by Dick Francis
I watched Bobby with his horses as he ran his hand down their legs to feel for heat in strained tendons, and peered at the progress of minor skin eruptions, and slapped their rumps as a friendly gesture. He was a natural-born horseman, there was no doubt, and the animals responded to him in the indefinable way that they do to someone they feel comfortable with.
I might find him a bit indecisive sometimes, and not a razor-brain, but he was in truth a good enough fellow, and I could see how Holly could love him. He had, moreover, loved her enough himself to turn his back on his ancestors and estrange himself from his powerful father, and it had taken strength, I reckoned, to do that.
He stood up from feeling a leg and saw me watching him, and with an instinct straight from the subconscious stretched to his full height and gave me a hawk-like look of vivid antagonism.
‘Fielding,’ he said flatly, as if the word itself was an accusation and a curse: a declaration of continuing war.
‘Allardeck,’ I replied, in the same way. I grinned slightly. ‘I was thinking, as a matter of fact, that I liked you.’
‘Oh!’ He relaxed as fast as he’d tensed, and looked confused. ‘I don’t know… for a moment… I felt…’
‘I know,’ I said, nodding. ‘Hatred.’
‘Your eyes were in shadow. You looked… hooded.’
It was an acceptable explanation and a sort of apology; and I thought how irrational it was that the deep conditioning raised itself so quickly to the surface, and in myself on occasions just the same, however I might try to stop it.
He finished the horses without comment and we walked back towards the house.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said then, with a touch of awkwardness. ‘Back there…’ He waved a hand. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
I asked curiously, ‘Do you ever think of Holly in that way? As a Fielding? If her eyes are in shadow, does she seem a menace?’
‘No, of course not. She’s different.’
‘How is she different?’
He glanced at my face and seemed to find it all right to explain. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are strong. I mean, in your mind, not just muscles. No one who’s talked to you much could miss it. It makes you… I don’t know… somehow people notice when you’re there, like in the weighing room, or somewhere. People would be able to say if you’d been at a particular race meeting or not, or at a party, even though you don’t try. I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s what’s made you a champion jockey, I should think, and it’s totally Fielding. Well, Holly’s not like that. She’s gentle and calm and she hasn’t an ounce of aggressiveness or ambition, and she doesn’t want to go out and beat the world on horses, so she isn’t really a Fielding at heart.’
‘Mm.’ It was a dry noise from the throat more than a word. Bobby gave me another quick glance. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll plead guilty to my inheritance, and also exonerate her from it. But she does have ambition.’
‘No.’ He shook his head positively.
‘For you,’ I said. ‘For you to be a lasting success. For you both to be. To prove you were right to get married.’
He paused with his hand on the knob of the door which led from the yard to the kitchen. ‘You were against it, like all the others.’
‘Yes, for various reasons. But not now.’
‘Not on the actual day,’ he said with fairness. ‘You were the only one that turned up.’
‘She couldn’t walk up that aisle by herself, could she?’ I said. ‘Someone had to go with her.’
He smiled as instinctively as before he’d hated.
‘A Fielding giving a Fielding to an Allardeck,’ he said. ‘I wondered at the time if there would be an earthquake.’
He opened the door and we went in. Holly, who bound us together, had lit the log fire in the sitting room and was trying determinedly to be cheerful.
We sat in armchairs and I told them about my morning travels, and also assured them of Grandfather’s non-involvement.
‘The marked copies of the Flag were on people’s mats at least by six,’ I said, ‘and they came from outside, not from Newmarket. I don’t know what time the papers get to the shops in Cambridge, but not a great deal before five, I shouldn’t think, and there couldn’t have been much time for anyone to buy twenty or so papers in Cambridge and deliver them, folded and marked, to addresses all over Newmarket, twenty miles away, before the newsboys here started on their rounds.’
‘London?’ Holly said. ‘Do you think someone brought them up direct?’
‘I should think so,’ I nodded. ‘Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t someone from here who arranged it, or even did it personally, so we’re not much further ahead.’
