‘I wear a sweater instead of my jacket, in and around the aircraft.’
‘And hang up your jacket on a hanger for when you land?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He laughed, but without mockery. ‘You’re a rum sort of chap[38], Henry’. He ordered more beer, shrugged when I refused, and drank deep again. ‘Why are you so methodical?’
‘It’s safer.’
‘Safer.’ He choked on his beer, coughing and laughing. ‘I suppose it doesn’t strike you that to many people steeplechasing and air transport might not seem especially safe?’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘What, then?’
But I shook my head, and didn’t explain. ‘Tell me about Yardman,’ I said.
‘What about him?’
‘Well, where he came from… anything.’
Simon hunched his great shoulders protectively around his pint, and pursed his lips.
‘He joined the firm after the war, when he left the Army. He was a sergeant in an infantry regiment, I think. Don’t know any details: never asked. Anyway he worked his way up through the business. It wasn’t called Yardman Transport then, of course. Belonged to a family, the Mayhews, but they were dying out… nephews weren’t interested, that sort of thing. Yardman had taken it over by the time I got there; don’t know how really, come to think of it, but he’s a bright lad, there’s no doubt of that. Take switching to air, for instance. That was him. He was pressing the advantages of air travel for horses whilst all the other transport agencies were going entirely by sea.’
‘Even though the office itself is on a wharf,’ I remarked.
‘Yes. Very handy once. It isn’t used much at all now since they clamped down on exporting horses to the Continent for meat.’
‘Yardman was in that?’
‘Shipping agent,’ he nodded. ‘There’s a big warehouse down the other end of the wharf where we used to collect them. They’d start being brought in three days before the ship came. Once a fortnight, on average. I can’t say I’m sorry it’s finished. It was a lot of work and a lot of mess and noise, and not much profit, Yardman said.’
‘It didn’t worry you, though, that they were going to be slaughtered?’
‘No more than cattle or pigs.’ He finished his beer. ‘Why should it? Everything dies sometime.’ He smiled cheerfully and gestured to the glasses. ‘Another?’ He had one, I didn’t.
‘Has anyone heard any more of Peters?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Not a murmur.[39]’
‘How about his cards?’
‘Still in the office, as far as I know.’
‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
Simon shrugged. ‘You never know, he might have wanted to duck someone[40], and did it thoroughly’.
‘But did anyone ever come looking for him?’
‘Nope. No police, no unpaid bookies, no rampaging females, no one.’
‘He just went to Italy and didn’t come back?’
‘That’s the size of it[41]’, Simon agreed. ‘He went with some brood mares to Milan and he should have come back the same day. But there was some trouble over an engine or something, and the pilot ran out of time and said he’d be in dead trouble if he worked too many hours. So they stayed there overnight and in the morning Peters didn’t turn up. They waited nearly all day, then they came back without him.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘That’s the lot,’ he agreed. ‘Just one of life’s little mysteries. What’s the matter, are you afraid Peters will reappear and take back his job?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He was an awkward bastard,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Stood on his rights. Always arguing; that sort of chap. Belligerent. Never stood any nonsense from foreign customs officers.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll bet they’re quite glad to see you instead.’
‘I dare say I’ll be just as cussed in a year or two.’
‘A year or two?’ He looked surprised. ‘Henry, it’s all very well you taking Peters’s job for a bit of a giggle[42] but you surely can’t mean to go on with it permanently?’
‘You think it would be more suitable if I was sitting behind a nice solid desk at Anglia?’ I asked ironically.
‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course it would.’
I sighed. ‘Not you too. I thought you at least might understand.’ I stopped wryly.
‘Understand what?’
‘Well… that who one’s father is has nothing to do with the sort of work one is best suited for. And I am not fitted for sitting behind a desk. I came to that conclusion my first week at Anglia, but I stayed there because I’d kicked up a fuss and insisted on getting an ordinary job, and I wasn’t going to admit I’d made a mistake with it. I tried to like it. At any rate I got used to it, but now… now. I don’t think I could face that nine-to-five routine ever again[43].’
‘Your father’s in his eighties, isn’t he?’ Simon said thoughtfully.
I nodded.
‘And do you think that when he dies you will be allowed to go on carting horses round the world? And for how long could you do it without becoming an eccentric nut? Like it or not, Henry, it’s easy enough to go up the social scale, but damn difficult to go down. And still be respected, that is.’
‘And I could be respected sitting behind a desk at Anglia, transferring horses from owner to owner on paper, but not if I move about and do it on aeroplanes?’
He laughed. ‘Exactly.’
‘The world is mad,’ I said.
‘You’re a romantic. But time will cure that.’ He looked at me in a large tolerant friendship, finished his beer, and flowed down from the stool like a green corduroy amoeba.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s time for another along the road at the Saracen’s Head.’
At Newbury Races the following afternoon I watched five races from the stands and rode in one.
This inactivity was not mine by choice, but thrust upon me by the Stewards[44]. They had, by the time I was twenty, presented me with their usual ultimatum to regular amateur riders: either turn professional, or ride in only fifty open races each season. In other words, don’t undercut the trade: stop taking the bread and butter out of the professional’s mouths. (As if jockeys ate much bread and butter, to start with.)
I hadn’t turned professional when I was twenty because I had been both too conventional and not really good enough. I was still not good enough to be a top rank professional, but I had long been a fully employed amateur. A big fish in a small pond. In the new-found freedom of my Yardman’s job I regretted that I hadn’t been bolder at twenty. I liked steeplechasing enormously, and with fulltime professional application I might just have made a decent success. Earth-bound on the stands at Newbury I painfully accepted that my sister had brought me to my senses a lot too late.
The one horse I did ride was in the ‘amateurs only’ race. As there were no restrictions on the number of amateur events I could ride in, few were run without