Proof by Dick Francis
He grunted. ‘Plentiful and quite good.’
‘It’s an attractive label altogether,’ I said. ‘Cream background with black and gold lettering, and a line drawing of an elegant château. The château reminds me of somewhere… I wish you could see it, you might recognise it.’
‘Soak it off, my dear Tony, and send it.’
‘Yes, I might.’
‘And the wine under the label?’ he asked. ‘What of the wine?’
‘At a guess, mostly Italian. Blended with maybe Yugoslav, blended again with anything handy. Impossible, I would think, to distinguish its origins, even for a master of wine. It’s light. Not much body. No finish. But pleasant enough. Palatable. No one would think it undrinkable. Wherever it came from it wasn’t abused too much before it was bottled.’
‘Bordeaux bottled…’ he said thoughtfully.
‘If the château doesn’t exist, the wine could have been bottled anywhere,’ I said. ‘I kept the cork. It looks pretty new and there is no lettering on it.’
The row of six corks stood before me on the desk, all identical. When châteaux bottled their own wine in their own cellars they stamped the corks with their name and the year of vintage. Anyone ordering a château-bottled wine would expect to see the cork, consequently a swindler would be less likely to present his work as château-bottled: too great a risk of a clued-up customer knowing what he wasn’t being given.
Whoever had chosen the Silver Moondance labels had chosen well: all familiar-sounding respected names, all saleable at a substantial price. At a guess the wine itself, part of the great European wine lake, might have cost the bottler one-fiftieth of what Larry Trent’s diners had been charged.
I asked Henri Tavel when I could telephone again.
‘Tomorrow night, again at this time. I will enquire at once in the morning.’
I thanked him several times and we disconnected, and I pictured him as I’d so often seen him, sitting roundly at his big dining table with its lace cloth, drinking armagnac alone after the evening meal and refusing to watch television with his wife.
Flora collected me from the shop at one the following day as arranged and drove me in Jack’s opulent car to Martineau Park races. She talked most of the way there out of what seemed a compulsive nervousness, warning me mostly about what not to say to Orkney Swayle, the owner she felt cowed by.
Flora, I thought, had no need to be cowed by anybody. She had status in the racing world, she was pleasant to look at in a motherly middle-aged way and she was dressed for action in tailored suit and plainly expensive shoes. Self-confidence had to come from within, however, and within Flora one could discern a paralysed jelly.
‘Don’t ask him why he’s called Orkney,’ she said. ‘He was conceived there.’
I laughed.
‘Yes, but he doesn’t like it. He likes the name itself because it has grandeur which he’s always looking for, and Tony dear, if you can be a bit grand like Jimmy it will do very well with Orkney. Put on your most upper-class voice like you do sometimes when you aren’t thinking, because I know you damp it down a bit in the shop so as not to be intimidating to a lot of people, if you see what I mean.’
I was amused and also rueful at her perception. I’d learned on my first day of sweeping and carrying as general wine shop dogsbody that my voice didn’t fit the circumstances, and had altered my ways accordingly. It had been mostly a matter, I’d found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I’d just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman.
‘I’ll do my best Jimmy imitation,’ I promised. ‘And how is he, by the way?’
‘Much better, dear, thank goodness.’
I said I was glad.
‘Orkney thinks he owns Jack, you know,’ she said, reverting to what was more immediately on her mind. ‘He hates Jack talking to other owners.’ She slowed for a roundabout and sighed. ‘Some owners are dreadfully jealous, though I suppose I shouldn’t say so, but Orkney gets quite miffed if Jack has another runner in Orkney’s race.’
She was driving well and automatically, her mind far from the road. She told me she usually drove Jack to meetings: he liked to read and think on the way there and sleep on the way back. ‘About the only time he sits still, dear, so it has to be good for him.’
‘How old is this Orkney?’ I asked.
‘Getting on for fifty, I should think. He manufactures some frantically unmentionable undergarments, but he’ll never say exactly what. He doesn’t like one to talk about it, dear.’ She almost giggled. ‘Directoire knickers, do you think?’
