He felt utterly miserable. For two years he’d been fighting the fact that he was crazy about Amber. He’d give up all the girls in the world for her. Nothing had equalled the agony when he’d seen her motionless body at the Field of Hope.
He must be lunatically smitten for it to take his mind off winning the Gold Cup, but even that agony was nothing to the red-hot-poker rage when he saw her in Marius’s arms. It was entirely his fault, he’d taken the piss out of her so often, and now he’d lost her and screwed his career.
As he walked into the Arrivals lounge at Heathrow, his mobile rang. It was Diana Keen from Sunset and Vine, the ace production company with the massive task of covering the Grand National for the BBC:
‘Hi Rogue, Billy Lloyd-Foxe is ill and won’t make it, Bluey Charteris has got pneumonia. How’d you like to come and help us with the commentary on the Grand National?’
131
Rupert Campbell-Black had moved almost entirely away from National Hunt to the flat, winning the big races with the progeny of his stallions to advertise their potency. As each stallion was capable of covering 150-odd mares a year, at a massive stud fee, the riches were unimaginable.
The great Irish trainer at Coolmore, the sheikhs in Dubai and Rupert all respected and liked each other and bought each other’s foals. Although he was a martinet, Rupert’s jockeys and stable staff would jump through fire for him. Now he was fiftysix, not too many miles from sixty, his record-breaking three-thousandth win was expected before the end of the season. But Rupert was not happy.
For a start, he was faced with the problem of the two Eddies. His father Eddie had been such a hit on Buffers, the television show in which retired military men argued about wars, that the public had even started shoving Rupert out of the way to get Eddie’s autograph. Eddie, however, was slipping into senility, resolutely exposing himself in the orangery, addicted to pornography, sliding DVDs entitled Eight Hours of Big Tits and Dicks into a machine and his hands up girls’ skirts.
Even Painswick, who’d helped Eddie out with his fan mail when things had been slack at Throstledown, wasn’t out of bounds and Pocock was threatening to call Eddie out. Rupert, woken by moaning the morning after the Gold Cup, thought it was Banquo the Labrador desperate to go out, but discovered it was one of Cindy Bolton’s Casanovas which a naked Eddie was watching in the study.
More stressful, however, was Eddie the second: Edward Alderton, Rupert’s twenty-year-old grandson by Perdita and Luke Alderton, both international polo players, so Eddie could ride before he crawled.
Arrogant, spoilt, opinionated, Eddie had already achieved considerable success as a flat jockey in America, but having grown too tall and heavy he’d decided to try his luck over fences and had come to spend a year with Grandpa Penscombe and Taggie.
Like Rupert nearly forty years ago, this gilded brat thought he knew everything and was very rough on horses. The rows between him and Rupert were pyrotechnic. Poor Taggie, Rupert’s wife, was desperately attempting to keep the peace.
Racing was different in America. Even apprentice jockeys only ride out from six thirty to ten thirty in the morning, while stable lads, mostly Mexican, look after the horses. Painkillers banned in England are allowed in the States to enable horses to run. Jockeys are ponied down to the start. Eddie refused to admit how terrified he’d been when, in his first race in England, he had to find the start by himself and his horse had carted him. Eddie had also taken some time to overcome his terror of Rupert’s kamikaze downhill gallop. Now he scorched down, taking every liberty.
Young Eddie had also palled up with old Eddie. They watched porn together with howls of laughter and encouraged each other in all sorts of silly behaviour which drove Rupert crackers.
Also contributing to Rupert’s unhappiness was the fact that his beautiful chestnut avenue, a towering candlelit vigil in spring, shedding conkers like a bed of fire in autumn, which he had planted when he first started showjumping back in the sixties, was dying of some incurable fungus, its bark cracking. It might soon have to be felled.
Finally Rupert was devastated because his greatest friend, Billy Lloyd-Foxe, was dying of cancer. Rupert, despite his Olympian caprice, had troops of friends but none equalled Billy for tolerance and sweetness and a sense of humour.