‘What name?’
‘Satinwood, sir.’
Checking the impulse to say: ‘And you left him in the hall!’ Val passed hurriedly into that part of the house.
His old college pal was contemplating a piece of plate over the stone hearth.
‘Hallo!’ said Val.’
His unemotional visitor turned round.
Less threadbare than in Green Street, as if something had restored his credit, his face had the same crow’s-footed, contemptuous calm.
‘Ah, Dartie!’ he said. ‘Joe Lightson, the bookie, told me you had a stable down here. I thought I’d look you up on my way to Brighton. How has your Sleeping Dove yearling turned out?’
‘So-so,’ said Val.
‘When are you going to run him? I thought, perhaps you’d like me to work your commision. I could do it much better than the professionals.’
Really, the fellow’s impudence was sublime!
‘Thanks very much; but I hardly bet at all.’
‘Is that possible? I say, Dartie, I didn’t mean to bother you again, but if you could let me have a “pony”, it would be a great boon.’
‘Sorry, but I don’t keep “ponies” about me down here.’
‘A cheque –’
Cheque – not if he knew it!
‘No,’ said Val firmly. ‘Have a drink?’
‘Thanks very much!’
Pouring out the drink at the sideboard in the dining-room, with one eye on the stilly figure of his guest, Val took a resolution.
‘Look here, Stainford –’ he began, then his heart failed him. ‘How did you get here?’
‘By car, from Horsham. And that reminds me. I haven’t a sou with me to pay for it.’
Val winced. There was something ineffably wretched about the whole thing.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s a fiver, if that’s any use to you; but really I’m not game for any more.’ And, with a sudden outburst, he added: ‘I’ve never forgotten, you know, that I once lent you all I had at Oxford when I was deuced hard-pressed myself, and you never paid it back, though you came into shekels that very term.’
The well-shaped hand closed on the fiver; a bitter smile opened the thin lips.
‘Oxford! Another life! Well, good-bye, Dartie – I’ll get on; and thanks I Hope you’ll have a good season.’
He did not hold out his hand. Val watched his back, languid and slim, till it was out of sight.…
Yes! That memory explained it! Stainford must have picked up some gossip in the village – not likely that they would let a ‘Sleeping Dove’ lie! It didn’t much matter; since Holly would hardly let him bet at all. But Greenwater must look sharp after the colt. Plenty of straight men racing; but a lot of blackguards hanging about the sport. Queer how horses collected blackguards – most beautiful creatures God ever made! But beauty was like that – look at the blackguards hanging round pretty women! Well, he must let Holly know. They could stay, as usual, at old Warmson’s Inn, on the river; from there it was only a fifteen-mile drive to the course.…
The ‘Pouter Pigeon’ stood back a little from the river Thames, on the Berkshire side, above an old-fashioned garden of roses, stocks, gillyflowers, poppies, phlox drummondi, sweet-williams. In the warm June weather the scents from that garden and from sweet-briar round the windows drifted into an old brick house painted cream-colour. Late Victorian service in Park Lane under James Forsyte, confirmed by a later marriage with Emily’s maid Fifine, had induced in Warmson, indeed, such complete knowledge of what was what, that no river inn had greater attractions for those whose taste had survived modernity. Spotless linen, double beds warmed with copper pans, even in summer; cider, home-made from a large orchard, and matured in rum casks – the inn was a veritable feather-bed to all the senses. Prints of ‘Mariage à la Mode’, ‘Rake’s Progress’, ‘The Nightshirt Steeplechase’, ‘Run with the Quorn’, and large functional groupings of Victorian celebrities with their names attached to blank faces on a key chart, decorated the walls. Its sanitation and its port were excellent. Pot-pourri lay in every bedroom, old pewter round the coffee-room, clean napkins at every meal. And a poor welcome was assured to earwigs, spiders, and the wrong sort of guest… Warmson, one of those self-contained men who spread when they take inns, pervaded the house, with a red face set in small, grey whiskers, like a sun of just sufficient warmth.
To young Anne Forsyte all was ‘just too lovely’. Never in her short life, confined to a large country, had she come across such defiant cosiness – the lush peace of the river, the songs of birds, the scents of flowers, the rustic arbour, the drifting lazy sky, now blue, now white, the friendly fat spaniel, and the feeling that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow would for ever be the same as yesterday.