Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt Page A

actually. ’ Liz wondered if Aunt Marjorie had ever finished a sentence of her own free will in her life. Probably not. ‘I’m told he doesn’t do anything, just stays indoors all day. Daddy said . . . oh look, there’s Joe.’
    Elizabeth Ayres’ loyalties were sadly divided in the jump-off for the main event, since the two competitors most likely to win it were her brother Joe and her fiancé. Joe was the better rider, but Philip’s horse seemed to have found remarkable form just at the right moment. Only last week, Philip had been talking of selling it; perhaps it had been listening (at times, they seem almost human) for today it was sailing over the jumps like a Harrier. Even Aunt Marjorie, who in matters of showjumping was a firm believer in entropy, had admitted that the animal wasn’t too bad.

    â€˜My money’s on your boyfriend,’ said Aunt Marjorie. ‘What’s that horse of his called? It’s playing a blinder today. Almost as if it understood .’
    She had a point there. Intelligence, so Philip had always maintained, had never been one of old Mayfair’s attributes. Any animal capable of taking a paper bag or a rusting Mini for a pack of wolves and acting accordingly was unlikely ever to win Mastermind, and this lack of mental as opposed to physical agility had prompted one of Philip’s brightest sayings. Even if you led Mayfair to water, he would say, it probably wouldn’t even occur to him to drink. But today, Mayfair hadn’t put a foot wrong, in any sense.
    â€˜Mr Joseph Ayres and Moonbeam,’ said the tannoy. A hush fell over the crowd, for it seemed wrong that Joe should be riding the horse instead of the other way round. Joe was obviously the stronger of the two, just as Moonbeam was clearly the more intelligent. Aunt Marjorie, who was, like so many of her class, a sort of refined Centaur, leaned forward and fixed her round, bright eyes on horse and rider. ‘Look at his knees,’ she muttered. ‘Just look at them.’
    Joe did his best, but the consensus of opinion was that his best was not going to be good enough. ‘Twelve faults,’ said the tannoy, and Aunt Marjorie shook her head sadly. ‘Why wasn’t the idiot using a martingale?’ she said. ‘When I was a girl . . .’
    â€˜Excuse me,’ said one of the three rather pretty girls who had just made their way to the front. ‘You obviously know all about this sort of thing. Could you tell us what’s going on? We’re terribly ignorant about horse-racing.’
    â€˜It isn’t racing, it’s jumping,’ said Aunt Marjorie, not looking round.
    â€˜Oh,’ said the youngest of the three girls. ‘Oh I see .’

    â€˜Haven’t you been to a show before?’ Liz asked, kindly.
    â€˜No,’ chorused the girls, and this was true. There are no shows and very few gymkhanas at the bottom of the River Rhine, where these three girls, the Rhinedaughters Flosshilde, Wellgunde, and Woglinde, had spent the last two thousand years. They have trout races, but that is not quite the same.
    â€˜Well,’ said Aunt Marjorie patiently, as if explaining to a Trobriand Islander how to use a fork, ‘the idea is to make the horse jump over all the obstacles.’
    â€˜Why?’ asked Flosshilde. Woglinde scowled at her.
    â€˜Because if you don’t, you get faults,’ said Aunt Marjorie, ‘and if you get more faults than everyone else, you lose.’
    â€˜That explains a great deal,’ said Flosshilde, brightly. ‘Thank you.’
    â€˜Mr Philip Wilcox on Mayfair,’ said the tannoy.
    Aunt Marjorie turned to the Rhinemaidens, who were amusing themselves by making atrocious puns on the word ‘fault’. ‘Watch this,’ she urged them. ‘He’s very good.’
    The Rhinedaughters put on their most serious expressions (which were not very serious, in absolute terms)