III

Papers in hand, John Quillan waited on the quay of King George’s Dock while cranes swung the horses ashore.

‘There’s one mitigating thing about Darkie,’ Michael had told Annette. ‘He’ll be going to John Quillan.’

‘John Quillan?’ Annette was startled.

‘He’s Leventine’s trainer.’

‘John? A trainer in Calcutta! John! But isn’t he in the Queen’s Own?’

‘Was. Should have had his majority by now.’

‘John has left the regiment?’ Annette, herself a Colonel’s daughter, could not believe it; not the John Quillan she had known in her twenties, danced with, ridden with, watched play polo. And, ‘Why?’ demanded Annette. ‘Why?’

‘There was some blow up. Pity. John was the younger son, but he was sitting pretty. Some exalted uncle or godfather must have been watching over him – expect gave him an allowance. I believe that when it happened John was A.D.C. to the Governor of Bengal.’

‘Calcutta in the winter. Darjeeling in the hot months.’ Annette knew the ritual.

‘Yes. Could have been one of the chosen ones, silly idiot, until… ’

 

John Quillan could remember that day. The Governor’s Military Secretary, Colonel Maxwell, had sent for him.

‘Sit down, John.’

‘Thank you, Max.’

‘His Excellency,’ – the Colonel did not say H.E., which showed the formality of the occasion – ‘His Excellency has decided that you should go on immediate leave. Home leave,’ the Colonel emphasised that point, ‘and on your return you will rejoin your regiment.’

Silence. Then, ‘I don’t have to tell you why,’ said Colonel Maxwell.

John had met Dahlia at a party, a ‘B’ party. ‘In this salubrious city,’ Robert Kerr, a fellow A.D.C. had said to John, then a newcomer to Calcutta, ‘there are A and B girls, the latter for the hot weather only – naturally most of ours go Home then.’

‘I see,’ said John. ‘What happens at the party?’

‘Usual thing. They behave very well and we behave very badly and then they behave worse.’

Dahlia, then eighteen, had been brought by her cousin, cajoled into it – ‘They need more girls’ – and had sat terrified in a corner in her overbright cheap net dress, a little fish out of water; indeed, every now and then she gave a little gasp and her eyes, not confident, nor even interested, were like a sea anemone’s that drop their fringes against the next wave they see coming.

John had taken pity on her. ‘You’re not enjoying this.’

‘Oh yess. Yess,’ but he knew she meant, ‘No, no.’

‘Let me take you home.’

A sharper gasp. Dahlia had been warned about those five little words.

‘You mean – my home?’

‘I mean your home,’ and she had trusted him.

‘At least,’ he told Mother Morag, ‘she has trusted me ever since.’

Even then John had been disgustedly against ‘the hypocrisy and callousness of this hateful city,’ he told Mother Morag. ‘The endless protocol and snobbishness of Government House; come to think of it, of my own regiment,’ and he had defiantly made friends with Dahlia’s father, an Irish Eurasian mechanic on the railway who had married an Indian woman. John had liked Patrick McGinty and his big calm wife and was soon openly calling for Dahlia and protecting her at the parties to which he still went – ‘from monsoon boredom, I suspect.’ Dahlia had also been wonderfully pretty, with a dew of innocence that touched John’s heart and often, in his car, they escaped into the night where, between deluges of rain, the drenched spaces of the Maidan were dense and dark as velvet and there was no-one to see them except, when the clouds parted, stars big as sequins of Indian gold, and, nestling in his arms, Dahlia was sweet and, unlike other Calcutta women, absolutely without guile. ‘How many people are that?’ John asked Mother Morag and, ‘She wanted me so badly,’ but he could not say that to a nun.

He had been warned by the young but more experienced Robert, ‘Don’t get too enchanted, John. It can be expensive, you know.’

‘Expensive?’

‘If you have to buy them off – for a reason,’ said Robert.

John had been warned off too, surprisingly, by Dahlia’s father. ‘We would please ask you, Captain Quillan, not to take our daughter Dahlia out any more.’

‘Why not?’ John had been furious but Mr McGinty was not intimidated.

‘Dahlia is our only child. We think she is beginning to love you very much and we know, and you know, what happens to girls like Dahlia.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ John had said, ‘about this.’

‘Don’t we? You are Captain Quillan of a famous regiment. Also you are A.D.C. at Government House. As soon as your superiors hear, conveniently you will be sent back to England. In our world we are used to broken promises and broken hearts, but please not for Dahlia.’ Mr McGinty was not angry, only sad.

John was silent, then he asked, ‘Do you play chess, Mr McGinty?’

‘Chess?’

‘Yes. In chess there are Kings and Queens, Bishops, Knights – I’m not any of those – and pawns that can be moved any way the player likes. I am not a pawn, Mr McGinty.’

 

‘We have booked you a sleeper on the Blue Train tonight,’ said Colonel Maxwell. ‘Tonight, John. You sail on the Orion next Tuesday. His Excellency has written to your Colonel.’

‘He could have saved himself the trouble,’ said John. ‘I have written to him myself. Sent in my papers.’

‘John!’

‘You see, I married Miss McGinty this morning.’

‘You what?’ and then, as Max took it in, ‘You young fool!’

‘Exactly the congratulation I thought I should get,’ said John.

 

‘He was a bloody fool,’ Michael told Annette. ‘No doubt about it; he could have paid the girl compensation, if he felt he had to do, as dozens of others have done. Maybe she had started a child, but he was let out of it already. Think, Annette, his father, grandfather, great-grandfather were all in the regiment, but John was always uncommonly quixotic.’

‘Or uncommonly honourable. Odd,’ said Annette. ‘He always seemed so cynical and yet I remember him getting angry about things the rest of us just accepted, and I think,’ said Annette, ‘though he kept it hidden, he was the kindest young man I knew.’

 

On the quay this morning of October the sun was already hot. John’s bush shirt was sticking to his back, he could feel the sweat on his neck running down from the band of his felt hat. Dahlia would have liked him to wear a topee – to her the mark of the true English – she was always running after the bandar-log with the topees they too refused to wear, ‘and come to no harm,’ said John.

Other trainers were waiting too but, after the first greeting, they kept apart. His, and their, Indian grooms, waiting to meet their new charges, squatted, gossiping and smoking; a hookah was passed round or biris, the small strong-smelling Indian cigarettes, were offered; some of the men chewed betel. An owner came down, obviously on his way to the office to speak to the popular Australian trainer, Dan Regan. He nodded to John then turned his back.

On the railway siding a gang of twenty brown-skinned crop-headed bare-footed men in dirty loincloths formed up behind a closed iron goods wagon. Another brown man wearing a coat shouted an order and the gang broke into a chant: ‘Hull a lai, Hull a lai.’ The wagon wavered, swayed and began to move.

Somewhere invisible a kite called kee-ee-ee, a sound seemingly unending, infinitely remote.

‘God! What ages they take,’ thought John.

 

Dark Invader and Ted had been shipped with a dozen other racehorses by the City of London from Birkenhead. It had been a cold, dark, drizzling day and now, a month later, the ship moored in warmth and sunlight to discharge passengers at a jetty in a broad river where kites swooped for floating offal and fought aerial battles with shrill mewing cries. Leaning over the rail with the other grooms, Ted saw the domes of a great building in dazzling white marble, brooding over a wide expanse of grass and trees.

