Field of Thirteen Read online

  The management tossed her head, compressed her lips and stared blindly at her wronged and steaming customer. She wanted him to go away. She had no appetite for a fight.

  Bill Williams, who did have such an appetite, felt the militancy drain away in the management and, as always when he had won, his own hostility weakened. Lowering one’s guard is lethal, he’d been often warned, but he’d never got the knack of kicking the fallen foe. He rose abruptly from the management’s chair and sought the fresh night air and the path through the rose garden and the blue upholstered mattress in the punt.

  He changed his clothes, folded back the punt’s anti-rain canopies and lay in his sleeping bag looking up at the dry clear sky. He knew he’d lost any chance of editing the Daily Troubadour. He spent the night not sleeping but ceaselessly revolving in memory the humiliations heaped on him undeservedly and his own failure to make a public fuss. And would the public fuss have won him the Troubadour? Would it not more likely have passed into snigger-raising mythology, whereas now, if he read Mrs Robin Dawkins right, the evening would merely give her an ‘I told you so’ weapon in her internecine wars?

  He fantasised about an appropriate revenge, doubting his ability to carry it out. As ex-editor he couldn’t get the food columnist to do a demolition job: the same columnist that had given the recently opened restaurant a ten-star rave. As Mr Ordinary Citizen, he might fume without costing Mainstream Mile a fraction of his sleepless night.

  Dawn brought him no sweet dreams. Full daylight found him putting the punt ship-shape, though there was no joy left in his journey. In the next town downstream he would summon the Lechlade people to collect their boat.

  Down the path through the rose garden came the same dark-suited waiter as before, though this time without the bouncing smirk.

  ‘The management,’ he said, ‘invite you to take coffee ashore.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Served in the bar.’

  He turned away and departed without waiting for a response.

  Bill Williams didn’t know, in fact, what response to make. Was coffee an olive branch? An apology? He felt far from accepting either. Could coffee, though, be a preliminary to the cancelling of his credit card slip? Had the management decided he shouldn’t have to pay for their appalling treatment?

  The management had not. It wasn’t in any case the money that had infuriated Bill Williams, since his abrupt removal from the Voice had cost the new owners several noughts. He entered the restaurant intending to accept a refund grudgingly, but was offered not a cent.

  He went into the bar, which was shuttered and dark at breakfast time. A waiter slowly came in and put on one of the small tables a tray bearing a cup and saucer, a cream jug, sugar, and a china pot of coffee.

  And that was all. In cold disbelief Bill Williams drank two solitary cups of admittedly good strong coffee. No one came into the bar. No one said anything at all.

  If the coffee were an olive branch, it was also an insult.

  When he’d finished the second cupful Bill Williams rose from his small table and, going across the room, opened the exit door which led through a small vestibule to the car park outside. Over the entry door of every place in Britain licensed to sell alcoholic drink there has to be displayed by law the name of the licensee. Bill Williams, without a clear plan of retaliation, went to see at least the name behind the affront.

  The name over the entrance door of Mainstream Mile was Pauline Kinser.

  Kinser. A coincidence, but odd. Bill Williams turned back into the bar and found it, this time, not empty. The management lady from the previous evening stood there, flanked by four of her staff. They stood stiffly, bodyguards, but also vigilant that she shouldn’t blame them for their behaviour.

  ‘Are you,’ Bill Williams asked the woman slowly, ‘Pauline Kinser?’

  She reluctantly nodded.

  ‘Do I get an apology for last night?’

  She said nothing at all.

  He asked, ‘Do you know anyone called Dennis?’

  Bill Williams was aware only of deepening silence. Pauline Kinser’s eyes stared at him darkly, wholly devoid of any admission of fault. He shook with a primitive impulse to slam her against the wall and frighten her into speech but was constrained not by clemency but by the thought of handcuffs.

