I heard his name on the commentary before I spotted the colours.

'And now on the stands' side it's Pease Pudding coming to take it up. With two furlongs to go, Pease Pudding on the rails with Gossamer next and Badger making up ground now behind them, and

Willy Nilly on the far side followed by Thermometer, Student Unrest, Manganeta-' He rattled off a long string of names to which I didn't listen.

That he had been fit enough to hit the front two furlongs from home was all that mattered. I honestly didn't care from that moment whether he won or lost. But he did win. He won by a short head from Badger, holding his muzzle stubbornly in front when it looked impossible that he shouldn't be caught, with Tommy Hoylake moving rhythmically over the withers and getting out of him the last milligram of balance, of stamina, of utter bloody-minded refusal to be beaten.

In the winner's unsaddling enclosure Major Barnette looked more stunned than stratospheric, but Tommy Hoylake jumped down with the broadest of grins and said, 'Hey, what about that, then? He had the goods in the parcel after all.'

'So he did,' I said, and told the discountenanced pressmen that anyone could win the Lincoln any old day of the week: any old day, given the horse, the luck, the head lad, my father's stable routine, and the second best jockey in the country.

About twenty people having suddenly developed a close friendship with Major Barnette, he drifted off more or less at their suggestion to the bar to lubricate their hoarse-from-cheering throats. He asked me lamely to join him, but as I had caught his eye just when, recovering from his surprise, he had been telling the world that he always knew Pease Pudding had it in him, I saved him embarrassment and declined.

When the crowd round the unsaddling enclosure had dispersed and the fuss had died away, I somehow found myself face to face with Alessandro, who had been driven to Doncaster that day, and the previous day, by a partially revitalised chauffeur.

His face was as white as his yellowish skin could get, and his black eyes were as deep as pits. He regarded me with a shaking, strung up intensity, and seemed to have difficulty in actually saying what was hovering on the edge. I looked back at him without emotion of any sort, and waited.

'All right,' he said jerkily, after a while. 'All right. Why don't you say it? I expect you to say it.'

'There's no need,' I said neutrally. 'And no point.'

Some of the jangle drained out of his face. He swallowed with difficulty.

'I will say it for you, then,' he said. 'Pease Pudding would not have won if you had let me ride it.'

'No, he wouldn't,' I agreed.

'I could see,' he said, still with a shake in his voice, That I couldn't have ridden like that. I could see-'

Humility was a torment for Alessandro.

I said, in some sort of compassion, 'Tommy Hoylake has no more determination than you have, and no better hands. But what he does have is a marvellous judgement of pace and tremendous polish in a tight finish. Your turn will come, don't doubt it.'

Even if his colour didn't come back, the rest of the rigidity disappeared. He looked more dumbfounded than anything else.

He said slowly, 'I thought- I thought you would- what is it Miss Craig says-? rub my nose in it.'

I smiled at the sound of the colloquialism in his careful accent.

'No, I wouldn't do that.'

He took a deep breath and involuntarily stretched his arms out sideways.

'I want-' he said, and didn't finish it.

You want the world, I thought. And I said, 'Start on Wednesday.'

When the horsebox brought Pease Pudding back to Rowley Lodge that night the whole stable turned out to greet him. Etty's face was puckered with a different emotion from worry, and she fussed over the returning warrior like a mother hen. The colt himself clattered stiff legged down the ramp into the yard and modestly accepted the melon sized grins and the earthy comments (you did it, you old bugger) which were directed his way.

'Surely every winner doesn't get this sort of reception,' I said to Etty, after I'd come out of the house to investigate the bustle. I had reached the house half an hour before the horse, and found everything quiet: the lads had finished evening stables and gone round to the hostel for their tea.

'It's the first of the season,' she said, her eyes shining in her good plain face. 'And we didn't expect- well, I mean- without Mr Griffon and everything-'

'I told you to have more faith in yourself, Etty.'

'It's bucked the lads up no end,' she said, ducking the compliment. 'Everyone was watching on TV. They made such a noise in the hostel they must have heard them at the Forbury Inn-'

The lads were all spruced up for their Saturday evening out. When they'd seen Pease Pudding safely stowed away, they set off in a laughing and cheering bunch to make inroads into the stocks of the Golden Lion; and until I saw the explosive quality of their pleasure, I hadn't realised the extent of their depression. But they had after all, I reflected, read the papers. And they were used to believing my father rather than their own eyes.

'Mr Griffon will be so pleased,' Etty said, with genuine, unsophisticated certainty.

But Mr Griffon, predictably, was not.

I drove down to see him the following afternoon and found several of the Sunday newspapers in the waste basket. He greeted me with a face that made agate look putty, and was watchfully determined that I shouldn't have a chance of crowing.

He needn't have worried. Nothing made for worse future relations in any field whatsoever than crowing over losers; and if I knew nothing else, I knew how to negotiate for the best long term results.

I congratulated him on the win.

He didn't quite know how to deal with that, but at least it got him out of the embarrassment of having to admit he'd been made to look foolish.

'Tommy Hoylake rode a brilliant race,' he stated, and ignored the fact that he had given him directly opposite instructions.

'Yes, he did,' I agreed wholeheartedly, and repeated that all the rest of the credit lay with Etty and with his own stable routine, which we had faithfully followed.

He unbent a little more, but I found, slightly to my dismay, that in contrast I admired Alessandro for the straightforwardness of his apology, and for the moral courage which had nerved him to offer it. Moral courage was not something I had ever associated with Alessandro, before that moment.

Since my last visit, my father's room had taken on the appearance of an office. The regulation bedside locker had been replaced by a much larger table which pushed around easily on huge wheel castors, like the bed. On the table was the telephone on which he had broadcast so much blight, also a heap of Racing Calendars, copies of the Sporting Life, entry forms, a copy of Horses in Training, the three previous years' form books and, half hidden, the reports from Etty in her familiar schoolgirl handwriting.

'What, no typewriter?' I said flippantly, and he said stiffly that he was arranging for a local girl to come in and take dictation some time in the next week.

'Fine,' I said encouragingly; but he refused to be friendly. He saw the winning of the Lincoln as a serious threat to his authority, and his manner said plainly that that authority was not passing to me or even to Etty, while he could do anything to prevent it.

He was putting himself in a very ambivalent position. Every winner would be to him personally excruciating, yet at the same time he needed it desperately from the financial angle. Too much of his fortune for safety was still invested in half shares: and if the horses all ran as badly as it seemed he would like them to, their value would curl up like dahlias in a frost.

Understanding him was one thing: sorting him out, quite another.