‘Thought it would be all dry and brown and dirty,’ said Ted. ‘Look, there’s flowers,’ and there were white people, some of them riders among the flotsam of Indians; motor cars drove past and in the distance was an English-looking church with a spire, and Ted saw what made his eyes light up – the familiar white rails of a big racecourse. ‘Doesn’t seem such an outlandish place as I thought,’ Ted had said.

The horses and grooms were not to get off here, and next day the ship dropped down the river to the docks and the cranes swung the horse-boxes ashore. ‘At long last,’ said John.

The horses walked out of their boxes, stepping gingerly on overgrown shoeless feet under the hot sun. The light was a bright glare and some of them held back, their lads holding them short on the leading rein, being jerked half off their feet. The Indian grooms ran to help them.

Seven of the newcomers were for John Quillan. Two were Lady Mehta’s, five for Mr Leventine. With Lady Mehta, John could not guess what he would get; spending every summer in France, she bought as she fancied. ‘It’s no use advising Meena,’ Sir Prakash – Readymoney – Mehta said. ‘She was born wilful.’ Now John saw a mare – light bay, silky mane, lustrous eyes, a lovely appealing thing but, ‘Back at the knees,’ groaned John, ‘narrow-bodied as a board on edge.’ He flipped over the papers to find the vet’s certificate. ‘Sound’, written aggressively in green ink. ‘You might have been then, you may be now, but you won’t be in a year’s time.’ John tried to keep the pity out of his voice as he patted the silken head. The next was better, a solid dark bay with the broad, well-muscled quarters of a sprinter. ‘Thank God we can do something with you,’ but John’s real interest was in Mr Leventine’s five, his first experience of what that enigma would buy.

Two mares, a gelding and a young colt, sharp little horses good for races of six furlongs to a mile. Sound legs and good feet, bright-coloured coats, even after a long voyage and little or no grooming. The stuff to turn out week after week in the Winter handicaps, to stand the stifling heat and the bashing of the raised course in the Monsoon meetings. No-nonsense types, thought John. His respect for Mr Leventine increased.

Last out of his box, overtopping the others by a hand, was Dark Invader. John looked at his papers. Leventine couldn’t have bought this one, surely? But there it was: ‘Brown colt, off hind fetlock partly white.’ No mistake about that. Seventeen hands at least, thought John, too big for the Course. John looked at the paper again; unplaced since a win first time out eighteen months ago. John frowned. He wouldn’t have thought Mr Leventine would have thrown money away. Then, ‘Good morning, sir,’ said a hoarse croaking voice, and John found himself looking down at a little man whose blue eyes were appraising him – from head to toe, thought John. The polite ‘Good morning, sir,’ was quite unlike the ‘Hy-ah’, or ‘Hullo there’, of the other travelling grooms who relinquished their charges with a pat, sometimes even without a backward glance, as they went off with the trainers to collect their pay – and blow it during their few days in Calcutta, thought John. Why not? Their fares home were paid.

In contrast to their sloppiness, this little man was spruce in a clean shirt with a celluloid collar such as John had not seen for years, a waistcoat with a silk watch chain – probably made for him by his wife or admirer, thought John – cord breeches, box-cloth leggings and worn but brilliantly polished boots; those boots sent John back on a wave of almost unbearable nostalgia to his father’s stable yard and the standards he knew now he had lost.

There was even the inevitable cloth cap, touched respectfully by the finger of one hand; the other hand held the big horse with an authority that kept the Indian grooms back.

‘You must be from Mr Traherne.’ Emotion always made John terse.

‘Yes, sir. The name is Mullins. Ted Mullins.’

‘And I’m John Quillan. I train for Mr Leventine.’

‘Yes, sir, and this is Dark Invader.’

If Ted had expected eulogies he did not get them. John Quillan walked slowly round Dark Invader, appraising the horse as closely as Ted had appraised him. ‘Certainly fills the eye,’ was all he said, exactly as Peter Hay had done. That was too much for Ted and, in his turn, he said what he had told Peter. ‘He’s a bloody lovely hoss, sir, and such a gentleman with it.’

The horse was not the only gentleman. ‘Would it be in order with you, sir, if I walked the Invader home?’

John noted the use of the word ‘home’; evidently Ted’s appraisal had ended in approval, but John had to hesitate. ‘It’s a longish walk, all of three miles.’

‘Good. After tramping round and round them decks the Invader’ll feel a bit strange. He’s used to me.’

‘Of course, but… would you just walk with him?’

Ted flushed. ‘You mean out here an Englishman shouldn’t be seen leading a hoss?’ He was nettled.

‘It’s a question of prestige, yes, but not yours,’ said John. ‘I’m thinking of Sadiq and Ali who will be Dark Invader’s grooms – we call them “syces” out here. Sadiq is waiting to take charge and if he doesn’t… well, there would be a loss of face.’

‘I see, sir. Would he – Mr – is it Saddick, sir? Would he mind if I walked along?’ asked Ted.

 

Ted never forgot that first walk in Calcutta.

Sadiq was a head taller than Ted, the turban he wore making him seem even taller. He was burly – would have made two of Ted, dark with a fierce upturned moustache and prominent brown eyes with curiously yellowed whites, so that they reminded Ted of snail shells; already they were looking at Dark Invader with the pride of a mother in her first-born son and Ted had to swallow and turn his head away.

‘You’ll need a hat,’ John Quillan was saying. ‘That cap’s no good. The sun is hot even though it’s October. Perhaps you bought a topee at Port Said?’

‘Didn’t think it was worth it, sir, seeing as I’m going straight back.’ John noticed, too, that Ted’s face was white.

‘Sure you want to walk? All right, I expect I have a topee in the car – my wife puts one in.’

A second groom had joined Sadiq on the off-side. Dark Invader led the way, the other Quillan horses coming behind but, even with the stiffness that came from the weeks of being boxed, his great stride soon outpaced them. ‘Him fast.’ Sadiq prided himself on his English.

‘Ji-han!’ the other groom panted as he tried to keep up. Ted was glad to see neither of them jerked on the reins. He put a restraining hand on Dark Invader’s bridle. ‘Steady, boy, steady.’

‘S-steady. S-steady.’ The s’s hissed through Sadiq’s teeth.

Their way led, at first, through streets lined with one-, or two-, or three-storeyed houses, ramshackle, most of them hung with notices in Hindi and English, ‘Malik Amrit Lal Patney, advocate’, ‘Goodwill Electric Company’, ‘Happiness Coffee and Tea House’, alternating with shacks and open-fronted shops. Each street seethed with traffic – trams, buses, carts drawn by heavy white bullocks or even heavier massive wide-horned black water-buffaloes at whom their drivers shouted; Ted shuddered as he saw how the men cruelly twisted their tails and the sores, rubbed raw, on the bullocks’ necks. Queer high box-carriages passed, shuttered and closed, with a clatter of hooves and bumping wheels, and again he was sickened by the thinness, rubs and sores of the horses that drew them, some no more than ponies; though they wore strings of blue beads round their necks, and some had aigrettes of feathers in their browbands, their ribs and hip bones stood out, and some were lame but driven on with whips. The trucks had jewellery too, hung with tassels, as did some of the cars and taxis, with turbanned black-bearded drivers who seemed never to stop sounding their horns; now and again a shining well-kept car slid through, with perhaps one person in it and a smart, capped or turbanned chauffeur, but each taxi seemed to hold a dozen people and there were rickshaws, laden too, each with a skinny little man, glistening with sweat, running between the shafts and sounding the clank clank of its flat bell and, around and among them, on the pavements and in the gutters and in the road itself was a river of people.