  Pauline Kinser felt relieved to see her difficult customer return to his punt and move off down river, and she believed she’d heard the last of him. She didn’t even mention what she thought of as ‘the unpleasantness’ when her nephew Dennis Kinser drove in for one of their frequent business meetings. Dennis Kinser, always golden tongued, had first persuaded his unmarried aunt to sell her house to start the restaurant and then had raised a mortgage on it to set himself up as a racehorse trainer. His Aunt Pauline balked at putting the proceeds of her house directly into a racing stable as she didn’t like horses. Apart from that, in her eyes Dennis could do no wrong. Dennis it was who had chosen the comfortable chairs in the restaurant dining-room and the handsome tableware, Dennis who had engaged a chef of renown, Dennis who had dressed her in kaftans, Dennis who had enticed newspaper columnists to visit and dazzled them with excellence, and Dennis, too, who had made the rule of no boats.

  ‘Restaurants in London turn away people they don’t want,’ he’d told his aunt. ‘And I don’t want vulgar hire boats clogging up our pier and attracting the hoi polloi.’

  ‘No, Dennis,’ his aunt said staunchly, seeing the sense of it.

  Her nephew heard about the customer in the punt from the waiters in the kitchen and, vaguely troubled by their evasive self-justifications, he asked his aunt what had happened.

  Dennis Kinser was only moderately dismayed. However badly he’d been wronged, one disgruntled diner couldn’t ruin a brilliantly successful enterprise.

  ‘This punt guy,’ he said, looking through ledgers, ‘he really had booked a table?’

  ‘Yes, he had.’

  ‘Then you should have served him decently, same as everyone else.’

  ‘But you said no–’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but use some sense.’

  Pauline Kinser’s reservations book lay open on the desk. Dennis Kinser, glancing at it, asked, ‘Which booking came from the man in the punt?’

  ‘That one.’ His aunt pointed. ‘The first one for yesterday. Williams, four people, eight o’clock. We took his phone number too, of course.’

  Dennis Kinser glanced at the phone number and his whole body lurched. He knew that number. He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. He tugged his aunt’s phone roughly towards him, pushed the buttons and listened to the woman answering saying ‘Cotswold Voice, good morning.’

  Half speechless, Dennis Kinser asked to be connected to the racing writer who, as usual, was leaning back in his chair cleaning his nails.

  ‘Williams?’ the racing writer said. ‘Sure, of course I know him. He used to be our editor. Bloody good at it too, though I wouldn’t tell him. It was thanks to him you got all that publicity for your racing syndicates and such. He sent me to interview you, that day we had the photographer for the pics. What do you want him for?’

  ‘I… er… I just wondered.’ Dennis Kinser’s throat felt glued together.

  ‘Don’t mess with him,’ the racing writer said with half-solemn warning. ‘He may look small and harmless but he strikes like a rattlesnake when he’s angry.’

  Swallowing, feeling light-headed, Dennis Kinser spoke next to the food columnist who’d given his Aunt Pauline the puff that had sent her soufflés soaring.

  ‘Williams?’ the food man said. ‘He used to like me to do recipes. The new editor’s got a chips and ketchup complex. Bill Williams asked me – well, he was probably joking, but he asked me where to take three business people to dinner who could make or break his whole future, so I said your aunt’s place, and I know he phoned up straight away.’

  Dennis Kinser put down the receiver with his whole brain repeating ‘Oh my God’, ‘Oh my God’, like a man
tra.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ his aunt asked. ‘You’ve gone white.’

  ‘That man Williams…’ Dennis Kinser sounded strangled. ‘What did you say to him to put things right?’

  Pauline Kinser wrinkled her forehead. ‘I gave him some coffee.’

  ‘Coffee! And an abject apology? And his money back? And the grovel of the century?’

  Confused, she shook her head. ‘Just coffee.’

  Her nephew, frightened, screamed at her, ‘You stupid bitch. You bloody stupid bitch. That man will find a way of bankrupting us both. He writes for newspapers. And I owe him… God, I owe him… and he’ll ruin us for last night.’

  His aunt said mulishly, ‘It’s all your fault. It was you who said to turn away boats.’

  *

  In London that afternoon the Lionheart News Group held a monthly progress meeting consisting of the three warring proprietors, the business managers of all the Group’s many newspapers and periodicals, and sundry financial advisers. No editors or journalists were ever invited to this sort of affair: to Mrs Robin Dawkins – acting as Chairman – they were merely the below-stairs hired help.