‘I’ll be careful not to ask,’ I said ironically. ‘Directoire knickers! Do even great-grannies wear them any more?’
‘You see them in those little advertisements on Saturdays in the newspapers,’ Flora said, ‘along with things to hold your shoulders back if you’re round shouldered and sonic buzzers that don’t actually say what they’re for, and all sorts of amazing things. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘No,’ I said, smiling.
‘I think sometimes of all the people who buy all those things,’ she said. ‘How different everyone’s lives are.’
I glanced at her benign and rounded face, at the tidy greying hair and the pearl earstuds, and reflected not for the first time that the content of what she said was a lot more acute than her manner of saying it.
‘I did tell you, dear, didn’t I, that Orkney has a box at the races? So we’ll be going up there when we get there and of course after the race for ages and ages; he does go on so. He’ll probably have a woman there… I’m just telling you dear, because she’s not his wife and he doesn’t like people to ask about that either, dear, so don’t ask either of them if they’re married, will you dear?’
‘There’s an awful lot he doesn’t like talking about,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, dear, he’s very awkward, but if you stick to horses it will be all right, that’s all he likes to talk about and he’ll do that all night, and of course that’s just what I can’t do, as you know.’
‘Any other bricks I might drop?’ I asked. ‘Religion, politics, medical history?’
‘Yes, well, Tony dear, you’re teasing me…’ She turned into the entrance of Martineau Park, where the gateman waved her through with welcoming recognition. ‘Don’t forget his horse is called Breezy Palm and it’s a two-year-old colt, and it’s run nine times this season and won twice, and once it smashed its way out of the stalls and nearly slaughtered the assistant starter so maybe you’d better not mention that too much either.’
She parked the car but didn’t get out immediately, instead pulling on a becoming hat and adjusting the angle in the driving mirror.
‘1 haven’t asked you how your arm is, dear,’ she said, ‘because it’s perfectly obvious it’s hurting you.’
‘Is it?’ I said, slightly dismayed.
‘When you move it, dear, you wince.’
‘Oh.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better in a sling, dear?’
‘Better to use it, I should think.’
The kind eyes looked my way. ‘You know, Tony dear, I think we should go first of all to the first aid room and borrow one of those narrow black wrist-supporting slings that the jumping jockeys use when they’ve broken things, and then you won’t have to shake hands with people, which I noticed you avoided doing with Tina yesterday, and other people won’t bang into you if they see they shouldn’t.’
She left me speechless. We went to the first aid room, where by a mixture of charm and bullying she got what she wanted, and I emerged feeling both grateful and slightly silly.
‘That’s better, dear,’ she said, nodding. ‘Now we can go up to Orkney’s box…’ All her decisiveness in the first aid room vanished. ‘Oh dear… he makes me feel so stupid and clumsy and as if I’d never stepped out of the schoolroom.’
‘You look,’ I said truthfully, ‘poised, well-dressed and anybody’s match. Stifle all doubts.’
The Martineau Park grandstands were among the best in the country, the whole lot having been designed and built at one time, not piecemeal in modernisation programmes as at many other courses. The old stands having decayed to dangerous levels around 1950, it had been decided to raze the lot and start again, and although one could find fault about wind tunnels (result of schools of architecture being apparently ignorant of elementary physics) the cost-cutting disasters of some other places had been avoided. One could nearly everywhere, for instance, if one wanted to, watch the races from under cover and sitting down, and could celebrate afterwards in bars large enough for the crush. There was a warmed (or cooled) glass walled gallery overlooking the parade ring and a roof above the unsaddling enclosures (as at Aintree) to keep all the back-slapping dry.
The two long tiers of high-up boxes were reached by enclosed hallways along which, when we came out of the lift, waitresses were pushing trolleys of food: a far cry from Ascot where they tottered with trays along open galleries, eclairs flying in the wind. Martineau Park, in fact, was almost too comfortable to be British.
Flora said, ‘This way,’ and went ahead of me with foreboding. Orkney Swale, I thought, simply couldn’t be as intimidating as she made out.