Ted had never seen so many people, brown-skinned, some in only a loincloth, like those men on the dock, but here pushing loads on carts or with yokes balanced across their shoulders, or on their heads, women too, balancing a pitcher or a basket, or even a bucket, with a poise he could not help admiring. A few men were dressed in immaculate flowing white, a loose shirt, draped muslin instead of trousers, slipper shoes, and carried umbrellas and briefcases – Ted was to meet one of them, John Quillan’s office clerk, or babu, Ram Sen – but babies were naked except for a charm string; they crawled on the pavements. Some of the boys were naked too, with swollen stomachs, and it seemed people lived in the streets; Ted saw women washing themselves under the street tap; true, they were wearing a sari, but the thin cotton, wet, showed every curve. A man, squatting on the pavement, was having his head shaved; another was dictating a letter; the letter writer had a desk, without legs, on the ground. Men turned their backs and relieved themselves in the gutter and Ted saw women slapping cakes of dung – yes, manure! thought Ted, astounded – to dry on walls; it was only afterwards he learned dung was used as fuel. Pigeons picked grain from the grain shops, pai dogs nosed rubbish and everywhere was a hubbub of voices, creaking wheels, motor horns, shouting, vendors’ cries, mingling with a smell of sweat and urine, woodsmoke, acrid dung smoke and a pungent smell that later he was to learn came from cooking in hot mustard oil and, now and again, a waft of heavy sweetness as a flowerseller passed, or from a garland of flowers hung on a door, or from a woman in a clean, softly flowing sari, with flowers round the knot of her hair. Ted saw that between her short bodice and her waist, her midriff was bare and, What would Ella say? he thought; already his tuft of hair was standing on end and he was shocked to the depths of his clean Methodist soul – this is a dreadful place – yet, at the same time he was fascinated, so curiously drawn that he almost forgot Dark Invader.

Dark Invader though, with his customary calmness, passed unruffled; he did not know it, but this was his first encounter with his public.

 

Ted was more than glad when they left the streets and the hordes of people, to strike off across the green turf he had glimpsed from the ship. ‘Maidan,’ said Sadiq and here again were the white rails of a racecourse, well kept lawns and paddocks.

They passed mounted policemen, Englishmen in white uniforms and Indians in khaki. In the distance Ted saw mounted troops, the glitter of swords and the flutter of pennoned lances; a parade was going on but Sadiq turned away to the right, crossed a wide busy road and led the way up another, quieter, tree-shaded, with broad verges on which the horses’ hooves made only a light sound. As they turned in through two huge open gates, once painted green, Dark Invader went still faster as if he knew he was coming to what Ted had called it – home.

 

‘Good Lord,’ said Ted. ‘Good Lord!’ It was the first time he had seen Indian syces grooming.

He had seen Dark Invader into a roomy stall, open-fronted, fenced in by two wooden rails, seen what a good feed was waiting, not in a manger as in England, but in a heavy galvanised tub, seen the crows, big black and grey birds with strong beaks and darting pirate eyes, fly down to perch on the rails, waiting for droppings of corn. They were, John Quillan told him, every horse’s constant companions. Then Ted had gone with John. ‘I have booked you into the Eden boarding house. It’s supposed to be good. I hope it is.’ After a lunch, when Ted was waited on by two table servants and, out of curiosity, tasted curry for the first time – he hastily ordered roast mutton instead – exhausted by the, to him, heat and strangeness as much as by the long walk, Ted had slept in his spacious room until John had come to fetch him. ‘Thought you might like to see my string.’

Ted had blinked at Scattergold Hall, blinked more at the sight of the bandar-log; two were fighting over a large pet ram which, in its turn, was fighting them; one, a girl, was swinging like a monkey on a branch of a tree. An older boy was earnestly schooling a pony, while two, almost babies, were making mud pies on the edge of the drive, pouring red dust and water on each other’s heads. Dahlia, in a rocking chair on the verandah and wearing her usual loose wrapper, sat peacefully rocking and fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan. She smiled over the fan at Ted with her dark fringed eyes and called ‘Hullo.’

‘My wife and children,’ John had said absently. Ted took off the topee John had lent him and bowed, but John did not introduce him; instead, ‘Come and see the horses and our evening grooming.’ He had led Ted to the stable square and Ted blinked again; more than blinked. He had never seen anything like it.

The horses were tethered outside their stalls to rings set in the wall, the syces, two to a horse, ranging themselves one each side. As Dark Invader was so big, Sadiq and the second groom, Ali, stood on upturned food boxes, set far back so that they could throw their weight on their hands, then laid into him with what John told Ted was the classic hand-rubbing – ‘hart molesh’ in Hindi – of Indian horse care. ‘You mean they groom with their hands?’ asked Ted.

‘Every part of their hands, fingers, thumb, the ball of the thumb, the heel of the hand and right up to the forearm. Watch.’

Now and again Sadiq or Ali turned to rinse hands and forearms in a bucket of cold water to wash off the dead hair, then sweating and panting, back again, while Dark Invader grunted with ecstasy and nipped playfully at Sadiq’s plump bottom. ‘Ari! Shaitan!’ Sadiq cursed him happily and Ted saw, with another pang, that already they understood one another perfectly.

At a call from the Jemadar, the Quillan head man, imposing in his maroon-coloured turban, well-cut coat and small cane, the hand rubbing stopped and each man fitted his hands with leather pads, stuffed like boxing gloves, and began using them in a rhythm that resounded round the square: right pad, left pad hard on the horse, then both pads hit together in the air to free dust and sweat; thump, thump – thrump: thump, thump – thrump, over and over again for at least fifteen minutes while Ted stood as if mesmerised, watching. At last the rhythm ended, pads were put away, then came the final polishing with soft brushes and cloths; manes and tails were brushed out, tails bandaged into shape, hooves lifted and cleaned inside and out, then oiled. Finally the men stood by their horses as the Jemadar walked round. Sometimes he stopped, pointed with his cane, criticising sharply; sometimes he gave a nod of satisfaction. When he had made his inspection, he came up to John.

As John approved them, one by one, the horses were led out to walk round and round the track of tan for an hour’s gentle exercise. This was the time when, in the cool of the evening, the owners, and sometimes jockeys and riding boys, gathered to watch, discuss, saunter on the grass or sit under the trees. Meanwhile the undergrooms prepared the feeds, each inspected by the Jemadar, cleaned and filled buckets of water, hung rugs and surcingles ready and made the bedding for the night, carefully edging it with the plait of straw Mother Morag had seen. Then they laid out the bed roll of their particular senior syce on his charpoy – a wooden-framed string bed – set on the verandah: ‘They sleep with their horses?’ asked Ted.

‘They pull their charpoys right across the stall,’ said John. ‘A good groom like Sadiq hardly lets his horse out of his sight all day.’

To Ted it was as if, in more ways than one, he had stepped into a different world. It was not only the, to him, torrid air, the pale glare of the sky – the glare was dimming now as it fell towards evening; not only the strange smells and sounds, the brilliant colours in the garden of the boarding house. He had seen a whole hedge of poinsettias; their garish scarlet and upstanding stamens had startled him – they hardly seemed like flowers; nor did the crimson hibiscus bells, the beds of flaming cannas, and here, in the Quillan garden, the tumbled masses of bougainvillaeas, the gorgeous blue of morning glory, paler blue of plumbago. Ted could not then put a name to any of these flowers, but he could to the parakeets, flying wild in the trees. It was not the shock of Scattergold Hall either, nor of Dahlia and the children, nor the surprise of the stables. Ted felt as though barriers that had penned him all his life had fallen down. After that sleep, when he had come out on the boarding-house verandah, a travelling bearer had been waiting for him – ‘bearer’, he gathered, meant ‘valet’. ‘I look after you, sahib. Save you much trouble. I, Anthony, have many good “chits”’ – which seemed to be references. ‘I look after you.’