  Mrs Dawkins treated the urgent need for a replacement editor for the Daily Troubadour – fourth on the agenda – as if she were lacking a butler. As long as he knew his place and was metaphorically good at keeping the silver untarnished, she could overlook an afternoon fondness for port. The dismayed managers tactfully tried to point out that the present editor’s fondness for afternoon port was three-quarters of the trouble.

  Russell Maudsley forcefully reported that Absalom Williams, ex-editor of the Cotswold Voice, whom they had at first considered, need not now be borne in mind, and F. Harold Field declared with even more emphasis that Absalom Williams at thirty-three was too young, had too many academic degrees and couldn’t insist on getting his own way.

  Several of the managers held their breath, not least a competent but thwarted woman from the Daily Troubadour who knew from experience that when Field and Maudsley agreed against a course of action Mrs Robin Dawkins would suddenly be for. As the majority shareholder she would insist, and the two men would shrug and give in.

  The Daily Troubadour manager knew that most great editors hit the top in their middle thirties: that like orchestral conductors they either did or didn’t have the flair. She listened to Mr Field complaining to Mrs Dawkins that moreover Williams couldn’t even write, and then she read a portion of only one of the photocopied sheets that F. Harold had been lackadaisically distributing all round the table from a folder, and felt the instant impact of the fizzing Williams’ talent on the page. Not write? This was Gettysburg stuff.

  Looking up, she saw F. Harold Field watching her. He smiled. He wants this Absalom, she thought.

  That same afternoon Dennis Kinser’s first explosive rage against his aunt had deepened painfully like mustard-gas burns. He sat leaning his elbows on her desk with his head in his hands, seeking a way out of a quicksand of debt.

  His aunt grumbled repetitively, ‘It was you who said no boats.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Bugger the boats,’ Dennis Kinser said violently, and his aunt, regally distinguished in a blue, silver and purple kaftan of Dennis’s choosing, retired hurt and wept in the tiny sitting-room that held all that was left of her former home. She’d given Dennis everything else. She couldn’t bear his anger. She didn’t like horses. She hated the man in the punt.

  Dennis Kinser’s wheeler-dealing relied entirely on Mainstream Mile flourishing as the rave of the region. In spite of the Voice racing writer’s golden superlatives there hadn’t so far been enough promises of response to the couch potato gambling syndicates to fill even a short row of boxes, let alone the whole sparkling stable he craved. To bamboozle the horse-racing licensing department into believing that he had the qualifying dozen horses in his yard, he’d invented a few and brought in others limping from their retirement fields; and in a burst of typical hubris he’d promised to sponsor a two-mile hurdle at Marl-borough races – the Kinser Cup. Fame would follow. Rich owners, impressed, would eat at his restaurant and send him horses galore. Fame and riches attracted fame and riches. He’d seen it. He, Dennis Kinser, would have both.

  His trouble was, he was in too much of a hurry. He had that very morning sent out press releases to every publication even distantly aware that racing existed. His invitations to every influential pen couldn’t be retrieved from the Royal Mail. He would in effect be shouting ‘Look at me, I’m great’, and the rattlesnake in the punt could print and publish, ‘Look at him, he’s a fraud’, and the write-ups he’d get would be mocking instead of admiring.

  Dennis Kinser groaned aloud.

  Bill (Absalom Elvis etc.) Williams bought a copy of the Cotswold Voice the next day, Saturday, and winced his way from the headlines onwards.

  On the racing page, his racing writer, now demoted to halfway down the space available, was happy to let readers know that their very own syndicate-forming trainer was sponsoring a race at Marlborough the following Saturday ‘Be there!’ encouraged the Voice. ‘Kinser can win.’

  ‘Race to Mainstream Mile!’ admonished the food column. ‘A brilliant Kinser double!’

  As he had always done to dilute disappointment and make frustration bearable, Bill Williams stretched for a ball-point and paper and wrote the knots out of his system.

  He wrote with vigour, and unforgiving fire. He wrote from the sharp memory of humiliation and from an unappeased lust for revenge. He ridiculed Pauline Kinser for the pretension of her kaftans and the snobbery of her no-boats ban. He savagely pulverised the multiple lies of the make-believe glamorous racing stable and he jeered at Dennis Kinser himself for being a conceited humbug, a fast-talking trickster, a self-deluding sham. It was a piece designed and calculated to trample and destroy. It would probably never see public print.

