Rat Race - By Dick Francis Page 0,64

pop-eyed man in his later forties with a good deal of the Duke’s natural benevolence in his manner. The house he presided over opened to the public, a notice read, every day between 1st March and 30th November. The Duke, I discovered, lived privately in the upper third of the south-west wing.

‘The Duke is expecting you, sir. Will you come this way?’

I followed. The distance I followed accounted for the length of time I had waited for the Duke to come to the telephone and also his breathlessness when he got there. We went up three floors, along a two furlong straight, and up again, to the attics. The attics in eighteenth century stately homes were a long way from the front hall.

The manservant opened a white-painted door and gravely showed me in.

‘Mr Shore, your Grace.’

‘Come in, come in, my dear chap,’ said the Duke.

I went in, and smiled with instant, spontaneous delight. The square low-ceilinged room contained a vast toy electric train set laid out on an irregular ring of wide green-covered trestle tables. A terminus, sidings, two small towns, a branch line, tunnels, gradients, viaducts, the Duke had the lot. In the centre of the ring, he and his nephew Matthew stood behind a large control table pressing the switches which sent about six different trains clanking on different courses round the complex.

The Duke nudged his nephew. ‘There you are, what did we say? He likes it.’

Young Matthew gave me a fleeting glance and went back to some complicated point changing. ‘He was bound to. He’s got the right sort of face.’

The Duke said, ‘You can crawl in here best under that table with the signal box and level crossing.’ He pointed, so I went down on hands and knees and made the indicated journey. Stood up in the centre. Looked around at the rows of lines and remembered the hopeless passion I’d felt in toy shops as a child: my father had been an underpaid schoolmaster who had spent his money on books.

The two enthusiasts showed me where the lines crossed and how the trains could be switched without crashing. Their voices were filled with contentment, their eyes shining, their faces intent.

‘Built this lot up gradually, of course,’ the Duke said. ‘Started when I was a boy. Then for years I never came up here. Not until young Matthew got old enough. Now, as I expect you can see, we have great times.’

‘We’re thinking of running a branch line right through that wall over there into the next attic,’ Matthew said. ‘There isn’t much room in here.’

The Duke nodded. ‘Next week, perhaps. For your birthday.’

Young Matthew gave him a huge grin and deftly let a pullman cross three seconds in front of a chugging goods. ‘It’s getting dark,’ he observed. ‘Lighting up time.’

‘So it is,’ agreed the Duke.

Matthew with a flourish pressed a switch, and they both watched my face. All round the track, and on all the stations and signal boxes and in the signals themselves, tiny electric lights suddenly shone out. The effect, to my eyes, was enchanting.

‘There you are,’ said the Duke. ‘He likes it.’

‘Bound to,’ young Matthew said.

They played with the trains for another whole hour, because they had worked out a timetable and they wanted to see if they could keep to it before they pinned it up on the notice board in the terminal. The Duke apologised, not very apologetically, for keeping me waiting, but it was, he explained, Matthew’s first evening out of school, and they had been waiting all through the term for this occasion.

At twenty to eleven the last shuttle service stopped at the buffers in the terminal and Matthew yawned. With the satisfaction of a job well done the two railwaymen unfolded several large dustsheets and laid them carefully over the silent tracks, and then we all three crawled back under the table which held the level crossing.

The Duke led the way down the first flight and along the two furlongs, and we were then, it appeared, in his living quarters.

‘You’d better cut along to bed, now, Matthew,’ he said to his nephew. ‘See you in the morning. Eight o’clock sharp, out in the stables.’

‘Sure thing,’ Matthew said. ‘And after that, the races.’ He sighed with utter content. ‘Better than school,’ he said.

The Duke showed me into a smallish white-painted sitting-room furnished with Persian rugs, leather armchairs, and endless sporting prints.

‘A drink?’ he suggested, indicating a tray.

I looked at the bottles. ‘Whisky, please.’

He nodded, poured two, added