The fellow, with his smooth English, was almost in Ted’s room and, ‘I look after meself,’ Ted had said gruffly, but the man had called him ‘sahib’, him, Ted, who, except for a few short seasons and the three years of the war, had always been a ‘lad’. ‘Sahib!’ Though they had only exchanged a few words, Ted felt free and more equal with John Quillan than he had ever done with Michael Traherne, for all their mutual affection and respect. When Michael had been a little boy, Ted had called him Master Michael and he had never sat down in the presence of Annette. Now, feeling happier than he had done since Michael had told him Dark Invader was sold, happier than he had thought he would ever be again, happier and somehow taller – ‘Such a little squirt of a man,’ people usually said of him – Ted stood with John Quillan, watching Sadiq and Ali at work.

Then he watched even more closely. It seemed to his experienced eye that now and again, especially when the strapping approached the Invader’s neck, a muscle twitched and he flinched. At once Sadiq’s hand discarded the leather pad to smooth and gentle the place and Dark Invader grunted with pleasure again but, ‘Might be,’ said Ted as he watched and, as he saw it repeated, ‘Might be – might do the trick.’ He thought he had said it under his breath, but John’s sharp ears had heard.

 

Next day a big sandy-haired, soft-voiced man in breeches and Newmarket boots appeared with a sheaf of papers. This time John did introduce Ted: ‘Ted Mullins, Captain Mack, our Turf Club Official Vet. He has come, as you have probably guessed, to identify Dark Invader as the horse of that name and breeding entered in the Stud Book.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Ted said primly, but he watched anxiously as Captain Mack examined Dark Invader, checked his colouring and markings, looked at his teeth. Then he completed his notes and closed his book with a snap.

‘What did he make of him, sir?’ Ted asked John when the Captain had gone.

‘Mack doesn’t say much unless he’s making a diagnosis. He said Dark Invader looked very like a horse.’

Ted was visibly disappointed. ‘Was that all, sir?’

‘Yes, Mullins.’

That forbade any more questions but it was not all Captain Mack said. The same night he called round at Scattergold Hall for a drink and, when the bandar-log had got tired of their exuberant welcome and gone to their own occupations and Dahlia was singing the current baby to sleep, the two men sat comfortably drinking their whisky. Dahlia’s slow lullaby punctuated their talk, the ayah’s song that had lulled generations of foreign babies to sleep:

 

Nini, baba, nini,

Roti, mackan cheeni.

 

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Bread, butter and sugar.

‘How I remember that,’ said Captain Mack. ‘I was out here as a child, you know,’ and his big body relaxed into peace.

 

Roti, mackan, cheeni …

‘Don’t go to sleep too,’ said John and called to the ‘boy’, as Dahlia persistently called him, but who was, in fact, John’s Ooryah bearer, Danyal, to fill their glasses. It was not until after the fourth of the long pale whiskies, though, that Captain Mack said, ‘Leventine’s new importation – that’s one hell of a horse, John.’

‘So he may be, but he also has one hell of a record.’ John held out a paper. ‘Read this chit Mullins gave me from Michael Traherne.’

 

Dear John,

I send you in the care of his lad, Ted Mullins, one of the nicest horses I have come across, which is saying a good deal.

From the viewpoint of our profession he is a problem. As you will see from his record, a win first time out in good company, nothing since; in fact the highlight of his three year old season was fifth in a field of washouts at Folkestone.

What the record does not show though is his form on the home gallops; at a mile and a half or upwards he is pretty nearly unbeatable – but not in public.

I had hoped to find the solution, but his owner has lost patience, so… Now he’s all yours and good luck to you.

‘What do you make of that?’ asked John.

Captain Mack pondered, then: ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit,’ he said. ‘It can’t be a physical thing; if it were, it would be there all the time, home gallops or race. If we could find it we could probably cure it, but… ’

‘You mean,’ said John, ‘a sound horse that won’t try under pressure is usually one that has been whipped at the finish of a race and has learnt his lesson that if he takes the lead he will be punished.’

‘Exactly. “The shadow of remembered pain.”’ Sandy Mack was given to quotation. ‘It’s in the mind, John. Besides, it’s the leadership instinct; you don’t need me to tell you, even in thoroughbreds, it’s a rare and frail thing – crush it and it has gone for ever. No, John. I doubt if this hope of Leventine’s will win any race this side of Doomsday.’

‘Any race! He’s aiming at the Cups.’

Captain Mack laughed. ‘What! The Viceroy’s? I’m not a betting man and I won’t bet with you, but if Dark Invader gets anywhere near that, I’ll eat my hat.’

‘H’mmm,’ was all John said but, next evening, as he and Ted were watching the grooming down, ‘What did you mean, Mullins,’ he asked, ‘when you said this… ’ he gestured at the working grooms, ‘might do the trick?’

‘You heard?’ Ted was amazed.

‘I heard. What did you mean?’ Ted looked up at John. If a hawk or falcon could have blue eyes, thought John, this man’s are like a hawk’s, missing nothing, but Ted was silent. Some inward struggle was going on. John tried to help.

‘Dark Invader was thoroughly vetted before he was bought, by the vet Mr Leventine chose.’

‘He certainly was.’ The day after Michael’s telephone call from Dilbury, a grizzled man in a bowler hat, brown gaiters and black boots had driven into the Traherne yard in a yellow-wheeled dog-cart drawn by a high-stepping hackney. ‘That was Major Woods, sir. He’s well known and you should have seen the going over he gave the Invader. Even had his shoes off. Real old sort, that one,’ said Ted. ‘Did a proper job and time no object. Learned his trade before there were motor cars. He filled in a printed form with a mighty lot of words and told Mr Michael: “A1 at Lloyds and sound as a bell of brass.” He knew a quality hoss when he saw one – meaning no disrespect to Captain Mack, of course.’

‘Well then,’ and John said quietly, ‘in spite of all that, and Captain Mack’s opinion, you still think there’s something wrong. What?’

‘Ar!’ Ted drew a breath of satisfaction. ‘Soon’s I saw you, I knew one day you would be asking me that. I believe it’s his muscles, sir, high on the shoulder.’

‘Yet they didn’t find it?’

‘Couldn’t,’ said Ted. ‘Not looking at him like that. Can’t see nothing, nor feel it. Pass your hand firm and there’s nothing, but with pressure… muscles have two ends, sir, and it’s deep. Did you see when Mr Saddick… ’

‘Sadiq?’

‘Yes. Mr Saddick was strapping; the hoss flinched,’ and Ted burst out, ‘It was that Bacon what began it. Those damned bow legs of his. Nutcrackers,’ said Ted with venom. ‘Squeezing a hoss in a place God never meant a man’s legs to be – he rides so short, see, and the Invader, he were nothing but a great sprawling baby, and it were his first race. But that Captain Hay was set on a win, no matter what.’

‘Which he got,’ said John.

‘Yes.’ Ted’s face was grim. ‘Will you watch, sir? Just watch – when Mr Saddick lays it on hard.’

John watched, standing close. In his presence, Sadiq and Ali doubled their efforts and, on the far side, as Sadiq came up the shoulder, John saw the Invader flinch and, ‘You’re right,’ he told Ted. ‘There is a tender spot. We’ll get Captain Mack to have a look.’

