Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

We went back to her sister’s and slept soundly on each side of the wall. Early in the morning, in her dressing-gown, with tousled hair and dreaming eyes, she made coffee for Patrick and me before we set off for the airport.

‘You’ll come back?’ she said almost casually, pouring my cup.

‘As soon as I can.’

She knew I meant it. She kissed me good-bye without clinging, and Patrick also. ‘For bringing him,’ she said.

In the taxi on the way to the airport Patrick said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here with her? You easily could.’

I didn’t answer him until we were turning into the airport road.

‘Would you? Stay, I mean.’

‘No. But then, I need to keep my job.’

‘So do I. For different reasons, perhaps. But I need to keep it just the same.’

‘It’s none of my business,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad.’

We loaded the Italian mares and flew them to snowy England without another hitch[213]. I soothed them on their way and thought about Gabriella, who seemed to have established herself as a warming knot somewhere under my diaphragm.

I thought about her with love and without even the conventional sort of anxiety, for as she had said with a giggle, it would be a poor smuggler who couldn’t swallow her own contraband.

Chapter Seven

Stratford Races were off because of snow, which was just as well[214] as Yardman squeezed in an extra trip on that day at very short notice[215]. Seven three-year-olds to France, he said; but at loading time there were eight.

I was held up on the way to Cambridge by a lorry which had skidded sideways and blocked the icy road, and when I reached the airport all the cargo had already arrived, with the box drivers stamping their feet to keep warm and cursing me fluently. Billy, and it was Billy again, not Conker and Timmie, stood about with his hands in his pocket and a sneer permanently fixed like epoxy resin, enjoying the disapproval I had brought on myself. He had not, naturally, thought of beginning the work before I arrived.

We loaded the horses, he, I, and deaf old Alf, whom Billy had brought with him, and we worked in uncompanionable silence. There was a fourth groom on the trip, a middle-aged characterless man with a large straggly moustache and a bad cold, but he had come with one particular horse from an upper crust stud, and he refrained from offering to help with any others. Neither did he lend a hand on the journey[216], but sat throughout beside his own protegée[217], guarding it carefully from no visible danger. Billy dropped a handful of peat in my coffee and later poured his own, which was half full of sugar, over my head. I spent the rest of the journey in the washroom, awkwardly rinsing the stickiness out of my hair and vowing to get even with Billy one day when I hadn’t thousands of pounds worth of bloodstock in my care.

During the unloading I looked closely at one inconspicuous brown mare, trying to memorise her thoroughly unmemorable appearance. She was definitely not a three-year-old, like all the others on the trip, and she was, I was sure, almost identical to the one we had taken to France the first day I flew with Billy. And very like the one we had brought back that afternoon on the second trip. Three mares, all alike… well, it was not impossible, especially as they had no distinct markings between them, none at all.

The special groom left us in Paris, escorting his own horse right through to its new home. He had been engaged, he said, to bring another horse back, a French stallion which his stud had bought, and we would be collecting him again the next week. We duly did collect him, the next Tuesday, complete with the stallion, a tight-muscled butty little horse with a fiery eye and a restless tail. He was squealing like a colt when we stored him on board, and this time there was some point in his straggly moustached keeper staying beside him all the way.

Among the cargo there was yet another undistinguished brown mare. I was leaning on the starboard side of her box, gazing over and down at her, not able to see her very clearly against the peat she stood on and the brown horse on her other side, when Billy crept up behind me and hit me savagely across the shoulders with a spare tethering chain[218]. I turned faster than he expected and got in two hard quick kicks on his thigh. His lips went back with the pain and he furiously swung his arm, the short chain flickering and bending like an angry snake. I dodged it by ducking into one of the cross-way alleys between the boxes, and the chain wrapped itself with a vicious clatter round the corner where I had been standing. Unhesitatingly I skipped through to the port side[219] of the plane and went forward at top speed to the galley. Hiding figuratively under the engineer’s skirts may not have been the noblest course, but in the circumstances by far the most prudent, and I stayed with him, drinking coffee, until we were on the final approach to Cambridge.