Shall we get back to Carmen’s wonderful day at Newmarket? Sun shone, flags waved, crowds thronged, horses paraded, sweated, rolled their eyes and tossed their manes; punters thrilled to victory or were cast down by defeat: millions of pounds changed hands: cheques bounced, bookies yelled, villains slunk, men drank themselves silly in the bar, and women, though there were fewer of them, drank themselves even sillier, and no doubt a lot of sex went on behind bushes or underneath the grandstands; a day at the races is like that − as smooth, sexy and brilliant as the satin of the jockeys’ colours. Too drastic for some tastes; excess and risk in the air, and underneath it all the heady suspicion of corruption. Who’s paying whom to pull this horse, dope that one? People whisper in each other’s ears; talk behind their hands; and small, hunted, thin-faced, weathered, elderly men – stable lads that is, thus dismissively referred to, those with actual working contact with the horses – dodge or doff their caps to everyone in sight. (Servility’s bred into them. They are offended by pay rises, so their masters aver. But they would, wouldn’t they?) Not poison in the golden goblet of the Borgias any more: just a little nasty something in the bran mash, as friend betrays friend, wife stabs husband, for the sake of the smooth-skinned beasts with the eyelashes and unsafe-looking legs, creatures who can’t even speak, can’t ever answer back. A horse-owning sheik, they say, has just built a palace for his steed a couple of miles outside Newmarket. The horse lives in marble rooms carpeted with the finest silk rugs: there are gold taps on his bath; he has full air conditioning. He lives better than any human around. But he doesn’t have his freedom, does he, folks? That’s meant to add up to something. He can’t leave his palace without help any more than I can leave my wheelchair. And he can’t even complain about it the way I can; all he can do is roll his large reproachful eyes.
Down Newmarket way, the fact that the Emperor Caligula declared his horse his successor makes perfect sense to everyone.
An outing to the races has become a favourite PR exercise for many a contemporary firm which wishes to give its client a memorable treat, and stengthen the bonds of trust and gratitude which from time immemorial, etc. have linked vendor to emptor. No doubt the Emperor Nero took the captains of his slave ships to his box at the Arena to watch the gladiators die, and next week beat down their asking price. No doubt the wily Emperor Diocletian, organising his triumph through Rome on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his reign, invited along the suppliers of Roman Purple, with which he was soon to subvert the Senate. (Someone’s dropped off twelve copies of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the Centre. The print is tiny but the contents are absorbing, which is just as well. I have nothing else to do but read. No one takes me to Newmarket for the day. I have to imagine what’s going on: but perhaps it makes a better day out because it’s all in the head − who’s to say? I’m not.)
The marquee which was Peckhams’ for the day took its place in an encampment of others just like it – white canvas elegantly lined with enough tucked and pleated filmy fabric to put one in mind of the princely tents of the Bedouin. There were little gold tables and chairs, and a big TV perched up high to show the races in better detail and at greater length than the human eye could manage – for what do horses do as you press up against the rail but just thunder past; though the approaching and increasing roar of the crowd, reaching its praxis just where you stand, and then passing and fading thereafter, is no doubt excitement enough for some. A temporary tote had been set up in the corner, a booth staffed by two dutifully polite but bored women who had seen better days and better jobs, and a bar where champagne was served free for the first hour. After that you paid for yourself. How everyone drank!
Carmen’s taxi driver lost his way several times, so she arrived too late for the free drink, but was not short of offers of champagne from Peckhams’ management over lunch. Henrietta Cotton was courteous enough to say how pleased she was that Carmen had turned up: how bad she’d felt when Carmen had been left behind.
‘It’s usually me,’ she remarked, ‘it happens to.’
Shanty just said, ‘Glad you could make it, Carmen. Quite an initiative test, what?’
Poppy managed to keep an eye on Ronnie, dragging him away should he drift too near Carmen, while also, on and off, gazing into Shanty Cotton’s eyes. Shanty, who was becoming dangerously red in the face, kept chucking her under the chin and saying to Ronnie, ‘Wonderful taste you’ve got, Ronnie,’ or ‘I’d keep an eye on this one if I were you, Ronnie,’ or ‘How about coming aboard the Peckhams’ ship, Poppy?’ while she dimpled and clung. Carmen wondered how anyone could take Poppy seriously, but it seemed men did. While Carmen wore her cartwheel hat and Zandra Rhodes dress she could move only slowly and with dignity. Poppy’s pillbox hat was no trouble to Poppy at all. Henrietta sat in a corner under her straw brim and looked sad, but Shanty took no notice.
Driver was not there, but his emissaries were. None other than Prince Leopold stumbled into her as she clung to the rail, cheering, wondering quite what was going on, or which horse was which. He tipped her hat right off, falling to his knees before her the quicker to pick it up, his spaniel eyes adoring, slightly bloodshot, as the eyes of spaniels often are. Royalty on its knees before little Carmen Wedmore of Fenedge, East Anglia!
‘A thousand pardons,’ begged Prince Leopold, from his knees. ‘Kick me, whip me, beat me for my error. I deserve it. I shan’t complain. The charm, the grace of your dress: the beauty of your legs!’ Carmen moved them closer together: he was staring up them. ‘The elegance! Have you escaped perhaps from some royal party somewhere? It is where you rightly belong. Let me introduce myself. Prince Leopold of Croatia, nephew of the rightful monarch, soon to regain his throne. I am the only heir. Open your heart to me and the whole world will open up to you!’