The door of his box stood open. Flora and I reached it together and looked in. A sideboard scarcely groaning with food and drink stood against the wall. Three small tables with attendant chairs filled the rest of the floor space, with glass doors to the viewing balcony beyond. To the right of the entrance door, a small serving pantry, clean and uncluttered. Orkney’s, unlike some of the boxes we’d passed, wasn’t offering lunch.
A man sat alone at one of the tables, head bent over a racing newspaper and form book, pen at the ready for making notes.
Flora cleared her throat, said ‘Orkney?’ waveringly and took three tentative steps into the box. The man at the table turned his head without haste, an enquiring expression raising his eyebrows. Even when he saw Flora and clearly knew her he was in no rush to stand up. He finally made it, but as if the politeness were something he’d belatedly thought of, not an instinctive act of greeting.
He was tall, sandy haired, wore glasses over pale blue eyes, smiled with reluctance.
‘This is Tony Beach, Orkney,’ Flora said.
Orkney looked me calmly up and down, gaze pausing briefly on the sling. ‘Jack’s assistant?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ Flora said, ‘a friend.’
‘How do you do?’ I said in my best Jimmy manner, and got a nod for it, which seemed to relieve Flora, although she still tended to shift from foot to foot.
‘Jack asked me to tell you he’d had good reports about Breezy Palm from the head lad,’ she said valiantly.
‘I talked to Jack myself,’ Orkney said. After a noticeable pause he added, ‘Would you care for a drink?’
I could sense Flora about to refuse so I said ‘Yes, why not?’ in a Jimmy drawl, because a stiffener might be just what Flora needed.
Orkney looked vaguely at the sideboard upon which stood a bottle of gin, a bottle of scotch, an assortment of mixers and several glases. He picked up an empty glass which had been near him on the small table, transferred it to the sideboard and stretched out his hand to a Seagram’s bottle.
‘Gin and tonic, Flora?’ he offered.
‘That would be nice, Orkney.’
flora bought gin from me to give to visiting owners, saying she didn’t much care for it herself. She watched apprehensively as Orkney poured two fingersworth and barely doubled it with tonic.
‘Ice? Lemon?’ he asked, and added them without waiting for an answer. He handed her the glass while looking at me. ‘And you… er… same for you?’
‘Scotch,’ I said. ‘Most kind.’
It was Teacher’s whisky, standard premium. He poured the two fingers and hovered a hand between ginger ale and soda, eyebrows elevated.
‘Just as it comes,’ I said. ‘No ice.’
The eyebrows rose higher. He gave me the glass, recapped the whisky and returned to the gin for himself. Two and a half fingers. Very little tonic. Two chunks of ice.
‘To luck,’ I said, taking a sip. To… ah… Breezy Palm.’
‘Oh yes,’ Flora said. ‘Breezy Palm.’
The blended flavours trickled back over my tongue, announcing their separate presences, grain, malt and oakwood, familiar and vivid, fading slowly to aftertaste. I maybe couldn’t have picked Teacher’s reliably from a row of similar blends, but one thing was certain: what I was drinking wasn’t Rannoch.
‘Hurt your arm?’ Orkney asked.
‘Er…’ I said. ‘Had an accident with a door.’
Flora’s eyes widened but to my relief she refrained from rushing in with details. Orkney merely nodded, acknowledging life’s incidental perils. ‘Too bad,’ he said.
A waitress appeared at the doorway, pushing a trolley. A quick glance at Flora’s face showed me one couldn’t expect too much from this, and the reality turned out to be three moderately large plates bearing respectively crustless sandwiches, cheese with biscuits and strawberry tartlets, all tautly wrapped in transparent cling-film. The waitress asked if she could liberate the modest feast but Orkney said no, he would do it later, and there it all sat, mouthwateringly out of reach.