 

Captain Mack stood, like John had, close beside the horse, but his scepticism showed as he let Ted, as far as Ted could reach, then Sadiq, guide his fingers slowly up the Invader’s shoulder, pressing all the way. Suddenly the horse grew restive. ‘S-steady, Darkie, s-steady,’ hissed Sadiq, but Captain Mack pressed harder – scepticism had given way to intentness – harder, harder – there came a definite flinch and Dark Invader threw up his head, almost jerking Sadiq off his feet. ‘Ar!’ whispered Ted as, ‘Get me something to stand on,’ ordered Captain Mack. ‘You great brute!’ He clapped Dark Invader affectionately on his quarter. ‘You’re tall as a giraffe,’ and, ‘That bench will do,’ he said and, as he got up, ‘Stand still, you,’ he said to Dark Invader as his fingers reached steadily on; a moment later he was looking with interest, not where Ted and Sadiq had shown him the tenderness, but above it, where the hairs of the mane came to an end and, ‘John,’ he said, ‘look here.’

John joined him on the bench. ‘See anything?’ asked the Captain. ‘Look. There’s a scar under those white hairs.’

‘But… it’s minuscule.’

‘On the surface. Mullins, hop up. Ever noticed that before?’

‘Course,’ said Ted. ‘Them’s the only other white hairs he’s got. Had them when he come from Ireland. I reckon when he were a baby running loose he maybe caught a bit of barbed wire, or cut hisself – but that was long before, so it couldn’t be the trouble… or could it?’ Ted had seen Captain Mack’s satisfaction. ‘Could it?’

‘It could. In fact, I think that’s it. Happened when he was a foal, guess you’re right there, but not wire, rolling in the grass more like and met a bit of broken bottle or a sharp stone – anything – and made a small cut that healed on the surface but left damage; maybe a bit of gravel or a chip of glass got in and caused infection deeper down. The muscles lost flexibility – in fact grew fibrous – left a scar in the muscle if you like – nothing to see on the outside but any pressure on that spot would cause pain. When the horse was over-stretched, tired as well – remember how young he was… ’

‘It must have hurt like hell,’ said John, ‘and I can guess that Streaky Bacon’s grip just caught it, which could account for everything. Sandy, you clever old devil.’

‘Don’t thank me, thank Ted and Sadiq.’ Captain Mack got down from the bench. ‘But you’re not out of the wood yet. Sadiq’s “hart molesh” is the best possible treatment, but there’s more to this than that. Everything to do with the finish of a race, other horses challenging, the noise, the excitement, tells Darkie, “Stop before it hurts.” That’s it, isn’t it, old fellow,’ he pulled one of the dark ears.

‘So we still have our problem.’

‘You do indeed. You now have to “minister to a mind diseased”,’ and the Captain went on:

‘“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow

Raze out the written troubles of the brain…”’

‘Macbeth Act Five Scene III,’ said John, ‘so shut up and don’t show off.’

‘Dear me!’ said Captain Mack, ‘and I thinking that cavalry officers were semi-illiterate.’

‘Granted, but I acted in Macbeth at school. First Murderer.’

‘Pity you weren’t the First Witch. You could do with a little magic just now.’

‘Meaning that you think it’s still no go?’

‘Meaning just that. John, face it. You know that a spoiled horse never comes back.’

 

‘Mullins,’ said John when Captain Mack had gone. ‘Why didn’t you tell Mr Traherne what you thought about the horse?’

Ted hesitated. ‘The Invader was never no trouble with me, sir, and there was nothing I could be sure of. I hoped Mr Michael might see for hisself. Then when the hoss was sold, who was I,’ asked Ted, ‘to set meself up against a veterinary like Major Woods? Besides, if Mr Michael had listened, it would have put him in a spot. Don’t get me wrong, sir, Mr Michael, or his father or his grandfather, come to that, would never have let a hoss be sold out of his stables if he didn’t think it was sound, and Captain Hay… ’ Ted spat, ‘he wouldn’t have waited. If he had known, it would have been any old place for Dark Invader, maybe even the kick.’ Ted unashamedly drew his sleeve across his eyes and, for a moment, could not go on. ‘Mr Michael couldn’t have stopped that and I thought with Mr Leven… ’

‘Leventine.’

‘Yes. You see, sir, two of them travelling lads would have done to bring out all his hosses to In’ja, but for the Invader he brought me out special so I thought with him… ’

‘Dark Invader might have a chance?’

‘Yes sir, but has he? Couldn’t follow all that talk,’ said Ted, ‘but I guess what the Captain meant was, if the Invader was to meet Streaky again, even now, he would remember.’

‘Possibly, but he won’t see Streaky.’

‘Or his like?’

‘Or his like. We’ll see to that.’

‘Then – you think he has a chance in spite of Captain Mack?’

As always when John Quillan met opposition he was obstinate and, ‘He’s going to have a chance,’ said John.

‘But how, sir?’

‘I don’t know how – yet – but somehow. We must see to it,’ and, ‘I’m glad you came, Ted.’

‘So am I,’ said Ted.

 

After dinner, when the last bandar had hushed, the last baby been fed, when Dahlia had gone to bed and the last round of the stables been done, John liked to light a cigar – he allowed himself one every evening – and then stroll among the tumbledown terraces and fountains of his scented garden to think over his plans and the problems of the day. Tonight it was Dark Invader.

John could visualise that first race at Lingfield. Dark Invader well away – Michael Traherne had assured him the horse was a willing starter – but when the field caught up with him, forced to quicken his stride by an almighty squeeze in an unexpected place and John saw the typical Bacon finish, the furiously urgent figure, the rhythmically swinging whip, shown but not striking, the horse desperately extended, those legs, thighs and knees gripping vice-like above the flimsy saddle. It must have hurt hideously – ‘a stab from a knife’, Mack had said. Poor old Darkie, thought John. That’s probably what you were trying to tell us stupid old human blockheads. Well, we’re there at last, but what to do about it? What the hell to do about it, I don’t know. With which dispiriting thought he threw away the butt of his cigar, called to Gog and Magog and turned to go to bed.

On the verandah he paused; certain troubled, puzzled and honest phrases were coming back to him. ‘I never had no trouble with him… ’, ‘Had it when he come over from Ireland… but that was before… ’, ‘I never had no trouble with him,’ and, ‘I wonder,’ said John to Gog and Magog, ‘I wonder.’

 

‘Ted,’ said John next morning – Mullins had now permanently become Ted – ‘I have been doing some thinking. I should like you to show me how you ride Dark Invader. Will you?’

‘Will I?’ It was Dark Invader’s fourth day in India and during early work John had had him walked quietly down to the racecourse and on to the exercise track. ‘Will I? Thought I would never be on him again,’ said Ted.

Like most trainers, John Quillan retained his own jockey, a young quarter English, three quarters Chinese, whose name was Ah Lee, but whom everybody called Ching. Ted had already met him, lithe, slim, eager, his black eyes alert. John had picked him out from a set of young jockeys from Singapore and had slowly trained him. Now, ‘Will Mr Ching mind?’ asked Ted. ‘It’s the Invader’s first ride here.’

‘No. No. I like to see, maybe learn,’ but Ching was obviously puzzled as he stood with John, watching.

Dark Invader had acknowledged Ted’s arrival in the saddle with a backward slant of an ear. Nothing else. ‘Not much awkwardness about him after a month at sea,’ said John.

