by Dick Francis
Neither of us landed a decisive punch. Surtees, as Chris Young had sworn, wasn’t the boxing gym type.
Add in Xenia, who, as befitted her clothes, carried a riding crop, and we arrived at a childish form of warfare in which a bodyguard would have lightened the load.
Surtees clutched my hair and tried to bang my head on the ground, which gave me the idea of doing it to him, with equal lack of effectiveness, while Xenia danced around us lashing out with the riding crop, which usually landed on me though occasionally on her father, to his bellowing disgust.
I scrambled finally to my feet, but dragged Surtees with me, as he wouldn’t leave go. Xenia hit my legs. Surtees tried a sweeping too-slow wide-armed clout to my head that gave me a chance to both duck the blow and get hold of his clothes and fling him with all my strength away from me so that he overbalanced and staggered backwards and, falling, cracked his head against a brick stable wall.
It stunned him. He slid to his knees. Xenia screamed, “You’ve killed my daddy,” though I clearly hadn’t, and I wrapped my arms round her writhing little body, lifting her off her feet, and yelled to Emily, “Are any of these stalls empty?”
“The end two,” she shouted, and struggled to hold Golden Malt in control, the horse stamping around, upset by the noise.
The top half-door of the end stall stood open, the bottom half closed and bolted. I carried the frantically struggling child over there and dropped her over the lower half of the door, closing the top half and sliding home a bolt before she could agilely climb out.
I unbolted and opened both halves of the vacant stall next door, and grabbing the groggy Surtees by the back of his collar and by his belt, half ran him, half flung him into the space, closing both halves of the door and slapping home the bolts.
Xenia screeched and kicked her door. Surtees had yet to find his voice. Out of breath, I went over to Emily, whose expression was a mixture of outrage and laugh.
“Now what?” she said.
“Now I bolt you into Golden Malt’s stall so that none of this is your fault, and decamp with the horse.”
She stared. “Are you serious?”
“None of this is serious, but it’s not very funny either.”
We could both hear Xenia’s muffled shrieks.
“She’ll upset all the horses,” Emily said, calming Golden Malt with small pats. “I did think you might ride this fellow away again,” she said. “I was just saddling him when Surtees came. The saddle is over there, in his stall.”
I walked across the yard and found the saddle, which I carried back and fixed in place. There was a full net of hay in the stall also, and a head collar for tying up a horse more comfortably than with a bridle. I carried them out and threaded them together with the zipped bag I’d brought, taking out the helmet but slinging the rest over the withers of the horse, in front of the saddle; like saddlebags of yore.
Then I took the reins from Emily and walked with her to the empty stall. She went inside and I bolted the bottom half of the door.
“You’d better hurry,” she said calmly. “The grooms will arrive in less than half an hour for evening stables, and Surtees will have the police looking for you five minutes after that.”
I kissed her over the stable door.
“It will be dark in the next hour,” she said. “Where will you go?”
“God knows.”
I kissed her again and bolted her into her temporary prison, and hauled myself into Golden Malt’s saddle, and buckling on the helmet, set off again onto the Downs.
I needed the helmet for anonymity more than safety. So universal was the wearing of helmets that a head without one would have been remembered, even in a part of the country where horses were commoner than cows.
Golden Malt, to my relief, showed no reluctance to go along the stretch of road leading to the familiar track up to the training grounds, and seemed, if I understood him at all, to be reassured by being ridden and directed, not running loose and having to find his own way home.
Even at four in the afternoon there were other horses around in the distance. Golden Malt whinnied loudly and received an echoing response from afar, which caused him to nod his head as if in satisfaction: he went along sweetly, not trying to buck me off.
The problem was that I didn’t know where to go. Surtees might indeed send the police after me, and although they wouldn’t try to catch me on horseback like a Wild West posse, at some point or other I would very likely find myself vulnerably back on a road. Out of sight—that was the thing.
