I frowned. ‘The malt from Islay?’
‘That’s right,’ Jimmy said. ‘Heavy malt whisky. My grandfather liked it. He used to give me sips when I was small, much to my mother’s fury. Funny how you never forget tastes you learn as a child… and of course I’ve had it since… so there it was, on the trolley of drinks they rolled round with the coffee, and I thought I would have some… Nostalgia, and all that.’
‘And it wasn’t Laphroaig?’
‘No.’
‘What was it?’
He looked uncertain. ‘I thought that you, actually, might know. If you drank some, I mean.’
I shook my head. ‘You’d need a proper expert.’
He looked unhappy. ‘I thought myself, you see, that it was just an ordinary blend, just ordinary, not even pure malt.’
‘You’d better tell Mr Trent,’ I said. ‘Let him deal with it himself.’
He said doubtfully, ‘He’ll be here this morning.’
‘Easy,’ I said.
‘I don’t suppose… er… that you yourself… er… could have a word with him?’
‘No, I certainly couldn’t,’ I said positively. ‘From you it could be a friendly warning, from me it would be a deadly insult. Sorry, Jimmy, but honestly, no.’
With resignation he said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t. But worth a try.’ He poured himself more scotch and again put ice into it, and I thought in passing that true whisky aficionados thought ice an abomination, and wondered about the trustworthiness of his perception of Laphroaig.
Flora, rotund and happy in cherry red wool, came in her light-stepped way into the tent, looking around and nodding in satisfaction.
‘Looks quite bright, doesn’t it, Tony dear?’
‘Splendid,’ I said.
‘When it’s filled with guests…’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
She was conventional, well-intentioned and cosy, mother of three children (not Jack’s) who telephoned her regularly. She liked to talk about them on her occasional visits to my shop and tended to place larger orders when the news of them was good. Jack was her second husband, mellowing still under her wing but reportedly jealous of her offspring. Amazing the things people told their wine merchants. I knew a great deal about a lot of people’s lives.
Flora peered into the tubs. ‘Four cases on ice?’
I nodded. ‘More in the van, if you need it.’
‘Lets hope not.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘But my dear, I wouldn’t bet on it. Jimmy love, you don’t need to drink whisky. Open some champagne. I’d like a quick glass before everyone swamps us.’
Jimmy obliged with languid grace, easing out the cork without explosion, containing the force in his hand. Flora smilingly watched the plume of released gas float from the bottle and tilted a glass forward to catch the first bubbles. At her insistence both Jimmy and I drank also, but from Jimmy’s expression it didn’t go well with his scotch.
‘Lovely!’ Flora said appreciatively, sipping; and I thought the wine as usual a bit too thin and fizzy, but sensible enough for those quantities. I sold a great deal of it for weddings.
Flora took her glass and wandered down the marquee to the entrance through which the guests would come, the entrance which faced away from the house, towards the field where the cars would be parked. Jack Hawthorn’s house and stableyard were built in a hollow high on the eastern end of the Berkshire Downs, in a place surrounded by hills, invisible until one was close. Most people would arrive by the main road over the hill which faced the rear of the house, parking in the field, and continuing the downward journey on foot through a gate in the low-growing rose hedge, and onto the lawn. After several such parties, Flora had brought crowd control to a fine art: and besides, this way, no one upset the horses.
Flora suddenly exclaimed loudly and came hurrying back.
‘It’s really too bad of him. The Sheik is here already. His car’s coming over the hill. Jimmy, run and meet him. Jack’s still changing. Take the Sheik round the yard. Anything. Really, it’s too bad. Tell Jack he’s here.’
Jimmy nodded, put down his glass without haste and ambled off to intercept the oil-rich prince and his retinue. Flora hovered indecisively, not following, talking crossly with maximum indiscretion.
‘I don’t like that particular Sheik. I can’t help it. He’s fat and horrible and he behaves as if he owns the place, which he doesn’t. And I don’t like the way he looks at me with those half-shut eyes, as if I were of no account… and Tony, dear, I haven’t said any of those things, you understand? I don’t like the way Arabs treat women.’