‘I didn’t expect it, sir. Easiest horse alive,’ and Ted told Dark Invader, ‘Walk on, boy. That’s the fella! Just a little trot now. Gently does it,’ and Dark Invader trotted round the circuit soberly, as he was told. There were new things to look at: a fat little sheep: three geese: rough-bottomed baskets full of horse dung: a vulture picking at some small dead animal. Dark Invader examined them all with prick-eared attention, without faltering in his steady trotting. Then, ‘That’s enough,’ Ted seemed to say as he brought the big horse round and back to where Sadiq was waiting. Ted slipped to the ground and patted the handsome neck, while Dark Invader nosed impatiently at his pockets.

‘Thanks, Ted.’ John came up. ‘Just what was wanted.’ Then, ‘Ted, would you ride a bit of work for me? Would you take Snowball, that old grey there, and do the whole circuit with the riding boy on that bay mare? She’s to race in a fortnight’s time. Snowy’s not in the same class, but he has been racing in the Monsoon Meeting so he’s that much fitter. Take them along to the four furlong mark and come home as fast as you like.’

‘Fast! On Snowy!’ said Ching.

‘Exactly. The mare should lose him fairly quickly,’ said John.

Snowball’s stud book name was Arctic Elegance; he was Australian bred, a gelding, now twelve years old; his coat, once grey, had whitened, his teeth yellowed and the hollows over his eyes sunk deeper. Years of slogging round the same racing and practice course had hardened his mouth and soured his temper. ‘I hate ride him,’ said Ching.

John watched closely as Ted began by taking the old horse round and round their group, and saw how Snowball tried to get his snaffle-bit into its usual position against his back teeth – and failed to get it to stay there. ‘Hands!’ said John to Ching. ‘Watch Mullins’s hands.’ They saw Snowball begin to chase the bit with his tongue with a flicker of interest. Then John heard Ted’s voice, ‘Cheer up, old cuddy. ’Tisn’t such a bad old world,’ and saw him run a finger up the side of the hogged mane and pull one of the stiff ears in what seemed one continuous movement. Snowball shook himself and gave a little hoist to his quarters. ‘Good boy,’ said Ted. ‘Come on, let’s show them what we old ’uns can do,’ as they set off to join the mare and riding boy. ‘The touch of the craftsman,’ said John, but Ching did not understand. At the four furlong mark, John pressed his stop watch and waited for the mare to draw away from Snowball. After a furlong she led by half a length but could not shake him off, and Snowball finished galloping stride for stride with his head level with her girth. The stop watch showed a satisfactory time for the mare, a surprising one for Snowball. ‘Well, well,’ said John. ‘The old English long rein finish. I never thought to see it in this city.’

Ching was almost too dumbfounded to speak. At last, ‘Is English style?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Was,’ said John. He walked over to where the riders had trotted back, noting with increased respect Ted’s steady hand and unhurried breathing. They dismounted and John said again, ‘Thank you, Ted. You certainly sweetened that old plug and kept him going. He didn’t even do his usual ducking out towards the rubbing-down sheds.’

‘No, I told him different.’ Ted said it as if it were every day – as it is with him, thought John. ‘I think I often know what’s in a hoss’s mind before he knows hisself. Comes from being with them.’

With them in more senses than one, thought John, but, aloud, ‘I can guess that’s true.’ Then he said directly, ‘Ridden with the best in your day, haven’t you, Ted?’

‘I did quite a lot,’ Ted admitted. ‘Pre-war Derby, four times. Never in the frame, though. Come to think of it, I was third in the Oaks once, and fifth twice.’

‘And what are you doing now when not seeing the world free of charge?’ They were walking towards the Stands. ‘Still riding?’

‘No… retired from all that.’

John heard a pause. Lost his ticket, he thought. I wonder why.

‘Didn’t do much after the war,’ Ted went on. ‘It didn’t seem to matter. You see, I lost my wife in the ’flu epidemic – ’18 that was.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Her name was Ella.’ John did not know it, but this was a rare confidence; Ted had not spoken Ella’s name in all these years. ‘Wouldn’t swop my Ted for the King of England.’ Ella had often said that; she had made Ted feel like the King of England too. Ella, a heap of clay with his flowers beaten into the soil by the rain, and yet it seemed to Ted now as if Ella were suddenly with him again, egging me on to talk, thought Ted. ‘Mr Michael, he took me on ’cos of his father, I think. A man on his own doesn’t need much,’ said Ted. ‘So I did my two, same as when I was a nipper. Must admit there was a bit of whisky – more’n a bit. Then the Invader came – from Ireland it was. I remember the day. After that it was just him. Somehow I never got round to thinking he would be sold… Now… ’ and Ted looked away over the green distances of the Maidan, then quickly recollected himself. ‘’Spect I’ll make out,’ and, ‘You were saying, sir?’

‘I was interested in your finish, the long rein,’ said John. ‘Seems a lost art. The boys nowadays can’t drive a horse without climbing up its neck and think they’re not on the job unless they’re chewing its ears off. Interesting too that you don’t ride as short as most.’

‘Not surprising. When I were a boy, it was all straight legs, toes down. Soon we was all taught different, but I never took to the very short style, like Streaky’s – legs doubled up like a frog.’

‘Yes. I should guess you ride four to six holes longer,’ and John again said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder.’

 

Ted had a fortnight before his ship, the City of Benares this time, sailed for England and, ‘You should see something of India,’ John told him. ‘You could easily make a tour, go to Darjeeling and see the Snows. Everest.’

‘They are lovelee,’ said Dahlia. She and Ted were now fast friends.

‘Delhi, Agra and the Taj Mahal,’ said John.

‘They are lovelee too.’

‘And you could go across and see the Ellora and Ajunta caves and sail from Bombay,’ but all of India Ted wanted to see was here in the Quillan stables – the track that led down to the racecourse, the racecourse itself and its circuits. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’

Ted cleared his throat. ‘If it’s all right by you, sir, could I stay here a little longer? There’s another boat in about three weeks’ time, and I think Mr Michael could spare me as he hasn’t the Invader; and as I’m here… I have a bit put by so could pay my way.’

‘No need for that,’ said John. ‘I was wishing you could give me a hand. Ching hasn’t much experience. There’s Dark Invader to acclimatise and,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘Mr Leventine.’

 

Back from Europe Mr Leventine came to watch the evening parade. Several owners were there, sitting on the seats or benches, walking, gossiping and visiting their horses, giving them sugar-cane, carrots, even apples. ‘Apples! Probably from Kulu! Think what they cost!’ Sister Ignatius would have said. The owners patted necks and pulled ears affectionately, talked to the grooms, often consulted with John, sometimes Ching or the Jemadar. Never at this time was there a sign of Dahlia or the bandar-log.

Gog and Magog, sitting on each side of the verandah steps, kept guard – no owners’ dogs dared intrude. Ayahs were putting the babies to bed, the children were having their supper. Now and again a wail or the sound of a child fight would float out over the lawn, but this was one rule that had to be kept because, ‘Out of sight, out of mind – almost,’ John said bitterly. It took time for Ted to understand.