I tried to remember the map Emily and I had spread out in the kitchen, but I’d been concentrating on the way to Foxhill then, and now I couldn’t go back there. Emily had a Patsy informant in her yard—one of her grooms making a little extra money from Surtees—and so, now, maybe, had her Foxhill friend. No good risking it.
The rolling sea of grass on Lambourn Downs was to my eyes featureless. I’d been up there fairly often with Emily in her Land-Rover, but it had been five or six years ago. I looked back and could no longer distinguish the track home.
Think.
Monday, late afternoon. Time for all horses to go to their stables for food, for night.
I decided to be ordinary; to conform. It would be the abnormal, like an unhelmeted head, that would draw comment and attention and questions.
I thought again of the Ridgeway path. I wouldn’t get lost on it.
I might get found on it.
Golden Malt trotted happily the length of Mandown, his regular exercise ground. It was when I stopped at the far end and didn’t turn his head back towards home that he grew restive.
I patted his neck and talked to him, as Emily would have done.
“Never mind, old fellow, we’re safe out here,” I murmured over and over, and it was the lack of panic in the voice of confidence that I think calmed him. I was afraid he would bypass the false front and go instinctively for the underlying doubt, but he slowly relaxed and waited patiently, twitching his ears forwards and back as untroubled horses do, leaving his future in my hands.
Unwelcome though the thought had been, I’d accepted that we might have to stay out on the Downs all night. I could otherwise amble into someone’s stable yard or farm and ask for stabling until morning, but this wasn’t normal any longer in the age of cars. There were motels but no horsetels; not anyway for unannounced strangers on thoroughbreds.
Shelter.
The weather was fine, though chilly. It wasn’t too cold for Golden Malt’s survival; it was that he was used to a snug stall with food and drink provided, and perhaps a rug. An animal of racehorse caliber wouldn’t stand quiet for even an hour if one simply tied his reins to a railing. He would break free and kick up his heels in a V sign as he galloped to the horizon. While red carpets might be out of the picture, four walls and water were essential.
There were two hours left until darkness. It took me nearly all of that time to find a place that Golden Malt would enter.
There were various huts on the Downs where the groundsmen kept equipment, but none of these would be big enough or empty enough, or would have running water. What I needed was the sort of shelter farmers built at a distance from their home yards, providing walls and roofs against hail and gales, and troughs for their stock to drink from.
The first two such shelters I came to were both filthy inside, thick with droppings. More importantly, Golden Malt wouldn’t drink the water, even though I tried to clean out the troughs before refilling them from their taps. The horse whiffled his nose and lips over the surface and turned his fastidious head away: and it was no good getting angry, I had to trust to his equine sense.
The third shelter I came to looked just as unappetizing, but Golden Malt walked into it amiably and then came out and drank from the trough even before I’d removed bits and pieces from the water’s surface.
Much relieved, I waited until he’d drunk his fill and then walked back in with him, and found a comfort in the shape of an iron ring l
et into the wall. Exchanging the head collar for the bridle, I fastened the horse into his new quarters and positioned the hay net where he could eat when he wanted. I unsaddled him and took the saddle outside where he couldn’t step on it, and finally—and resignedly—took stock of my own situation.
Like almost all such shelters, its windowless walls faced chiefly north and west and south against the prevailing winds. The east wall was pierced by the entry, which of course had no door. By good luck, although the air was always on the move on the uplands, there was no strong wind that evening, and although the temperature dropped with darkness, I felt more at home in the open than inside with the horse.
I unzipped the holdall and thankfully put on the padded jacket, which alone made the night enterprise feasible. Then I folded the holdall thickly to make a cushion and propped the saddle against the wall for a chair back, and reckoned I’d spent far worse hours in Scottish mountains.
After dark the clear sky blazed with depths of stars, and in the folds of the Downs below me, little clumps of distant lights assured me that this solitude was relative : and solitude, to me anyway, was natural.
