Longshot

Dee-Dee smiled, which in a triangular way looked feline also, although far from kittenish. I wondered fleetingly about claws.

Tremayne ate his toast and went on giving sporadic instructions which Dee-Dee seemed to have no trouble remembering. When the spate slowed she stood, picked up her mug and said she would finish her coffee in the office while she got on with things.

‘Utterly reliable,’ Tremayne remarked to her departing back. ‘There’s always ten damned trainers trying to poach her.’ He lowered his voice. ‘A shit of an amateur jockey treated her like muck. She’s not over it yet. I make allowances. If you find her crying, that’s it.’

I was amazed by his compassion and felt I should have recognised earlier how many unexpected layers there were to Tremayne below the loud executive exterior: not just his love of horses, not just his need to be recorded, not even just his disguised delight in Gareth, but other, secret, unrevealed privacies which maybe I would come to in time, and maybe not.

He spent the next half-hour on the telephone both making and receiving calls: it was the time of day, I later discovered, when trainers could most reliably be found at home. Toast eaten, coffee drunk, he reached for a cigarette from a packet on the table and brought a throw-away lighter out of his pocket.

‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, pushing the pack my way.

‘Never started,’ I said.

‘Good for the nerves,’ he commented, inhaling deeply. ‘I hope you’re not an anti fanatic.’

‘I quite like the smell.’

‘Good.’ He seemed pleased enough. ‘We’ll get on well.’

He told me that at ten o’clock, by which time the first lot would have been given hay and water and the lads would have had their own breakfasts, he would drive the tractor back to the gallops to watch his second lot work. He said I needn’t bother with that: I could set things up in the dining-room, arrange things however I liked working. As all racing was off from frost he could, if I agreed, spend the afternoon telling me about his childhood. When racing began again, he wouldn’t have so much time.

‘Good idea,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Come along, then, and I’ll show you where things are.’

We went out into the carpeted hall and he pointed to the doorway opposite.

‘That’s the family room, as you know. Next to the kitchen...’ he walked along and opened a closed door, ‘...is my dining-room. We don’t use it much. You’ll have to turn the heating up, I dare say.’

I looked into the room I was to get to know well; a spacious room with mahogany furniture, swagged crimson curtains, formal cream-and-gold striped walls and a plain dark green carpet. Not Tremayne’s own choice, I thought. Much too coordinated.

‘That’ll be great,’ I said obligingly.

‘Good.’ He closed the door again and looked up the stairs we had climbed to bed the night before. ‘We put those stairs in when we divided the house. This passage beside them, this leads to Perkin and Mackie’s half. Come along, I’ll show you.’ He walked along a wide pale-green-carpeted corridor with pictures of horses on both walls and opened double white-painted doors at the end.

‘Through here,’ he said, ‘is the main entrance hall of the house. The oldest part.’

We passed onto a big wood-blocked expanse of polished floor from which two graceful wings of staircase rose to an upper gallery. Under the gallery, between the staircases, was another pair of doors which Tremayne, crossing, opened without flourish, revealing a vista of gold and pale blue furnishings in the same formal style as the dining-room.

‘This is the main drawing room,’ he said. ‘We share it. We hardly use it. We used it last for that damned party...’ He paused. ‘Well, as Mackie said, I don’t know when we’ll have another.’

A pity, I thought. It looked a house made for parties. Tremayne closed the drawing-room door, and pointed straight across the hall.

‘That’s the front entrance, and those double doors on the right open into Perkin and Mackie’s half. We built a new kitchen for them and another new staircase. We planned it as two separate houses, you see, with this big common section between us.’

‘It’s great,’ I said to please him, but also meaning it.

He nodded. ‘It divided quite well. No one needs houses this size these days. Take too much heating.’ Indeed, it was cold in the hall. ‘Most of this was built about nineteen six. Edwardian. Country house of the Windberry family, don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘My father bought the place for peanuts during the Depression. I’ve lived here all my life.’

‘Was your father a trainer also?’ I asked.

Tremayne laughed. ‘God, no. He inherited a fortune. Never did a day’s work. He liked going racing, so he bought a few jumpers, put them in the stables that hadn’t been used since cars replaced the carriages and engaged a trainer for them. When I grew up, I just took over the horses. Built another yard, eventually. I’ve fifty boxes at present, all full.’

He led the way back through the doors to his own domain and closed them behind us.