Mr Leventine’s arrival was different from anyone else’s, as was his car, a large Minerva, painted deep blue with huge brass lamps and a bulb horn in the shape of a brass serpent. The chauffeur was in blue to match, with polished brass buttons, and another servant with a crested turban sat beside him; his duty was to open doors and carry any possessions Mr Leventine happened to have with him. Mr Leventine himself was in a pale grey suit, a carefully folded white silk handkerchief in the breast pocket, a pink rose in his buttonhole. He also wore brown and white laced shoes, the sort unkindly called ‘co-respondent’, of which he was innocently unaware. Of the other owners, the men, mostly in jerseys, sports coats and flannels, looked dusty and shabby beside him and as he advanced with a strong waft of cologne, a few said, ‘Good evening, Leventine,’ but most of them parted before him and became immersed in talk. Only Lady Mehta smiled and waved.

‘Well, Johnny. How are you?’ and Mr Leventine laid a diamond-ringed hand on John’s shoulder who was spared from responding, ‘And you, Cas?’ as Mr Leventine would have liked him to, because the excited voice went straight on: ‘Where are they?’ Mr Leventine had not come to meet people, but to look at his horses. ‘Where is he?’

‘Dark Invader?’

‘Of course.’

John presented Ted who was given a curt nod. Ted could see nothing wrong with Mr Leventine. ‘Dressed up,’ he would have conceded that, ‘but that’s natural, isn’t it? He’s some sort of foreigner and they have different ways. Can guess he’s very rich, probably doesn’t know how rich he is, but not half as much a show-off as Captain Hay. Talks loud ’cos he’s interested,’ and Ted followed as Mr Leventine went along the stables – his horses had been kept in for his visit – discussing each with John. Then they came to Dark Invader who whickered when he saw Ted.

‘Ah!’ said Mr Leventine and stood still. Ted noticed that Sadiq’s eyes gleamed at the sight of Mr Leventine and he gave a deep salaam. ‘Ah!’ and then, ‘You asked me why I bought him,’ said Mr Leventine in a reverent tone. ‘Well, look, Johnny. Look.’ Mr Leventine’s voice was as loud as if he were addressing a stadium. ‘Look at him. He’s bred to the big Open races.’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘I can guess what happened. His owner – this Captain Hay – is, by all accounts, a young man, ambitious for a big win, not interested in anything else. They tried Dark Invader, a certainty to win first time out as a two year old, got good odds about him ante post and engaged the famous Tom Bacon to ride him. Colt was green; got left six lengths but Bacon had his orders so he set about him and got him home.’

‘Correct,’ whispered Ted under his breath.

‘Colt hasn’t tried a yard since. Why? He’s bred right, looks right and moves right.’

‘Hear, hear,’ whispered Ted.

‘But isn’t right,’ John said it calmly.

‘Then find out why,’ commanded Mr Leventine. Then he dropped his voice still further. ‘Don’t you see, now’s our chance, Johnny. His record’s so terrible he’ll be put in Class IV with a lot of Australian washouts and English weeds, and so… slowly, slowly, if we handle him carefully, he need never have another hard race.’

‘Till he gets back to his own class.’

Mr Leventine gave his trainer a long, purposeful stare. ‘He’s in a class by himself,’ said Mr Leventine with finality.

‘That’s what I say.’ Ted was suddenly bold enough to speak aloud, and Mr Leventine turned. ‘Johnny said you were… ?’

‘Ted Mullins, sir.’

‘Ah! I remember. The Dark Invader’s stable lad.’ Mr Leventine, Ted noted, did not call him Darkie. ‘The one I had come out with him.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ted, ‘and I thank you, sir.’

The unexpectedly good manners – ‘It was Ella kept me up to that’ – struck even Mr Leventine. He gave Ted an even longer, harder look than he had given John, then made what John called ‘one of the swift and, usually irrevocable, Leventine decisions’. ‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘this man must stay with the horse.’

‘Stay?’

‘Right through,’ said Mr Leventine.

‘But he’s working for Michael Traherne,’ began John and, ‘perhaps Traherne can’t spare him…’

‘Traherne’, and the, for Ted, omnipotent Michael was brushed away like a fly. ‘Settle terms, any terms they like,’ ordered Mr Leventine, ‘but this man must stay.’

 

Against his usual custom – he detested getting up early – Mr Leventine began to come down for the morning’s work, wrapped in a camelhair coat, his throat muffled in a cashmere scarf. His footman or car attendant or bearer, ‘or what-you-call-him,’ said John, stood behind him holding a shooting stick, a handsome pair of binoculars, and a topee for when the sun grew warm. Mr Leventine watched with John as Ching on chosen horses, the riding boys on others, and Ted on Dark Invader, took their turn.

The scene was always the same; each trainer had his ‘camp’ with horses and syces moving round it, a heap of rugs and saddlery in the middle. The Jemadar called the horses out to the group of waiting riders; John watched tensely, sometimes worried, sometimes delighted. Sometimes he mounted Matilda to ride further up the circuit; sometimes he went on foot, but always shadowed, though never intruded upon, by Gog and Magog, the amber of their paws and flanks wet and dark with dew.

After work, while the grooms and riding boys walked the horses home, most trainers and their owners and jockeys went over to the stands for coffee and chat. John avoided this, riding Matilda straight back to the stables, but with Mr Leventine it was different; he demanded his full rights and talking about his horses, the daily discussion, was one of these.

Over coffee he asked suddenly, ‘Why isn’t that little man riding for Micky?’ – it was the first time John had heard anyone call Michael Traherne ‘Micky’. John had told Mr Leventine about Ted’s riding of Snowball, Arctic Elegance; at the time Mr Leventine had only said, ‘Humph!’ but he had watched Ted minutely and, ‘That man’s a jockey,’ said Mr Leventine firmly.

‘Yes. He was quite well known before the war.’

‘Then why?’

‘Lost his licence.’

‘Not mixed up in any dirty work, I hope.’ The small brown eyes were sharp.

‘Wouldn’t be with Traherne if he had,’ said John. ‘It was a doping case. Mullins obviously didn’t know anything about it but, as you know, once the powers get working they’ll warn off anything in sight up to and including the stable cat, and ask questions afterwards. Poor Ted!’

‘Humph!’ said Mr Leventine.

‘More coffee?’ John had to ask it twice, but Mr Leventine said neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’. He beckoned to his henchman and was gone.

 

In the evenings, after his visit to the stables, Mr Leventine liked to play billiards at the Turf Club. The Royal Calcutta Turf Club was the only Club where he was an acceptable member; its criteria were not colour, race or class, but a true interest in racing and absolute integrity, points on which no-one could have failed Casimir Alaric Bruce Leventine. He was more than proud of his membership, loving the Club’s spacious flower-filled park, its airy rooms, the prestige of its portraits of past Senior Stewards, and admiring its members with most of whom he could not have fraternised except through racing and games like billiards. On this particular evening, it was by a lucky chance that, in a tournament, he was playing against one of the most eminent, the High Court Judge Sir Humphrey Hyde, who was also a Steward and, ‘one of Calcutta’s monuments in the world of racing,’ John Quillan would have said.

The game was a close one and, though Mr Leventine was good – indeed, was known to have a surprising virtuosity – he lost by a narrow margin. Sir Humphrey, who did not mind winning, was amused by the ingenuity with which Mr Leventine allowed it. ‘I wondered what the fellow wanted,’ he told a crony afterwards. ‘Favour from the Bench? Hardly, he’s too shrewd and far too well established. Racing? Probably. I suspect he wants to be a Steward. Well, in a year or two’s time, why not?’ but that, for once, was not in Mr Leventine’s mind. ‘I have a new horse,’ he said.

‘Several,’ said the Judge. ‘I have been looking at the new arrivals you have just registered. One of them puzzled me. Dark Invader – is that the one?’ Mr Leventine nodded. ‘More fashionably bred than we usually see here,’ said Sir Humphrey. ‘Indian stake money doesn’t as a rule justify the price you must have paid.’