‘In the good old days,’ Flora told me later, ‘one used to be able to take one’s own food and drink to one’s box, but now the caterers have an absolute stranglehold and everyone has to buy everything from them, and for some things they are frightfully expensive, absolutely exorbitant my dear, and Orkney resents it so much that he buys the absolute minimum. He’s not really so mean as he looks today, it’s just his way… he told us once that the caterers charge bar prices in the boxes, whatever that means, and that it made him very angry.’
‘Bar prices?’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Is that so bad, dear?’
‘Judging from race meeting bar prices, about a hundred and fifty per cent profit on a bottle of scotch.’
Flora worked it out. ‘So Orkney has to pay in his box more than double what the same bottle costs in your shop?’
‘Yes, a good deal more than double.’
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I’d no idea drinks in the boxes cost so much.’
‘A pound barely wets the glass.’
‘You’re teasing me.’
‘Not entirely,’ I said.
‘No wonder Orkney resents having to pay that much when he used to take his own.’
‘Mm,’ I said reflectively. ‘The caterers do have big overheads, of course, but to charge by the tot in the boxes…’
‘By the tot, dear?’
‘Thirty-two tots to a bottle. That’s the single measure for spirits in all bars, racing or not. Two centilitres. One large mouthful or two small.’
Flora hardly believed me. ‘I suppose I don’t often buy drinks in bars, dear,’ she said sighing. ‘Jack does it, you see.’
In hindsight Orkney Swayle’s hand on the bottles had been lavish: generosity well disguised by a cold demeanour. And the external manners, I came to see during the afternoon, were not intentionally rude, but a thoughtless habit, the sort of behaviour one could inherit in ultra-reserved families. He appeared not to be aware of the effect he had on others and would perhaps have been astonished to know he reduced Flora to quivers.
Orkney made inroads in his gin with his regard impassively on my face.
‘Are you knowledgeable about horses?’ he asked.
I began to say ‘marginally’ but Flora didn’t want any sort of modest disclaimers on my part, she wanted Orkney to be impressed. ‘Yes of course he is, Orkney, his mother is a master of hounds and his father was a colonel and the greatest amateur rider of his generation and his grandfather was also a colonel and nearly won the Grand National…’
The faintest of gleams entered and left Orkney’s eyes
‘Yes, Flora,’ he said. ‘Those references are impeccable.’
‘Oh.’ She fell silent, not knowing if he were mocking her, and went pink round the nose, looking unhappily down at her drink.
‘Breezy Palm,’ Orkney said, oblivious, ‘is by Desert Palm out of Breezy City, by Draughty City, which was a half-brother to Goldenburgh whose sire won the Arc de Triomphe, of course.’
He paused as if expecting comment so I obligingly said, ‘What interesting breeding,’ which seemed to cover most eventualities, including my own absolute ignorance of all the horses involved.
He nodded judiciously. ‘American blood, of course. Draughty City was by Chicago Lake out of a dam by Michigan. Good strong hard horses. I never saw Draughty City of course, but I’ve talked to people who saw him race. You can’t do better than mixed American and British blood, I always say.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said.
Orkney discoursed for several further minutes on Breezy Palm’s antecedents with me making appropriate comments here and there and Flora, on the edge of my vision, slowly beginning to relax.
Such progress as she had made was however ruined at that point by the arrival from the powder room of the lady to whom Orkney wasn’t married, and it was clear that however much Orkney himself made Flora feel clumsy, his lady did it double.
Compared with Flora she was six inches taller, six inches slimmer and approximately six years younger. She also had strikingly large grey eyes, a long thin neck and luminous make-up, and was wearing almost the same clothes but with distinctly more chic: tailored suit, good shoes, neat felt hat at a becoming angle. An elegant, mature, sophisticated knock-out.
To the eye it was no contest. Flora looked dumpy beside her, and knew it. I put my arm round her shoulders and hugged her and thought for one dreadful second that I’d reduced her to tears.
‘Flora,’ Orkney said, ‘of course you and Isabella know each other… Isabella, my dear, this is Flora’s walker… er… what did you say your name was?’
I told him. He told Isabella. Isabella and I exchanged medium hello smiles and Orkney returned to the subject of American forebears.