If Etta had been vain, she would have sworn Bonny was hanging on to her share in Wilkie and watching Valent like a warder to ensure that a ‘lascivious old lady’ didn’t pull a fast one.
For once Etta was happy with her clothes. Painswick had turned up an old dusty-pink coat to well above the knee, Rafiq had polished her black boots and Trixie, out of her first month’s pay packet, had bought her grandmother a dashing mauve velvet beret topped by a bunch of felt violets.
If only Trixie could buy her a new face as well.
Glancing round as the minibus splashed down Leckhampton Hill, Etta noticed Corinna, glass in one hand, copy of Hamlet in the other, scowling in her direction.
‘If we’d accepted Shade’s offer,’ she repeated sourly, ‘dear David Shilling could have run me up a new hat.’
‘Then you wouldn’t have had a horse to dress up for any more,’ said Painswick tartly.
As a downpour drummed enraged fingers on the bus windows, everyone groaned. Marius had refused to make a decision as to whether to run Wilkie until midday. But the pressure was great. Forty thousand extra were expected on the gate to cheer her home. Cheltenham staff had been rugger-tackling each other all week, practising crowd control.
Nor would Valent let Marius pull her. He had poured a lot of money into Marius’s yard. He wanted results.
The Willowwood minibus was cheered all the way through Cheltenham, loveliest of cities, even lovelier in her party dress of pink and white blossom. Daffodils nodded in the parks like horses after a race.
The pavement swarmed with all types and ages. Seedy-looking men in shiny suits and spiky greased-up hair flogging tickets, smiling Irish turning the whole day into a party, Sloanes in little suits and boots. The Check Republic was out in force, high and low society, saints and sinners, happily mixing as they banged on the minibus window.
‘There’s Mr Pocock, how’s your garden growing?’, ‘Hello, Seth, when are you going back to Holby City? And there’s Corinna, his partner, isn’t she lovely?’, ‘And there’s Woody, isn’t he goodlooking, can we have your autograph?’, ‘And little Phoebe, how’s Bump, Phoebe?’, ‘And look, there’s Etta and Halban, hello, Halban.’
‘Good God,’ said Alban, going pink.
‘They really know who we are,’ squeaked Etta, ‘thanks to Wilkie.’
‘If she wins, the bookies’ll be carried out on stretchers,’ said Joey.
‘“Amber’s up, the money’s down, the frightened bookies ee,”’ sang the crowd as they drifted into the course.
In the hospitality boxes, waitresses were stripping down to their bras and tattoos and donning aprons, red waistcoats and trousers, to provide splendid lunches for over two thousand people. Ten thousand more were living it up in the tented village. For reasons of economy, the syndicate had not hired their own box, assuming they could watch the race from the Owners and Trainers. Now they bitterly regretted it, never having dreamt of such a scrum, as they fought to buy drinks or have a bet. It was like backstage on Britain’s Got Talent, as men on stilts in top hats, women in hoop dresses and ethnic jewellery, belly dancers, brass bands and gypsies brandishing white heather battled their way through the crowds.
Debbie, being used by the Major as a battering ram, was in full throttle, complaining about the dreadful smell of scampi, fish and chips, burgers, frying onions and stale fat as her huge scarlet Stetson got knocked sideways and her splash of colour was splashed with Guinness.
‘How much did you pay for that heather?’ she beadily asked Joey.
‘A fiver.’ Roaring with laughter, Joey tucked the white sprig into his woolly hat beside his gold pen. ‘Gypsy wanted a tenner. I asked her where she’d picked it, she said, “Birmingham warehouse.”’
Alan, who’d been typing the story of a lifetime on his laptop in the bus, invaded the press room, a hive of rattling activity, where his friends Marcus Armytage and Brough Scott descended on him for news of Wilkie. Would Marius run her?
By the window, the great John McCririck, in his check deerstalker with brown earflaps, pored over hieroglyphics like a kindly stork.
‘When I saw Rogue Rogers looking through his legs,’ typed the Scorpion, ‘I knew he had something up his sleeve.’
Having walked the course, Marius finally gave the OK at midday. It had stopped raining, but overhead, dark clouds merged with the William Hill balloon.
‘The ground isn’t ideal,’ he tersely told a flotilla of tape recorders, ‘but Mrs Wilkinson has rested since Warwick in February and she’s very well in