‘I got him cheaply,’ said Mr Leventine. ‘Spoiled by a hard race as a two year old. I’m hoping he’ll change his ways.’

‘Rogues don’t as a rule.’

‘Perhaps he won’t, but he’s not a rogue; besides… ’

‘Besides?’

‘I don’t like to see such beauty and breeding thrown on the scrap-heap.’

‘You’re a good chap, Leventine,’ the Judge did not say it aloud, but his look of approval said it for him and, for the first time, for anyone in that Club, he gave Mr Leventine a pat on the shoulder. ‘I wish you luck with him.’

‘Thank you, Sir Humphrey,’ said Mr Leventine with just the right touch of deference. ‘I expect I’ll need it.’ He did not say any more that night.

 

Ted fitted quickly and happily into the life of the Quillan stable and, to his own surprise, into Scattergold Hall. John had suggested he move from the boarding house into a one-roomed annex among the many at the Hall. Ted’s scrupulous soul was satisfied when John let him pay his rent and board from the salary – to Ted enormous – that Mr Leventine paid him. Michael had agreed without demur to his staying – ‘I can’t imagine anything happier for Ted,’ he had told Annette – so that there was no disloyalty. Ted liked his stone-floored room; its windows and doorways had shutters, no glass or door – in the daytime a curtain hung across the doorway; the furniture was so plain that his scant possessions did not seem too cheap, yet there were things he had never had before – and appreciated – a bathroom of his own and a private verandah with cane chairs and a table; along the verandah edge the gardeners put pots of violets and carnations. ‘I didn’t think vi’lets grew in In’ja.’

The bearer, Danyal, looked after Ted’s clothes, made his bed and dusted his room, ‘But you mustn’t ask him to touch any food,’ said John. ‘It’s against his caste.’ It was Ahmed, a Muslim, who brought Ted his meals from the kitchen. The sweeper, called Khokhil, a handsome, tall man, but an Untouchable, swept the floors and cleaned the bathroom, ‘except the basin,’ said John, ‘or the drinking and tooth glasses – he mustn’t touch them. They are Danyal’s province.’ Another of Khokhil’s permitted functions was to look after the dogs and he was as proud of Gog and Magog as Ted was of Dark Invader – but an Untouchable! Ted shrank from the idea of that; indeed, it all seemed topsy-turvy to him. ‘What would Ella say?’ and he was sometimes embarrassed. Ahmed had wanted to stand behind Ted’s chair while he ate, but Ted begged John to tell Ahmed to leave the dishes and go away. John did tell Ahmed but, ‘You will have to get used to it, Ted,’ he said. ‘In a way it’s a sort of respect – not for us but from us.’

‘You mean we recognise their ways.’ That made Ted feel easier – he was used to giving respect, not to getting it – and soon he fell into the routine, almost the rhythm of the day. It began with the rise at dawn, a tray of tea and, to Ted, extraordinary, buttered toast and bananas brought to him by Ahmed, who seemed to work at all hours and never, Ted was to discover, had a day off or a holiday. Then came the ride down to the racecourse – Dark Invader coming behind as he had done at Dilbury – and the morning’s work, carefully regulated by John to the demands of the Invader’s big frame with long periods of walking or trotting under Ted’s expert hands. After that the slow walk back, when Ted had, perforce, to watch Sadiq and Ali do the rubbing down, grooming and the morning feed. ‘As Mr Leventine’s paying me, couldn’t I, sir?’

‘These are my stables and my syces,’ John reminded him.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Besides, it’s not the custom,’ John said more gently, ‘and in India we don’t go against that.’

After breakfast, an English breakfast, came the cleaning of the tack, saddles, bridles, reins, stirrup-leathers; stirrups, bits and whips had to be laid out for inspection. This was the time, too, when Captain Mack came; he was called for the slightest cause. ‘We don’t take chances with other people’s horses,’ said John.

At two o’clock, when the midday feed was done and the men themselves had gone by turn to cook and eat, for horses and syces alike came peace – the syces asleep on their charpoys, the beasts in their stalls. Then, the only sound in the stables was a human snore or the stamp of a hoof or swish of a tail to keep the flies away – the horses wore light nets that even covered neck and heads. A crow might give a lazy caw, a goose or duck quack, hens scratch, but the cats were curled in the verandah chairs, the Great Danes stretched prone on the floor. John slept too, as did Dahlia and the babies, even the children, though not as long as the servants, and the gateman retired into his little cell by the gate, ‘for a whole two hours!’ said Ted.

At first he had tried to keep awake. ‘Sleep in the afternoon!’ but the general laziness caught him too, or perhaps it was the after effect of the curry and rice he was beginning to like, and that Dahlia ordered every day; it was only the rattle of china that woke him when Ahmed again brought tea and Ted heard the Jemadar’s call in the stables, the horses’ answering neighs, and it was time for more work; sometimes back to the racecourse for an hour, sometimes schooling in the school yard, then the evening ritual.

Dark Invader had taken to the country as though in some previous incarnation he had been an inhabitant. He made no objection to the villainous crows that sidled along the bars of the open stall and robbed his food tub. He blew appreciatively on the huge ram that lived in the yard, and formed a grave and kindly friendship with the bandar-log and accepted their offerings of stolen sugar and sweetmeats out of the bazaar: jilipis, sticky sugar rings dripping with sweetness, coconut ice or sandesh – thick white toffee. Above all he liked the attention. ‘He must have been a Maharajah,’ said John. ‘A pasha with slaves.’ His muscles began to harden, his coat to glow. His appetite was prodigious.

The fact that Dark Invader’s food cost three times Sadiq’s total pay, four times Ali’s, did not worry them at all. By the standard of their trade they were well off and had prestigious and steady work at Quillan’s where each was given a blanket, a thick coat of serge, a brown woollen jersey for the winter and two cotton shirts for summer, and was allowed to wear a conical skull-cap with a soft cloth turban wound round it in the Quillan maroon. Sadiq lived and slept on the verandah in front of his horse’s box. Twice a day he handed over for an hour to Ali while he went to cook and eat his food, and five times a day he turned his face towards Mecca and, as a good Muslim, made his prayers, standing, bowing, kneeling, touching his forehead to the ground as he muttered them. Ali, when Sadiq came back, did the same.

Sadiq was a happy man but, ‘Eighteen rupees a month!’ Ted exploded. ‘That’s less than seven shillings a week!’ It was enough for Sadiq; food for the month cost six rupees, twelve annas, so that ten, sometimes eleven rupees would be sent by money order each month to his family; once a year he took a month’s leave and travelled to Bihar to see them. ‘That’s a rum go,’ said Ted, trying to think of himself parted from Ella for eleven months of the year and, what was more, ‘I think this year I no go,’ said Sadiq.

‘But you must. You wife, children… ’ but, ‘Not go,’ said Sadiq and smoothed Dark Invader’s mane. ‘I stay him.’

The co-operation between the two – necessary, Ted had to admit – was complete; the horse’s great handsome head would come down to be groomed, to have the head-collar put on, to accept the bridle. He had never been as confident and tractable. With Ted to ride him, Sadiq always near, and the wonderful ‘hart molesh’ that was beginning to disperse that spot of tenderness, pain and fear seemed to have vanished. ‘Come on a marvel,’ Ted wrote to Michael Traherne.

‘But he hasn’t raced yet,’ said John.