triumph of will over weather. Bright faces under grey skies. Warm coats over the pretty silks, umbrellas at the ready for the occasional top hat. When I painted pictures of racegoers in the rain, which I sometimes did, most people laughed. I never minded. I reckoned it meant they understood that the inner warmth of a pleasure couldn’t be externally damped: that they too might play a trumpet in a thunderstorm.

Come to think of it, I thought, why didn’t I paint a racegoer playing a trumpet in a thunderstorm? It might be symbolic enough even for Jik.

My friends were deep in a cross-talking assessment of the form of the first race. Sarah, it appeared, had a betting