‘And his horses win races,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Flora sighed. ‘It’s not all sweetness and light being a trainer’s wife. Some of the owners make me sick.’ She gave me a brief half-smile and went away to the house, and I finished the unloading with things like orange juice and cola.
Up on the hill the uniformed chauffeur parked the elongated black-windowed Mercedes, which was so identifiably the Sheik’s, with its nose pointing to the marquee, and gradually more cars arrived to swell the row there, bringing waitresses and other helpers, and finally, in a steady stream, the hundred-and-something guests.
They came by Rolls, by Range Rover, by Mini and by Ford. One couple arrived in a horsebox, another by motorcycle Some brought children, some brought dogs, most of which were left with the cars. In cashmere and cords, in checked shirts and tweeds, in elegance and pearls they walked chatteringly down the grassy slope, through the gate in the rose hedge, across a few steps of lawn, into the beckoning tent. A promising Sunday morning jollification ahead, most troubles left behind.
As always with racing-world parties, everyone there knew somebody else. The decibel count rose rapidly to ear-aching levels and only round the very walls could one talk without shouting. The Sheik, dressed in full Arab robes and flanked by his wary-eyed entourage, was one, I noticed, who stood resolutely with his back to the canvas, holding his orange juice before him and surveying the crush with his half-shut eyes. Jimmy was doing his noble best to amuse, rewarded by unsmiling nods, and gradually and separately other guests stopped to talk to the solid figure in the banded white headgear, but none of them with complete naturalness, and none of them women.
Jimmy after a while detached himself and I found him at my elbow.
‘Sticky going, the Sheik?’ I said.
‘He’s not such a bad fellow,’ Jimmy said loyally. ‘No social graces in western gatherings and absolutely paranoid about being assassinated… never even sits in the dentist’s chair, I’m told, without all those bodyguards being right there in the surgery… but he does know about horses. Loves them. You should have seen him just now, going round the yard, those bored eyes came right to life.’ He looked round the gathering and suddenly exclaimed, ‘See that man talking to Flora? That’s Larry Trent.’
‘Of the absent Laphroaig?’
Jimmy nodded, wrinkled his brow in indecision and moved off in another direction altogether, and I for a few moments watched the man with Flora, a middle-aged, dark-haired man with a moustache, one of the few people wearing a suit, in his case a navy pinstripe with the coat buttoned, a line of silk handkerchief showing in the top pocket. The crowd shifted and I lost sight of him, and I talked, as one does, to a succession of familiar half-known people, seen once a year or less, with whom one took on as one had left off, as if time hadn’t existed in between. It was one of those, with best intentions, who said inevitably, ‘And how’s Emma? How’s your pretty wife?’
I thought I would never get used to it, that jab like a spike thrust into a jumpy nerve, that positively physical pain. Emma… dear God.
‘She’s dead,’ I said, shaking my head slightly, breaking it to him gently, absolving him from embarrassment. I’d had to say it like that often: far too often. I knew how to do it now without causing discomfort. Bitter, extraordinary skill of the widowed, taking the distress away from others, hiding one’s own.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he sai
d, meaning it intensely for the moment, as they do. ‘I’d no idea. None at all. Er… when…?’
‘Six months ago,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ He adjusted his sympathy level suitably. ‘I’m really very sorry.’
I nodded. He sighed. The world went on. Transaction over, until next time. Always a next time. And at least he hadn’t asked ‘How…?’, and I hadn’t had to tell him, hadn’t had to think of the pain and the coma and the child who had died with her, unborn.
A fair few of Jack’s guests were also my customers, so that even in that racing gathering I found myself talking as much about wine as horses, and it was while an earnest elderly lady was soliciting my views on Côtes du Rhône versus Côte de Nuits that I saw Jimmy finally talking to Larry Trent. He spotted me too and waved for me to come over, but the earnest lady would buy the better wine by the easeful if convinced, and I telegraphed ‘later’ gestures to Jimmy, to which he flipped a forgiving hand.
