The Ginger Griffin by Ann Bridge

Author:Ann Bridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

ON the last Sunday before the Spring Meeting in Peking, the morning gallops at the racecourse lose their professional status and are elevated into the dignity of a social function, which is attended with enthusiasm by many who never otherwise leave their beds before 10 A.M. and have neither stake nor serious interest in the subject at issue—the horses. This gathering was spurned by such serious spirits as Henry Leroy and Old Bill, but the Leicesters had invited Amber to go under their escort, and she accordingly found herself, at about 9.30 on this particular May morning, seated at a small white table in front of the grand-stand, eating grilled kidneys in company with a largish party which included the Rothsteins, Hawtrey, and Dickie Roberts, and at intervals watching the rather lackadaisical gallopings of various ponies through the screen of pink geraniums which fringed the white rails. On this occasion the gallops are rather a farce—there is too much publicity for serious business; but when Crème de Cacao idled past, she rose, like his owner, to admire his peculiar beauty of shape and movement; then she settled down again, a contented spectator of the scene about her.

It was undoubtedly a pretty one. The graceful little grand-stand with its attendant buildings, the rails of the course, the paddock, stood up, gay and snowy in their fresh paint from turf which had been brought by diligent watering to some semblance of greenness, against a fragile background of tall willows, the undersides of their leaves showing white too as the morning breeze stirred them. Oleanders and pink geraniums bloomed everywhere. The masses of flowers on the scheme of green and white, the groups of people at little tables, eating such an unwonted meal as breakfast in the open air, above all the extraordinarily brilliant light, gave to the whole picture a certain theatrical quality, a novel and rather moving, though artificial, gaiety. Without nervousness, now, Amber observed all this, while she ate, and chatted with M. Rcthstein; she knew these people, she had no need any more to look round for someone to make her a personal safety. Since leaving the Legation and coming to Uncle Bill’s she had been living mainly in the safe world of horses and those who deal with horses—but, oddly enough, during these weeks, she had felt increasingly that this world was less safe, and the other less dangerous, than she used to think. She had become aware of a certain sense of division in her life, particularly when she met or visited the Grant-Howards—on the one side they and Rupert, and all that they, somehow, were and meant; on the other her uncle and aunt and the Leicesters, the de Bulles, the Rothsteins and the rest. What exactly she meant by this division she could not frame to herself with any definiteness, but that she went from one sort of world to another was certain, even if she made the transit by the mere crossing of a room.

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