Inside the shelter, Golden Malt steadily chomped on his hay and made me feel hungry. I’d eaten breakfast in London and a chocolate bar on the train to Didcot, but I hadn’t had the foresight to fill the holdall with enough for dinner.
It couldn’t be helped. I scooped a handful of water out of the trough and smelled it, and although it wasn’t the cleanest ever, judged that if the horse had passed it, it wouldn’t kill me. Cold water was never bad at anesthetizing hunger: and hunger was an odd sort of thing, not so much a grind in the stomach as an overall feeling of lassitude, and a headache.
I put my hands into the jacket pockets for warmth and slept sitting up, and soon after two o’clock (according to the luminous hands on the cheap watch I’d bought to replace my father’s stolen gold one) awoke from cold. Everything was so quiet inside the shelter that I went in in some alarm, but Golden Malt was still there, safely tied up, asleep, resting a hock in mental twilight, his eyes open but no thoughts showing.
I walked around quietly outside to unstiffen and warm myself and after a while drank more water and sat down again to wait for dawn.
None of my thoughts was hilariously funny.
Surtees’s secondhand dislike and spite towards me would now certainly have intensified into personal hatred, because he would think I had made a fool of him in front of his daughter. No matter that he had belligerently chosen to come to remove Ivan’s horse, no matter that it was he who had rushed me first to knock me down, he would care only that Xenia had seen him fail on both fronts: the obnoxious Alexander had made off with the goods and left her father imprisoned in a stall for horses, looking stupid.
Xenia, with whom I had no quarrel, could now be counted a foe for life. Her mother’s consequently increased antagonism might really give a bodyguard work. Someone had sent the robbers to my bothy.
Next time you’ll scream ...
Bugger it, I thought. Even if I should dump Ivan and all his concerns (and with him, my mother) I wouldn’t necessarily free myself from Patsy’s obsession or revenge.
Surtees was Ivan’s son-in-law. I was Ivan’s stepson. Which of us, I wondered vaguely, took legal priority? Did priority exist?
I itched to paint, I longed to go back to my easel, to my silent room. Zoë Lang filled crevices in my mind to such an extent that in the middle of wondering if water was drinkable I would see the hollow under her cheek-bone and think, purple glaze on turquoise thinned with medium. The face of the inner woman had to be built of glazes, of color not as opaque as outer living skin might be, but still to be unmistakably the person who lived in that flesh, who thought and believed and confronted doubt.
I had set myself an unattainable ideal. Such human skill as I could summon wasn’t enough for the job. I felt the suicidal despair of all who longed to do what they couldn’t, what only a few in each century could—whether blessed or cursed in spirit. No achievement was ever finite. There was no absolute summit. No peak of Everest to plant a flag on. Success was someone else’s opinion.
I drifted and dozed and woke again shivering in the first gray promise of light. Golden Malt was pawing the ground, his hooves thudding heavily on dirt, giving me the prosaic news that he had finished his hay. I undid his head collar and took him outside for a drink, and felt, if not exactly a communion with him, at least an awareness of being a fellow creature on a lonely planet.
Deciding that grass would do for breakfast, he walked around a bit, head down, munching, while I held his rope and thought of coffee and toast. Then, as daylight more positively arrived, I saddled and bridled him in the shelter, and changed my sneakers for jodhpur boots, to look and ride better, and finally, when the morning’s first exercise strings would be peopling the landscape, heaved myself and gear onto his back and set about completing the disappearing trick.
I rode to the east, towards the strengthening light. I knew that the Ridgeway path lay to the north of me, also running west to east. Not far ahead I would come to the road from Wantage going south to Hungerford, and I wanted to cross that to reach the next wide expanse of open downland on the far side, where many trainers had their yards, but wouldn’t know by sight a conspicuous horse from Lambourn. Neither Emily nor I, in my rush to be gone before the grooms arrived for evening stables, had given a thought this time to a hood and boots for hiding Golden Malt’s white features.