Waitresses wove through the throng carrying dishes of canapés and sausages on sticks, and I reckoned that many more than a hundred throats had turned up and that at the present rate of enthusiasm the forty-eight original bottles would be emptied at any minute. I had already begun to make my way to the tent’s service entrance near the house when Jack himself pounced at me, clutching my sleeve.
‘We’ll need more champagne and the waitresses say your van is locked.’ His voice was hurried. ‘The party’s going well, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, very.’
‘Great. Good. I’ll leave it to you, then.’ He turned away, patting shoulders in greeting, enjoying his role as host.
I checked the tubs, now empty but for two standing bottles in a sea of melting ice, and went onwards out to the van, fishing in my pocket for the keys. For a moment I glanced up the hill to where all the cars waited, to the Range Rover, the horsebox, the Sheik’s Mercedes. No gaps in the line: no one had yet gone home. There was a child up there, playing with a dog.
I unlocked the rear door of my van and leaned in to pull forward the three spare cases which were roughly cooling under more black bags of ice. I threw one of the bags out onto the grass, and I picked up one of the cases.
Movement on the edge of my vision made me turn my head, and in a flash of a second that ordinary day became a nightmare.
The horsebox was rolling forwards down the hill.
Pointing straight at the marquee, gathering speed.
It was already only feet from the rose-hedge. It smashed its way through the fragile plants, flattening the last pink flowers of autumn. It advanced inexorably onto the grass.
I leapt to the doorway of the tent screaming a warning which nobody heard above the din and which was anyway far too late.
For a frozen infinitesimal moment I saw the party still intact, a packed throng of people smiling, drinking, living and unaware.
Then the horsebox ploughed into the canvas, and changed many things for ever.
THREE
Total communal disbelief lasted through about five seconds of silence, then someone screamed and went on screaming, a high commentary of hysteria on so much horror.
The horsebox had steam-rollered on over the canvas side-wall, burying people beneath; and it had plunged forward into one of the main supporting poles, which snapped under the weight. The whole of the end of the tent nearest me had collapsed inwards so that I stood on the edge of it with the ruin at my feet.
Where I had seen the guests, I now in absolute shock saw expanses of heavy grey canvas with countless bulges heaving desperately beneath.
The horsebox itself stood there obscenely in the middle, huge, dark green, unharmed, impersonal and frightful. There seemed to be no one behind the driving wheel; and to reach the cab one would have had to walk over the shrouded lumps of the living and the dead.
Beyond the horsebox, at the far end of the tent, in the still erect section, people were fighting their way out through the remains of the entrance and rips in the walls, emerging one by one, staggering and falling like figures in a frieze.
I noticed vaguely that I was still holding the case of champagne. I put it down where I stood, and turned and ran urgently to the telephone in the house.
So quiet in there. So utterly normal. My hands were shaking as I held the receiver.
Police and ambulances to Jack Hawthorn’s stables. A doctor. And lifting gear. Coming, they said. All coming. At once.
I went back outside, meeting others with stretched eyes intent on the same errand.
‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘Coming.’
Everyone was trembling, not just myself.
The screaming had stopped, but many were shouting, husbands trying to find their wives, wives their husbands, a mother her son. All the faces were white, all the mouths open, all breaths coming in gasps. People had begun making slits in the canvas with penknives to free those trapped underneath. A woman with small scissors was methodically cutting the lacings of a section of side-wall, tears streaming down her face. The efforts all looked puny, the task so immense.
Flora and Jack and Jimmy, I knew, had all been in the part of the tent which had collapsed.
A horse was whinnying nearby and kicking wood, and it was with fresh shock that I realised that the noise was coming from the horsebox itself. There was a horse in there. Inside.