Carmen took her hat and turned her back on him. When she looked over her shoulder he was gone. She went into the Ladies in order to leave her hat there, but someone ran after her with it, so she put it back on and watched a race or so, then returned to the marquee, where all Peckhams and its associates were singing the Whipperpool Song, still moaning on out of a dreadful Sinatra-ridden past:
‘We’re three little lambs who have lost our way,
Baa-baa-baa –
Gentlemen songsters out on a spree,
Doomed from here to eternity –’
‘God have mercy on such as we,’ said Carmen to Henrietta, who was joining in the singing, in a pitiful attempt not to be a wet blanket. Everyone who was anyone in the Poultry World sang and swayed that day, and swayed and sang, carried away by emotion, regret for time wasted and opportunities lost, and the need to drink to forget. A terrible, wistful, feathery melancholy seized them all.
Someone bumped Carmen’s elbow; none other than Rollo Hopper the film star: staring and smiling out of whisky fumes and cigar smoke, and the smell of fried onions from the catering van just outside the marquee: ‘Upper Crust Catering’.
‘Well, whaddya know,’ said Rollo Hopper, ‘the girl the whole world’s looking for, a star for the remake of Touch of Evil. Come with me to Hollywood and perhaps it will be you!’
‘And perhaps if I do I’ll get every social disease under the sun,’ she said, which could hardly be more impolite, and walked away, but he grabbed her arm, with considerable force for a phantom − for such she assumed him to be.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said.
But he didn’t leave her alone. He had his hands down the front of her Zandra Rhodes dress: but not for long, because none other than Ronnie seized him and dragged him away, while Poppy said, ‘Don’t be so tactless, Ronnie. Can’t you see she’s enjoying it.’
‘God, these Europeans,’ said Rollo Hopper, ‘so primitive!’ and he hit Ronnie backwards into a trestle table carrying petits fours and individual strawberry mousses: Ronnie rallied and punched Rollo, but Rollo got Ronnie’s head somehow tucked under his arm and hit him in the eye and then shoved poor stunned Ronnie right into the bar table, so that glasses and bottles broke and women screamed and the bartender swore and the girl at the tote shut up shop in a hurry, though there were two races yet to go.
‘Sorry, darling,’ said Rollo Hopper to Carmen, ‘no big time on the screen for you. You blew that one!’ and loped off, flexing his muscles. Carmen helped Ronnie to his feet but Poppy intervened and led him away to the washroom, saying, ‘Darling, you’re not very strong, are you!’, but not before Ronnie had managed to say to Carmen, ‘Look, give me a call at my office some time –’
The party broke up. Carmen’s décolletage was considered by all to be the cause of the trouble, and perhaps indeed it was. The bodice was ripped in a way that she could not understand, for Rollo Hopper had really hardly got a hold on it. The management limousines departed without her, as they had arrived. She was left standing in the littered desolation, like Ruth amongst the alien corn – alone except for the barman, and the barman when he turned to face her had Driver’s eyes and spoke with Driver’s voice. ‘Come on,’ said Driver, ‘I don’t believe this. Give me a reason. I’ve offered you two men currently on Vogue’s Most Eligible Bachelor list. The third, the diplomat, I did not pursue because I could understand your reluctance: women are vain and whimsical so I can alter their looks at the drop of a hat, but men have their dignity.’
‘Oh yeah?’ enquired Carmen, as nastily as her lips would allow.
‘Well,’ said Driver, moderating his initial claim, ‘let us say that for various reasons many men tend to like themselves the way they are. But I’ve tidied up the Prince and the Star no end, so what can be your objection?’
‘They’re foreign,’ said Carmen, for what would Driver understand about love, or why some men have a knack for it, and others don’t, and why so many women love men who can do them no good at all? Driver is only ever sympathetic to self-interest. But Carmen had made a mistake: she should not have been flippant.
‘Sir Bernard is local,’ he said, ‘home-grown and local and now you’ve used up all your excuses.’
He snarled and flashed a little and lightning jumped around the metal support poles of the marquee. Outside the crowds were drifting off home: coaches were being manoeuvred out of parking lots; horses were being shuffled up the ramps of horseboxes, the great majority in disgrace: owners slipped off with the wives of other owners for a quick G&T before the Members’ Bar closed. Tomorrow’s favourites were changing as the day’s results were collated. Some jockeys were on form: some stables performing well: some trainers coming up trumps, others not. Making money is never easy, even if gambling’s how you do it.
‘Cover yourself up,’ said Driver. ‘You’re a disgrace to your sex.’ Carmen made a modesty bodice of discarded betting slips, using the safety pins which attached a floral bouquet to the canvas fabric of the marquee, and covered herself up as best she could. She allowed Driver to take her home. What else could she do? She had to get back somehow. And Driver didn’t even have to say, you’ll be sorry for this, because she knew she would be. She treasured in her heart what Ronnie had said – ‘Give me a call at my office some time’ – and hoped that would act as her talisman. In the hour of her most need she could call him up.
Along with Decline and Fall, our unknown benefactor had dumped a cardboard box of paperbacks, all romantic fiction, outside the Centre. They stayed outside all night and no one even stole them, as our occupational therapist, a stern feminist, had hoped they would. It rained hard during the night and the volumes, shoddy enough to begin with, were sodden by the time Alison carried them in. It was difficult to separate the pages and so make any consecutive sense of what was written, and some had simply fallen out, and were mixed up with a collection of the torn-out protective tabs of sanitary towels, for some reason also in the box. Well, you have to be grateful for what you get. The tabs are plastic, and hard to dispose of, I know. You can’t burn them and it seems unethical to flush them down the loo. I felt, as I sorted through the pages, matching heroine to hero, title to plot, that I was picking over the debris of the world. But most of us live amongst the debris anyway. And what is romance but a tragedy that ends on Saturday night instead of going on to Sunday morning? What’s the matter with that? If I lived in a romantic novel some young doctor would come along and first marry me, then cure me: the latter being consequent upon the former. In real life, it would happen the other way round, if at all.