Strike Out Where Not Applicable Read Online Free PDF

which was comfortable. He started to walk quietly up the road, using his stick.
    The manège was a large farmhouse with a slated roof, a rarity which gave it a formal wealthy look; it might have been built as a country house, early in the nineteenth century. It was surrounded by trees which left a semicircular space in front where cars were parked, and showed a cheerful country-house façade: the seriouspart – stables, ‘pistes’, exercise courts and yards – lay behind and masked by trees. Beyond these trees were fields, in which could be glimpsed, scattered about, obstacles, brightly painted wooden hazards for horses to jump.
    The front door stood open; he passed a second glassed door and found himself in a large hall, decorated with pennants and rosettes behind glass, medals, cups, and trophies in rather tarnished silver, and a great many large flourishing photographs of the clean shiny bellies of horses (photographed intentionally from very low) stretched to clear dramatically high barricades. In this large room five or six people were drinking coffee and chatting. When he appeared the chat stopped to take him in, but only for one well-bred moment. Curiosity as vulgar as any other, but covert. Arlette had told him that it was good form here, following Francis, to be rather shabby. It struck him that it was a bit overdone; several boots could have done with a good rub and he observed (he was inclined to be a bit of an old maid where clothes-brushes were concerned) the shoulders of one or two jackets with distaste.
    He advanced across a floor laid out in parquet, or rather a pattern of hardwood blocks about forty centimetres square. (Yes, that showed country-house rather than farmhouse origins.) It had been recently cleaned but was smeared with mud and scarred by dashing cavaliers who would not dream of going to bed at home with their spurs on, but were quite ready to do so here, where they hadn’t paid for the sheets. At the end of the hall was a kind of little bar strewn with dirty coffee-cups, and a girl behind it of about eighteen, in breeches and a sweater, was looking at him in an enquiring way. An apprentice in the business, he guessed, learning to be a ‘piqueur’ – he had picked up scraps of the jargon from Arlette, who was amused at the rather mangled cavalry-school French that floated about.
    â€˜Good afternoon. I should like to know where I might get hold of Mr La Touche.’
    â€˜About riding lessons, was it? We can probably fix you up – you’ve ridden before, have you?’
    He smiled. The days were past when he presented little dogeared cards. Eighteen months ago he would probably have said, ‘Oh yes, I ride anything.’ Now he put his stick under his arm.
    â€˜Van der Valk is my name. Be so good as to tell him.’
    â€˜I’m afraid he’s rather busy,’ began the girl in a cheeky way, but one of the women, a thin brown thing with very splashed boots and three diamond rings, lounging sprawled over a coffee-cup, intervened.
    â€˜Don’t be dim, Elsie – it’s the Commissaire of Police, from the town.’
    â€˜Well, nobody told me,’ going out of a French window at the back of the bar with something of a flounce – oh yes, one can flounce in riding breeches – and crossing two little girls in blue jeans, their brown hair held at the back with elastic bands.
    â€˜There you are, darlings,’ said the thin woman. ‘Good day?’
    â€˜Ooh yes – Willy let me have Merman – he pulls like anything but he’s terrific. Bambi’s coughing so I couldn’t have her today. Jane had a fall for no reason at all,’ looking at her younger sister with contempt. Van der Valk put his stick under the other arm in a lieutenant-colonel’s gesture and smiled austerely.
    â€˜I knew you,’ said the woman with a social brightness that had a touch of sly vulgarity.
    â€˜Oh I’m not