‘It’s all so pointless,’ Holly said.
‘No one seems to have been looking out of their windows by six,’ I went on. ‘You’d think someone would be, in this town. But no one that I asked had seen anyone walking up to anyone’s door with a newspaper at that time. It was black dark, of course. They said they hardly ever see the newsboys themselves, in winter.’
The telephone on the desk beside Bobby’s chair rang, and Bobby stretched out a hand to pick up the receiver with a look of apprehension.
‘Oh… hello, Seb,’ he said. There was some relief in his voice, but not much.
‘Friend,’ Holly said to me. ‘Has a horse with us.’
‘You saw it, did you?’ Bobby made a face. ‘Someone sent you a copy…’ He listened, then said, ‘No, of course I don’t know who. It’s sheer malice. No, of course it’s not true. I’m here in business to stay, and don’t worry, your mare is very well and I was just now feeling her tendon. It’s cool and firm and doing fine. What? Father? He won’t guarantee a penny, he said so. Yes, you may well say he’s a ruthless swine… No, there’s no hope of it. In fact on the contrary he’s trying to squeeze out of me some money he lent me to buy a car about fourteen years ago. Yes, well… I suppose it’s that sort of flint that’s made him rich. What? No, not a fortune, it was a second-hand old banger, but my first. I suppose I’ll have to pay him in the end just to get his lawyers off my back.Yes, I told you, everything’s fine. Pay no attention to the Flag. Sure, Seb, any time. Bye.’
He put down the receiver, his air nowhere near as confident as his telephone voice.
‘Another owner full of doubt. Load of rats. Half of them are thinking of leaving without waiting to see if the ship will sink. Half of them, as well, haven’t paid their last month’s bills.’
‘Has Seb?’ asked Holly.
Bobby shook his head.
‘He’s got a cheek, then.’
‘That wretched paragraph reached him by post yesterday: just the Intimate Details column. A clipping, he said, not the whole paper. In an ordinary brown envelope, typed. From London, like the others.’
‘Did all the owners get a clipping?’ I asked.
‘It looks like it. Most of them have been on the phone. I haven’t exactly rung the rest to ask.’
We sat around for a while, and I borrowed the telephone to pick up my messages from the answering machine in the cottage, and to call in return a couple of trainers who’d offered rides during the week, and to talk to a couple of jockeys who lived in Newmarket, asking for a lift down to Plumpton in Sussex for racing the next day. Two of them were already going together, they said, and would take me.
‘Will you come back here?’ Holly said, when all was fixed.
I looked at the anxiety in her face and the lack of opposition in Bobby’s. I wouldn’t have expected him to want me even in the first place, but it seemed I was wrong.
‘Stay,’ he said briefly, but with invitation, not grudge.
‘I haven’t been much help.’
‘We feel better,’ Holly said, ‘with you here.’
I didn’t much want to stay because of practical considerations. I was due to ride in Devon on the Tuesday, and one reason I preferred to live in Lambourn, not Newmarket, was that from Lambourn one could drive to every r
acecourse in England and return home on the same day. Lambourn was central.
I said apologetically, ‘I’ll have to get a lift back to Lambourn from Plumpton, because I need my car to go to Devon on Tuesday. When I get back to Lambourn on Tuesday evening, we’ll see how things are here.’
Holly said, ‘All right’ dispiritedly, not attempting to persuade.
I looked at her downcast face, more beautiful, as often, in sorrow than in joy. A thought came unexpectedly into my head and I said without reflection, ‘Holly, are you pregnant?’
FIVE
Bobby was dumbstruck.
Holly gave me a piercing look from the light brown eyes in which I read both alarm and stimulation.
‘Why did you say that?’ Bobby demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s only a short while overdue. We haven’t had any tests done yet,’ Bobby said; and to Holly, ‘You must have told him.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ She shook her head. ‘But I was thinking just then how happy I was first thing on Friday, when I woke up feeling sick. I was thinking how ironic it would be. All those months of trying, and the first time it may really have happened, we are in such trouble that the very last thing we need is a baby.’