With stiff legs I went along to the standing section of tent, going in through a gap where other people had come out. The second pole stood upright, the potted chrysanthemums bright round its foot. There were many scattered and broken glasses, and a few people trying to lift up the folds of the heavily fallen roof, to let the trapped crawl from under.
‘We might make a tunnel,’ I said to one man, and he nodded in understanding, and by lifting one section only, but together, and advancing, he and I and several others made a wide head-high passage forward into the collapsed half, through which about thirty struggling people, dazedly getting to their feet, made their way out upright. Many of their faces and hands were bleeding from glass cuts. Few of them knew what had happened. Two of them were children.
One of the furthest figures we reached that way was Flora. I saw the red wool of her dress on the ground under a flap of canvas and bent down to help her: and she was half unconscious with her face to the matting, suffocating.
I pulled her out and carried her down to the free end, and from there gave her to someone outside, and went back.
The tunnel idea gradually extended until there was a ring of humans instead of tent poles holding up a fair section of roof, one or two helpers exploring continuously into the edges until as far as we could tell all the people not near the horsebox itself were outside, walking and alive.
The horsebox…
Into that area no one wanted to go, but my original tunneller and I looked at each other for a long moment and told everyone to leave if they wanted to. Some did, but three or four of us made a new, shorter and lower tunnel, working towards the side of the horsebox facing the standing section of the tent, lifting tautly stretched canvas to free people still pinned underneath.
Almost the first person we came to was one of the Arabs who was fiercely vigorous and at any other time would have seemed comic, because as soon as he was released and mobile he began shouting unintelligibly, producing a repeating rifle from his robes and waving it menacingly about.
All we wanted, I thought: a spray of terrified bullets.
The Sheik, I thought…. Standing against the side wall, so that his back should be safe.
We found two more people alive on that side, both women, both beyond speech, both white-faced, in torn clothes, bleeding from glass cuts, one with a broken arm. We passed them back into comfort, and went on.
Crawling forward I came then to a pair of feet, toes upwards, then to trouser legs, unmoving. Through the canvas-filtered daylight they were easily recognisable; pinstripe cloth, navy blue.
I lifted more space over him until I could see along to the buttoned jacket and th
e silk handkerchief and a hand flung sideways holding a glass in fragments. And beyond, where a weight pressed down where his neck should have been, there was a line of crimson pulp.
I let the canvas fall back, feeling sick.
‘No good,’ I said to the man behind me. ‘I think his head’s under the front wheel. He’s dead.’
He gave me a look as shattered as my own, and we moved slowly sideways towards the horsebox’s rear, making our tunnel with difficulty on hands and knees.
Above us, inside the box, the horse kicked frantically and squealed, restless, excited and alarmed no doubt by the smell; horses were always upset by blood. I could see no prospect all the same of anyone lowering the ramps to let him out.
We found another Arab, alive, flat on his back, an arm bleeding, praying to Allah. We pulled him out and afterwards found his rifle lying blackly where he’d been.
‘They’re mad,’ said my companion.
‘It didn’t save their master,’ I said.
On our knees we both looked in silence at what we could see of the Sheik, which was his head, still in its white headdress with its gold cords. A fold of reddened canvas lay over the rest of him, and my companion, gripping my wrist, said, ‘Leave it. Don’t look. What’s the point.’
I thought fleetingly of the policemen and the ambulancemen who would soon be forced to look, but I did as he asked. We made our way silently back to the standing section and began a new tunnel round to the other side of the horsebox.
It was there that we came to Jack and also Jimmy, both with pulses, though both were unconscious and pinned to the ground by the thick tent pole, which lay across Jack’s legs and Jimmy’s chest. We scarcely touched the pole ourselves, but the tremor of our movements brought Jack up to semi-consciousness and to groaning pain.
My companion said ‘Hell’ through his teeth, and I said, ‘I’ll stay here if you go and get something to keep the canvas off them,’ and he nodded and disappeared, the heavy material falling behind, closing me in.
Jimmy looked dreadful; eyes shut above the long nose, a thread of blood trickling from his mouth.