I came to the road and dismounted to walk the horse across, needing to open and shut gates on either side, but that done, I was free on the wide lands south of Wantage, with five or six miles available in most directions to find a suitable string of horses to attach myself to and follow.
I was looking for a small string of no more than four or five, as I reckoned I would get a more hospitable reception from a small-scale trainer: and so it proved. Just when I thought I’d drawn a blank and was in trouble I came across four horses plodding homewards, one of them being led by a groom on foot.
I followed at a distance and tried not to feel disconcerted when my leaders headed towards the heart of a village from where I could see ahead the huge swath of the main north-south arterial road, the A34: impassable, if not impossible, for horses to walk across.
The road into the village led downhill. The string of four marched on, undaunted, and I found we were crossing the expressway beneath it, to a second half of the village on the far side. On through the village, the horses turned in between the peeling gates of a small stable yard.
A motor horse van stood in the yard with a trainer’s name and phone number painted on it. I retraced Golden Malt’s steps to a phone box we had passed in the village and, juggling reins and coins, took the trainer away from his breakfast.
I was, I explained, an owner who was also an amateur jockey. I had just had a blazing row on the Downs with my trainer and had ridden off in a fury, and I was looking for somewhere to park my horse while I sorted things out. Could he help?
“Glad to,” he said heartily, and showed no less enthusiasm when I shortly arrived on a good-looking thoroughbred, offering generous cash for its board and lodging.
When I asked the trainer (“Call me Phil”) the quickest way to London he said, “By taxi to Didcot,” and I thought it ironic that I’d traveled three parts of an oval on Golden Malt and ended in the underpass village of East llsley, which was actually nearer to Surtees’s stud farm than to Emily’s yard.
I would come to fetch my horse later that day, I told Phil, and he said not to hurry. He phoned for a taxi for me. We shook hands, in tune.
Back in London I met Ivan’s and my mother’s anxiety with perhaps more reassurance than I truly felt. Golden Malt, I assured them, was secure and well looked after, but it might be better to move him right away from the Berkshire Downs area, where to horse-educated eyes he was as recognizable as a film star.
I asked Ivan to lend me his copy of Horses in Training, which gave the
location and other details of every licensed trainer and permit holder in Britain, and I asked my mother to phone Emily and get her to go out shopping in Swindon or Newbury, as she often did, and to phone back to Park Crescent from a public phone there.
“But why?” my mother asked, puzzled.
“Emily’s walls have ears, and Surtees is listening.” My mother looked disbelieving. “And,” I added, “please don’t tell Emily I’m here.”
My obliging parent talked to Emily, who cheerfully said she would be going shopping soon, and forty-five minutes later she was telling my mother the number she was calling from in Swindon. I took the number and my mother’s phone card and jogged to the nearest outside line; and Emily wanted to know if all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was necessary.
“Probably not,” I said. “But just in case.” I paused. “What happened when I left?”
Emily almost laughed. “The grooms came for evening stables and let us all out. Xenia’s tantrums turned to tears. Surtees was purple with fury and phoned the police, who arrived with a siren wailing that upset all the horses. Surtees told them that you’d stolen Golden Malt but fortunately the police had been to my yard before when we had a lot of saddles and bridles stolen, and they believed me when I said the horse was Ivan’s and you had absolute authority to look after it in any way you thought best. I showed them the copy you gave me of the power of attorney and they told Surtees they wouldn’t start a police hunt for you, which sent him practically berserk. He was yelling at the police which did him no good at all with them, but I begged them to stay until he had gone because he was so violent I was afraid he would attack me or some of the horses. So they tried to quieten him and finally got him to drive his trailer away, but Xenia was crying out of control, and if Surtees reached home without causing an accident it will have been a miracle.”
“He’s a fool.”
“He’s a dangerous fool,” Emily said. “All that silly-ass front of his has changed to pure poison. So take care, Al. I’m serious. You made him look stupid and he’ll never forgive you.”