Bobby frowned. ‘You must have told him,’ he repeated, and he sounded definitely upset, almost as if he were jealous.
‘Well, no, I didn’t,’ Holly said uncertainly.
‘On the way back here yesterday,’ he insisted.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget I said it. What does it matter?’
Bobby looked at me with resentment and then more forgivingly at Holly, as if some thought had struck him. ‘Is this the sort of thing you meant,’ he said doubtfully, ‘when you told me once about you and Kit reading each other’s minds when you were kids?’
She reluctantly nodded. ‘We haven’t done it for years, though.’
‘It doesn’t happen nowadays,’ I agreed. ‘I mean, this was just a once-off. A throw-back. I don’t suppose it will happen again.’
And if it did happen again, I thought, I would be more careful what I said. Stray thoughts would be sieved.
I understood Bobby’s jealousy perfectly well because I had felt it myself, extraordinarily strongly, when Holly first told me she had fallen in love. The jealousy had been quickly overlaid by a more normal dismay when she’d confessed just who it was she’d set her heart on, but I still remembered the sharpness of not wanting to share her, not wanting my status as her closest friend to be usurped by a stranger.
I’d been slightly shocked at my jealousy and done a fair amount of soul-searching, never before having questioned my feelings for my sister: and I’d made the reassuring but also rueful discovery that she could sleep with Bobby all she liked and leave me undisturbed: it was the mental intimacy I minded losing.
There had been sexual adventures of my own, of course, both before and after her marriage, but they had been shortlived affairs with no deep involvement, nothing anywhere approaching Holly’s commitment to Bobby. Plenty of time, I thought, and maybe, one of these days; and platitudes like that.
Bobby made at least a show of believing that telepathy between me and Holly wouldn’t happen again, although both she and I, giving each other the merest flick of a glance, guessed differently. If we chose to tune in, so to speak, the old habit would come back.
The three of us spent the evening trying not to return over and over to the central questions of who and why, and in the end went wearily to bed without any possible answers. I lay down again in jeans, jersey and socks in case Graves should return, but I reckoned that if he’d ever planned it, he had had second thoughts.
I was wrong.
The bell woke me with a clatter at three-thirty-five in the morning, and I was into my shoes, out of the house and running down the drive, in the strategy that Bobby and I had discussed the night before, almost before it stopped ringing.
Out of the open gateway, turn left; and sure enough, on a stretch of roadside grass that sometimes accommodated gypsies, stood the wherewithal for shifting horses. A car, this time, towing a two-horse trailer. A trailer with its rear ramp lowered; ready, but not yet loaded.
I ran straight up to the car and yanked open the driver’s door, but there was no one inside to be taken by surprise. Just keys in the ignition; unbelievable.
I lifted up the trailer’s ramp and bolted it shut, then climbed into the car, started up, and drove a couple of hundred yards to a side road. I turned into there, parked a short way along, left the keys in the ignition as before, and sprinted back to Bobby’s yard.
The scene was almost a repeat of the time before, at least as far as the lights, the shouting and obscenity went. Bobby and Jermyn Graves were standing outside the empty box where the alarm had been rigged and had all but come to blows. A thin boy of perhaps sixteen stood a short distance away, holding a large carrier bag, shifting from foot to foot and looking unhappy.
‘Give me my property,’ Graves yelled. ‘This is stealing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said in his ear. ‘Stealing is an intention permanently to deprive.’
‘What?’ He swung round to glare at me. ‘You again!’
‘If you’re talking law,’ I said, ‘it is within the law to withhold property upon which money is owed, until the debt is discharged.’
‘I’ll ruin you,’ he said vindictively. ‘I’ll ruin you both.’
‘Be sensible, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘You’re in the wrong.’