  One of Dennis Kinser’s gaudy press releases ended up in the Lionheart News Group’s little-used office of F. Harold Field. F. Harold, his hand hovering over the shredder, caught a glimpse of the words ‘Mainstream Mile’ and briefly glanced at the come-hither.

  ‘Warm Welcome’, he read, and smiled grimly. Not his lasting impression of the head waiter.

  ‘Hurdle race sponsored by trainer Dennis Kinser, co-owner of Mainstream Mile. Buffet lunch. Restaurant chef. Chance to buy a share in a Syndicate!’

  Hm… F. Harold Field, who liked a flutter, decided to go.

  Bill Williams, Dennis Kinser and F. Harold Field collided at Marlborough racecourse.

  During the past week the August days had been edged out by the chill of early September dawns.

  During that week Bill Williams wrote five opinion and comment pieces and sent them all to the prestigious London broadsheets that had published him pre- Voice. They were enthusiastic on the telephone, but no one needed an editor.

  During that week Dennis Kinser finally received from the syndicate fixer one half-paid for but talented hurdler complete with an entry in the Kinser Cup. Dennis the ex-stable lad did know how to train horses and turn them out looking good. When the syndicate horse paraded before the Cup, its coat shone in the sun.

  Dennis Kinser spent the rest of his week borrowing money and sucking the restaurant dry.

  During that week F. Harold Field visited the Lionheart Group’s managers one by one and left a pro-Williams consensus in his wake. Russell Maudsley nodded. Mrs Robin Dawkins, still believing her colleagues intended a thumbs down, said contrarily, ‘I think you’re wrong to ditch him, Harold.’

  Waving his conspicuous invitation, F. Harold made his way from his (chauffeur-driven) Daimler up to the large private box where Dennis Kinser, though now running on an empty gas tank, was trying to buy himself a glittering future by the widespread indiscriminate application of champagne.

  Dennis Kinser, not knowing by sight half the free-loaders guzzling his bubbles, gave F. Harold a wide hello and with an extravagant gesture put an arm fa
miliarly round his guest’s shoulders. A hard-headed businessman impervious to soft soap, oil and honey, F. Harold Field intensely disliked the too intimate unwanted pressure of the arm, but without shaking himself free he turned his well-groomed head to look Dennis Kinser in the eye and asked him straightly what Williams, the sometime editor of the Cotswold Voice, could possibly have done to be treated so insufferably by the management and staff of Mainstream Mile.

  To F. Harold Field this was no idle question: he needed to know what would stir A. E. de V. Williams to clenched fists, and, beyond that, what would stop him from using them. F. Harold regularly judged people by their rages: sought the cause and watched the performance. When not overruled by Mrs Robin Dawkins (as he had been the last time they’d chosen an editor) F. Harold Field seldom made mistakes.

  Dennis Kinser removed his arm from his guest’s shoulders with sick speed. All week he’d been unable to sleep or eat with physical ease. Each day he’d expected to hear the rattlesnake and be pierced by the fangs. But this, he thought in bewilderment, this solid grey-suited taxpayer didn’t match the racing-writer’s verbal identikit. This couldn’t be the lean mean man in the punt.

  F. Harold Field flatly said, ‘As Williams’ guest I was treated like dirt, and I don’t know why. Give me a reason why all the papers and periodicals I co-own in the Lionheart Group shouldn’t blow your house down.’

  ‘But… b-but,’ Dennis Kinser stuttered, aghast at this new abyss, ‘he came in a boat.’

  ‘He…what?’

  Dennis Kinser abruptly left-wheeled and crashed into the gentlemen’s retreat. He had taken days of drugs to control the bacteria in his gut, but nothing it seemed could anaesthetise the cataclysm he saw ahead.

  F. Harold Field, still unsatisfied, went down (on the non-reappearance of his host) to watch the horses as they plodded round the parade ring. Dennis Kinser’s extravagant Cup lay two races ahead. F. Harold Field filled in time by winning modest third-place money on the Tote.