‘Who the shit cares. I won’t have some pipsqueak jockey and some bankrupt little trainer get the better of me, I’ll tell you that.’
The attendant boy said nervously, ‘Uncle…’
‘You shut up,’ Graves snapped.
The boy dropped the carrier and fell over his feet picking it up.
‘Go away, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Calm down. Think it over. Come and fetch your horses when your cheque’s been cleared, and that’ll be the end of it.’
‘No, it won’t.’
‘Up to you,’ I said, shrugging.
Bobby and I watched him try to extricate himself without severe loss of face, which could hardly be done. He delivered a few more threats with a good deal of bluster, and then finally, saying ‘Come on, come on’ irritably to his nephew, he stalked away down the drive.
‘Did you immobilise his horsebox?’ Bobby asked.
‘It was a car and a trailer, and the key was in it. I just drove it out of sight round the nearest corner. Wonder if they’ll find it.’
‘I suppose we needn’t have bothered,’ Bobby said. ‘As Graves went to the alarm box first.’
We had thought he might go to his other horse’s box first, find it empty, think he had the wrong place, and perhaps remove one of the horses from either side. We thought he might have brought more men. In the event, he hadn’t done either. But the precaution, all the same, might have been worth it.
We closed the empty stable and Bobby kicked against something on the ground. He bent to pick it up, and held it out for me to see: a large piece of thick felt with pieces of velcro attached. A silencer for a hoof. Fallen out of the carrier, no doubt.
‘Not leather boots,’ Bobby said, grimly. ‘Home-made.’
He switched off the yard lights and we stood for a while near the kitchen door, waiting. We would hear the car and trailer drive off, we thought, in the quiet night. What we heard instead, however, were hesitant footsteps coming back into the yard.
Bobby turned the lights on again, and the boy stood there, blinking and highly embarrassed.
‘Someone’s stolen Uncle’s car,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Jasper.’
‘Graves?’
He nodded and swallowed. ‘Uncle wants me to ring the police and get a taxi.’
‘If I were you,’ I said, ‘I’d go out of the gate here, turn left, take the first turn to the left along the road a bit, and use the public telephone box you’ll
find down there.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He looked at us almost beseechingly. ‘It was only supposed to be a lark,’ he said. ‘It’s all gone wrong.’
We gave him no particular comfort, and after a moment he turned and went away again down the drive, his footsteps slowly receding.
‘What do you think?’ Bobby said.
‘I think we should rig the bell so that anyone coming up the drive sets it off.’
‘So do I. And I’ll disconnect it first thing when I get up.’
We began to run a blackened string tightly across the drive at knee level, and heard Graves’s car start up in the distance.
‘He’s found it,’ Bobby said. He smiled. ‘There’s no telephone box down that road, did you know?’
We finished the elementary alarm system and went yawning indoors to sleep for another couple of hours, and I reflected, as I lay down, about the way a feud could start, as with Graves, and continue through centuries, as with Allardecks and Fieldings, and could expand into political and religious persecutions on a national scale, permanently persisting as a habit of mind, a destructive hatred stuck in one groove. I would make a start in my own small corner, I thought sardonically, drifting off, and force my subconscious to love the Allardecks, of which my own sister, God help her, was one.
Persistence raised its ugliest head first thing in the morning.
I answered the telephone when it rang at eight-thirty because Bobby was out exercising his horses and Holly was again feeling sick: and it was the feed-merchant calling in his Etonian accent to say that he had received a further copy of the Daily Flag.
‘I’ve just picked it up,’ he said. ‘It’s today’s paper. Monday. There’s another piece outlined in red.’
‘What does it say?’ I asked, my heart sinking.
‘I think… well… you can come and fetch it, if you like. It’s longer, this time. And there’s a picture of Bobby.’
‘I’ll be there.’
I drove straight round in Holly’s car and found the feed-merchant in his office as before. Silently he handed me the paper, and with growing dismay I looked at the picture which made Bobby seem a grinning fool, and read the damage in Intimate Details.